Red Hen Press

This is the personal story of the life of Blase Bonpane, a vanguard practitioner of liberation theology and a former Maryknoll priest.

In the wake of the Second Vatican Council 1962-1965 many religious people, especially those serving in Latin America, began to understand a spirituality that transcended sectarianism. Having come from an upwardly mobile Italian American family marked by Southern Italian anti-clericalism, Blase was accustomed to hearing his parents express real differences with their institutional church. He went into the seminary despite the avid protests of his parents.

BlaseÆs odyssey takes us from his high school and college years, through his service in Guatemala during a violent revolution, to his expulsion from that country for subversion. After receiving gag order from the Church, which he could not in good conscience accept, Blase met with the editorial board of the Washington Post and released all of the material he had regarding the U.S. military presence in Guatemala. This action led to his separation from the Maryknoll Fathers.

Blase accepted a teaching post at UCLA. While serving in academia, he met the former Maryknoll Sister Theresa Killeen, who had served in Southern Chile. They married in 1970. Their adventures include working directly with Cesar Chavez at his headquarters in La Paz, California, building solidarity with the Central American Revolution, forming the Office of the Americas, working in the forefront of the international movement for justice and peace, and raising two children.

Blase worked on the ground for international peace in Mexico, Guatemala, El Salvador, Nicaragua, Costa Rica, Honduras, Panama, Colombia, Ecuador, Cuba, Japan and Iraq. He led the U.S. contingent of the International March for Peace in Central America from Panama to Mexico in 1985-1986.

As a child Natalia goes fishing with her father, Walker, but spends more time humming songs than catching fish. When Walker comes upon Natalia sitting beside a stream, he hears her singing and asks what the music is. Natalia tells him that it’s the music she hears in her dreams, music she wants to write and perform.

So begins into the silence: the fishing story, America Hart’s genre-bending, time-warping debut novel. Natalia does become an accomplished musician, but even with her father’s encouragement, she struggles with her family—especially her younger sister Nadine—to be understood. She sets off on her own, dropping out of school and following Dan, a ballet dancer, to his new job in a new city. There, too, she encounters obstacles to her creative vision.

Throughout her journey, Natalia and her father are visited by apparitions of Walker’s mother, America, and his grandmother, Anastasia. Their stories are told through diaries found by Natalia and Nadine; reading them, the two sisters make surprising discoveries about their family’s history.

With echoes of Woolf and Burroughs, employing structures found more commonly in art music, into the silence weaves together voices and motives, past and present, into a haunting, polyphonic song of striking and original beauty.

Home-care nurse Emily Klein can’t get out of her new assignment – weekly prenatal visits to Pippa Glenning, a young Isis cult member under house arrest for the death of her daughter during a Solstice ceremony. But she takes her work seriously and plays by the rules, so Emily is determined to take good care of her high-profile and unconventional patient.

With two other cult members in prison, Pippa Glenning struggles to keep the household intact. If she follows the rules of her house arrest, she may be allowed to keep her baby; but as the pregnant woman in the family it’s her duty to dance for Isis at the upcoming winter Solstice ceremony. To escape the house arrest without being caught, Pippa needs Emily’s help.

Despite their differences, Emily and Pippa’s friendship grows. Returning to Maine for her grandfather’s funeral, Emily begins to grapple with her parents’ activism a generation earlier and her father’s death in prison. Back home, as the Solstice and the trial approach, anti-cult and racist sentiment in the city escalates. Emily and Pippa must each make decisions about their conflicting responsibilities to their families and to each other – decisions that put their lives, and Pippa’s unborn baby – in jeopardy.

Home-care nurse Emily Klein can’t get out of her new assignment – weekly prenatal visits to Pippa Glenning, a young Isis cult member under house arrest for the death of her daughter during a Solstice ceremony. But she takes her work seriously and plays by the rules, so Emily is determined to take good care of her high-profile and unconventional patient.

With two other cult members in prison, Pippa Glenning struggles to keep the household intact. If she follows the rules of her house arrest, she may be allowed to keep her baby; but as the pregnant woman in the family it’s her duty to dance for Isis at the upcoming winter Solstice ceremony. To escape the house arrest without being caught, Pippa needs Emily’s help.

Despite their differences, Emily and Pippa’s friendship grows. Returning to Maine for her grandfather’s funeral, Emily begins to grapple with her parents’ activism a generation earlier and her father’s death in prison. Back home, as the Solstice and the trial approach, anti-cult and racist sentiment in the city escalates. Emily and Pippa must each make decisions about their conflicting responsibilities to their families and to each other – decisions that put their lives, and Pippa’s unborn baby – in jeopardy.

