RopeWalk Writers Retreat
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RopeWalk Press

As the 20th anniversary of the RopeWalk Writers Retreat approaches, we are pleased to extend our efforts to the RopeWalk Press.  In keeping with our belief that quality trumps quantity and attention to detail is of greatest importance, RopeWalk Press will strive to produce excellent products in limited runs.  In addition to publishing chapbooks, we will publish a 20th year anthology in 2008.  You can e-mail RopeWalk Press at ropewalkpress@usi.edu.   

Click here to read samples from RopeWalk Press publications.


Chapbooks

Celestial Emporium of Benevolent Knowledge
by Jeffrey Thomson

In "The Analystical Language of John Wilkins," Jorge Luis Borges describes a mythical Chinese encyclopedia, the Celestial Emporium of Benevolent Knowledge, that divides all plants and animals into fourteen wonderful, fanciful categories as a means to refute the precise and scientific linguistic structure of those, like Wilkins, who had long sought to produce a universal language.  In his new chapbook, Jeffrey Thomson uses the categories of the Celestial Emporium to create a poem sequence that brings Borges's encyclopedia to life, exploring the way metaphor, memory, and desire combine to rewrite and alter the human experience. 

Update, 9/17/07 - Jeffrey Thomson has been chosen from more than 70 Maine writers from all genres, as the Maine Arts Commission Literary Arts Fellow for 2008.  His selection was based on his chapbook Celestial Emporium of Benevolent Knowledge.
       

What they're saying about Celestial Emporium of Benevolent Knowledge

“The words churn in Jeffrey Thomson’s imaginative poems. The impulse to catalog, to embrace through language, is given free reign in a book that gives life to the fascinating categories of knowledge that come to us from Borges’s ‘The Analytical Language of John Wilkins.’ The sheer appetite of these poems, their intellectual drive and rhythmic insistence, conveys an almost physical sense of the poet’s curiosity, a wonder that deepens, over the course of the book, to a conveyance of his love for the fullness of the natural world.”
—Bob Hicok

“That Jeffrey Thomson’s fabulous and fabulist Celestial Emporium of Benevolent Knowledge creates an enchanting world within our own world puts him in the company of Calvino, Borges and Cervantes, but that he also inserts our own world into the fabulous one makes this collection an amazing feat. He has it, that is, both ways. Working from Borges’s idea of an imaginary taxonomy of all plants and animals, each poem introduces us to a new creature that is also a mirror of ourselves. Indeed, the poems are filled with such radical leaps so that we start to ask with him—‘How to count?’ but of course we can’t, for the poems suggest an endless cascade of surprising turns. ‘I could write anything— / a pack of pigs sucking at the blank canvas / of the sow’s belly—and you’d believe it,’ he says at one point, and given the superb control, the authoritative voice and the sheer power of imagination here, we do.”
—Richard Jackson

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The first release from RopeWalk Press is Matthew Guenette’s A Hush of Something Endless.

Guenette says, “If there's a consistent theme in Hush, I would say it's the very poetic tradition of a narrator wringing order from the chaos of desire and loss. My goal with these poems was to generate velocity and construct a voice that is both distracted and amazed by a world of strange, beautiful details that hint at a higher order. I also wanted to create a voice that finds humor in this world, as way of negotiating defeat.”                 

Praise for A Hush of Something Endless

“Matthew Guenette’s poems are simultaneously haunting and thrilling, full of hilarity and daring leaps, of flights of fancy that don’t ever land in the same place. Guenette’s a joker, a trickster, a half-cocked sage whose poems zoom and surge, pulling the reader with them on their slippery dash past reasonable doubts to unreasonable truths. His poems show how mad the heart and mind can be for each other—and how much crazy fervor can be contained between the two.”
—Allison Joseph

A Hush of Something Endless is a vital book—lush diction, imaginative tropes, and at least one perfect lyric about Illinois. If you can't find something to love about Matthew Guenette's poems, you aren't trying hard enough.”
—Austin Hummell

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20 Years in Utopia: The RopeWalk Writers Retreat Anthology

Matthew Graham, co-founding RopeWalk director and director of Creative Writing at USI, said, “Starting RopeWalk Press is a logical extension of the RopeWalk umbrella. In our 20th year, we want to commemorate our accomplishments by introducing a 20-year anniversary anthology containing the poems, short stories and essays of writers who have participated in the conference over the years.”  Ordering information will be available in early 2008.
 



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