Lost Horse Press Catalog
New Releases
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Decomposition, Fungi-inspired Poems, edited by Renée Roehl and Kelly Chadwick Gathered from the root-zones of many different trees, knife-scraped from rock-face, lifted from dung, spore-flung into air, these gathered mushroom poems offer undomestic, distinctive discoveries to all who choose to join the effort to find them. —Jane Hirshfield |
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Frescoes, poems by Stephen Gibson Winner of the 2010 Idaho Prize for Poetry, selected by Carolyne Wright Harsh and highly accomplished, these poems redeem the people from the paint, plaster and piety. They pull victims and perpetrators alike out of the history and myth of the treasures of Great Arts into the arena of our ongoing moral dilemmas, our struggles for survival as well as for the preservation of compassion and decency in a perennially fallen human world. After reading these poems, we will never again be able to stand before these mysteries of life and death and then, like too many tourists, merely check them off our guidebook’s must-see list. Stephen Gibson has created a sequence of poems with the same sweep and dimension as the art that inspired them. —Carolyne Wright, Final Judge for theIdaho Prize for Poetry 2009 |
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Lost Horse Press New Poets Series: This fourth volume of the Lost Horse Press
New Poets | Short Books series offers three
strong voices, each with a personal brand
of courage. Their lives are as different from one another as can be, and their sensibilities are very much their own, yet in practicing the art of poetry they share something too mysterious and vital ever to be replaced by a new technology. That is because poetry is a primary and, one might argue, primal manifestation of the life force itself. All of our brilliant inventions notwithstanding, what life feels like remains inside us. Here are three poets, each of whose personal language is part of that richness we cannot do without. —Marvin Bell |
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I Go to the Ruined Place: Contemporary Poems in Defense of Global Human Rights, edited by Melissa Kwasny and M.L. Smoker For each book sold, $2 will be donated to the Bonner County (Idaho) Human Rights Task Force. When we made our call for submissions for an anthology of poems in defense of human rights, the allegations of torture were foremost in our minds. We knew people were outraged, saddened, profoundly moved and ashamed. But we also wanted to reach people who had suffered violations of their own rights from circumstances across the globe, or whose families had, or for whom preventing or healing these violations had become a life’s work. We drafted our call loosely: We are increasingly witness to torture, terrorisms and other violations of human rights at unprecedented degrees. What do our instincts tell us and what is our response to these violations? What is our vision of a future wherein human rights are not only respected but expanded? What we received were both first hand accounts of violation—see prisoner Adrian English’s “Raped Man’s Stream of Consciousness,” or Farnoosh Moshiri’s poem recounting the terror of giving birth in Iran, or Li-Young Lee’s “Self-Help for Fellow Refugees”—and responses from people who feel struck personally by the blows enacted on others: To speak for, to speak as, and to speak against. We were surprised at the range of issues spoken to by the poets. While torture remained a critical topic, as well as issues at stake in the Iraq War, there were also poems that addressed immigrant rights, prisoners’ rights, the Holocaust, the wars in Cambodia, Vietnam, Serbia, South America, Palestine and Israel. We received poems that spoke of suicide bombing, violence against women, the aftermath of 9/11, and outlawing marriage for gay Americans. We were also moved at the range of experience among the responders: homeless advocates, civil rights workers, clinical social workers, medics, the mentally ill, veterans, humanitarian aid workers, teachers, conscientious objectors, and, of course, many writers who work and fight daily for social justice in their communities. We are particularly proud of the number of Native American poets included in this anthology, something unusual in anthologies of this sort. It seemed to us impossible to collect a group of poems on human rights issues if we didn’t acknowledge the far reaching and often appalling violations that have taken place in our own country, upon the first citizens of this land who belong to five-hundred-sixty-two federally recognized tribes who function as sovereign nations. It is the acknowledgement of this history, among others, that will allow us to move forward as a country with a clearer conscience, extending our hand to other nations and other peoples who continue to endure neglect and abuse. —Melissa Kwasny & M.L. Smoker |
