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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.
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Lines of Inquiry offers verse essays, interviews, letters, and other exploration into matters as minute as a freckle in the ear of a stranger on the Shanghai subway and as vast as the equal standing of all humans before the truth. Hix’s lines of inquiry yield surprising answers to pressing questions.
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“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
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“Hix has written the most important poetic sequences published by an American poet during the last several decades. He is the most interesting American poet writing today, the least predictable and the most challenging.”—David Caplan, Pleiades Legible Heavens explores what the most intimate forms of experience reveal about our most cosmic concerns, and vice versa. Its four sequences act like compass points to orient a human landscape. On one axis, “Star Chart for the Rainy Season” laments love lost, appealing to the biblical assertion that “love is stronger than death, and passion more cruel,” in contrast to “Material Implication,” which celebrates love found, in sonnets of desire insistently “glowing against the dusk.” On the other axis, “All the One-Eyed Boys in Town” treats love as perdition, the speaker imagining his life as “a match scratched down your wingbones,” in contrast to “Synopsis,” which treats love as salvation, reinscribing the biblical gospels (canonical and apocryphal alike) to “solicit a miracle I must not expect.”
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$16.74
In Leaves Borrowed from Human Flesh, the solipsistic self gives way to a language which attempts to recover the female body’s experience of place, and of the human and non-human creatures which inhabit it. The ethical dilemmas of representation are framed by a consciousness which allows itself to be permeated by whatever lies outside it, impinging on its boundaries to make them fluid, plural, at times, evanescent.
Divided into four sections which highlight an unmistakable female consciousness engaging with vast natural landscapes in four different continents, the collection’s evolution is towards a subtle form of resistance where anthropocentric certainties are interrogated. What starts as left-margined free verse, often using ekphrasis to highlight gender violence and resistance, leans increasingly towards the playful and experimental, at times adopting metre and traditional forms in combination with found poetry and erasure so as to destabilize the boundaries between genres. By the end of the collection, the page is no longer a mechanism for order and structure, but instead, evolves into a canvas and visual field, challenging the social order through language itself.
In Abigail Ardelle Zammit’s third collection, suffering, mortality and environmental degradation are inseparable from the poet’s relentless search for meaning. Relationships, aloneness and connectedness must be probed as inexhaustible themes in the vast trajectory of existence. Each poem is a question, an exploration of what can be unearthed through linguistic play, as well as an attempt to decolonize the self from a language that is always on the verge of running dry.
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H. L. Hix’s Incident Light explores a life that became “instantly mythical” after a startling revelation. The artist Petra Soesemann learned at age forty-nine that the dad who had raised her from birth was not her biological father. Her dad had died some years before; her father was still alive. Her dad, like her mother, was a blue-eyed German blond; her father was Turkish, with dark eyes and dark hair like Petra’s own. Incident Light is a biography: not an ordered account of the facts of a life, but an invitation into the dad’s devotion, the mother’s passion, the father’s honor, and especially into the daughter’s own embracing of her experience, newly understood. Incident Light testifies to the many lives that converge on one life to lend it beauty and mystery. “Hix’s eighth collection is a fine addition to this protean poet’s fast-growing (and critically lauded) body of work. Like C.D. Wright, Hix works both with highly wrought descriptive passages and with verse that sounds like regular speech cutting swiftly between them.”—Publishers Weekly, starred review “Any new book by this inventive poet is cause for excitement.”—The Kansas City Star
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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 -
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.
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In five spellbinding lyric sequences that record a lover’s dreams and a dreamer’s loves, I’m Here to Learn to Dream in Your Language extends H. L. Hix’s ongoing poetic inquiry into spiritual and sexual ecstasy, that condition in which one becomes most oneself precisely by being transported out of oneself. “In Hix’s beautiful poems, language and thought become physical as well as abstract realities, where one dream can split off into a thousand dreamers…” — Paisley Rekdal, author of Animal Eye “To read I’m Here to Learn to Dream in Your Language is to realize that we have among us a visionary devoted to revelation.” — Dan Beachy-Quick, author of Circle’s Apprentice
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$16.74
In language wild and restrained, opulent and precise, these sonnets make something lasting, even beautiful, from tragedy—personal and national. Diane Raptosh’s collection of sonnets, I Eric America, combines elements of family trauma (her brother Eric’s survival of a plane crash and subsequent paraplegia) with disturbances on the national stage. Equal parts origin story, myth, and song, the book unfolds from the premise that “America is the nation-expression of / a severely traumatized person.” Throughout their singing, the poems seek to heal, transmute and transform.Please note: you will be transferred to an outside website to make this purchase.
