It Might Do Well With Strawberries

Paperback - October 2008
142 Pages
ISBN10: 1-934851-02-7
ISBN13: 978-1-934851-02-9
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American Prophet

Paperback - January 2009
97 Pages
ISBN10: 1-934851-01-9
ISBN13: 978-1-934851-01-2
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Homage to Paul Celan

Paperback - September 2008
84 Pages
ISBN: 0-9779703-4-5
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The Blue City

In the complicated trio of Tomas the fishmonger, Marta the intellectual, and Josef the shady narrator involved in something dark and unsaid, Sean ThomasDougherty fashions a series of intertwined noir chapters that draw on real and imagined Eastern European history. In The Blue City, characters weave in and out of mythical cities based on colors that cut across time and space, as they seek to understand the many avenues that inhabit us both outside and within. Part Calvino, part Jàbes, this brief experimental novella challenges notions of the genre, as its characters search for meaning and redemption in their own lives, as the past intrudes into the present, and what was done or not done, will destroy them or be forgiven.

Never Night

Paperback - April 2008
84 Pages
ISBN: 978-0-9712676-5-7
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Should we have stayed at home, wherever that may be?" a traveler writes in a notebook at the end of Elizabeth Bishop's "Questions of Travel." The poems in Never Night ask the same question as they travel textual geographies from wheat farm to boreal forest, from a cave become fallout shelter to a spy satellite's view of a wrecked oil tanker, from a gold mine's tailings to a child burying a dead guinea pig. Whether investigating a derailed train, a two-headed moose fetus or a melting glacier, these poems reveal wounded earth giving birth to shimmering form, death held at bay without artifice in the meditations of a child's new words.

Emily Ate the Wind

Hardcover - April 2008
ISBN Hardcover: 978-0-9712676-4-0
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118 Pages

Paperback - April 2008
ISBN Paperback: 978-0-9779703-9-1
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118 Pages

Emily Ate the Wind tells the story of the drinkers, gamblers, lifelong friends, and frustrated lovers whose lives revolve around The Bar. Told in a series of vignettes, love letters, question and answer formats, newspaper clippings, short stories, and prose poems, the familiar dramas of these characters’ lives unfold with deft, poetic strokes. From sweeping lyricism to gritty realist scenes, Peter Conners follows these characters from childhood to adulthood, from marriage to war, through loyalty and the shock of betrayal.

"Sparks of brilliant images light up the compressed worlds Peter Conners creates with words. Music is made with whispers and curses, belches and laughter, pronouncements and asides and sly retorts. Startling lists transform into unsettling truths. The performances in Emily Ate the Wind are dazzling."

—Joanna Scott

“The crisscrossing sketches, stories, chronicles, and dialogues of Emily Ate the Wind definitively capture the shimmers and smashups of life in its darkening seasons. Peter Conners has written a wise-hearted, courageously compact book of quiet, vital exactnesses.”

–Gary Lutz

"Like the grotesques of Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio, Conners’ characters slice through these pages with their gaping moral, spiritual and emotional blindspots, and their big hopes and hopelessness. Loosely woven together (and including lovely anomalies, such as the tales from an earlier era written by the author’s father and the fabulous interview with a sunburn victim), these stories slip between the heartrending and the visionary, lashing to a wounding close."

—Eleni Sikelianos

The Fortunate Islands

Paperback - April 2008
84 Pages
ISBN: 978-0-9712676-6-4
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"These poems are sure-footed, engaging, broad in subject matter but grounded in the poet's wary detective-mind. I have a strong feeling for the most "psychological" of the poems, and those with psychological twists in the last stanza. The poems in this collection feel emotionally complete. An irresistible reading experience and revelation. Fortunate Arrival!"

