You can buy books by Tim Jones online!
- Voyagers: SF Poetry from NZ from Amazon.
- Transported (short story collection) from Fishpond or New Zealand Books Abroad.
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Tag: Men Briefly Explained
My Book Tour Hits The North Island – And Adds A New Kapiti Coast Event
After a damp but enjoyable South Island leg, the book tour to launch my new poetry collection Men Briefly Explained and Keith Westwater’s prize-winning debut collection Tongues of Ash has reached the North Island – and we have added a new book tour event, this coming Saturday at 1pm at Paraparaumu Library.
This one has been added at very short notice, so it would be great if you could let Kapiti Coast folks who may be interested know about it.
Here are the remaining tour dates. I hope to see you at one of them!
- Lower Hutt: Friday, 28 October, Rona Gallery/Bookshop, Eastbourne, 6pm
- Kapiti Coast: Saturday, 29 October, Paraparaumu Library, 1pm
- Auckland: Tuesday 1 November, Poetry Live, Thirsty Dog, 469 Karangahape Road, 8pm
It’s On! The Men Briefly Explained and Tongues of Ash Book Tour Begins Today
No Tuesday Poem on my blog this week, but no shortage of poetry, because the Men Briefly Explained and Tongues of Ash book tour begins today!
Once more, here is the itinerary – STOP PRESS – now with Saturday’s Kapiti Coast event added:
- Dunedin: Tuesday, 25 October, Circadian Rhythm Café, 72 St Andrew Street, 8pm
- Christchurch: Wednesday, 26 October, CPIT, Madras Street, 5:30pm
- Wellington: Thursday, 27 October, Wellington Central Library, 5:30 for 6pm
- Lower Hutt: Friday, 28 October, Rona Gallery/Bookshop, Eastbourne, 6pm
- Kapiti Coast: Saturday, 29 October, Paraparaumu Library, 1pm
- Auckland: Tuesday 1 November, Poetry Live, Thirsty Dog, 469 Karangahape Road, 8pm
You can sign up to attend the tour on our Facebook events page: http://www.facebook.com/#!/event.php?eid=188416554563635
Some lovely Tuesday Poets have kindly posted poems from Men Briefly Explained on their blogs this week – you can check them out by going to the Tuesday Poem blog and looking on the right-hand menu. Don’t forget to check out this week’s hub poem and all the other excellent poems featured on the right.
If you can’t make it to one of the tour dates, here is …
How To Buy Men Briefly Explained
You can buy Men Briefly Explained from Amazon.com as a paperback or Kindle ebook.
Likewise, it is available from Amazon.co.uk in paperback and ebook formats.
You can also find out more about it, and buy it directly from the publisher, at the Men Briefly Explained mini-site.
Men Briefly Explained is also available in a range of formats from eBookpie and for the Kobo.
Poetry Tour Preparations: The Physical Tour … and the Virtual Tour?
The Physical Book Tour: It’s All On
It begins in a fortnight. And appropriately enough, it beings on a Tuesday.
“It” is the book tour Keith Westwater and I are embarking on to launch our new poetry collections: Keith’s first collection Tongues of Ash, and my new collection, Men Briefly Explained.
Here are the stops on the tour:
- Dunedin: Tuesday 25 October, Circadian Rhythm Café, 72 St Andrew Street, 8pm
- Christchurch: Wednesday 26 October, CPIT, Madras Street, 5:30pm
- Wellington: Thursday 27 October, Wellington Central Library, 5:30 for 6pm
- Lower Hutt: Friday 28 October, Rona Gallery/Bookshop, Eastbourne, 6pm
- Auckland: Tuesday 1 November, Poetry Live, Thirsty Dog, 469 Karangahape Road, 8pm
If you live in one of those places, I hope you’ll be able to make it along – and, whether or not you can make it along, please tell your friends in those centres!
Some other things you can do:
- Sign up for the tour on Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/#!/event.php?eid=188416554563635
- Check out the tour poster and other details
- Buy the books online if you can’t make it to a tour event: Men Briefly Explained: paperback and ebook and Tongues of Ash: paperback and ebook.
It’s worth noting that Dr David Reiter, the publisher of Interactive Press and a noted poet in his own right, will also be in attendance and reading from his new collection My Planets. As he is an international poetry publisher who has a track record of publishing collections by New Zealand poets, he may be someone you want to get to know.
The Virtual Book Tour: Under Construction
On hearing about the physical book tour, two writer/bloggers have kindly offered to host stops on a virtual book tour to follow the physical one. I’m grateful to those people, I think this is a great idea, and I am keen to line up more stops. So, if you would be interested in your blog hosting a stop on the virtual book tour, please get in touch by emailing senjmito (at) gmail.com, or say so in the comments below.