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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.
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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
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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.
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$18.60
In her unique collection, Funeral Playlist, Sarah Gorham explores twelve musical works that might be featured at a funeral in the future. The essays engage the songs in writing, using the Playlist to examine the interplay between music, prose, and mortality. A series of memoir-like interstices reveal what art and artmaking can do to connect these subjects. The musical selections range widely—from Mozart’s “Benedictus” (The Requiem) to Nina Simone’s rendition of Black is the Color of my True Love’s Hair. Caccini’s 17th century madrigal Amarilli, mia bella, as performed by Cecilia Bartoli. Matthew Houck’s (aka Phosphorescent) brings us something from the South in Be Dark Night, and the Wailin’ Jennys add their simple, gorgeous version of The Parting Song. But there’s also the song of a mourning dove, and the nonchalance of a human hum. All may become a medium of transcendence for the living (and, possibly, the departed).Please note: you will be transferred to an outside website to make this purchase.
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A poet of international acclaim, Milton Kessler published five books of poetry during his lifetime. Kessler received numerous awards and distinctions, including a Robert Frost Fellowship, an Edward MacDowell Foundation Fellowship, and a National Endowment Program Grant. Several years ago, one of his poems, “Thanks Forever,” was chosen to appear in London subway cars to be seen by as many as two million riders a day as part of the “Poems on the Underground” project. Milton Kessler died in April 2000, leaving behind a manuscript of new work. Free Concert: New and Selected Poems celebrates the life and work of a gifted poet of original voice, collecting work from each of his books together with his new poems. “A lyricist capable of lovely and musical effects.”—Elizabeth Bishop “Kessler’s sharp phrases catch the motion, textures, and strange, beautiful voices of a physical world we live in but never fully know.”—Camille Paglia
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H. L. Hix’s poetry collections have not been merely collections. Each fulfills a vision that creates a whole greater than the sum of its parts: each poem contributes to a sequence, each sequence talks to another. For readers already acquainted with Hix’s ambitions, then, the subtitle “Obsessionals” (instead of “Selected Poems”) will need no explanation: from collections that don’t just collect, what sense would it make for a selection just to select? Hix’s poems were already at work rewriting and recontextualizing the language of others, language from sources as various as fragments of Pythagoras, apocryphal gospels, and speeches of George W. Bush. In First Fire, Then Birds, Hix keeps at the task, recontextualizing his own poems, creating a revision (seeing anew) and recomposition (putting together afresh) of an already distinctive body of work. "[H. L. Hix is] one of our most daring poets, his oeuvre a rebuke to timidity, apathy, and retreat in any of its manifestations."—Anis Shivani, The Huffington Post
Award
Named by The Huffington Post as one of "The 17 Most Important Poetry Books of 2010." -
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.
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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 -
The poems in Drift Ice view the natural world through a lens of ecological and spiritual concerns. They focus especially on Prince William Sound in Alaska fifteen years after the Exxon-Valdez oil spill, Long Island Sound at the estuarial mouth of the Connecticut River, and Sri Lanka before (and, in one poem, after) the tsunami. The poems address the myth of a once-pristine wilderness and the indifferent, ever-changing nature of “nature” and our human place in it, as they also investigate the flexibility and lambency of lyric form. “In her new and marvelous book, Drift Ice, Jennifer Atkinson evokes the natural world with preternatural clarity…This is a beautiful book, mature, exciting, innovative, and unforgettable.”—Alan Shapiro
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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.
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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.
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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 -
Through a variety of questions both overt and embedded, the poetry and prose poems in this collection explore the inexplicable too-muchness/not-enoughness of imaginative experience: Is this the neighborhood we signed up for? What in our universe can be trusted, what holds things together and apart, and what was time contemplating as it sprang into existence?
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Joyce Carol Oates once called William Heyen a “remarkable poet,” noting that he “writes with the wild, radiant audacity of the visionary.” W.S. Merwin praised “the urgency and authenticity” and the “plain directness” of Heyen’s voice. The same voice rings true again in this collection, Heyen’s eighteenth volume of poetry.
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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.
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“In this, his most intricately composed book, his most important yet, Bruce Bond has achieved a sonorous grandeur.”—Bin Ramke “With the luminous precision of music, Bruce Bond has crafted, in Cinder, a generous and urgent collection of poems, a work that celebrates the human condition and terrifies us with it in equal measure. The result is a book of poems weighted with dark vision, set loose. Bruce Bond is one of our generation’s best poets, and this is his best book.”—Laura Kasischke