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Tim Seibles’ Voodoo Libretto: New and Selected Poems is in many ways a book of memories, a chronicle of both the personal and the political. Driven by a restless and wide ranging imagination, the poems are sometimes humorous, sometimes deadly serious, sometimes erotic, sometimes mystical, and occasionally all of these things at once. -
This book of essays by Norman Mailer’s biographer, Dr. J. Michael Lennon, collect personal and literary reminiscences, insights, and investigations from the last half century. Th rough the rising action of his life in literature, Lennon’s remembrances track the influence not only of his literary pater familias, Norman Mailer, but his actual father, a booze-bitten blue-collar bibliophile with his own reputation for genius, and how together these mentors forged and focused the 20/20 literary vision Lennon takes to the work of some of the greatest writers of the Twentieth Century, from Baldwin and Bishop to Didion and DeLillo and, not least, Mailer himself. -
Also Dark is fresh from the pen of Angelique Palmer, a Black Woman Queer Mama forced to forge her own armor and create her own path. Bigotry, ageism, sexism, colorism, homophobia, and ableism are given voice and a voracious opponent in her poems. -
“Blessed be sin if it teaches men shame,” wrote Georges Benanos. Sinnerman continues Michael Waters’ exploration of trespass as a mode of worship in poems that “delight in wit and wordplay” (The Gettysburg Review) and display “raucous devotion” while assuming “a divine erotic presence even in his more harrowing poems” (The Georgia Review). A fire escape, a fire hydrant, a father’s comb, the mosaic of a bull in an Italian shopping mall, a soul in flight—all assume resonance “that they may shine more darkly” in the light of Waters’ words. If sin is “seen as good once gone,” these poems weigh our attraction to transgression against our desire for forgiveness. Novelistic in depth and reach, elegiac in its embrace of the living and the dead, raw in its fraught vulnerability, and cunning in its explosive and tongue-delighting sound play, Sinnerman seems poised between the here-and-now and the invisible it invites and confronts. -
Black Metamorphoses pierces a 2,000+ year-old veil inspired by a range of Ovidian myths while resisting a direct conversion of the work. This collection explores the Black psyche, body, and soul, through inversion and brazen confrontation of work that has shaped Western civilization. In a poetic range of forms, voices, and rhythms, the reader is bathed in ancestral memory, myth, and sense of the timeless of the shapeshifting, resilient Black body. -
Darrell Bourque’s poetry collection is a set of jazz-infl ected ghazals tied to epigraphs from Colum McCann’s award-winning novel Apeirogon and illuminated with Bill Gingles’ abstract expressionist paintings. Predominately rooted in the tragic losses in contemporary Israeli and Palestinian families, the poems braid those losses into parallel losses in geo-political race, ethnic, class, and caste conflicts. -
In the third Tribus by Etruscan Press, we present work by poets of three generations: William Heyen, H. L. Hix, and Dante Di Stefano. It was Di Stefano’s new book, Lullaby with Incendiary Device, which inspired this tribute to three generations. Lullaby is deeply immersed in a soon-to-be-realized future, in which Di Stefano’s daughter faces an array of 21st century challenges. For the last half-century, Heyen’s poetry has explored world history, from Nature, to Native Americans, to the Holocaust and the atom bomb, the Iraq Wars, to the British Royals. In this book, Heyen presents another entry into his Holocaust opus, The Nazi Patrol. H. L. Hix’s work is also inextricably involved with the world as seen in a recent collection, American Anger, which explores the psychology of rage underneath recent political turmoil, yet it also turns inward, creating new forms to join the world and the inner life. This theme is most prominent here, in How It Is That We. -
With a wandering spirit and an inquisitive mind, Stephen Benz ventures around town, across country, and overseas in search of forgotten, overlooked, or misunderstood stories. From rock concerts and courthouses to farm towns, battlegrounds, historical sites, and quirky museums, these “itinerant essays” revel in discovering “new wonders every mile.” -
