January Jollies

Happy New Year, my bright and shiny lit-nerds! I hope your festive season was full of well-behaved loved ones and smelly new books. We’re kicking off 2014 in fine style here at Malvern, with a couple of events you’ll want to immediately note down in your brand-new Fast Disappearing Red Telephone Boxes of Wales calendars…

First up, we’re introducing a new monthly reading series for all you poetry fiends. We’re calling it Everything is Bigger (naturally), and it’ll be hosted by our very own Tyler Gobble. Our inaugural Bigger reading will take place on Wednesday, January 15th, at 7pm, and will feature three brilliant poets who need no introduction (but they’ll probably get one anyway; we’re polite like that): Dean Young, Blake Lee Pate, and Vincent Scarpa.

Tiny Art

And on January 26th we have something rather special for you: a display of artworks from Josh Ronsen’s Tiny Art Exchange (the tiny art above is by Reed Altemus). Here’s how Josh describes the Exchange:

I send you something tiny, you send me something back equally tiny. Someday, I’ll have enough pieces to fill a bathtub.

We won’t have a bathtub’s worth at Malvern, but we will have a great heap of miniature artworks for you to sift through (and yes, a very gentle fondling of the artwork is allowed, as some pieces are double-sided).

We’ll look forward to seeing you in the store for BIGGER poetry and TINY art! And in the meantime, let’s get the new year off to a handsome start with some loveliness from the aforementioned Mr. Young…

The Infirmament (from First Course in Turbulence, 1999)

An end is always punishment for a beginning.
If you’re Catholic, sadness is punishment
for happiness, you become the bug you squash
if you’re Hindu, a flinty space opens
in your head after a long night of laughter
and wine. For waking there are dreams,
from French poetry, English poetry,
for light fire although sometimes
fire must be punished by light
which is why psychotherapy had to be invented.
A father may say nothing to a son for years.
A wife may keep something small folded deep
in her underwear drawer. Clouds come in
resembling the terrible things we believe
about ourselves, a rock comes loose
from a ledge, the baby just cries
and cries. Doll in a chair,
windshield wipers, staring off
into the city lights. For years
you may be unable to hear the word monkey
without a stab in the heart because
she called you that the summer she thought
she loved you and you thought you loved
someone else and everyone loved
your salad dressing. And the daffodils
come up in the spring and the snow covers
the road in winter and the water covers
the deep trenches in the sea where all the time
the inner stuff of this earth surges up
which is how the continents are made
and broken.

Something Grand!

Party CatYes indeed, that glorious time is upon us: the Grand Opening of Malvern Books! We opened our doors softly six weeks ago, and now that we’ve mastered the tricky stuff—shushing politely and making the cash register go ping!—we’re ready to fling open those doors with ribbon-shredding abandon. And, such is our OMG WE’RE A BOOKSTORE!!! excitement, we decided that a one-day celebration just wouldn’t do… so we’ve arranged for y’all forty-eight hours of wanton literary festivities.

What’s the plan? Well, we indicated that there might be free cheese, and I think we can make good on that promise, and possibly include several other pleasant foodstuffs as well. There will also be beverages, music (did someone say… marching band?), and very special discounts on very special books. Most importantly, there will be readings! So, what are you waiting for? Get your sharpies out, pull that Goats in Trees calendar off the wall, and put a big ol’ GONE TO MALVERN through November 22nd and 23rd.

On Friday, November 22nd, we’ll be hosting a reading from poets Joshua Edwards and  Lynn Xu. Joshua and Lynn are currently on a 650-mile walk across Texas, from Galveston to Marfa, and will stop in at Malvern to give their aching feet a rest, share their adventures, and read from their new collections. Joining them is acclaimed poet and translator Kurt Heinzelman, an English Professor at UT Austin and the editor-at-large for Bat City Review. Kurt will be reading from his hot-off-the-press collection, Intimacies & Other Devices.

But wait! There’s more! The following night, Saturday, November 23rd, Malvern will play host to a trio of irreverent poets: Matt Hart, Taylor Jacob Pate, and Tyler Gobble. Matt is the co-founder of the literary journal Forklift, Ohio and the author of five poetry collections, including the recent Debacle Debacle. Taylor is an MFA candidate in the New Writers Project at UT Austin, as well as the editor-in-chief of Smoking Glue Gun and the art director for Bat City Review. And Tyler Gobble is Malvern Books’ most impressively named staff member—and a poet to watch out for. His first collection, More Wreck More Wreck, will be out from Coconut Books in 2014.

On both nights, plan to stop by Malvern at 6.30pm for nibbles, browsing, and chitchat; the readings will begin around 7pm. And please do remember to invite all your chums… the more, the Malvernier!

Meet The Malverns #2

It’s opening day here at the bookstore—oh boy!—and what better way to celebrate our metaphorical ribbon cutting than to ask for a book recommendation from a cheery Malvern staff member. If you encounter the awesomely named Tyler Gobble (below left) at the store, here’s what he’ll have to tell you about one of his favorite poetry collections:

Tyler

Joe Hall’s second book, The Devotional Poems, is like the transcription of a journal found in a lonely, winter-beaten Midwestern woods, taken home, unfolded, typed back out—the words, but also somehow the musty stench and the hisses and the blistering wind it has brought back too—and here unleashed. I love what that wild/wise man, Blake Butler, said in that blurb of his: “[d]evoted, yes, to terror, but true too to the gorgeous black underbelly of how we’re all at once somehow together possessed.” Devotional poems, exorcisms, names for the abyss—these poems transact in that old-timey way of getting rid of the demons, real and imagined, understood and baffling. And whether it works or not—for the author, for the speaker, for you there in your demented home—the shrieks come out of the dangerous rubble and treacherous lulls of life and bring forth a new meaning to staggering and a new breath, somehow, to the broken.