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  Poetry

The Color of a New Country
Author: Knorr, Jeff
Pub Date: Mar 2017; 74 pages
ISBN: 978-1-59539-047-9
Price: $13.95

Description:
Poetry. In his best collection yet, Jeff Knorr writes of love and land, of the deep connections we forge with each other, how we navigate the loss of these relationships, and how we recover. These poems not only take us into our hearts but also take us into a voice that personalizes some of the American politics that have shattered lives in the tough beginning of the twenty-first century. The journeys we take in these poems will place you deep in the west and lift you in the resilience of the human spirit.
Pennsylvania Blues
Author: Boggs, Bill
Pub Date: April 2016; 160 pages
ISBN: 978-1-59539-018-9
Price: $19.95

Description:
Poetry. Rich in rhythm and detail and honest self-reflection, William Boggs’ Pennsylvania Blues takes us on an insightful journey through one hundred choruses and through a complex world of experience. This spiritual meditation on life is grounded in the everyday, examining the simple to try and figure out the hard. Boggs takes us with him on this journey, and we emerge with the wisdom of uncertainty.  —Jim Daniels
Cymbalism  Cymbalism
Author: Minar, Scott
Pub Date: Jan 2016; 72 pages
ISBN: 978-1-59539-028-8
Price: $19.99

Description:
Cymbalism is, on the one hand, a book of remarkable conversations, a cacophony (a chorus) of voices—mythical, historical, conjured, dreamed—roused into speech by chance encounters with the poet’s shadow-self, Insidious. On the other hand, it’s the expression of a philosophical imagination tempered by humor, skepticism, and an economy of style that somehow manages to reconnect that broken link between the mundane and the mysterious. Scott Minar has written a wonderful book, one that haunts the mind long after the last page is turned.”  —Sherrod Santos.
Crepuscular  Crepuscular Non Driveway
Author: Mirskin, Jerry
Pub Date: 2014; 59 pages
ISBN: 978-1-59539-015-8
Price: $13.95

Description:
Poetry. Professor Mirskin’s third full-length collection of poetry, written in what one reviewer calls Mirskin’s “distinctly American voice,” juxtaposes the ordinary with the exceptional, enabling readers to gain a new understanding of the world around them.
vorticity  Vorticity
Author: Anderson, Victoria
Pub Date: Sept 2013; 65 pages
ISBN: 978-1-59539-033-2
Price: $12.95

Description:
"Victoria Anderson is a poet who searches for signs and portents, warnings and prophecies, harbingers and clues. The wry, deftly crafted poems in Vorticity travel through time and across cultural borders to create a cabinet of prophetic wonders. The result is a fundamental exploration of all things neglected, afflicted, uncombed, and unhewn. In her search for beauty, Anderson embraces every human flaw with wit, honesty, and compassion." —Joanne Diaz.
that hum to go by  That Hum to Go By
Author: Schiff, Jeff
Pub Date: April 2012; 97 pages
ISBN: 978-1-59539-012-7
Price: $12.95

Description:
Poetry. My father is my death / and I am dying / of nothing to say...;, so begins the poem from which the title of this book derives. Part verse memoir, all cathartic outspilling, That hum to go by recounts in often excruciatingly confessional detail the glories and tortures of a Jewish youth in what was likely a more common household than he knew or is typically acknowledged.
Good Sumacs  Good Sumacs
Author: Grieneisen, Jeff
Pub Date: Aug 2011; 65 pages
ISBN: 978-1-59539-011-0
Price: $13.95

Description:
Poetry.
Girl in Cap and Gown  Girl in Cap and Gown
Author: Levin, Harriet
Pub Date: Aug 2011; 61 pages
ISBN: 978-1-59539-029-5
Price: $12.95

