Review of Susie Bright

Here is a review for Bee-In speller-to-bee Susie Bright's new book Big Sex, Little Death

Date of the Celebrity Spelling Bee is May 16th in S.F., don't miss it!

THESE LINKS WORK CORRECTLY

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A small glitch early Tuesday.

The proof of the pudding is in the tasting, as they say. So give it a try.

When I typed those words, I should have known I was asking for it.

• The Wide Road by Carla Harryman and Lyn Hejinian (Belladonna*)
• Verbal Paradise (preverbs) by George Quasha (Zasterle)
• Home/Birth: A Poemic by Arielle Greenberg and Rachel Zucker (1913 Press)
• Hallucination by William Fuller (Flood Editions)
• Moving Day by Ish Klein (Canarium Books)
• Against Professional Secrets by César Vallejo (Roof Books)
• Sonja Sekula : Grace in a cow's EYE : a memoir by Kathrin Schaeppi (Black Radish Books)
• The Firestorm by Zach Savich (Cleveland State University Poetry Center)
• Campeche by Joshua Edwards and Van Edwards (Noemi Press)
• This Is What Happens When Talk Ends by Gale Nelson (Burning Deck)
• Fire Wind by Yván Yauri (Ugly Duckling Presse)
• Helsinki by Peter Richards (Action Books)
• Steady, My Gaze by Marie-Elizabeth Mali (Tebot Bach)
• Ordinary Sun by Matthew Henriksen (Black Ocean)
• The World as Phone Bill by Stan Apps (Combo Books)
• Late in the Antenna Fields by Alan Gilbert (Futurepoem Books)
• lucky coat anywhere by Michael Burkard (Nightboat Books)
• Kings of the F**king Sea by Dan Boehl (Birds, LLC)
• Confederate Streets by Erin E. Tocknell (Benu Press)
• Hum Who Hiccup by Chris Mason (Narrow House)
• Makeshift Instructions for Vigilant Girls by Erika Meitner (Anhinga Press)
• Destroyer and Preserver by Matthew Rohrer (Wave Books)
• Testify by Joseph Lease (Coffee House Press)
• In Canaan by Shane McCrae (Rescue Press)
• Night of Shooting Stars by Leonardo Sinisgalli (Tavern Books)
• The Porthole by Adriano Spatola (Otis Books/Seismicity Editions)
• About Them by Chester Aaron (El León Literary Arts)
• Halal Pork and Other Stories by Cihan Kaan (UpSet Press)
• Music of the Spheres by Michael Burke (Caravel Books)
• The Alpine Tales by Paul J. Willis (WordFarm)
• Alaskan: Stories from the Great Land by John Elvis Smelcer (Standing Stone Books)
• My Old Man Was Always on the Lam by Tony Medina (NYQ Books)
• VIII Stepping Poems & other pieces by Fergal Gaynor (Miami University Press)
• Everything Else We Must Endure by Brian McGettrick (sunnyoutside)
• In the Common Dream of George Oppen by Joseph Bradshaw (Shearsman Books)
• Caló: A Dictionary of Spanish Barrio and Border Slang by Harry Polkinhorn and Alfredo Velasco, Editors (Junction Press)
• No Permanent Scars by Michael Hemery (Silenced Press)
• Demodulating Angel by Richard Tagett (Ithuriel's Spear)
• Lend Me Your Voice by Kjell Espmark (Marick Press)
• TRACK THIS: A Book of Relationship by Stephen Bett (BlazeVOX [books])

SPD RECOMMENDS! New Titles Feb. 22–Mar. 15

Try Electronic Ordering! SPD is on Pubnet, SAN 1066617. Questions? Contact Clay at clay@spdbooks.org orders@spdbooks.org ▫ www.spdbooks.org ▫ 800.869.7553 ▫ fax: 510.524.0852

FACEBOOK | TWITTER | BLOG | POETRY BEST-SELLERS | FICTION BEST-SELLERS | MAGAZINES

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NEW FEATURES

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I've added new links to our book listings below. Now you may also click an author's name to see what other titles by that author SPD carries. And if you click a publisher name, you'll travel to a list of that publisher's other new and forthcoming titles. The proof of the pudding is in the tasting, as they say. Give it a try.

