Red Hen Press

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.

Comic, tragic, colorful, and adventurous, Stickball on 88th Street is a sequence of thirty-four narrative poems that follows its speaker from boyhood to college. ItÆs a memory book, bound with vignettes of school, family life, and the streets of New York City, as well as Maine and Mexico, culminating with a swan dive in Colorado. It reads like a novel or memoir, with characters, setting, and plot.

Stickball employs an original form, neither free verse nor traditionally formal, but rather lexical. Instead of meter and syllable counts, the book uses individual words as its units of measure. Each quatrain has twenty words: six each in the first two lines, four each in the last two lines. This form imposes no ponderous regularity, allowing for a swift narrative flow. It was written over the course of thirteen days in August, 1977, and has remained unchanged since then.

In the nearly twenty years that Leonard Koznowski has been sheriff of Beaver Rapids, Wisconsin, he’s never encountered a homicide. When the local mortician and his assistant are brutally gunned down, Leonard is thrust into a tumultuous investigation linking religion, high school athletics, the black market of body parts, unwholesome sexual proclivities, and a sinister secret society. And with deer season fast approaching, the timing could’ve been a hell of a lot better.

Inspired by actual events, acclaimed cult author Jim Knipfel gives a hilariously dark, satirical twist to the American pastoral.

Río De Sangre tells the story, in Spanish, of the overthrow of a dictatorship in a fictional South American country. In the aftermath of a coup d’état, the new leader of a Latin American republic embarks on an idealistic course for his nascent government. Faced with numerous problems and no one to trust, our protagonist Delacruz realizes that the good of the country and the protection of his own family may be more than he can achieve.

A series of catastrophic events follow—earthquakes, kidnapping and assassination, combine to allow the rise of an adversarial wolf in sheep’s clothing. The outbreak of a riot affords the opportunity for this adversary to assume control of the government, thus perpetuating the tragic cycle of oppression.

The passion and color of the South American heritage, and the triumphs and struggles of its people throughout its history of oppression and tragedy suggests music of monumental drama.

Keyboard man Jack Voss spends his evenings in the relative sanctuary of the clubs, playing jazz standards on the piano and occasionally singing some of the songs that made him famous. His 1974 rock opera, The Enchanted Pond, catapulted his band, Vossimilitude, into the stratosphere of rock superstardom. Later, solo albums earned him a reputation as a musician’s musician. Reverence for his genius led his shortcomings—as a husband, father, and friend—to be forgiven, or at least overlooked.

But when his life of comparative comfort and solitude is rocked by a devastating personal loss, Voss is led back to The Enchanted Pond. The story of an ill-fated love triangle based on the tense relations between Voss, his childhood girlfriend Avery, and Vossimilitude’s dangerous and charismatic bassist, Hal Proteus, Voss’s masterpiece set him on a path to this day of reckoning. To endure, he must confront the tragic consequences of his self-absorption on the only firm ground left him: the piano.

With the sure, unsentimental narrative command of writers like Richard Russo and Jonathan Franzen, John Van Kirk has brought to life in Song for Chance not just a fallen rock god, but—with the help of liner notes, bonus tracks, and the complete Voss discography—the whole sex, drugs, and rock and roll era with an immediacy so recognizable that it feels like yesterday.

Against a background of suburban Philadelphia in the 1950s, and the family secret of his father's alcoholism, Henry comes of age as the youngest of four children. He rejects his father's course in managing the family chocolate factory, and goes on to college, becoming a writer and teacher. When Henry marries, and becomes a father himself, he is impacted by the social revolutions of the 1970s, and struggles to avoid his father's flaws. He leads a literary life in Boston, founds the literary magazine Ploughshares, and befriends novelist Richard Yates. During the 1980s, Henry suffers the deaths of his parents, infertility, rejections of his work, and setbacks in his teaching career. In the 1990s, while his daughter and adopted son are swept up into trials of adolescence and young adulthood, and as his wife grieves the deaths of friends and family, Henry confronts a spiritual abyss similar to his father's, and learns to surrender to life, to love, to aging and mortality.

