Madville Publishing - Full Catalog 2018-2025 by Kim Davis

FALL 2018

An Englishman in Texas: A Memoir

by Ron Kenney

978-1-948692-02-1 paper 16.95

978-1-948692-03-8 ebook 9.99

5½x8½, 144 pp. Memoir

August 2018

An Englishman in Texas is a memoir by Ron Kenney, an English jockey who came to the United States in 1960. His autobiographical account begins with his childhood in the northeast of England during WWII. He goes on to describe how, with no knowledge of horses, he was sent four hundred miles from home at 14 years of age to apprentice as a jockey. He’d been turned away by the foreman at the coal mine because he was too small. The story follows Kenney through his coming of age to his coming to America when he was 30. It follows his fortunes in pursuit of the American Dream. Kenney tells of riding horses for some of the wealthiest and most famous horse trainers in Texas. He tells of his loves and his betrayals, and he introduces the people who helped him along the way.

Ron Kenney is a man short in stature, but tall in tales.

Dr. Barbara Hayes DNP, FNP-C

Gunshot, Peacock, Dog

Poetry by Rick Campbell

978-1-948692-04-5 paper 15.95

978-1-948692-05-2 ebook 9.99

6×9, 80 pp.

Poetry

September 2018

Rick Campbell’s latest collection reads like an extended elegy for the poet himself, for his lost loved ones, and for the changes in the wider world. In this way, it is reminiscent of Hardy. This is the work of a man wise in the ways of the world and not afraid to be what we all are: flawed. His voice is personal and vulnerable . . . The book consists of very detailed and compressed poems, both focused on the natural world and on an inner landscape described with a consistent tone and voice throughout.

George Drew, author of Fancy’s Orphan, Pastoral Habits, and Down and Dirty

These poems are crafted from the raw material of experience, from a life lived deeply and without varnish, and each poem sparks and flares with hard -earned wisdom. Brian Turner, author of Here Bullet, Phantom Noise, and My Life as a Foreign Country, a Memoir Rick Campbell has published five previous collections of poetry and numerous poems and essays. He teaches in the Sierra Nevada College Low Residency MFA Program and at Florida A&M University. He lives on Alligator Point in Florida’s Panhandle.

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

Sisypha Larvata Prodeat (Sisypha Wearing a Mask Advances)

薛西法假面潛行

Poetry by Jan Cole, Art by Adelina Moya

Translated by Angela Liu

978-1-948692-00-7 paper 16.95

978-1-948692-01-4 ebook 9.99

6×9, 128 pp.

November 2018

This poetry collection was first published in 1987 when Jan Cole lived and worked in San Francisco, but the poems were written over the course of many years, beginning with her time in university at the Newcomb College of Tulane University and at the Sorbonne. Many of the poems are set in the town of Huntsville, Texas, where Jan was raised and lives today. Still others reference friends Jan has known and worked with around the world. This edition includes the striking art of Mexican artist, Adelina Moya and Chinese translations by Angela Liu. Finally, the project would never have taken place if not for the editorial oversight of Lorrie Lo Wagamon.

Here is what people are saying about this unique collection:

These poems are about life, love, friendship, and masks. The rhythmic lines carry quick movements of life . . . They are witt y and thought - provoking, funny, agonizing with suggestions of human struggles, and [they are] freshly imagistic 薛西法假面潛行」是本有關生命，友誼與面具的詩集。韻律十足的詩句帶動了生命與思想的快節奏。它們機智且引人深思，有趣，有暗示人類掙扎的痛苦，也有將憂鬱與蛋重疊的鮮活意象。大部分的詩都很短，但它們令人有瞬間領悟的時刻。

Dr. Jianqing Zheng (鄭建青英美文學博士)

These poems have given me greater insight into this remarkably talented woman whose low, soft voice and extreme modesty belie an active and passionate inner voice one which can express universal truths while telling her personal story. 這些詩也助我更深入的領會到，這個有著非凡天賦的女人，其實在她輕柔，低沉，且極端謙虛的言語之下，還有一道激情活躍的聲響在敘述自身故事的同時，還能表達普世真理的一道聲音。

Dr. Ralph Pease (洛夫．皮士英美文學博士)

Poet, Jan Cole, seated, Kimberly Davis, Jacqueline Davis, Lorrie Lo (editor), and Joy Pan (publicist) at the book launch party for Sisypha Larvata Prodeat (Sisypha Wearing a Mask Advances). Photo by Linda Pease at the Wynne Home Arts Center in Huntsville, Texas. This project was supported in part by a grant from the Huntsville Arts Commission, in Huntsville, Texas.

Jan Cole is best known as a musician, composer, linguist and teacher. Studying music at the Paris Conservatory with Jean Pierre Rampal and Franciso LaGoya, among other musical legends, fueled Cole’s love of language as well as music. She performs on many instruments including flute, recorder, krummhorn, fife, penny whistle, guitar, ukulele, mandolin, tenor banjo, 5-string banjo, psaltery, guitarrón, keyboard, folk harp, and dulcimer. One of her greatest joys is seeing the professional successes of her flute and guitar students.

Adelina Moya’s art is displayed in galleries around Mexico and Texas. She teaches porcelain, ceramic, watercolor, wood-burning, oil, acrylic and wash techniques.

No Evil is Wide

A Novella by Randall Watson

978-1-948692-06-9 paper 16.95

978-1-948692-05-2 ebook 9.99

5½x8½, 144 pp. Fiction

November 2018 (graphic novel coming in 2023!)

No Evil is Wide is the linear and violent story of an unnamed narrator, the prostitute he is tasked to “find,” and Carpenter Wells, the man that makes that return impossible. The remembrances of the narrator revolve around sexual awakening, family distance and dissolution how they crumble to common and inevitable animalism. It is filled with philosophical epistles to the reader that concretize the themes of the work. The narrative that allows the reader purchase within the text begins with the narrator locating the unnamed girl while the world devolves into a chaotic madness of bombings and destruction not dissimilar to contemporary existence. This chaos serves as an uncanny reminder of the everyday violence we overlook.

Randall Watson is the author of No Evil is Wide, (Madville Publishing), which received the Quarterly West prize in the novella, The Geometry of Wishes (Texas Review Press), a finalist in the Juniper and Tampa Review Poetry Prizes, The Sleep Accusations, which received the Blue Lynx Poetry Prize at Eastern Washington University, (currently available through Carnegie Mellon University Press), and Las Delaciones del Sueño, translated by Antonio Saborit with an Introduction by Adam Zagajewski, published in a bi-lingual edition by the Universidad Veracruzana in Xalapa, Mexico. His website is https://randallwatsonauthor.com

just read [this] novella and loved it. gorgeous sentences. so lush even for all its darkness. something sort of noir-ish about it. i was so touched

Nance Van Winckel, author of Our Foreigner, Book of No Ledge, and Pacific Walkers

I would not have picked the winner I have were anyone to try and tell me what it was about, what it was like, what it was. And in a way I am still struggling to figure out how to describe [it] except to say it is a work of art. Sometimes reminiscent of Cormac McCarthy, sometimes Kem Nunn, there is to this work the kind of ambition, the sort of bravery and insight and quality of writing and mind behind it that all defy easy summation. The language to this, its pace, its architecture, its audacity and cruel bone-jarring brutality and the cold and loving and miserable and strong-hearted vision of it just blew me a way. Period. This was a meaningful, powerful, flatout, go-for-the-throat read on all fronts. And what makes it especially strong is that throughout this dark dark dark story there is a strand of hope, unbeatable, undeniable, unquenchable hope, despite the ugly and graphic and deadly world the story inhabits.

Brett Lott, former editor of Quarterly West and of Crazy Horse

This is a fascinating read.… The poetry of this book is astounding. It reads like a glorious symphony of sounds, even triumphing over the cruelness of the world depicted within. The story is complex and not for the fan of light reading, for this reads much more like classical literature. Watson’s story centers around an unnamed narrator and his obsession with a prostitute in a world filled with evil. In-between the story of finding her, the author weaves the philosophy and beliefs of the narrator. The book will challenge you at every turn.

Julia Picks 1

2019

The Autobiography of Francis N. Stein: The Last Promethean

A Novel by A. Rooney

978 - 1 - 948692 - 08 - 3 paper 18.95

978 - 1 - 948692 - 09 - 0 ebook 9.99

5½x8½, 216 pp.

Fiction

February 2019

The Autobiography of Francis N. Stein: The Last Promethean is a hell of a story about the last imagined descendant of Dr. Frankenstein’s wretch the spurned monster. It offers struggle and pathos, pain and absolution, deception and deliverance. Reminiscent of Neil Gaiman’s Shadow Moon from American Gods, Francis Stein is a slow thinking giant of a man who attracts attention wherever he goes. Stein seems cursed with bad luck, and trouble waits for him around every turn in spite of his good intentions.

Mix Blue Velvet with a dash of True Romance, add some gothic and some noir, flavor with firebear and Pho and enter the engaging, shifting, transforming, surreal vision of Francis, offspring of one of literature’s most famous creations . . .

–Randall Watson, author of No Evil is Wide and The Geometry of Wishes

Rooney’s title character is a superb creation and, like Mary Shelley’s original, a compelling chronicler of life as a monstrous outsider, as terminally unique, “dependent on none and related to none” (to borrow Shelley’s phrase). Yet, driven by the police and other wouldbe destroyers high into the Colorado Rockies, Francis Stein manages to forge tenuous friendships: fragile connections with others that offer the possibility of redemption, of a second chance, of learning what it means to be genuinely human. Sharply written, with flashes of dark comedy and lyric evocations of the 21st-century American West, The Autobiography of Francis N. Stein gives us a beautiful monster for our time and place as Shelley did for hers.

Thomas H. Schmid, author of Fools of Time

A. Rooney is an associate professor who teaches writing at Jindal Global University in Sonipat, India when not in Denver, Colorado. He has published a collection of stories, The Colorado Motet (Ghost Road Press) and a novella, Fall of the Rock Dove (Main Street Rag). His stories and poems have appeared in journals, magazines and websites all over the world. A linked collection, The Indian Motel Stories is forthcoming from Bombaykala Press.

Fairview Chronicles

A novel by Jonathan Paul with illustrations by Andrew Dunn

978 - 1 - 948692 - 10 - 6 paper 18.95

978 - 1 - 948692 - 11 - 3 ebook 9.99

5½x8½, ~208 pp.

Fiction

March 2019 out of print

With a peculiar and creative blend of mystical horror and science fiction, Fairview Chronicles takes us into the mind of lonely college professor Randall Covington as he uncovers the dark and magical secrets of the town of Fairview. The series of connected stories and journal entries centers around a secret society known as the Order of the Red Moon and the sinister Necromancer they serve. Slowly, but assuredly Randall begins to uncover the spectral demon’s plot. The only question that remains is, will he be able to maintain his sanity until the end?

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 has a long history as a journalist and op-ed writer for various film industry websites. Among his greatest influences are Stephen King, Steven Spielberg, J.R.R. Tolkien, H.P. Lovecraft, and Terry Gilliam.

Dancehall Poetry

edited

by Janet Lowery

978 - 1 - 948692 - 12 - 0 paper 18.95 978 - 1 - 948692 - 13 - 7 ebook 9.99

6x9, ~256 pp.

