Madville Publishing - 2022 Catalog by Kim Davis

NEW TITLES FOR 2022

OBAMA’S CHILDREN BY EARL S. BRAGGS

ISBN: 978-1-948692-72-4 PAPERBACK 16.95 ISBN: 978-1-948692-73-1 EBOOK 9.99 6 X 9, 76 PP DECEMBER 2021 POETRY

A universal quest for human dignity and acknowledgement made specific through the Black experience. WHAT PEOPLE ARE SAYING ABOUT OBAMA’S CHILDREN: If poetry is music, Earl Braggs is its composer. And what he composes is jazz—smoky, sensual, serpentine stanzas of jazzy poetry at its improvisational best: staccato-trumpeting lines, tempodriven voices, melodic repetitions, lowdown bluesy fragmentations of logic and sensibility… pouring into the corners of our consciousness, ragtiming us into booty-shaking highs and tenorsaxing us into deep deep downs. Such is jazz. Such is poetry. Such is jazz and poetry together. And such is this jazz-riffing collection. —George Drew, author of Drumming Armageddon and Fancy’s Orphan “Like notes of jazz played between notes of jazz music,” Obama’s Children is a headlong riff on the motifs of race, history, legacy and love. These vital poems reverberate with elements of improvisation and pastiche and are galvanized by exultant word play and an ecstatic vividness of spirit. Of Earl S. Braggs’ many collections, Obama’s Children is a fearless, sparkling magnum opus. —Gianna Russo, Wordsmith of the City of Tampa, and author of One House Down Earl Braggs is his own man. His poems are a personal and public history of America told in numerous personas, poetic syntax, and a dancing rhythmic narrative that carries the reader into stories that seem familiar yet are often a bit askew. It’s like looking at the world through old glass windows— streets, cars, trees, people, and history are wavy and grainy but not untrue. The truth is in the spirit, in the heart of the work and the poet. Book after book reveals what it’s like to be a Black man in the United States, and therefore, what it’s like to be an American. —Rick Campbell, author of Provenance and Gunshot, Peacock, Dog

A country boy from Wilmington N.C., Earl S. Braggs is a UC and Battle Professor of English at the U of Tennessee at Chattanooga. His awards include the International Jack Kerouac Literary Prize and the Anhinga Poetry Prize. Braggs is the author of fourteen poetry collections including Negro Side of the Moon and Ugly Love.

All titles available through Ingram, all online retailers, and direct from Madville. Contact: Kimberly Davis, info@madvillepublishing.com for wholesale orders. Visit our website at https://madvillepublishing.com

CELEBRATE DOLLY PARTON'S 76TH BIRTHDAY WITH POETRY SUBMISSION CALL FOR DOLLY PARTON POETRY ANTHOLOGY TO DEBUT JANUARY 19, 2023 Last year, many of you helped celebrate Dolly’s Parton’s 75th birthday with Limp Wrist’s tribute issue, co-edited by Limp Wrist editor Dustin Brookshire and poet Julie E. Bloemeke. We had over 18 poems selected from hundreds of submissions. Both Collin Kelly and Caridad MoroGronlier were nominated for Pushcart Prizes. We Zoomdebuted the issue with a reading, complete with musical numbers and a fashion homage to our favorite Saint of Tennessee. But Julie and Dustin decided one celebration was not enough, and fortunately the folks at Madville Publishing agreed. So, what better way to begin 2022 than by topping off our cup of ambition? Help us celebrate Dolly Rebecca Parton’s 76th birthday by submitting your work for the Dolly Parton Anthology, which will debut on January 19, 2023. Submission window will open on Dolly’s birthday and close at midnight (CST) on June 1, 2022.

WHAT WE ARE LOOKING FOR: Dazzle us with your Dolly expertise. Pay tribute to her music, movies, TV appearances, philanthropy, Dollywood, Dollyisms, interviews, fashion influence, religious connection, family history. We want to see how you envision Dolly as a cultural phenomenon, and how your work helps amplify Dolly as a national treasure. And, while we love rhinestones and sequins, we want to see poems that move beyond Dolly as queen of glitz and sparkle. Poems don’t have to be “fully Dolly”—we invite work with cameos, Dolly impersonators/look-a-likes, or Dolly-adjacent portraits. We want to read poems that include a well-placed Dolly appearance that strengthens the intention of the poem. DO’S TO CONSIDER: Show us you’ve read some Dolly history, are up on Dolly lore, or give us some anecdotes that will surprise us. Reveal some Sevierville or Nashville or share some insight into Dolly’s costume designers or tour bus driver. Know where or on what Dolly first penned the lyrics to “I Will Always Love You?” Run with that.

However, tread carefully when considering messing with perfection: there is a reason “Jolene” moves us all; trying to improve on Dolly’s writing might just make you a bit too mighty for your britches. Previously published poems will be considered; please provide information on where the poem first appeared and be certain that you retain rights to your work. A few notes for previous Dolly Limp Wrist issue submitters: If you submitted to the Dolly Limp Wrist issue and your poem was accepted, you will be required to resubmit. If you submitted to the issue previously and your Dolly poem was not accepted, please only submit revised versions of your work. Thanks to fundraising and generous donations, Madville is waiving the submission fee for the anthology. Dustin and Julie will be donating their royalties, which will be paid annually, to Dolly’s Imagination Library. To be transparent, they will also provide evidence of the donations by way of their personal websites.

SUBMISSION GUIDELINES: • • • • • •

All submissions must be uploaded to Submittable. Poems submitted via email will not be considered. Submit no more than 5 poems in one Microsoft Word document. Poems should not exceed 3 pages each; submissions should not exceed 15 pages total. Poems should be single spaced and in Times New Roman font. The Microsoft Word document should not contain any author identifying information. All submissions must be received by midnight (CST) on June 1, 2022.

PAYMENT: Contributors will receive one copy of the anthology as payment for the acceptance of their work.

NEED INSPIRATION? START HERE: • Dolly Parton Adds Three New Guinness World Records to Epic 2021 • Dolly Parton Steers Her Empire Through a Pandemic and Keeps It Growing • The Grit and Glory of Dolly Parton • Dolly Parton Achieves First Christian Chart No. 1: 'It Does My Heart Good to Know That We Have Touched So Many' • 8 Times Dolly Parton Cemented Her Status as an LGBTQ Icon • Dollymania • Dolly Parton on BLM: ‘Of Course Black Lives Matter’ • The Unsinkable Dolly Parton • Dolly Parton Looks Back on Her Best Country-Glam Fashion Moments • 10 Of Dolly Parton’s Greatest Quotes On Life, Love And Everything Else In Between • Dolly Parton opens up about song inspirations, being 'Aunt Dolly' to female country artists and those tattoos • Dolly Parton's Imagination Library • Barbara Walters Tried to Play Dolly Parton But She Really Played Herself • Dolly Parton's America • "Dolly Parton, Songteller" is a gold mine of little-seen photos and personal anecdotes All titles available through Ingram, all online retailers, and direct from Madville. Contact: Kimberly Davis, info@madvillepublishing.com for wholesale orders. Visit our website at https://madvillepublishing.com

DEAD FISH WIND BY COOPER LEVEY-BAKER

ISBN: 978-1-948692-74-8 PAPERBACK 19.95 ISBN: 978-1-948692-75-5 EBOOK 9.99 5 ½ X 8 ½, 204 PP JANUARY 2022 FICTION

Cicely has got problems. Stuck working a crappy job to take care of her deadbeat father, she’s living just a step above homelessness in a town ruled by a remote, affluent elite and stricken with a catastrophic outbreak of red tide. But then Cicely makes a friend, perhaps her first, and she starts dreaming of a way out of her predicament. It’s a scheme that involves stolen placentas and a dangerous outlaw doula that leads to a confrontation with the malignant forces around her and the mother who abandoned her as a child. In this grim, comic debut novel, author Cooper Levey-Baker tells a bizarre comingof-age story in prose that is lyrical, gross, tragic, goofy, and maybe even a bit tender. Cooper Levey-Baker is a writer and journalist. His fiction has appeared in the Sierra Nevada Review and Burrow Press’s Fantastic Floridas series, and his journalism has won multiple awards from the Florida Magazine Association and the Florida Society of Professional Journalists.

