Jeff Newberry's interviewed by the Barn Owl Review, and he says:

I’ve also been reading Jake Adam York’s new book, A Murmuration of Starlings. Jake’s one of my favorite poets writing today. He does this whole “documentary lyric” thing that I find really cool.

Jeff is also giving mad props to some other righteous poets, Ed Pavlic included.

Gary L. McDowell's also there. I'm glad to see this sort of interview thing going on.

A friend just e-mailed me to ensure I hypered over to Ron Slate's blog to see the list he's compiled in an entry entitled "Twenty Poets Name Some New Favorites to Celebrate National Poetry Month." So I scroll down to this:

A Murmuration of Starlings by Jake Adam York (So. Illinois, 2008)
recommended by David Wojahn
York's notes to the volume state that it is "part of an ongoing project to elegize and memorialize the martyrs of the Civil Rights movement." The book proves worthy of its goal. It's a large and sweeping documentary poem in the tradition of Rukeyser's Book of the Dead and Reznikoff's Testimony, with a cast of characters ranging from Emmett Till to Sun Ra. Long poem projects along these lines often seem tethered to their "research" and end up smelling like a library carel—not so York's collection. His struggle with the benighted history of his native South is conveyed with great urgency, and with a terse concision that brings to mind the early work of Heaney. It's a book of unusual ambition and range. – DW

April is not the cruelest month. Not this time anyway. Thank you.

I don't know who wrote this, but so far this is the coolest review ever. I love the rating system (biceps! (I'm sure I'm supposed to know whose they are, but I don't)):

This is a fantastic book of poetry! His other book of poems, Murder Ballads was very good, but this one was great. The poems all centered around the civil rights movement. I loved how Mr. York used music in his poetry. These poems were beautiful and chilling at the same time. They were just perfect. Okay, enough gushing.

And thank you...

Mobs and poetry is an oxymoron these days. So who could resist attending Poetry Flash Mob, an event in which the public is invited to join poets for the reading of poems in unison down the 16th Street Mall. Head over there between noon and 1 p.m. Tuesday. (The walk begins at Glenarm St.) "Despite the date," quips one of its organizers, Jake Adam York, about the April Fools' Day event, "it's no joke."

Boston.com (the Boston Globe's website) presents a story about Alabama barbecue that quotes my introduction to Alabama barbecue, presented at the Southern Foodways Alliance's Southern BBQ Trail site. To wit:

Swerve three times in Alabama, and you're liable to run into a roadside barbecue joint. The tastes of one restaurant's slab compared to another can be as different as the Alabama terrain, which stretches from the Gulf Coast near Mobile, to the central piney woods, and northward into the Appalachian range...

In an ode to 'Bama barbecue' at The Southern BBQ Trail website, Jake Adam York celebrates the influences that arrive from neighboring states, whether mustard mixing with tomato for an orange sauce near the Georgia border, or chicken in a white sauce up near Tennessee.

"Whether the influence is Cherokee, Appalachian, Georgian, Mississippian, Floridian, Tennessean, Texan, or just plain Alabamian," York writes, "barbecue springs up everywhere, with significant variation."

Thank you Tom Haines for getting it. Now I'm hungry...

The first (?) review of A Murmuration of Starlings is online at The Yalobusha Review.

I had hoped someone would feel this way:

Laudably, the collection avoids oversimplifying the individual struggles of the Civil Rights Era, refusing the easy binaries of innocence and guilt, goodness and badness, self and other.

My brother's now working freelance, and he just contributed to his second ESPN.com story about Matthew Conley, a young soldier from Greenhill, Alabama, killed two years ago in Iraq and commemorated on Jason Isbell's newest album in a song called "Dress Blues."

His first was a feature on a bar in Kiln, Mississippi, known as "Lambeau South."

And some of you may remember his book, With Signs Following, which you should buy, if you already haven't.

& have you seen Octopus 10? CD Wright
Paul Fattaruso
Cecily Parks
Anthony Hawley
Martha Ronk
Dorothea Lasky
Linh Dinh
Julie Doxsee
GC Waldrep
Jordan Davis
Will Oldham
Allison Titus
Karen Volkman
Laura Mullen
Sara Veglahn
Adam Clay
Brenda Hillman
Sandy Florian
DA Powell
Jen Tynes
Cynthia Arrieu King

Paste #41 arrived at the house yesterday with more than a few surprises, all of them pleasant. 

If you're an even semi-frequent visitor to this site, you'll see a redesign's in progress. I'm trying to put it all together at last, all my Movable Type, CSS, &c., and all the information I need to keep straight, integrated in one system. Scheduled readings are now listed under the "On the Schedule" heading and are programmed to disappear from the list while the reading is in progress, to reappear later as an archived entry, ideally with some pictures from the reading and even audio, from time to time. And I've got this "Fresh Ink" box where I can post my most-recent publications and interviews (motivated in part by the encouragement of the editors at Southern Spaces). A bibliography of a sort appears at the bottom of the site's root page, and slowly I will be integrating that into the Movable Type system, for more flexibility. The goal is to make this a good-looking site, an informative site that will respond to requests I can't anticipate right now, and to make this a completely database-driven site.