Poetry

March 2019

If, as Philip Larkin says, poetry preserves the memory of the human race, we believe that sweet, smoky, gritty memories of scooting boots across dusty dancefloors in honkey tonks deserve to be part of that record. This collection offers memories of love found and of love lost. There are verses about line dancing and mechanical bulls, crusty bartenders and jukeboxes whining out two-stepping songs full of pedal-steel guitar. And, of course, the collection won’t be complete without a few crying-inyour-beer poems too.

Janet Lowery ’s poetry has been published in journals such as Poetry East, Greensboro Review, Concho River Review, and in anthologies such as Mutabilies Press’s 2015 Untameable City and the 2011 Improbable Worlds (edited by Martha Serpas); Texas in Poetry 2 (TCU Press, 2002), the Poetry East collection Who Are the Rich and Where Do They Live? (2000), and Women’s Blood (Continuing Saga Press, 1981).

The World Was My Garden, Too

by Sam Pickering

978 - 1 - 948692 - 14 - 4 paper 19.95

978 - 1 - 948692 - 15 - 1 ebook 9.99

5½x8½, 304 pp.

Familiar Essays

May 2019

The World Was My Garden, Too is a collection of familiar essays in which Sam Pickering wanders the blooming world. He roams New England, Arkansas, the Caribbean, Nova Scotia and the familiar and odd plots of mind and thought. He explores shorelines and climbs “hillish” mountains. He sits on porches and talks to passersby and their dogs. He meets strange and delightful people, most of whom are real.

“Reading Pickering,” a reviewer wrote in The Smithsonian decades ago, “is like taking a walk with your oldest, wittiest friend.” “Now,” Pickering says, “I am old, and the friends who thought me witty have fallen off the perch. But that’s okay. What I write makes me smile and mutter, ‘What a guy.’” And what wonderful essays these are pages that awaken the affections and make readers smile and embrace the beauty of this bruised world

Sam Pickering grew up in Nashville, Tennessee. He spent 67 years in classrooms learning and teaching and has long been a rummager and writer wandering New England and the South, the Mid-East, Britain, Australia, and Canada. He has written some thirty books and is a member of the Fellowship of Southern Writers.

A Third Place: Notes in Nature

by Bob Kunzinger

978 - 1 - 948692 - 16 - 8 paper 16.95

978 - 1 - 948692 - 17 - 5 ebook 9.99

5 ½ x8 ½ , 144 pp.

Familiar Essays

August 2019

A Third Place exists in the extremes, pinpointing the details in nature which demand attention, and finding within those details our place in the bigger picture. Set in a series of observations and experiences, A Third Place on the one hand brings us all closer to nature through the eyes of the author yet makes us wonder if he has been following us around on our afternoon walks

Bob Kunzinger is the author of eight collections of non-fiction, and has been widely published in publications such as World War Two History, Southern Humanities Review, the Washington Post, St Anthony Messenger, and more, including notations for essays in Best American Essays. He lives and writes in Virginia.

A Clearing Space in the Middle of Being

by Jeff Hardin

978 - 1 - 948692 - 18 - 2 paper 16.95

978 - 1 - 948692 - 19 - 9 ebook 9.99

6×9, 72 pp. Poetry

September 2019

If the taste of the eternal “is increasingly absent in our words,” then Jeff Hardin’s sixth collection, A Clearing Space in the Middle of Being, attempts to behold language anew, to listen in on its “preview of eternity.” Aware of ambiguities that plague our lives and given to swerves of logic and dislocations, to echoes and reverberations “too numerous to see in some totality,” his poems nonetheless speak openly to existence, to the mind’s “attempts/to console itself,” and to the “intoxication of incoherence” existence so often feels like. Here in a postmodern world, is it still possible to step boldly into certainty, into clarity, to find a sacred and shared space where “all moments blaze up with a speaking/voice”? Hardin listens intently, discovering more and more how “wanderingly vast” enchantment still might be. In the presence of so many options for understanding, he chooses to believe “a new/parable unfolding, still instructive,” pointing him toward a fellowship with others who likewise “lean toward thinking some healing is already/underway.”

Jeff Hardin is the author of five previous collections of poetry, most recently Small Revolution and No Other Kind of World. His work has been honored with the Nicholas Roerich Prize, the Donald Justice Poetry Prize, and the X. J. Kennedy Poetry Prize. His poems have appeared in The Southern Review, Hudson Review, North American Review, Gettysburg Review, Southern Poetry Review, and many others. He is a professor of English at Columbia State Community College in Tennessee. Visit his website at www.jeffhardin.weebly.com

One House Down

by Gianna Russo

978 - 1 - 948692 - 20 - 5 paper 16.95

978 - 1 - 948692 - 21 - 2 ebook 9.99

6x9, 72 pp.

Poetry

October 2019

The candid poems in Gianna Russo’s One House Down are grounded in experiences of ambivalence and oneness, not unlike those we sometimes find in true love. Russo ruminates on the past and scrutinizes the present in her hometown of Tampa with honest affection, concern, anger and delight. She asks an essential question: How can we treasure a place whose history and values have sometimes supported injustice? And if those wrongs are still evident today then what? With family roots in Tampa that go back over a century, Russo skillfully pursues an answer in these inventive, surprising poems.

Gianna Russo, a third generation Floridian, is the author of the award-winning collection, Moonflower. A Pushcart Prize nominee, she has had publications in Ekphrasis, Crab Orchard Review, and Calyx, among many others. She is founding editor of the Florida poetry chapbook publisher YellowJacket Press, yellowjacketpress.org. She holds an MFA in Poetry from the University of Tampa, and is Assistant Professor of English and Creative Writing at Saint Leo University where she directs the Sandhill Writers Retreat.

2020

Baby Steps in Doomsday Prepping

Prose Poems by Gerry LaFemina

978 - 1 - 948692 - 24 - 3 paper 18.95 978 - 1 - 948692 - 25 - 0 ebook 9.99

6x9, 72 pp.

Poetry

February 2020

Anyone in the mood to be enchanted by a collection of prose poems that celebrate the quotidian, the commonplace, the ordinary things of this world those “dumb beautiful messengers,” as Walt Whitman famously referred to them in “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry”? Then you best pick up a copy of Gerry LaFemina’s book Baby Steps in Doomsday Prepping…. [LaFemina offers a] kind of precision with language making a “place” into a “thing” and conveying its feel, look, and impression on the soul with such searing clarity…. [his poems] enchant the senses and succeed in stopping time . . . so that we might examine the things of this world with love and intelligence, so that we might hear them speak to us again.

Janet Lowery, editor of By the Light of

Gerry LaFemina’s poetry collections include 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. gerrylafemina.com

a Neon Moon

Runaway : An Anthology

edited by Luanne Smith, Michael Gills, & Lee Zacharias

978 - 1 - 948692 - 26 - 7 paper 22.95 978 - 1 - 948692 - 27 - 4 ebook 9.99

6x9, 300 pp. fiction anthology March 2020

What follows in this anthology is a collection of stories, real or imagined, that have been carefully crafted into works of art on the theme of running away. . . . In many of them absence becomes presence the absences created for those left behind or the absences created within those who leave, or even think about leaving, others behind. In every one of these stories something is missing, a parent, a feeling, or some essential part of the self.

It is no surprise that many of these stories are motivated by abuse. . . . In one case a teen mother sacrifices herself by returning to an abusive father to let her baby daughter go for what she hopes is essential medical care. Not many of us know where or even how to run, and though a few characters run to, most of them run from. But to or from, one thing comes clear to them and to the reader: you can run from yourself, but no one ever completely escapes.

The two prize-winning stories1 both involve rituals, one mysteriously invented, the other ill-conceived. And though both of the honorable mentions 2 begin with young women barely into adolescence hanging out with friends, the tone and atmosphere of those tales diverge. That these are all such different stories should give everyone heart. . . . No one’s running away story is quite like anyone else’s. Perhaps no one’s circumstances are quite like anyone else’s. Memory and imagination never spin exactly the same way. More importantly, the art one creates from such circumstances, or the circumstances imagination creates, is unique. These fully realized stories speak in diverse ways to a nearly universal desire. Who has never wanted to run away from something? Every one of these stories has been selected because it contributes to a larger narrative. Every one of them speaks to the questions that belong to that larger narrative. Who are we if we refuse to be shaped by our pasts? Who are we if we choose no longer to be ourselves? Who are we, whether we are left behind or gone? from the forward by Lee Zacharias

CONTRIBUTORS:

Jodi Angel – Emily Chiles – Aden Albert – Richard Jay Goldstein – Bradford Philen – Misty Skaggs – Maureen O’Brien – Louise Marburg – Emily Hoover – Erica Soon Olsen – Jeffrey Byrem – Michael Simpson – Deborah Johnstone – Marisol Cortez – K.B. Carle – Bobby Horecka – Merrill Gray – Shelbi Carpenter – Rick Campbell – Lou Morrison – Maurice Carlos Ruffin – Brett Riley – Melanie Rae Thon –Randall Watson – By Bonnie Jo Campbell

Roseville to Kansas City, Jamaica Plains to Lubbock, the characters in Runaway find new lives. These exciting stories find transformation via spirit, heart, loss, hope and emptiness. Luanne Smith, Michael Gills, and Lee Zacharias have crafted a collection that is at once devastating and utterly magical. This is a collection to be read and re-read, shared in writing workshops and savored.

Karen Salyer McElmurray, author of Wanting Radiance

1 "Ritual" by Aden Albert and "Willie's Crucifixion" by Rick Campbell are the winners.

2 "Neighbor Boys and Cousins" by Jodi Angel and "Nothing to Light Our Way" by Emily Hoover" are the honorable mentions.

Long Gone & Lost: True Fictions and Other Lies

by Bobby Horecka

978 - 1 - 948692 - 28 - 1 paper 18.95

978 - 1 - 948692 - 29 - 8 ebook 9.99

5½x8½, 200 pp. fiction

March 2020

FINALIST for 2021 Texas Institute of Letters’ Sergio Troncoso Award for Best First Book of Fiction

You might’ve just started out or reached the jumping off spot. Maybe you’re the rainyday saver who never left anyplace without charting a precise destination and itinerary first, or you’re plumb astounded you got where you’re at and couldn’t tell me what happened last night much less what’s in store six weeks from now. You might have a working man’s callused hands, the callused soul that only the mistreated know or the callused heart that comes with having yours shattered too many times. Everybody needs to catch an occasional break, or they risk becoming Long Gone & Lost…

What people are saying about Bobby Horecka’s Long Gone & Lost : Wow! This guy is a master story teller.... I chuckled, I felt sympathy, I sometimes howled at what he had written. Anyone who has spent time in Lavaca County, as Mr. Horecka has, will have been exposed to gobs of raw material, and I mean raw.... The author throws a shovelful of hyperbole onto an ordinary situation and nurtures it into a riotously funny story. In all the stories, the author thoroughly describes his characters, and keeps painting layer after layer onto the subject as the story proceeds, until the reader can almost see the person. He sets the scene in detail and carefully builds the mood.

Bob Zumwaldt, author of Trapped by a Mouse: And Other Stories

Read this one you’re gonna like it! Bobby’s stories grabbed us right from the start. It’s the “true and otherwise” part that stops us in our tracks. There is a heavy dollop of truth in every story. We applaud the man who grew up, through these very hard times, to be someone with gritty, wonderful, integrity. And we congratulate him on being shortlisted for a Texas Institute of Letters first work of fiction award.