Hmmm, you may be wondering, what is a virtual book tour? Well, it involves a series of bloggers hosting interviews with or guest posts by a writer with a newly released book, according to a pre-arranged schedule. Not long after setting up this blog, I was one of the stops on the virtual book tour for Tania Hershman’s debut short story collection, The White Road and Other Stories, which serves as a good model.
(Note: Some of the links in this 2008 post no longer work.)
I don’t have Tania’s impressive stamina for answering a lot of questions in a short time, so I thought – and one of my generous prospective hosts has suggested – that I could use the “Five Questions With…” format used in the tour for Tales For Canterbury. That makes the load a bit lighter on everyone.
So. If you can come to one of the launch events, please do – I think you will enjoy them. And if you’re interested in hosting a stop on a virtual book tour, please get in touch.
Tuesday Poem: happened to meet
happened to meet
fingers extending a welcome
household of tired gods
the table, drinks
then morning.
Birds, coffee, the paper
affirmed you
my hand on your hip
my hand on your breast
my hand on your heart.
Credit note: “happened to meet” is a new poem, first published in my new poetry collection Men Briefly Explained.
You can check out all the Tuesday Poems on the Tuesday Poem Blog – this week’s hub poem in the centre of the page, and all the other Tuesday Poems on the right.
Tuesday Poem: Men At Sea
1. Puysegur
Glint of gold, horizon
proclaiming fish: familiar
warnings of gale and cloud.
He descends to the fishing boats.
One will take him tideward,
southward, a tolerated,
but far from welcome,
inspector of catches. In a pre-dawn
counterfeit of morning, they cast off
for Puysegur: the south-west
corner, the Roaring Forties’
big back yard, their hunting ground.
Three days of the sea as mountain range,
eating with the crew, sharing danger
but not profit. Three days
of soaked skin, puddled clothes, each
wooden bunk a trampoline, salt spray
in every cut and nick. At last
the turning homeward, past Solander,
past Centre Island — the Bluff
finally, blessedly, in sight.
He will make tallies, say farewells,
enact the weary rituals
of damp wharf and empty office.
He will drive a narrow highway home,
eyelids heavy, engine cold and catching
in the falling winter light.
2. Halfmoon Bay
School holidays. The ferry’s
uncertain plunging past the fishing fleets,
young feet
attentive to the scuppers. Green bile
derived from dread and remnant breakfast
flung, a final offering,
to the greedy waves. Then this
harbour long desired, Foveaux’s fingers
unclamping from my inner ear. Sudden
ease, relief; a brief reflection
that all this must be undergone again.
Boats in our wake, men at sea
raising a laconic workman’s finger
to visitors, to loopies,
to the daily irruption of other lives.
And now the island: crash
of gangways, solid ground,
davits whining as we walk away.
Men at sea, I take my father’s hand
as we approach the village, houses
hunched against the glowing skies.
The lure of escape, of absorption
into no-time, merely being
and doing. The memory of waves.
The journey back. Hands,
half-longed-for, half-feared,
reaching as we near the shore.
Credit note: “Men At Sea” is a new poem, first published in my new poetry collection Men Briefly Explained.
Tim says: My dad used to work as a fisheries inspector in Southland, the southern province of New Zealand. Halfmoon Bay on Stewart Island/Rakiura, and Puysegur Point at the south-west corner of New Zealand, were two of the places on his ‘beat’. I went with him several times to Stewart Island, but the trip to Puysegur was regarded as a bit tough for a child of my age. I still haven’t been there.
You can check out all the Tuesday Poems on the Tuesday Poem Blog – this week’s hub poem in the centre of the page, and all the other Tuesday Poems on the right.
October Book Tour To Launch Men Briefly Explained and Tongues Of Ash
It’s all on! The Interactive Press book tour for my third poetry collection, Men Briefly Explained, and Keith Westwater’s prize-winning debut collection Tongues of Ash, starts in Dunedin on Tuesday 25 October and ends in Auckland on Tuesday 1 November. Here is the tour poster:
For the benefit of Google and of those, like me, whose eyesight is not what it was, here are those details again in text format:
- Dunedin: Tuesday, 25 October, Circadian Rhythm Café, 72 St Andrew Street, 8pm
- Christchurch: Wednesday, 26 October, CPIT, Madras Street, 5:30pm
- Wellington: Thursday, 27 October, Wellington Central Library, 5:30 for 6pm
- Lower Hutt: Friday, 28 October, Rona Gallery/Bookshop, Eastbourne, 6pm
- Auckland: Tuesday 1 November, Poetry Live, Thirsty Dog, 469 Karangahape Road, 8pm
You can also see these, and signal your attendance, on our Facebook events page: http://www.facebook.com/#!/event.php?eid=188416554563635
To celebrate the occasion, Keith Westwater has launched his own website.
