The “us” of Frost’s title evokes both the intimacy of lovers and the anonymity of strangers, the negotiations of domestic life and the chance encounters that shape our daily, public lives.  Throughout the narratives in All of Us, miscommunication threatens havoc, as time and again, these poems present misfires of communication, gaps in memory, and the simple limitations of language that cause frustration and isolation. The title poem explores a cityscape where community is vertically compressed, and strangers – who are also neighbors – appear eye-to-eye at the peep holes of their locked doors.  What is the nature of what Ezra Pound called “commerce” between us? Frost explores this question with passion, humor and pathos.  

Elisabeth Frost is the author of The Feminist Avant-Garde in American Poetry and co-editor of Innovative Women Poets: An Anthology of Contemporary Poetry and Interviews (both from Univ. of Iowa Press). Her chapbook, Rumor, is available from Mermaid Tenement Press. She is Associate Professor of English and Women's Studies at Fordham University.

“The persistence of bad dreams, the meaning of illness, the acquaintances and the distractions of apartment life ("the stairs in the walk-up ringing"), erotic attachment and filial attention energize the elegant poems, mostly in prose paragraphs, of this debut. Frost already has some reputation as a critic of difficult poetry, but those who expect provocative, frame-breaking poems will not get them. Mostly, Frost's work is more straightforward. Her people view the ordinary life course--birth, growth, health; parenthood, illness, death--with a tenacious combination of fear and devotion. A grandmother holds her first grandchild "as if she had always known how," and a "tall man in his sixties" recovers almost completely from amnesia: "He remembered everything except how he had gotten to where he was after boarding the train. It hardly mattered, now his life was back." One couple tries to decide whether to have children, whether to devote their lives "to the well-being of another, unformed and vaguely like oneself." Another couple watches a medical show together and then decide "They ought to watch less TV. It seems too much to hope for, health, now that they've seen it up close."”

—Publishers Weekly

“Frost’s debut collection, All of Us, uses the seemingly narrative prose poem to turn the unconscious conscious. What is unseen but seen and what is unspoken but spoken becomes apparent, as quotidian moments create layers to a voice that probes its own resonance only to find itself to be in all of us. Through the deep intelligence of these poems, Frost has composed transparent channels into our own lives―a stunning achievement.” 

―Claudia Rankine 

“In the white space out beyond Elisabeth Frost’s cropped tales, subtle situations, plausible and bizarre fantasias, you may sense the ghosts of Kafka and Borges strolling. But these delicious, low-key, disturbing and always surprising prose poems, with their train of lyric elegance, are a world unto themselves. All of Us is a compulsively readable book.” 

―Alicia Ostriker 

“Reading Elisabeth Frost’s extraordinary debut collection, All of Us, we enter a postmodern scene edged with irony, precise and elegiac. . . . Frost refuses the artifice (and comforts) of closure, observing that ‘All talk is slippery.’ The ground of these brilliant poems slips from caustic wit to still-palpable mourning, and All of Us opens to a tender and finally capacious vision.” 

―Cynthia Hogue 

“Elisabeth Frost’s poems explore romantic love, family, and the outer social realm with passion and uncanny perception. The question that sparks Frost’s creation is deeply philosophical and epistemological: how do we know each other? She asks how we read and more particularly how we read each other. . . . All of Us presents a discerning vision of possibility and hope about the way all of us stand in relation to the concrete and spiritual universe.” 

―Aliki Barnstone

“It's unusual to call a book of poetry a 'page turner,' but this collection, with the knocking and jostling of words that mark the peculiar rhythm and appeal of the prose poem, is just that. Holly Iglesias has an uncanny ability to capture whole sweeps of history in a few lines, while her eye and ear for the quotidian result in the characters pulling us from one remarkable incident to another as if they had physically taken us by the elbow, whispering urgently. Here is nostalgia without sentimentality, menace without despair, confession without bathos.”