Kimberly Davis, director of Madville Publishing

Horecka’s Long Gone & Lost is a melange, a mix of writing including fiction, creative nonfiction, and poetry by a longtime journalist who knows how to whip sentences into shape. Perfect for post-virus reading at inland beaches.

A. Rooney, author of The Autobiography of Francis N. Stein

I'm hooked. It's like he's sitting with you telling you the story. I honestly got lost in the first few pages ... Bobby Horecka's writing allows the story to play out in your mind. You'll feel like you're there.

Katherine Stulting Gillett, owner of Design 4 Me

Bobby Horecka holds an MFA in creative writing from the University of Houston Victoria, and taught at Victoria College. He has numerous works of short fiction, prose and poetry, published in literary magazines and anthologies like Amarillo Bay, Bluestem Magazine, Scribe, and The Ocotillo Review. Horecka spent 25 years in print journalism, working newsrooms large and small across Texas.

What Magick May Not Alter

by JC Reilly

978 - 1 - 948692 - 30 - 4 paper 18.95

978 - 1 - 948692 - 31 - 1 ebook 9.99

6x9, 144 pp.

Poetry

April 2020

Read What Magick May Not Alter on a porch swing by a live oak if you can. This layered Southern fantasy is unlike any you’ve read before. Real-world issues like the prevalence of the KKK, sexual assault, manslaughter, alcoholism, and complex family dynamics move the plot into emotionally treacherous and painfully real places. Twin sisters Lulah and Vi anchor this story of a magically gifted family told through poetry. Set in early nineteen-hundreds Louisiana, the choice to tell this story in verse sets it apart, making it feel like a spell book or a manifesto at times. Emotion sings through it clear and strong, as in this pivotal passage when Talulah visits Vidalia:

She smiles as she slips the doll in a pocket and begins a song in a language that hovers somewhere between the voices of flowers and the timbre of wind. Lulah joins in then, in made-up words of her own.

A Louisiana writer living in Atlanta, Georgia, JC Reilly writes across genres and has received Pushcart and Wigleaf nominations for her work, as well as awards from the National Federation of State Poetry Societies, the Georgia Poetry Society, and the Louisiana Division of the Arts. She is the author of the chapbook La Petite Mort and a contributing author to an anthology of occasional verse, On Occasion: Four Poets, One Year. Follow her @aishatonu.

FALL 2020

Mistakes by the Lake

by Brian Petkash

978-1-948692-32-8 paper 19.95

978-1-948692-33-5 ebook 9.99

5½x8½ , 256 pp.

Short Fiction

May 2020

The collection and its stories have garnered numerous accolades: Finalist: Nilsen Prize (Southeast Missouri State University); Winner: The Lake Prize in Fiction (Midwestern Gothic); Shortlisted: The Novella Award (Liverpool John Moores University); Shortlisted: Munster Literature Centre’s Seán Ó Faoláin Short Story Competition; Honorable Mention: Family Matters Contest (Glimmer Train). Praise for the novella, Mistakes by the Lake: “Full of action, movement, tension and shocks. The world of the Cleveland stockyards and its denizens is brought to life with verve, skill and command” (Vulpes Libris).

Set in Cleveland, Ohio, from its earliest beginnings as a forested frontier to the urban blight of modern times, Mistakes by the Lake is a collection of ten thematically-linked stories spanning the many faces of the city’s history: A motorman navigates his 1920’s back-and-forth trolley until he snaps; A stockyards knocker encounters the Virgin Mary during the 1954 World Series; A wannabe wrestles his unruly mind along the flammable 1960’s Cuyahoga River; In a reinvention of Henry IV, a young man must either stick with his bumbling criminal crew or uncover legit ways to support his mother and transgender Gramps.

PRAISE FOR MISTAKES BY THE LAKE

“With a tender and transportive love note to a city with shades of Richard Powers’s feel for people and land, spiked by flashes of the odd experimentalism of underground poet d.a. levy Brian Petkash has written a muscular, inventive, and engrossing novel in stories, each one set in a different Cleveland decade. From 1796 to 2013, we travel from wilderness to street car, from the day a steer escapes the stockyards to the awful day a star little leaguer disappears. Each chapter about this city in Ohio throbs with love, intensity, devotion, and creativity. Epic, ambitious, gorgeous, and deeply felt, all of the stories in Mistakes by the Lake add up to a book at least as old, important, and beautiful as the grand old city of Cleveland itself.” Nathan Deuel, author of Friday Was the Bomb and frequent Los Angeles Times book critic

“Evidently, Brian Petkash was somebody’s big secret until now. I don’t know how they kept him from us. No one writes this good the first time out, do they? Well, secret no more, folks: this genie’s out of the bottle. Brian Petkash’s Mistakes by the Lake is a stunning literary achievement. The prose is luminous and compassionate, the themes are complex and resonant, the characters are riveting and heroic. You won’t soon forget them, and you won’t want to. They’ll haunt your dreams. This is not a book that you can put down until it’s through with you. Yes, it’s that good, and you’re going to thank me for telling you about Mistakes by the Lake. Buy it now.”—John Dufresne, author of I Don’t Like Where This Is Going

“In this remarkable debut, Brian Petkash immerses his reader with textured prose that is as beautifully nuanced as it is brutally honest. The settings of these stories are authentically Cleveland, but the terrain is the full range of human emotion. From a trolley driver searching the tracks for purpose to a war veteran wounded by the loss of his wife, Petkash binds together a disparate cast of characters with threads of hope and humanity. Mistakes by the Lake is a collection that resonates long after the read, and Petkash is an author to be watched.” R. Dean Johnson, author of Californium

Brian Petkash was born and raised in Cleveland, Ohio. He holds an MFA in Creative Writing from University of Tampa and his stories have appeared in Midwestern Gothic and Southword, among other publications. He currently lives in Tampa, Florida, where he remains an avid fan of Cleveland sports.

Drumming Armageddon

by George Drew

978-1-948692-34-2 paper 18.95

978-1-948692-35-9 ebook 9.99

6x9, 144 pp.

Poetry

June 2020

Often it is said of contemporary music that it’s the soundtrack of our lives. If so, Drumming Armageddon is a poetic rendering of that soundtrack: Rock, Country, Jazz, Pop, Folk, The Blues they’re the genres comprising it, and they all are present in this collection. The poems pay homage to the artists Dylan, Clapton, Lennon, Crow, The Beatles, Elvis and track the poet’s personal musical biography: his experiences and memories the music both relates to and marks. The poems, like the music, have plenty of swagger. Finally, though, they remind us that, at their best, poetry is music, music poetry.

Studio drummers use the phrase “In the Pocket” when they want to talk about being in that sweet spot right on the beat and tucked straight away into a song. That is exactly where you’ll find George Drew’s voice in the poems of Drumming Armageddon. Drew spins his turntable through the history of electric music from rockn-roll icons like Chuck Berry, Elvis, the Beatles, and The Rolling Stones, to blues giants like Stevie Ray Vaughn. The poems render these characters much better than any history book could, and what’s even more impressive, the lines ride the melodies of the music in and out of personal narratives deftly telling family stories and offe ring tributes to friends who’ve passed away. This book rocks like a greatest hits album, and this poet turns in a performance as memorable as any front man could.

Jack B. Bedell, Poet Laureate, State of Louisiana, 2017-2019

Surely all good poets, especially the ones born in Mississippi, think of their poetry as a sort of blues. George Drew’s Drumming Armageddon is, without question, not merely a celebration of the blues, but the blues in fact. Oh, he channels such heavyweights as Chuck Berry, Gladys Knight, Elvis, Jerry Lee, Stevie Ray Vaughn, Aretha, Roy Orbison and so on, but Drew knows the blues are love, how you somehow keep going and keep caring in spite of a world that seems always just a breath away from Armageddon, a terrible world of anger and pain and death. Aptly, he leaves us with Charlie Parker blowing his sax on a lonely country road, playing to a cow. He leaves us wrung out and worn out and whole, putting our envies and sins aside for a little while and saying, Lord have mercy, that boy can sing.

Jack Butler, Author of Broken Hallelujah

George Drew is the author of Fancy’s Orphan (Tiger Bark Press, 2017), The View from Jackass Hill, 2010 winner of the X.J. Kennedy Poetry Prize, Texas Review Press, which also published his Down & Dirty (2015) and his New & Selected, Pastoral Habits (2016), winner of the Adirondack Literary Award for Best Poetry Book, and a finalist for the Lascaux Review’s Poetry Book Prize.

The World Out There

by John Talbird

978-1-948692-95-3 hardcover 26.95

978-1-948692-36-6 paper 20.95

978-1-948692-37-3 ebook 9.99

5½x8½ , 296 pp.

Fiction

July 2020

Cover art by Melinda Yale.

The World Out There is set in Gainesville, FL during the early nineteen-nineties and its NorthCentral Florida setting is important as both physical and psychological space. In addition to Spanish moss, heat-radiating highways, and palmettos, the novel explores the violence beneath the glittering surface of the “Sunshine State”: racial tensions, neo-fascist violence against “others,” and a string of serial murders acts as an ominous backdrop for the action. The car wreck into Lake Walters, coming within the first pages, is a catalyst for action the concentric waves radiating from the car dropping through that lake surface like danger reverberating throughout the book. The story follows the lives of three people Jan, William, and Ray with the action centered around a used bookstore.Each of these Gen-Xers came to Gainesville to get college degrees and then never left. Each watches his or her grandiose ideas of “success” drift away as they pass through their thirties, replaced with a vagueness of purpose, a nagging anxiety that there is something else they’re supposed to be doing.

In one of the (many) compelling and memorable scenes in John Talbird’s debut novel, The World Out There, Jan responds to her fear of an at-large serial killer who’s terrorizing the town. Most of the victims are “petite brunettes with shoulder-length hair,” Jan tells her boss and lover, William, when she asks him to crop her long, dark hair that she then dyes bright yellow. After William runs his fingers through Jan’s short hair, he has her shave his head. The dramatic tension and the sensuality of this moment amplify the reader’s awareness that these are people disguising themselves even as they seek their true identities. Talbird vividly creates the multiple perspectives of contradictory characters and earns sympathy for imperfect men and women struggling to make connection and find love in a violent and unpredictable world.

Allen Wier, author of Late Night, Early Morning and Tehano

The World Out There is the world we occupy full of chaos, love, longing, and despair. Talbird takes us to the Florida of the early nineties, a landscape that pulses with violence under the skin of all encounters, and where danger makes itself intimately known. Each of these characters is haunted by their mistakes and the mistakes of others, and by the daily perils of simply being human. It made my heart hurt with the reminder of how hard it is to grow the hell up.

Erin

Flanagan,

author

of The Usual Mistakes and It’s Not Going to Kill You and Other Stories

John Talbird’s The World Out There thrums with electric energy. Talbird mines and displays our deepest fears, desires, and heartbreaks through his mismatched couple, Jan and William. It’s the swampy 90s and the world hasn’t yet tipped to technology. The World Out There dwells in the loneliness of the indie bookstore, the awkward hipness of the indie record store, the solace of the second-run movie theater, and the futility of the won’t-ever-make-it band playing a nowhere bar. Mainly, it looks fear right in the eyes. Dig in. You’ll crawl out of this book a changed person.