For our fourth Tribus, we present Fates, in which three poets—Ann Pedone, Katherine Soniat, and D. M. Spitzer—weave destinies by reimagining stories from the past. The books of Fates resist retellings. Instead, they reopen stories we have been carrying with us. They explore the limits and possibilities of form, testing the poetic line. And they invite new voices to disturb the universe. Each book of this Tribus, at once a daring translation and a rich original work of art, offers a distinct poetic voice. Yet, when read together, the books of Fates transform into a collective love song, three disparate poets all singing resolute, all singing luminous. -
The newest collection from one of America’s foremost African-American poets threads the journey from youthful innocence to the whittled-hard awareness of adulthood. Along the way it immerses the reader in palpable moments —the importance of remembering, the complexity of race, and the meaning of true wakefulness
“Crisply comic, disarmingly frank, and aurally bold …”
—Publishers Weekly
Awards
2014 — Theodore Roethke Memorial Poetry Prize 2013 — PEN Oakland Literary Award Winner 2012 — National Book Award Finalist -
In a memoir Lance Olsen calls “fascinating, horrifying, unfalteringly honest,” award-winning writer Renee E. D’Aoust draws from her experiences as a modern dancer in New York City during the nineties. Trained at the prestigious Martha Graham Center, D’Aoust intertwines accounts of her own and other dancers’ lives with essays on modern dance history. Her luminous prose spotlights this passionate, often brutal world. Scarred, strained, and tough, bearing witness to the discipline demanded by the art form, Body of a Dancer provides a powerful, acidly comic record of what it is to love, and eventually leave, a life centered on dance. "Body of a Dancer fills a void in the dance literature that has existed for far too long. . . As D'Aoust reveals in her wonderful memoir, the 'Body of a Dancer' is also shaped by an entire life led both inside and outside the studio.” —Ballet-Dance Magazine "Fascinating, horrifying, unfalteringly honest, Renée E. D’Aoust’s Body of a Dancer is a remarkably clear-eyed descent into New York’s surreal world of modern dance peopled by the obsessed, dispossessed, sexy, suicidal, brutal, broke, and absurd, where piercing self-doubt and ambition give way to luminous instants of transcendence, and where the body is a site of pain and beauty and discipline and joy, a home you can never fully inhabit and never fully leave." —Lance Olsen, author of Head in FlamesAward
2011 Finalist – Foreword Review Book of the Year Award -
Quick Kills chronicles the desperate longing to belong as well as the effects of neglect, familial absence, and the nature of secrets. The young female narrator is seduced by an older man who convinces her that she is the perfect subject for his photographs. Meanwhile, the narrator’s sister embarks on an equally precarious journey. Never clearly delineating the border between art and pornography, the narrator’s escalating disquiet is evidence that lines have been crossed. "Quick Kills is a chronicle of bewilderment sprung from the terrible want to be wanted, the paralyzing flux of allegiances that keeps us pinned where we ought not be. Girls go missing as readily as shoes in this darkly suggestive novel; nobody’s paying much attention but the predators, who are everywhere and swift. The reader is left to navigate by images, flashes in the dark—a drawer stuffed with frogs, a spatter of blood, a child in an empty swimming pool. Lurie insists that we look, keep looking, make beauty from the ruin, and live." —Noy Holland, author of Swim for the Little One First Read the Quick Kills Kirkus Review Here » -
A Heaven Wrought of Iron: Poems from the Odyssey offers a fresh approach to — and a collaboration with — the Odyssey by weaving together translated fragments from the Greek text with a sequence of poems drawn from an imaginative engagement with the Odyssey. D. M. Spitzer’s collection unfolds within the framework of the ancient epic: 24 books and a well-known and complex narrative architecture. The poems contained in A Heaven Wrought of Iron inhabit a range of voices drawn from both the world of Homer’s Odyssey and from that of the poet-as-reader. -
Aaron Poochigian’s Mr. Either/Or is an ingenious debut, a verse novel melding American mythology, noir thriller and classical epic in language in which gritty rhythms, foreboding overtones and groovy jams surround you like an atmosphere. Imagine Byron’s Don Juan on a high-stakes romp through a Raymond Chandler novel. Think Hamlet in Manhattan with a license to kill. Mr. Either/Or is now available for download on Audible.