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In Praise, poems by Ray Amorosi Sometime in the spring of 2007, Ray Amorosi, from whom I had not heard in twenty-five years, called and read one of my own poems into my answering machine. I called him back. He called me back. This went on for a couple of weeks until, once when he called he announced that he’d written a poem, and then he read it. It began, God, The poem just melted me and I said so. He mailed me a handwritten copy (his hands have suffered some damage and it’s hard for him to type). The following week two more arrived, and a week or so later there were two or three more. All had the totally original slant and language I remembered so well from the earlier work, but all of them, too, had this great embracing sense of gratitude for both life’s darkness and its light. I began typing the poems as they came in, sending them back to Ray for proofing, and sometimes sending them out on his behalf to journals, where they were quickly snapped up. After some months it was clear that we had the makings of a coherent and spectacularly unusual book. This book. A phoenix of a book rising out of the ashes of long silence as though there were no tomorrow. And there isn’t; the poems say this again and again: there’s today, refreshed, troublingly and laughably bemused, trickster-ish, reverent, irreverent, glowing and infused with the world’s ironic loveliness. This book will make you happy. —Christopher Howell |
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Book of Shadows: New & Selected Poems, poems by Carlos Reyes “Over the years Carlos Reyes has written poems of the highest order and it’s a pleasure to see so many of them gathered together in The Book of Shadows. This is a necessary book that clearly shows the author’s deep humanity and his sophisticated skill; like all first-rate work it returns our lives to us. In poem after poem readers are given those quick shocks of recognition which make them say, Yes, this is the way it is! Such an important contribution to our literature deserves to be recognized and honored by everyone who cares about the art of poetry.” |
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Feeding Strays, very short fiction by Stefanie Freele A woman hides from her husband in a fish tank and another absently bakes sponges inside her tarts. Appliances drop from the sky, men grapple with chainsaws, women struggle with hormonal violence, and abandoned boys beg on doorsteps. Enter into the territory of broken people and the folks that love them. Sensitive and unruly, sincere and absurd, Stefanie Freele’s Feeding Strays is a collection of fifty short stories, both slipstream and modern, about children, family, relationships, and oysters. |
Forthcoming
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The Voluptuary, poems by Paulann Peterson |
Poetry
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As Is, poems by Sheryl Noethe As Is tells the heroic story: loss, struggle, victory, and how god is milk and throat at once, and rock and child, and how the future leaks outlandishly into the present. That the reason humans exist (now didn’t you ever want to know that?), the reason for humans is that we can love. It’s our job because that’s what we were built to do. Join the Divine. |
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Lucifer, a Hagiography, a poem by Philip Memmer "Lucifer is on a non-linear trajectory, revolving its readers through the profane and the pious swinging door of heaven and earth. Memmer’s collection, with a few pitches and an unexpected saint we can all root for, has the power to provoke, enlighten and unsettle. The paradox remains the same—so much is at stake in these poems, and so little—but Memmer has managed to give us an original and remarkable passageway." —M.L. Smoker, Final Judge for the 2008 Idaho Prize for Poetry |
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The Baseball Field at Night, last poems by Patricia Goedicke "Everything Patricia Goedicke looks at sharpens for me and becomes hopeful. She is a believer in our connectedness to the things of this world and to each other," poet Maxine Kumin said of her work. "Goedicke has been compared to Whitman in her use of the extended line, and because she seeks to bring the entire world into the poems. The profound feel for rhythm, swing, and modulation of the human voice is astonishing and makes Goedicke’s poetry a great physical pleasure to read," wrote a reviewer for New Letters. 2008 Book of the Year Award Finalist from ForeWord Magazine |
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The Radium Watcher Dial Painters, poems by D.S. Butterworth "The Radium Watch Dial Painters is a book of sheer power and range, poems that burn in brilliant flashes and with searing luminescence. There are great stories in here, flurries of fresh images and graceful turns of music and wit. Above all, you find Dan Butterworth’s pitch-perfect gift for language, his acrobatic intelligence, his fierce decency. I loved this book." |