Sherrie Flick, author of Thank Your Lucky Stars and Whiskey, Etc

John Talbird is the author of the chapbook, A Modicum of Mankind (Norte Maar). His fiction and essays have appeared in Ploughshares, Grain, Juked, The Literary Review, Ambit, Potomac Review and many others. He is on the Editorial Board of Green Hills Literary Lantern and a frequent contributor to Film International. An English professor at Queensborough Community College-CUNY, he lives in New York City with his wife, Melinda Yale.

The Asthmatic Kid & O ther Stories

by Mark Tulin

978-1-948692-46-5 paper 18.95

978-1-948692-47-2 ebook 9.99

5½x8½ , 203 pp.

Short Fiction

August 2020

The Asthmatic Kid & Other Stories is a collection of narratives that chronicle the life of a young man trying to survive his childhood. These stories take place in the 60s and 70s featuring compelling characters that often have conflicting interests, get a few bumps and bruises, but discover what is truly important. Mark Tulin’s quirky stories speak of freedom, love, and the joys of youthful mischief. “Crazy Grandpa,” “Into the Blue Suburban Sky,” “Dark Clouds Over Baseball” and others in this collection will make trauma not seem so scary and, in many cases, quite amusing.

PRAISE FOR THE ASTHMATIC KID & OTHER STORIES

With sensitivity and lyrical sentimentality, Mark Tulin zooms in on what it’s like to grow up. His characters exist in a gentler version of urban America. An America that’s lost to the past as they experience their first road trip, first sex, first experiments with drugs our heart flutters along with theirs. These stories will transport you to when you were sneaking away from your parents for the night, fumbling your first kiss, or listening to the record that blew your heart wide open.

Charlie Fish, screenwriter and short story writer.

Mark Tulin picks up the torch left by Philip Roth, and The Asthmatic Kid doesn’t try to pretend that real life is always pretty. The book’s filled with gritty writing that leaves stains on the sidewalk. However, Tulin’s skill lies in raising his central characters above everything that surrounds them. The Asthmatic Kid is literature that entertains, challenges, and uplifts all at once.

Gordon Lawrie, editor of Friday Flash Fiction and author of The Blogger Who Came in from the Cold

Mark Tulin’s darkly hilarious stories have graced the pages of Smokebox.net since April 2016, when we published his beautifully stark, Room Full of Strangers. Inner demons, unsettled familial scores, and brutally honest appraisals of human frailties are employed deftly by Tulin in The Asthmatic Kid and Other Stories. If the title story is any indication, with its cast of hopelessly damaged ne’er-do-wells and sweetly fragile personal growth, Asthmatic Kid and Other Stories promises to provide an expertly guided journey through the highs and lows of life’s headlong course.

Marcus Covert, associate editor, Smokebox.net

Mark Tulin’s formative years were spent in Philadelphia playing baseball and getting into mischief with his friends. He parlayed his experiences growing up in a dysfunctional family to become a successful marriage and family therapist. Once he retired and relocated to California, his interest in creative writing flourished. His stories have appeared in anthologies, journals, and podcasts. He has published in Page & Spine, Cabinet of the Heed, and Fiction on the Web, among others. His poetry chapbook, Magical Yogis, was published by Prolific Press in 2017. Follow Mark at www.crowonthewire.com

The Memoir of the Minotaur

by Tom Shachtman

978-1-948692-96-0 hardback 25.95

978-1-948692-38-0 paper 18.95

978-1-948692-39-7 ebook 9.99

5½x8½ , 203 pp.

Fiction

September 2020

Cover art by Nick Gilley.

The Memoir of the Minotaur is the posthumous confessions of the half-man, half-bull of Crete, as offered to an audience of recently deceased, 21st century fellow souls in Hades’ domain. This book is a satire for readers unafraid of a rollicking good tale involving anatomically complex beings, unforgivable puns, the champion serial killer of all time, scantily clad Greek maidens and youths, articulate tyrants, and feminist proto-history leavened with theological impertinence.

The Memoir of the Minotaur shares its form with other popular retellings of the monster narrative such as John Gardner’s Grendel, and the narrative voice has likenesses to the exuberance, bawdiness, and blasphemy of Salman Rushdie and John Barth. Packed with actions both big and small, while containing a breadth of complexity as it deals with themes of power, violence, sexuality, and the role of storytelling, its most endearing quality is the hilarity and absurdity of our classical values interacting with our animalistic cores. Ultimately, the book is riotous.

Tom Shachtman holds a B.S. in animal behavior, an M.F.A. in playwriting, and has a body of published and produced work that includes eighteen non-fiction books, such as The Day America Crashed, Rumspringa: To Be Or Not To Be Amish, and the latest, The Founding Fortunes; short novels, including Beachmaster and The Eagle’s Claw; books for children, such as Growing Up Masai; and documentaries for ABC, CBS, NBC, and PBS, the most recent being Absolute Zero and the Conquest Of Cold, a two-hour Nova based on his book of the same name. He has also collaborated on a dozen books, among them Whoever Fights Monsters (with Robert K. Ressler), considered the definitive study of serial killers.

WHAT READERS ARE SAYING…

“A romping confessional riff on the classic tale, a portrait of the artist as a young bull. Shachtman’s rollicking prose weaves mythology into a gripping yarn and gives antiquity’s voiceless celebrity monster a soaring human heart.”

Charles Graeber, NYT bestselling author of The Good Nurse and The Breakthrough

"A fine read. Exciting, entertaining, witty. Even more, a rare experience. Despite the blood and gore, the book resonates with wonder, and lingers in our minds for weeks afterward. Its conclusions are generous and thoughtful. A ‘classics’ challenge for readers that stuns us with its bravery and humor. I loved it."

John Neufeld, author of international bestsellers Lisa, Bright and Dark, and Edgar Allen.

Some Notes You Hold

Poems by Rita Quillen

978-1-948692-98-4 hardback 24.95

978-1-948692-44-1 paper 16.95

978-1-948692-45-8 ebook 9.99

6x9, 80 pp.

Poetry

October 2020

Some Notes You Hold is about surviving what life throws at us as we age. The so-called “Golden Years” are so named because of the high admission price the tremendous losses, disappointments, illnesses, and failures we all experience if we live long enough.

The first part of the book, called “Letting Go,” focuses on surviving deep grief; the second half, called “Holding On,” explores all the roads leading to survival: playing music, prayer and meditation, deep communion with the natural world, and writing.The price paid for those “golden years” leads to the prize: insight, joy, and a kind of peace we were incapable of when we were young.

Praise for Some Notes You Hold : Framed within the twin templates of scripture and domestic ritual, these poems pay loving homage to hard times and the resilience it takes to survive them. Quillen often employs a colloquial voice that perfectly fits these poems, poems that ring as brightly as the “big bell on the steeple” of the family church, narrative poems animated by metaphors of music, “music . . . the creek you swam in.” I am grateful for this collection and how it unfailingly reminds me that beyond heartache, poetry persists in offering deep solace.

Marc Harshman, author of Woman in Red Anorak, winner of the 2017 Blue Lynx Prize for Poetry.

As I’ve heard it said that harmony creates a longing in the voice, this book creates a longing in the heart for all that passes as well as for all that endures. Rita Quillen draws for us a world that holds both abundance and quiet, joy and “grace from goi ng without.” Some Notes You Hold is itself a “holy chorus” bringing the human voice together with “wolf howl, cooing doves, hallelujah magpies.”

Diane Gilliam, author of Kettle Bottom

“Heart wide as the river, / spirit open and at risk every moment / yet strong enough to stand all the sadness and sweet longing” that’s how Rita Quillen praises fiddlers who take listeners to “the exact spot where music lives.” Those words also perfectly describe Quillen’s own art in these radiant poems. Her deft, generous voice travels the octaves from “the tiny cosmos of root, stem, and vein” to the human complexities of hard work, loss, and love. Quillen knows in her blood that language is the music of living, and her readers will savor her every word.

Lynn Powell, Season of the Second Thought, winner of the Felix Pollak Prize

Rita Quillen’s new novel Wayland, a sequel to Hiding Ezra, will be published by Iris Press in fall, 2019. Her full-length poetry collection, The Mad Farmer’s Wife, was published in 2016 by Texas Review Press, a Texas A & M affiliation and was a finalist for the Weatherford Award in Appalachian Literature from Berea College. Her novel Hiding Ezra, released by Little Creek Books, was a finalist for the 2005 DANA Awards. One of six semi-finalists for the 2012-14 Poet Laureate of Virginia, she received three Pushcart nominations, and a Best of the Net nomination in 2012. Read more at www.ritasimsquillen.com

Cover art by Suzanne Stryk

Mother Mary Comes to Me: A Pop Culture Poetry Anthology

edited by Karen Head & Collin Kelley

978-1-948692-97-7 hardcover 24.95

978-1-948692-42-7 paper 18.95

978-1-948692-43-4 ebook 9.99 6x9, 192 pp.

November 2020

Selected as a book all Georgians should read by the Georgia Center for the book.

The Virgin Mary long ago transcended her religious origins to become and instantly recognizable icon. From pop art to pop music, Mary’s status as the Mother of God continues to inspire the faithful and the secular. A statue of Mary weeping blood or appearing in a piece of toast still has the power to make front page news and bring the devoted running with candles and eBay bids. In Mother Mary Comes To Me, poets explore the intersection of the sacred and the larger than life persona that Mary has become throughout the ages and how she still holds sway in 21st century as a figure to be praised, feared and mined for pathos and humor.

CONTRIBUTORS:

Franklin Abbott – Ivy Alvarez – P.F. Anderson – David-Matthew Barnes – GraceBauer – Julie E. Bloemeke – Laure-Anne Bosselaar – Jericho Brown – Brent Calderwood – Rick Campbell – Michelle Castleberry – Ann Cefola – Chelsea Clarey – Jennifer Clark – Catharine Clark-Sayles – Jill Crammond – C. Cleo Creech – Tom Daley – Denise Duhamel & Maureen Seaton – Rupert Fike – Alice Friman – Jeannine Hall Gailey –Marcene Gandolfo – Lara Gularte – Danielle Hanson- Deborah Hauser – Trebor Healey – Gustavo Hernandez – Lincoln Jaques- Mike James – Julie Kane – Tina Kelley – Blake Leland – Janet Lowery – Rupert Loydell – John C. Mannone – Jennifer Martelli – Pablo Miguel Martínez –Marissa McNamara – Linda Parsons – Robert Peake – Alison Pelegrin – Lee Ann Pingel – Fiona Pitt-Kethley – Kyle Potvin – Steven Reigns –JC Reilly – Todd Robinson – Janna Schledorn – Donna McLaughlin Schwender – Robert Siek – Larry D. Thacker – Richard Utz – Jane Varley – Megan Volpert – Lillo Way – Tyson West – Cassondra Windwalker – Karen Weyant – Robert E. Wood

Karen Head is the author of Disrupt This!: MOOCs and the Promises of Technology (UP New England, 2017), She has published five books of poetry (Lost on Purpose, Sassing, My Paris Year, Shadow Boxes and On Occasion: Four Poets, One Year), co-edited the poetry anthology (Teaching as a Human Experience: An Anthology of Poetry), and exhibited several acclaimed digital poetry projects. In 2010, she won the Oxford International Women’s Festival Poetry Prize. She also creates digital poetry; her project “Monumental” (part of Antony Gormley’s One and Other Project) was detailed in a TIME online mini-documentary. She is an Associate Professor at Georgia Tech, and is the Editor of Atlanta Review

Collin Kelley is the author of the poetry collections Midnight in a Perfect World, Render, Better To Travel and Slow To Burn. He is also the author of the Venus Trilogy of novels, Conquering Venus, Remain In Light and Leaving Paris. A recipient of the Georgia Author of the Year Award, Deep South Festival of Writers Award and a finalist for the Townsend Prize for Fiction, Kelley’s poetry, reviews, essays and interviews have appeared in magazines, journals and anthologies around the world.

