Bobby Steve Baker—author of Numbered Bones (Accents 2011)—will soon release This Crazy Urge to Live from Linnet’s Wings Press in early summer. As a mixed media piece, it weaves together poetry, photographs by Baker, photograph’s of sculptured from his son (Robin Baker), and classic art.

Poems from Crazy Urge are available in the winter/spring edition of Linnet’s Wings. Here is a snippet from the poem “Inspiration”:

what was it I wanted
to write about
just a minute ago
before the dog woke up […]

You can read the rest of the poem here.

As a reminder, the deadline for our 2014 Accents Chapbook Contest is April 30th and will feature Patty Paine as our guest judge.

Also, April is National Poetry Month. And if you remember last year, June was officially declared Lexington Poetry Month by Mayor Jim Gray. I wonder if anything will happen this year…*

More from Numbered Bones and Bobby Steve Baker:

• “Mom and Son Distraught after Bride Cancels Wedding”
• “Homo Lupus Homini”
• “There Is No Medicine for What I Got”
• “Chaos, Clarity and Contradiction”
• “Wild Game”

*(Stay tuned to find out more!)

Thom Ward (author of Etcetera’s Mistress) will have five poems in The Autumn House Anthology of Contemporary Poetry (3rd edition). It will be available in the Spring of 2015 for $34.95, but he currently has four poems from Etcetera’s Mistress in the 2nd edition, available now.

Aside from having his work in anthologies with 100 other contemporary poets, Ward will be a judge in the Finger Lakes Regional Competition of Poetry Out Loud at Seymour College Union on the campus of SUNY Brockport in New York. Students from all 50 states will memorize, recite, and perform contemporary poetry while hoping to win a spot in the Poetry Out Loud National Finals in Washington, D.C. and hopefully earn a $20,000 scholarship from Poetry Out Loud.

For more from Thom Ward, you can check out any of his poetry editing and proofreading services, any of his poetry collections (listed below), or find Etcetera’s Mistress wherever Accents books are sold.

Thom Ward’s poetry collections:

• Small Boat with Oars of Different Size (Carnegie Mellon University Press, 2000)
• Various Orbits (Carnegie Mellon University Press, 2004)
• Tumblekid (University of South Carolina-Aiken, 2000)
• The Matter of the Casket (Customwords, 2007)

More from Etcetera’s Mistress and Thom Ward on the Accents Blog:

• “Postcard to the Postcard I Didn’t Write”
• “Of Course”
• “Observations”
• “Goldfinch, Cockroach”
• Etcetera’s Mistress at the Accents Store

Thom Ward teaches creative writing workshops at high schools and colleges around the country, tutors individual poetry students, and edits poetry manuscripts. He is a faculty and advisory board member at Wilkes University’s Graduate Creative Writing program in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania. Thom Ward lives in western New York with his girlfriend Jennifer and their cat Phantom.

image from Pirene’s Fountain

We have been thrilled to learn more about what Accents-published poets have been doing lately. Earlier this week we told you about Tom C. Hunley, last week we brought you the latest from Lori A. May, and now we are excited to give you the latest from our 2011 International Poetry Book Winner, Patty Paine!

• Paine’s interview with Pirene’s Fountain discusses her diverse heritage, how she likes living in Qatar, and how she solves literary crimes.
  • “I spent about an hour checking other poems this person published and discovered that probably 99.9% of what was published was plagiarized.”
• For a sneak peak at Paine’s Grief & Other Animals, you can pick up a copy of
  • revolution house to read “Merciless” and “One should not try to write after reading Levis” or
  • the upcoming issue of Blackbird: an online journal of literature and the arts to catch “What You Sow” and “What Light Does”
• Diode Editions will release Urn, a new chapbook by T. R. Hummer at this year’s AWP.

For more information about Patty Paine, be sure to check out the Diode Editions website by clicking here and follow her on Twitter @PattyPaine.

Previous posts about The Sounding Machine and Patty Paine:

• 2014 Poetry Chapbook Contest
• “Vantage”
• “Restore”
• “Ars Poetica”
• The Sounding Machine at the Accents store

As part of a new regular feature on the Accents Blog, we want to keep our readers up to date on the status of our poets. Today, we’re covering the author of our newest full-length book, Square Feet, Lori A. May.

• The blog for Wilkes University’s Creative Writing program, The Write Life, recently interviewed may about Square Feet. For a taste, May said about writing:
  • “Inspiration is overrated. Persistence gets the work done.”
• Kim Loomis-Bennett of Collage: Book Reviews covered Square Feet, saying, “In the style of William Carlos Williams’s ‘The Red Wheelbarrow,’ May hones the collection’s brief moments into homages of daily life.” Wow.
• May will be at AWP for an off-site reading for Pirene’s Fountain literary journal.
  • Friday February 28, 6-9pm at East Olive Way Starbucks in Seattle, Washington
• May will be reading with Joy Gaines-Friedler in Ann Arbor, Michigan
  • Monday March 17, 7pm at Literati Bookstore
• 1966 Journal‘s spring 2014 issue features a Lori A. May essay titled “After the Winds Die Down”.
• And last but not least, May recently published an the essay “AWP: An Opportunity to Exercise Literary Citizenship” for The Write Life.

As part of our new feature, we not only want to highlight the achievements of our poets, but we want to keep the community informed. If you want more information about your favorite Accents author, leave a comment. Or if you have any feedback on the “Accents Update” feature (such as a more engaging title), let us know. We’d love to hear from you!