Let’s pause a minute while you roll your eyes and groan.

Now let’s get serious. Moon Law is a work of narrative poetry that speaks to everyone who’s ever drifted away from a friend, a lover, a family member. It speaks to people who love pop culture references and biting social commentary. It speaks to everyone who’s ever wondered if the grass is really greener on the other side but suspected it probably isn’t.

“Page” one, back and front.

The book comes in the form of postcards, with a poem printed on one side and a gorgeous illustration on the other side. The postcards fit neatly in a clear plastic box accented with a red vinyl ribbon, just as if they’d come from a lover. Each copy is hand-numbered and signed by the author.

Text and images speak to each other and the loneliness of being human. The postcards beg to be read, to be loved, individually and as a whole. Buy two copies of the book, and you could even get them framed, reinvent the text as your own love story.

Moon whispers to you. Can you hear it?

We might take literature seriously here, but that doesn’t mean we don’t like to have fun, so here’s how to enter:

1. Write a love haiku to the Moon. It can be serious, funny, angsty, whatever. It can be a breakup haiku. Have fun with it. Write more than one, if you want (but no more than five).
2. Follow Wild Age Press on Twitter and/or on Google+.
3. Tweet your haiku with the hash tag #moonlaw and/or post your haiku on Google+ and share it directly with us (just type “+Wild Age Press” to share your post directly). You are encouraged to enter both ways.
4. You have until Friday, October 5 at midnight EDT to get your entries in!

Samantha Duncan will choose her three favorite haiku, and the winners will all receive copies of Moon Law signed by the author. You MUST be following Wild Age Press on either Twitter or Google+ to win. By entering you agree to allow us to post a screen capture of your haiku on our website. As always, you keep copyright to your work.

If you have any questions, leave a comment here or email editor[at]wildagepress[dot]com.

Happy Haiku-ing!

So where does Newt come in? MOON LAW developed out of his idea to colonize the Moon, and expanded like an exploding star from there. The collection not only features beautiful language, but an earnest look at the things in our culture that keep us apart.

Wild Age Press is happy to send interested reviewers and book bloggers a free PDF copy of MOON LAW. Simply email editor@wildagepress.com with your name and the URL of your blog or the name of the newspaper or magazine for which you work. We would also be happy to send copies to select Goodreads users. If you have rated more than 200 books and have a large friends network, contact us for more information, and please include a link to your Goodreads profile.

MOON LAW will be released on October 16, 2012. Check back in a few weeks for a sneak peak and pre-orders! For more information on the book, click here.

• 1st Place: Samantha Duncan for her poetry chapbook Moon Law
• 2nd Place: Laura LeHew for her poem “Salt”
• Honorable Mention: Daniel Ari for his four poems “Serious Ink,” “Now You Know,” “A Vision During A Vision Quest,” and “Tale of Two Oh Ten”
• Honorable mention: Ron Ray for his poem “More About Gray Jello”

The first and second place winners will receive publication and 10% of the print run. Keep reading for more about each winner!

1st Place: Samantha Duncan
Samantha Duncan is a poet, fiction writer, and chai addict. A graduate of the University of North Texas, her work has appeared in THIS Literary Magazine, scissors and spackle, Thunderclap Magazine, Eunoia Review, Emerge Literary Journal, and Everyday Other Things. After many years spent on novel, short story, and play compositions (a body of work sitting in retirement on the sunny beaches of a USB drive), her focus turned to the rhythmic wordplay of poetry. Moon Law is her first chapbook.

Duncan grew up in Plano, Texas, and briefly resided in opposite realms of the universe, Washington, D.C., and Macon, Georgia. She currently lives in Houston with her husband, son, and two dogs. She writes from the Moon and occasionally blogs at planesflyinglowoverhead.blogspot.com.

2nd Place: Laura LeHew
Laura LeHew is an award winning poet with a myriad of work appearing in national and international journals/anthologies like the Ambush Review, Anobium, Collecting Life: Poets on Objects Known and Imagined, Eating Her Wedding Dress: A Collection of Clothing Poems from Ragged Sky Press, Eleven Eleven, Filling Station and PANK. It’s Always Night, It Always Rains is forthcoming fall 2012 in an anthology Ashes Caught on the Edge: 10 Chapbooks (Winterhawk Press Books). Willingly Would I Burn is forthcoming spring 2013 (MoonPath Press). Beauty (Tiger’s Eye Press) is in its 3rd printing.