Stand in the Traffic: A Himalayan Adoption Story

by Kate Saunders

FINALIST

FOR THE SARTON WOMEN ’ S BOOK AWARD

978 - 1 - 948692 - 22 - 9 paper 20.95 978 - 1 - 948692 - 23 - 6 ebook 9.99

6x9, 300 pp.

Memoir

November 2020

Kate is a thirty-something-year-old adventurer and single mother who sells her stateside business to go to Kathmandu, Nepal with her young son, Jack. Her intention is to adopt an orphaned toddler named Devi, a little girl she knows only from a photograph. The expedition ends up completely redirecting Kate’s moral compass and forcing her to find peace within chaos. Stand in the Traffic is the story of Kate’s year long journey through culture shock, paperwork delays, and revolution. As the days drift by, Kate struggles to connect with the stoic little girl whose charcoal eyes and visible scars betray her elusive past.

In Stand in the Traffic, Kate’s fresh, engaging voice speaks to women’s issues, parenting, politics, and adventure travel. Readers will be captivated by Kate and her family. Unlike other adoption retrospectives, this is not a dry, drawn out account of bureaucracy and childlessness, but rather a heart-pounding journey to the land of rickshaw wallahs and orange-clad saddhus, incense laden temples, and sly street dogs. As the months unfold, Kate finds herself contentedly immersed in Devi’s vibrant culture, in spite of the revolution brewing just down the lane. Kate’s story of immersion in a foreign culture leads readers into an enchanted dreamscape.

Kate Saunders is a first-time author, but a life-long writer and avid entrepreneur. Following spinal surgery and a subsequent neardeath experience, she felt compelled to reevaluate her life and reinvent herself through activism and writing. She views Stand in the Traffic as a subtle path to raise her readers’ awareness.

2021

This Fierce Afterglow

by Swep Lovitt

978-1-948692-70-0 paper 16 .95

978-1-948692-71-7 ebook 9.99

6 x 9 , 68 pp. Poetry

January 2021

This Fierce Afterglow, by Swep Lovitt, contains selected poems from his earlier collection, Sometimes the World is Too Beautiful along with 33 new poems. Lovitt’s guiding dictum comes from Ezra Pound: “only emotion endures.” These are poems of family and the day-to-day in the world, all the while burning up in the atmosphere.

Swep Lovitt was born and raised in Mississippi. After college, he worked for 30 years in Memphis and now resides in Brookhaven, Mississippi. He played college golf and took a Masters in Modern European History from the University of Southern Mississippi. His publications include two volumes, A Boy’s Face with Swan Wings, and Sometimes the World is Too Beautiful, and 75 poems in magazines and literary journals including: The Texas Review, Mississippi Review, Poem, and Visions-International. Lovitt has two grown sons and a daughter, each with poems of their own.

PRAISE FOR THIS FIERCE AFTERGLOW :

The poems in This Fierce Afterglow, explores tenderness and sensibility of a human being. The scene of turtle on the road, crawling or crushed, is common in Mississippi. When the speaker spots one closing up inside its shell, his first reaction is to get out of his car and ferry the turtle off the road even though both can be “squashed.” His action shows a human’s tender heart by doing a good thing on a good day. In short, This Fierce Afterglow shows its uniqueness in using simplicity and thought-provoking language to heighten pleasure in reading as well as sensibility to human nature and to commonality of human life. It’s a good read. J. Gauner, excerpted from New Pages January 7, 2021

Once Before Sunset

by David Deutsch

978-1-948692-56-4 paper 18.95

978-1-948692-57-1 ebook 9.99

5½ x 8½, 200 pp.

Fiction

March 2021

You can always start again, and stories can always be retold to make new meanings. In Once Before Sunset, Will Belicor wanders through small-town New Hampshire, Princeton, and Amsterdam like a medieval knight errant, reworking old narrative traditions to re-assess his aristocratic New England upbringing and his increasing desire for other men. As medieval knights sought religious ecstasy through encounters with hermits, locked-up lovers, and foreign lands, Will turns to exiled intellectuals, feverish crushes, and the city of Amsterdam to establish his own moral guidelines.

David Deutsch studied medieval literature early in his career and now writes cultural studies of British literature, classical music, and queer American poetry and prose. In his own fiction, he prefers to take a break from historical subjects so as to explore actions and events that never quite happened but that have moral resonances within contemporary gay life. At present, he is working on a monograph on twenty-first-century American gay painting and a second novel set in New York and Oxford that focuses on modern classical music and genetics.

Terrible Sanity

Essays by Sam Pickering

978 - 1 - 948692 - 52 - 6 paper 19.95

978 - 1 - 948692 - 53 - 3 ebook 9.99

5½ x 8½, 294 pp. January 2021

Terrible Sanity is wondrous sanity. Pickering’s essays are acetaminophen for hippish days. “Life doesn’t have a neat beginning and a tidy end,” Roger, a character in V. S. Naipaul’s Half a Life, says. “Life is always going on.” In this collection, Pickering depicts the joy and sadness of life’s going on. Great knowledge often brings small pleasure while the small knowledge that all people experience brings great pleasure. A dental hygienist tells him that every day patients greet her on the street and in stores. “Their faces are always unfamiliar, and I never recognize them,” she says, “but if they opened their mouths wide, I’d know them immediately.” For the record she also volunteers that in twenty years of tooth-scrubbing, she had only been bitten once.

Pickering is nomadic, and his essays explore place and thought. He quotes the old Afghan proverb that doing good to the wicked is doing evil to the good. He discusses how to teach and avoid becoming an inspiration. He describes “Smoking Allowed Churches” and suggests replacing the mealy phrase student athlete with the more accurate entertainer athlete. He notes that people of a certain age attend funerals not to mourn the deceased but to see how many of their mutual friends are still alive and almost kicking. A reviewer once called him “the last Southwestern humorist,” and he is an exhilarating teller of tall tales, Mark Twain’s stretchers. He is also an omnivorous reader reaping pleasure from both the famous and the lesser known, an example of the latter being the romance novel with the enticing title The Billionaire in Penthouse B.

He is also an amateur naturalist, and animal familiars wander through his days like characters from children’s books, backyard rabbits, foxes, reclusive opossums, lonely deer, and ill-mannered skunks. He watches birds. Flowers illuminate his paragraphs and trees grow bosky on the margins of his pages. Down in the soiling dirt is where most gods live, rooting and flowering, dying, and being reborn, he writes. Consequently, he avoids arid heights where dogma flourishes.

No book or person is a “thing of beauty or joy forever,” but some books sparkle and so entertain that they brighten the passing hours. Terrible Sanity is just such a book.

Author Sam Pickering was born and raised in Nashville, but he has spent the past fifty years of his life living and teaching in New England, most of these last years at the University of Connecticut. He resembles an old tree knobby with burls of books and worm holed by hundreds of articles and reviews but thriving, host to greening mosses, startling polypore funguses, and to paragraphs rich with observations and thoughts. “Writing,” he once wrote, “has enriched, if not made my life not quite as enriching as dressing a field with manure, but nevertheless enabling me to harvest almost endless nourishing days. I hope my pages will similarly perk up readers’ curiosities if not their digestions. If they don’t fancy corn or cornpone, maybe apples will do. ‘Of all the delicacies which Britons try / To please the palate or delight the eye,’ William King wrote at the end of the seventeenth century. ‘Of all the sev’ral kinds of sumptuous fare, / There is none that can with Apple pie compare.’”

Sam Pickering’s other titles with Madville are The World Was My Garden, Too and The Gate in the Garden Wall. He also judged (along with Bob Kunzinger) the essay anthology, Being Home

Daughters of Bone , by Jessica Temple

978 - 1 - 948692 - 48 - 9 paper 16.95

978 - 1 - 948692 - 49 - 6 ebook 9.99

6×9, 80 pp.

Poetry

February 2021

Cover Art: Joshua Raymond

Daughters of Bone explores the landscapes and people of the South. Drawing on personal and collective history, these poems explore the relationships between place, people, history, culture, and language. Subjects include family and relationships, especially between women of different generations, means of handling grief, and travel and return. Photographs or physical objects often work as keys to memories of events or people from the past. Particular locations or landscapes likewise serve as reminders. This collection questions the meaning of “home” and “family.” It mythologizes the author’s own history as she searches for her place within it.

Jessica Temple earned her PhD in poetry from Georgia State University. She co-directs the syndicated poetry college radio program melodically challenged and teaches at Alabama A&M University. Her work has appeared in Thema; Crab Orchard Review; Canyon Voices; and Stone, River, Sky: An Anthology of Georgia Poems from Negative Capability Press, among others. She is the author of the chapbook Seamless and Other Legends (Finishing Line Press, 2013). She attended the Sewanee Writers’ Conference and was named Alabama State Poetry Society’s 2019 Poet of the Year. Learn more at jessicatemple.com author photo by TC Caldwell, photographertc.com

PRAISE FOR DAUGHTERS OF BONE : POEMS

DAUGHTERS OF BONE strikes me as a claiming: of self, of personal history, and of the voice to speak of these things. Few poets have the ability to simultaneously evoke the particularities of their own lives and draw a reader in to make it hers as well, but Jessica Temple made me feel welcome, at home in these poems. I know these women, and I know these places. Temple’s intense engagement with words and their histories reveals how we make the world with the stories we tell, and with the beauty of their telling. Jennifer Horne, Poet Laureate of Alabama, 2017-present and author of BORROWED LIGHT, LITTLE WANDERER, and BOTTLE TREE

The South is both a place and a feeling, and Jessica Temple constructs that entity on the page with a raw and curious eye in DAUGHTERS OF BONE. The lost mother, questions of family lineage, and even a dip into Grimm folklore make up some of this book’s themes, which feel all at once like memoir and verse. Temple’s willingness to see her South and her life with poetic finesse is well worth the read! Ashley M. Jones, author of DARK / / THING and MAGIC CITY GOSPEL

I don’t normally read a lot of poetry, but DAUGHTERS OF BONE really caught my eye although it was mainly the beautiful cover that drew me to it. From the beginning I could tell DAUGHTERS OF BONE had a completely different tone and feel as it focuses more on human relationships not just with other people but with locations and time itself. Some of the poems were quite light-hearted and fun which was delightful to read. Then some were darker in tone which was also quite delightful to read, and I could not wait to continue reading. I really enjoyed the writing in DAUGHTERS OF BONE as it fluidly changed style and genres without jarring me from the reading experience, Temple also moves fluidly between real life events and imagined thoughts or stories or dreams but writes in such a way that you can picture everything in your mind with startling clarity. The images of Alabama summers, barbeques coupled with images of death and the dying was strange yet uniquely endearing. I can honestly say that for most of my life, I have never understood poetry and the poetry I have read I don’t normally enjoy. However, as I am getting older and experiencing more of life and the world myself, I am coming to appreciate how difficult it is to translate these experiences, thoughts, ideas, dreams and so much more into physical language as it never seems enough to convey the emotions and desires held in a single moment, but it is just enough to ignite that same passion or feeling in the reader. Overall, I gave DAUGHTERS OF BONE five stars. I enjoyed it because it incorporates the dark and gritty themes I loved alongside nostalgia and happiness. I think going forward I will try to actively seek out more poetry in a similar style to Temple’s as it really works for me as a reader. Jodie Cook, reviewer for Edelweiss

I will have to admit, this is my first foray into Temple’s poems, but I absolutely enjoyed them and will definitely try to track down more of her books. With just a few words you could feel the world of the poem come to life around you. I’ve never been to Georgia, but I could feel the heat of the summer and the smell of the kitchens. Coming from the North, there’s a lot I don’t fully understand about growing up in the South, but I do recognize many situations that were described, which also probably helped with the immersion. I also noticed some echoes from growing up as a woman, and most of the time those feel jarring to me, or uncomfortable, but these poems present it as something natural, something that can morph as it grows instead of needing to stay confirmed as one thing. I recommend this book to anyone who has ever grown up, that being, everyone. Thank you again Edelweiss for a copy of this stunning poetry collection. Maxie Froelicher, reviewer for Edelweiss

T aboos & Transgressions: Stories of Wrongdoings

edited by Luanne Smith, Kerry Neville, & Devi S. Laskar

978 - 1 - 948692 - 64 - 9 paper 20 .95 978 - 1 - 948692 - 65 - 6 ebook 9.99

6x9, 300 pp.