“John Domini is one of those rare writers who doesn’t bend his characters towards his own pre-determined ends, but follows where they lead. In lesser hands, Domini’s people would have been drowned in bathos. But Domini honors them with a generous but unsentimental imagination, giving us lives worth knowing about, layered portrayals of the obdurate world and our own terrifying self-betrayals. His profound, unflinching attention reminds us how closely together fiction, at its best, can unite justice with mercy.”

—Jay Cantor

“John Domini’s densely textured stories teem with compelling inner and outer life. He is a master at capturing the complex workings of minds under stress and the hard-edged negotiations we make with fate when our backs are against a wall. He knows how women and men can behave with one another. The stories move swiftly and sinuously, emerging from the everyday to coil around a reader’s heart.”

—Floyd Skloot

“Fiery, crackling prose. Domini’s writing wields a double-bladed humor that is both fearsomely entertaining and pleasurably dark. Highway Trade is a sharp and compassionate work; unforgettable.”

—Diana Abu-Jaber

"Has No Kinsman is an amazing exploration of the soul of all that is abstract and yet is more real for it. Kim’s language is supple, sensual and these poems are emblematic."

—Chris Abani

High School Literary Anthology

The ideal text to get high school kids writing instead of texting.

There's a 17-foot-tall naked guy who lives in Florence, Italy. He spends most of his time being ogled by anyone who cares to look. He's okay with this—he isn't the least bit ashamed. He's been doing this for over five hundred years, after all.

Come to think of it, maybe you've seen him before. His name is David. His picture's on the cover of this book.

David began his life as a very large, very lonely, and very slightly mistreated block of rock. When David's father, the legendary sculptor and all-around artistic genius Michelangelo, looked at the rock, however, he didn't just see a simple piece of weathered marble—he saw the stone boy, the statue, trapped inside.

When you look at rocks, what do you see? What are the things you see in life that no one else sees? Chances are that you see some pretty cool, pretty wild stuff.

"Chungmi Kim explores the themes of longing and displacement in a culture she sees as both askew—like seeing 'the mountain upside down'—and engaging, as in her title poem, 'Glacier Lily,' where identity is born not of the purity of nostalgia but of the coloring of age, vibrant and transforming, as are all of the poems in this collection."

—James Ragan

"Chungmi Kim’s passion, empathy, and lyric voice bring us diverse communities: from Hollywood to South Central L.A.; from Korea to America. We see what she sees: 'the mountain upside down,' but the very next moment we are lifted skyward by her words. Chungmi Kim’s poems find us again and again, but never in the same way."

—Russell C. Leong

“American girlhood, with its anorexia and Girl Scout merit badges, piano recitals and razored self-mutilations, is the shattered ‘glass town’ of Lisa Russ Spaar’s magical poems. Setting out to ‘heal the old rifts-- / heaven and earth, girl / and dream,’ Spaar records the rituals of a tribe we recognize chiefly by its fierce determination to survive—girls, bent first on perfection, then, on returning from the banishment of our preoccupation with their bodies, their beauty.

“What a marvel this book is! In language that manages to be both ardent and elegant, Spaar gives witness to marvelous mythologies in which ‘the old story: / the world for my body, / my body for the world,’ is cancelled in a moment’s reckoning, and Rapunzel saves herself.”

—Dorothy Barresi

The poems in The Gentle Man were composed between 1999 and 2001. The title poem speaks to those of us who seek to simplify our lives by enriching what it is we give to others, especially what we offer them in kindness and devotion. If the very act of love is patient and wise, then those who are fortunate enough to receive it are blessed by its gift and know, quite naturally, what to offer in return.

And yet, when that love somehow cannot be met through blindness, happenstance, history, remorse, or sorrow, we are habitually haunted by past apparitions who remind us that our need for affection, and a place called home, is an inclination not easily forgotten. Be they “Broken Heats,” “Photograph (circa 1960),” “Your Father’s Ghost,” “Last Request,” or “Locomotive to Hell,” these poems address what it means to constantly search for meaning both inside and outside of ourselves—to travel down tracks in an attempt to discover or rediscover our identity. By doing so, we examine what went wrong in our testament to friendship and love and how we can still approach the longing and desire that resides in each of us, applying for “Forgiveness” as a starting point.

