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Arcadia Road is three long poems – narrative, lyrical, meditative – each as audacious as down-to-earth, each as strange as intimate. Moeckel’s trilogy is as rich, lush, and organic as the soil of his Virgina Blue Ridge homestead. In a mode both contemporary and as old as Hesiod, Moeckel sustains a cosmic and earthbound incursion into essential techniques and textures of life. These poems are organic and intimate, revolving around the time, work, grace and struggle of bringing food from field to table. -
Crave is a coming-of-age memoir that chronicles a young girl’s journey through abuse and impoverishment. The effusive narration descends into the depths of personal and sexual degradation, perpetual hunger for food, safety and survival. While moving through gritty exposés of poverty, abuse, and starvation, Crave renders a continuing search for sustenance that simply will not die. Laurie Jean Cannady is most recognizable through her voice. Lyrical and august, yet strangely intimate, her lucid memory for the texture of daily existence weaves the reader into the fabric of the story. We discover that the most slender threads bind the strongest. It is no surprise this memoir is a narrative about a victim who becomes a survivor. Cannady is assertive, motivational, and unafraid to reach her target audience: women, African-Americans, high-school students, college students, survivors of physical and sexual abuse, veterans, people raised by single parents, and folks who are living in or have lived through impoverishment.Awards
2015 Finalist – Foreword Review Book of the Year Award -
In Who’s Afraid of Helen of Troy, David Lazar extends the language of prose poetry, mixing the classical and the high modern, the song and dance man, and the Odyssean. Nothing, he finds, is as far apart as we think, except for chaos and order, innocence and experience. Who’s Afraid of Helen of Troy is a sequence of prose poems about the ravages of love, how we desire it, and whether we care to recover. The voice in these prose poems is semi-autobiographical, and performative; masked yet emotionally raw. It draws on features of modernist poetry, uses an arch, cadenced sentence as its primary unit, but draws on the Iliad, Odyssey, and other classical myths as part of its internal cosmos. The book is an essay, of sorts, and a chorus of one, splintered. It takes the prose poem to a new pitch of expressive and intellectual discourse. The speaker dreams himself in and out of movies and cities: Troy, Paris, London. On the verge of dissolution, he understands that memory is almost never a consolation, that it draws blood as a price for its music. When we are ashen, irony is the instrument that we keep checking for in our pockets. Lazar’s voice is a sacred last resort: something’s gotta give. -
The Dog Looks Happy Upside Down is a collection of flash fiction that conveys entire worlds that are haunting, sad, funny, touching, and strange in the most enlivening, beautiful ways. This collection of tiny, intimate truffles is as powerful as soul-chocolate infused with caffeine. Each story contains bite-sized glimpses into the lives of everyday people, leaving readers with the long and lasting effects of a full-length novel. Each chapter dives into relevant life events that require further contemplation. These 50 stories reveal the dark truth and reality of the world. Direct, brave, funny, achingly personal, darkly humorous and sad, these stories linger and pull, begging to be reread many times. Pokrass is a trickster, a shape-shifter, a writer who chronicles the maladies of the modern world, and makes us laugh. Named a finalist for the 2017 Saboteur Awards
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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. -
Following her big hit, American Amnesiac, Raptosh's Human Directional zigzags across consciousness, searing through old patterns of thought and offering new directions for the mind, heart, and world. Raptosh points the way to what Montaigne called “unlearning how to be a slave.” With the deadly precision of the fey, Human Directional reveals the heartbreak and absurdity of our world by exploring— and often exploding—its most sacred memes. -
For this book collection, the author has selected about 150 poems from eight previous books, and concludes with a new collection of 46 poems. In the face of such obscenity that stains our 20th century, how is it possible that we might stay sane, might honor the innocent victims of unspeakable horror, might remember, and might even dare to attempt to compose poetry despite Theodor Adorno’s injunction that after Auschwitz only a barbarian would write it. The author comments about this collection: “I suppose that The Candle is the record of my attempt to come to grips with Elie Wiesel’s reminder: ‘If you have not grasped it until now, it is time you did: Auschwitz signifies death — total, absolute death — of man and of mankind, of reason and of the heart, of language and of the senses. Auschwitz is the death of time, the end of creation; its mystery is doomed to stay whole, inviolate.’” -