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Friendly Fire, poems by Katrina Roberts Friendly Fire—that accidental agent of injury or death to one’s own forces—lends its name to Katrina Roberts’s third collection, capturing the disquieting mix of innocence and violence central to the work’s exploration. Elemental and protean, fire appears throughout these lyrical glimpses, always a syzygial force; that which terrifies (or destroys) may be that which is necessary. These poems consider how both nurture and nature inform violent behaviors; how we must choose to see beauty in decay; how prayer has power even if we don’t know whom we’re addressing. Informed by the possibilities of the "American" sonnet, this sequence confronts inherent dangers in even the best-intended human gestures, and explores how we sustain faith in the face of such damage. Searching for sense in an often shattered world, limning a seam between personal and political, mining contradictions we must live within when so many people are at war, when hunger, disease and poverty are rampant, these poems forge a place where intentions and consequences are called into question; where silence is indeed profound and must be honored with apology, forgiveness and praise; and where—when facing mortality—one might sing in celebration. |
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Necessary Angels, poems by Carolyn Maisel "Carolyn Maisel’s poems are spoken by a sort of gnostic angel whose impulse is always to describe the indescribable, to say what cannot be said. The remarkable blend of passion and concision such poems required, the discipline they embody mark Maisel as a masterful poet. How fortunate we are to have had her lustrously imaginative spirit among us, and to have, now, this beautiful book." "Carolyn Maisel—admired by Marvin Bell, Yusef Komunyakaa, and many of America’s finest poets—has kept vigil on a fearsome landscape reminiscent of the Southern gothic vein in American fiction. An introvert, intimate in emotion, rather like Akhmatova, Maisel charts this eerie terrain with cool monastic grace, a cartographer of the known interlaced with astonishing half-glimpsed, unknown things. She loved "this green planet" intensely, but was curious about what might lie on the other side." |
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Retreats & Recognitions, poems Grace Bauer "All one has to do is read “Note From the Imaginary Daughter,” the first poem in Grace Bauer’s Retreats and Recognitions, and you’ll be caught in the grip of psychological drama and an evocative imagination that will make you want to read further. Bauer’s poems probe the dark landscapes between impression and apprehension, the past and its repetition though imaginative transformation, impulse and restraint. Her delivery is tough and terse; her imagery is fresh and often startling. There is experience and authority in her voice. She can be immensely witty, as in "Plot Lines," where she improvises on the word, tale, or virtuoso as in her intricate sestina, "A Little Like Dorothy." Succinct, like "Awakened By the Fall," and evocative, like "Lunacy." Her poems are poignant, intelligent, and believable. Poetry lovers, read this book!" |
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A Change of Maps, poems by Carolyne Wright "Formally elegant, thematically intelligent, rgent and thoughtful, A Change of Maps traverses the American landscape—its primal beauty and human diminishment—and explores the tensions in the nature of this country, its mix of cultures, and its losses both national and personal. In these brilliant and intuitive poems, Carolyne Wright reflects on love and independence, love and work, choices made in youth and the larger awarenesses that enable the world and the species to continue." Winner of the 2007 Independent Publishers Book Awards, Poetry, Bronze award |
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Thistle, poems by Melissa Kwasny These thirty-seven poems are eccentric in the true meaning of the word—off-center. Their titles, bearing the names of weeds, flowers, herbs, trees, are merely points of departure. "How hard can it be," the poet asks, "to lie down in the green / mussed bed of the senses . . . In clover." Whether it’s clover or rue, aspen or moss, the reader is invited into that rumpled but rich bed. |
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Like This, Like That, poems by Libby Wagner "The poems in Like This, Like That revitalize a faith in the imagination. They are intelligent, sad, funny, and always surprising. With poise and an unflinching eye on our underlife, Libby Wagner sings back to us in a voice that is muscular, sensual, and clear." "Libby Wagner's first full-length collection of poetry, Like This, Like That, is a work of disciplined emotion: an autobiography of the body and soul, and the record of a journey of a young girl into womanhood in America. All of this is enriched by a gracefully imaginative regard for the world, and however personally referential the details of this life may seem, Ms. Wagner manages through her keen eye for details rich in historical and emotional context, to open up this life so that we may enter there and find our common ground." |