                                   —Marie Harris

“Reading Angles of Approach is like getting out of the car after a road trip, having followed a map of blue highways through places both strange and familiar. The poems uncover the peculiar, contending histories of transplanted cultures that shape the American landscape, and a resilient self in the midst of conflict. Through a sensory weave of rich detail and intimately exhilarating language, Iglesias places us in the light of those small answers that mean the most.”
                       —Gary Copeland Lilley

“The cumulative effect of Holly Iglesias’ gorgeous prose poems in Angles of Approach is both hypnotic and disturbing. She is witness and actor alike, a citizen of American soil both running from and caught deep in its grand mistakes and its sharp-edged minutiae. There is humor to keep us from despair, and there is a dark vision that begs questions. Iglesias, as a lover of history and a chronicler of its shared and intimate details, pronounces no judgments with her trim elegies. She simply renders them musical and faultless, places them side by side, and invites us to listen.”

 —Maureen Seaton, author of Cave of the Yellow Volkswagen

RHETORIC

You avoid breezy questions, the musings they call forth that do not pass for answers but nod, rather, toward some small intimation of a reason to be here, the black tulip plucked from a neighbor’s yard, or jottings on note paper the color of dusk when you nursed a carafe of vin ordinaire until the light completely faded and it was no longer safe to walk back to the hotel. You shun the phrase body of work, buckling at the image of your words in a satin-lined box, the family gazing at sentences, paragraphs, grief-struck but composed as they recall your writing implements, their evolutionary path from crayon to pencil, typewriter to laptop, a series akin to the March of Progress in school books that always started with an ape at the left margin, walking toward the low-browed homo sapiens, then an erect Neanderthal, his posture promising years of hunting and gathering, the mastery of tools that will spawn pyramids, aqueducts, monasteries sacked by barbarians, Scripture translated into vulgar tongues, kings with their own churches, conquistadors claiming entire hemispheres in the middle of the page, then bolts of textiles, kegs of rum, leg irons and cotton gins, belching smokestacks and fireproof safes loosed upon the world by titans of industry, and finally, the barrel-chested man in a homburg checking his pocket-watch as a locomotive called The 20th Century edges toward him from the right.

PROJECTOR

Motor whirring, screen emitting a smell like floor wax, Brother’s fist in front of the lens, blotting out Aunt Ruth’s head as she extends the pickle dish for the camera to see. Dust in the tube of light, antic as 8 mm film.

Children in the dark, untouched by war and all the parents know but never say. They stare at the rush of images—birthday cakes, Mother’s prize roses, a red Schwinn—jittery icons to comfort them in some future Babylon.

SERMONETTE

This morning I take as my text the third book of Ralph, where we learn of his wanderings and the conversation with demons on the open road that led to his first conversion—yes, his first, for there were to be many more, and yes again, because for him conversation was The Way, not the books by which we remember him, those most silent of conversations, but the garrulous meander that flowed so easily in the presence of strangers, that river of words with no apparent source which was—amen—the route to redemption as surely as Paul’s fall from his horse or Thomas’s probe of the Most Precious Wound.

SAINT OF SHENANIGANS  

On the lip of dark ages, a canker, a queen of deceit, her felicitous tongue but babble to boys fattened on empire. Fidgety quick, she feeds a hem inch by inch to the ravenous needle, hair littered with pins and lint, shirtwaist crusted with starch for modesty's sake. The sass of that girl, a mouth that won't quit. Barbarians, the lot of them, filthy Harps, always drunk or saying their beads.

 Oh Bridget, we pray ye, spare us the Know-nothings, their nativist spleen. Grant us patience to soothe the rage-racked heart. 

Holly Iglesias is the author of Souvenirs of a Shrunken World (Kore Press), a collection of poems focused on the 1904 World’s Fair, and a critical work, Boxing Inside the Box: Women’s Prose Poetry (Quale Press). She teaches at the University of North Carolina -Asheville and has received fellowships from the North Carolina Arts Council, the Edward Albee Foundation and the Massachusetts Cultural Council. 