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New Cross-Genre from Belladonna* The Wide Road Carla Harryman and Lyn Hejinian $16 | paper | 148 pp. Belladonna* ISBN: 9780982338742 Poetry. Fiction. Cross-Genre. What would have happened had Thelma and Louise not driven off the cliff but stayed on the road? In Carla Harryman and Lyn Hejinian's picaresque novella, friendship lives on to follow eros through a polymorphic landscape where their fearless, inquisitive "we" encounters "hunger in two places at once." THE WIDE ROAD was collaboratively composed by Carla Harryman and Lyn Hejinian between 1991 and 2010. The cover art was drawn for this manuscript by the artist Nancy Blum, and this first edition is printed with two different cover designs. LINK→

New Poetry from Zasterle Verbal Paradise (preverbs) George Quasha $16 | paper | 68 pp. Zasterle ISBN: 9788487467486 Poetry. VERBAL PARADISE is the first book of a projected six books of preverbs. "'Words say too much to let you know the truth.' George Quasha's torqued, enigmatic proverbs create unlikely balances among discrepant engagements. The vectors of these marvelous poems work at cross purposes, keeping each other aloft. These are sparkling aphoristic aporias for a new age in an old time. 'Poetry,' says Quasha, 'resists immortality with difficulty.' And also with wit and charm. Be here now, in which case immortality will take care of itself"—Charles Bernstein. AUTHOR VIDEO →

New Cross-Genre from 1913 Press Home/Birth: A Poemic Arielle Greenberg and Rachel Zucker $11 | paper | 208 pp. 1913 Press ISBN: 9780977935178 Poetry. Literary Nonfiction. Cross-Genre. Women's Studies. A lyric essay & total collaboration of extraordinary & shocking beauty, this hybrid text troubles the waters of genre, gender, motherhood, and the politics & poetics of birthing. An exacting and honest conversation between two of our most interesting writers and our most dedicated activists. LINK→

New Poetry from Flood Editions Hallucination William Fuller $14.95 | paper | 96 pp. Flood Editions ISBN: 9780981952079 Poetry. William Fuller's HALLUCINATION negotiates between worlds of the living and the dead, shifting mercurially from verse to prose and from parody to parable. Along the way, Fuller draws our attention to the ineffable qualities of experience, proposing that "Matter is a fog one looks through toward pale headlights..." Through these glancing observations and surreal memoranda, the mysteries appear more vivid, our follies more desperate and absurd. LINK→

New Poetry from Canarium Books Moving Day Ish Klein $14 | paper | 112 pp. Canarium Books ISBN: 9780982237663 Poetry. MOVING DAY is the second collection by acclaimed poet Ish Klein. In this book, the poet deepens her commitment to socially-engaged lyricism, as she directly confronts the darkest sources of conflict and shared suffering while also investigating and celebrating the relationships that help us deal with personal, societal, and environmental ills. Like Whitman and O'Hara before her, Klein is a poet of camaraderie and boundless love. "Kids need each other. / Better they never get / separated entirely." AUTHOR VIDEO →

New Poetry in Translation from Roof Books Against Professional Secrets César Vallejo $14.95 | paper | 100 pp. Roof Books ISBN: 9781931824422 Poetry. Latino/Latina Studies. Bilingual Edition. Translated from the Spanish by Joseph Mulligan. "César Vallejo is indispensable to the Latin American experimental tradition and one of the first Peruvian poets to become a reference point for American writers. In AGAINST PROFESSIONAL SECRETS Vallejo cannibalizes the European tradition and transforms it into an American experience. Joseph Mulligan's exceptional translation opens up that dialogue to English, to a new readership, and to the present"—Ernesto Livon-Grosman. LINK→

