Founded in 2006, Zone 3 Press is a nonprofit literary press dedicated to
publishing emerging writers and to building an audience for contemporary
poetry and prose. We are grateful for the generous support of the Center of
Excellence for the Creative Arts at Austin Peay State University.
To order one of our titles from Small Press Distribution, please click here
Measuring the Dark by Kate Gleason
Houses Fly Away by Leigh Anne Couch
City of Regret by Andrew Kozma
We are pleased to announce Phillis Levin has selected Kate Gleason’s manuscript Measuring the Dark as the 2008 winner of the Zone 3 First Book Award for Poetry. We would also like to congratulate John Pursley III whose manuscript If You Have Ghosts won the 2008 Zone 3 Editors' Prize.
Finalists are Jeffery Bahr, Rebecca Foust, Joe Hall, Ian Harris, Carolyn Hembree, Jeff Mock, Keith Montesano, Charlotte Pence, Derek Pollard, Brenda Sieczkowski, K.C. Trommer, Wendy Videlock, and Holly Welker.
Semifinalists are J.S. Agudelo,
Marilyn Annucci, Andrew Jowdy Collins, Nick Conrad, James Engelhardt, Kate
Fetherston, Scott Gallaway, Alice George, Melissa Ginsburg, Julie Hanson,
John Hart, W.R. Hastings, Jessica Johnson, Janet Kenning, Katie Kingston,
Steve Kistulenz, Robert Krut, Peter Marcus, Seth Michelson, Wendy Miles,
Missy-Marie Montgomery, Kantrinka Moore, Susan Roney-O’Brien, Steven
Schroeder, Matt Shears, Carrie Shipers, Barbara Buckman Strasko, Therese
Tappouni, Colette Thomas, Sue Thomas, Judith Valente, Jonathan Wells,
Charles Wyatt, and Patricia Valdata.
Finally, we would like to thank
everyone who participated in this year’s competition.
Sincerely,
The Editors
Zone 3 Press
"Kate Gleason’s first book, Measuring the Dark, has the force of a full life behind it: a mature intelligence and gravitas gleaned through long experience. Gleason exhibits a sure handling of metaphor–both extended conceits and interlocking analogies— and a sure handling of the new science, from quantum physics to string theory, finding in the scientific world analogies for the human condition. Whether writing expansive narratives, layered with personal and political history, or tightly controlled lyrics with dazzling metaphysical conceits, Gleason measures love and loss on earth, set against the darkness and empty space that surrounds us, lit up, moment to moment, by the memory of those who moved us to words."
—Neil Shepard, editor of
Green Mountains Review and author
of three poetry collections:
This Far
from the Source
(2006),
I'm Here
Because I Lost My Way
(1998),
and
Scavenging the Country for a Heartbeat
(1993), all from
Mid-List Press
$14.00
"What a surprising and exciting debut this is! Leigh Anne Couch's poems are a
completely natural amalgam of the ordinary and the fantastical, as if our
own zone of consciousness were repeatedly pierced by another, resulting in a
kind of dual perception that's both weird and completely logical. Thus the
world in which these poems form and flower is stranger and more dangerous
than our own familiar one, but also more winged and beautiful."
—Chase Twichell
"Houses Fly Away, Leigh Anne Couch's beautiful and intricately crafted first
collection of poems, makes permanent through memorable language the
condition of the fleeting, its sense of impermanence yet possibility for
transformation. There is a rightness of tone and imagery, a world of
situations and occupations, an attentiveness to the landscape and the heart.
These poems astonish and delight."
—Stuart Dischell
$12.00
"In Andrew Kozma's poems, the world is intriguingly askew:
'The desert sky
opens like the mouth of a dying fish.' Cafés undress, walls merge with air,
and rooms speak, sometimes even returning one's gaze, projecting strange
images that will shadow you like portraits whose eyes follow you around the
room and even into the street. Kozma is at his best evoking those odd
moments of disorientation when the stuff of your life transforms, seeming to
submerge into a matrix of dream—'those moments air becomes solid and you
stare through ice / like a man in a glacier.'"
—J. Allyn Rosser
"Language and mourning, these are Andrew Kozma's two main themes and quests
in his fascinating
for mourning—like forest for deer."
—Adam Zagajewski
$14.00
"David Till has produced in Oval a collection that encompasses the full
circle of experience.... The 58 poems take a wide range of forms and
lengths, including everything from the expressionistic, fragmentary "About
Trout" ('...Go stardust / One goes off hot inside / yr dream hand'), to the
joyous occasional piece "Two Poems for their Wedding": ('I could say: dogwood
are like moonlight, / or like wedding gowns in the dark church; / but to me,
/ they are cold banks of snow in the mountains...') The disparate quality of
the poems is offset by Till's consistently gentle, grounded
sensibility...."
—Maria Browning, The Nashville Scene
$14.00
