The word-twister's news

"Tamlaine" by James Herbert MacNair, 1905

Thank you to Micah Mattix for including Maze of Blood in this morning's Prufrock News. It's a great arts and letters newsletter, and I'm glad to be in it.

Oh! I just found Midori Snyder's lovely, interesting post about my two new poems in The Journal of Mythic Arts. Here it is, in her blog, In the Labyrinth, which is well worth following. She also links to reviews she has written of some of my books.

Night Journey from Kingfisher at The Journal of Mythic Arts
This poem and "Prothalamion for Linnet" are from a new manuscript inspired by Yoruban chants. I'm starting to send them out now and will be thinking about a publisher in the coming year.

Print journal North Carolina Literary Review will be publishing four others from the series,
"Spring Tree Egg,"
"Alice,"
"Night Blooming Cereus,"
and "She-Who-Changed."

Prothalamion for Linnet at The Journal of Mythic Arts
And thanks to Midori Snyder for collecting these poems from me!

You can look at the entire archive of poems here.  Endicott Studio is a wonderful site, full of interesting nooks and crannies, put together over many years by those notable women, Midori Snyder and Terri Windling. So stay and look around. It's where I first encountered the art of my friend Clive Hicks-Jenkins, who has beautified so many of my books.

The Annunciation Carved in a Medieval Nut in Books and Culture
Now up online as well as in the print edition.

And if you go here, you can see links to a lot of other poems by me in the magazine, as well as to reviews and "year's best" mentions. The editor, John Wilson, is quite possibly the best-read person I've ever met (well, I've never met him, but you know what I mean!)

Hodgepodge, with medieval prayer-nut

The Annunciation Carved in a Medieval Prayer Nut

Here's one of the poems I wrote for Phoenicia Publishing's Annunciation anthology, forthcoming in the not-too-far-off future. Being the sort of person I am (you can call that mad, or you can call it in love with making things and words), I wrote seven, so that editor Elizabeth Adams could pick one from a group. So this poem is not going to be in the anthology, but it is HERE, and also in the print version of "Books and Culture," edited by the most widely-read reader I have encountered, John Wilson. (The poems in the anthology will be: "Mystic Journey," "The Annunciation Appears in a Painting by Andrew Wyeth," and "Iconography of an Imaginary Medieval Painting.")

I also have a couple of poems in the just-out current (print, though I expect that issue 13 will eventually be up at trinacriapoetry.com) edition of Trinacria, edited ("by invitation") by the feisty, formal-poetry-defending Joseph Salemi. And those two are "Solitaire" and "In the Dream Behind My Eyes."

Photos: This is a sixteenth-century prayer-nut on display at the British Museum. Photo credit is unlisted at my source... though I'd be happy to credit more than the British Museum! If you want to see more prayer-nuts (they are fascinating) in a round-up of examples, go to My Modern Met.

"Macbeth" with gulls and Glimmerglass and Glimmer Globe Theater

Lovely evening at the new Hamilton amphitheater behind Fenimore Art Museum, starting with a champagne picnic with shrimp salad and duck enchiladas and baguette and meringue cookies, followed by "Macbeth" with newlyweds (well, a year out--still new!) Michael and Danielle Henrici as Macbeth and Lady Macbeth. Must say that a pregnant Lady Macbeth adds to the drama of many lines. So fine to see a great play with Glimmerglass lightly wrinkled in the background and gulls flashing white against the hills.

Photo from the Fenimore Art Museum album on Facebook.
Michael Henrici as Macbeth

Danielle Henrici, Lady Macbeth,
above Hamilton amphitheater at the Fenimore Art Museum.
Photograph by Macbeth, aka Michael Henrici!

Goodreads giveaway / jacket copy / pub date

"a haunting tale of dark obsessions and transcendent creative fire, 

rendered brilliantly in Youmans' richly poetic prose."  --Midori Snyder

Official pub date is rapidly approaching: September 1st.
I will soon be doing events in North Carolina and Virginia,
but if you have a special interest in my work, please spread the word,
as this is a book from a university press and could use a kiss
from the lovely Lady Word of Mouth.

Art by Clive Hicks-Jenkins.
Design by Mary-Frances Glover Burt.
Mercer University Press

If you are on Goodreads and haven't signed up for a chance at a signed copy of Maze of Blood, please do so! It's a short giveaway, with 330 people signed up so far. It helps spread the word, and some lucky person gets a free signed book and postcard.  