New Poetry from Black Radish Books Sonja Sekula : Grace in a cow's EYE : a memoir Kathrin Schaeppi $15 | paper | 160 pp. Black Radish Books ISBN: 9780982573150 Poetry. LGBT Studies. Art. "'I love words—to me writing is drawing.' So says artist Sonja Sekula. And so it is in her hands in Kathrin Schaeppi's hands in this book in your hands. Schaeppi makes words into shapes into painting into ambiguated memoir—who is speaking?—of artist on artist. There is true pain here; attempts at survival. And there is art. This book can be read through the lens of gender: Sekula was a persecuted lesbian, an under acknowledged female artist among the big boys. Can be read through the lens of madness. Through ekphrasis. Perhaps even through the glass of the empathic. Ultimately, though, what we have here is, well, yes, it is the presence of grace"—Cara Benson. NEW REVIEW LINK →

New Poetry from Cleveland State University Poetry Center The Firestorm Zach Savich $15.95 | paper | 96 pp. Cleveland State University Poetry Center ISBN: 9781880834954 Poetry. "Take Zach Savich's THE FIRESTORM as one proof of Emerson's assertion that the mind's nature is volcanic. A firestorm is such a conflagration that it produces above it its own atmosphere. And so a reader finds in Savich's pages a super-heated cloud in which the poet's voice grows multiple, grows active, and the poem records the intimate collisions of lines that veer from prophecy to aphorism to ribald wit to stoic speculation. If this sounds nebulous, it is not. It is fulgurative, lightning-like, shot through sudden flashes of experience that in the sudden afterglow reveal that experience also experiences itself. Such is the complicated place where wit turns witness, and in doing so, opens up the deeper ironies—ironies that at first glance seem quite plain: 'I have forgotten if I am pulling the curtain open or closed.' Savich pulls the curtain open and closed, showing us again poetry's paradoxical necessity: that the poem must show and hide at once, reveal and obscure simultaneously, and that a song that thinks makes of its melody a matter that matters"—Dan Beachy-Quick. AUTHOR VIDEO →

New Poetry + Photography from Noemi Press Campeche Joshua Edwards and Van Edwards $15 | paper | 112 pp. Noemi Press ISBN: 9781934819197 Poetry. Photography. Titled after pirate Jean Lafitte's name for Galveston Island, CAMPECHE is a cautionary lyric composed of poems and photographs in which a real place is overlaid with the parable of a mythical world on the verge of an apocalyptic flood. Like the body fishermen of the Yellow River, this book combs water for remains and meditates on evidence, while attempting to reckon with the self as a troubled song within a greater song. "If the soul is a souvenir in human shape, / the sun is half its shadow and discloses / who is what when in public." This is the first book of Joshua Edwards's eschatological trilogy. AUTHOR VIDEO →

New Poetry from Burning Deck This Is What Happens When Talk Ends Gale Nelson $14 | paper | 104 pp. Burning Deck ISBN: 9781936194063 Poetry. There are eight sets of eight poems. All poems within a set follow the vowel pattern of a particular passage from Shakespeare. They could be called homovocalic translations of Shakespeare though they ignore his content while trying to build toward their own coherence. The sets are not presented in linear succession. Instead, the poems are arranged in a chess pattern, the earliest surviving knight's circuit, attributed to al-Adli ar-Rumi of Baghdad and presumed to date from A.D. 840. LINK→

New Poetry in Translation from Ugly Duckling Presse Fire Wind Yván Yauri $14 | paper | 80 pp. Ugly Duckling Presse ISBN: 9781933254760 Poetry. Latino/Latina Studies. Bilingual Edition. Translated from the Spanish by Nicholas Rattner and Marta del Pozo. FIRE WIND is a translation of Peruvian poet Yván Yauri's Viento de fuego, his second book of poems and the first of his work to appear in English. Yauri's poetics stem from the tradition of the Latin American avant-garde, and he maintains his activism in the ranks of the contemporary Marxist-Trotskyites. "With their full pedal wawa, their panting physicality, and a reference field that incorporates just about everything, Yauri's poems track cosmic interactions with earthly particularities. FIRE WIND takes on Empire and routine with a streetfighting swagger. The poems are roiling with lifeforce"—Forrest Gander. LINK→

