Norma Cole, poet, Giants fan, author of To Be at Music: Essays & Talks, just out from Omnidawn.

Two New Titles by Merrill Gilfillan from Flood Editions

Moussey

Attention Span 2010

Each year since 2003, Steve Evans has been asking readers of his Third Factory site to contribute lists and commentaries charting their current interests in poetry and related fields.

He calls the feature "Attention Span" and the lists are always filled with SPD titles.

Evans also provides a helpful list ranking the frequently-mentioned books here.  The list for Attention Span 2010 was released this week.

Along with SPD's bestseller and staff picks lists, Attention Span is an excellent way to explore SPD titles that other passionate readers of small press poetry are excited about.

Cash Prizes for Translators & Authors

In great news for translators of poetry and fiction, today it was announced that Amazon will begin funding the Best Translated Book Award given each year by Three Percent at the University of Rochester.  Both the translators and the authors will receive $5,000.

Publisher's Weekly article can be found here.

In past years, SPD-distributed books have been well-represented on both the long and the short list for the Best Translated Book Award, so with luck one of the many wonderful translators connected to SPD publishers may take home a substantial prize soon!

The Orchard by Harry Matthews

The Orchard: A Remembrance of Georges Perec Harry Mathews $7 | paper | 34 pp. Bamberger Books ISBN: 9780912449401 LAST COPIES! Literary Nonfiction. Memoir. THE ORCHARD is a record of the friendship of Harry Matthews and Georges Perec, one an American, the other French, both writers. These memories were set down by Matthews in the wake of Perec's premature death. "I remember" is complete and irreducible in itself—I remember Georges Perec getting off the bus at Trocadéro and ostentatiously dropping his ticket on the middle of the sidewalk, smiling as he did so. I still cannot see his point.—but most meaningful when set among the others, like the moments of friendship itself.

(If you don't want to buy it from SPD, click here.)

Park by Cole Swensen

Park Cole Swensen $10 | paper | 64 pp. Floating Island Publications ISBN: 9780912449401 LAST COPIES! Poetry. Cole Swensen's PARK is a book of poetry devoted to the discoveries and happenings in an unspecified park. Swensen, who was recently awarded the Guggenheim Fellowship, takes an aesthetic interest in the phenomena of park-ness and an interest in seeing as a way of knowing what makes a place a generator of experience. The poem is organized numerically and gestures at its own fluidity as in the park "every time I've been back...I've had the distinct impression that everything is moving."

(If you don't want to buy it from SPD, click here.)