Description:
"Harriet Levin [is] a shining poet in her generation.... The dynamics of her language and her vigorous voice distinguish all her poems. Levin's fearless willingness to tackle any subject combines with her subtle intelligence to produce a rare reading experience, the moving, psychologically sophisticated and intriguing work of a poet with both guts and craft" —Molly Peacock
Mixed Diction  Mixed Diction
Author: Schiff, Jeff
Pub Date: Sept 2009; 88 pages
ISBN: 978-1-59539-027-1
Price: $11.95

Description:
Poetry.
Moist Meridian  Moist Meridian
Author: Hughes, Henry
Pub Date: April 2009; 99 pages
ISBN: 978-1-59539-026-4
Price: $11.95

Description:
Poetry. With a nod to Melville s mutual, joint-stock world, in all meridians, Henry Hughes joins savagery and civilization, sex and sexuality, bodies and ideas, animals and humans, men and women all in a dazzling cast of voices. Praised by Li-Young Lee for the gorgeous and masterful writing in his Oregon Book Award-winning Men Holding Eggs, the new poems of Moist Meridian show us the growing range and depth of this accomplished writer.
In Flagrante Delicto
Author: Mirskin, Jerry
Pub Date: Oct 2008; 119 pages
ISBN: 978-1-59539-025-7
Price: $11.95

Description:
"These brilliant poems virtually flash with the life force. They affirm that joy is what we are meant to experience, despite the ‘low sideboard of grief.’  They are rich journeys into the extraordinary, the particular, even the everyday. Jerry Mirskin shows us that only caught in the act of love, for a mate, a child, the universe, do we become truly human."  —Elaine Terranova
Too Much of this World
Author: Murphy, Erin
Pub Date: Aug 2008; 89 pages
ISBN: 978-1-59539-024-0
Price: $11.95
 

Description:
Poems that "delight and teach by poking fun: at poets giving readings, Burger King signs, poetry contests, and men who say, 'I'll take care of those wasps for ya honey'. If you're tired of poems that try to be a little too smart for their own britches, these'll take care of 'em for ya, honey." —
H. L. Hix

Demon Love
Author: Rosenberg, Liz
Pub Date: Oct 2008; 84 pages
ISBN: 978-1-59539-023-3
Price: $11.95

Description:
Poems of love, family, and the larger world.

"Liz Rosenberg has chronicled the life of love—its suffering and its sustaining grace... 'Brandish a radiance from your broken sparks’, one poem calls out, ‘brilliant enough to make these sorrows possible to bear.’ And so it happens. I didn’t know what I was looking for until I found it here in these pages." —Marie Howe
 

To William Merwin: A Poem
Author: Heyen, William
Pub Date: Aug 2007; 63 pages
ISBN: 978-1-59539-020-2
Price: $11.95

Description:
Poetry. A reminiscent tribute to a friend in Maui.

William Heyen was born in Brooklyn, New York. He is Professor of English/Poet in Residence Emeritus at SUNY Brockport. A former Senior Fulbright Lecturer in American Literature in Germany, he has won prizes and fellowships from the NEA, the Guggenheim Foundation, Poetry, and the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters. His Crazy Horse in Stillness won 1997’s Small Press Book Award in Poetry, and Shoah Train was a finalist for the 2004 National Book Award.

The Palace of Reasons
Author: Minar, Scott
Pub Date: May 2006; 59 pages
ISBN: 978-1-59539-002-8
Price: $10.95

Description:
Poetry. A Collection of original poetry based on readings in John Simpson's The Oxford Book of Exile. Subjects include The Holocaust, exile, alienation, war and poetry, political oppression, journalism, and more.
The Rope
Author: Heyen, William
Pub Date: Aug 2003, 2005; 103 pages
ISBN: 978-0-9718059-4-1
Price: $10.95

Description:
The Rope's poems about life and the world around him explore "the central questions that confront us in the 21st century." 