If by the mere act of consequence, we can keep the solemn prayer alive—this striving for peace through reconciliation, then we ultimately retain a chance at the relief that so often escapes us and keeps us at bay with ourselves along the dangerous curves we face. Perhaps, then, “The Cost of Being Me” will not be so great, the sacrifice so difficult to bear, as we turn the bedcovers down and read the next page of the book we continue to write, night after night after night. And in the end, hopefully, certainly mercifully, we come to understand that “The Gentle Man” and what he entails is all we’ve ever wished to know—and become.

"Jodi Johnson writes like an Angel in love with the world. She knows the risk of being alive and alert, and makes every encounter a perilous discovery. For Johnson a horseback ride is an interior journey illuminated by the stunning accuracy of her vision."

—Benjamin Saltman

"Feeding the Animals is a first book of poems filled with surprising graceful turns. The landscape of the poems teem with animals-birds horses-real creatures who are also figures in a personal mythology emboldened by the author’s passion, recorded with a keen observer’s eye. This felicitous combination of passion and accuracy yields, in poem after poem, an arresting new voice."

—Carol Muske

"I love the thing-richness of these poems: a chalk horse’s white spine, a red beet-stem, a mattress cover swimming with mermaids. In poems as elegant as dressage, as intuitive as a bareback ride, Jodi Johnson’s language renews the world- the troubling beauty that takes our hearts."

—Angela Ball, Mississippi Review

"With this luminous tribute to Wilma Elizabeth McDaniel Peters is in top form. His steely eyed, poignant testimony unearths the midden heap of his rural past, evoking the pungency of that past with all of its stench and sweetness."

—Edward Field

"Peters, a master of the poetic close-up, here closes the loop on his many decades of writing. That he recalls so much of his early life so vividly is an enviable feat of discipline and imagination."

—Jim Cory

Once upon a time, there lived a girl whose story was not her own. . .

So the story goes: Neglected and abused by her family, eclipsed by her elder and more beautiful sister, a young girl longs for happily-ever-after, for something, someone to rescue her. She is soon swept away into the next chapter of her life: marriage—a promising world mirroring Old Testament stories and fairy tale traditions. But loving just anyone and living the age-old “ever-after” narrative, as it turns out, fails to bring true happiness after all. Dragged down by a destructive marriage, her sister’s continued manipulations, and the growing weight of roles and expectations created by others at her back, she must choose between continuing in her familiar, complacent life, or boldly breaking free—and finally making her own way.

Named for an Appalachian murder ballad in which a girl is drowned by her sister, this lyrical fairy tale unseats expectations for what it means to live a fairy tale life, revealing the powerful force that comes from stripping away the traditional roles and beginning to write a story all your own.

When a woman breaks all the rules, she is often punished. In the case of Marie Girard, whose transgressions include prostitution, unwed motherhood, divorce and setting fire to her home, punishment includes ex-communication from the Catholic Church, incarceration in mental institutions and electroshock therapy.

In this novel in poems, author Terry Wolverton suggests that the social institutions--the family, the Church, the medical establishment--that were supposed to protect Marie instead failed her. She contrasts the society into which Marie was born--early-Twentieth Century Detroit--with the culture of the Wendat Indians who'd lived in the same region hundreds of years earlier; the Wendat believed that madness was the result of "unfulfilled desires."

In seventy-three vivid and lyrical poems, Embers contends that women's "bad" behavior may in fact be justifiable resistance against systems that exploit and endanger women.

Middle School Literary Anthology

This is the middle school anothology that makes middle school kids want to get in touch with their inner poet or pirate tale teller.

What do you do when you're the goddess of love, but you don't have arms? That's the trouble with the Venus de Milo, this crazy armless statue some guy found on an island called Milos about two hundred years back. You've probably seen the statue somewhere before... maybe on the cover of this book!

Nobody's quite sure how the Venus de Milo lost her arms. The French sailors who bought her, though, claimed that they battled brigands on a beach to get to her. Apparently, her arms were ripped off during the fight!

That's a pretty cool story.

It might not be true, but, now that you've heard that version of the tale, you'll probably never forget it. It's unique and exciting, and only the Venus's own rescuers could have told it like that.

There are an infinite number of Venus de Milos in the world—objects, people, places, and ideas that are strange, cool, and quite possibly, unique to your life. And, just like those French sailors, you, too, have awesome versions of those Venuses' stories to tell.

"This book is a brouhaha of fun and cleverness, where many of the poems are double-edged with humor and lasting wisdom. ... These poems are delivered with the perfect clarity of everyday language."

