The 2012 Big Poetry Giveaway

It's that time of year again! It's National Poetry Month, and that means it's time for The Big Poetry Giveaway! This is my second year participating in the event, created and arranged by Kelli Russell Agodon at The Book of Kells. What's the big idea? Poets everywhere are giving poetry books away for free!

Yep: FREE!

In this exciting campaign, meant to promote the poetry we love during National Poetry Month, participating poets are giving away a book of their own and one of a poet they admire. All you have to do is leave a comment below by midnight, April 30, with your name and contact information (at least an email address), and I will choose two winners at the end of the month to receive the free books via random number generator. That's it! I will send the book to you absolutely free, including shipping, anywhere in the world you may be.

Here are the books I'm giving away:

The Stones

This chapbook of poems came out almost at the same time as Shapeshifting, which I gave away last year. The collection is a little bit different, however; more Miami poems, and the Lois Lane poems everyone seems to like so much.

Loose Woman by Sandra Cisneros

This is one of my favorite books of poetry of all time, and contains one of my favorite poems of all time, the title poem. I have a pretty big reason for making it one of the giveaways this year, however. Cisneros is one of the authors the students in Arizona will not be reading this year after the scandalous and shameful "confiscation" of books following the termination of the Tucson Unified School District’s Mexican American studies department. And no wonder; the assholes of the world should be afraid of a woman who writes like . . . well, you'll just have to imagine, since I received a message from her agent asking me to remove the four stanzas of the poem I had quoted. Whatever. Sometimes the whole world becomes Arizona.

The 2011 Big Poetry Giveaway

Thanks to Kelli Russell Agodon at The Book of Kells, poets everywhere are giving poetry books away for free!

Yep: FREE!

In this exciting campaign, meant to promote the poetry we love during National Poetry Month, participating poets are giving away a book of their own and one of a poet they admire. All you have to do is leave a comment below by midnight, April 30, with your name and contact information (at least an email address), and I will choose two winners at the end of the month to receive the free books via random number generator. That's it! I will send the book to you absolutely free, including shipping, anywhere in the world you may be.

Here are the books I'm giving away:

Shapeshifting (Spire Press, 2006)

This is my debut collection of poetry. It won the Spire Press award in 2005, and contains poems, as the title implies, that address the shifting aspects of my identity. Poems from this collection have appeared in the Iodine Poetry Journal, Tar Wolf Review, and The Powhatan Review.

The Capable Heart by Ann E. Michael (Foothills, 2011)

I pretty much owe my poetry career to Ann E. Michael, who chose Shapeshifting as the winner of the Spire contest. Imagine my delight when I discovered her to be a hauntingly beautiful poet. Since that fateful event, I have become a Michael groupie. This latest collection is a tight exploration of female identity centered on the symbolism of horses, on their--and our--"capable hearts."

Good luck, people! I will announce the winners of the giveaway on May 1. If you would like to see other poets who are participating in this event and learn more about it, please visit Agodon's blog, The Book of Kells.