—Sandra McPherson, author of The God of Indeterminacy

As When, In Season

Paperback - April 2008
78 Pages
ISBN: 978-1-934851-00-5
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“I like these poems immensely. What Schley has done is to reinvent the ode, especially in the nine poems for the muses. Prosodically heÕs discovered an odic tone, grave but graceful, imaginatively objective. ItÕs extremely effective, and it tokens a very large degree of literary depth and experience.” —Hayden Carruth

The Boy Who Killed Caterpillars

Paperback - September 4, 2007
160 Pages
ISBN: 978-0-9712676-7-1
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An eight-year-old boy with a case of head lice kills and narrates, withholding the identity of his victim until the end of the novel. In the process, he discovers the reason behind his parents' divorce and unknowingly unravels the mystery surrounding the nickname of his sadistic father.

THE BOY WHO KILLED CATERPILLARS teaches us how to see afresh how sentences look and function on the page, isolating their sparse beauty, floating each in a small sea of white space, making each tentative, always ready to try a new version of itself, making each as obsessive about itself as the unhinged Oedipal narrator is about himself, about his universe of childhood secrets, fears, trespasses, violence, voyeurism, a frightening father, an ineffectual mother, a bevy of bullying boys, a houseful of haunting revelations. Tight, clean, spare, this is the real deal.

—Lance Olsen, author of Nietzche's Kissesand Anxious Pleasures

The Catfish (Chapbook)

Paperback
30 Pages
ISBN-13: 978-0-9712676-9-5
USD $10.00

Franz Wright is the author of fourteen collections of poetry. Walking to Martha's Vineyard (Knopf 2003) was awarded the Pulitzer Prize. His newest collections, GodÕs Silence, and Earlier Poems were published by Knopf in, 2006 & 2007. WrightÕs other books include The Beforelife (2001), Ill Lit: New and Selected Poems (1998), Rorschach Test (1995), The Night World and the Word Night (1993), and Midnight Postscript (1993). Mr. Wright has also translated poems by RenŽ Char, Erica Pedretti, and Rainer Maria Rilke. He has received the PEN/Voelcker Award for Poetry, as well as grants and fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Whiting Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Arts. Wright has taught in many colleges and universities, including Emerson College and the University of Arkansas. He is currently the writer-in-residence at Brandeis. He has also worked in a mental health clinic in Lexington, Massachusetts, and as a volunteer at the Center for Grieving Children.

Storm (Chapbook)

Paperback
30 Pages
ISBN: 978-0-9712676-8-8
USD $10.00

Katie Ford is the author of Deposition (2002) and Colosseum (Graywolf Press, 2008).Her poems have appeared in the American Poetry Review, Ploughshares, Partisan Review, Seneca Review, Poets & Writers, American Literary Review and Pleiades. She is poetry editor of the New Orleans Review and currently teaches at Reed College.

The Dropped Hand

Paperback - April 2007
84 Pages
ISBN: 978-0-9779703-3-9
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To rescue language from itself: this is one of the primary responsibilities of the poet. Terry Blackhawk takes this aim and takes it to the highest of levels by shaping and reshaping language into a poetry that is built to last. In The Dropped Hand, Blackhawk's third full-length book, what is lost is regained, is reclaimed, is remade, into a world that must be, at times cruelly and with great difficulty, relearned. This book is one poet's daring testimony that dares to go to that most inward of places where few books dare to go. It is from such a place, of absence and silence, of "sorrow loosened/ at last," that Blackhawk "pulls songs from the lining of her pockets," from the socket of her heart, "And sings them for you.

Death gains on us. It honors neither time nor place nor human quest for meaning. Its emblem might be, as it is in these fine elegies, a dropped hand of playing cards: ‘abrupt and final / silence.’ If that were all, the bravery of the poet would be much, but Terry Blackhawk wrests from this strict vista a powerful antithesis. With patience and wisdom and, above all, with love, she crafts the vessel that counters dissolution. It is poetry’s dream to do just this.

— Linda Gregerson

In The Dropped Hand, Terry Blackhawk masterfully weaves threads of loss and grief into a fine tapestry that is both personal and universal.This is, I think, Dr. Blackhawk’s finest and most moving collection.

— Naomi Long Madgett

I love the poetry of Terry Blackhawk, above all else, for its heart, always searching for “something bursting with spring and belief.” Through the poems in The Dropped Hand she teaches us both how to hold on and how to let go of those we love. These compassionate poems reach out through the complex world to find the connections that sustain us. She celebrates our exposed places, the places where we are most vulnerable and most human. We so often cover up those places — it takes a magician like Terry Blackhawk to reveal to us what was there all along.