WHAT READERS ARE SAYING ABOUT DEAD FISH WIND: For those who adore the dystopic cli-fi, the not-quite-today, the Jeff-VanderMeer-on-aplate-in-Florida, Cooper Levey-Baker’s Dead Fish Wind does it all. Ciceley, our heroine, in her pasties serving Cub Scouts. Ciceley confronting her father with a boxcutter. Ciceley inching toward happiness with Zinnia, a remote chanteuse. Dead Fish Wind, Levey-Baker’s first novel, is set to explode. But beware the orange-scented golf course, the male nurse in blue scrubs, and, of course, the fish. —Terese Svoboda, author of Great American Desert The scariest part of Cooper Levey-Baker’s near-term dystopia in Dead Fish Wind is that after our poisoned, red tide summer, that future is already here. Levey-Baker’s heroine, Cicely, scrapes by in an ecologically ruined Florida. One wishes this taut novel, LeveyBaker’s first, could serve as yet another eco-warning. Instead, it’s a guide on the dark choices we will all soon have to make to survive. —Tony D’Souza, author of Whiteman, winner of the Florida Book Award for Fiction The Florida depicted here is one we know and one we don’t want to know; it is our present and it is our possible future. Levey-Baker’s achievement, through wondrous prose and compelling characters, is to vividly bring us into this debauched and debased world and, perhaps, offer us a plaintive warning. Dead Fish Wind is an important novel from an impressive new writer. It’s not to be missed. —Brian Petkash, author of Mistakes by the Lake

ALL I SEE IS YOUR GLINTING: 90 DAYS IN THE PANDEMIC

POEMS BY GIANNA RUSSO PHOTOGRAPHS BY JENNY CAREY ISBN: 978-1-948692-99-1 HARDBACK 28.95 ISBN: 978-1-956440-00-3 PAPERBACK 19.95 ISBN: 978-1-956440-01-0 EBOOK 9.99 8 X 8, 90 PP JANUARY 2022 POETRY / PHOTOGRAPHY

All I See Is Your Glinting, a dialogue between poems and photographs, documents each day of the last quarter of 2020. Against the backdrop of the pandemic, ninety poems written in a created form called the daily, detail the small meaningful moments in daily life. Stunning photographs of the natural world and intimate environments enrich and further open the text. Together, they refract and reflect our collective experience through a personal lens. All I See Is Your Glinting champions the value of nature, friendship, family, and love in coping with individual and universal suffering and grief. Gianna Russo is the inaugural Wordsmith of The City of Tampa (2020-22). She is the author of the poetry collections, One House Down (Madville Publishing, 2019) and Moonflower (2011), winner of a Florida Book Award. She has published poems in Green Mountains Review, Gulf Stream, Negative Capability, Crab Orchard Review, Apalachee Review, The Sun, Poet Lore, saw palm, The MacGuffin, Florida Review, Tampa Review, Ekphrasis, Florida Humanities Council Forum, Karamu, The Bloomsbury Review, and Calyx, among others. She is Assistant Professor of English and Creative Writing at Saint Leo University, where she directs the Sandhill Writers Retreat. A third-generation Tampa native, a mother and grandmother, Gianna lives in an almost 100-year-old bungalow with her husband Jeff Karon and their cat Gingko. Jenny Carey is a photographic artist residing in Florida. Her work explores the themes of memory, loss, and sense of place. Ordinary subjects and intimate environments are used to evoke memories, document the intangible, and narrate unseen beauty. She began her practice as a photojournalist and that perspective is evident in her work. Her images have been exhibited nationally, most recently at The Tampa International Airport Gallery (Florida), Manifest Gallery (Ohio) and Davis Orton (New York). Her photographic works are included in numerous private collections. The natural environment is often the subject matter in her images, but frequent travels have opened narratives with urban elements. She is the founder of Creatives Exchange, a collective of professional women artists in Tampa, Florida where she maintains a studio practice.

WHAT PEOPLE ARE SAYING ABOUT ALL I SEE IS YOUR GLINTING: 90 DAYS IN THE PANDEMIC with poems by Gianna Russo and photographs by Jenny Carey: Gianna Russo’s All I See Is Your Glinting is a beautiful, timely collection of delicate, haiku-like poems that shape-shift and transform into a magical, wide-ranging long poem, a necklace of small beauties to wear in grief and celebration. I love the way the subtly changing form of these poems unfolds across the days, building resonances that ultimately feel like revelation. This is formal poetry in the best sense of that word: the limitations Russo has imposed upon herself guide and control her improvisations while sustaining a scintillating tenor of surprise and delight. Paired with striking photographs by Jenny Carey, there’s great wisdom in this supple and inventive verse—not a word is superfluous, not a moment of perception lost.

—Michael Hettich, author of The Mica Mine, winner of the 2020 Lena Shull Book Award, and many other books of poetry In this poignant and gentle book, poet Gianna Russo strikes out to cross the pandemic in a form that she has invented, the daily. Each day is an image, a number of words, and an attempt to contain fear and make sense of the wrenching fragility that had become viral and global. Paired with Jenny Carey’s healing photographs, this innovative and luminous book goes straight for the heart.

—Janisse Ray, author of Red Lanterns and A Cracker Childhood Engaging with Gianna Russo’s verse and Jenny Carey’s photographs is a stirring immersion. Each diary entry possesses its own poignant beauty. All tell us something about ourselves and our relationship with the earth, its resilience and our own—and that there is something worthwhile to hold onto from hard times, just as you will want to hold onto this inspiring book.

—Jack E. Davis, winner of the Pulitzer Prize for The Gulf: The Making of an American Sea Gianna Russo’s dailies—haiku-like poems—mark the seasons of the plague. She deftly mines the shifting emotions, the fear, the fleeting beauty, the frustrations, and the sudden joys of each passing day. Jenny Carey’s photographs tell their own story at the nexus of the manmade and natural worlds, her meanings often spelled out in the crinkled letters of fallen leaves. All I See Is Your Glinting is a pitch-perfect chronicle of our shared year of masks and menace, alongside the muted doings of daily life.

—Paul Wilborn, author of Cigar City: Tales from a 1980s Creative Ghetto The book speaks unabashedly and refreshingly about issues of human interpersonal relationships and feelings of alienation... Both the poetry and the photography speak with an unsentimental approach to reality in both material and spiritual character. Russo and Carey touch on universal themes such as acknowledging the limits of human experience, putting into words and colors something so difficult to understand, let alone explain. — Zora Carrier, Ph.D., Executive Director, Florida Museum of Photographic Arts These haiku-like diary entries by the poet Gianna Russo and images from nature by the photographer Jenny Carey speak to one another in an inspiring dialogue. Together, they create a dual spiritual diary that responds to our pandemic era. The poems meditate on landscape, relationships, and current events, while the photographs focus on nature’s news of feathery grasses, glinting light, and rippled reflections in water. —Lynn Saville, NYC Fine Art Photographer