New Poetry from Action Books Helsinki Peter Richards $16 | paper | 90 pp. Action Books ISBN: 9780979975554 Poetry. HELSINKI: part erotic, part nuclear, entirely mutagenic, dangerously Sublime. HELSINKI: a fort, a hospital bed, an escape pod, the mind, and memory itself. "[A] word chain peppered with strange, colorful ciphers"—Boston Review. LINK→

New Poetry from Tebot Bach Steady, My Gaze Marie-Elizabeth Mali $15 | paper | 80 pp. Tebot Bach ISBN: 9781893670662 Poetry. "'Wholehearted' is an undervalued word; to my mind it means not blind enthusiasm or unthinking embrace but something more like the full consent of the self to experience, to be present in the glorious and wounding matrix of the here and now. I can't think of a better word for Marie-Elizabeth Mali's poems. She wants 'the honeyed sizzle beyond all language,' wants to be a vulnerable and conscious participant in the life of things as they are, awake to love and the struggle to live freely and compassionately. 'How to hold the ocean,' she asks, 'when the vessel leaks? Rise your wild, / dear animal...'"—Mark Doty. AUTHOR VIDEO →

New Poetry from Black Ocean Ordinary Sun Matthew Henriksen $14.95 | paper | 120 pp. Black Ocean ISBN: 9780984475223 Poetry. Henriksen opens ORDINARY SUN by insisting that "an eye is not enough." Resisting solipsism, these poems negotiate that conflict between the mind and what exists outside the mind. Though pain intrinsically resides in that conflict Henriksen strives for an honest happiness, a kind of gorgeous suffering that blesses our days. To this end, these poems emerge from images of all those innumerable things that embody both visceral and ethereal beauty—rocks, trees, broken glass, baseball, angels... Here we find immediacy immersed in the image, and in the reading of these poems becomes ourselves immersed in the immediate. LINK→

New Poetry from Combo Books The World as Phone Bill Stan Apps $19.95 | paper | 248 pp. Combo Books ISBN: 9780972888042 Nonfiction. Literary Nonfiction. Poetics. THE WORLD AS PHONE BILL comprises essays in the tradition of Michel de Montaigne, Charles Olsen, and Buck Rogers. Authors covered include John Cage, Hannah Weiner, Nada Gordon, Frank O'Hara, K. Silem Mohammad, Gary Sullivan, Rodney Koeneke, Mathew Timmons, and Ara Shirinyan. Topics covered include poetic inspiration, the uses of "Flarf," literary representation in an age of globalism, and the rough stance of urban poets. NEW REVIEW LINK →

New Poetry from Futurepoem Books Late in the Antenna Fields Alan Gilbert $16 | paper | 120 pp. Futurepoem Books ISBN: 9780982279830 Poetry. Alan Gilbert's much anticipated debut threads desire and loss, image and consumption, memory and hope through a dystopian landscape of war, ecological disaster, and the ruins of empire. As in Dante, love is the guiding principle for a personal and social practice, even if paradise is just as likely to bury it all under a mountain of wreckage. "Alan Gilbert's powerful first collection reads like a verbal superconductor collider, wherein the intractable litter of our times careens though dark space, indifferent to our need to pause or reflect; an additive slippage disintegrates the status quo"—Ann Lauterbach. "These poems are like no others...they seethe and roil and bite and play on through the cold lens of a microscope in the scathing and witty lineage of William S. Burroughs.... An enormous achievement"—Anne Waldman. LINK→

New Poetry from Nightboat Books lucky coat anywhere Michael Burkard $15.95 | paper | 158 pp. Nightboat Books ISBN: 9780984459810 Poetry. In his first collection of new poems since Unsleeping, Michael Burkard presents an array of verse and prose forms dense with allusion, emotion and sensuality. Drawing on his own strand of the confessional lyric—a peculiar combination of dreams, personal disclosure, and matter-of-fact accounts of daily life—these poems rinse perception and allow one to actually see the world, free of simulation and stimulation, for what it really is. "He gives us the wisdom of indescribability and the mystery of beauty and wonder"—Malena Mörling. LINK→