Laura received her MFA in writing from the California College of the Arts, writing residencies from Soapstone and the Montana Artists Refuge and interned for CALYX Journal. She guest edited The Medulla Review. Laura is the editor of Cascadia (a student contest awards anthology), former President and former Contest Chair for of the Oregon Poetry Association, and is on the steering committee of the Lane Literary Guild. Uttered Chaos, her small press, has produced 8 books and 2 anthologies by local authors. Laura writes, edits and sharpens her claws in Eugene, Oregon.

Laura lives in the realm of possibility, where anything can happen. She is constantly thinking of new ideas and themes to convey in her work. Her intent is to create works that are formally and aesthetically engaging while conceptually connecting with the everyday; to reify the ordinary into the extraordinary; to question realities—social, political and otherwise. Poetry is a way to explore and understand those ideas which frustrate and confront her.

Honorable Mention: Daniel Ari
Devoted to the practice since 1985, Daniel Ari writes and publishes a lot. Writer’s Digest, Strong Verse, McSweeney’s, 42 Magazine, Turbulence, Pif Magazine, Ceramics Now and Conscious Dancer have recently published his writing. Recently The Mockingbirds set his lyrics to music on their record, Lacuna. Daniel also writes professionally and leads creative writing events and performances throughout the Pacific Northwest including at his home in Richmond, California.

In addition to his own blog, FightsWithPoems, Daniel shares a poetry blog with Marna Cosmos: IMUNURI.blogspot.com. (That’s I aM yoU aNd yoU aRe I.) You can read the poems Daniel submitted to the contest on his blog by clicking here.

Honorable Mention: Ron Ray
Ronald Ray is a self-taught writer and visual artist. His work tends towards the emotional, but he also enjoys the surreal and whimsical side of writing, preferring free verse poetry.

A long-time member of DeviantArt, he has been published in Wordsmiths magazine under the pseudonym “Bark”. His work has also been published in Grawlix Poetry and Taft College’s “A Sharp piece of Awesome” Spring 2012. More will be published in the upcoming months in The Turtle Way and Death Cross Monk. He has also self-published two volumes of poetry and a collection of short stories through Lulu Press.

Born in Charlotte, NC, he currently resides in Rockford, IL. You can find him online at bark.deviantart.com and ronraylit.wordpress.com.

Magazine writer Zach Tackett asks Israel some great questions, like: “Throughout the book, there are explicit moments of violence. Are you commenting on Venezuela or the violence there? Is this book political in any sense?”

They also discuss the hybrid nature of the text. Israel’s description of what exactly Bamboo City can be defined as is perfect, in my opinion: “But Bamboo City can’t be defined as a ‘short story’ or a ‘poem.’ It is more like a cocktail. … In a good cocktail, you can taste everything.”

You can read the full text of the article here: Bamboo City: A New Book by Venezuelan Writer Israel Centeno.

*Also to note: Some issues we were having with the online store have been resolved. We apologize for the inconvenience.

This was the first contest we’ve ever run, so we’ve already learned a lot. We know that it’s the great writers who submit work to us who make us a great publisher, not the other way around, so one of our goals is to make sure we’re always improving our submission process and guidelines to make things easier for you. Hopefully when the Prescription Bottle Project comes around, the guidelines will be more streamlined from the beginning, eliminating confusion. Thanks for bearing with us!

For the next few weeks we’re going to work hard at getting responses out to everyone who submitted as quickly as possible. So if things seem a bit dead around here, it’s because we’re reading, reading, reading!

Because of the high volume of quality submissions we’re receiving for the Anything Goes Contest (seriously, you guys are blowing our minds), and because of our small staff, we’ve decided to postpone the Prescription Bottle Project. We will now be reading submissions for that during the month of December. This means you can send us a submission any time before then, but we aren’t going to look at it until December.

If you have already sent us something, you do not need to resubmit. However, if you would like to withdraw your submission because of the now 6 month response time, we understand, and you may do so by sending an email to wildagepress[at]gmail.com.

If you’ve yet to submit an entry to the Anything Goes contest, please check out the submission guidelines and send us something! Or, if that’s not up your alley, send us something short(ish) for the Prescription Bottle Project, an innovative publishing initiative we’ll be launching this fall with recycled prescription bottles.

Not a writer? There are other ways to support our fledgeling press. All of them are good for your karma.

• Purchase a copy of Israel Centeno’s Bamboo City, our first book, in our new online store
• Follow us on Twitter
• Follow our Google+ Page
• Add our blog to your RSS reader of choice so you can stay up to date on the latest Wild Age Press news
• Put a link to our website, www.wildagepress.com, on your blog or website
• Enjoy every sandwich