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Composing Voices: A Cycle of Dramatic Monologues, poems by Robert Pack "Robert Pack’s new volume of poetry, Composing Voices: A Cycle of Dramatic Monologues, is a fabulously expanded version of his 1984 book, Faces in a Single Tree. In each of the poems a single person is talking to one other person to whom he is intimately related, creating deep dramatic tension: a father talking to a bereaved daughter or puzzled son; a sister confronting a sister gone astray or a brother to whom she is confessing her compromised pregnancy; husbands and wives, old and young, reviewing some crisis of their lives together. Combined with these human dramas are the dramas of nature. Pack inherits Robert Frost’s sensitivity to the minutiae of spectacle and evolution, the mysteries of God and Darwin’s theories. He regards these with humor and compassion. And, perhaps miraculously, but surely most wisely, he does it all within the regulations and beauties of blank verse." |
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Hurry Back, poems by Alvin Greenberg "Here are Alvin Greenberg’s poems of experience, his grown man’s tribute to negative capability. He knows we live in a world of indeterminacy, with our various ignorances and failures of language. Yet without prettying-up these conditions, his Hurry Back offers an unsentimental, clear-eyed paean to them, a kind of “elegiac lean-to/set right out in the weather because the weather’s/what there is and where we do our loving.” Though such sagacity pervades this book, these are not poems of resignation. Greenberg knows the birds on the highway “almost always” fly up in time, but he’s not going to let that “almost” stop him from driving a little over the speed limit." Semi-finalist in Poetry for the 2006 Independent Publisher Book Awards |
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Late at Night in the Rowboat, poems by Donald Junkins "Readers will discover in these landscapes that are at once achingly real and hauntingly magical, both loss and grace, and renewals that redeem remorse and regret. With something very much like prayerful reverence for exactitude and truth, these poems do what Bergson says art must do—they bring us into our own presence." Finalist for the 2005 Poetry Book of the Year from ForeWord Magazine |
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At the Edge of the Western Wave, poems by Carlos Reyes "What I love about this collection is that it catches perfectly that special sense of rural Ireland which might be described as mixture of raw satirical humour, tragedy, and a kind of yearning for love and connection in a society that feels a constant tension between materialism and spirituality. At the Edge of the Western Wave is a big and sweeping enough collection to be able to accomodate these themes and their nuances: I'm constantly amazed at the way in which Reyes can present a small detail--a shop-front, a "wink" of light, an Hiberno-English phrase, a name, a place name--and evoke a whole way of life. |
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Iron Fever & Other Poems by Stephan Torre "The poems in Iron Fever are carefully wrought and passionate. Torre talks of life and work on the edge of wild lands and wrestles with the paradox of man's drive to change and overwhelm the very wilderness which gives him sanctuary and renews his spirit. Many of the poems have wilderness settings, from F lathead Lake in Montana to the south-central coast of California to the spruce forests and subsistence farms of the Fraser River Valley in British Columbia. The poems are filled with images of manual work---axle grease and wood shavings, with the raw beauty of the mountains and with machinery rusting in abandoned fields. Torre brings to his subjects an understanding and lyric intensity which makes these poems a delight to read. Finalist for the 2004 Poetry Book of the Year from ForeWord Magazine |
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Just Waking, poems by Christopher Howell "Christopher Howell’s poems rely on a redeeming darkness to bring themselves into the world. Through meditative, short lyrics, and an eerily quiet approach, Howell redefines the place of the self in a poem. These deceptively triumphant views of discovery and survival arrive in a place that welcomes us as both witnesses and participants." Finalist for the for the 2004 Washington Book Award & Finalist for the 2004 Poetry Book of the Year from ForeWord Magazine |
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Though Silence: The Ling Wei Texts, poems by Christopher Howell "Each of us early in life has an imaginary friend, one we makeup, that no religion has invented first. It is a pleasure, not a strain, to believe in Christopher Howell's Ling Wei—this shared friend of ours. We won't get tired of listening to his life and insights, the round and wavy way he speaks the truth. Ling Wei and his creator are powerful poets." "Slip this book into your backpack this summer. You'll find yourself sitting up late at night, discussing with Ling Wei the origin of the stars, where the moon hides during the day (in the snows of mountain peaks, a child once told me), and the sound of rain on a worn path. The sumptuous madness of Ling Wei might even rub off on you . . ." |