By turns lyrical, quirky, confessional, and experimental in form, Henry's essays build into an affirming and generous vision. While addiction, the uses of imagination, a passion for literature, and issues of heart and soul are key motifs, a bungee jump becomes Henry's central metaphor: "isn't this life? isn't this art? We live and trust in our safe suicides."

“We’ve tamed too much of our world, too much of our mind, too much of our soul. Doug Thorpe helps us understand what Thoreau really meant when he said that in wildness is the preservation of the world.”

—Bill McKibben, author of The End of Nature

“Doug Thorpe has thought deeply-as he has trekked deeply-into the terra incognita where lies the intersection of the phenomenal and the supposed pre-phenomenal, understanding that language itself is the surest tool whereby the pilgrim might discover those traces joining what is visible and what is not, a disposition more likely than most for apprehending revelation.”

—Scott Cairns, author of Short Trip to the Edge; Where Earth Meets Heaven-A Pilgrimage

“Throughout Rapture of the Deep Doug Thorpe pursues, and is pursued by, one question: ‘What will we do with the wild truth?’ [...] Thorpe’s quest-narrative is further enhanced by the authentic and insightful way in which he interweaves the writers he loves, including Dante and Wordsworth, Jung, Pullman and LeGuin. I feel personally grateful as a reader, writer, teacher and householder for this illuminating book.”

—John Elder

On a wintry morning in 1974, Hank Preston makes a semen delivery to the New York Hospital Fertility Clinic. Running late, he takes the elevator rather than the stairway earmarked for such deliveries. A woman enters, the recipient of his semen, and a relationship develops that threatens to blow their already rocky lives to smithereens.

To add to Hank's problems, his transgender boss at the Strand Bookstore is in love with him. But I'm straight, Hank protests. And I'm a woman, Joey insists.

The odd intermingling of these vibrant characters makes for an unforgettable story. Hank needs to come to terms with what happened to him in Vietnam. Karen, the would-be mother, needs to clarify the difference between fantasy and reality. Joey, the sanest of the three, despite or maybe because of her gender mix-up, shares her wisdom and tries, somewhat unsuccessfully, to hold them all on course. Secrets are revealed as a twisting plot erupts in a fiery conclusion.

Offspring is a story of longings, thwarted dreams, and the search for truth of family, and our fervent need to belong.

In his twenties, an American manual laborer and poet found himself living with his beautiful wife in a village in southern Greece. Their first encounter with that country would prove an unrecoverable dream of intimate magic, but through decades of steadfast affection, poet David Mason grew to a deeper understanding of what it means to be a citizen of one’s own country and a citizen of the world. News from the Village is a lyrical memoir of Aegean friends, including such figures as Orhan Pamuk, Bruce Chatwin, Katerina Anghelaki-Rooke, Yiorgos Chouliaras, and Patrick Leigh Fermor, each of whom comes fully alive, along with a brilliant cast of lesser-known characters. Fearing he has lost Greece and everything it has meant in his life, Mason goes back again and again to the country he knew as a young man. He encounters Turkey and Greece together in the shadow of 9-11, follows the lives of his friends, whose trials sometimes surpass his own, and brings them all together in the circle of this generous narrative. Ultimately, Mason’s memoir is about what we can hold and what slips away, what sustains us all through our griefs and disappointments. This book is richly evocative and rare.

"I could call Keith A. Mason’s writings an ecstatic torrent of memory and myth, a dangerous funk, dank and chuckling, in a kitchen heavy with cheeseburgers, catfish, tandoori chicken and tofu. I could say the man’s concerns are religious, God lashing his tongue like it’s the alpha dog pulling us from America’s present winter toward a place hot enough for nakedness, hot enough that the blood comes quicker and in Technicolor™. Then I got all the way down to “Book IV” (as you should) and realized that New Wine and Black Men’s Feet is what happens when L.A. becomes writing. The fitful traffic of sentences. Tense multiculturalism blurring in rearviews. Our windshields turning the world a silver screen so you can confuse 300 for history, flesh for geography, a poet for a prophet (and vice versa). It happens here, here, here."

