All Books

“Susan McCabe’s Swirl is a constantly provocative and often wildly inventive debut collection of poetry. Edgy and wise, sly and disarming, these poems are both cinemagraphic and kaliedescopic in their workings. Profoundly gestural and always powerful, Swirl introduces to American poetry a memorable and compelling new voice.”

—David St. John

“Every sentence in Susan McCabe’s gorgeous poems is a sounding. Her lines haunt the far side of memory—for “remembering is learning,” though of the most difficult kind; without its shadow side, “there is no presence.” Aswirl with the necessarily figurative conjurations of hidden, internal objects, Swirl mingles melancholy and metaphor to form a full-fledged yet emotionally bottomless reality. This poet doesn’t force anything: she is always already at the heart of imaginative fecundity, expanding, morphing like a “creature / drowning in blue whose limbs / loosen and pitch hooks.” She both searches the shadows with relentless honesty and joys in language. Her gift to the reader is immense.”

—Calvin Bedient

What happens when one hundred poets from across the country all follow the same “recipe” for creating a poem? If you think the result is one hundred identical poems, then you haven’t seen Mischief, Caprice, and Other Poetic Strategies, an anthology edited by Terry Wolverton from Red Hen Press.

The collection includes nationally recognized poets such as Michael Waters and Richard Garcia, Los Angeles notables such as Alicia Vogl Saenz and Jim Natal, poets from Canada, Mexico, and India, and a twelve-year-old and eight-year-old—all writing in response to the same set of instructions. The “recipe,” called the Twenty Little Poetry Projects, was devised by poet Jim Simmerman and first made its nationwide debut in The Practice of Poetry, a 1992 collection edited by Robin Behn and Chase Twitchell. Simmerman devised the exercise, he says, to encourage his poetry students to explore “free-for-all wackiness, inventive play, and the sheer oddities of language itself.”

“Too many poems,” asserts Terry Wolverton, “suffer for their earnestness, an overabundance of sincerity, which sometimes means you tell the reader what they already know. A good poem shows the reader something new, and to do that, sometimes the poet needs to think differently.” Wolverton, an instructor of creative writing herself and founder of Writers At Work, a writing center in Los Angeles, has long used the Twenty Little Poetry Projects herself to “disrupt whatever habits one may be in with regard to writing poems.” The result is a poem in which “the journey to arrive at the content is unexpected, entertaining, and provocative.” She predicts that students will have a great time with the book, which will demonstrate that “poems can be playful and serious at the same time.”

The poems in this book travel with us up to the door of another life. They are clear and radiant with the fulfillment of having lived a life, loving and being loved. There are hands bathing babies, there is the kiss of the lover; there is plywood and good food. Life becomes its most minute details and yet, opens out into some larger realm.

These poems create astonishment. It is with these poems, that Benjamin Saltman has left us. These poems will become for our culture, part of the canon, part of our breath, part of what and who we think of and remember best when we place our faces in our hands, feel our mortality and look up at "a white astonished sun still waiting to speak."

Natural history, work, queerness, and family collide in Interpretive Work. When they do, a deep stubborn will emerges, a belief in the unexpected beauty of the world "flaws and all. The poems of this collection foreground the role of the viewer" the interpreter "smudging self across what's seen."

From neighborhood kids cussing in the cul-de-sac to marbled murrelets calling in Southeast Alaska, the poems of this book reach toward a moment where one finds "this unsettlement, / this beauty applauded at last."

Bradfield delivers her bruised truths through a quiet honesty that stands in ardent defense of mainstream normative expectations. A male singer has a woman's high, sweet voice, redefining beauty. A female deer grows antlers. A woman chooses to be child-free without regret. As a whole, these poems furtively suggest that the tourist on the sunset cruise ship misinterprets the cravings of humpback whales in the same way Bradfield's family, neighbors and bureaucratic officials misunderstand love, sexuality and gender.

Sholeh Wolpé’s poems are political, satirical, and unflinching in the face of war, tyranny and loss. Talismanic and alchemical, they attempt to transmute experience into the magic of the imagined. But they also dare to be tender and funny lyrical moments. This book is remarkable and unexpected.

—Chris Abani

"Doubts and secret disappointments are the knots that secure this hammock...stretch out...hang suspended...But beware: do not...relax."