William Heyen "speaks for the conscience of our time, and for what in our days is worth caring for."—W. S. Merwin;  Heyen is a poet of "wild, radiant audacity." —Joyce Carol Oates;  William Heyen is "one of our most original and urgent poets." —David Watson
 

Book of the Unbroken Days
Author: Terman, Philip
Pub Date: 2005 Rev. Ed.; 132 pages
ISBN: 978-1-59539-007-3
Price: $10.95

Description:
"Here is a poetry of the inward voice, of the eye sharply trained on the outside world. There is a kind of secular grace informing these poems
—a sensuous, loving, clear-eyed celebration of the ordinary human and natural miracles of existence. 'Thus,' he says, 'we greet the world.' It's a pleasure to greet this richly achieved Book of the Unbroken Days as it greets the world." —Eamon Grennan

The House of Sages
Author: Terman, Philip
Pub Date: Jan 2005 Rev. Ed.; 152 pages
ISBN: 978-1-59539-008-0
Price: $10.95

Description:
Poetry. Jewish Studies. In this revised first collection of poetry the Terman's speaker carries himself without skin, absorbing the particulars of the human struggles in its many dogged and eloquent forms, and recording it with capacious empathy. The writing is rich with the need to convey his confrontations and affections, and not simply in the striking detail but in the whole moment of his memory. Terman's poems, like those of James Wright, have a down-to-earth mysticism, a hard-earned spirituality which cuts through the haze of everyday. This collection is remarkable for its range, depth, and mature vision. Terman captures the heart of people, and the heart of places.

 

Nightshift Belonging to Lorca
Author: Dougherty, Sean Thomas
Pub Date: Feb 2004; 82 pages
ISBN: 978-0-9718059-9-6
Price: $10.95

Description:
Poetry. Steeped in the experiential world, often formal and experimental in the same breath, award winning performance poet Sean Thomas Dougherty’s sixth book offers the reader a mix of brief stanzas, canzones, prose poems, and textured performance monologues, continuing the exploration of diverse and seemingly contradictory strategies of lyricism begun in his earlier collections. Evoking the ghost of the great Andalusian poet Federico Garcia Lorca, Dougherty replants Lorca in a conversation with Rumi at an Erie State Park, up late arguing with Tu Fu, and streaming black tears and laughing at some sudden recollection. In poem after poem of work, class, neighborhood, and love, Dougherty evokes for the reader an often blue collar world, rendered in exquisite urban metaphors. While so much contemporary poetry loses itself in language, Dougherty urges us to "consider the lungs of the accoridon. All around you the living are telling radiant jokes, or weeping for something to eat."

 

Men Holding Eggs
Author: Hughes, Henry
Pub Date: Jan 2004, 2007; 86 pgs.
ISBN: 978-1-59539-001-1
Price: $10.95
 

WINNER
2004 Oregon
Book Award

Description:
Poetry. A refreshingly accessible collection of narrative poetry describing the love, violence, and fragility of men's lives. Beginning with young adventures on Long Island, the characters take their passions for animals, moons, water and women to lives in Indiana, South Dakota, Japan and China. Li-Young Lee writes: "Henry Hughes has had a very complete encounter with the sayable sum of his experiences. The writing is gorgeous and masterful."
Keeper
Author: Knorr, Jeff
Pub Date: Sep 2004, Mar 2017; 89 pages
ISBN: 978-1-59539-009-7
Price: $10.95

Description:
Poetry. Essays. In this mingling of essays and poems Jeff Knorr takes us on metaphoric fishing journeys down rivers, to lakes, and even across fields hunting for pheasant. Keeper explores childhood memories fishing with his grandfather, his own father, and what it means to raise a boy of his own. In these captivating writings, our heartaches and memories are cast out against the surface of the water only to retrieve what is important to us
—to teach the younger generation through our stories and actions in order to weave a compelling pattern of life and living.
Burro Heart
Author: Schiff, Jeff
Pub Date: Sep 2004; 92 pages
ISBN: 978-1-59539-006-6
Price: $10.95

About the Author:

Jeff Schiff is author of Anywhere in this Country (Mammoth books), The Homily of Infinitude (Pennsylvania Review Press), The Rats of Patzcuaro (Poetry Link), and Resources for Writing About Literature (HarperCollins). His poetry and prose have appeared in more than sixty periodicals. He teaches at Columbia College, Chicago and lives with his wife and son in Illinois.