New Poetry + Art from Birds, LLC Kings of the F**king Sea Dan Boehl $18 | paper | 116 pp. Birds, LLC ISBN: 9780982617748 Poetry. Art. Images by Jonathan Marshall. "I often have a difficult time distinguishing between the memories of my childhood nightmares, the movie Time Bandits, and now KINGS OF THE F**KING SEA. At the heart of each is an unrecoverable distance from home. In Dan Boehl's poems, the sea is not home. If we stay on it, we will eventually drown in it, but there is nothing we can do. His poems are unforgivably wise. Like the sea, they are an unafraid mirror. And though they remind us it's always too late—that our adventure is a constant failure—their beauty keeps us afloat for just long enough"—Zachary Schomburg. LINK→

New Poetry from Benu Press Confederate Streets Erin E. Tocknell $16.95 | paper | 141 pp. Benu Press ISBN: 9780984462902 Poetry. "We're born into a world already in progress, like arriving late at a movie. Erin Tocknell, born to Nashville, loved the city in a wide-eyed, child's way, before she had a glimmer of the history that had shaped what she took to be her world. CONFEDERATE STREETS recalls how it feels to wake up to history, to understand you are living right in the midst of it. Not all the lessons are easy, but in Tocknell's telling we come to appreciate the rewards of facing up to the hard facts, of refusing the false glamour of living innocent of history. CONFEDERATE STREETS reminds us what as a nation we seem always to be forgetting, just how far love and understanding and goodwill can take us toward the promised America"—Kevin Oderman. LINK→

New Poetry from Narrow House Hum Who Hiccup Chris Mason $15.95 | paper | 136 pp. Narrow House ISBN: 9780979390159 Poetry. "Chris Mason has fabricated a set of visual charms, small and intense constellations of words that make & do, bounce & hope, zap & slap. These are dreams of poems more than poems of dreams, sweet & filled with delight"—Charles Bernstein. NEW REVIEW LINK →

New Poetry from Anhinga Press Makeshift Instructions for Vigilant Girls Erika Meitner $17 | paper | 98 pp. Anhinga Press ISBN: 9781934695234 Poetry. "These cool, hot poems about women and girls in danger and on the prowl, coming of age and being of age, are full ofstartling detail and vivid setting. Meitner's range, wit, compassion and her alertness to the moments where domestic andcollective experience intersect, make these poems memorable. This book is a seriously good read"—Daisy Fried. LINK→

New Poetry from Wave Books Destroyer and Preserver Matthew Rohrer $16 | paper | 88 pp. Wave Books ISBN: 9781933517506 Poetry. Griffin Poetry Prize finalist Matthew Rohrer illuminates the modern plight: trying to figure out how to be a thoughtful citizen, parent, and person as the landscape of terror and history worms its way into our everyday existence. Unnervingly humorous, casual, and tender, Rohrer's poems help us investigate our lives as he investigates his—openly and with a generous presence. NEW REVIEW LINKS →

New Poetry from Coffee House Press Testify Joseph Lease $16 | paper | 63 pp. Coffee House Press ISBN: 9781566892582 Poetry. "I regard Lease as the best poet of his generation. This is a poetry filled with stories that are built to last. This is a poet who will become a major voice in American poetry"—David Shapiro. Joseph Lease gracefully delves into American culture—narrating American lives, struggling with unjustified war, anxiety, and the broken promise of democracy. Lease braids humor, political bite, and lyric beauty, taking us to a place of warning, critique, and elegy. LINK→

New Poetry from Rescue Press In Canaan Shane McCrae $10 | paper | 35 pp. Rescue Press ISBN: 9780984488919 Poetry. African American Studies. In Shane McCrae's IN CANAAN, he inhabits the personae of the escaped slave Margaret Garner, who, in the mid-1800s, murdered one of her daughters in order to keep her from returning to slavery. "I couldn't stop/Hurting her because it hurt," writes McCrae in the voice of Garner, "Before that night   I never had the chance to love   / Anyone/ she was the first   person I loved." McCrae composes in broken forms and shattered fragments, retelling a harrowing historical story through the imagined first-person point of view of its tortured and terrified heroine. LINK→