Fiction Anthology

March 2021

A fine and varied collection that gives eloquent voice to the unsayable.

Kirkus Reviews, Best books of 2021

Taboos and Transgressions: Stories of Wrongdoings, is an anthology that includes fiction and nonfiction. It was edited by Luanne Smith, Kerry Neville, and Devi S. Laskar, and focuses on breaking the rules with stories by Pam Houston, Bonnie Jo Campbell, Joyce Carol Oates, and Kim Addonizio alongside exceptional work by both noted and emerging writers. The anthology offers a scope of voices, styles, stories, and wrongdoings. From infidelity to family prejudices, from breaking the law to broken promises, from losing everything to finding empowerment, characters in these pieces offer a look at stepping over the line in all too human ways.

This anthology represents the best of both solicited and unsolicited work. Unsolicited material has been read by judge Maurice Carlos Ruffin and prizes awarded to one winning story and two runners up.

CONTRIBUTORS:

Kim Addonizio - Paco Aramburu - Lisa Lynn Biggar - Bonnie Jo CampbellYohanca Delgado - Walter Evans - Michael Gaspeny - Molly Giles - Pam Houston - Kyle Ingrid Johnson - Soniah Kamal - Sabina Khan-Ibarra - Jen Knox - Dalton Monk - Hadley Moore - Joyce Carol Oates - Pamela Painter - Francine Rodriguez - J.C. Sasser - C.J. Spataro Sarah Stone - Melanie Rae Thon - Chavisa Woods - Lee Zacharias

Also edited by Luanne Smith:

Heirloom Language

P oems by Barbara E. Young

978 - 1 - 948692 - 54 - 0 paper 16.95 978 - 1 - 948692 - 55 - 7 ebook 9.99

6×9, 86 pp.

Poetry

May 2021

Heirloom Language is full of poems about life and dying, growing up and growing old; about how being loved transcends endings, and how sometimes anger and irony are ways of expressing love. I sometimes describe myself as a short-attention-span novelist, and my poems as stories, chapters, characters, notes trying to make sense of our life. But reality is defiantly chaotic, and makes some poems partial truths, jokes, or outright lies. It isn’t their fault. That’s how things worked out.

Barbara E. Young was born in a Nashville, Tennessee that was nothing like today’s city. She wrote poetry in high school, won a contest with a disappointing prize, went away to a small Baptist college. The nineteen-seventies are a blank during which she gave up writing in the belief that poetry should have something important to say, and she had nothing. Years later she discovered writing prompts, decided that important things were over-rated, and eventually having found no other calling began to admit to being a poet. She, husband Jim, and their two cats live in White Bluff, near Nashville. Read more at barbaraeyoung.com

PRAISE FOR HEIRLOOM LANGUAGE :

Emerson reminds us that all language is fossil poetry. Barbara Young picks up Emerson’s formulation and turns it over in her hands and her mind: “Once upon a time . . . words some / words had meanings unlike today’s.” In fact, she transforms the Boston Brahmin’s rocky antique into a gift for the future; that’s the nature of her heirloom language, where both memory and foresight provide this poet’s soulful provisions for her readers, her family, and our coming days. In Heirloom Language, Barbara Young gives us all “a place to sit and knit elation / while the long rains fall.”

David Baker, author Swift: New and Selected Poems

In Heirloom Language, Barbara E. Young’s mind “diagrammed like a hurricane” puzzles over words and existence and the contexts that leave us, in small and big ways, “survivor[s] on a wreck of long days.” Will we be “stunned dull” by the possible, the impossible, the improbable each becoming ontological or will we be broken into aliveness by the fact and the force of mystery? There is no condensed version to find in Young’s poems since “any premise has consequences.” Hers is a voice by turns witty and sardonic, wry and bewildered, if not whip-smart and eager to “[t]aste every flower / in the honeycomb.” Her poems are paradoxes and pesterings but also “letter by letter, / a tear knotted into every syllable” prayer and lamentation.

Jeff Hardin, author of A Clearing Space in the Middle of Being

What a Wonderful World This Could Be

by Lee Zacharias

978-1-948692-50-2 paper 19.95

978-1-948692-51-9 ebook 9.99

6x9, 312 pp.

Fiction

June 2021

What Alex, illegitimate daughter of an alcoholic novelist and an artist, has always wanted is family. At 15, she falls in love with a 27-year-old photographer, whom she will leave when she comes under the spell of Ted Neal, a charismatic activist on his way to Mississippi for 1964’s Freedom Summer. That fall Ted organizes a collective that turns to the growing antiwar movement. Ultimately the radical group Weatherman destroys the “family” Alex and Ted have created, and in 1971 Ted disappears while under FBI investigation. When Ted surfaces eleven years later, Alex must put her life back together in order to discover what true family means.

Lee Zacharias is the author of three previous novels, Lessons, At Random, and Across the Great Lake, a 2019 Notable Michigan Book, as well as a collection of stories, Helping Muriel Make It Through the Night, and a collection of essays, The Only Sounds We Make. She has received two silver medals from the Independent Book Publisher Awards, won North Carolina’s Sir Walter Raleigh Award, and held fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the North Carolina Arts Council. Her work has been reprinted and frequently cited in the annual volumes of The Best American Essays. You can read more about her at www.leezacharias.com

PRAISE FOR WHAT A WONDERFUL WORLD THIS COULD BE

Lee Zacharias brings the 1960’s and 80’s to life with a poet’s precision and a novelist’s sense of drama in this luminous, riveting story. Spare, unflinching, and deeply compassionate, What a Wonderful World This Could Be is both a historical novel about political, artistic, and sexual awakening (and re-awakening), and a powerful mirror for our own time. I was gripped from the first page to the last. Alex’s journey from brilliant, neglected teen to mature artist broke my heart and renewed my faith in humanity in equal measure. This novel is a gift.

Abigail DeWitt, author of News of Our Loved Ones

What a Wonderful World It Would Be, Lee Zacharias’s incantatory novel, is a complex, generous, unflinching portrait of Alex a romantically conflicted, artistically gifted young woman who comes of age during the tumultuous sixties. Reading it is like hearing Dylan or Joni Mitchell or Leonard Cohen, but for the first time. There isn’t a smidgeon of nostalgia or sentimentality here. In fact, the world it invites us into couldn’t feel more timely or more true. It’s about loss and love and about how we can’t know one without the other.

Tommy Hays, author of The Pleasure Was Mine

“At the center of every art is a question of allegiance,” Lee Zacharias writes in What a Wonderful World This Could Be, a riveting novel that foregrounds the personal fallout of the political maelstrom that was the American Radical Left in the 1960s and ’70s. Zacharias’s allegiance is to a narrative that refuses compromise in its revelations of the highs and lows of fighting for a just cause in an unjust world, and the price photographer Alex pays for seeing clearly what others around her will not: in life, as in politics, actions have consequences, many of them irreparable.

Kat Meads, author of For You, Madam Lenin

One of our finest novelists and a first-rate photographer, Lee Zacharias weds visceral language with lush visual imagery as she modulates main character Alex’s voice to match shifts in time that dramatically render her unforgettable experiences as a 15-year-old who falls in love with a 27-yearold photographer, as the wife of a 60’s New Left activist, and as a photography professor who, in 1981, reconnects with her first love. What a Wonderful World this Could Be is about art, it is about political change, but most of all it is about enduring love.

Allen Wier, author of Tehano and Late Night, Early Morning

Sonju

by Wondra Chang

978 - 1 - 956440 - 20 - 1 hardcover 26.95s

978 - 1 - 948692 - 58 - 8 paper 19.95

978 - 1 - 948692 - 59 - 5 ebook 9.99

5½ x 8½, 290 pp. | Fiction | July 2021

After she defies the rigid, oppressive Confucian tradition of order and conformity, Sonju descends from an aristocratic upbringing to working at a men’s club. In spite of social condemnations and personal tragedies, her determination to be her own person never wavers.

Sonju’s life takes a turn when her mother marries her off to a man from a wealthy farming clan rather than allowing her to marry the man she loves. Set against the historical background of the humiliating Japanese occupation and the horrors of the Korean War, Sonju portrays one woman’s journey to personal liberation.

Wondra Chang was born in South Korea and has lived in the U.S. since 1970. Her writing discipline began at age ten, writing five short stories a day under the tutelage of a writing teacher. She won first place in a province-wide inperson writing competition. She studied journalism at Ewha Womans University in Seoul, Korea. She currently lives in San Antonio, Texas, where she lives with her husband, Bernard Rauch. PRAISE FOR SONJU :

A well-crafted tale of a person who forges ahead amid heartbreak and war. Kirkus Starred Review, Kirkus Reviews, Best Books of 2021

This revealing, passionate account of a young woman’s coming of age, achievement of maturity, and discovery of emancipation is written from the heart. More than merely a story of love and betrayal, loss and sacrifice, it also offers an allegory for the emergence of South Korea as a significant player in the game of nations. Sonju’s “flowering,” in a sense, her journey of self-discovery is watered by the tears of pain and the gut-wrenching experience as she is dragged almost physically from a primitive world of repressive tradition and subjugation, a prescribed life deeply rooted in antiquity into a bewildering world of rapidly evolving modernity and change. Her story is, in a way, Korea’s story, and her pain, in so many ways, reflects Korea’s pain as a nation divided by artificial lines and fiercely debated social and political convictions, as it struggles to protect its identity, its values –Clay Reynolds, author of The Vigil, Agatite, Franklin’s Crossing, Ars Poetica, and The Tentmaker

Chang gifts us with an epic pulsing with life, fevered with longing, brimming with hope, and coursing with humanity. It’s the kind of writing and storytelling that will settle into your heart, your soul, your very bones Brian Petkash, author of Mistakes by the Lake