JUDGMENT DAY & OTHER WHITE LIES BY MIKE HILBIG

ISBN: 978-1-948692-76-2 PAPERBACK 18.95 ISBN: 978-1-948692-77-9 EBOOK 9.99 5 ½ X 8 ½, 164 PP FEBRUARY 2022 SHORT STORIES

Judgment Day & Other White Lies is a short fiction collection that deconstructs whiteness by retelling versions of Greek, Roman, and Christian myths, concepts, and characters through a contemporary lens that reads whiteness into history as a force of destruction for white characters (in addition to those they oppress). From an alternative biblical Genesis about apes having orgies while on magic mushrooms to create western civilization (as told by the kinds of philosophers who have to be stoned themselves), to a retelling of the Oresteia where the white heavy metal musician Orestes is helping his aging mother Dawn commit suicide, to a white graffiti writer, magician, and cultural mis-appropriator named Per-C who fundamentally alters reality by painting fantastical ’Dusa portraits all over the city of Houston to the eponymous story Judgment Day that primarily concerns the mind-altering-collapsing effects of a hallucinogenic on a Christlike white man who has two sets of memories stuck in his head, these stories show the tragicomic consequences of what happens when white people identify with the white lie of an identity that lives a fiction to maintain power. Cover by Crowcrumbs, a designer, illustrator, and artist based in Houston, Texas. She studied design and studio arts at the University of Houston. Mike Hilbig graduated in 2017 from Sam Houston State University with an MFA in Creative Writing, Editing, and Publishing. He lives in Houston, TX and teaches English at the University of Houston-Downtown and at Lone Star College.

The stories in Judgment Day & Other White Lies are quintessentially Mike Hilbig, his deft artistic imagination at work (and play). The stories engage in a kind of Romantic revolution. But Hilbig’s is a post-Romantic strategy designed both to turn the natural into the supernatural and the supernatural into the natural, and to deconstruct, destabilize that Romantic experiment—a postmodern impulse I believe Coleridge himself would find deeply com-pelling…. These are stories underpinned by wisdom and humor, which are simultaneously a powerful cultural critique—the call for a reckoning. —Robin Davidson, author of Luminous Other and Poet Laureate of Houston, TX from 2015-2017 Judgment Day & Other White Lies is a kaleidoscopic collection—sharply intellectual, at times hallucinatory, but always grounded in deeply felt and richly imagined human drama. In these stories, the mythic and the mundane collide and remix in startling ways, feeling both timeless and contemporary. The transfigurations that Hilbig’s characters undergo are rendered with such precision and empathy that the reader can’t help but feel transformed as well. —Nick Lantz, author of You, Beast A thoroughly enjoyable work by Mike Hilbig on the interconnectedness of race, gender, religion, and spirituality … and Houston! A writing style that’s at once Milan Kundera like, and original, with a voice that speaks for and to our tumultuous times. —Amit Verma, author of A Quiver in the Purlieu

THE PURSUIT: A MEDITATION ON HAPPINESS BY GERRY LAFEMINA

ISBN: 978-1-948692-78-6 PAPERBACK 19.95 ISBN: 978-1-948692-79-3 EBOOK 9.99 8 X 8, 154 PP FEBRUARY 2022 PERSONAL ESSAY / CREATIVE NONFICTION

It’s CNF. Like the Stones’ Exile on Main Street, it’s a hodge-podge: memoir, philosophy, lit crit, pop culture, history, and reflection. Gerry calls it a meditation. It really is an essay in the French way of being a trial or an experiment.

Gerry LaFemina’s poetry collections include Baby Steps in Doomsday Prepping, The Story of Ash and Little Heretic. His essays on prosody, Palpable Magic, came out in 2015 and Kendall Hunt recently released his textbook, Composing Poetry: A Guide to Writing Poems and Thinking Lyrically. He teaches at Frostburg State University and in the Carlow University MFA Program. https://gerrylafemina.com/

WHAT PEOPLE ARE SAYING ABOUT GERRY LAFEMINA’S THE PURSUIT: A MEDITATION ON HAPPINESS

Among the many inspired riffs in Gerry LaFemina’s freewheeling meditation on happiness, nothing impressed me more than the hard-won honesty the author brings to bear on his own foibles, wounds, privileges, and passions. Though he never explicitly says so, his book strongly implies that while honesty cannot guarantee happiness, it does make happiness possible. It has done that much and more for LaFemina. —Garret Keizer, author of The Unwanted Sound of Everything We Want I have a hard time distilling books that are wise, timely, gracefully written, richly compassionate, and honest and truthful and necessary. And yet, here I go, fumbling around trying to find the right words to entice you into opening these pages, knowing that no map is the territory, no portrait is the person. All I can tell you is Gerry LaFemina’s voice is as warm and direct as soul music, and his observations about our fallen world will give you hope. Go on ahead, open the book. Here comes our morning. —Reginald McKnight, author of White Boys and He Sleeps All titles available through Ingram, all online retailers, and direct from Madville. Contact: Kimberly Davis, info@madvillepublishing.com for wholesale orders. Visit our website at https://madvillepublishing.com

HEARTBREAK TREE BY PAULETTA HANSEL

ISBN: 978-1-948692-88-5 PAPERBACK $16.95 ISBN: 978-1-948692-89-2 EBOOK $9.99

6 X 9, 94 PP POETRY MARCH 2022

painting by Angelyn DeBord Heartbreak Tree is a poetic exploration of the intersection of gender and place in Appalachia. “There is a road, but the road is still inside you,” the mature Hansel tells the girl she was, encouraging her: “You are trying. Remember.” This book does the work of that remembering, honoring the responsibility of the poet to speak the forbidden stories of her own and other women’s lives. Pauletta Hansel is a poet, memoirist and teacher who is author of eight poetry collections including Friend, Coal Town Photograph and Palindrome, winner of the 2017 Weatherford Award for best Appalachian Poetry. Her writing has been widely anthologized and featured in print and online journals including Oxford American, Rattle, The Writer’s Almanac, American Life in Poetry and Verse Daily. Appalachian Journal, Appalachian Review, Cincinnati Review, and Still: The Journal, among others. Pauletta was Cincinnati’s first Poet Laureate, 2026-2018 and for ten years served as managing editor of Pine Mountain Sand & Gravel, the literary publication of Southern Appalachian Writers Cooperative.

WHAT READERS ARE SAYING ABOUT HEARTBREAK TREE: Women. We belong to a secret sharing, among mothers and daughters, girlfriends and sisters and lovers. We see each other across the grocery line, or in traffic, or in the salon—and we nod, knowing that we each have suffered brutalities, unnamed. We survive what others do to us, and we survive what we do to us, so often in self-violating silence, as we go on because we must—mustn’t we?—smiling, pleasing. But sometimes, rare and sure, a voice comes out of this silence, unpleased and singing; sometimes, somehow, a woman knows how to transform this violence into medicine, enough to share. Pauletta Hansel’s Heartbreak Tree is just such a miracle. Every unflinching, healing poem tells the mother, daughter, girlfriend, lover who is silenced inside me to never forget: it is only the truth that sets us free. —Rebecca Gayle Howell, Author, American Purgatory; United States Artists Fellow, 2019 Heartbreak Tree is a gorgeous book, carefully assembled from flowers, dirt, graveyards, family memories, and letters to the poet’s younger self. It’s a love story to a place and a people, an excavation, a time capsule, a fierce inquiry and a song. Read it once for the pleasure of the honest voice, read it again for the beauty of the land and lamentation at its destruction, and keep reading it because its heartbeat, however specifically regional, is the same that pulses through all of us, whispering “home, home, home.” —Alison Luterman, In the Time of Great Fires, winner of the 2020 Catamaran Poetry Prize Pauletta Hansel’s Heartbreak Tree is the breakout work of a lifetime, a work of breaking silences and ancestral truth telling, of weighing what poet Mary Oliver called a “box of darkness” in heart and hand like the pound of flesh it extracted—and finding it a strange gift of hard growth, harder knowledge and wisdom, and perhaps most importantly, self-forgiveness. —Linda Parsons, author of Candescent and This Shaky Earth Pauletta Hansel’s poems were born in the hardscrabble mountains of Kentucky. The splendor of their moments of beauty that spring up like “ironweed purpling/ the spent fields” seems earned, deserved. —Michael Simms, author of American Ash, and editor of Vox Populi

MUDDY BACKROADS: STORIES FROM OFF THE BEATEN PATH EDITED BY LUANNE SMITH AND BONNIE JO CAMPBELL ISBN: 978-1-956440-14-0 PAPERBACK $20.95 ISBN: 978-1-956440-15-7 EBOOK $9.99 6 X 9, ~300 PP PROSE ANTHOLOGY MARCH 2022

For this anthology, Muddy Backroads: Stories from off the beaten path, the editors asked for stories that moved away from the norms of daily life to explore the side roads that take us away from the known. What do your characters do when they step away from what’s seen as normal or usual? What happens when they find themselves in unexpected situations or locations? What if nothing about their lives is what most consider typical? When a character takes a “muddy backroad,” he, they or she moves away from society and out into a place where anything can happen. Where will those backroads and back alleys take us?