Most readers assume that the writing of the American prose poem began in the 1960s but in fact there is a long tradition of the prose poem in the first half of the 20th century. Much of this work appeared in literary magazines and was never collected. The anthology collects over 60 voices including such well-known figures as Sherwood Anderson, Paul Bowles, Kay Boyle, E.E. Cummings, H.D., Robert Duncan, T.S. Eliot, William Faulkner, Earnest Hemingway, Amy Lowell, Kenneth Patchen, Laura Riding Jackson, Gertrude Stein, Jean Toomer, Thorton Wilder  and William Carlos Williams. Margueritte Murphy's scholarly Introduction sets the stage for this collection which traces the history of American prose poetry from 1900-1950.

Robert Alexander is the co-editor of the Marie Alexander Poetry Series. He is the author of two books of poetry, White Pine Sucker River and What the Raven Said; and a book of creative nonfiction, Five Forks: Waterloo of the Confederacy. He previously served as an associate editor at New Rivers Press.

Margueritte S. Murphy is the Associate Provost at Hobart and William Smith Colleges in Geneva, New York.  She is author of A Tradition of Subversion: The Prose Poem in English from Wilde to Ashbery and Material Figures: Political Economy, Commercial Culture, and the Aesthetic Sensibility of Charles Baudelaire, and co-editor with Samir Dayal of Global Babel: Questions of Discourse and Communication in a Time of Globalization. 

“I thought the last thing we needed was another anthology of prose poetry, but I was woefully wrong. Alexander’s choices of American prose poems between 1900 and 1950 prove  the genre, in many different guises, was preparing itself to be honed by the masters of the 1960s. If you have any doubt the prose poem was flourishing over this fifty-year period, “Hysteria” by T.S. Eliott, “Family Portrait” by Kenneth Patchen, a number of short beauties by Fenton Johnson (among many other startling entries), suggest otherwise. If you need to be further convinced , Marguerite Murphy’s excellent introduction fills a gap in prose-poem criticism that was sorely needed.  As a bonus we get Alexander’s witty afterward, tracing one’s man’s personal history writing prose poems, grappling with all the complexities of the genre. This is a book I’ll be returning to often and with pleasure, and anyone who has ever considered writing prose poetry should be familiar with it.”

—Peter Johnson

“Family Portrait doesn't just rewrite the history of the prose poem in America - it sets the record straight. Robert Alexander has done a great service for everyone who loves this sinewy, quirky, delicious form. Margueritte Murphy's scholarly Introduction sets the stage for a book that traces the history of American prose poetry from 1900-1950. Simply put, this collection belongs on every poet's - and poetry lover's - bookshelf. From here forward, no one will be able to write about the prose poem without referencing Family Portrait." 

—Peter Conners

“Once again, we have Robert Alexander to thank for expanding our vision of the tradition of American prose poetry. Fifteen years ago, his co-edited anthology The Party Train demonstrated a tradition that pre-dated the poetic experimentations of the1960s and the 1976 publication of Michael Benedikt’s The Prose Poem: An International Anthology, long considered the gateway to contemporary interest in the form in English.

In Family Portrait, Alexander’s vision is solidified, clearly demonstrating the roots of prose poetry taking hold in the early years of American Modernism. This volume offers an invaluable selection of prose poems by a broad array of writers born before 1925, including William Carlos Williams, Gertrude Stein, Sherwood Anderson, Kay Boyle, Laura Riding and Kenneth Patchen. As importantly, Margueritte Murphy’s introduction and Alexander’s afterword provide the aesthetic framework and historical context for the poems, together making a solid case for the importance of prose poetry to the American literary canon. 

The prose poems of these Modernist writers illuminate not only the particularly supple strength of American language, but also how the form itself, “the child of two worlds” (in Alexander’s words), “serves to bring together, at long last, the sacred and mundane.””