—Melody Stevenson

"I like [Gale's] gutsy sensuality--even snow banks have thighs...a dream like quality...rich with haunting images."

—Lyn Lifshin

"Pearson's poetry astonishes— her range is wide and profound. She explores the loss, the mundane, and quirkiness of life with passionate joy. Her skillful images and wry tone linger, encouraging you to reread her poems— to put yourself inside her poems, inside the very essence of what it means to be woman, to be human. A stunning and highly enjoyable collection!"

—Jewell Rhodes, author of Voodoo Dreams

From its headwaters in Calabasas to the tidal mouth in San Pedro, the Los Angeles River is many things—an open air art gallery, a wildlife corridor, a history lesson, a storm drain, and a metaphor for missed chances balanced against the hope of future possibilities. Once integrated into one of the largest estuary and floodplain systems in California, the L.A. River now waits for rediscovery and renewal. Many people do not know it is there at all, and few can accurately recall its history. Río de Dios changes that, blending science, history, art, and poetry to explore the complex and contradictory worlds of the Los Angeles River. A fresh, vivid synthesis of the culture and biology of the river, this book investigates its pockets of still-wild habitat, honors its losses, and celebrates its evolving future.

“In Sholeh Wolpe’s Rooftops of Tehran , an unforgettable cast of characters emerges, from the morality policeman with the poison razor blade to the crow-girls flapping their black garments, from the woman with the bee-swarm tattoo emerging from her crotch to the author as a young girl on a Tehran rooftop with a God’s eye view ‘hovering above a city / where beatings, cheatings, prayers, songs, / and kindness are all one color’s shades.’ Here is a delicious book of poems, redolent of saffron and stained with pomegranate in its vision of Iran and of the immigrant life in California. Wolpe’s poems are at once humorous, sad, and sexy, which is to say that they are capriciously human, human even in that they dream of wings and are always threatening to take flight.”

—Tony Barnstone, Award winning poet and translator, author of The Golem of Los Angeles

Excerpt from Fishers of Men:

The Last Photograph

In the small photograph my mother has her eyes closed. I am shapeless, rather pale probably two. There is snow. My sister has a sled. It is only a year before my mother will abandon me to be beaten, brainwashed. For years I was sure that she despised that shapeless creature until I looked carefully and realized I'd been buried in the snow up to the armpits. She was sitting there, eyes closed that thing that had been her daughter already a part of the landscape, her mind already gone.

Including fourteen selections from the poetry journal, RATTLE Conversations offers rare insight into the lives and thoughts of some of the most notable American poets of our time. Informative and intimate, the conversations look beyond the academic minutia and into the heart of what we love — the passion that compels poetry, and the process that completes it. These poets explore not what they wrote, but why they had to write it, and how it came to be. As such, RATTLE Conversations serves as an indispensable guide and companion to anyone who appreciates the art and experience of writing.

CONVERSATIONS WITH

Daniel Berrigan, Hayden Carruth, Lucille Clifton, Sam Hamill, Jane Hirshfield, Yusef Komunyakaa, Jack Kornfield, Li-Young Lee, Philip Levine, Sharon Olds, Gregory Orr, Luis J. Rodriguez, Alan Shapiro, Diane Wakoski

This is What Happened—
He said, I love you more than London
and she gave her eyes to him
she gave everything to him.

"Flannery O'Connor has written that 'Fiction operates through the senses. . . The first and most obvious characteristic of fiction is that it deals with reality through what can be seen, heard, smelt, tasted, and touched.' Doug Lawson's story collection is a banquet for the senses, though the winds of change are often chilly enough to make us shiver, and what is served up is there not only to sustain us, but to surprise us. His characters are contemporary, but their struggles are timeless. A Patrimony of Fishes contains some beautiful descriptions of the physical world, paired with some disconcerting observations about the ways of the heart. It's a wonderful collection."

—Ann Beattie

"Any other poet with Gail Wronsky’s gift for sheer gorgeousness—for the sensuous image, for shapeliness, for the ever-unfolding ever-mobile vocal line—would call it a day. But Wronsky’s intellect is of a larger order: restless, irreverent, wittily attuned to the force-fields of cultural fashion and to the depths those fashions bespeak. How heartening to see trenchant critique and passionate endorsement so fully intertwined! Poems for Infidels is a celebrant’s book, “guilty . . . of beauty” and, resoundingly, of faith."