GRAFFITI HEART
Author: LaFemina, Gerry
Pub Date: Jan 2003; 79 pages
ISBN: 978-0-9718059-8-9
Price: $10.95
 

Description:
Poetry. Following in the tradition of Larry Levis's Winter Stars, Gerry LaFemina's GRAFFITI HEART presents a collection of elegies and love poems cutting across American and personal landscapes and moving between urban adolescence and small-town adulthood through deft meditation and lyric observation. With long, sweeping lines and introspective interrogation, LaFemina places himself at a crossroads of American poetry, Americana. These are poems that remind us of how intensely personal the art form can be and how it can transcend the personal, making poetry matter by presenting not confessional autobiography, but moments of a life that could belong to any of us.
picture a gate  Picture a Gate Hanging Open and Let that Gate be the Sun
Author: Mirskin, Jerry
Pub Date: 2002; 74 pages
ISBN: 0-9666028-9-7
Price: $14.95

Description:

Poetry. "In these luminously beautiful and deceptively simple lyrics, Jerry Mirskin evokes the things of this world-birth, death, childhood, father and son relationships, travel, work, the natural world, religion, mythology-affirming the necessity of both love and loss, the holding on and the letting go. With effortlessness and grace, in poem after memorable poem, he conveys his faith and affirmation in the face of 'the holiness and the terror' that make up any individual life. These are poems of succor and consolation, poems of witness and celebration, poems of patient affection and concern. They are necessary poems"
—Ron Wallace.
subjects for other conversations  Subjects for Other Conversations
Author: Stigall, John
Pub Date: 2001; 56 pages
ISBN: 0-9666028-6-2
Price: $12.95

Description:

Poetry. John Stigall's fourth book of poetry extends and deepens his concerns with growing older, investigating his past identity as a "Woodstock-wanna-be, / Chairman Mao worshipping, Hendrix & / Coltrane crazed, anti-war protesting, womanizing / financially faithful husband" and reconciling it with his complex relationship to religious faith. Stigall's other books of poetry include In Avant-Gardens, Schizofrenzy, and Broken Mirrors Reflect The World.
these happy eyes  These Happy Eyes
Author: Rosenberg, Liz
Pub Date: 2001; 95 pages
ISBN: 0-9666028-5-4
Price: $12.95

Description:

Poetry. These Happy Eyes is a collection of prose poems that appear to explore the quotidian (in bus windows, daily events, weather) but also resonate on a deeper field driven by emotions and the abstract qualities of life. "Not entirely happy, never entirely happy. This depression lingers like the flu. It makes it hard to face the future. Sometimes I sit on top of an old wooden crate in the attic, like the madwoman, chin sunk in my hand, just looking or breathing in and out, till eventually, always, something catches my eye and my heart leaps up for joy. It never fails me. I never know what it will be - an old man going so slowly around the block he looks like a statue come alive, the children racing behind the church, a leafless tree, snow falling at midnight making the only light in the room. Thank god. These happy, happy eyes" Liz Rosenberg.
the never wife  The Never Wife
Author: Hogue, Cynthia
Pub Date: 1999; 78 pages
ISBN: 0-9666028-4-6
Price: $12.95

Description:

Poetry. "I drive into an August tropic rain./ The road's behind a waterfall and I'm/ hunched squinting like a crone/ for signs. Ghosts mark time ..." (Moving to New Orleans, 1991). "I am moved by Ms. Hogue's apparent knowledge of people, and by her ability to present them convincingly in her poems. This is a quality all too rare in contemporary poetry, characterized as it is by a nearly universal self-absorption. There is wisdom here, and acute observation of the human situation" John Haines.
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