CONTRIBUTORS:

ALSO EDITED BY LUANNE SMITH:

Dorothy Allison, Hillary Behrman, Henri Bensussen, T.C. Boyle, Elizabeth Bruce, Ulrick Casimir, Michael Darcher, George Drew, Stephanie Dupal, Michael Gaspeny, Roger Hart, David Hartshorne, Suzanne Heagy, Jen Knox, Mark Lammers, Robert McBrearty, Jayne Anne Phillips, Heather Mateous Sappenfield, Lee Scharf, Misty Skaggs, August Tarrier, Melanie Rae Thon, Luis Alberto Urrea, Siobhan Wright, Paula Younger NO MUD WAS ACTUALLY REQUIRED. the editors are LUANNE SMITH & BONNIE JO CAMPBELL. the judge is ALAN HEATHCOCK, author of VOLT: STORIES. All titles available through Ingram, all online retailers, and direct from Madville. Contact: Kimberly Davis, info@madvillepublishing.com for wholesale orders. Visit our website at https://madvillepublishing.com

WATERMARK BY JEFF HARDIN

isbn: 978-1-948692-80-9 paperback $18.95 isbn: 978-1-948692-81-6 ebook $9.99

6 x 9, 80pp poetry april 2022

At the heart of Jeff Hardin’s inventive seventh collection Watermark, a devotional, philosophical faith seeks “to know what can’t be known,” to step into, as if a sanctuary, “some deeper / deep / than what our words / can touch.” In each poem, his meditations stitch back through a visible, vertical phrase—a whispered prayer, a “watermark”—that serves not only to anchor thought but also to align and to re-align the purpose of thought within “this bent and broken world.” Born from Frost, Dickinson, Rilke, Whitman, and others, these phrases bind us and bless us at a time “when it seems the words / to enter others’ lives / are disappearing.” In an age in which it is increasingly difficult to “sort out what is true,” Hardin’s poems invite us to wake to the mystery all around us, to time’s revelatory unfolding, and to how our minds might find healing, if not communion, if only we listened intently enough to hear “the intercessions / made on our behalf.”

Jeff Hardin is the author of six previous collections of poetry, most recently A Clearing Space in the Middle of Being, No Other Kind of World, and Small Revolution. His work has been honored with the Nicholas Roerich Prize, the Donald Justice Poetry Prize, and the X. J. Kennedy Prize. Originally from Savannah, Tennessee, he has taught for almost three decades at Columbia State Community College in Columbia, Tennessee.

WHAT PEOPLE ARE SAYING ABOUT WATERMARK In Watermark, his seventh collection, Jeff Hardin continues his project of retrieving shreds of grace from the dusty corners of ache and want. With an attention to form as original and incisive as Mary Szybist’s, and with a sense of wonder as far-reaching as Wendell Berry’s, he spins out poems that have a timeless quality—like the hand stitching of a nine-patch quilt, or congregational singing from a shape-note hymnal, or the eternity-flung stanzas George Herbert left behind. Jeff Hardin’s poems are vessels of wisdom and truth. —Bobby Rogers, author of Paper Anniversary and Social History For years, Jeff Hardin’s captivating, spiritually engaged poems have revealed the resonant beauty of the natural world and celebrated the labor of metaphysical striving. Watermark’s lyrically rewarding poems provide a “whispered prayer” that tracks Hardin’s deliberations and debates with luminous companions—Yeats, Whitman, Hopkins, Dickinson, Oliver, the Four Evangelists, U2, John Mellencamp, and more. This poet’s restless intellect pays tribute to “the shape of thought,/how it shimmers and stretches/and cannot lie still,” examining the legacy of personal loss, family trauma, and the “murky depths” of faith. Hardin, a master craftsman, brings into view “the glimpsed-forth/shining/of one thing seen/through the presence/of another. —Jane Satterfield, author of Apocalypse Mix

THE IRON SCAR: A FATHER AND SON IN SIBERIA BY BOB KUNZINGER WITH PHOTOGRAPHS BY MICHAEL KUNZINGER ISBN: 978-1-948692-86-1 PAPERBACK $19.95 ISBN: 978-1-948692-87-8 EBOOK $9.99 MEMOIR APRIL 2022

The Iron Scar is both a literal journey by a father and son on the longest railway journey in the world, and a metaphoric pilgrimage of not just the author and his adult son, but all of us learning to let go on our way through life. Bob Kunzinger is the author of nine collections of essays, including: A Third Place: Notes in Nature, and Penance: Walking with the Infant. He lives in Virginia.

Michael Kunzinger’s photography has ap-peared in publications such as Kestrel, Blue Planet Journal, and St Anthony Messenger, and has been in solo and group shows in Virginia, New York, and Galway, Ireland. His abstract work was featured for a solo exhibition at the renowned Quick Center for the Arts in New York, a finalist in an International Competition featured at The Louvre in Paris, and he is the author of the photo essay book, Across This Wild Land: A Photographic Journey on the Trans-Siberian Railroad from Blurb Books www.blurb.com/b?ebook=638486.

WHAT PEOPLE ARE SAYING ABOUT THE IRON SCAR: The Iron Scar brought me on a journey that unexpectedly and artfully had me thinking about my own father and my sons throughout the book, as well as introducing me to the wild, warm, and colorful world of Siberia. Thank you for bringing me onboard with you and your son. —Martin Sheen, actor and author of Along the Way: The Journey of a Father and Son I wish every book I've read over the past two months had been as moving, gripping, and loaded with fascinating information. The journey becomes an emotional and thematic whole that transcends the standard “look what I saw” travel book. So many things stick with me: the royal blue station shacks, the birches with no tops, the meat and potato pastries, the smell of onions, the vodka, the wheel tapping, the once-in-hundred-year flooding, the vast vacancies of human presence, the moving village of the train, the Leningrad hero, the Leningrad ghosts . . . Just so much. Well done! —Tim O'Brien, author of The Things They Carried and Going After Cacciato

MAY 1, OPEN FOR SUBMISSIONS TO THE SECOND ANNUAL ARTHUR SMITH POETRY PRIZE September 30, 2022 submission deadline. Winners will be announced in December 2022 September 2023 publication The winning poet receives a $1,000 advance, a standard royalty contract, and 20 copies of the published book. Finalists will also be considered for future publication. ARTHUR SMITH was born in central California. He received degrees from San Francisco State University (B.A., M.A.) and from the University of Houston (Ph.D.). He passed away on November 9th, 2018. To those who knew and loved him, he was a master teacher and a masterful poet. His first book of poems, Elegy on Independence Day, was awarded the Agnes Lynch Starrett Poetry Prize and was published by the University of Pittsburgh Press in 1985. That same year, it was selected by the Poetry Society of American to receive the Norma Farber First Book Award. His second book of poems, Orders of Affection, was published by Carnegie Mellon University Press in 1996, and his third book, The Late World, was published in 2002, also by Carnegie Mellon University Press. His most recent book of poems is The Fortunate Era (2013). His work has been honored with a “Discovery”/The Nation Award, a National Endowment for the Arts Creative Writing Fellowship, two Pushcart Prizes, and he was selected as the Theodore Morrison Fellow in Poetry for the 1987 Bread Loaf Writer’s Conference. He served two terms as an advisory member of the Tennessee Arts Commission Literary Panel, and he was a Professor of English at the University of Tennessee. His poems have appeared in numerous journals including The Nation, The New Yorker, Poetry, The Southern Review, The Kenyon Review, and North American Review. —Curt Rode