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The Cheap Seats, poems by Scott Poole "The Cheap Seats awakens us to the delightful power many of us have forgotten since childhood that we possess: the power of transforming prosaic objects and events into poetry . . . Poole's imagination is of the heart; he shows us how to spread a quiet, wry, and genuinely humble wonderment over the field of our vision. I love the poems in The Cheap Seats . . . I feel sure that those of you who think that poetry is not for you will change your minds when you read this book . . ." Finalist for the 2000 Poetry Book of the Year from ForeWord Magazine & Finalist in the Northwest Association of Book Publishers 2001 Best Book of the Year Award |
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Hiding from Salesmen, poems by Scott Poole, with illustrations by Robert Helm "Hiding from Salesmen is a collection of wry poems by Scott Poole that mix humor with quizzical insight and a dash of the fantastic. Black and white surrealist illustrations by Robert Helm enhance this unforgettable collection." "It would be simple enough if all Poole were interested in was comic resistance to certain death-pulls in our culture. Instead, his speaker—a husband, a father, someone grateful for "reality's green backyard"—looks everywhere for signs of nobility and magic in human life. He finds it at a girl's soccer game, at the river's edge where lovers meet for picnics, at the scene of a terrorist attack. Under the beam of an MRI, the huge machine circling round him, "I let it register my love of baseball, / the friend I saved from drowning. . . / And I hoped / something greater than me / might show up on the screen."Just as the instrument searches within, the poems in Poole's book look out, tracking what is beautiful, useful, and true." |
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Betting on the Night, poems by Dennis Held "Held's poems are so full of keenly heard sounds, sharply observed sights, sly and sympathetic humor, and enjoyed experience that it is easy to fall in love with them. Maybe that explains the bare-breasted beauty languidly, tantalizingly dozing (in a chapel? an art museum?) on the cover. At any rate, the poems are actually about fishing, relaxing with the Packers on TV or a bottle of bourbon, remembering burning the trash outdoors, skipping church of a Sunday, and imagining the glaciers creating the Northwest. They include celebrations of weeds, the poets scrotum, and childish abandon; a fantasia about some cats who haunt a grain elevator; a perfectly envisioned moment of self-pity ("Before Fire"); a serious parody that turns the justified bitterness in a Richard Hugo poem into philosophical amusement; a tribute to Fred Flintstone; and a couple glimpses of Van Gogh riding the rails and stalking the landscape of Montana. Set in Wisconsin and Montana, they are poems of the Northwest, gusts of sweet, cold, enlivening air." |
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The Little Spokane, poems by Tom I. Davis "Nothing too prissy about this poetry: it's coming right at you, frank and genial, delivered as a good tavern raconteur would, conveyed in the rough-hewn speech and clipped rhythms of the Northwest USA citizenry, God Bless every damned one of them. Tom Davis is working in the unmistakable tradition of poets like Stephen Crane, Carl Sandburg, Robinson Jeffers, Richard Hugo, Tom Wayman—the kind of writing that doesn't get discussed much. . . . Details—place names, hair color, local and personal histories, features of dogs and CETA "clients," landscapes and trawlers—refresh the old inescapable themes of La Comédie Humaine, "birth, copulation, and death." . . . But what I'll cherish most are the story-poems, so rich with that speech, redolent of chew-tobacco and insomnia, and that off-the-cuff, yet exactly observed, description of scene and character." |
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Caliban, poems by John Whalen "John Whalen's Caliban is tempest-, whiskey-, and romance-tossed. It is also mordantly funny, peculiarly moving, and always gorgeous. These poems are as deeply pleasurable to read one at a time as in one great gulp, which is all we should ask of any book." "John Whalen's poems stalk the persona of the monster trapped in ourselves, and in our everyday world, and free the spirit to be lover, singer. These are poems of adroit surprise, of vivid phrase and dramatic voice, celebrating the paradox of the timeless and contemporary." |
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The New Hand, poems by Sean Gillihan "Sean Gillihan is a vivid and accurate, true new voice in the American West. He's been down the roads, worked the crops, fed the cattle—he knows the drills, and dignifies each quiet thing he talks about." "Never before has the universe crumbled out of a rotted fence post so convincingly, an old dog been so wise, the lives of tired bar flies mattered so much than in this amazing first book. If by the end of The New Hand ou don't feel like a beautiful zen monk then you must be dead." |
New Poets Series