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Will Dowd takes us on a whimsical journey through one year of New England weather in this engaging collection of essays. As unpredictable as its subject, Areas of Fog combines wit and poetry with humor and erudition. A fun, breezy, and discursive read, it is an intellectual game that exposes the artificiality of genres.Award
2017 — Mass Book Award -
A wild ride on the madcap streets of Guatemala City. A twilight walk through old Havana with a Cuban mailman. A canoe trip in search of a lost grave in the Everglades. A late-night visit to a border-town casino. These are some of the experiences Stephen Benz describes in this witty, insightful, and evocative collection of personal essays and literary journalism. Benz takes readers to locales both familiar and remote, introducing unusual characters and recounting little-known historical anecdotes. Along the way, he contemplates the meaning of road signs, describes the hardships of daily life in the former Soviet Union, reflects on the lives and deaths of forgotten people, and listens to a bolero during a Havana blackout.
2019 Foreword Reviews INDIES Book of the Year Finalist -
Trio: three books of poetry—Planet Parable, by Karen Donovan; Run, by Diane Raptosh; Endless Body by Daneen Wardrop—bound together in one accommodating volume; three distinct and fully realized, absorbing universes that stand on their own but, here, not apart. Inevitably, serendipitously, the intelligences, preoccupations, prosodic signatures begin to reverberate and ricochet, not just for readers but for the poets themselves, who together, in an afterward, comment on the project and create an intriguing cento of combined lines. Individually, Karen Donovan’s poems unspool lyric macrocosms and microcosms with equal and precise astonishment; Diane Raptosh’s poems unveil and reclaim with intimacy the spiritual, sexual and political history of Victoria Woodhull, an American feminist purged from the annals; and the poems of Daneen Wardrop, with close and darting attention, create an intricate, syncopated network. Each of these three poets, with daring and mastery, compels on her own; together in Trio, their synergy is riveting. — Carol Moldaw, Beauty Refracted -
In a world that expects women to take care of everyone else except themselves, and find validation and value in such self-negation, Felice Belle’s Viscera is an unflinching practice and declaration of defining oneself for oneself, with radical acceptance of the great, and challenging, consequences of doing so. Viscera is poetry for people who think they hate poetry—quirky, accessible and pop culture obsessed…for fans of 90 Day Fiancé and Ntozake Shange…an urban (self) love story for anyone who has ever felt like an other…a celebration of what Jonathan Lethem calls the “frivolous Now.” -
Chromatic bears as its epigraph the philosopher Baruch Spinoza’s assertion that “Desire is the very nature or essence of every single individual.” The three sequences of poems in Chromatic test that claim. Each borrows its title: “Remarks on Color” from Ludwig Wittgenstein, “Eighteen Maniacs” from Duke Ellington, and “The Well-Tempered Clavier” from J. S. Bach. Exploiting those predecessors, the poems in Chromatic explore the full range of effects caused by human desire, from ecstasy to despair. “Among the new writers who interest me most at the moment. . . . Hix is cerebral, ingeniously inventive, and often scary. He is an experimental poet whose experiments usually succeed—a rare event in contemporary letters.”—Dana Gioia, TurnrowAward
[icon color="#dbb95c" size="16" type="icon-star" unit="px" ]2006 Finalist — National Book Award in Poetry -
Food doesn’t get any more local, cosmic, primitive, tasty, or disturbing than in this book-length, lyrical-meditative poem. At stake are no less than the origins and mysteries of flesh and touch. “Thorpe Moeckel’s Venison is civilized and wild, like a life lived well, a barbaric yawp of pain and joy and true wonder at the brilliant ordinariness of a life lived close to the earth and close to the bone. Moeckel’s fine poetic is whetted on the visceral and cannily transcendental. Read it.”—Christopher Camuto “This wonderfully layered poem shows us ‘how to come to know the woods such that you dream them through the eyes of the deer. This is the praise song of the hunter and the world he hunts.”—Michael Chitwood -
