University of Akron Press Will Publish New Poetry Collections by Anne Barngrover and Caryl Pagel
The University of Akron Press is pleased to announce that it will publish new books by two continuing press authors, Everwhen by Anne Barngrover, and Free Clean Fill Dirt by Caryl Pagel. Barngrover’s book Brazen Creature was published by The University of Akron Press in 2018, as an Akron Poetry Prize editor’s choice selection. The University of Akron Press published a new edition of Pagel’s poetry collection Twice Told in 2019.
Anne Barngrover’s Everwhen is an anxious, verdant collection that is preoccupied with a chthonic era—when the secrets of long ago catch up to now, and when the past, present, and future collapse into what’s long been identified by indigenous cultures and early naturalists as Uncreation or Deep Time. Driven by the voice of the betrayed Roman goddess Ceres, these poems consider what it is like to live out of time, to suffer unnamed illnesses of the female body, to love and grieve at the end of the world, and to even find hope and joy in “the way an apocalypse can mean/ to reveal.”
Free Clean Fill Dirt, Caryl Pagel’s third book of poetry, is a study in disruption, interruption, and ruin, tracing geological and historical palimpsests via caesura, fragmentation, echo, and humor. In these rigorous, formally adventurous poems Pagel calls upon the playful, unsettling sonic sensibilities of writers such as Lorine Niedecker, Russell Atkins, Frank O’Hara, and H.D., as she ties the music of place to personal inquiry: “There is / something in the way / of the thought,” the narrator posits: is it sound, desire, violence, or image? Pagel dwells in the anti-ordinary ordinary strata of Midwestern mythologies, emergencies, landscapes, and crises. Using a blend of ecopoetic, visual, and archival modes, Free Clean Fill Dirt is a collection of poems making intimacy of deep time and vanitas of vision.
Barngrover is the author of Brazen Creature (University of Akron Press, 2018), Yell Hound Blues (Shipwreckt Books, 2013), and co-author with Avni Vyas of the chapbook Candy in Our Brains (CutBank, 2014). Her poems and nonfiction have appeared or are forthcoming in places such as Verse Daily, The Slowdown podcast, Boulevard, Arts & Letters, River Teeth, Guernica, and Ecotone. She is an assistant professor of English and Creative Writing at Saint Leo University, where she is on faculty in the low-residency MA program in Creative Writing, and lives in Tampa, Florida.
Pagel is the author of two previous books of poetry, Twice Told and Experiments I Should Like Tried at My Own Death, as well as a collection of essays, Out of Nowhere Into Nothing. She is an editor and publisher at Rescue Press and the director of the Cleveland State University Poetry Center. Pagel teaches creative writing at Cleveland State University and in the NEOMFA program.