Carcanet online book launch: Red Carpet by Steve Malmude

Linked in with the famous and fabulous New York School of poets, Steve Malmude has a new book out with Manchester’s Carcanet Press, with a launch online so you can enjoy wherever you happen to be.

Red Carpet contains Malmude’s best work drawn from sixty-five years’ writing. His resonant poems, built largely in modern quatrains, work rhyme and rhythm in unprecedented ways. This new “selected” gathers together substantial selections from Malmude’s books – all but ten of his previously published poems are included here – as well as unpublished early work (the opening sonnet was written in 1958, when Malmude’s guiding star was Robert Lowell) along with poems written after he moved from NYC in 2002 to Limerick, Maine, where he lives with his wife, Christine.

An under-recognised poet, Steve Malmude was born in Manhattan in 1940, nominally stamping him as a second-generation poet of the New York School. However, his hieratic, almost ideogrammatic poems, made slowly and carefully – sometimes over many years – are utterly distinct from those of his peers. He has published three books and two pamphlets of poems. This is a great chance to find out more.

The collection is edited by Miles Champion, who will be hosting this reading and discussing the whys and wherefores with Malmude. Miles Champion was born in Nottingham in 1968 and now lives in Brooklyn, New York. He edited Tom Raworth’s As When (Carcanet, 2015) and Ted Greenwald’s The Age of Reasons (Wesleyan University Press, 2016). With Trevor Winkfield, he co-authored How I Became a Painter (Pressed Wafer, 2014).

As always with Carcanet Press events, extracts of the text will be shown during the reading so that you can read along, and audience members will have the opportunity to ask their own questions. Registration for this online event is £2, redeemable against the cost of the book – attendees will receive a discount code and details of how to get hold of the new book during and after the event.