Lo-fi Poetry: Poets cover your record collection. CityLit Press's Lo-fi Poetry Series continues with POET SOUNDS. Inspired by The Beach Boy's seminal 1966 album, "Pet Sounds," this anthology features more than thirty poets covering each of 13 tracks. A "Liner Notes" section of poems reflects on the power of the album as a whole. This eclectic range of poems is like verse surfing and is filled with what defines Brian Wilson's voice and poetics.
Edited by Gerry LaFemina and Christine Stroud, POET SOUNDS includes poems from Glen Armstrong, Ned Balbo, Robert Balun, Susana H. Case, Vincent A. Cellucci, John Davis, Rishi Dastidar, Bonnie Emerick, Kestra Forest, George Guida, Denise Scannell Guida, D. Gilson, Donald Illich, Jacqueline Jules, Tim Kahl, Lisa Kosow, Gerry LaFemina, Amy Lemmon, M. L. Liebler, Margaret Luongo, Dawn McDuffie, Cameron McGill, Katie Mullins, Sean Murphy, Joey Nicoletti, Corey Oglesby, Kenneth Pobo, Andrea Rogers, Brent Royster, Jane Satterfield, Jessica Server, David Starkey, Brendan Stephens, Christine Stroud, Tim Tomlinson, Jon Tribble, and George Yatchisin.
From editor Christine Stroud's essay, "More Than Just Surfer Anthems": "One of the final pieces in the book, found in the liner notes, “Animal Gospel” by Jane Satterfield, reminds me again the way art inspires. She writes,
...Upbraid me if I forget
the jade frenzy of grasshoppers
caught in a plastic superstore pouch,
the sleepwalker’s sanctuary broken
as the doe threads a stand of oak,
its tonnage pounding the fraught floor.
Those lovely lines, those rich images, those reverberating sounds. I’m in awe again and again reading this book because it reminds me again how connected we are and how we all continue to search for more. Like the tracks on Pet Sounds, these poems call to us, say “Let’s Go Away for Awhile.”
Gerry LaFemina's latest book is the poetry collection The Story of Ash (Anhinga, 2018). Both a new chapbook, Points South (Hysterical Books, 2019), and a new volume of prose poems, Baby Steps for Doomsday Prepping (Madville, 2020), are forthcoming. His previous books include a novel, a collection of short stories, and numerous award-winning collections of poetry, including The Parakeets of Brooklyn, Notes for the Novice Ventriloquist (prose poems), Vanishing Horizon, and Little Heretic. His essays on poets and prosody, Palpable Magic, came out on Stephen F Austin University Press and his textbook, Composing Poetry: A Guide to Writing Poems and Thinking Lyrically was released by Kendall Hunt. The former director of the Frostburg Center for Literary Arts, he teaches at Frostburg State University and serves as a Mentor in the MFA Program at Carlow University.
Christine Stroud is editor-in-chief of Autumn House Press. She has an MFA in Creative Writing from Chatham University, where she earned the Best Thesis in Poetry award. Her chapbook, The Buried Return, was released by Finishing Line Press in March of 2014, and her second chapbook, Sister Suite, was released from Disorder Press in 2017. Stroud's poems have appeared in Ninth Letter's first web edition, The Paterson Literary Review, Cimarron Review, The Laurel Review, and many others.
