New Releases
Nin Andrews' ironic humor and laser-sharp focus on the social landscape are in full force in these pages. But beware, dear reader, as the author warns in the opening page of The Secret Life of Mannequins:
This book is not designed for you if you are faint of heart. If you have a history of psychiatric problems, especially if you have a tendency towards insomnia and self-flagellation.
Go on, you know you want to read it!
On a Bed of Gardenias: Jane & Paul Bowles, Karren Alenier’s sixth collection of poetry, unfolds the exotic love story of Jane Auer and Paul Bowles, American expatriate writers considered to be the precursors of the American Beats. The poetic story begins after Jane’s death in 1973 as Paul and Jane’s Moroccan lover Cherifa sit smoking kif and revisit scenes from Jane and Paul’s lives. The insinuation is that Cherifa poisoned Jane. Paul says that Jane was his muse but did he bleed her pen dry?
This collection feeds Alenier’s libretto How Many Midnights, a multi-media opera-in-progress with her collaborator, composer John Supko. Alenier spent three weeks in 1982 in Tangier, Morocco, working on her poems about Gertrude Stein with Paul Bowles. In 2005, some of those poems about Stein premiered in Gertrude Stein Invents a Jump Early On, her first opera with composer William Banfield.
The poems of Zack Rogow's My Mother and the Ceiling Dancers give voice to a spirit at once vulnerable and tough, broken and resilient. This is our first full-length book, hand-sewn and hand-glued, hand bound here at the wompus. At a glance, My Mother and the Ceiling Dancers looks like a typical trade paperback. You could get lost in the vintage family photos on this book's cover. Pick it up, and you may note the hand of the maker in linen threads peeking through, and the ever so slightly kattywompus individuality of each copy.
"The heart of this intensely moving book is the long poem about Rogow's mother, an extraordinary woman through whose life Rogow illuminates the anguished, fabulous history of the twentieth century." --Robert Thomas, author of Dragging the Lake and Door to Door.
The poems in Chad Prevost's Greatest Hits collection have appeared everywhere from The Huffington Post to Sentence. These poems pound a stake into ground both profane and hallowed, ruthlessly articulating the contradictions and complexity of life as a human. "Chad Prevost and Mythic Reality," his opening essay, will take you on as wild as ride as the poems themselves. Prevost lets no one off the hook, least of all himself:
"My heart would rather not know / where it is going, would prefer / never to carry a calendar or a map. / It just goes around giving itself away / like this with so little self-direction. / Even as it takes you from behind / it's banging its head into the wall / of all the made-up rules / everyone goes around pretending / are real."
--Chad Prevost, from "Hitch-Hiking Heart"
Take a 1940s doctor's manual of sexual instruction for the layman; apply a lens of adult daughter, examining the sex life of her parents; season with the pathos and hilarity of gender clashes between the sheets--and you have Susana Case's Manual of Practical Sexual Advice.
"To the delicate genital corpuscles / like taste buds in the mouth / like nerve endings in the retina / ticket takers of sensations. To the bulbo-cavernous muscles / their spasmodic pulsations.
What did my mother think the first time it happened? What / did my mother think the first time it didn't happen?"
--Susana H. Case, from "Ode to Orgasms"
Eric Anderson came to the press one day last month to help stitch copies of The Parable of the Room Spinning, our second hand bound, full length poetry collection. Those of you who read The Sun are familiar with Eric's heartbroken, plainspoken poems, which The Sun editor Sy Safransky says are like "a friend offering fresh bread and hot soup on a cold day."
Dan Chaon, author of Stay Awake, notes Anderson's "uncanny knack for finding the macabre in the ordinary, and vice versa." And just as he peels back the innate strangeness of our very personal everyday lives, Anderson offers up a tilted, disturbing peek into the world of our political elite:
"Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain. Pay no attention to the man in front of the curtain. Pay no attention to the curtain, the gold tassle edges sweeping dust from the stage. Pay no attention to the theater, abandoned seats like red velvet patrons, the house lights gone dim.
Pay no attention to the girl and her companions: the beast, the machine, the empty inside. Pay no attention to the witch’s curled toes, curled feet. Pay no attention to the sky; it’s only a backdrop. Pay no attention to the city’s two dimensions.
Pay no yellow, no brick, no road.
Pay some attention to the monkeys. Pay some attention to the little voices. Pay some attention to the girl after all, lonely, longing for home."
--Eric Anderson, from "Barack Obama"
Oral storyteller, puppeteer, and “Science Magician” who can bounce eggs and throw ordinary playing cards into hypnotized watermelons, Martin Willitts, Jr. gives us a collection on survival, forgiveness, and bearing witness, poems that draw from Willitts' work as a medic for the American Service Committee during the Vietnam war, then range free into contemporary life, speaking truth about our wounds, speaking truth to power.
America Asks About Justice
We are transporting bananas through fields of bones.
And we dare to ask about Justice?
A church stating good intentions sends Bibles to cure AIDS.
Someone points out
we must save the innocent by bombing them
for weapons they never had.
We stretch lazily across borders and ask about Justice.
Hypocrisy is packaged like corn flakes.
We made men stand naked on a small wavering box,
blindfolded as Lady Justice, a noose around their necks,
threatening to kick the box out from under them,
haggling over the price of gasoline.
This is the Justice we hand out as purple thumbs.
We justify our actions.
We justify someone else’s poverty.
We do not investigate the infected mold of FEMA trailers.
We do not investigate contaminated food given to the School Lunches.
We do allow fraud to exist in non-bid contracts to War contractors
who build things that fail our soldiers.
Justice is a smirking recruitment poster.
We would rather teach children about values
from a book written by a man who was arrested
after violating three of his own values.
This is justice.
We bring justice like bombing raids.
When enough damage is done,
there will be final assessments
of the success or failure.
The end result does not matter.
Justice will be served on a platter like empty collection plates.
A chapbook excerpted from much lauded poet and Cave Canem fellow Randall Horton's as yet unpublished memoir, Roxbury tells a story of redemption through writing, and through the love of a father for his son. Not many manuscripts bring the editor to tears, the way this one did.
“This is a son talking to his father, admitting the hard roads that damn near broke him and asking for forgiveness. He writes through, not around the life that bleeds men in the streets, and does it in a way that remembers what it means to be wrong. You can't walk away from this writing without knowing how the hustle, in the end, was nothing when weighed against the strength of a father's love.”
–Dwayne Betts, author, A QUESTION OF FREEDOM