—The Cafe Review

"Brewer is the most consistently dark-side-of-the-moon poet around...his...athletic style exactly suits the subject."

—Hugh Fox, Small Press Review (Review of Presently A Beast)

"I love the edgy laughter I hear on almost every page...There's a 'camaraderie of betrayal, lust, and song'."

—David Kirby

At the nexus of a top-secret government conspiracy to develop a doomsday-style bio-weapon, cutting edge science and ancient primal bloodlust collide when a team of ill-fated explorers unlocks the eons-old secrets of humankind's savage evolutionary past lurking miles beneath the killing cold of Antarctica.

When disgraced evolutionary biologist Dr. Claire Matthews is asked to accompany a group of leading scientists on a fact-finding expedition to Antarctica to investigate a tragic accident, she is naturally suspicious. Her checkered past and ongoing professional exile are more than enough to convince her that any offer made by the charismatic and scheming Dr. Ethan Hatcher merits serious skepticism.

Despite her doubts, Claire cannot turn her back on close friend and colleague, Alan Whitehurst. Killed under mysterious circumstances weeks earlier with the members of the first expedition, Alan deserves better than an anonymous death in Earth's harshest and most unforgiving environment. While the expedition promises Claire an unwelcome reunion with an array of personal demons, it also presents her with a golden opportunity to resurrect a once-promising career. Proving the existence of S. iroquoisii, an ancient microscopic organism critical in the evolution of primitive man, would mean the culmination of her life's work, and a triumphant return for one of the scientific communityÆs brightest prodigies.

To earn her keep, Claire must determine the role S. iroquoisii played in the catastrophic accident that decimated the previous expedition, before her crew falls prey to a similar fate. Employing the latest in forensic investigation, Claire and a joint team of military and civilian personnel undertake the gruesome task of piecing together the events that led to the massive explosion that destroyed the previous research station. As a nightmare of unimaginable proportions begins to coalesce, Claire is drawn ever deeper into a maze of deception and savage violence. Pitted against a primordial foe they can scarcely fathom, Claire and her colleagues must battle the cold, each other, and the growing madness within themselves to survive the infinite polar night.

Death of a Circus tells the story of the Bringlebright Circus, a small fictional troupe traveling the United States in the early twentieth century, an era when circuses are falling out of favor and only the largest shows are enduring. Initially, the book follows Lor Cole, a young African American man from Connecticut who dreams of leaving behind his provincial past and making a name for himself as a high wire walker. Upon joining Bringlebright, however, Lor quickly learns that the characters who join him under the Big Top have their own stories to tell.

Closest to Lor is Cirella Flannery, a beautiful and startlingly devious fire-eater who has struggled for survival since her spirited days in a juvenile detention facility. Ranju, Bringlebright's reclusive chief animal trainer, hides a history of magic and trickery that may be his undoing. Stalwart, Ranju's young protege, finds solace in his journal even as he grapples with a mysterious connection to Lor. Presiding over the show is Mr. Barnacle, the Ringmaster, a charlatan who constantly concocts new stratagems to keep Bringlebright afloat. Together, these performers create a colorful ensemble that illuminates the twin sides of the show: one rapturously razzle-dazzle, the other rough-and-tumble.

Death of a Circus is a novel of multiple narrative lines. It captures the rapid pacing of an adventure story, but it is ultimately much more. Chock full of circus allusions, Big Top lingo, folklore and historical detail, it is a far-reaching fairy tale that speaks to the foibles of the human heart and what happens when life is lived both within and outside the center ring spotlight.

In the tradition of the Langton Hughes classic Montage of a Dream Deferred, Mitchell L. H. Douglas uses persona poetry to explore the personal and professional struggles of soul legend Donny Hathaway in his debut collection Cooling Board: a Long-Playing Poem. Evoking the sense of listening to a concept album, Douglas presents a narrative in two sides: side one focusing on Hathaway’s development as a young musician and subsequent rise to fame and side two bearing witness to the adversity that plagued his later years. Readers will see Hathaway as true to his family, true to his faith, and uncompromising in his quest for musical innovation.

In a nod to Hathaway’s legacy as a musical trailblazer, Douglas implements a significant poetic innovation in the format of the book. By including alternate versions or “takes” of poems throughout Cooling Board, the reader hears an echo of ideas that can be likened to an album with previously unreleased versions of popular songs. When the poems are revisited in alternate takes, new information emerges, and the reader is forced to consider new interpretations. Along the way, poems resembling liner notes and pop charts enhance the experience, never letting the reader forget that the heart of this ride is the music.

