Wow wow!!! Alaska Quarterly Review accepted my lyric essay “Have You Ever Given Your Sister a Snowman?”! Yippee! Thank you to my friends Dustin and J for allowing me to interview you for this essay. Thank you to Ragdale Foundation for providing me with a residency and fellowship where I could write the early drafts of this essay. Thank you to Ronald Spatz for accepting it!
Hot dang! My contributor copy of the new Broadsided Press 2005-2020 Anthology just landed here in Syracuse and it’s a real beauty! This hefty art book contains my poem “Stop Doing That,” collaboratively illustrated by the awesome Amy Meissner, plus so much great writing and art by the likes of Camille Dungy, Danez Smith, Catherine Pierce, Robert Wrigley, Jane Hirshfield, Philip Metres…that’s just the beginning of the Table of Contents! Thank you Elizabeth Bradfield, Alexandra Teague, Miller Oberman!
Order your copy here: https://provincetown-arts-press.myshopify.com/products/broadsided-press-fifteen-years-of-poetic-and-artistic-collaboration-2005-2020
What a delightful and heartfelt Zoom reading tonight at Uncloistered Poetry! Thanks again to Jonie McIntire for inviting me! It was such a pleasure to be a featured reader along with Aleathia Drehmer and Rick C. Christiansen and to hear all the open mic poets read after. Warmed me up on this chilly Syracuse night.
Huge THANK YOU to David Ebenbach for this generous review of my book, If We Had a Lemon We’d Throw It and Call That the Sun, in the new Asheville Poetry Review, together with Matthew Lippman’s new book, Mesmerizingly Sadly Beautiful, a poet whose work I deeply adore, to put it lightly. How awesome to be reviewed together!
“These books, in their flights from the personal to the ceiling of the universe and back again, truck in classic themes of love and purpose, and yet they do it in a way that finds readers where they are in the peculiarity of the moment. Citro and Lippman are two voices we really need right now.”
Howdy! Listen to me and Dustin Nightingale read our 3 collaborative prose poems in Bear Review with awesome improvised piano music by my partner Sarah! Thank you to the whole Bear Review crew for sharing this, and thank you especially to Marcus Myers for your generous words about our audio.
My book is 1 year old! Happy birthday to my second poetry book If We Had a Lemon We’d Throw It and Call That the Sun, winner of the Antivenom Poetry Award and published by Elixir Press! My book and I would like to say a huge, quivering THANK YOU to everyone for reading it and for being so awesome about it over these 12 months.
If you’d like a signed copy, you can order one from my website. (I’ll mail it out with a bright yellow lemon sticker on the front of the package which makes our local postal clerk Vinnie say, “Sold another book, did you? Good job!”
You can also buy a regular copy just from Bookshop dot org, Small Press Distribution, Amazon, and elsewhere!
I’m offering private Zoom classes this Spring! One’s a short-form creative nonfiction workshop and the other is a discussion seminar where we’ll read and chat about contemporary world poetry (in English). Classes begin the last week of April 2022. Register early as classes will cap at 12 participants each. Feel free to share this with anyone who might be interested! 😀
For more info and to register visit http://christophercitro.com/private-classes/!
Thrilled to receive my contributor copies of the new Bat City Review, which contains “Look! Fruit!” one of the collaborative prose poems I’ve been writing with Dustin Nightingale. There’s so much literary awesomeness in this gorgeous issue! Massive thank yous to Luci Arbus-Scandiffio, Sarah Matthes, and the whole BCR crew!
Hot dang! I just received the new Rain Taxi which contains the interview with me about my book, If We Had a Lemon We’d Throw It and Call That the Sun (Elixir Press, 2021). I’m doing loop-de-loops! I hope you’ll snag yourself a print copy in your bookstore, library, or by purchase or subscription! Thank you Eric Lorberer at Rain Taxi and thank you Christopher Carter Sanderson for interviewing me!
“Smell of Wet Earth Like the Inside of My Hands”
Poem & Video by Christopher Citro
Music by Brian Citro
I’m delighted to share this first poem video from a new poetry & music video project I’m doing with my nephew Brian. Hope you enjoy it! (It’s posted to my YouTube.)
Brian Citro has been playing and writing music on guitar for 30 years. A long-time member of The Drastics, he’s performed and toured with JC Brooks and the Uptown Sound, Ted Sirota’s Heavyweight Dub! and others. With Charles Gorczynski, Nate Lepine and Quin Kirchner he made music as Salamander and Video Gum Culture. Brian is also an international human rights lawyer and has lived, travelled and played music in Africa, Asia and Europe.
Christopher Citro is the author of If We Had a Lemon We’d Throw It and Call That the Sun (Elixir Press, 2021), winner of the 2019 Antivenom Poetry Award, and The Maintenance of the Shimmy-Shammy (Steel Toe Books, 2015). His awards include a 2018 Pushcart Prize for Poetry. He lives in Syracuse, New York.
Poem from If We Had a Lemon We’d Throw It and Call That the Sun (Elixir Press, 2021)