Updated, Nov. 15. Time for a plug. I'm pleased to announce that "After Voices," a poetry chapbook by my wife, Jane Rosenberg LaForge, was released last week by Burning River of Cleveland. Jane has been laboring over these poems for a couple of years. Some people have asked, what is a chapbook? One definition: a short booklet containing poems, ballads or stories. Jane's chapbook includes 12 poems and an essay arranged around the theme of her father's deafness. (He is already disputing some of the facts. Fun times!) Jane plans to read some of the poems at a New York University faculty-student reading in the East Village in December.

A hard copy of the chapbook can be ordered online for $6 a copy from Burning River. A PDF version can be downloaded for free (it includes a bonus poem not in the print edition). It will eventually be available as a digital book in epub format from Project Gutenberg. You can also buy a copy at Visible Voice Books in Cleveland, Housing Works Bookstore Cafe in SoHo, and the McNally-Jackson Bookstore, also in SoHo. I'll update this post if it becomes available anywhere else. Jane's working on that. Poets have to be their own distributors sometimes. It's a tough field, without a sustainable business model.

On the weekend of Oct. 17, the chapbook was released in conjunction with readings at the Morgan Conservatory of Papermaking and Visible Voice. Jane read several of the poems, including my favorites, "Lemons" and "Highway 5 Stockyard," as well as some of her unpublished poetry.

Some poems in the chapbook were previously published in some form or another in La Petite Zine, Burnside Review, Bateau, Makeout Creek, Ottawa Arts Review and Noun Versus Verb. She has also had work published by the Tipton Poetry Journal and Adirondack Review.