Wondra Chang offers an insightful exploration into post-WWII South Korean life through her portrayal of Yu Sonju, a miscast woman who comes of age at a time when her family and others of her class cling to a culture that suppresses women’s dreams and ambitions. Chang, a former psychotherapist, takes us to a place in the world that has recently become more visible to Western audiences due to the success of South Korean films such as the award-winning Parasite and Cho Nam-Joo’s bestselling novel, Kim JiYoung, Born 1982. Chang, however, in a story largely set in Seoul, provides a vivid picture of South Korea as it once was and a place well on its way to becoming the country we know today, rendered through the perspective of a woman who struggles to find a place for herself in her native land. Despite the suffering she endures, Sonju’s story is one of triumph made possible through the relationships she develops with the women she meets along her journey, and eventual success as a writer and businesswoman in a male dominated world. Chang has written a deeply moving novel that will expand the worldview of readers from all backgrounds Reggie Scott Young, author of Yardbirds Squawking at the Moon

One of feminism’s many challenges is to express it in fiction without yielding to the temptation to oversimplify or overdramatize its evolution within individual women, and within those women’s social and cultural milieus. When those milieus are unfamiliar to most readers, the difficulties can be compounded. Sonju does a masterful job of guiding the reader through all of this. || Sonju herself is a young Korean woman who comes of age in the 1940’s while her country is subjected to Japanese rule. She submits to a hasty, inferior marriage to protect her family’s status, then tries to be resigned and loyal while still trying to find her own way. Relationships within her new family, the Korean War, her husband’s infidelity, her decision to leave him and return to the lover of her youth all serve to slam doors shut behind her. She is even forbidden all contact with her daughter, a loss that torments her ever after. At the same time, what lies ahead is nothing she planned and nothing she knows how to manage. Without overt or artificial drama she leads the reader through the thoughtful renovation of her life, and, at the same time, the slow evolution of her country. || Without the usual spectacle of such a Cinderella-seeming story, Sonju rings with truth and realism. The reader never questions the harshness of the culture nor her commitment to it. The reader admires the small but steady steps she and Korea make together. This story is truly one of a kind, unforgettable, and deeply satisfying Kathryn Berck, author of The Hostage, The Suppliant, The Hunter, and The Good Kinsmen

Wondra Chang delights us with a story of family, love and the search for happiness. Here is a journey filled with romance, tragedy, and intrigue, a journey worth taking. Enjoy Jose Antonio Rodriguez, author of This American Autopsy

Pitting a woman’s passion against life-crippling traditions, Wondra Chang does for South Korea what Thomas Hardy did for the English countryside. Chang’s debut opens in Seoul in 1946, when Sonju is almost 20 and the nation is poised on the edge of war and modernization. Her strict parents force her to marry a well-off stranger in the country, though she has long loved a poor, fatherless man committed to an equal union. But Sonju was not made to be a sacrificial lamb on the altar of family “honor.” With a style direct and lyrical, Chang’s debut moved me so viscerally that I wept through the last third. You won’t be the same after reading this courageous and powerful novel. Janet Benton, author of Lilli de Jong

A Woman’s Story

by Francine Rodriguez

978 - 1 - 956440 - 22 - 5 hardcover 26.95

978 - 1 - 948692 - 60 - 1 paper 19.95

978 - 1 - 948692 - 61 - 8 ebook 9.99

5½ x 8½, 294 pp.

Short fiction

August 2021

The stories of these Latina women’s lives depict conflict in gender bias, experiences of exploitation, violence, and powerlessness, sometimes resulting in pain and despair in their turbulent world. But these stories also tell of these women’s celebration of life itself that empowers them and gives them the will to sustain. These stories resonate on a deeply emotional level.

Francine Rodriguez grew up in and around downtown Los Angeles and later worked as a Civil Rights and Equal Employment Opportunity Investigator in the Federal sector. All told, she has worked in the fields of law and psychology for over thirty years, and her experiences in these fields inform her writing. She has published two previous novels, A Fortunate Accident (Booklocker 2015), and A Woman Like Me (Booklocker 2019). Her website is FrancineRodriguezAuthor.com

PRAISE

FOR STORIES FROM A WOMAN’S STORY

“Smiley and the Laughing Girl” By Francine Rodriguez WHY WE LIKE IT: We love Rodriguez’s honest, down to earth, totally unaffected style and her deep investment in her characters. The story falls under the classification of ‘dirty realism’ (with a feminist slant) but in the end it resists any kind of definition. All we can call it is “good writing.”—Fleas On The Dog, Vol 7

Wow! Once again author Francine Rodriguez proves that she is the eyes and ears of Latina Realism. Her series of short stories in A Woman’s Story draws on her inner-city life experiences, revealing extraordinarily provocative vignettes of love, sex, violence, and injustice. Francine’s vivid descriptions of the lives of women as heroines and as victims stir all one’s emotions. My soul is aroused by her captivating imagination portrayed in the half-fiction, half real-life personalities ¡Bien hecho! Rocky Barilla, International Society of Latino Authors, author of Esmerelda

Through a brutally honest approach, Rodriguez’s words guide you on a timely and unfiltered expedition of the contemporary social landscapes Latinx women traverse in the U.S. in the early 2000s. Her writings explore the delicate and very real balancing ac t they must display being the human at the center of frenzied collisions in culture, community, socioeconomics, sexuality, and gender. Often gentle, and painful, the intensity of her stories shine through with the same intensity with which Latinx women must face society in today’s America. Nikolas Gonzales, World History Adj. Professor World History Department - Bunker Hill Community College, and author of Moraga Deconstructed: Illuminations in Mexican-American Heritage

In a unique and unlikely feminist reclaiming of dirty realism, Francine Rodriguez’s A Woman’s Story takes us on an intimate yet dystopian journey into the effects and innerworkings of identity-based marginalization.… These silenced memories give us insight into many other Herstories and truths that may never be known not only because they were once forbidden, but because they are still mostly inaccessible to a mass U.S. American audience Liliana Conlisk Gallegos, Ph.D., Associate Professor – Decolonial Media Studies Department of Communication Studies, CSU San Bernardino

Being Home

edited by Sam Pickering & Bob Kunzinger

978 - 1 - 956440 - 26 - 5 hardcover

978 - 1 - 948692 - 62 - 5 paper 19.95

978 - 1 - 948692 - 63 - 2 ebook 9.99

6x9, 200 pp.

Essay Anthology

September 2021

Being Home is about the spirit of place, the juncture of memory and emotions. It is different for everyone; it is different for members of the same family, and it most likely has nothing to do with where you were born or grew up. Award-winning essayists Sam Pickering and Bob Kunzinger selected the essays for this collection, favoring essays about being home where setting becomes character, where time becomes the antagonist, and where we make our most important discoveries. These are not quarantine, stay in place, Covid-19 essays.

CONTRIBUTORS:

Johnnie Bernhard • Rick Campbell • Maryah Converse • Susan Delgado Watts • John Flynn • Debra Frank • Karin Hedetniemi • Anndee Hochman • Richard Holinger • Jamie Hughes • Robert Iulo • Kyle Ingrid Johnson • Judy Johnson • Deb Liggett • Mel Livatino • Geoffrey Martin • Robert Miltner • Vicky Oliver • Lea Page • Rhonda Ray • Claude Clayton Smith • Marsha Lynn Smith • Bill Stifler • Elizabeth Templeman • Elaine Terranova • Lee Zacharias • Madelaine Zadik

EDITORS: Sam Pickering spent 67 years in classrooms learning and teaching and has long been a rummager and writer wandering New England and the South, the Mid-East, Britain, Australia, and Canada. He has written some thirty books. Bob Kunzinger is the author of eight collections of non-fiction, and has been widely published in publications such as World War Two History, Southern Humanities Review, the Washington Post, St Anthony Messenger, and more, including notations for essays in Best American Essays.

Alegría

a no vel b y Emi Wright

978 - 1 - 948692 - 40 - 3 paper 16.95

978 - 1 - 948692 - 41 - 0 ebook 9.99

6x9, 336 pp.

Fiction , October 2021

Alegría’s family struggles to keep afloat amid secrets as she develops narcolepsy, a sleeping disorder that disrupts her nights and dulls her days. In a fantastical world where dead grandmothers come to visit and witch doctors prescribe waking concoctions, young Alegría discovers the secrets behind her namesake and the imperfections within her family. When the wind blows and the rains come, will she be able to keep her family together?

A powerful and impassioned novel based out of hope, loss, and of finding one’s place in the world. Through breathtaking descriptions and elegant prose, A Myriad of Dreams shows a girl’s mystical journey through its enchanting moves, and it’s graceful telling of life’s search for faith, acceptance, and clarity.” Jasmine Robinson, author of Stony the Road we Trod

Drenched in the witchdoctor mojo of the world she’s conjured, Wright’s Alegría is the hundred-year dream-flood of a lifetime. Where daughters are named for their mother’s drowned sisters, and ghosts walk hand in hand with the living, as fine a debut as you’ll ever see. Bravo.” Michael Gills, author of Burning Down My Father’s House

A Quiver i n t he Purlieu

INTERNATIONAL BOOK AWARD FINALIST

b y Amit Verma

978 - 1 - 948692 - 68 - 7 paper 18.95

978 - 1 - 948692 - 69 - 4 ebook 9.99

5½ x 8½, 158 pp., Fiction, available: November 2021

A book flies away as soon as it’s completed, defining a pivotal point in the life-arch of the protagonist. This life-arch also features a banyan tree growing in Canada, a bar in semi-rural U.S.A., a sliver of time in an idyllic, isolated village in India, a bored billionaire playing the stock market, a comic book princess, and an interstellar spaceship journey. And all this takes place in a universe that’s ever-expanding.

PRAISE FOR A QUIVER IN THE PURLIEU

“This magical novel takes the reader on a remarkable journey that at times made me think of Herman Hesse and Gabriel Garcia Marquez. A fanciful work from a promising author.”

Don Trowden, author of No One Ran to the Altar

“The literary universe expands its depth to make room for Amit Verma’s new novel A Quiver in the Purlieu. This book travels from Canada to America to India to outer space and deals in themes as varied and complexly relayed as postcolonial politics, Lacanian psychoanalysis, and even monetary market theory. It channels Italo Calvino by addressing the capital “R” Reader, who is ready to expand their thinking while also having a wildly fun time zigging and zagging through this unpredictable gem!”

Mike Hilbig, author of Judgment Day & Other White Lies

“Verma has penned a thought provoking and enlightening tale about a young man’s epic journey from boy to man.… When we first meet [the protagonist], we find him lost in a chaotic world that is a mystery to him…. we sense that he is grappling with daily life and is doing his best to make sense of the essence of just being…. This was a brilliant read and I take my hat off to Amit Verma for creating such an awe-inspiring story.”

Natasha Murray, award winning author of Julia’s Baby and 58 Farm End

AMIT VERMA Is a resident of Houston, TX, where he divides his time among things he is passionate about, including molding captive impressionable minds and conducting research as a professor in Electrical Engineering, a perfect family, and a never perfect yard. His two works on literary fiction, The Lives and The Times, and The Lives and The Times II have been variously called, “rare find,” a “page-turner,” and “… Is refreshing and does a humorous take on some of the pressing Issues …”

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

January 2022

poetry

A universal quest for human dignity and acknowledgement made specific through the Black experience.

PRAISE FOR 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, tempo-driven voices, melodic repetitions, lowdown bluesy fragmentations of logic and sensibility… pouring into the corners of our consciousness, ragtiming us into booty-shaking highs and tenor-saxing 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.

Dead Fish Wind

by Cooper Lev e y - 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.

PRAISE FOR 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, LeveyBaker’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 Hard back 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 202 2 p oetry / p hotography

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.