—Douglas Kearney

Adroitly told, Geoffrey Clark's collection of stories Necessary Deaths will appeal to anyone who has faced difficult choices regarding the care of animals. Mr. Clark's characters struggle to learn how to let go and confront loss. His stories examine the themes of violation of innocence, and the acceptance of required acts of violence. His characters live with animals and care for them. Through the transcendent experience of that care, they must face assumptions they've been living with regarding what is natural and right with and around them. As either victims or perpetrators of violence, the characters in these stories are forced to ask themselves if violence is inherent in their condition. Mr. Clark avoids glib, over-worked metaphors, and as a writer with five decades of stories behind him, he renders internal and external landscapes of his stories through a knack for the bon mot that enlightens, startles and illuminates. Peppered with trenchant details, cadenced in a laconic, sometimes very funny Mid-western narrative voice, each story resonates long after it's been read. The stories are polished without being pompous, and charged with a vivid, consistent accuracy. The best, culled from earlier collections, poignantly evoke a time gone by in northern Michigan during the post World War II years, and Mr. Clark addresses without nostalgia the hardscrabble innocence and complexities of rural life in that region and era. There is authenticity, skill and subtlety in the telling. Mr. Clark does not disappoint; he deserves a wide readership."

—John Flynn is author of Something Grand, a collection of stories, and several volumes of poetry and translations.

"Despite my mother’s efforts to tame me, I resisted, holding onto my creature nature until the day she informed me I would no longer be running naked in the yard or showering with my dad. It took a few scoldings before I was transformed from colt to show-pony: a proper reflection of whichever laundered, starched, pressed, brushed, straightened, zippered, tied, and buttoned garment was placed upon me."

—From the foreword of Summer Brenner's new collection of short stories, My Life in Clothes

These stories explore the charm, tyranny, and preoccupation of clothes, on and off, bought, made, or found, fashion or function, projection or expression, body and soul turned inside out.

Passion Maps is a lyrical cartography of historical and biographical experiences, of the poet's lived and imagined mappings. The poems in this collection chart a world itinerary of stopping places, or stassis—a transliterated Greek word for a stop or a pause—that transport the reader from locations of childhood memory to pauses of lost love, and lost life, through landscapes as disparate as Vietnam, Greece, New Jersey, and the Balkans. As poet and critic Joseph Powell described Kalfopoulou's first collection, Wild Greens, "the best of these poems make beauty ache", a phrase used by Frost to describe Yeats' poetry; of this new collection Powell notes a range of "different types of utterance, of poems ambitious and experimental in a volume that is tough, tender and honest throughout."

As Passion Maps suggests, these are poems of experiences that have mapped, as much as experiences that have become maps; there are the inevitable first cartographies of family: a father "stoic/ in brutal combat", a mother who "would have preferred to sing her words" that expand into the broader mappings of "bygone lives,/" and "the lyric ruin of cities", an America of "New World opportunity" and an old world of "whole towns/now erased by the grass." In his review of Wild Greens in the Crab Orchard Review, Jon Tribble describes the "bitter and the sweet" of poems that "test our palates" and "remind us that the bread and meat and fruits and greens of life come with many flavors and at a cost that is as dear as it is worthwhile." The same could be said of Kalfopoulou's second collection though here we have the voice of a poet who has broadened her style to include more of the world.

“Like the mystery bruise of the title poem, these memento mori are livid imprints left behind by collisions with life, tattooed reminders of emotional confrontations. But Terry Wolverton is a survivor of her deep passions. Her heart beats on despite its contusions and pulses underneath the corpus of her experience like a wellspring of life under the painful intimations of mortality. This is a remarkable body of work.”

—Michael Lassell, author of A Flame for the Touch That Matters

“Terry Wolverton’s passionate achievement crackles with unsparing revelations from the dark side of the American Dream—epidemics, urban unrest, and a girlhood which might have been conjured in the imagination of Norman Rockwell’s diabolical twin. Into this end-of-the-century landscape, peopled by casualties, survivors, and warriors, she direcfts the manifold redeeming powers of poetry: to bear witness, to exorcise, to shore up—and hold fast among us—memories of those lost.”