— Holly Iglesias

“Family Portrait contains a rich variety of American voices—the well-known side by side with the completely new—speaking from their shared time and their individual sensibilities in language that ranges from the straightforward folksy talk set down by William Carlos Williams to the provocative linguistic disjunctions of Gertrude Stein and e. e. cummings.  This volume provides a delightfully colorful, eye-opening, and essential addition to our library of American literature.”  —Lydia Davis

“Maureen Gibbon’s Magdalena offers a fresh and profound voice to Americna poetry. Comparisons are impossible because ths book doesn’t remind me of anything I’ve read in years. I loved it.”

-Jim Harrison

“Gibbon delivers a strong, sensual, shimmering, elegant work of  a woman happily alive in her own skin. She welcomes nature — dolphins, birds and “Trees and flowers that give off their smells in the heat, like women.” Magdalena is honest and alive with erotic poems that began to simmer when the poet “was 16 and hungry all the time.”

—Carol Conolly - Minneapolis Star Tribune

A selection of one-hundred and ten poems, sixty-three of which are new, from the man Alan Cheuse called “a marvelous godfather” to the prose poem.

“Mort Marcus one of America’s hidden literary treasures, has become a suberb master of the prose poem...Often, it’s the situation, the little storyline that captivates...At other times its is language...that sends a shiver up the spine. I couldn’t get enough of this delectable stuff, and there is nothing else like it anywhere.”
--Al Young

Sixty-five new poems take their place beside forty-five poems published in Marcus’s previous two books. Employing and many times parodying the structures of discourse by which we have communicated our sense of the world through the ages, Marcus re-examines the notions on which the human species has understood its place in the universe. In the process, he has created his own cosmology, a cosmology by turns humorous, satirical, poignant, and always compassionate in revealing our beliefs, foibles, hopes, and contradictory actions. Morton Marcus is the author of seven books of poetry and one novel, The Brezhvev Memo. A film historian and critic as well as a poet, Marcus taught film and literature at Cabrillo College in Aptos, California, until his retirement.

“Mort Marcus one of America’s hidden literary treasures, has become a suberb master of the prose poem...Often, it’s the situation, the little storyline that captivates...At other times its is language...that sends a shiver up the spine. I couldn’t get enough of this delectable stuff, and there is nothing else like it anywhere.”
--Al Young

Postage Due is a sometimes-ekphrastic, often-epistolary scrapbook of poetic artifacts documenting an odd girl's coming of age.  Within, we find aubades, fugues, and nocturnes, rapturous ambivalence and apologies without regret.  Also, epiphanies: "Home is a fault line that/strikes the earth differently/ now, ruptures the pen's/smooth line like a polygraph."  Interspersed with postcards to a lost past, fan letters to childhood heroes, and inhabited voices as varied as Hester Prynne, Mr. Clean, and Vanna White, this unconventional debut collection pulses with the kitsch and candor of a bold, postmodern kunstlerroman.

Born in Seattle in 1979, Julie Marie Wade completed a Master of Arts in English at Western Washington University and a Master of Fine Arts in Poetry at the University of Pittsburgh.  Since 2004, she has received the Chicago Literary Award in Poetry, the Gulf Coast Nonfiction Prize, the Oscar Wilde Poetry Prize, the Literal Latte Nonfiction Prize, the AWP Intro Journals Award, the American Literary Review Nonfiction Prize, the Arts & Letters Nonfiction Prize, and 7 Pushcart Prize nominations.  Julie is the author of 2 collections of lyric nonfiction, Wishbone: A Memoir in Fractures (Colgate University Press, 2010) and Small Fires (Sarabande Books, 2011), as well as a poetry chapbook, Without (Finishing Line Press, 2010).  She teaches in the MFA program at Florida International University in Miami.

“Julie Marie Wade’s Postage Due is a dazzling series of necessary utterances.  Those addressed in these intriguingly immediate poems sometimes get what’s coming to them; other times, they are given their due, and this poet pays up.  Wade uses the language of Christianity to section her book, fraught with joy and pain, to explore what we owe and to whom.  She employs postcards, letters, and literary and pop culture heroines—most notably Oz’s Dorothy—to tell and retell of the dreamlike past. Come out, come out, wherever you are.  In Postage Due, you will meet the (post-confessional) young lady who fell from a star.”