New Poetry in Translation from Tavern Books Night of Shooting Stars Leonardo Sinisgalli $17 | paper | 144 pp. Tavern Books ISBN: 9781935635062 Poetry. Bilingual Edition. Translated from the Italian by W. S. Di Piero. NIGHT OF SHOOTING STARS is the definitive edition of Leonardo Sinisgalli's poetry in English. Selected, translated, and introduced by W. S. Di Piero, this bilingual collection represents work from each phase of Sinisgalli's career, giving readers a comprehensive look into one of Italy's essential 20th century poets. "Sinisgalli's work follows a trajectory that passes from the modern city at one end of its major axis to the ancient countryside of Lucania at the other. W. S. Di Piero...offers the reader an exceptionally good translation that is both sensitive and faithful"—World Literature Today. LINK→

New Fiction in Translation from Otis Books/Seismicity Editions The Porthole Adriano Spatola $12.95 | paper | 112 pp. Otis Books/Seismicity Editions ISBN: 9780979617799 Fiction. Translated from the Italian by Beppe Cavatorta and Polly Geller. Recipient of the 1966 "Ferro di Cavallo" prize for a first novel, THE PORTHOLE was a highly praised and controversial debut. Pulling together diverse elements from the musical experiments of Cage, Schnebel and Kagel, the pictorial innovations of assemblage and pop art, x-rated comics, and dialogue from horror and World War II films, Spatola liberated his narrative from the stultifying edifice of Italian prose. The Porthole remains even more important today for its remarkable achievement in that fertile period of experimental literature. A co-publication of Otis Books/Seismicity Editions and Agincourt Press. LINK→

New Fiction from El León Literary Arts About Them Chester Aaron $20 | paper | 176 pp. El León Literary Arts ISBN: 9780979528576 Fiction. "Chester Aaron's novel-in-stories, ABOUT THEM, published nearly 35 years ago, holds a unique and lasting place in the artistic annals of American boyhood. Through the account of young Benny Kahn we come to inhabit the Pennsylvania mining town of Sundown in the years leading up to World War II. Colorful and clear-eyed, unsentimental but full of feeling, the book gives us a rich and textured sense of life as it was lived there and then. Now, in ABOUT THEM, an octogenarian Benny revisits what remains of that largely vanished world—to show what time and memory have done to the characters and the place, to fill in suppressed pieces of the past, and to irradiate the whole with a sense not only of what was and is, but what should be. The narrative, by turns dramatic, comic, and chilling like its predecessor, is nonetheless permeated with kindness, generosity, and love right up to the astonishing ending. How Aaron manages this without a trace of mawkishness is not the least of the truly rare delights this book offers"—Donald Fanger. LINK→

New Fiction from UpSet Press Halal Pork and Other Stories Cihan Kaan $16.95 | paper | 144 pp. UpSet Press ISBN: 9780976014232 Fiction. In HALAL PORK AND OTHER STORIES, Cihan Kaan projects an avant garde, post 9/11 world, from the perspective of a young Muslim New Yorker. It's a place where Coney Island meets Mars; where hijabi girls are punk rock dervishes; where identity salesmen count pigeons at insane asylums as a cream cheese conspiracy brews in gitmo; where rich boys pay to be Muslim for a day; where the transgendered are holy; and where the bacon is halal. Kaan offers up five urban Sufi tales in the swirling graffiti of Brooklyn. VIDEO EXCERPT →

New Fiction from Caravel Books Music of the Spheres Michael Burke $16 | paper | 185 pp. Caravel Books ISBN: 9781929355709 Fiction. Johnny Heron is down once again, but that doesn't stop him from attacking a seemingly impossible case, not believing the rumors and not backing down from the threats. One more time, he fumbles and fights his way to the truth behind blackmail, infidelities, and murder...and a really good martini. MUSIC OF THE SPHERES is Burke's follow-up to his debut novel SWAN DIVE, which the Mystery Gazette referred to as "an intriguing, intelligent, contemporary American mystery." LINK→