Above all, Douglas’ depiction of Hathaway gives readers the human side of a man who has remained a mystery in the 30 years since his death. Not only does the poet speak in the voices of Hathaway and his long-time collaborator Roberta Flack, the reader also hears the voices of those closest to Hathaway whom we are less familiar with: his mother, Drusella Huntley, his grandmother, Martha Crumwell—Hathaway’s earliest music teacher—and his wife, Eulaulah.

As the book’s first “Liner Notes” poem recognizes, “Cooling Board is about life lessons, the difficult things you don’t always get on the first take.” With Douglas as a guide versed in the power of possessing many tongues, Cooling Board captures its reader like the best Hathaway song: passionately, honestly, and with an undeniable sense of purpose.

The poems in Cartographies travel new territory, exploring the heart’s changeable cartography and the soul’s uneven terrain. They map the familiar, and always complex world of the San Gabriel Mountains, as well as nearby Los Angeles, with its cultural richness and social/political tensions. Divided into four sections—The Soul, The Self, Mountains, The City—Cartographies investigates our profound relationships with time, nature, love, and death.

Simon finds meaning in unexpected locales, from the "Rorschach" on a butterfly’s wings to a barrio bakery, and in the briefest of moments, evoked by the plaintive voice of a spider, or provoked by a breathless escape from an avalanche. These poems record the paradoxes present in our daily lives, those interstices of yearning and mourning or fear and celebration that reveal the deep wells and turbulence of human consciousness. Simon apprehends the elegiac within the purest moments of joy, and intimates catharsis within despair. She opens the mind’s windows to small miracles provoked by the barest glimmers of wonder and hope.

"The masterful wedding of the narrative and the lyric in these poems (whose subject is the maturation of a sensibility, the coming-of-age of a young Englishwoman—the power of her ties to family, husband and her 'adopted' country, Nigeria—as well as the illumination of her own soul and that of the narrator's) fills the reader with both sorrow and wonder. It is an instructive tale for our age—its vision of the individual will and imagination resisting the madness of politics and the destruction of war is singular and profound."

—Carol Muske-Dukes

Fifty years from now, historians will be identifying the criminality of the George W. Bush Administration. As these academics document their task they will be dependent on authors who were \u0022in his face\u0022 at the time of these international crimes. Blase Bonpane believes that silence is complicity. Civilization is Possible identifies the crimes at the very time they were being committed. Aside from the weekly commentaries of Blase Bonpane, this volume also includes his personal interviews with like minded observers of the disastrous Bush years: Noam Chomsky, Chalmers Johnson, Robert Fisk, Greg Palast and Peter Laufer. These are voices crying in the wilderness of rampant militarism, torture and collateral damage (murder). This toxic mix was nurtured by literally hundreds of lies coming from a failed administration that blatantly abused the sacred trust of our citizens.

These commentaries would have never been permitted by the rigid corporate media censorship which marks the Iraq War years. This exercise of free speech in Civilization is Possible was only made possible by \u0022fiercely independent\u0022 KPFK radio Los Angeles (listener supported and \u0022powered by the people\u0022) for the Pacifica Network.

Civilization is Possible completes a trilogy of Blase Bonpane's books published by Red Hen Press. His previous books were: Guerrillas of Peace; Pacifica Radio Commentaries and Peace Reports from the Office of the Americas, second printing, 2002, and Common Sense for the Twenty-First Century, 2004, which in addition to his radio commentaries includes interviews with the Reverend James Lawson, Jonathan Schell and Chalmers Johnson.

By selecting The Universal Declaration of Human Rights as the preface to Civilization is Possible, Blase Bonpane gives a hint about how his title might become a reality.

“Delicate, detailed, and firm all at once. Amy Randolph’s poems in Cold Angel of Mercy are anything but cold. They are loving celebrations of what it means to live on this side of heaven. She is an exquisite poet.”

—Liz Rosenberg

“In an age of poems all too easily written and all too frequently published, Amy Randolph’s poems are those rarest of things: works of art filled with tact, restraint, and deep human feeling seasoned by experience and years. Filled with 'grief and unfolding,' yet open to all that arrives, 'lonely in its unexpectedness,' her poems are as vigilant as the regrets she herself observes, as heartfelt as that yearning for God she so movingly inhabits and describes. Here is a poet who knows all too well that 'you don’t have to go far to be damaged,' but who also knows the distance one does have to go—and the attention that needs to be paid, the love given—to be redeemed.”

