Jake Fournier will present his debut poetry collection ‘Punishment Bag’ at Bookworks

AT BOOKWORKS

Jake Fournier of Albuquerque will present his debut poetry collection “Punishment Bag” at 6 p.m. Tuesday, Jan. 20, at Bookworks, 4022 Rio Grande Blvd. NW.

Fournier said he will read and discuss the title poem and the poem “Quick Recovery.” He said the discussion about “Quick Recovery,” will include where it came from and the sometimes prophetic quality that he finds in poetry.

“It’s a persona poem, in a voice not my own,” he added.

The new collection, Fournier said, “is a product of 15 years of discipline and engagement with poetry.”

Several of his earlier poems are in the volume, but were in a different form in a previously unpublished collection.

The new collection’s front cover has an unusual typographical element. The word “Punishment” in the title, Fournier’s first name “Jake” and the word “Poems” are all spelled with the letters facing in the opposite direction.

“This is the result of a collaboration with the University of New Mexico Press and their design team,” Fournier said.

When not writing poems, Fournier works as a firefighter for Bernalillo County Fire Rescue and teaches in the creative writing graduate program at the Institute of American Indian Arts.

He is a licensed emergency medical technician and holds three academic degrees — a Bachelor of Arts in literature from New York University, a Master of Arts in poetry from the Iowa Writers Workshop and a doctorate from the University of Chicago with his dissertation being a long prose study on mid-19th century abolitionist poetics.

NEW NOVEL OUT

“Shadow-Man” is the title of a new novel by longtime Edgewood resident Rory McClannahan.

The author said in a press release the book is about Cold War spies with an alien twist. It’s “an homage to the Gold Medal paperbacks from the 1960s and 1970s combined with an unhealthy habit of falling asleep at night with ‘The Twilight Zone’ playing on the television, and an appreciation for the humor that life brings us.”

The protagonist is Reyn Baker, a young Air Force sergeant. All he wants is a place to sober up and use a restroom. He gets that but isn’t expecting an alien symbiont in his colon, the East German police, the Soviets or a sexy American spy.

Copies of the novel are available at Organic Books or amazon.com.

McClannahan is a technical editor for a federal government contractor.

He worked for the Albuquerque Journal for 22 years as a reporter, editor and the publisher of the Mountain View Telegraph. He also served as executive director of the New Mexico Press Association.

His website is rorymcclannahan.com.

A NEW BOOK OF STORIES

Raymond Whitehead of Santa Fe is the author of the newly published book “Funny Blind Stories.”

The text on the book’s back cover says the stories are of “weird, wacky, wild and wonderful things that happened to the author during the 20 years it took to go completely blind and for the last 27 years without sight.”

The publisher is Sunstone Press of Santa Fe.