Parisian Phoenix Publishing

Recently, in my Substack newsletter, I mentioned how my grandfather served on the Queen Mary during World War II and how this led to his meeting and marrying my grandmother. I mentioned this because I was reading Jane Friedman’s hot sheet and saw she would be presenting at a writing and publishing cruise on the Queen Mary 2. And to put me on a boat– the namesake of my grandfather’s ship– and tell me to write is the only way I am going on a cruise.

My maternal grandfather was British. He came to the United States after World War II because he met this cute army nurse, my grandmother. He spent the war as an engineer on the Queen Mary when it was used as a soldier transport. He died when I was a baby, but when my grandmother passed away in the late 1990s, his scrapbook of clippings about the war and the Queen Mary (and Princess Elizabeth’s marriage) came into my possession. It even included an autograph from Bob Hope!

World War II resurfaces this week with a new poetry chapbook submitted to Parisian Phoenix by Benjamin Goluboff and Mark Luebbers. The collection, Group Portrait: Poems on a Photograph by Herman Landshoff, will release this summer.

From Ben’s original query letter:

Our subject is the well-known 1943 photograph of exiled European artists posing at Peggy Guggenheim’s Manhattan home. The poems are in various forms and voices, one for each of the sitters, one for Guggenheim, and one for the photographer. Some are funny, some are sad, all serve the project of unpacking the extraordinary photo.

A fact you may not know about me, but I adore 20th Century history and the early to mid-century fascinates me. While my interests often focus on French history and literature, and how the French civilizing mission provides a warning for modern imperialistic foreign policy, I also have an academic soft spot for Antoine de Saint Exupèry, a pilot most known for his classic The Little Prince, written while he spent World War II in Long Island.

I even have a Little Prince tattoo. But for now, I’ll stop there.

So it is with great excitement we begin work on Group Portrait.