—Michael Blumenthal

Bristol Bay is the easternmost part of the Bering Sea and the site of the largest Salmon run in the world. It is also home to some of the highest tides and roughest water on the planet. In winter, ice storms freeze the riggings of fishing boats and the added weight of the ice, if not chipped off and thrown overboard, is sufficient to sink all but the largest of boats. The working conditions are brutal and the Bay itself as unforgiving as it is lovely. If it were a town, its name would be Deadwood or Tombstone, a place where life is measured in sunrises, not years.

The title poem, “Bristol Bay,” is autobiographical. Much of what is described in the poem is true and not hyperbole or metaphor. The author worked two seasons on the 420 foot floating processor, the All Alaskan, now a partially submerged wreck outside of Kodiak, Alaska, and the poem speaks to that almost apocalyptic experience.

The poems in this book are thematically aligned with the title poem in that they share a willingness to explore the potentially fatal, often unknown body of the individual. Homelessness, war, the blue collar work ethic, the love of all things opposed by the hatred of one thing—mothers and fathers—all of these become touchstones through which greater awareness may be experienced as a spiritual participation in building and sustaining human communities.

Orlando White explores language from a Diné (Navajo) perspective. One idea that interests him, inspires him to think and write, is the idea of the English language as a forgotten language.

Imagine if we as a people, all people in the United States, are speaking an Indigenous language rather than English; that the English language exists merely as a language of the colonial past. White explores and experiments with this particular colonizing language, because that language remains a kind of cultural/intellectual/social threat to Indigenous thought, as English was imposed to dehumanize Indigenous peoples from their culture, language, and consciousness.

White's Diné perspective poetically reveals audience notion of linguistic dehumanization within the Bone Light volume. Non-Natives, throughout American history, have documented the Indigenous Americas using the dominant written word of English. Thus, as an artist, White writes what he writes to document as well, but also to create something a bit more beautiful (intriguing) than harmful (erasing). White is not attempting critique of the English language; he is working with it to gain a better understanding of viewpoints, veritably creating a relationship by way of exploring language.

Reality has begun to show its age, have you noticed? Joe has.

Calamity Joe is the pen name of the mysterious narrator in a new kind of poetry collection. Spending his days in a lab, talking to mice & microbes, he will soon be the last living member of his family. More and more life seems to hint at its syntax and Joe feels that he can just make out the page he inhabits. Drastic measures are called for, but for what?

Poet Brendan Constantine hasnÆt crafted another \u201cnovel in verse,\u201d but a secret life revealed by poetry. Open it anywhere and be rewarded with poems that stand alone; read it from the beginning and discover the deeper context that ties every image together. As with his previous collections, Constantine employs countless approaches to poetry and no single style dominates. Looking through JoeÆs eyes we understand that life has no single story, that love is not a single feeling, and that consciousness may be an act of sheer will.

A child dies on the border between California and Mexico. This is nothing new: immigrants die crossing the border all the time, escaping from poverty and violence in Latin America. They bake in the desert. But this death is different. Someone has taken body parts from the child.

FBI Agent Romilia Chacón, a Salvadoran American, follows this case into a world that swallows her with its horror, a world that exists alongside ours, where children are bought and sold like cattle and shipped to men all across the country. The dealers in this blackest of markets have no moral barometer, only a lust for cash. And one among them has taken murder to a level beyond serial killing.

Romilia comes to this case already broken: the man she loved and yet had to hunt—drug runner Tekún Umán, a regular on the FBI's Most Wanted List—is gone. Romilia has two friends, her partner Nancy Pearl—who lives a double life between the Feds and the cartels—and a bottle of booze. Romilia's mother is on her back to get sober; her son drifts further and further away. And the killer is taking away pieces of Romilia's life, day by day.

Books would seem to be one thing, and rough business another—except that the life of Tullio Pironti has brought both together. This mover and shaker in Italian arts and publishing began as a scuffling street kid in Naples, then enjoyed a boxing career that included two trips to the nationals, and only after that entered the book business. Yet in the decades that followed, he ended up working with the likes of the Nobel Prize-winner Naguib Mahfuz and the Maestro of Italian film, Federico Fellini. Not surprisingly, then, Pironti\u2019s memoir won wide attention in his home country, with more than 100 notices. Red Hen Press is excited to bring it out now in an American edition.