WORRISOME CREATURES BY KATE SWEENEY

ISBN: 978-1-948692-82-3 PAPERBACK $17.95 ISBN: 978-1-948692-83-0 EBOOK $9.99 POETRY 78PP MAY 2022 This is a collection of the body, of the failings of history and family. The range is wide and balanced—in geography, in tenderness and trauma, in startling imagery, craft, and heart. Kate Sweeney’s work takes me within and outside myself, making both realms real and seen/felt as if for the first time. In fact, much of the collection feels like entering uncharted territory—and how intriguing to explore it! Here is a master poet and, as the highest compliment, I wish I could write poems like those in Worrisome Creatures. —Linda Parsons, author of Candescent and This Shaky Earth Kate Sweeney Kate Sweeney is the author of the chapbook Better Accidents (Yellow Jacket Press, 2009). Her work has appeared in Best New Poets, Meridian, Tampa Review, and Poet Lore, among others.

WHAT PEOPLE ARE SAYING ABOUT WORRISOME CREATURES: In this sharply observed account of the subtle and not-so-subtle varieties of violence we visit upon one another, often on those we love best, Kate Sweeney reflects on the relationships families sustain and sometimes unravel. To have a child is to consign oneself to a lifetime of worry, and these vibrant and moving poems wrestle with this constraint as they delineate the consequences of loving and the various impositions we visit on those we live with. The poems meditate on our fragilities and strengths and, more broadly, observe the burdens we impose on the landscape we live in in this complex and deeply intriguing collection.

—Sidney Wade, author of Bird Book and Straits & Narrows

Reading Worrisome Creatures is like paging through a family album, images rich with loss and love, and then walking the beach at the continent’s edge, along history’s wrack line. With a voice intimately, achingly authoritative, Kate Sweeney’s poems startle us with both the familiar and the exotic. —Elizabeth Dodd, editor of Dear America: Letters of Hope, Habitat, Defiance and Democracy, and author of Horizon’s Lens: My Time on the Turning World Kate Sweeney’s debut collection Worrisome Creatures bursts with beauty, humor, frank confidences, and nervy resolution. With pitstops across America and the decades, these poems range over everything from pregnancy, motherhood and exes to cockroaches, invasive trees, her own jealousies and other people’s stupidity. Sweeney deploys fresh, startling images in these lines and bolsters them with both tenderness and wit. Worrisome Creatures announces the arrival of a poet in full command of her craft and a worldywise voice that is just right for this moment. —Gianna Russo, Wordsmith of the City of Tampa and author of All I See Is Your Glinting and One House Down

GENESIS ROAD BY SUSAN O’DELL UNDERWOOD

ISBN: 978-1-948692-84-7 PAPERBACK $22.95 ISBN: 978-1-948692-85-4 EBOOK $9.99 FICTION JUNE 2022

Glenna Daniels faces a midlife cul-de-sac. She bears a recent miscarriage and third divorce the way her Appalachian parents taught her to cope with tragedy—in stoic secrecy. She quits her social work position in Knoxville and runs away from home at the age of thirty-six, heading west with childhood friend, Carey, a gay professor in Atlanta. During their years in school, Glenna protected him from bullies. Now Carey is her savvy guide as she tries to heal her fractured life. Through the wilds of America Glenna grapples with the past and reconciles a way back home.

WHAT READERS ARE SAYING ABOUT GENESIS ROAD BY SUSAN O’DELL UNDERWOOD “Genesis Road is a sprawling travel narrative that centers on Glenna Daniels, a woman from Appalachia, and her childhood best friend Carey, who as a gay man abandoned small town living for an urban cultural center. As Glenna and Carey make their way across America, readers grapple with something new while also being aware that every landscape and every character has a vast and untold history. Throughout this complex journey, Underwood carves out a deeply rendered story of America that reveals the deep scars of its history even as it is also a place where we love and lose each other, searching for a definition of home.” —Mike Hilbig, author of Judgment Day & Other White Lies “Glenna Daniels of Genesis Road joins a long tradition of Appalachian narrators bound to home and bound to leave. A woman with no plan, Glenna leaves behind the ashes of her life, roadtripping with a lifelong friend with his own losses and facing the landscape of the West ‘like a blank page and writing her name there, a brand new name.’ The humor and warmth of intimates on the road interlaces with Glenna’s account of her past full of regret, hurt, and the rare tender moment of salvation. Underwood’s compassionate novel allows us to journey with her characters into a more deeply understood sense of self and belonging.” —Jessie van Eerden, author of Call It Horses, winner of the 2019 Dzanc Books prize, and The Long Weeping (Orison Books 2017), winner of a Foreword INDIES Book of the Year Award.

Susan O’Dell Underwood grew up in Bristol, Tennessee, the daughter and granddaughter of publicschool teachers who also farmed. She earned an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of North Carolina at Greensboro and holds a PhD in English from Florida State University. She directs the creative writing program at Carson-Newman University, where her husband, artist David Underwood, also teaches. Besides two chapbooks, she has one full-length collection of poetry, The Book of Awe (Iris Press), and her poems, nonfiction, and stories are published in many journals and anthologies, includ-ing Oxford American, Ecotone, Bellevue Literary Review, Still: The Journal, and A Literary Field Guide to Southern Appalachia.

PROVENANCE: A NOVEL

BY SUE MELL

WINNER OF THE MADVILLE BLUE MOON NOVEL COMPETITION ISBN: 978-1-956440-02-7 PAPERBACK $19.95 ISBN: 978-1-956440-03-4 EBOOK $9.99

JULY 2022

Still grieving his wife’s early death, DJ has spent the last three years—and the money from her insurance policy—collecting guitars, composing music, and continuing to shop the Brooklyn stoop sales and flea markets they’d always enjoyed. When his building is sold, he takes refuge in his younger sister’s half-finished basement, imagining a comfortable and solitary retreat in Hurley, the small Hudson Valley town where they grew up. Instead, he finds himself caught up in her troubling divorce, drafted as caregiver for his 11-year-old niece, and unable to face or afford a storage unit crammed with hundreds of vinyl records and every other scrap of his former life. DJ gifts his niece a marbled glass egg, a porkpie hat, and one of his prized guitars. But what’s asked of him, on his return to Hurley is not to give the perfect object—it’s to give of himself. Winner of the Madville Publishing 2021 Blue Moon Novel Award, Provenance is a story of hope in ruin. With subtle poignancy and humor, it offers fresh takes on contemporary conflicts, exploring pivotal moments of sorrow, longing, and renewal in the lives of three deeply textured and indelible characters.