—Denise Duhamel

“Poised somewhere between the good girl’s nostalgia and the bad girl’s vengeance, the speaker in Postage Due recounts a personal history shaped by familial, religious, and societal proprieties.  Wounded and rapturous at once, the letters that comprise this collection talk back to the heroes and villains of that harrowing history: girlfriends and parents, Mary Tyler Moore and The Stafford Shirt Man.  The real addressee of these letters is, of course, the speaker’s younger self, whose vulnerability and fierceness the poems achingly recover.  This book is as ardent as it is bitter, as painful as it is transfiguring.”

—Rick Barot

“ Julie Marie Wade’s Postage Due is a fierce homage to the past using a pocket knife. Her poems leave me breathless in their rough cutting into the experience of gender, sex, violence, regret, and revenge. This is a poetry that screams into what can sometimes be a hollow existence with a brave language that holds us unforgivingly in its grip." 

—Dawn Lundy Martin

“The poet's job is to name the invisible and unnameable, to give voice to the unspeaking and unspeakable past—‘All of it a dream from which you suddenly wake up.’  Julie Marie Wade's poems do just that, in a formally dexterous volume of poems that fit individual memories of a repressive childhood against the art of Magritte, the icon Mary Richards, and the protagonist of a Carson McCullers’ novel.  This marriage of high and low is made holy by the searing lyricism of the poems themselves.  Brave, defiant, and thrilling, Postage Due dares to speak from ‘the trenches of language that divide us’—to sing back from those divides a suturing song.” 

—James Allen Hall

“In her new book of very short stories, Kim Chinquee works the flash fiction form in much the same way that Raymond Carver worked somewhat longer story forms: with a stunningly complex simplicity.  There is always a roiling subtext beneath the seemingly placid surfaces and tones of Chinquee’s stories, a dichotomy which speaks to deep truths about the human condition.  Kim Chinquee is a true artist with a true vision, and Pretty is a brilliant book.”

—Robert Olen Butler

“Kim Chinquee writes with remarkable heart and grace.  Her wise capsulizings of love’s devastations and of life’s roil and disappointments come at you with a sorrowing precision that comforts even as it haunts.”

                                    —Gary Lutz

“These brief snapshots of conversations in specific settings manage to seem not like fragments of lost wholes but like vivid distillations of essential dramas, each a variation on the shared subject of thwarted intimacy. Though each snapshot is complete in itself, the book gathers mass and momentum, and so achieves a singular power.”

                                    —Carl Dennis

Kim Chinquee was raised on a dairy farm in rural Wisconsin. She served as a medical lab tech in the Air Force, and was stationed in Mississippi, Texas, England, Germany and North Dakota. She received her M.A. in creative writing from the University of Southern Mississippi's Center for Writers, her M.F.A. from the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, and she is the recipient of a Pushcart Prize and a Henfield Prize. She lives in Buffalo, New York, where she teaches creative writing.

Oh Baby is her first book of flash fiction. 

In this quiet, clear-eyed collection, Townsend
meditates on loss - childhood bereavement, depression,
divorce - to arrive at the realization that it is
through loss that we come to possess some of life's
most profound gifts.

Alison Townsend is also the author of What the Body
Knows. Her work has appeared in many journals,
including The North American Review, The Southern
Review, Calyx, and Fourth Genre, and been widely
anthologized, most recently in Are You Experienced?
and A Fierce Brightness. She teaches English at the
University of Wisconsin-Whitewater.