—Suzanne Lummis, author of In Danger

“In Mystery Bruise, poems of loss and troubled adolescence give way to songs of healing and self-assertiveness. Terry Wolverton looks us straight in the eye, channels raw experience into lean columns, staunch forms. Her poems sting with the truth, the toxic times we live in, yet offer hope, instruct us how to reshape who we are.”

—David Trinidad, author of Answer Song

As a small child, Josiah believed that his father’s absence could be explained by the simple fact that he was a high ranking alien official on the planet Parnuckle. It explained so much else, too, like why Josiah should eat nothing but chocolate (Parnucklians eat nothing but chocolate), and why he should be proud of and idolize his father, the Keymaster of Gozer, even though they’d never met.

But as time goes on and the gaps in this mythology widen, Josiah is faced with two possibilities: either it’s all very real or it’s all very pretend. This betrayal comes into sharper focus when, three weeks before his sixteenth birthday, Josiah is released back into his mother’s care after two years in a group home. His mother is about to marry Johnson Davis, and when Josiah, his mother, Johnson Davis, and his daughter Bree Davis—a prematurely mature girl with her own history of parental betrayal—attempt to live together as an all-American nuclear family, the myths underpinning all of their lives come chaotically and absurdly unspooled.

This startling, stylish, hilarious debut novel explores what it means to grow up an alien in your own family and your own life. It’s a story about the secret, solitary lives of kids held hostage by the caprices of their caretakers. In Parnucklian for Chocolate, B.H. James has taken the alien heart of family life and made it recognizable and relatable to all—extraterrestrial or otherwise.

These stories take the reader on journeys realist and absurd, meta-fictional and post-modern. Motel Girl is peopled by the colorful, the transcendent, the sane and insane—by egoists, self-deprecators, demons and drunks, by the well-meaning, and by monsters. From a Muscovite torn between the affections of her live-in bear and her boyfriend to a corporate bureaucrat who discovers the secret to immortality in a decrepit art museum, from a vengeful adolescent motel clerk to a legal proofreader poisoned on a subway platform, these short stories play by rules that might seem unorthodox to some, refreshing to others. This collection is proof that the form is alive and well—and breaking new ground—in the first decade of the 21st century.

Motel Girl amounts to an exploration of the contemporary laws of romance, longing and sex, of how the computerized, branded universe is now fully integrated into the fabric of our thought and behavior. Join in the journey, a frenetic and disarming joy ride. Taken as a whole, these stories create a new paradigm for the American short story, an expansion in narrative reach, creative power, and experimentation.

“‘I am going to keep death from entering this poem,’ Kurt Brown writes in No Other Paradise. These masterful poems are taut with the power of the unspoken. Their urgency is visceral. If the problem of our century is Hegel’s dilemma of cognition and the will—the more we know, the less we can act—Brown is searching for a knowledge so immediate, so free of rhetoric, that our scary responsibilities will open the world up rather than paralyzing us. With a clear eye, zapping wit, and a mind haunted by the unfathomable future, Brown is creating fascinating poetry whose horizons lie far beyond the self. No Other Paradise leaves us in that strangest, richest moment, the human present.”

—D. Nurkse

“At the climax of Kurt Brown’s evocative meditations on everything from nature and news to baloney, there is his astonishing title poem. A walk through a teeming cityscape inhabited by the memorable likes of Miss Donna, “Mystical Astrologist,” this Whitmanesque celebration of the turbulent here-and-now powerfully conveys Brown’s vision of the fleeting, sensory moment, a view summed up in his echoing line: don’t let go.”

—Kimiko Hahn

Heartbreakingly honest and hilarious, My Almost Certainly Real Imaginary Jesus shows just how easy it can be to fall headlong into fundamentalism, venturing into the very heart of enemy territory and the churchÆs false promises of altar calls and sexual cures. In the spirit of Anne LamottÆs Traveling Mercies, this debut memoir is plainspoken, speaking with candor and insight. Barth particularly addresses the disconnect between the radical and very human Jesus of history and the churchÆs supernatural savior. She asks the question to all in the closet—both closet Christians and closet homosexuals: Which is more difficult, admitting to being Christian or admitting to being gay?