(cover art by Sue Mell) Sue Mell is a writer from Queens, NY. She earned her MFA from Warren Wilson College and was a 2020 BookEnds fellow at SUNY Stony Brook Southampton. Her collection of micro essays, Giving Care, was a semi-finalist for the Digging Press 2020 Chapbook Prize. Other work has appeared in Brilliant Flash Fiction, Cleaver Magazine, Digging Through the Fat, Jellyfish Review, Narrative Magazine, Newtown Literary, The Journal of Compressed Creative Arts, and Whale Road Review. Find her at suemellwrites.com and on Twitter @suemell2017

WHAT PEOPLE ARE SAYING ABOUT PROVENANCE: The story is compelling, and the relationships that are explored here are a study in the dynamics of family and social expectation. It reminded me in ways of novels such as The Shipping News, and others of like categories, studies in mood and situation and character. More to the point, it’s just plain beautifully written. The prose is gentle, swaying, warm, and inviting. It’s a good read, and it stays with the reader afterwards in a very pleasant if somewhat bittersweet way. —Clay Reynolds, clayreynoldstx.com, Blue Moon Novel Competition judge, and author of The Vigil, Agatite, Franklin’s Crossing, Ars Poetica, Monuments, and The Tentmaker. "Provenance is a beautifully supple book about the power of renewal and the everyday, small redemptions hiding within families. Sue Mell artfully captures the hold of the past in all its intoxicating, tumbledown glory and sings it to life in the present." —Dominic Smith, author of The Last Painting of Sara de Vos

“Widowed DJ leaves Park Slope to move in with his younger sister and her 11-year-old daughter in upstate New York, leaving behind a lifetime’s collection of musical instruments, memorabilia, and flea market treasures. Unmoored without the security of his stuff, DJ is finally able to face his own grief and become able to truly love, for perhaps the first time in his life. Sue Mell’s searingly beautiful prose and her truly troubled, truly decent characters make Provenance a gorgeous, unforgettable novel about learning how to value what is most important in life: those we love and those who show us how to be better.” —Susan Scarf Merrell, author of Shirley: A Novel “Sue Mell’s Provenance is a story of resiliency. Her characters are as challenged and as flawed as the rest of us, but through the small things they do for each other and the small gifts they give each other, they find their way forward. Ultimately, this is a book about kindness, compassion, and sacrifice—old-fashioned virtues that, Mell shows us, still hold their value.” —Peter Turchi, author of Maps of the Imagination “In Sue Mell’s Provenance, an adult brother and sister navigate a tricky relationship that tests the limits of interdependence. They exemplify what Alfred Hayes said, that what one ran out of was not mistakes, but the years to make them in. This novel taps into the characters’ reserves of motivation and strength in service of what we all want: another chance, and what might still be possible when our best efforts fall short.” —Amy Hempel, award-winning author of Sing to It and The Collected Stories of Amy Hempel “Siblings DJ and Connie have each lost a spouse and a home. Now what? Living together as adults, they make sense of what they still possess— literally and metaphorically, using the objects in their lives to consider the past and move into the future. Sue Mell’s Provenance is a relatable, intricate novel about later-life reckoning that (like the antiques store it features) offers up plenty of treasures for the reader.” —Debra Spark, author of Unknown Caller “Wisdom of great depth and span marks each page of Sue Mell’s Provenance. The two memorable central characters, brother and sister, try to dig out of accumulations of guilt and loss and dread while learning to count on each other as never before. Mell presents their complex dilemma with remarkable sensitivity and intelligence. The reader of Provenance intimately experiences the characters making the difficult effort to recognize who they were and who they are, not for the sake of easy absolution, but for the intention of living more authentically.” —Kevin McIlvoy, author of One Kind Favor “Sue Mell's Provenance is a novel of irresistibly messy lives, loves, and legacies that, ironically, reads immaculately. Not a letter, not a paragraph, is out of place in this beautiful, beautiful book." —Liam Callanan, author of Paris by the Book “In clear-eyed, luminous prose, Sue Mell tells the story of a man submerged in grief and impossible yearnings who digs his way out of the remnants of a former life. D.J. scrutinizes his vanishing options with the startling honesty of a man bewildered by circumstance, adrift in his suddenly unrecognizable existence, but always articulate, always a charmer. In this wise and beautiful novel, everyone falls in love with D.J., including the reader.” —Megan Staffel, author of The Exit Coach “Sue Mell's astute powers of observation, wit, and emotional intelligence shine in this deeply rewarding novel about a middle-aged man-child who can't stop himself from screwing up. DJ has been relying on his charm to coast through life. Women have always bailed him out. But when his wife succumbs to cancer, his life falls apart. Grief—past the platitudes—is a dangerous trap, especially for a guy like DJ. I raced through the pages of this book to see if he was capable of doing better for the sake of his sister who takes him in. Long after I read the last page, this book sings in my heart.” —Olga Zilberbourg, author of Like Water & Other Stories “Sue Mell is a master of quiet tension, which builds slowly throughout Provenance, until the characters seem to have run out of options to make their lives work, either alone or together. At the same time about large themes like life and death, the novel gathers its momentum from the small moments and choices that fill our days. Packed with quietly exquisite prose, nearly every word perfectly chosen, Provenance fills the reader with both admiration and anxiety—until the very end, when the main character, who fizzled away his previous life and has come to live in his divorced sister’s basement, realizes he might need to rethink his purpose.” —Jane Anne Staw, author of Small: The Little We Need for Happiness “If you’ve ever suffered a loss, if you’ve ever had to start over, you will find kinship and hope and even joy in Provenance, the story of a widower seeking to salvage his life after moving back to his small hometown in upstate New York. I cannot recall reading a debut novel imbued with such depth of understanding and compassion for its characters, or one that better captures the messy business of living. Sue Mell writes like a dream.” —Will Allison, author of the novels What You Have Left and Long Drive Home

SECRET CITY BY KATHERINE SMITH

ISBN: 978-1-948692-90-8 PAPERBACK $17.95 ISBN: 978-1-948692-91-5 EBOOK $9.99 POETRY AUGUST 2022

Secret City explores belonging and power through the eyes of children and adults, whether the relationships in question are to a family, to a religion, to a region or to a country. The imagery of the natural world weaves in and out of the dreams of a young Jewish girl brought to live with a Christian family in Oak Ridge, Tennessee during World War II. A woman with a childhood of being bullied moves north only to find herself an authority figure, teaching students who are themselves outsiders marked for deportation. In the midst of confusion and ideology, where victim and perpetrator ceaselessly exchange roles, the voices in these poems search for a ground of belonging in the natural world, in serving others, and in the intimately textured language of poetry. Cover art by Kathryn (with a y) Smith. She goes by Kat and is no relation to this author, Katherine Smith.

WHAT PEOPLE ARE SAYING ABOUT SECRET CITY: I have long admired Katherine’s finely tuned, lush work and her discipline as a writer. Her vision continues to expand and deepen in this third collection, Secret City. Persecution, war, and its haunting aftermath come in various forms. But redemption is nigh in this work, the prayer of embrace and belonging answered by red sumac, willow, camellia, chestnut pony. The speakers are indeed born again: “I’m going to live twice, / once baptized in the Clinch River, // once with the wild geese that fly over Norris Dam / towards the Cumberland Plateau and never look down.” —Linda Parsons, author of Candescent and This Shaky Earth Secret City is the perfect title for Katherine Smith’s latest collection of poems. Literally, it is the name for Oak Ridge, Tennessee, where atomic bombs were made in secret during World War II. This is the setting for many of her poems inspired by her relatives who immigrated there. Metaphorically, it stands for the life of the mind of this fine poet working at the height of her powers to create poems that lyrically and lovingly describe her journey from childhood as a (lonely) Jewish girl in the South into adulthood, all the while “… yearning for/ the scent of a place, the song of a people.” A keen observer of the natural world, the poems are grounded by these exquisite images as she finds the language of identity at the various stages of her life. Ultimately, Smith finds peace with her history and her choices, stating in the final poem: “I am American, teacher, woman, Jew. In both worlds/ I am born not of those who stayed behind/ but of those who sailed away.” —Marjory Wentworth Katherine Smith is a meticulous observer of the flora and fauna of the Tennessee Valley, allowing us to join her “…to breathe… to feast/ at the common table of trees and mountains.” She deftly turns her description of trees into a commentary on human nature: “I learned to distinguish the American chestnut/ from the oak chestnut by the serrated edge,/ …I learned to recognize my kind by its serrated song.” With a stunning lyricism, Smith reminds us we cannot separate ourselves from the natural world we carry inside: “So too you have seen the ordinary oak/ of your own heart. Its aorta branches/ from the ventricle, beats/ on the screen.” —Nancy Naomi Carlson, author of An Infusion of Violets, Associate Editor, Tupelo Press

Katherine Smith’s poetry publications include Boulevard, North American Review, Cincinnati Review, Missouri Review, Ploughshares, The Southern Review, and many other journals. Her first book, Argument By Design (Washington Writers’ Publishing House) appeared in 2003. Her second book of poems, Woman Alone on the Mountain (Iris Press), appeared in 2014. A Tennessee native, she works at Montgomery College in Maryland.