Aurally rich, structurally varied and inventive, sensually textured, these are poems at once passionate and analytical, descriptive and meditative, lyrical and complex—poems that keep one eye on the moon while leveling their gaze at the self and its immediate world. With an alert nuanced intelligence, a sinuous flexible line, Moldaw’s poems turn swiftly and sharply, surprising us in their range and ease, their visionary core. While, in the quoted words of the painter Agnes Martin, “the mind knows what the eye has not seen,” Moldaw’s exact and sometimes challenging language bring eye and mind together, with revelatory transparency. A wild fire brings into focus her daughter’s unknown birth mother; a columbary outside the hospital window becomes a columbarium as she comes to terms with a friend’s dying of AIDS; tossing the I Ching coins affords the occasion for a long meditative sequence built on distilled moments; overheard piano music catalyzes a reverie of longing; Walter de Maria’s sculpture Lightning Field inspires a layered, penetrating rumination on art and life’s “multi-angled interrelationships.” Out of acutely observed, deeply felt particulars, Moldaw constructs poetry of imaginative daring that illuminates and transforms the life within us all, repeatedly achieving, to quote from The New Yorker, “lyric junctures of shivering beauty.” -
In A Poetics of Hiroshima, William Heyen has broken through to face full square what has been working its way to surface through several of his highly-praised earlier books including Erika: Poems of the Holocaust and Shoah Train (Etruscan, 2003): the interfusions, in art and in our desire for art, of beauty and atrocity. Heyen’s lines claw their ways into an aesthetics of formful but obscene sound that may now be our century’s only viable, or possible, home. “A remarkable poet in whom the ‘visionary’ and the unblinkingly ‘historical’ are dramatically meshed. He writes with the wild, radiant audacity of the visionary; yet his eye and ear are sharp, unsparing.”—Joyce Carol Oates “William Heyen’s music and meditations continue to amaze. I’ve now read and absorbed all the poems of A Poetics of Hiroshima. I am not ready to write anything about them, except to express my awe.”—Cynthia Ozick -
“In this strong debut novel, Schwartz takes a hard look at the dark secrets hiding within a marriage. Depressed over the death of her mother six months before, Jane Rosen, a stay-at-home mom of three girls and longtime wife to busy, self-absorbed rabbi Saul, finally flies down to her mother’s long-empty Florida house to put her affairs in order. There, Jane finds evidence of a mother she never knew, while Saul contends with the girls—in particular unhappy, fragile 16-year-old Malkah—and a dying congregant’s bombshell confession, that he had an affair with Jane 10 years before. Shocked and wounded, Saul tells Jane not to come home, leaving her to pursue her mother’s secret life. Soon, Jane’s caught up with a gardener who traps her in a spider web of drugs, sex and secrets. At home, Malkah’s descent into depression and Saul’s compounding fury push the family toward tragedy. Though readers may feel the couple is let too easily off the hook, Schwartz pursues both threads of the story unflinchingly to the end.”—Publishers Weekly -
In poems at once playful and grave, H. L. Hix pits excerpts from the speeches of George W. Bush against arguments from Osama bin Laden in a poetic dialogue embracing politics, literature, language, and culture. Reframing Beltway sound-bites and Islamic fundamentalist rhetoric, God Bless delves into the minds of two men whose intransigence has had global consequences. To break the stalemate, this original sequence of poems plucks the antagonists from their bunkers in Oval Office and Afghani cave and presents them, for the first time, face to face. Hix then opens the conversation to a diverse panel of experts, including the Iranian Ambassador to the United Nations, CNN’s terrorism analyst, distinguished professors of Arabic and Islamic studies, and other prominent writers and authorities, who shed light on the issues raised by the poems. "[H. L. Hix is] one of the most distinctive writers of our time.”—David Mason, The Hudson Review -