"The Blue Dress is filled with a capacious,
multi-faceted, and above all, physical knowledge. That
the life of the body is both our vulnerability and our
salvation is a wisdom running throughout these poems'
hard-won, bravery rendered record of losses and
loves."
-Jane Hirshfield

"The project of Alison Townsend's poetry is to chart a
course through the deepest of losses -to attempt some
safe passage through a lifetime's erasures. Intimate,
warm, and observant, this book involves us in the
inscription of a life."
-Mark Doty

"Alison Townsend's articulation of sorrows has always
cast an aura, of beauty, and deepest, truest
instruction. I've always, instinctively, moved toward
it, have always missed it when it was absent. Delicate
pieces of memory, mood, and self - self examining
itself- of hope and despair, of crystalline light
shining through "grief solid as a rock," the seemingly
unsayable grief of a mother's death... in The Blue
Dress, Alison Townsend says it."
-Sharon Doubiago

“Delicate natural imagery, an eye for particular material detail and spare language combine to create a heady emotional hit.”

–Isthmus Books Quarterly 

“This is an utterly beautiful book. I don’t know how to say it better than that. Townsend takes the memories of her life—losses, victories, the treasures and the thrownaway—and renders them into unforgettable and lasting art.”

—Vince Gotera - North American Review

“The Blue Dress, is a quietly ambitious collection of verse and prose that, through a series of declarative gestures, sculpts the distant and not so distant past into a delicate though decidedly unsentimental shape. One of Townsend’s strengths as a storyteller is her ability to dramatize the depths of honest feeling while entirely avoiding sentimental or melodramatic methods of manipulation. The poems in The Blue Dress demonstrate her unwavering dedication to the vast field of ordinary moments that constitute the emotional landscape of our lives.”

—Tony Leuzzi - Double Room 

” … a true original. His pictures of the life we lead are satiric gems, yet so consummate an artist is he that the reader can do nothing but laugh uproariously and demand ‘More, more…,’”
- Morton Marcus

”Jack Anderson is one of our great tightrope dancers. His balance is exquisite, even when he’s holding a chair, an umbrella, and an elephant … sometimes teaching high hiliarity, sometimes utmost seriousness.”
- Robert Hershon

"The writing of Kathleen McGookey shines more brightly than most fine things we feel pleasure to read. Celebrate it!"
-Naomi Shihab Nye

“A collection of poetry that, by dismantling romantic preconceptions, examines our daily need to believe in fate… it is through [McGookey’s] attention to detail and her powers of self-examination that she is able to peel away the false layers, the pretty layers, to examine their interior workings… It is this conflict between ideal and real worlds that makes McGookey’s collection so intellectually and emotionally complex.”

–Third Coast

“These poems know no bounds; they are musical, leaping, magical. With a finely crafted language of subtlety, with many shadings, a feel for syntax, and keen attention given to the ear, McGookey invokes a dozen different kinds of pleasure… McGookey is a fresh voice, an innovative and daring poet who is worth our attention… Whatever Shines is a strong first book, and a pleasure.”

–American Book Review

“Whether writing in prose or verse, McGookey manages a sensitivity and energy that encloses the reader in the clear light of what is being said… Whatever Shines lifts us to the valuable space of contemplating a way to live, and upon landing, we find it has equipped us with the strength to embrace the consequences.”

–Cimarron Review

The poet has produced a powerful narrative of the life of a Puerto Rican boy who lived the first fourteen years of his life in institutions and foster homes but then was adopted by the author and her husband and brought to New Hampshire. How Manny and his new community deal with the possible, the impossible (like spelling), and the hoped for (a real job) is at the heart of the tale that is heartbreaking and heartwarming.

This is the second book in our Marie Alexander prose poetry series. In Your Sun, Manny, Marie Harris has created a prose poem memoir that reveals in touching detail her story of adopting and caring for Manny, a child who was abused and neglected until he was fourteen, when Harris and her husband made him a part of their family.

"Take this book to your heart and carry it away. The beauty and expressiveness of the author's words will renew your faith in the possibility of using language to capture experience and make it glow with meaning."
-Laurel Speer, contributing editor, Small Press Review

"This is a complex story of hard-earned successes and brilliantly achieved failures, a story full of humor and wisdom and love:"

-Erica Funkhouser, author of The Actual World