An answer is found in her own hard-won journey, a hopeful answer that is an "attempt to leave a record of the early signs of the turning and softening of a collective heart." Giving voice to many who have searched for sanctuary in a church that has largely rejected them, this story pauses at the threshold of one of a growing number of churches which, in opening the door to her and other homosexuals, welcome Jesus back inside as well.

A review of Modern Love and Other Tall Tales:

With prose as clean as Hemingway’s and a Kafka-esque sense of the absurd, Greg Boyd delivers a memorable book in Modern Love and Other Tall Tales. But these tales are not quite so “tall” as the title might suggest; in fact, their distinction lies in the way they negotiate a fine line between veracity and the farcical.

Each narrator seems to fancy himself “the rational one” while elaborating the most bizarre situation with little or no comment. Boyd exploits this irony by mingling a crushing sense of isolation with a host of eccentric, straight-faced characters whose predicaments become the reader’s source of stupefaction and endless mirth. In “Horny,” a man walks around town carrying a heavy wood cross on his back, convinced that suffering will erase his primal instincts; “listen” is a one-sided conversation in which the narrator formulates a sad and defensive logic that falls on dead ears or—as one might imagine—no ears at all; and “The Further Adventures of Tom, Huck, and Jim” transports Twain’s classic characters to Southern California and brings us hilariously up to date.

But Modern Love isn’t just one laugh after another. Though Boyd makes light of unfortunate circumstances, there is an underlying feeling of loneliness and sadness throughout, as if his characters’ idiosyncrasies were born from an acute sense of helplessness or an inability to participate in or relate to typical activities. The characters themselves seem real but flimsy, as if they will at any moment be blown off the page by a Kafkan ill wind, as if they were all once, as in “Unglued,” “shy and sickly, largely ignored by the other children.”

Boyd’s writing, like his characters, is straightforward and descriptive. There’s no need for verbal trickery here because the author’s imagination provides us with more than enough to digest. In Modern Love it’s quite possible to become so engrossed in a story that you forget you’re actually reading at all.

Leaving Resurrection is one woman's love poem to the Alaskan places and people that have taken possession of her soul. Eva Saulitis writes with great honesty about her vulnerability and fears, about her excitement and discoveries, and about her passionate love for the wild. She inspires us with her boldness, she invites us to eagerly accept challenges, she opens us to the willing embrace of adventure, and she takes us into the hidden glories of Alaska as few other writers have done.

These gentle, richly perceptive, beautifully rendered stories take readers straight to the heart of Alaska. And like all fine writing, it leaves you aching for more. Eva Saulitis writes deeply from the spirit of Margaret Murie, and she shows us that the soul of wildness is still very much alive in the north country.

The wild country of Alaska has always attracted women of extraordinary strength and character, women with a keen eye for the land's beauty and a heart strong enough for its challenges, women equal to the measure of the Alaskan land itself. Eva Saulitis and Leaving Resurrection are wonderful reminders that the tradition lives on.

René Maria Rilke was born in Prague on 4 December 1875 and died near Montreux in Switzerland, on 29 December 1926. The foremost lyric German poet of the 20th century, he is remembered primarily for his Duino Elegies, the Sonnets to Orpheus, the Neue Gedichte, the Buch der Bilder, the Stundenbuch, and the Cornet.

Although his mature poetry has been translated into many languages, his early poetry remains accessible only in the original German. This translation of the Larenopfer, or offerings to the Lares, the Roman household deities, are songs that Rilke sings to his hometown Prague and to his beloved Bohemia, short poems on the parks, fountains, churches, bridges and palaces of Prague, not forgetting Rabbi Löw’s legends, the Jewish cemetery, the Thirty Years’ War and, of course, young love.

This cycle of 90 poems offers the reader a unique view into Rilke’s fascinating world, the turn-of-the-century atmosphere of Prague, then the third largest city in the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Here a young German of the ruling bourgeoisie shows great appreciation for contemporary Czech literary works and enthusiasm for the cause of Czech cultural identity. Larenopfer possesses not only literary merit but is also of considerable sociological and historical interest.