BICYCLES OF THE GODS: A DIVINE COMEDY BY MICHAEL SIMMS

FICTION ISBN: 978-1-956440-04-1 PAPERBACK $19.95 ISBN: 978-1-956440-05-8 EBOOK $9.99 AUGUST 2022

In Bicycles of the Gods, the main character, Jesse, presents an earthly incarnation of Jesus Christ come to earth in the body of a 12-year-old boy in the company of Xavi, who is the earthly incarnation of Shiva, Destroyer of Worlds, also a 12-year-old boy. The pair stand on a hilltop above the city of Los Angeles contemplating how best to destroy it as a precursor to destroying the entire world to rid it of humanity so it can refresh and rebuild. Xavi is ready to get on with the task The Big Guy, God, has assigned them, but Jesse has a problem. He isn’t sure that everyone deserves to be destroyed. WHAT PEOPLE ARE SAYING ABOUT Bicycles of the Gods A playful, provocative, and imaginative discursus, Bicycles of the Gods is an affront to racism, sexism, classism, ageism, and heterosexism as it posits a Divine who will not be captured and used by white supremacists for their own purposes. Michael Simms has created an engaging new world order that functions within our familiar one. —Rev. Dr. Moni McIntyre, author of Social Ethics and the Return to Cosmology Whether Michael Simms is writing a personal essay about growing up with autism or poems about our dying planet, a barfight, or the mystery of a hummingbird’s radiance, he is a master storyteller whose narratives hold memorable moments full of fresh and telling details that unlock the heart. And now, in Bicycles of the Gods he has invented a new genre—apocalyptic satire. The novel is hilarious at times, but make no mistake, Simms is serious as a heart attack in a hurricane. It tells an old story in a completely new way, exploring issues of faith, politics, trauma, imagination, and the triumph of love over tyranny. —Peter Makuck, author of Wins and Losses: Stories Set in today’s digital-age Los Angeles, with a delightful cast of characters, including celestial ones “in disguise to make it easier to move through the world,” you will encounter The Big Guy, Maria, Jesse, Xavi, Luke, and Abe, as well as Christine, Mikey, Patrick, the Six Sisters of the Piston, Father Jack, Stefan the Poet, Birdie, Dharma the Dog, and Caruso the Parrot, all of whom are caught up in the tragic-comic battle between the forces of Good and Evil, Light and Darkness. Michael Simms has given us a frolicking and “novel” approach to the Apocalypse of John that offers a front-row seat to the shenanigans of the times in which we are presently living. Bicycles of the Gods deserves its own Broadway billing as both “Dantean” and “Shakespearean.” —Rev. Dr. Charles Davidson, author of Bone Dead and Rising: Vincent van Gogh and the Self Before God MICHAEL SIMMS is an accomplished poet, writer, editor, publisher, teacher, blogger and entrepreneur. Seven collections of his poetry, three novels, and two widely adopted poetry textbooks have been published or are under contract with publishers. He has also been the lead editor of over 100 published books, including the bestselling Autumn House Anthology of Poetry, now in its third edition. Simms has taught at a number of universities, including Chatham University’s MFA program from 2005-2013. Bicycles of the Gods is Simms’s debut novel.

GRAVITY HILL

BY SUSANNE DAVIS

RUNNER UP IN THE MADVILLE BLUE MOON NOVEL COMPETITION ISBN: 978-1-956440-06-5 PAPERBACK $19.95 ISBN: 978-1-956440-07-2 EBOOK $9.99

FICTION

SEPTEMBER 2022

Gravity Hill is a story about Jordan Hawkins, her family, and a small rural town in Connecticut wrecked by the tragic death of three boys on Gravity Hill. But what first appears to be a tragedy of drunk driving leads back to a mysterious accident that has plagued a small town for years, sending Jordan on a journey to clear her brother’s name. What she discovers—a hidden toxic waste site—sends the whole town on its own bumpy road to self-awareness and healing. WHAT READERS ARE SAYING ABOUT GRAVITY HILL: Susanne Davis’s Gravity Hill delivers the goods: hers is a heartfelt story of loss and renewal, populated with characters who are flawed, feisty, and entirely sympathetic. At the heart of this story is Jordan Hawkins, an irrepressible young woman whose grief over her brother’s death triggers the risky behavior and impetuous decision-making that will send her down roads she had not meant to travel. Davis has a gift for dialogue and vivid description; her details about agricultural life, the family dynamic, and the rules of the road are evocative and precise. It’s both a pleasure and an honor for me to endorse Gravity Hill, a story to which readers will be drawn and by which they’ll be rewarded. —Wally Lamb, New York Times bestselling author of We are Water and She’s Come Undone Susanne Davis is an extraordinary writer. She creates characters that you instantly care about, that you worry over, that you live with. She writes about situations and lives that, like John Irving, are not only fiercely entertaining, but they also have a deep moral center about how we should be living our lives, what we should care about, how we can manage our rich and complicated world. A diamond talent. —Caroline Leavitt, New York Times bestselling author of both Is This Tomorrow and Pictures of You In Gravity Hill, Susanne Davis has tackled the wide, sweeping themes of love and loss, environmental troubles, feuds, families forced to confront each other’s mistakes, communities coming apart and then coming together, regrets, fathers and sons, and families torn up by old lies and secrets. This story, told with gentle but vivid writing, brings us to painful tears of recognition about the human condition and yet uplifts us with the redemptive quality of hope. —Maddie Dawson, author of The Stuff That Never Happened

SUSANNE DAVIS is the daughter of a sixth-generation dairy farmer and lives near her dad’s farm where the real Gravity Hill exists. Her dad works every day to keep his farm from developers, just like Jordan's father. She has an MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and a short story collection, The Appointed Hour (Cornerstone Press). Individual stories have been published in American Short Fiction, Notre Dame Review, Clackamas Literary Review, and other literary journals. Her work has won awards and recognition, including 2nd place Madville’s Blue Moon Novel Competition and mention as distinguished story in the Best American Short Stories series. She teaches creative writing at the college level and beyond.

JUST LIKE OZ: ESSAYS ON A FEW POET WIZARDS & THEIR MULTIFACETED MAGIC BY GEORGE DREW ISBN: 9781956440126 PAPERBACK $20.95 ISBN: 9781956440133 EBOOK $9.99

ESSAYS / LITERARY CRITICISM OCTOBER 2022

Just Like Oz, a book consisting of eighteen essays, some short and some long, mostly examines the work of “wizard poets,” some well-known and even iconic, a few unknown to the wider literary community. George Drew’s purpose is to take a deep critical dive into the art of poetry by analyzing the work of those wizard poets and, in doing so, praising them and their shimmering art. For those poets, Drew shows us, the poetic flood flowered. For readers, these essays provide a kind of yellow brick road into an Oz of truth and beauty that is the magic realm of poetry.