Before anything else, the young Pironti had to survive a war. His memoir begins with a refugee experience, as he and his family are driven out of their homes in downtown Naples by the American bombing of 1942-43. Then after the liberation, Pironti must make his way with his wits and his fists, amid a colorful array of Neapolitan street figures. His recollections of youth provide rare insight into coming of age in a culture so ancient, so full of secrets.

Then once Pironti quits his boxing career, the real fight begins. His rise as editor and publisher presents the Italian version of up by the bootstraps—during a period of near-Biblical changes for the country. In the arena of the arts, Pironti experiences those changes first-hand. As he improvises his way onto the best-seller lists and into the film industry, his work makes a larger and larger place for women, and for books by Arabs and Africans. Then too, many of his publications boldly expose the destructive collusion between the Mafia and the politicians in Rome. At the memoir\u2019s climax, Pironti himself suffers for his expos\u00e9s. He faces trumped-up charges from some of the most powerful forces in Italy, and finds out just how gratifyingly broad his support is, across native city.

Anyone who wants to know the real Italy, and what it\u2019s been through over the last half-century, will find Books & Rough Business a source of endless fascination. On top of that, this autobiography offers the timeless pleasures of watching a wily player work his way from next to nothing to great success, overcoming just about every kind of adversity along the way.

We began in the dark, and from the dark, we created myths, stories, the children of Israel wandering in the wilderness, Odysseus returning home, Buddha sitting lotus quiet. We had a few good stories to sustain our wanderings.

Over several thousand years, the fire of myths began to burn out. Or we burned them out. We burned Troy, the prophets, and Joan of Arc, and finally, as one myth after another descended onto the pile of ashes, we found ourselves outside the church, the cathedral, the pyramid, the synagogue, with no path, and no journey. No Holy Grail to seek for, no reason to seek a grail. We pick up the skull of the storyteller, turn it over in our hands, fumbling for the eye sockets that used to see something. We don't know how to handle the skull, with what ritual to bury it, what song to sing for the dead or the living. The stories in this collection, address this place in which we've found ourselves, more aware of the dead than the living. The dead had their myths and their fire.

"This book claims as its territory the indefinite spaces separating us: the ground where we move together and apart, the long curve desire describes and follows. Connection seems tenable as a jet trail, 'a seam, holding together / the two halves of the sky.' Kate [Gale] Harper belongs in the company of Lorna Goodison, Margaret Atwood, Lucille Clifton—all poets who write, with force and directness, what a woman lives. I think the secret of Harper’s strength is this: from the middle of all loss, all bewilderment, her poems aspire to the condition of dancing.”

—Angela Ball, Mississippi Review

*Finalist for the California Book Award*

The thirteen stories in Birds of Paradise Lost shimmer with humor and pathos as they chronicle the anguish and joy and bravery of America’s newest Americans, the troubled lives of those who fled Vietnam and remade themselves in the San Francisco Bay Area. The past—memories of war and its aftermath, of murder, arrest, re-education camps and new economic zones, of escape and shipwreck and atrocity—is ever present in these wise and compassionate stories. It plays itself out in surprising ways in the lives of people who thought they had moved beyond the nightmares of war and exodus. It comes back on TV in the form of a confession from a cannibal; it enters the Vietnamese restaurant as a Vietnam Vet with a shameful secret; it articulates itself in the peculiar tics of a man with Tourette’s Syndrome who struggles to deal with a profound tragedy. Birds of Paradise Lost is an emotional tour de force, intricately rendering the false starts and revelations in the struggle for integration, and in so doing, the human heart.

“The poems in Elise Paschen’s Bestiary explore domestic preoccupations set against the backdrop of the wild-heartedness, real and imagined, of the animal world,” praises the poet Jason Shinder. In this modern-day Bestiary, or “Book of Beasts,” the line between animal and human is thinly-drawn – the daughter of a Celtic king, through love, is transformed from beast to human; lovers take flight as moon and owl; manatees transform, before the explorers’ eyes, into mermaids. This dynamic runs throughout the collection: taking flight, hovering between air and earth, plunging, and then resurfacing from water. The poems create a constant engagement between what tethers us to our daily lives – marriage, motherhood, raising a family, the loss of parents in old age – and the desire for other worlds. Exploring notions of transformation, these poems cross thresholds between animal and human, between death and life.

Award-winning poet, Elise Paschen, creates in her third and most complex poetry collection, work which is elegant and passionate, preternaturally still and reckless all at once. Paschen displays a variety of form and nuance – from ghazals to long-lined free verse poems. Writing out of a distinct Western literary tradition, but tapping into her Native American (Osage) roots, Paschen celebrates the mythic, the unusual, the magical glimpsed in the everyday.

