Letras Caseras

Tonight at 6 PM I will be reading with a host of international and local poets at The Consulate General and Promotion Center of the Argentine Republic in New York 12 W 56th St, New York, NY 10019.

Thank you, Acentos Review, for publishing my short story “Whatever You May Dream.” Read an excerpt below and or click the link for the full story! Mad love.

Guillermo Rosa had a trained eye. He knew people’s reactions, their facial tics and their emotional responses.  In fact, had anyone walked up to Guillermo and asked him, “Excuse me sir, but can you tell what I’m feeling?”  He would have said “Yes, absolutely.”  Guillermo fancied himself empathic; that is to say, someone who can read emotions.

“I am a man extremely concerned with details.” Guillermo replied. “I believe that details keep businesses afloat when sales are shaky.” Guillermo concentrated hard to keep eye contact.

Something he learned when he first started in sales. Customers who had money to spend always sought eye contact. They wanted affirmation from the seller.

“Tell me Mr. Rosa, what is your impetus for pursuing this enterprise?”

Come through if you’re in the neighborhood!

2pm, Sunday, June 10

Paterson Museum

Come through if you’re in the neighborhood!

2pm, Sunday, June 10

Paterson Museum

You can order a copy of my book from Small Press Distribution and directly from the publisher. See links below:

http://www.spdbooks.org/Products/9780998102719/melancolia.aspx

…and my book is out! Cop yours at The Dodge Poetry Festival or at the link below. Mad love.

Melancolía Poems by Roberto Carlos Garcia

Cervená Barva Press is pleased to announce the publication of Melancolía Poems by Robert Carlos Garcia.

Agitations both tender and muscular simmer inside these poems. A sadness that’s palpable and physical haunts this poet; so does rage at the power-mongers’ forces that keep children hungry, that fester poverty in terrifying mutations. Poet of engagement, Garcia speaks to the moon, to his sister, to the seasons and the garden, to his body a vessel: “these hands like a chunk of asteroid-full of taking & giving.” This book offers us a photo-real blueprint of one man’s life-space, an elegant blues-print of one man’s heart, with direct utterance and lavish music.

-Judith Vollmer, Vollmer is the author of five full-length books of poetry, including The Apollonia Poems, forthcoming in 2017 as winner of the University of Wisconsin Press Four Lakes Poetry Prize.

Roberto Carlos Garcia is, it seems to me, poet-kin of both Lorca and Neruda, but also things like rain, wind, the color yellow and the color green. In Melancolía we have a collection of gorgeously quiet poems rendered by intellect and the dream where lyricism is born out of the dusky space between mystery and the everyday. Here is a breathtaking archive of an imagination at work, a body made up of effort and world. See: “My friends I am not above you // I can hear the song of reckoning in the rose thorns” and “In my mouth Melancolía is an orchard, /a yellowing day & bluing night, // In my ribcage melancolia is an ecstatic lilt /made of pearls, my heart-wet sand, /pungent as dogwoods.”

-Aracelis Girmay is the author of three collections of poetry: The Black Maria (BOA Editions, 2016); Kingdom Animalia (BOA Editions, 2011), and Teeth (Curbstone Press, 2007). She is a Cave Canem fellow and teaches at Hampshire College and in the Drew University MFA program.

In these sensuous poems everything is up for inspection and interrogation, including the speaker himself. Here are echoes of Lorca and Neruda, their depth and power, but in a voice entirely the poet’s own. Roberto Carlos Garcia’s poems take beauty as a gift, and also as a sometimes foil against capitalism and the numbness of the suburban life we are supposed to desire. “& what is poetry if not what we need?” We need poems like these, with their living language and their vision of where we are and where poetry, ecstatic and elegiac, can take us.

-Anne Marie Macari, author of Red Deer, (Persea, 2015)

Order online: http://www.thelostbookshelf.com

Mad love & thank you to all of our supporters! We wouldn’t be here without you. We have ten days left on our Kickstarter Campaign! Can you donate anything? 3, 4, 5 bucks? Every little bit helps us publish poetry from marginalized communities & by poets tired of the contest system. Show us some love, yo.

I’m reading at the Dodge Poetry Festival!!! Woo-Hoo!! Click the link below for the full line up!

http://www.dodgepoetry.org/festival-events/lineup/

(Get Fresh Books LLC)

PLEASE REBLOG!!

Dear Friends,

Thanks to a very generous donation we are now 62% funded!! We’ve raised $3,135 dollars and are only $1, 865 dollars shy of our $5K goal. Thank you to everyone who has donated so far!!

I’m both overwhelmed and honored by your support and belief in the press. We’ll work hard to reward that belief.

Donations of $10, $15, $20, $25, $50, and $100 are so important because they inch the needle forward. If you haven’t given yet please consider giving. No amount is too small and we’re so close!

I’ll end by thanking you once again and by asking for your continued support. Here’s a poem by Gerald Stern that gives me strength in the face of everything.

Mad love!

These Birds

These birds burst in and out of their shadows as if they alone in all the world were breathing, as if their violent heartbeats were the only hope, as if the snow could withstand two more contradictions, as if they could defy the life of all sanity.

They bring their bodies with them and walk into the wires and through the trees as if they could drink and eat with impunity, as if their wings gave them the right to stand there, as if there were not another life to think of, as if one stillness were not overlying the other, as if they had not already created the first darkness, as if dreaming and not dreaming were the same, as if the sky could save them, as if they could depend again on their own savagery.

Get Fresh Books LLC is a cooperative press, our authors, editors, and the publisher create and pursue a vision for the writer’s work. In many ways the press has a traditional work ethic and process, think Scribner or Perkins. However, are adaptable and fully ready to use all the available technology at hand to succeed. There are no contests or submission fees, and no open reading periods. Get Fresh Books LLC pursues writers publishing in today’s many literary journals. However, we also work with established writers who have published books. 

Tumblr, please help me by reblogging. I’m trying to put the power of publishing back in the hands of authors!

I’m a writer. I write poetry, fiction, non-fiction, and graphic novels. I’m frustrated by the poetry book contest system, the near impossibility of landing a literary agent, and the constant fees for submitting. If you’re a writer perhaps you feel the same way, or did at some point in your career. My dream is to run a publishing press where the publisher and the author work together to edit, publish, promote, and contribute to the literary conversation. 

Get Fresh Books LLC will work as a cooperative press, where our authors, editors, and the publisher create and pursue a vision for the writer’s work. In many ways the press will have a traditional work ethic and process, think Scribner or Perkins. However, we will be adaptable and fully ready to use all the available technology at hand to succeed. There will be no contests or submission fees, and no open reading periods. Get Fresh Books LLC will pursue writers publishing in today’s many literary journals. However, we will also work with established writers who have published books. Help me make this simple ideal a reality. Come to the reading, donate. Or donate whatever you can today at my Kickstarter campaign.

Roberto Garcia