“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. 

“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

“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