Red Hen Press

What happens when we enter unfamiliar realms, when we open ourselves to the unknown? Sometimes that not-knowing makes art possible. In Toucan Nest, the eighth book by Alaska State Writer Laureate Peggy Shumaker, her first vivid encounters with the rainforests of Costa Rica—with its basilisk lizards, bats, and bromeliads, its crocodiles, sloths, and strangler figs—refresh and renew our world in a work of startlingly beautiful mindfulness and imagination.

The Hundred Fathom Curve chronicles the search for an American identity from the Vietnam war to 9/11. The poems, drawn from five previous collections and published over 40 years, include BarrÆs eye-witness accounts as a Navy veteran of Vietnam, and as a New Yorker who was present at 9/11. They explore the boundary of what is human with all that is not, and find things never to be as they seem. They follow the journey from nature into art, and the efforts of the artist to discover what it means to be human.

Brynn Saito’s debut collection of poetry begins in a cityscape and ends \u201cdeep in the cloud-filled valley,\u201d traversing myriad terrains—both emotional and physical—as it weaves towards completion. From the bays of Denmark to the deserts of California, Saito’s searching lyricism gathers stories of sudden departures, forced removals, and the journeys chosen in between. Narrative selections inspired by childhood, sisterhood, lost loves and newfound freedoms are cased by interludes of otherworldly visions and persona poems spoken from many perspectives—animal and otherwise. This is a book about the ever-present capacity for wonder, transformation, and change: \u201cThe fighter is in me,\u201d claims the speaker in the poem \u201cWinter in Denmark,\u201d \u201cand the future is in me.\u201d Inside every moment of rage or loss—beneath tough city sidewalks and under the quiet of a moonlit valley—is another moment, ripe with possibility and foretelling the future sky. 

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.

Meet Oldguy: your regular aging superhero whose powers have dwindled over the years, and whose very mechanics are seriously fizzling. In seriocomic misadventures, Oldguy valiantly attempts to continue his former heroism in a somewhat wry version of Faulknerian endurance, defeating his enemies time and again—if not through superhuman abilities, then at least by 'outliving the sons-a-bitches.' With comic book-style illustrations, Oldguy inhabits a space all to itself—not strictly a poetry collection, not quite a graphic novel—in a hybrid comic-chapbook sure to visually and aurally delight.

**Winner of the American Book Award

**Silver Medalist for the California Book Award

Suck on the Marrow is a historical narrative, revolving around six main characters and set in mid-19th century Virginia and Philadelphia. The book traces the experiences of fugitive slaves, kidnapped Northern-born blacks, and free people of color, exploring the interdependence between plantation life and life in Northern and Southern American towns and illuminating the connections between the successes and difficulties of a wide range of Americans, free and slave, black and white, Northern and Southern. This neo-slave narrative treats the truths of lives touched by slavery with reverence but is not afraid to question the ways the old stories have too often been told. In addition to creating new stories, Suck on the Marrow develops new ways of telling those tales.

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. 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 Lessons from Summer Camp, Jim Tilley takes a fifty-year retrospective look at a ten-year period during his childhood and adolescence to discover what summer camp was really about. In both a wistful and an appreciative look back on the days of our youth, the poems reminisce on the memorable events of those summers, from fire-lighting contests at Council Ring, to races in war canoes during Tribal Games, learning to swim, and writing letters home—to the inevitable sadness of departing at the end of the summer, saying goodbyes at the station until next year. The poems evoke memories of experiences we've all shared and bring perspective to how lessons from summer camp often become apparent only later in life.

In Confidence is Jim Tilley’s first book of poems, ranging from lyric to narrative in form. About half of the 60 poems are open-form sonnets, most of which fit a broad theme of personal and societal “dislocation.” The collection covers a variety of subjects, from father-son and husband-wife relationships to issues of politics, the economy, and the environment. Stephen Dobyns cautions readers to look beyond the apparent calmness and elegance of the poems to the dangers that lurk beneath the surface. Many of the stories have unhappy endings. Several of the poems are presented in pairs with the same underlying setting or situation but markedly different development, exhibiting a kind of “quantum” picture with both states existing at the same time, not surprising since the poet was formerly a physicist. Billy Collins claims that Jim Tilley wins readers’ confidence by keeping a steady hand on the poem while maintaining a steady gaze at the world. This is a book of poems in which readers will find bits and pieces of their own lives.

We live in an age where to speak may not always be wise. Big Brother is watching you as you call and as you write. So why not write something that really stirs up ideas? The enemy for most Americans, the one thing that makes our lives sordid and uneventful, is the mind numbing life we all live. If our mind is too numb because we cannot turn off electronic stimuli long enough to think, then where will good writing come from? The Los Angeles Review is the voice of Los Angeles, and the voice of the nation. We do not have one editor who chooses work based on their idiosyncratic tastes, but instead bring in a variety of editors for each issue. This year\u2019s editors are focusing on The Stories We Tell. We dedicate the second issue of The Los Angeles Review to Deena Metzger.

Considering the suspicions, jealousies, bigotry, and crass opportunism inherent whenever one power occupies another, Golden Ghetto: How the Americans and French Fell In and Out of Love During the Cold War pieces together an improbable tale of how fear and skepticism were crushed by trust and friendship. Award-winning journalist Steve Bassett stumbled onto this story shortly after he and his wife purchased a home in Sainte Colombe in Central France. They heard countless, somewhat mystical tales about how a huge U.S. Air Force base transformed the political, economic, and social lives of two French and American generations lucky enough to grab on to the base’s brass ring. If ever a U.S. military base deserved the sobriquet “Golden Ghetto,” it was the Déols-Châteauroux Air Station (CHAS), which for sixteen years during the height of the Cold War was considered one of the most desirable postings in the world, until Charles de Gaulle booted the Americans and other NATO military out of France and the Golden Ghetto was padlocked. Based on hundreds of hours of research and interviews, Golden Ghetto is a collective memoir, a first-ever look at life on an overseas base from the perspectives of both the occupied and occupier. Professional and amateur historians as well as casual readers will be enthralled by this bird’s eye view of how early Communist-driven distrust and paranoia never stood a chance against handshakes, smiles, and kisses.

  New Hope for the Dead: Uncollected Matthews is the last of poet William Matthews' posthumous collections, following Search Party: Collected Poems (Houghton Mifflin) and The Poetry Blues: Essays & Interviews (University of Michigan Press), all edited by son Sebastian Matthews and close friend and fellow poet Stanley Plumly. New Hope for the Dead features the best of Matthews' remaining uncollected work, including over 30 poems spanning Matthews' prolific but tragically cut-short career. But unlike the first two collections, New Hope for the Dead features Matthews' unheralded talents as a short story writer, food writ

Savoring Alaskan landscapes by way of birch trees has become Kes Woodward s trademark. This collection brings together thirty years of his birch portraits and forest close-ups. Over those same thirty years, poet Peggy Shumaker has traveled inner landscapes via images drawn from two deserts the Sonoran and the Subarctic. Her poems embody the harsh beauty of heat and cold, the force of true extremes. Wounded trees, marked paths, slashes of color. Bursts of passions, licks of flame. The sensual spirits of two imaginations at work fuel this this volume.

 As a psychologist, Lisa C. Krueger is familiar with digging into what makes us human. The joys and celebrations or the pain of what cuts the skin—and what cuts deeper. In animals the size of dreams, Krueger looks into the dark corners and, instead of just shining a light, strips them down to their foundations, until all that’s left is life.