10/07/2014

PRISM international 53.1 - Launched!

As I mentioned in my last post, I was part of the team which launched PRISM international 53.1 (my first issue as poetry editor) at WORD Vancouver.

PRISM Editors: Clara Kumagai, Promotions; Yours Truly, Poetry;
Jen McDonald, Circulation; Nicole Boyce, Prose.

The weather was fantastic (a WORD rarity) and we were busy at the PRISM booth all day, breaking sales records and taking an inordinate number of octopus-teacup photos, including my favourite, featuring my game-for-anything mother:


Such photos make (a little bit) more sense when viewed next to our new cover:


Amidst all the fun of the launch, I hardly gave a thought to the poems I was helping send out into the world. Now that I'm a week or so removed from the launch, I'm taking great pleasure in sitting back and rereading the issue. It includes poems by Canadians Elise Partridge, Peter Norman, Raoul Fernandes and Michael Lockett, and Americans Gwen Hart, Emily Tuszynska and Mark Parlette. The fiction and non-fiction are top-drawer as well, selected by prose-editor-extraordinaire Nicole Boyce.

I'm particularly pleased to be able to share a few of Elise Partridge's and Raoul Fernandes' new poems (a sample, from Raoul, can be read here), as I believe they are two of the very best poets living and working here in Vancouver. And to our great fortune, both of them have books forthcoming in 2015 (from Anansi and Nightwood, respectively). Hurrah!

If you can't wait that long and/or you'd like to read some new work from writers you probably haven't yet encountered, I would love if you picked up a copy (either in a bookstore near you, or via our online store). Or better yet, if you buy a year-long subscription right now, you can get all four issues that will come out during my term as editor. You can also get those same four issues if you enter any of PRISM's three contests (non-fiction, fiction, poetry), all of which are currently open for submissions. If you subscribe, I promise I'll do my damndest to give you a howlin' good read.


Thank you to everyone at PRISM, especially my trusty colleagues, my incredible editorial board, and past poetry editor Zach Matteson (who showed me the ropes), for making 53.1 a success!

1 comment:

daniela elza said...

Congratulations, Rob! On this first issue. Sorry I missed the octopus cup and photo op at Word I was too busy wo-manning the author sighing table. :-)