Midwest Book Awards

I just got word that Breaking the Glass is a finalist for the Midwest Book Awards in two categories: Poetry and 2-Color Cover Design. Yippee! I couldn't be happier.

The other two finalists in the Poetry category are Margaret Hasse, for Milk and Tides, and Larry Shug for Arrogant Bones.

In the cover category, the others are Field Notes by Richard Quinney and Edge of Forever: Images of Lake Superior by Peter Scott Eide.

The award is given by the Midwest Independent Publishers Association.

From the MIPA website:

Finalists were chosen from 149 titles from 66 publishers in the 12 eligible states that were entered in the MIPA 19th Annual Midwest Book Awards competition for excellence in independent or non-profit publishing. More than 667 books were distributed to the judges for review in 25 categories.

Winners will be announced at the awards ceremony on May 13, 2009, with the help of our special guests from Publishers Weekly, Matthew Hurley and Associate Publisher Cevin Bryerman, who is a board member of the Independent Book Publishers Association (IBPA). Reservations are required to attend the Midwest Book Awards Ceremony at the Minnesota Humanities Center, 987 East Ivy Avenue, St. Paul, Minnesota, on Wednesday, May 13, 6:30 – 8:30 p.m.

Flurries

As a blizzard bears down on us from the Dakotas (6-12 inches of snow expected, with much blowing and drifting), a new poem of mine on that very topic has been included in Flurry: wintry poetry, intermittently, from Minnesota and the Dakotas , an online journal edited by Todd Boss. March 7 is the posting date. Be sure to browse the excellent poetry by lots of Upper Midwest poets, some of whom are friends and acquaintances.

While we're on the topic, here's another wintry poem of mine. I've linked it to the Northography website, but it also was part of a collection that I entered in the 2007 Creekwalker Poetry Prize competition.

Photo by Steve Peterson, from an in-progress collection of photos taken along Highway 64, between Motley and Akeley, MN.

Visible and Invisible

Tiffany Besonen's collage incorporating a fragment of my poem " I am Smoke When I Can Be" is currently touring with the show "The Veil: Visible and Invisible Spaces" (Tiffany's collage is on the right in this photo--2 panels). I visited the show in Milwaukee, and I recommend it highly. The exhibit will be traveling around the US until 2011. It is though-provoking and moving. The show's curator, Jennifer Heath, has this to say about the exhibit:

Visible and Invisible Spaces intends to engage received wisdom about the veil - particularly current clichés and stereotypes about Islamic practices - and to reflect on the great ubiquity, importance and profundity of the veil throughout human history and imagination. Visible and Invisible Spaces asks artists to investigate the veil in its broadest contexts. The exhibition will be divided into three categories to be interpreted widely: The Sacred Veil, The Sensuous Veil , and The Sociopolitical Veil. Visible and Invisible Spaces, however, is not a documentary exhibition.

Visible and Invisible Spaces is a visual companion to Jennifer Heath's edited volume, The Veil: Women Writers on Its History, Lore, and Politics (University of California Press, forthcoming 2008). The exhibition invited visual artists - including videographers, filmmakers and new media artists, as well as painters, sculptors, performance and installation artists - from around the world to investigate and re-vision the veil.

The veil is infinitely visual, yet it is also a means of concealment. The veil is itself mystery, even as it is the shroud that guards the mystery. Veiling is found everywhere and begins in Nature - such as eclipses and the periodic shedding of animals' outer bodily layer (feathers, skin, fur or horn) before re-growth. As much as the veil is fabric or a garment, the veil is also a concept. Veils can be illusion, divination, vanity, artifice, architecture, clothing, hair, deception, curtains, magic, alchemy and transformation, dream, euphemism and metaphor, depression, hallucination, masquerade, beauty, eloquent silence, holiness, birth, liberation, imprisonment. Veils are the ethers beyond consciousness, the hidden hundredth name of god, the final passage into death, even the biblical apocalypse - the lifting of god's veil to signal the "end times."

To be veiled is, to some degree, to be unseen, the condition of both great attraction and repulsion. The artists featured in Visible and Invisible Spaces will speak to these myriad aspects of the veil and more.

My First Amazon.com Review

I love it:

"Deep thoughtfulness rides on the surface of these pages. I've read these poems over and over, and each time it feels like the first. Every page is interesting, entertaining, and thought-provoking. Wonderful work.
I look forward to enjoying many future additions to LouAnn Shepard Muhm's artistry."

New Review

I reviewed Rachel Dacus' excellent book of poems Femme au Chapeau last year for the now-defunct HerCircle E-zine. She has returned the favor with this brief review of Breaking the Glass on GoodReads:

"Jane Hirshfield's blurb calls this "a book of fierce heart and strong hands" and I concur. These spare, almost haiku-like poems have deceptively simple surfaces, but the twist of insight shows in their depths. Many of the poems deal with relationships with others and with the ineffable. The compression of these poems often has a wryness that especially appeals in the more metaphysical themes. A must-read and re-read. "

Another brief review was published this month in Northwoods Woman Magazine, "also, too," as Sarah Palin would say.

Self-Googling

I know that people make fun of people who Google their own names, but I will be bold and admit that I do it on a regular basis. How else would I ever have known that British poet Matthew Merritt had reviewed my chapbook a couple of years ago, or that someone posted my book and rated it on GoodReads? So do it! Google yourself! It doesn't hurt at all.

Western MN Readings

This fall, I've done three readings for Letters to the World, an anthology of poetry by women from around the world. It's a collection of poems from members of Wom-Po, or the Women in Poetry List-serv, started in the late 90s by Annie Finch. I joined to read with the three other Minnesota contributors, Argie Manolis and Athena Kildegaard from Morris, MN, and Francine Sterle from the Gunflint Trail area, north of Duluth, MN. We read in Minneapolis in August, then at the Fergus Falls Art Center and University on MN, Morris in late September. All of the events were fantastic, and this poetic alliance is one I want to nurture and maintain. [Photo by Steve Peterson. L to R Back: LouAnn and Francine. Front: Athena and Argie].

More photos HERE.