WHAT BOOKS PRESENTS CAROLIE PARKER, SARAH MACLAY, AND HOLADAY MASON

What Books Press is proud to present two new books of LA poetry-- Mirage Industry, by Carolie Parker and The " She" Series: A Venice Correspondence, which is a braided collaboration of poems by Sarah Maclay and Holaday Mason. 

Mirage Industry

Mirage Industry is a collection of poems suggested by the social landscape of Los Angeles. A fairly reckless experiment in rearranging the natural world to serve human needs, the city borrows from a broad inventory of cultural models, adopted with a heavy dose of fantasy and inaccuracy. Whether breathing fire or air, the poems issue from this freewheeling approach to building place, combining random methods of composition with more formal structures. Mirage Industry draws on the author’s practice in the visual arts, her background in comparative literature and her experiences teaching humanities and art history.

Carolie Parker has a background in visual arts and foreign languages. She was recently a MacDowell Fellow in poetry and a Visiting Artist at the American Academy in Rome. Her work has come out in The Denver Quarterly, Now Culture, River Styx and Trickhouse. She teaches humanities and art history at LA Trade Tech College in Central Los Angeles.

The "She" Series: A Venice Correspondence

This collaboration, The “ She” Series: A Venice Correspondence, is a unique exploration of the mysterious feminine aspects of human experience which “unfolds between the poetic voices of Holaday Mason and Sarah Maclay, revealing a multifaceted universe—almost painfully private—where “She” appears as a dream-like composite of sexuality, longing, awareness and courage” (Mariano Zaro).

Sarah Maclay is the author of Music for the Black Room (2011), The White Bride (2008), Whore (2004), all from U of Tampa Press. A 2016 COLA Fellow and 2015 Yaddo resident, she’s also received a Pushcart Special Mention and the Tampa Review Prize for Poetry. Her poems and criticism appear in APR, The Writer’s Chronicle, FIELD, The Best American Erotic Poetry: From 1800 to the Present, Ploughshares, Poetry International, where she’s long served as Book Review Editor, and many other spots. A native of Montana, graduate of Oberlin and VCFA, she lives in Venice, California, teaches poetry and creative writing at LMU, and conducts Mini-Master Classes at Beyond Baroque.

Holaday Mason is the author of The Red Bowl: A Fable in Poems, (Red Hen Press) 2016, The “She” Series: A Venice Correspondence (collaboration with Sarah Maclay, What Books Press, fall 016), Towards the Forest, 2007, Dissolve, 2011 (New River Press, University of Minnesota) & two chapbooks. “The Weaver’s Body”, was finalist with honorable mention for 014 Dorset Prize & her chapbook “Transparency” was finalist for the Snowbound 2015. Pushcart nominee, widely published, co- editor of Echo 68, poetry editor of Mentalshoes.com, she is also a fine art photographer & a psychotherapist since 1996.