Jacket copy: Begin with what seems the end of things—how Conall Weaver lifts a gun to his head. And now dive backward into the labyrinthine worlds of home, where Conall is the center, into the maze of love, where Conall seeks and strives with his soul-mate, and into the maze of imagination, with its population of weapon-wielding heroes and local-color Texans…and then on, into the maze of childhood, where time seems illusion and all the threads and stories start. Red for the blood of frontiersmen and Indians, Conall thought, red for the blood of proven heroes and mother, the martyr of Cross Plains. Maze for the looping coils of a snake that ended in a rattle that shook out revolutionary warning: don’t tread on me! Maze for veins of blood. Maze for family. In Conall Weaver, the mundane world and the wonders of the imagination collide and shoot out sparks. Inspired by the life of pulp writer Robert E. Howard, MAZE OF BLOOD explores the roots of story and the compulsions and conflicts of the heart in a Southern landscape. “Marly Youmans is a great writer. Her prose is immaculate.” —Laird Barron “Marly Youmans is a novelist and poet out of sync with the times but in tune with the ages.” — First Things “I cannot recommend an author more than Marly Youmans, whose fantastic prose is absolutely gorgeous and haunting.” —Seb Doubinsky 

Maze of Blood page at Facebook

Maze of Blood page at the blog

Maze of Blood page at Mercer

Maze of Blood is still in pre-pub pricing at Amazon and bn.com, 
and perhaps in a few others....

Find an independent bookstore at indiebound.org.

One of the gorgeous division pages
with art by Clive Hicks-Jenkins.

Lady Ise

"Lady Ise" is a new poem just out in Books and Culture Magazine (print and online)... The two lines in quotes are a translation from one of her poems. If you're interested in my poetry, please take a look. (There's also a place to leave comments, should you be so inspired.)

I was not thinking of this image--"Hatsuhana doing penance under the Tonosawa waterfall"--by Japanese ukiyo-e master Utagawa Kuniyoshi (歌川 国芳, January 1, 1797-April 14, 1862), but was pleased to find it just now. I intended to use one of the wonderful Hokusai waterfall images from the series Shokoku taki meguri ("Journey to the Waterfalls in All the Provinces"), circa 1832, but think this one a grand fit.

And here is a tiny biography of Lady Ise, along with translations of nine of her poems. They include the "hidden immortal"lines quoted in my poem.

Kisoji no oku Amida ga taki by Katsushika Hokusai (1760-1849)
("Amida Waterfall on the Kiso Road")

On another book round-up...

I am pleased to have two books on John Wilson's annual book list: Favorite Books of 2012. He is the editor of Books and Culture and a formidably well-read man. Please hop over to the online annex to the magazine and see what they are and what he has to say...

The previous list for year's end was from critic D. G. Myers, Best fiction of 2012. His review was here.

My podcast (blush!)

I've had a book dedicated to me . . . but never have I had a podcast dedicated to me. I didn't know podcasts were dedicated to people! But this one is fascinating, focusing on writer Andrei Sinyavsky's A Voice from the Chorus. John Wilson, editor of Books and Culture, is probably the most well-read man on the continent, and if he says this book had a great impact on him, I'm going to read it. I suspect you should too.

"I'm mad, you're mad, we're all mad..."

The Countess and Excelsior take Pip in after he's been beaten senseless, a state Youmans describes in ways that force contagion. Pip's is a harrowing delirium, much like his migraine auras, both of which we're made to feel and reel from. I have not read another writer who so perfectly captures in words the scary wiles of brain activity suddenly gone awry. Youmans speaks into experience that unspeakable disequilibrium.  --from Linda McCullough Moore's review 

Last North Carolina reading from A Death at the White Camellia Orphanage: Saturday, May 26th at 11:00 a.m., McIntyre's (Fearrington Village / Pittsboro.)

Lovely Books and Culture review

A long and magnificent review of A Death at the White Camellia Orphanage by writer Linda McCullough Moore at Books and Culture, edited by that great bookman, John Wilson.

A taste: Which brings us—not before time—to Marly Youmans, whose new novel A Death at the White Camellia Orphanage is literary fiction at its finest. (Tell me you didn't see that coming.) Here is fiction which required the writer to reinvent language, engage magic and mystery with every commonplace of living, explore the whys and wherefores of human understanding, and enlarge the boundaries of what it's good to think about and know. Here is fiction which requires the reader to take it slow, to savor, bask and meditate, to revel, and to laugh aloud and cry. Another:  But what Pip does with all his might-have-beens and what he does with what-just-is is lovely to behold. What Youmans does with only words is beautiful to see.