—Linda Gregerson

“Some months after the judging panel chose Ann Silsbee’s Orioling as the winner of the Ben Saltman Award from Red Hen Press, I reread the manuscript only to find myself totally bowled over by the poems. Silsbee brings so much to the table in her poetry, it’s hard to know where to begin to praise such work. I had loved this collection from my first reading of it, but subsequent readings have put me in awe of the wonderful spirit behind the poems and the exquisite language of which they are made. If I had to pick a favorite, I’d say “The Ten Thousand Things,” but that’s just because it’s a perfect movie of the creative process. There’s no doubt in my mind but that this book is going to open some eyes and put a star on the map wherever Ann Silsbee spends her time.”

—Eloise Klein Healy

"Ryan Van Cleave’s explosive riffs roll over the American pop culture landscape like a caffeined-up emcee from the dark side. Trying to keep up with his quick wit and dizzying leaps may leave you out of breath, but gasping with surprise and wonder, marveling at how—beneath the glitz—Van Cleave has found the sick, twisted soul of this country."

—Jim Daniels, author of Show and Tell

The Golem of Los Angeles is the 2006 Benjamin Saltman Poetry Award winning poetry collection by Tony Barnstone.

"Tony Barnstone’s poems are besotted with the world—slot machines in Vegas, ants and centipedes and rivers, fires and beaches and “filtered forest light,” love in its carnal splendor, and the charnel squalor when love dies. Yet the Contents page in The Golem of Los Angeles—full of Psalms, Parables, Testaments, Sermons, Sutras, even the occasional Spell—makes clear that Barnstone’s deepest impulse is religious: to praise and to pray. I praise this book. May it fly, reader, into your hand."

—Charles Harper Webb

"Ron Koertge can elevate the ordinary places of America——the backyard, the classroom, the mall——into scenes of mock-epic significance. He can just as easily lower the mythic worlds of Superman, Ozymandias and Cinderella to a level just a few inches above the bathetic. And he does all this with a charming combination of wit and empathy, satire and sweetness."

—Billy Collins

"I would think a poem entitled Getting Tough with John Ruskin,” “Ozymandias and Harriet,” or “Teen Jesus” would be enough to entice any reader. But permit it to be known that Koertge also carries around a lexicon that includes locutions such as “snazzy,” a word I haven’t heard since my last Canasta game in 1959. We all know who said that poetry begins in delight and ends in wisdom, but Koertge might have said it because his poems are delight and wisdom all the way through. They are also very funny, the way the truly serious often is. This is a snazzy book, also a beautiful one, and I strongly urge you to buy it."

——B.H. Fairchild

Día de los Muertos is the lynchpin poem of Snake #3: Hunger Sutras, the third installment in Lemons’s Snake Quartet, being published as its own chapbook/adult coloring book. The poem is based on Lemons’s real, lived experience with a Día de los Muertos celebration in Oaxaca, Mexico; and though history truly comes alive, there is a sense that the authenticity of such a celebration is a thing of the past. Like the bones of a giant beast dug out of a tar pit then reassembled, it must poorly represent the living creature. Día de los Muertos intends to illuminate the dark things that scuttle out of graves carrying pieces of the newly buried back to the world to reanimate with new potential.

In this poignant and unabashed self-examination, Seema Reza uncovers the lessons she learned through motherhood and a dysfunctional and abusive marriage, and how she used her discoveries to make a meaningful difference in the world. This lyrical, non-linear narrative memoir traces Reza’s journey from repressed suburban housewife to coordinator of a unique creative-expression military hospital program. Through observing her own experiences from the darkest moments of her life and investigating societal attitudes towards loss, love, motherhood, and community, Reza exposes her triumphs, weaknesses, fears and regrets, and undermines the idea that strength requires silence.

In poems full of bounty, loss and the mysteries of the body, Taylor offers a rich, severe, memorable meditation about what it means to try to connect our bodies and our time on earth.