One Turn Around The Sun is a panorama of poems that attempt to define the twilight during which a person becomes caretaker of parents and begins to grind against that old saying, “Life is too short.” The book also studies the intricacies of being a self, a particular personality shaped by forces seen and unseen, both knowable and not. At times, the various voices might be considered characters that agree and sustain one perspective. In other cases, contending sensibilities imply an underlying argument. This is especially true of the book within the book, which is entitled “The Hilt.” Several questions drive this collection, the most central being how can a person stay sane when so often socio-political circumstances mock all efforts to create a livable world. This is a book intended to bolster an ongoing engagement with life at a time when running away is a great temptation. -
In these wild, intense, and fiercely crafted sonnets and other poems, Myrna Stone takes us on a journey through time and the psyche that is both novelistic and deeply lyrical. The range of voices—from Martin Luther’s to Mae West’s—explores both mortality and what might lie just beyond it. -
H. L. Hix’s Rain Inscription gives vivid testimony to the paradox that human making is both lasting and fleeting. Each of its three sections (a sonnet-sequence Q&A with contemporary cultural studies, a renewal of the sayings of Herakleitos and Jesus, and a group of dialogues with contemporary artists) extends an already capacious dialogue beyond its prior limits. -
All the Difference is a captivating account of the author’s transformation from a visibly disabled young woman to someone who could, abruptly, “pass” for able-bodied. In prose that is searing and humorous Patricia Horvath details her experiences with bracing and spinal fusion, as she considers the literature of physical transformation and how folk and fairy tales shape our attitudes towards the disabled. -
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 -
It is late 1948 and days before his wife is to give birth for the first time, Ghassan is approached by two talking jackals threatening that, if he doesn’t paint the signs of the newly named villages and towns, his wife will give birth to a goat. Thus begins the exile to Gaza of Ghassan and his goat. In the mode of Borges, Calvino and Coetzee, In the Cemetery of the Orange Trees presents linked mytho-poetic tales delving beneath the long Palestinian diaspora; the history of Gaza is told as never before: through the eyes of a night guardian of a talking goat; a carrier pigeon that befriends a young boy who sells photos of martyrs; a refugee who eats books and then recites them word for word; a Palestinian father who sneaks animals into Gaza through a labyrinth of tunnels; a talking sheep who is caged in the Gaza Zoo. These mystical voices echo in the mind of an American stranger as he witnesses the beauty and horror of this ancient, suffering land. In the Cemetery of the Orange Trees is a disquieting allegory of the clash between the powerful and the silenced.Award
2018 Finalist – Foreword Reviews INDIES Book of the Year Award -
Karen Donovan’s Aard-vark to Axolotl, an eclectic series of tiny stories and prose poems, is based on a set of illustrations from the pages of her grandfather’s 1925 Webster’s New International Dictionary. The author collected pictures of plants and animals, diagrams and devices, and dozens of other charmingly quirky objects and created a new narrative context for each one. Sometimes sneaky mysterious, sometimes downright weird, these small poetic stories work on the reader like alternative definitions for items drawn from a cabinet of curiosities. View all books from Etruscan Press by Karen Donovan -
With a lyricism that is both delicate and painful, Rough Ground explores the devastating consequences of trauma on our ability to speak about the world. Based upon Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logi-co-Philosophicus, Rough Ground distills philosophical speculation to poetic text, enacting an utterance almost beyond speech. While the philosopher concludes “that which we cannot speak about, we must pass over in silence,” the poems writ on “rough ground” enact a portentous silence, mapping a path between word and world. -
Using the schema of Dante’s Purgatorio, Romer is a poem of thirty-three Cantos in three-line stanzas, illuminating the experience of a modern man at every stage of his life. Just as the Purgatorio explores the psyche in terms of its earthly existence, Romer follows the journey of one man who needs to know who he is, where he is, and what he is trying to do. This need is universal, so in that sense, Romer is every man. -
Silk Road is a collection of poems written in the persona of Donata Badoer, the wife of Marco Polo, who observes a newly connected world while attending to her everyday activities. In unbidden moments, she turns to perceive the economics and erotics of contact between the people of Europe and China, recognizing both tensions and camaraderie in their links across the globe. -
