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Underground Singing: Poems by Harry Humes

Winner of the inaugural Keystone Chapbook Award, selected by Jeff Mann.

Publication date: December 21, 2007.

Now accepting preorders: please e-mail me to order your copy for $8 postpaid.

Excerpt

Answer Me This

How do you like this caved-in bedroom,
plaster all over the floor, wall paper hanging loose,
the onyx cuff links in their velvet box,
and how do you like the attic, Mickey Spillane novels,
shoe boxes of photos and Boy Scout knives,
and the view from the attic window
toward the torn-up railroad tracks,
and how do you like the beautiful Irish girl next door
grown old and screeching, and what was the name
of the family with the ugly pony,
how do you like the old sofa,
the hand-painted tea cups from Nova Scotia,
the dirt cellar with its spiders and rats,
always winter there, broken ax and shovel handles,
rusty nails, the bucket of pigeon bones,
how do you like this moaning and tears,
doors clicking shut, someone always leaving?

: Harry Humes, Underground Singing (2007)

Tree sweeping

While idly thumbing through a stack of chapbooks on my desk tonight, I ran across this poem by Carl Lindner, from his chapbook Eat & Remember, reminding me of course of last Sunday's snow and our concern for the Japanese maple--which has since de-leafed. The garden is shuttered down for December's arrival. I need to bring the bay tree in, but I wanted to give it a few cold nights first. (And to figure out where to put it.) But here's the poem:

The Tree Sweeper

Bent by snow still
falling, the young
pine called him out.

He took a broom
to sweep away
the white. Minutes

drifted down.
He went on
to the spruce. All

that morning saw him
brush the needles,
dusting off the crowns,

giving the slender
trunks a shake.
As he worked, only

he could tell how,
over and over, he
lifted like a branch.

With every pass
of the broom, he kept
singing “evergreen”

to himself, low,
the way a snowflake
hums as it falls.
* * *
I printed a test copy of Undergound Singing today. Found five or six layout errors, went back & corrected those, printed fresh pages, cut the whole thing to size, stapled it together so I could hold it, turn the pages, get the sense of the thing as a book. Sent it off to the author, after e-mailing him a PDF of (my design for) the cover.

Anyone want to help cut and tie some books? I'm hoping to get all the copies mailed out before the holiday. I've been raiding the recycling bins on campus for good sturdy envelopes to re-use.
* * *
Miriam has been writing some wonderful poems. I just read a batch of them today, and I'm impressed! Best of luck with your applications, M.
* * *
Ack, I'm up too late again.

Keystone Chapbook Results

The results of the 2007 Keystone Chapbook Competition are in: from the sixty manuscripts entered, our final judge, Jeff Mann, has selected "Underground Singing" by Harry Humes as the winner. Mann praised the manuscript as "a lyrical yet realistic description of coal-town life" that "displays admirable lucidity and accessibility, a haunting, sharp-eyed nostalgia, and vividly evoked detail."

The first runner-up manuscript was "Still," by Deborah Burnham of Philadelphia. The judge commented that the manuscript "brims with finely phrased appreciation of the romantic and the erotic, as well as displaying remarkably fresh figurative language and sensuous imagery."

The second runner-up manuscript, by Jillian Barnet of Pittsburgh, was "You Don't Need a Nose and Other Things I've Learned." Mann assessed this manuscript as "shocking, painful, blunt" and said "these poems of hospital tragedies, disease, and death remind us of how much can go wrong, how much there is to lose, and thus how much there is to celebrate while circumstances allow."

We are delighted to publish Harry Humes' collection this fall. Copies will be distributed to all contest entrants, and will be available for sale in January 2008. If you would like to review this chapbook, please e-mail me.

Thanks to all who entered this year--the judge remarked on the difficulty of selecting among many truly excellent manuscripts--and thanks, also, to everyone who helped to spread the word.

About the judge: Jeff Mann grew up in Covington, Virginia, and Hinton, West Virginia, receiving degrees in English and forestry from West Virginia University. His poetry, fiction, and essays have appeared in many publications, including The Spoon River Poetry Review, Wild Sweet Notes: Fifty Years of West Virginia Poetry 1950-1999, Prairie Schooner, Shenandoah, Laurel Review, The Gay and Lesbian Review Worldwide, Crab Orchard Review, West Branch, Bloom, and Appalachian Heritage. He has published three award-winning poetry chapbooks, Bliss, Mountain Fireflies, and Flint Shards from Sussex; and two full-length books of poetry, Bones Washed with Wine and On the Tongue. He teaches creative writing at Virginia Tech in Blacksburg, Virginia.

[photo: cornfield, 10/09/04]