In 2010, Tess Taylor was awarded the Amy Clampitt Fellowship. Her prize: A rent-free year in a cottage in the Berkshires, where she could finish a first book. But Taylor—outside the city for the first time in nearly a decade, and trying to conceive her first child—found herself alone. To break up her days, she began to intern on a small farm, planting leeks, turning compost, and weeding kale. In this calendric cycle of 28 poems, Taylor describes the work of this year, considering what attending to vegetables on a small field might achieve now. Against a backdrop of drone strikes, "methamphetamine and global economic crisis," these poems embark on a rich exploration of season, self, food, and place. Threading through the farm poets—Hesiod, Virgil, and John Clare—Taylor revisits the project of small scale farming at the troubled beginning of the 21st century.

Words for Lori LaitmanÆs opera, The Scarlet Letter

Based on the story by Nathaniel Hawthorne

Award-winning poet and librettist David Mason, author of Ludlow and other books, has given new life in verse to HawthorneÆs classic novel. By distilling the bookÆs narrative line and adding a charged lyricism of his own, Mason has created another magnificent work in his ongoing poetic portrait of America.

In old Boston, a young woman, Hester Prynne, has been charged with adultery and forced to wear the scarlet letter \u201cA\u201d embroidered on her breast. Just as she mounts the scaffold to receive her sentence, her husband, long presumed dead and newly escaped from captivity among the Indians, arrives and recognizes her. This man, renamed Roger Chillingworth, begins a quest to discover the father of HesterÆs child. As the community wrestles with whether or not to allow Hester to continue raising her daughter, Chillingworth moves in with the pale young minister, Arthur Dimmesdale, who hides the fact that he is the sought-after father. In a dark night of the soul, Arthur is taunted by a local witch, and it becomes clear that he is overcome with guilt and inner conflict about his past with Hester. The two lovers meet in the forest, plotting their escape, sure they can flee the laws and mores of men in this new world. But Dimmesdale cannot forget his guilt, and during an election day ceremony he confesses his sin to the crowd, exposing a branded letter \u201cA\u201d over his own heart.

A tale of conflict between an astonishing woman and her thwarted and thwarting community, of a ministerÆs guilt and a husbandÆs vengeance, MasonÆs Scarlet Libretto casts new light on HawthorneÆs classic, on the tension between freedom and responsibility, and on the secrets in the human soul.

“Wedding in October is a rich and gorgeous novel, deeply rooted in memory, delicately constructed, filled with subtle and compelling characters. While grappling with universal themes and events, Geoffrey Clark creates a world that is unmistakably Midwestern: fertile and expansive, plain-spoken and harshly beautiful. Wedding in October will lay claim to readers’ minds and hearts, its hold both gentle and utterly tenacious.”

—Susan Dodd

“Geoffrey Clark formulated into words those sublime experiences that habitually leave no trace in the compartments of our consciousness save a film whose images have silvered.”

—Dennis Must

2014 OMAHA READS SELECTION

2016 ONE BOOK, ONE NEBRASKA WINNER

Stuart, Nebraska is a long way from the battlefields of Western Europe, but it is not immune to the horrors of the first Great War for Peace. Like all communities, it has lost sons and daughters to the fighting, with many more giving themselves over to the hatred only war can engender.

Set in 1918 in the farm country at the heart of America, The Meaning of Names is the story of an ordinary woman trying to raise a family during extraordinary times. Estranged from her parents because she married against their will, confronted with violence and prejudice against her people, and caught up in the midst of the worst plague the world has ever seen, Gerda Vogel, an American of German descent, must find the strength to keep her family safe from the effects of a war that threatens to consume the whole world.

PAINTINGS BY AUTHOR OF THE PULITZER PRIZE AND NATIONAL BOOK AWARD WINNER, JAMES

PAINTINGS BY AUTHOR OF ERASURE, now adapted for the screen as the OSCAR-WINNING FILM, AMERICAN FICTION

There Are No Names for Red is a collaborative work featuring the poetry of Chris Abani and the paintings of Percival Everett.

Following the arc of a woman’s life, The Size of Our Bed begins with the title of its last poem, “Letter to a Dead Husband about the Size of Our Bed.” The remaining poems traverse their past, the narrator’s future.

Divided into sections from childhood and family, marriage, illness and death, recovery, acceptance and strength—contrasted with war—The Size of Our Bed offers poetry that is generous yet unflinching, personal, sometimes ironic and intense, yet resound with a reverence for both the joys and betrayals of life. These are poems of hard won wisdom and insight. They are emotionally introspective, even transformative.