| Learn more about the series and its editor, Marvin Bell. |
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Lost Horse Press New Poets Series: This fourth volume of the Lost Horse Press
New Poets | Short Books series offers three
strong voices, each with a personal brand
of courage. Their lives are as different from one another as can be, and their sensibilities are very much their own, yet in practicing the art of poetry they share something too mysterious and vital ever to be replaced by a new technology. That is because poetry is a primary and, one might argue, primal manifestation of the life force itself. All of our brilliant inventions notwithstanding, what life feels like remains inside us. Here are three poets, each of whose personal language is part of that richness we cannot do without. —Marvin Bell |
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Lost Horse Press New Poets Series: "The lunatics and hacks that have made up our national government for eight years could not keep Americans from singing and dancing, from imagining and pretending, or from making art in numberless ways. And they could not make poetry small. For the poets of any age are not only of their time. They hold hands with the poets of ancient times and of all time since. Poets and other artists have kept alive the life force of nations when it was hidden from the rest of the world. Let it be so again." |
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Lost Horse Press New Poets Series: "This book, like the volume that initiated the series, is appearing during a terrible time in our country. Let it be remarked, therefore, that we who can see the reality, or can imagine something better, will not close up shop. In a time of hate radio and the cruelest forms of capitalism, during a period of unsurpassed government corruption and incompetence, poetry, like every art, remains a survival skill." |
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Lost Horse Press New Poets Series: "These samplings, presented with as few trappings as possible, will reaffirm for readers the nature of the poetry in poetry. Serious poetry is not written to satisfy literary opinion. Poetry, like philosophy, is a survival skill." |
Fiction
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Like Men, Made Various, short stories by Paul Bowers "Here’s a writer! Paul Bowers’s Like Men, Made Various is aptly titled-—a "biological philosopher" seeks the essence of Life, only to be overwhelmed by the sonogram vision of his soon-to-be-born daughter; a Vietnam vet eccentrically acts out his post-traumatic stress; the father of a cancer-stricken child rages against the conventional concept of God’s Providence; the president of a failing small college stages a desperate sit-in to revive it; a man commits suicide by drowning as he kills the mule that killed his wife . . . Bowers’s range is seemingly limitless, his stories intelligent, imaginative, profound, and polished to a compelling luster." |
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The Art of Absence, short stories by Joy Passanante Like Passanante's other work, the stories in this volume are moving because of their humanity and the beauty of the writing. I felt that each story was a visit to a different room in the house of the soul (though there are doors between the rooms and influences move from one to another). Passanante's writing is sensuous, in its concreteness, its imagery, and the descriptions of sensation and feeling. It is also precise--I never found an unnecessary or a not-quite-right word. The characters are sexual, and Passanate's writing is wonderfully honest about the complexity of sexual feeling and expression. Sexuality is also their medium of expression, and the complexity of experience is reflected in the complexity of the characters' sexual feeling and behavior. There is much wit, and there is also tragedy. This is one of those writers who, even in her more gothic moments, describes a human being in a way that makes you recognize, sometimes reluctantly, some secret in yourself. Finalist for the 2004 Idaho Book of the Year Award, ForeWord Magazine’s Book of the Year Award Finalist, & Finalist for Short Story Fiction Book of the Year Award from Independent Publisher Book Awards |
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Food Chain, short stories by Janet Kieffer "Imagine Joyce Carol Oates as William Burroughs and you've got Janet Kieffer, writing of losers and lost in biting prose that glitters like rhinestones. A flotsam and jetsom parade of burlesque and grotesque on the edgy side of realism." "Janet Kieffer penetrates with wicked clarity and intelligence the obese middle of Middle America. Her stories literally render the American Dream in its own excess. If pigs could read they would take Food Chain as the anthem of their liberation. Ms. Kieffer's work is ruthless as satire, and irresistable as story-telling." |