—Jim Daniels

Folding a River

Paperback - April 2007
84 Pages
ISBN 13: 978-0-9712676-3-4
USD $14.95 + Shipping $1.50

Kawita Kandpal's Folding a Riveris an exploration of East-West cultures. In it, Kandpal's lingual and cartographic explorations of these cultural landscapes takes her into an emo-mythic place not to be found on any map.

“This is a volume of memory and desire, landscape and water, and again water. Loss is redeemed by the sensuous beauty of Kandpal's language, and the precision of her insights into ‘the darker currents.’ You will believe her when she names them ‘holy.’”

– AliciaOstriker, author of No Heaven

“In her debut collection, Folding a River, Kawita Kandpal traces the shoreline of memory. Birds lift in and from these poems as all our margins of error are measured and re-measured. ‘I praise what endures,’ one poem tells us, and here eden is remembered and re-imagined in all its bittersweetness. Haunted by other landscapes and other languages, Kandpal has written a new narrative of exile, a wish made from the sound of willows and the sound of hooves, a hum of longing, the song the bones sing: ‘tra la la to the flesh, tra la la…’”

–Mary Ann Samyn, author of Purr

“The elegantly muscular poems in Kawita Kandpal’s Folding a River are aware of themselves as artifacts with an aesthetic but are also, always, aware, intensely, of this world. These are poems that can rearrange ‘constellations, / spelling daughter in an evening sky,’ and delve deeply enough to find the ‘continents submerged / in centuries of desire.’ Folding a River illuminates the fact that grace is not the absence of longing but the form of longing that’s never absent. In Kawita Kandpal’s poems, that longing illuminates a sensual and sensuous world.”

– George Looney, author of The Precarious Rhetoric of Angels

“Folding a River, a collection of elegies, shows a pleasing range of free-verse forms that develop themes sustained throughout: loss, exile, myth, landscape. Kandpal’s mood is melancholy,articulated with intelligence and grace; her phrasing can rise to the level of proverb: ‘This time next year you will have evolved into an idea.’ In its personal evocations of geographical and linguistic exile from the subcontinent, centered on a lost father, her work recalls that of Li-Young Lee, yet with a feminine perspective often haunting in its own right: ‘tenderly / taking back the mistakes of men.’ A graceful, deeply meditative debut.”

– SharonaMuir, author of The Book of Telling

“Place Kawita Kandpal’s poems under your tongue and let them release the origamic blue of a folded river, the echoes of exile, the spaces in one language that can be filled with the heaviness of another. Each poem in this book is a ceremony, each word calls forth a home land. She names the language of silence and helps us take comfort in those absences waiting to be filled. Her book becomes a necessary part of the reader.”

– KathleeneWest, Poetry Editor, Puerto del Sol

Father, Tell Me I Have Not Aged

Paperback - April 2007
84 Pages
ISBN: 0-9779703-6-1
USD $14.95 + Shipping

A memoir in poetry drawing upon childhood, love and loss, with a french turn to film, especially Truffaut, in explaining the human spirit.

Russell Thorburn’s Father, Tell Me I Have Not Aged is as sure-footed and persuasive a poetry collection as I have come across in a long time. To say it both devastates and delights with its insights is simply to acknowledge the book’s depth and accuracy of emotion, its abiding humanity, and its vigorous pursuit of linguistic exuberance. I was not only moved by what I encountered in these poems, I was compelled. This is poetry of the first order. – Jack Driscoll

If every poem is, as Frost says, an adventure, then Russell Thorburn is a reliable guide and these poems, cinematic in their unfolding, full of startling visions and remembrance—good, rare gifts, indeed. – Thomas Lynch

In this collection of brilliant meditative poems, Russell Thorburn examines the strange ironies of being human, shaking his head in wonder, regret, bemusement, and even ecstasy. He looks back on the simplicity of the past with the wisdom of someone who knows no such simple life exists. Despite the shadow of death looming over these poems, despite the battle against the erasure of our pasts, Thorburn finds plenty to celebrate, for ultimately, this is a book of acceptance of life, with all its flaws—an acceptance of the human, stripped down to all its beauty and terror. – Jim Daniels

