Winner of the 2002 Dream Horse Press National Chapbook Prize for Poetry

New Fables, Old Songs

Carney, Rob

Dream Horse Press

88 Maps is Rob Carney's 4th full-length collection of poems that discusses how to find our way around in the New West, how to live in its physical and metaphysical suburbs. It's about the times, places, and wildness we should say yes to by praising and laughing and telling stories. And it's about looking at all our real and figurative cul-de-sacs and saying no. It's a collection of praise songs, mini-essays, challenges to rampant development and the injustice of market-crashed home foreclosures, and narratives commemorating the last best places, and 21st century fables.

88 Maps: Poems

Literature & Fiction

Poetry

Lost Horse Press

This literary collection of creative writing includes well-known poets and writers from across the country, including memoirist Dinty W. Moore, poets Katharine Coles and William Trowbridge, and novelist Jack Remick, as well as published and previously unpublished writers who have shared their work at Helicon West, Logan Utah's premier featured readers/open readings series, from 2006 to 2016.

The Helicon West Anthology: A Ten-Year Celebration of Featured Readers

Coles, Katharine

Dethier, Brock

Cokinos, Christopher

Keller, Tim

VanZanten, Chadd

Johnson, Kimberly

Coulbrooke, Star

Ballam, Shanan

Gunsberg, Ben

Literary

Helicon West Press

Poetry. "THE BOOK OF SHARKS is an accomplishment at the micro and macro level. Rob Carney has crafted lines that you'll want to save for your next tattoo inside of efficient poems that touch on creation myth, forgotten industries, and slices of life in villages he manufactures with a creator's divine spark. All of this works on its own inside of a larger, complex quilt that he has woven into an intricate pattern that revisits themes, finishes stories, and reminds you that THE BOOK OF SHARKS is a larger poem that is greater than just its sharpened teeth."--Jesse Parent "In precise, sharp lines, Rob Carney's THE BOOK OF SHARKS builds and interrogates myth and myth-makers, turning to sharks to also turn inward and outward, exploring one's purpose and place and the stories one tells to make meaning. Here, poems wash out and return like the tides they describe, inviting the reader to feel their weight, as if 'to disappear under the stories / as though they were waves.' In the end, whether in water, sky, or story, Carney invites us to consider the essential motivation of 'moving, arriving, being full,' what it means to seek."--Callista Buchen "'Some say sharks are the ocean's anger at us for being in its future,' writes Rob Carney. I say poems are sharks' way of forgiving us for the soup, the necklaces, the movies, and the mascots. And, let's not even mention climate change. Rob Carney's trenchant, probing poems circle around the self, not so much sensing blood but, perhaps even more dangerously, searching for understanding. Part confession, part documentation, part meditation, these smartly crafted lyrics explore how and why we have and have not allowed sharks (metaphors for so many things) to swim into our lives. This is a major effort from a talented poet."--Dean Rader "In his ambitious collection, THE BOOK OF SHARKS, Rob Carney reimagines the human world and facets of contemporary society by creating a mythology and origin story that correct the erroneous legend of sharks. In building a new lens through which to view the sea and its most vilified species, Carney opens up a new way to conceive of art, life, storytelling, and the connections among living creatures in the sea, on land, and among the stars. 'Some say sharks are the ocean's anger,' he repeats in two poems, and later--as the collection evolves--they become 'the ocean's blueprint.' In this collection, comprised of seven sections, containing seven poems each, Carney weds structure and symbolism to reinforce his creation myth; correction and etymology to reconfigure historical facts; and repetition of images and phrases to place these poems--all without titles, bleeding poignantly into one another as part of an ongoing narrative or interconnected species--in the epic tradition. Here we are offered a sympathetic view of sharks, an alternative way to see constellations and their corresponding myths, and a new foundation from which to begin our lives and our stories. Carney's speaker demands that we reexamine what is actually dangerous versus what's been stereotyped so, and most of all he begs us to see ourselves new, 'to bear in mind / we aren't the measure of Creation. Just a part.'"--Lisa Fay Coutley

The Book of Sharks

Black Lawrence Press

Poetry. "Rob Carney is tuned to some amazing frequency--it comes from 500 North and Morton, it comes from beyond, it comes from when we were wooded slopes--but he listens and returns with these poems, thrumming with 'lifeblood,' these songs which throw down and call out (see 'Poetic Justice'), which are often rich with praise but never falsify. Sure, one might want to 'lovetalk' nature but nature will always kick our ass. It's always there, underneath us, 'with teeth.' I find this book both serious and joyful. CALL AND RESPONSE is such a good journey."--Kate Northrop

Call and Response

Digital Art Lighting Basics will give you a great start on your way to mastering the techniques of lighting in your digital art. With great advice on the theory of light and how it works in art, and tips and tricks to be used in Photoshop and other software this handy guide will give beginners a head start with their lighting effects. With a list of useful plugins and brushes, and the best ways to use them, some of the more intermediate techniques are made easy. This handy book has step-by-step guides and clear, practical text to give a beginner everything they will need to know to enhance the lighting in their artwork.

Digital Art Lighting Basics: Expert Advice, Made Easy (Everyday Guides Made Easy)

Arts & Photography

Tysall, Paul

Other Media

Flame Tree Publishing

There is a centuries-old Japanese form of writing called the haibun: meditative narratives ending with a haiku that acts as a summary or extension of the ideas and moods in the prose. In Accidental Gardens, Rob Carney both honors this form and gives it an update for the 21st century. These 42 essays-arranged into sections titled "Environmental Studies," "Wine Is Rain in Translation," "Seven Seeds," and "Raccoon Verses"-are all short and end, haibun-style, with poems or encapsulating images. These essays are impressed by the natural world, and unimpressed by politics. They are lessons on poetic craft, and poetic themselves. They are at home in the American West but aware of the whole earth, all its landscapes and animals and magic, but also its fragility since so many of its human inhabitants are reckless and absurd. Sometimes hilarious, sometimes reverent, Accidental Gardens is always smart, and vital, and concerned.

Accidental Gardens

Wakefield Press

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Books by Carney, Rob