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Tales of a Dalai Lama, short fiction by Pierre Delattre "Pierre Delattre's joyful book, Tales of a Dalai Lama,records earthbound flights of the spirit, like a bridge over silence. Here is a work of fiction with language simple and beautiful, detailing the structure of the faith of the Tibetan people as seen through the eyes of the awestruck, funny, and wise Dalai Lama, sometimes old and sometimes young. Here is fiction at its best, sure in its footing, centered in writing as an art, fulfilling its own functions and overcoming its own obstacles, bearing the reader along a path of zen grabbers, belly laughs, and glimpses of enlightenment while experiencing the nobility of faith." "Brilliantly filigreed, airborne, cautionary tales . . . Delattre's wry, reed-thin humor achieves both intimacy and an agreeable distance from which to propagate the mythic/erotic paradoxical verities of The Way." |
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Love, short fiction by Valerie Martin "Ms. Martin's trademarks: a preoccupation with the dark underside of life, a taste for disturbing, even macabre imagery . . . excursions into an unseen realm [of] strange and magical events . . . Martin possesses a sure storytelling gift, [an] ability to transform a myriad of specific details into larger, symbolic shapes." "Few have written so surprisingly, so convincingly, as Valerie Martin about sexual obsession." "Little mad obsessions encased in precise prose make stories so startling you can't let go. Martin drags the psyche out of the dark cellars and closets into daylight. What happens is unsettling and weirdly beautiful in masochistic ways, like a gingerbread house with built-in gas ovens. Emotionally painful, iconoclastic, brilliant." |
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Sailing Away, short stories by Richard Morgan "The moment you think you see where Sailing Away is going to take you, I promise: you don't. These deft, sometimes daft, consistently darksome stories are as impossible to outguess and bewilderingly interesting to ride as the postmodern Pacific that inspires them." –David James Duncan |
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Woman on the Cross, a novel by Pierre Delattre Woman on the Cross is a novel that takes place near the end of the 18th century in a deforested Latin American country where the pre-Christian nature religion has been suppressed. The story tells of Sebastian Cristo Rey, the last actor in a family line of professional Christs who have made their living being crucified on Good Fridays, and what happens when Sidelle, daughter of the priestess who maintains the pre-Christian tradition of tree worship, is nailed to Sebastian's cross. The theme echoes the way that the rape of nature and the rape of women were simultaneously justified in many pseudo-Christian cultures under the traditional droit du seigneur, the right of the bleeder—the "señor," "sir" or "sire"—to claim whatever is virginal for his own profit and pleasure. |
Nonfiction
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Willing To Choose: Volition & Storytelling in Shakespeare's Major Plays, essays by Robert Pack "This book is intended for the reader and theater-goer who loves Shakespeare’s plays and enjoys contemplating them in their complexity: the richness of metaphorical language, the characters’ psychological depths and dimensions, the philosophical implications of the plays as organic dramatic entities that testify to the nature of human limitation and human freedom. I assume that the reader has the patience to delight in the minute details of Shakespeare’s patterns of imagery as well as to admire the overall structure of the plays. What most interests me is how these plays cohere and how they can be read from different perspectives which nevertheless complement each other. Thus, I have not adopted any single critical approach, but have responded to each play’s individual identity with what seem to me appropriate and fruitful interpretative points of view. Blessed in having been enfranchised by my profession to teach Shakespeare for half a century, I wish to share with my readers the humane vision I find everywhere in Shakespeare’s incomparable plays—a vision empathetic to human suffering and moral aspiration, tempered by his acute awareness of human frailty, which has immeasurably enriched my own life." |
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Finding the Top of the Sky, essays by James Grabill "In James Grabill’s unique view no one should settle for a world that conducts itself as though there were no mythic dimension; his other collection of essays and his many stunning books of poems make this clear. But unlike many American writers critical of the way this world we shouldn’t settle for is going, Grabill has the visionary skill to give us a glimpse of how it should be going. In the face of the escalating inanity and aridness of post-industrial life, the fine pieces in this volume insist that compassion triumph over cruelty, meditative clarity over bombast and spin. It is a great delight to feel the weight of Grabill’s conviction (along with his immense talent) and, with sea lions, lorikeets, giant ferns, and humpback whales, to follow it to the top of the sky, where it is so much easier to see what matters and what does not." |