Dr David Reiter, the publisher of Interactive Press and a noted poet in his own right, will also be in attendance and reading from his new collection My Planets. As he is an international poetry publisher who has a track record of publishing collections by New Zealand poets, he may be someone you want to get to know.
We will be doing lots more to publicise individual events over the next seven weeks, but if you just can’t wait that long to get your copy of these books, or if you live where you can’t get to a launch event, you can already purchase both books from Amazon in paperback and Kindle ebook formats, as follows:
Tongues of Ash: paperback and ebook
Men Briefly Explained: paperback and ebook
Oh, All Right, If You Insist
I wasn’t going to. But after spending the past two days reading nothing but pleas from leading media outlets for me to change my mind – “He must tell us!” (New Orleans Times-Picayune), “This has become an urgent matter of national security” (Washington Times), “All Blacks something World Cup something” (Dominion Post) – I have decided to give in. The rumours are true: the three titular brothers of my Tuesday Poem Tres Hermanos are indeed that trio of Hollywood hot-shots, Zack, Jed and Joss Whedon.
Here they are with Maurissa “Mo” Tancharoen at some San Diego Comic Con of distant memory – that’s Mo, Joss, Zack and Jed in that order. Since the brothers Whedon got their (uncredited) chance to shine in Tres Hermanos and hence Men Briefly Explained, here is Mo Tancharoen with Fran Kranz in the music video for her and Jed Whedon’s song “Remains”. It’s a video that manages to be beautiful, creepy, sad and feminist all at once.
Tuesday Poem: Tres Hermanos
They’re feudin’, Mama.
They’re rasslin’.
They’re camped up in Bozeman
for the party season.
One is a long bore.
Another raids the mini-bar, now sure
his date won’t show. The third
defends his diary with a secret code.
A horseman riding by
observes the niceties of outstretched thumbs
(that poor horse,
sway-backed and spavined,
when all it wanted was a better ranch).
Hear that far-off harmonica blow
beneath that far-off sky.
See that second mortgage slip away.
They’re fussin’ and a–fightin’, Mama,
those three sons of yours,
arguing over the script
as wolves tiptoe behind.
Credit note: “Tres Hermanos” appears in my new poetry collection, Men Briefly Explained.
Tim says: The note about this poem at the back of Men Briefly Explained helpfully advises as follows:
“Bozeman is the fifth largest city in Montana, on the route of the former Bozeman Trail. Though this is not stated in the poem, the three titular brothers are named Zack, Jed and Joss, which irresistibly suggested a Western theme.”
Times are tough, even in Hollywood.
You can read all the Tuesday Poems on the Tuesday Poem blog – the featured poem is on the centre of the page, and the week’s other poems are linked from the right-hand column.
Available On Amazon In Paperback And Kindle Ebook: Men Briefly Explained And Tongues Of Ash
STOP PRESS: Men Briefly Explained is now available on Amazon in print and Kindle ebook formats!
Print: http://www.amazon.com/Men-Briefly-Explained-Tim-Jones/dp/1921869321/
Kindle: http://www.amazon.com/Men-Briefly-Explained-ebook/dp/B005HRYM32/
Keith Westwater’s Tongues Of Ash is also available on Amazon in these two formats:
Print: http://www.amazon.com/Tongues-Ash-Keith-Westwater/dp/1921869267/
Kindle: http://www.amazon.com/Tongues-of-Ash-ebook/dp/B005HIV6J4/
Now, back to our regular programming:
In late October, Lower Hutt poet Keith Westwater and I are setting out on a book tour to promote our new poetry collections, my Men Briefly Explained and his Tongues Of Ash.
You can use this link to pre-order the paperback versions.
The Kindle versions are not yet available, and so the “Buy Kindle” links on these pages do not work yet. They will be updated once the Kindle versions are available.
Both books are being published by Interactive Press of Brisbane, who published Voyagers: Science Fiction Poetry from New Zealand in 2009.
Almost all the events on the book tour are now confirmed, and we’ll be releasing the tour details once all events are confirmed – but we start in Dunedin on Tuesday 25 October and end in Auckland a week later, winding through Christchurch, Wellington, and Eastbourne en route. Watch out for more details soon!