An American expatriate hopes to quell his grief for a long lost son in the stillness of his photographs of the Dodecanese Islands. But soon friendship and then love for a woman wounded in her own family-born grief propel him toward life again, where stillness is set into motion and identity might be recovered, against odds, in a foreign place. “. . . Oderman has a knack for keeping things moving and bringing the vibrant colors of the island to life.”—Publishers Weekly “In language as clear and beautiful as the Aegean Sea itself, Oderman seamlessly weaves the tales of three Americans, each fleeing to a remote Greek island to escape the past that haunts them. White Vespa takes the reader on a journey of the senses: the smells and tastes of the Greek isles; the thrumming heat; the languid stroll of life; the sometimes painful stabs of memory when all you want to do is forget.”—Jeff Talarigo, author of The Pearl Diver -
Following the manic journey of a man stripped of memory, American Amnesiac confronts the complexities of being American in an age of corruption, corporations, and global conflict. "Straddling confession and prophesy, history and myth, intimacy and anonymity, American Amnesiac offers a riveting meditation on a distinctly American condition. We are lost and at home in its world, a world in which past and present collide and identities fold and collapse. Following the hypnotic voice of the amnesiac speaker, the stranded reader stumbles along in a landscape marked by its own odd, jarring, incoherent signposts — shreds of a past as recognizable as it is impenetrable (the relentless refrain is, after all, “My name is John Doe”) and scraps of a world reduced to a collection of headlines, names, titles, symbols, letters — familiar and cryptic at once. With her consummate craft, Diane Raptosh has given us a collection of stunning, timely, and unforgettable poems." —Edvige Giunta, author of Writing with an Accent: Contemporary Italian American Women AuthorsThe self is a thousand localities like a small nation—assembly required: borders and roads,armies, farms, small and large pieces of parchment. I stand by all the territories I have ever been, even as I can’t remember them. I am a locum—ear to the emperor penguin, a banner ad blinking to the hoi polloi. Since I’ve become John Doe, I swear I can feel most objects with sixty digits instead of five. This makes me think of Lisette. Makes me miss her left collar bone. Her hips’ wingtips. A train moans from a far hummock. Which reminds me that everyone I’ll have to live without I must help to find a place within. Which is an act of granite will. A strain. A ditty. An exercise in utmost beautility. From American Amnesiac (Etruscan Press 2013) by Diane RaptoshAwards
2013 – National Book Award Longlist, Poetry 2014 Finalist – Housatonic Book Award for Poetry -
An Archaeology of Yearning explores a father’s effort to understand a family landscape altered by autism. Ultimately, however, the book is not about autism; it is about the central role of storytelling in sustaining human connections and the power of shared desires in embracing difference. -
In As Much As, If Not More Than, H.L. Hix first harries poetry with thrusts and parries and, next, with a self-interview composed of questions quoted from other texts. Hix then tests with a stunning sequence of tributes from the poet to poets—in glosas—one of poetry’s possibilities. As Much As, If Not More Than logs one explorer’s journey into the incompletely mapped region between prose and poetry, the territory—as H.L. Hix himself identifies it—“between speaking and singing, elenchus and jive.” -
The Arsonist’s Song Has Nothing to Do with Fire, a highly compressed prose poem of a novel, explores the loneliness of three misfits as they attempt to reconnect to the modern world: Vivian, the wallflower who’s obsessed with death; Ronny, the arsonist, who’s resisting the urge to burn the whole town down, and The Doctor, who struggles to glorify his legacy with a brilliant and reckless vision: human flight. -
Surrendering Oz is a memoir in essays that charts the emotional awakening of a bookish Bronx girl. From her early job as a proofreader at The Guinness Book of World Records through a series of dominating and liberating friendships and secret connections, the author takes charge of her life as a Texas professor, writer and wise student of her own soul. Reader’s Digest says reading Surrendering Oz “is like having a conversation with a bracingly honest but fundamentally kind friend. In 15 pitch-perfect essays, she chronicles her hard-earned rejection of the cultural fairytales of womanhood as she comes fully into possession of her life." Surrendering Oz was recently longlisted for the 2015 PEN/Diamondstein-Spielvogel Award for the Art of the Essay.Awards
2015 Finalist – The Community of Literary Magazines and Presses Firecracker Award 2015 Finalist – Longlist PEN/Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award for the Art of the Essay