George Drew is the author of nine poetry collections, including Pastoral Habits: New and Selected Poems and The View from Jackass Hill, winner of the 2010 X.J. Kennedy Poetry Prize, both from Texas Review Press, Fancy's Orphan, Tiger Bark Press, and most recently Drumming Armageddon, Madville Publishing, 2020. Drew also has published a chapbook, So Many Bones: Poems of Russia. He has a new chapbook coming out titled Hog: A Delta Memoir, Bass Clef Press. He has won awards such as the South Carolina Review Poetry Prize, the Paumanok Poetry Award, the Adirondack Literary Award, the St. Petersburg Review Poetry Contest, the Knightville Poetry Contest and in 2020 the William Faulkner Literary Competition. Drew was a recipient of the Bucks County Muse Award in 2016 for contributions to the Bucks County PA. literary community. His biography appears in Mississippi Poets: A Literary Guide, U. of Mississippi Press, edited by Catherine Savage Brosman. In 2019 Drew collaborated with singer/songwriter Rick Kunz on a CD of original poetry and songs entitled A Triumph of Loneliness, KBW Music.

FAIRVIEW CHRONICLES (VOL. II): THE CASE OF JOSIE WHITE By Johnathan Paul, illustrated by Andrew Dunn 978-1-948692-66-3 paper 19.95 978-1-948692-67-0 ebook 9.99 6×9, 200 pp. Fiction October 31 2021

FAIRVIEW CHRONICLES: THE CASE OF JOSIE WHITE is book two in the Fairview Chronicles series. It picks up where book one left off, but with the focus of the story on Josie White, the missing girl who drew Randall Covington, the protagonist from book one, to the mysterious town of Fairview. After the events of A WAYWARD PROPOSITION, Randall joins forces with Deputy Nick Faraday and Scientist Tim Hollis to uncover the truth behind the disappearance of Josie White. What they uncover is more than they bargained for and they come face to face with legendary beasts and mystical forces. Johnathan Paul is an award-winning Texas filmmaker, screenwriter and artist. His work

as a freelance illustrator and concept artist led him to experimental film, 3D animation, and documentary film making. Johnathan wrote the first story set in the fictional town of Fairview in 1998 and has quietly expanded that world ever since. Fairview Chronicles is the first of many titles set in this fantastic universe filled with mystical horrors. He is a Professor at the University of North Texas where he teaches film production, visual effects and screenwriting. He also has a long history as a journalist and op-ed writer, having written for various film industry websites. Among his greatest influences are Stephen King, Steven Spielberg, J.R.R. Tolkien, H.P. Lovecraft, and Terry Gilliam.

Andrew Dunn is an award-winning art director, illustrator, and graphic designer. His work as a comic illustrator and concept artist led him to

connecting with Johnathan Paul while in college. From that point on, Andrew has worked as the art director for many films and as the lead artist on Fairview Chronicles since 2007. His draftsmanship has grown through the years and has been influenced by artists such as Kenneth Rocafort, Greg Capullo, and Fiona Staples among others.

Also in this series: Fairview Chronicles (Vol. I): A Wayward Proposition

THE CYCLONE RELEASE

BY BRUCE OVERBY RUNNER-UP - MADVILLE’S BLUE MOON NOVEL COMPETITION ISBN: 978-1-956440-08-9 PAPERBACK $19.95 ISBN: 978-1-956440-09-6 EBOOK $9.99

NOVEMBER 2022

It’s the late 90s Internet boom, and Brendon Meagher has just lost his wife Sadie in a freakish car accident at the edge of Silicon Valley. The Cyclone Release follows Brendon as he emerges from tragedy and lands in a pre-IPO start-up that promises astonishing riches. Mo Gramercy, a bright and commanding colleague with her own deep secret, joins Brendon, disrupts his malaise, and takes him as her lover. The characters’ careen toward IPO millions, their secrets suddenly converging, and both are shaken without mercy from bucolic notions of work, life, and impending fortune.

WHAT READERS ARE SAYING ABOUT THE CYCLONE RELEASE: Masterful, provocative, and compulsively readable, The Cyclone Release speaks to the unpredictability of love and loss and the seemingly heartless way life changes on a dime, while offering readers an intimate view into the bizarre landscape of the Silicon Valley tech start-up. An impressive debut. —Danielle Girard, USA Today and Amazon #1 Bestselling Author of Far Gone In a cautionary tale of Silicon Valley, Brendon Meagher is a modern-day Tommy Wilhelm for fans of Saul Bellow’s Seize the Day. Overby delivers a poignant look over the cubicle walls of a high-tech start-up and into the lives of hard-charging acolytes. Filled with love and loss, and propelled by the looming promise of financial windfall, this debut is not to be missed! —Jeffery Hess, author of No Salvation and the Beachhead trilogy

Born in California’s Santa Clara Valley long before it became the Silicon Valley of today, BRUCE OVERBY both participated in and keenly observed the transformation and evolution of an insular place that many still fail to understand. His fiction has appeared in several literary journals, and his story “Bookmarks” won First Prize in the Lorian Hemingway Short Story Competition. He holds an MFA in Writing from Queens University of Charlotte and continues to live in Northern California with his wife Caroline. The Cyclone Release, a finalist in the Madville Publishing Blue Moon Novel Competition, is his first novel.

THE PARTING GLASS WINNER OF THE 2021 ARTHUR SMITH POETRY PRIZE BY LISA PARKER

POETRY ISBN: PAPERBACK $18.95 ISBN: EBOOK $9.99 NOVEMBER 2022

Jesse Graves, the judge for the 2021 Arthur Smith Poetry Prize, said: “… moving and memorable in terms of subject matter… accomplished in form and technique. The individual poems are brilliantly expressed, and they add up to sustained and coherent whole. The poet … captures the experiences living [in Appalachia] and moving away and the feelings about the language, beautifully.” Lisa Parker is a native Virginian, a poet, musician, and photographer. Her book, This Gone Place, won the 2010 Appalachian Studies Association Weatherford Award and her work is widely published in literary journals and anthologies. Her photography has been on exhibit in NYC and published in several arts journals and anthologies.

THE GATE IN THE GARDEN WALL ESSAYS BY SAM PICKERING ISBN: 978-1-956440-10-2 PAPERBACK $19.95 ISBN: 978-1-956440-11-9 EBOOK $9.99 DECEMBER 2022

Last year Sam Pickering announced that he’d written his final word. “I intend to sit in a chair at the edge of the driveway and on sunny days doze through hours waking up occasionally to identify birds on the feeder. My hands and lap will be empty, and I won’t worry about a wind scattering papers across the yard.” Three days later Mike a college classmate wrote him. “Given all the books you have written, it makes me sad to hear that you have written your last book. Please remember what mighty things 80-year-olds can do. For instance, Goethe taught himself Greek when he was 80. Too bad he died at 81.” “I’m trapped,” Pickering said and picked up his pencil. “Words are me.” Sam Pickering has written more than thirty books and barrows of articles. When not at his desk, he was in the classroom, the last thirty-five teaching English at the University of Connecticut. Originally from Nashville, he did not plan to teach, or write. “But,” he says, “the good life knocks a person about and takes him here and there”—in Pickering’s case to years meandering the Mid-East, Eastern and Western Europe, to Australia, and Nova Scotia, to places great and small. He says he loved teaching, the secret to which was “liking people.” His pages reflect his enjoyment of and love of life, particularly the ordinary things that form the fabric “of all our lives.” Vicki Pickering holding Little Sammy Pickering, Big Sammy looking on beside the Reedy River in Greenville, South Carolina. (Photo by Edward Pickering)

Madville Publishing - 2022 Catalog

Articles inside

Heartbreak Tree

The Pursuit: A Meditation on Happiness

Judgment Day & Other White Lies

All I See Is Your Glinting

Dead Fish Wind

Dolly Parton Poetry

Obama's Children by Earl S. Braggs