Not all questions are answered.

The Switchback family has inhabited Crawford County since before the War Between the States, and it has eked out an existence, and even prospered, by virtue of hard work and honesty. Peter Switchback, Jr. is the current inhabitant of the family estate and caretaker of the farm, and in many ways stands as a symbolic paragon of virtue. The Morgan family has been in Crawford County at least as long as the Switchback family, and has made its way in the world by means of greed, pride, and dishonesty. Sheriff Cecil Morgan is the third in his line to hold his office, and like his ancestors he is an avowed enemy of the Switchback family and all that they stand for.

The life of Crawford County plays out through the course of short tales told by several of its inhabitants, some tragic, some whimsical. The stories wind their way through the lives of Switchback and Morgan, framed by several ponderings of moral philosophy and existence. We are faced with Peter Switchback's obituary on the opening page of the story, and the balance of the pages works its way to that eventual outcome.

The Alphabet Conspiracy takes its name from a 1950s -era school filmstrip of the same title. With a cast that includes patron saints for country girls and criminals, a Revolutionary War hero, the Wolfman, a sin-eater, John Wayne, and Johnny Cash, these poems swagger and sulk through an educational film turned film noir, replete with femme fatales in love. Mark Doty noted that the title poem "artfully addresses itself to the way children are taught to enter--and then become trapped by--a world constructed of language." Rita Mae Reese digs beneath the surface of dictionary entries to uncover their secrets and to discover some of her own, as in the poem "Womanless," stemming from a headword in Webster's Tenth New Collegiate Dictionary for which there is no entry:

And what about me? When I look in a mirror,
I see the parts of a woman; but if womanless
Can include me, then womanless like me too,
For a few months here--not in paradise of course,
But close enough--until you. Then nothing was close

Enough....

The Alphabet Conspiracy is about the ways in which language itself can function as a plot, keeping us estranged from ourselves, but also about the way it can be used as a tool for recovering our truest selves.

The poems in Lisa C. Krueger’s Talisman interrogate the everyday expression of complex human emotions. In psychological portraits stunning in their precision, Krueger brings her observational powers to bear on the domestic and its darknesses—childbirth, play, sex, and family picnics, as well as abuse, disability, adultery, and mental illness. We see how intimacy is laced with uncertainty, how the bonds between us can be a form of bondage. Life’s long arc is considered, from the early developmental stages of attachment and individuation to the existential dramas of purpose and meaning in middle and old age. What emerges is a study in the mystery of survival, in how we move beyond the broken places in ourselves. These poems magnify small, everyday redemptions as signs—talismans—of human potential, and ask us to think about our choices, to use language as a force to press against truth.

**Winner of the American Book Award

**Silver Medalist for the California Book Award

Something Indecent is intended as a kind of symposium on European poetry. Seven contemporary Eastern European poets—Adam Zagajewski, Vera Pavlova, Tomaž Šalamun, Aleš Šteger, Nikola Madzirov, Eugenijus Ališanka, and editor Valzhyna Mort—introduce us to poems by writers who have become for them windows onto the world. They were asked: Who are the best representative poets of your region? Your generation? And, more broadly: Who are your favorite European poets of the 20th century? What European poets, across the millennia, are most important to an understanding of your particular region? Spanning thousands of years and thousands of miles, their surprising, often unpredictable choices—and the reasons for those choices—are collected here, forming the latest entry in a poetic conversation carried across centuries, countries, and traditions. More than a presentation of contemporary Eastern European poets, Something Indecent is a conversation about how European poets view themselves, their contemporaries, their century, and the place of their region in the millennia.

Includes poems by Guillaume Apollinaire, Bertolt Brecht, Joseph Brodsky, Catullus, Paul Celan, John Donne, Zbigniew Herbert, Nâzim Hikmet, Antonio Machado, Czesław Miłosz, Cesare Pavese, Raymond Queneau, Rainer Maria Rilke, Tomaž Šalamun, Sappho, Anna Swir, Wisława Szymborska, Georg Trakl, Tomas Tranströmer, César Vallejo, Paul Valéry, and many others.