The world of Wattle & daub is inhabited by mysterious and peculiar creatures. A woman who fears the living thing in her apartment walls. An office-based streaker with an axe to grind. Automatons that finally recognize their creator. A terminally ill man resorting to hypnotism to quit smoking. The couple who conceive an alarm clock. A dying brain unspooling receding memories of a funfair… With ear-dizzying force, the stories in this debut collection meld and stretch into truly new directions. Every page is mined with humor, sympathy, and blistering language that mark Brian Coughlan as a unique fabricator of short tales.Award
[icon color="#dbb95c" size="16" type="icon-star" unit="px" ]2018 Finalist – Foreword Reviews INDIES Book of the Year Award -
What if music could bring about a revolution? What power might reside in such a musical work, and to what madness would its listeners be driven? A haunting tale of love, loss and obsession, Sixteen can also be read as a fascinating literary thriller revolving around the mystery of music. View all books from Etruscan Press by Auguste Corteau -
Museum of Stones is a magnificent and bracing trek through motherhood. In a series of wellplaced stones of urgent prose poetry, Museum of Stones reveals the fates in store for this newborn boy: wrists “no wider than a straw” and sternum sporting a tiny tower of gauze, hospital monitors aglow in their wide range of numbers and, later, “neatly folded sheets of paper crammed with lists of [the boy’s] numerical codes.” The book illumines the mutable states of the mother: the means by which she must carve herself, with “no distortions or duplications,” from what precious daily clay is left.—Diane Raptosh, National Book Award Semi-Finalist, American Amnesiac
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Ill Angels explores the breakdowns and joys, the rhythms and reveries, the cul-de-sacs and jubilees, of early midlife. In poems that are at once formally assured and daringly inventive, Dante Di Stefano invokes the lives of artists, musicians, and writers he admires as his poems ruminate on love, death, music, language, and notions of national belonging. -
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 -
Against the busy background of the “information age” and the “anthropocene,” where’s poetry? It might seem invisible, irrelevant, but Demonstrategy proves it as salient as ever, and more urgent. In paired essays about poetry in the world and the world in poetry, Demonstrategy finds poetry’s pulse steady and strong. -
In Clay and Star, Romanian poet Liliana Maria Ursu captures with breathtaking precision the convergence of the sacred with the mundane. Whether anchored in Sibiu, Visby, Skala, or San Francisco, her poems both honor and transcend place and time as they search obsessively for essence, truths, self-knowledge, and the divine within. -
50 Miles is a memoir in linked essays that addresses addiction and alcoholism. The book traces the life of the author’s son, Gray, a talented but troubled young man, and his death from a drug overdose at thirty, as well as the author’s own recovery from substance abuse. -
A triptych typically depicts a scene, a single picture, in three panels. A trio is one song or one movement played by three musicians. But if this rich new book, Triptych, represents something singular, it is to show a small part of the singular diversity and range of contemporary American poetry. From Peter Grandbois’ intimate, disarming lyricism, to James McCorkle’s chewy, sustained meditations on time and the nature of decay, to Robert Miltner’s classical dramas where the Orphic myth can take us from creekside to the underworld of Vegas, each of this book’s books is as distinct as each poet’s style and manner—splayed or compressed, in lines or in prose, in wonder, in amusement, or in alarm. Over them all hovers the bedeviling circumstance of Time—enabler, nemesis, and charm. It imperils the lovers, fractures the landscapes, and confounds the sense of every self. —David Baker, Swift: New and Selected Poems -
Dear Z collects verse-letters to a newly fertilized zygote— not quite a person, nor even an embryo, but rather, the great human maybe. Th e speaker delivers to the “Z” a taste of what this might mean in poems whose topical range traipses from AutoFill to Idaho, New Zealand rivers to the zombie apocalypse. -
A book of provocative ideas, about art and artists, Variations In The Key of K is an artfully constructed collection of stories. Franz Kafka, Pablo Picasso, and William Blake are among the many artist lives reconceived here. A book of cautionary histories, on one hand. An irreverent celebration of the graces of the creative life, on the other. -
In her first collection, The Book of Orgasms, Nin Andrews introduced the orgasm as an ethereal presence, a character, a muse who begins a dialogue with her human counterparts. In The Last Orgasm, the author imagines a conclusion to the dialogue.