Welcome to the peculiar and headlong world of Brian DoyleÆs fiction, where the odd is happening all the time, reported upon by characters of every sort and stripe. Swirling voices and skeins of story, laughter and rage, ferocious attention to detail and sweeping nuttiness, tears and chortling—these stories will remind readers of the late giant David Foster Wallace, in their straightforward accounts of anything-but-straightforward events; of modern short story pioneer Raymond Carver, a bit, in their blunt, unadorned dialogue; and of Julia Whitty, a bit, in their willingness to believe what is happening, even if it absolutely shouldnÆt be.

Funny, piercing, unique, memorable, this is a collection of stories readers will find nearly impossible to forget:

... The barber who shaves the heads of the thugs in Bin LadenÆs cave tells cheerful stories of life with the preening video-obsessed leader, who has a bald spot shaped just like Iceland.

... A husband gathers all of his wifeÆs previous boyfriends for a long day on a winery-touring bus.

... A teenage boy drives off into the sunset with his troubled sisterÆs small daughters…and the loser husband locked in the trunk of the car.

... The late Joseph Kennedy pours out his heart to a golf-course bartender moments before the stroke that silenced him forever.

… A man digging in his garden finds a brand-new baby boy, still alive, and has a chat with the teenage neighbor girl whose son it is.

... A man born on a Greyhound bus eventually buys the entire Greyhound Bus Company and revolutionizes Western civilization.

... A mountainous bishop dies and the counting of the various keys to his house turns… tense.

... A man discovers his wife having an affair, takes up running to grapple with his emotions, and discovers everyone else on the road is a cuckold too.

And many others.

Avocations collects the best of Sam Hamill's prose on poetry over the last 18 years, presenting insightful readings of Kenneth Rexroth, Denise Levertov, Odysseas Elytis, Matsuo Basho, Kobayashi Issa, John Logan and many others together with critical commentary on poetry in translation and the practice of poetry in general.

"Sagan’s richly sensual writing blends elements of mature insight with deeply felt experience. These are poems of an examined life with moments of Zen clarity throughout. It is, in fact, the clarity that drives these poems. The language is careful but deliberate, exquisitely crafted and emotionally moving. One gets the sense that her desire to write poetry comes from the desire to give permanent voice to something in the experience of life – to find ourselves spoken for in art gives dignity to our pain, our anger, our lust, and our losses. This is what poetry is about. When Miriam Sagan casts her imaginative eye on something, it stares back."

—Jeanie C. Williams, Southwest Book Views

"Gaylord Brewer’s Barbaric Mercies is a book of extraordinary and delightful individuality. Alternately aggressive, outrageous, whimsical, and heartfelt, the poems are never predictable but always authentic. The author has such a genius for phrasing that there are many lines that make the reader stop and sigh or smile. A dark and delicious volume."

—Dana Gioia

"Barbaric Mercies, Mr. Brewer’s finest book of poems yet, seamlessly weaves a rich tapestry between landscape and longing, the poet’s big heart for language and his voracious appetite for making an impact on this life. This is a visionary collection, a lasting celebration to travel, leaving familiar turf for the unfamiliar, reveling in the simple beauty of words, gestures, images. If there is anything 'barbaric' about this book and these poems, it is their striving to make an indelible impact on our consciousness as readers. Their taking hold of our imaginations and our moods hearkens back to Whitman’s 'barbaric yawp,' that shouting/singing only the best poets seem to do rather effortlessly and with resounding ability."

—Virgil Suárez

Dr. Regina Moss has built herself a successful career as a psychiatrist in Boston: she enjoys a lucrative private practice, hefty consultation fees, and a reputation that inspires colleagues and patients alike. Why then, is Regina haunted by her past? Why does her own daughter barely speak to her? WhatÆs the story with her gruff, softhearted husband Walter—and why canÆt Regina stop thinking about the lanky new tech on the ward? An Age of Madness peels back the layers of ReginaÆs psyche in a voice that is brash, bitter, and blackly humorous, laying bare her vulnerabilities while drawing the reader unnervingly close to this memorable heroine.

From the author of The Preservationist, which was hailed as \u201chilarious and illuminating\u201d by The Los Angeles Times Book Review and \u201cpithy and smart\u201d by the New York Post, comes the latest turnabout in a career filled with unexpected surprises. An Age of Madness brings a sharp edge of psychological realism to a story filled with startling revelations and heartrending twists.