New Fiction from WordFarm The Alpine Tales Paul J. Willis $28 | paper | 592 pp. WordFarm ISBN: 9781602260061 Fiction. The best part of any good fantasy world is the promise that you could get there yourself. In THE ALPINE TALES, that promise is kept. The Three Queens Wilderness is only the swing of an ice ax away from the mountains you may think you know. It is a world inhabited by three strange sisters at mortal odds—and by marmots and ouzels and pocket gophers ready to help you find your way. The dangers you'll face are ever present. For this alpine world was a place of perfection until, by the bane of the Lava Beast, it crumbled into something sadder. Join the quest to repair the ruins of glistening peaks and endless forests, and discover a land you will dearly love. Here, for the first time, all four books of THE ALPINE TALES, newly revised, are collected in a single volume. LINK→

New Fiction from Standing Stone Books Alaskan: Stories from the Great Land John Elvis Smelcer $16 | paper | 144 pp. Standing Stone Books ISBN: 9780979194474 Fiction. Written over the course of a quarter century by one fo Alaska's best living writers, these two dozen stories embody the spirit of Alaska—its colliding cultures, magnificent beauty and dangerously unforgivign environment. "John Smelcer is Alaska's modern-day Jack London"—W. P. Kinsella. "John Smelcer's stories are an indispensable addition to Alaskan literature"—J. D. Salinger. LINK→

New Poetry from NYQ Books My Old Man Was Always on the Lam Tony Medina $14.95 | paper | 112 pp. NYQ Books ISBN: 9781935520368 Poetry. African American Studies. MY OLD MAN WAS ALWAYS ON THE LAM is a blues memoir in verse. With brutal honesty and lyrical prowess, Tony Medina plays the changes in an intimate collection that sticks like a stinging Ali punch and moves like a New York City subway train through the raw, unmitigated terrain of his psyche. Sparked by the sudden death of his father in Harlem, MY OLD MAN WAS ALWAYS ON THE LAM examines his relationship with a long-lost mother who abandoned him at birth, exploring his Bronx projects childhood and his relationship with the paternal grandmother who wrestled him from the clutches of the State and raised him, culminating with a reunion with his terminally ill mother, attempting to fill in the gaps of a precarious past destined to collide with its bare-bones present. In this, his fifth full-length collection, Tony Medina is at his most personal and revelatory. LINK→

New Poetry from Miami University Press VIII Stepping Poems & other pieces Fergal Gaynor $15 | paper | 80 pp. Miami University Press ISBN: 9781450737104 Poetry. VIII STEPPING POEMS & OTHER PIECES brings together ten years of work from Irish poet, critic and art practitioner Fergal Gaynor. This is poetry in the modernist tradition, often in experimental forms. The Stepping Poems make apparent a surrounding silence or inarticulacy; the terse, gnomic triads of the Runes are based on Old Irish riddling forms. Through these forms recurring themes are refracted: location, especially Gaynor's native Cork City and Munster region; the presence of history, often as fossilized remains, in XI Pieces for Austria-Hungary; and the contemporary, as something alien and urgent, the subject of science fiction. VIII STEPPING POEMS & OTHER PIECES is at once learned and passionate, impersonal and highly individual. LINK→

New Poetry from sunnyoutside Everything Else We Must Endure Brian McGettrick $13 | paper | 52 pp. sunnyoutside ISBN: 9781934513293 Poetry. EVERTHING ELSE WE MUST ENDURE allows the reader to peep through domestic doors not fully closed and see the varied interiors of the lives being led, introducing us to memorable characters who remind us that not all action takes place in the spotlight. In these poems, even the mundane sparkles and sometimes it's the young who have wisdom to spare. NEW REVIEW LINK →

