RopeWalk Writers Retreat

RopeWalk Press

In celebration of the 20th anniversary of RopeWalk Writers Retreat, 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 the spring of 2010. For questions, you may contact RopeWalk Press by email at ropewalkpress@usi.edu or by phone at 812/461-5202.

2009 Thomas A. Wilhelmus Award-Winning Chapbook Released!

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Chapbooks

Casa Marina
by Candace Black

Although many of the poems in Casa Marina were triggered by actual locations or events or characters, I wasn’t trying to write a memoir. I was more interested in exploring the balance between what has been lost—places, people, innocence—and what has been gained—knowledge, growth, experience—in that loss. An unanticipated joy of this sequence was working with the language of the tropics, as lush and evocative as the vegetation.

Praise for Casa Marina, Winner of the 2009 Thomas A. Wilhelmus Award

"Casa Marina evokes the intense and lingering sense of place Robert Heilman once said characterizes Southern writers—or in Candace Black’s case, writers who came of age in the South. Infused in these pages is the voluptuous landscape of the Florida Keys, which, like the native Royal Poinciana, blooms 'brazen as lipstick / nuns forbade us,' its 'slashes of flame / too sultry for the untried mouths of girls...' Though looking back on her youth, she avoids the shallowness of mere nostalgia: Black’s craft and music is downright compelling."
—William Trowbridge

"In this stunning sequence of lush and musical poems unraveling the tangled cultural marl of Key West, Candace Black’s Casa Marina reveals a landscape of prelapsarian beauty inextricably interwoven with a complicated and uneasy political history of multiple occupations. Black’s poems perform a 'risky cha-cha' of tropical vegetation and Caribbean cultures continually on the verge of breaking free from the strict containment of convent school and military base. The conflicted juxtaposition of these worlds creates a 'climate of moist / heat and hidden pockets of light,' in a locale both lovely and seedy.
—Lee Ann Roripaugh
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Ghost Season
by Melanie Jordan

Praise for Ghost Season

"The speaker in Melanie Jordan’s poem 'I Enter The World in Every Nameable Way' says, 'Evolved to a brain / larger than my ancestors’, I do have / the capacity to want what I cannot see.' With this declaration, we are inducted into the nexus of Jordan’s powerful Ghost Season. A space where '[a]bstractions / paste themselves' to the 'mental bulletin board' and poems realign in the interval between lucidity and narrative. With metaphor egging them on, the poems spin from Kepler to Charlie Brown to Berkeley without being beholden to any one of them. In these poems, Jordan works language with the same tenacity a sailor works a lodestone, finding the sweet equilibrium of imagination and honesty."
—Adrian Matejka

"To say that the poems in Ghost Season feel overdue would, I think, miss the point. It's true that these poems, and this poet, have waited too long for a wider readership. But I have no doubt that it is more true that Melanie Jordan comes along at just the right moment: unhurried, thoughtful, and deeply wise. Attentive to landscape and history and art and memory, the forces which shape us roughly, the poems are always lovely, sometimes astringent. They bring blood. They never flinch. And then they bloom."
—Paul Guest
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	Celestial Emporium of Benevolent Knowledge by Jeffrey Thomson In "The Analytical 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 Maine writers of all genres) as the Maine Arts Commission Literary Arts Fellow for 2008. His selection was based on his RWP 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 Click here to go to our secure order form.

A Hush of Something Endless
by Matthew Guenette

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, says, “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 soon.

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RopeWalk Writers Retreat
a program of the University of Southern Indiana