I’m wanting to leave these poems by Russell Thorburn on church pews and park benches, to fill cargo planes with his poems and airdrop them all over the world. I’m wanting to rush up to strangers on the street, the grocery store clerk, and to offer this collection as currency, to beg the ranting world one listener at a time to sit here and be still and be ruined alive by these fine poems. . . . You hold in your hands an artifact born of spark and tinder and this poet’s stubborn diligence. –-John Rybicki

The Seed Thieves

Paperback - September 2006
72 Pages
ISBN: 0-9779703-0-2
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In dramatic lyrics and narratives, The Seed Thieves investigates both the mundane and the extramundane. In varying styles and voices, the poems cover a wide spectrum of imagery, including: a man startled to prayer by fireflies, a teenage girl falling from a highway overpass, a drunk circling his lawn in a tractor, children scavenging through the treasures of a shattered piñata. Grappling with death, love, God, and existence in a world where “even lifting our hands to pray / we disturb the air,” these poems turn toward death and ruin in search of real light and redemption.

White Holes

Paperback - September 2006
80 Pages
ISBN: 0-9779703-1-0
USD $11.95 + $1.50 shippping

White Holes is a sequence of poems that attempts to give speech, broken as it might be, to the grief that is felt in the wake of a mother's death. Here, in Hart's left-behind world, what isn't said — what can't be said — carries as much weight as what is said. There is a delicate balance in these poems between language and articulation and the fractured space, both psychic and visible, that must be entered and accounted for in the aftermath of the mother's absence. It was Beckett who made the claim: “you must go on, I can't go on, I'll go on.” No other book of poems, no other poet, in recent years, seizes hold of this declaration and makes from it an artifact that is both holy and wholly his own.

A Complex Bravery

Paperback - April 2006
80 Pages
ISBN: 0-9712676-1-8
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This is the book of childhood, love and war. Lipton’s poems are a gang that takes no prisoners: his voice is direct, his tone is clear, his diction is ironic — but his irony is earned and felt-through. The manuscript is a book of elegies that refuse to go mourning without at least a little bit of protest. Whatever his loss is, Lipton’s voice is always quirky and alive, always ready to report the world straight to us, without patronizing, for ‘this battle is parent by parent/and I have homework to do.

The Sleeping

Paperback - April 2006
64 Pages
ISBN: 0-9712676-2-6
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The Sleeping, the first book of poetry by Caroline Maun, explores the meanings of what "home" is with naked vulnerability. Maun analyzes relationships with parents, her significant others, strangers, and herself in ways that are — or become — identifiable to the reader.

Solute

Paperback - September 2006
80 Pages
ISBN: 0-9779703-2-9
USD $10.95 + Shipping $1.50

Solute is a first book by a young poet who is, as it says in one poem, standing "at the threshold of desire." Desire, to want, is the verb of choice in Padilla's world, a desire to feel, a desire to be dangerous, a desire to be loved, to be understood, to be connected with others, a desire to find oneself whole in this world, not to mention the poet's own need, his "hunger for ink," to make from this desire an artifact of language charged with meaning.

Witness of Music

Paperback - September 2006
80 Pages
ISBN: 0-9779703-8-8
USD $22.95 + Shipping $1.50

In The Witness of Music, Alexander Suczek combs the archives and his memories to share intimate details of how Pro Musica Detroit outlasted the 19 other chapters that were established throughout the nation in the 1920s. Neither the Great Depression nor wartime nor changes in concert venues have veered the venerable concert society from its mission, which continues to this very day.Witness of Music is complete with details and reviews of many of its concerts and the impact the musicians and composers would later have on classical music on an international level. Likewise, “The Witness of Music” also recants the efforts of the many Detroit-area residents who volunteered to bring such talent to the community and leave their marks on an important slice of local cultural history. In addition to Suczek’s narration, Witness of Music includes a full roster of composers, musicians, programs as well as board members who have served Pro Musica Detroit throughout the years.