New Poetry from Shearsman Books In the Common Dream of George Oppen Joseph Bradshaw $15 | paper | 90 pp. Shearsman Books ISBN: 9781848611498 Poetry. Literary Nonfiction. Comprised of both poetry and essays, Joseph Bradshaw's IN THE COMMON DREAM OF GEORGE OPPEN makes its premise to imagine what bodies of work might exist in Oppen's fabled 25-year silence. By turns, the book forcefully projects a singularly fabricated biography onto the figure of Oppen, then self-reflexively retracts, divagating through a poet's desire for mentorship and community. Bringing in everything from ruminations on blurry memories of Idaho's landscape, to dialogues held across centuries and continents with the likes of figures such as the Elephant Man, IN THE COMMON DREAM OF GEORGE OPPEN brushes up against the fragile boundary between the finished and the unfinished poem, or a finished or unfinished life. LINK→

New Reference from Junction Press Caló: A Dictionary of Spanish Barrio and Border Slang Harry Polkinhorn and Alfredo Velasco, Editors $21 | paper | 146 pp. Junction Press ISBN: 9781881523215 Nonfiction. Reference. Latino/Latina Studies. "Polkinhorn and Velasco have busted the borders of linguistic analysis and Chicano talk assumptions. I hear the voices of my uncle Beto from El Paso in the 30s, the new multi-vocalities of the ‘¡Orale!’ generations of Latin America and the ever swashbuckling cross-cultural speakers and singers of the world. This is the unchained rap of the people! Tune into its poetic-love, community-renaissance and heart-rhythm dance. A twenty-first century ring-tone. ¡De aquellas! Right on!"—Juan Felipe Herrera. LINK→

New Memoir from Silenced Press No Permanent Scars Michael Hemery $16 | paper | 292 pp. Silenced Press ISBN: 9780979241062 Literary Nonfiction. Memoir. An instant classic, NO PERMANENT SCARS reads how creative nonfiction should read: like fiction. Like nonfiction. Like memoir. Like humor. Like literature. Like life. It's about childhood, adulthood, the neighborhood, and what it means to be a kid, a parent, a teacher, a human. Michael Hemery illuminates an honest working-class existence, offering both the sober realities of class discrimination and the humor and love of family. Intertwined with serious issues such as suicide, alcoholism, abuse, religion, and immigration, Hemery also endures a painfully slow and often naive coming of age (he once mistook an obvious prostitute for an office supply store employee). This is going to be the best book you'll read this year. AUTHOR VIDEO →

New Poetry from Ithuriel's Spear Demodulating Angel Richard Tagett $15 | paper | 146 pp. Ithuriel's Spear ISBN: 9780979339080 Poetry. LGBT Studies. "Fifty years at work in the field, he has been changing with the times, alert to the tiniest of human feelings as well as to the larger currents of shared social struggle. Like Jack Spicer, with whom he worked closely and on whom he coedited a volume of lasting value, Tagett knows when and how to lure the right words to his page, and how to insure they stick close to his branches.... I know of no other American poet whose very pages are as well filled out. What an accomplishment!"—Kevin Killian. LINK→

New Poetry in Translation from Marick Press Lend Me Your Voice Kjell Espmark $14.95 | paper | 140 pp. Marick Press ISBN: 9781934851227 Poetry. Translated from the Swedish by Robin Fulton. LEND ME YOUR VOICE (original Swedish title: Vintergata) is "the best collection of poetry published so far by a Swedish poet in the 21st century" according to the Swedish newspaper Svenska Dagbladet. The book has already appeared in Spanish, German, Italian, Romanian, Croatian, and Chinese. This is its first translation into English. LINK→

New Poetry from BlazeVOX [books] TRACK THIS: A Book of Relationship Stephen Bett $16 | paper | 148 pp. BlazeVOX [books] ISBN: 9781609640330 Poetry. In Bett's new book, TRACK THIS, we see a surprising, but highly engaging shift in sensibility. TRACK THIS is a risk-taking, stunningly beautiful book of poems that "tracks" an evolving love relationship. The poet employs his considerable technical skill to steer well free of clichéd, lyric sentiment by making use of Louis Zukofsky's still relevant, but rarely achieved dictum "upper register: music." The language of these minimalist, short line poems truly "sings" as the poems move and turn on the page. This is a poet who inherits the mantel from Creeley, Dorn, et al., but whose voice and ear for language are entirely his own. An utterly unique and gifted voice, intelligently hip, making postmodern language reach toward music. NEW REVIEW LINK →