PRAISE FOR

ALL

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 thirdgeneration 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.

I SEE IS YOUR GLINTING: 90 DAYS IN THE PANDEMIC

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

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

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-alteringcollapsing 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 1 9 .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

HEARTBREAK TREE

by Pauletta Hansel

Winner of the 2023 PSV North American Book Award

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.

FOR HEARTBREAK TREE : POEMS BY PAULETTA

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

PRAISE

HANSEL :

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

5.5 x 8.5 , 284 pp June 2022

For this anthology, 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?

Also edited by Luanne Smith:

CONTRIBUTORS:

Dorothy Allison, Hillary Behrman, Henri Bensussen, T.C. Boyle, Elizabeth Bruce, Ulrick Casimir, Michael Darcher, George Drew, Stephanie Dupal, Walter Evans, 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 ACTUAL MUD WAS REQUIRED

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 $1 9 .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 appeared 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 TransSiberian Railroad from Blurb Books www.blurb.com/b?ebook=638486.

WHAT PEOPLE ARE SAYING ABOUT THEIRONSCAR:

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

Worrisome Creatures by Kate Sweeney

Gold Medalist 2022 Florida Book Awards

ISBN: 978 - 1 - 948692 - 82 - 3 paperback $1 8 .95

ISBN: 978 - 1 - 948692 - 83 - 0 ebook $9.99 poetry , 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.

PRAISE FOR WORRISOME CREATURES :POEMS BY KATE SWEENEY :

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 worldy-wise 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 342pp June 21, 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.

A luminous tale of friendship; readers will be excited to travel with these complex characters Kirkus Reviews, Best of the Indies, 2022

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 - 9 56440 - 02 - 7 paperback $19.95

ISBN: 978 - 1 - 9 56440 - 03 - 4 ebook $9.99 212 pp. , 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

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, Blue Moon Novel Competition judge, and author of The Vigil 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

“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

Secret City

by Katherine Smith

ISBN: 978 - 1 - 948692 - 90 - 8 paperback $1 8 .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

2023 ERIC HOFFER AWARD FINALIST

ISBN: 978 - 1 - 9 56440 - 04 - 1 paperback $19.95

ISBN: 978 - 1 - 9 56440 - 05 - 8 ebook $9.99

Fiction , 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.

PRAISE FOR Bicycles of the Gods : A Divine Comedy by Michael

Simms

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 b y Susanne Davis

1st Place Novel, Connecticut Press Club, 2022

Runner up in the Madville Blue Moon Novel Competition

ISBN: 978 - 1 - 9 56440 - 06 - 5 paperback $19.95

ISBN: 978 - 1 - 9 56440 - 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

A remarkable protagonist leads a robust cast in this absorbing tale of selfdiscovery.

—Kirkus Reviews

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 o n a Few Poet Wizards & Their Multifaceted Magic

b y George Drew

ISBN: 97819564401 2 6 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 wellknown 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.

The Cyclone Release b y Bruce Overby

Runner - up - Madville’s Blue Moon Novel Competition

ISBN: 978 - 1 - 9 56440 - 08 - 9 paperback $19.95

ISBN: 978 - 1 - 9 56440 - 09 - 6 ebook $9.99 November 15, 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

In The Cyclone Release, Bruce Overby registers the shifting landscape of San Francisco’s South Bay, where orange groves and pastoral farm life have given way to big tech campuses, the mad energy of startups, and IPOs. We follow Brendon, an experienced tech writer, as he grapples with a new job and the intensity of an impending IPO in the wake of his wife’s sudden death. When he is finally ready to explore love again, he discovers an unlikely connection between his new workplace interest and his dead wife. Overby brings the book to satisfying crescendo with secrets revealed, an IPO launched, and a believable, sympathetic main character who finds himself facing a new, unexpected horizon of possibility.

Angela Pneuman, author of Home Remedies and Lay It On My Heart

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 J. Parker Poetry

ISBN: 978 - 1 - 9 56440 - 16 - 4 paperback $1 9 .95

ISBN: 978 - 1 - 9 56440 - 17 - 1 ebook $9.99 November 15, 2022

The Parting Glass, like the old Irish song, is a toast to the places and people who make up the author’s roots and base. However Appalachian at its root, it tells a universal story about what grounds and keeps us, even as we move in cities and circles far from home. At its core, this book brings the thread of downhome with its voices and song, to the cities and cultures the author moves through. The poems raise a glass to those still at the table and to those already gone, to homecomings and deployments, to the navigation of love and grief.

PRAISE for The Parting Glass by Lisa J. Parker :

As haunting as the Irish ballad for which it is named, The Parting Glass is a book of searing elegies and unforgettable odes to moments of joy shared in tranquil places. Whole worlds emerge and collide in these poems, experiences as rich as the black bread offered by the Ukrainian neighbor to the “Hillbilly Transplant” in New York City. Many of us from Appalachia will relate to her fish-out-of-water adventures and heartbreaks, missing family back home but also feeling the electric thrill of subway rides and all-night restaurants. Lisa J. Parker has created a deep and nuanced book that would have made the late Arthur Smith proud, and I cannot imagine a more worthy first entry for the poetry award named in his honor. I have felt tears welling in the corners of my eyes more than once when I come to the lines, “the surreality of that meager box / with its pewter top, your name punched into it.” The Parting Glass offers enormous heart and soul in the face of unbearable grief, survivable only through a sense of belonging to a place and its people and by committing to words those memories that affirm what we have lost.

Jesse Graves, author of Merciful Days and Said-Songs: Essays on Poetry and Place

Lisa Parker possesses the perceptive eye of a photographer and the truth-telling, visionary voice of poet. From the orange trumpet vines and sycamore trees of northern Virginia to the “crushed velvet walls” of the Metropolitan Opera, each precise, wondrous image in The Parting Glass transports the reader. As Parker shows us how to look at these beautiful, sometimes broken, sometimes aching landscapes, she tells an important story about the places we call home, the terrible weight of grief, and love always love.

Carter Sickels, author of The Prettiest Star

These are poems of loss, displacement, and deep grief, yet they are shot through with light, in particular the illumination that comes with beautiful writing. There is not one wasted word in this moving, intelligent, and timely collection of poems that stand perfectly on their own yet sing even louder as an entire gathering. The Parting Glass is a marvel of a book. Silas House, NY Times bestselling author of Lark Ascending

Lisa Parker is a native Virginian, a poet, musician, and photographer. Her first book, This Gone Place, won the 2010 ASA 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 She has worked in the Department of Defense for nearly twenty years, worked as a first responder for 15 years, and currently serves as a crisis and disaster response volunteer with Team Rubicon. Some of her work may be found at www.wheatpark.com

This Gone Place: poems

by Lisa J. Parker

ISBN: 978-1-956440-63-8 paperback $19.95

ISBN: 978-1-956440-64-5 ebook $9.99

Rereleased: November 2022

Winner of The 2010 Weatherford Award

This is a reissue of the 2010 edition timed to coincide with the release of Lisa J. Parker’s new collection, The Parting Glass

Praise for THIS GONE PLACE: POEMS BY LISA J. PARKER:

Lisa Parker comes “from women whose wombs rained babies…the first generation raised outside the hollers of the Blue Ridge…walking the line between the mountains and the cities.” As the speaker of the poem “Tracing” says, loading up her car to drive back to the city from her mountain homeplace, “I have known that spastic moment of pushing away all my life…” pushing away and yet always, always looking back. For Lisa writes from the razor edge of double consciousness which is both the gift and curse of the true poet she is here and not here, there and not there, fully present in every moment yet already absent, too, isolating it, knowing it, naming it. She exults in “every common, common thing,” finding “beauty in the scratched neon of those hometown fair rides, Kmart parking lot full of wide-eyed children sweat-palming tickets…those nights at the water tower…how the sky appeared a deep navy, banked against those black hills and jutting rockface, the distant glow of the coke furnace like a red marble perched on nothing.” This Gone Place is more than an extraordinary collection of poems; it is Lisa Parker’s hard-earned, deeply felt autobiography. Lee Smith, On Agate Hill and Fair and Tender Ladies

There is everything at stake unabashed and utterly necessary in Lisa Parker’s brilliant first book. Memory and family and the blood of the land. Have you missed real poetry? Have you wondered where it’s gone? Well, here it is. This is poetry in Lisa Parker’s tending hands: stunningly new, yet familiar to the heart as scripture. Honorée Jeffers, Red Clay Suite and The Gospel of Barbecue

What an amazing mind comes through in every poem in this collection, a rare and wonderful distinction among first books in this country which are leaning more and more towards the cerebral with its deep and unrelenting irony and cynicism and moving farther and farther from human experience with all its great complexities. If indeed this place of which she writes is now “gone,” it is brought back to us now, through Parker’s speaker, whole-cloth and shining with all the beauty and truth of that place, those people. Lisa Parker is an original voice and her work in this book moves her reader back again into the deepest recesses of the human experience, pressing us deeply down into that thing we sometimes call a “heart.” Anne Caston, Flying Out With the Wounded and Judah’s Lion

Lisa Parker is a native Virginian, a poet, musician, and photographer. Her first book, This Gone Place, won the 2010 ASA 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. She has worked in the Department of Defense for nearly twenty years, worked as a first responder for 15 years, and currently serves as a crisis and disaster response volunteer with Team Rubicon. Some of her work may be found at www.wheatpark.com.

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

June 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)

Let Me Say This: A Dolly Parton Poetry Anthology

edited by Dustin Brookshire and Julie E. Bloemeke

BEST BOOK AWARDS FINALIST 2023 , A Book All Georgians Should Read, & Nautilus Prize, silver medalist for poetry

ISBN: 978-1-956440-51-5 paperback $20.95

ISBN: 978-1-956440-52-2 eBook $9.99 poetry, 122pp., January 2023

Let Me Say This: A Dolly Parton Poetry Anthology offers 54 poets’ takes on often-unsung facets of this diamond in a rhinestone world calling in Dolly’s impeccable comedic timing, her lyric mastery, her business acumen, and her Dollyverse advocacy. These poems remind us to be better and to do better, to subvert Dolly cliché, and they encourage us to weave Dolly metaphor into our own family lore. Within these pages, Dolly takes the stage and the dinner table; readers see the public Dolly of the silver screen and the private Dolly of identity contemplation. Dolly raises praise and question, and she butterflies into our hearts to unabashedly to claim the mantra In Dolly We Trust.

With Dolly poems from 54 contributors:

Kelli Russell Agodon • Nin Andrews • Lana K. W. Austin • David-Matthew Barnes • Nicky Beer • Julie E. Bloemeke • Emma Bolden • Dustin Brookshire • Phillip Watts Brown • Marina Carreira • Denise Duhamel • teri elam •Rupert Fike • Diamond Forde • Chad Frame • Makayla Gay • Tyler Gillespie • Kari Gunter-Seymour • Robert Gwaltney • Beth Gylys • Karen Head • Raye Hendrix • Collin Kelley • Dorianne Laux • Chin-Sun Lee • Arden Levine • Katie Manning • Kelly McQuain • Lynn Melnick • Jenny Molberg • Rachel Morgan • Caridad Moro-Gronlier • Carolyn Oliver • Dion O’Reilly • Jeffrey Perkins • Stephen Roger Powers • Steven Reigns • Linda Neal Reising • Benjamin Anthony Rhodes • Micah Ruelle • Anna Sandy-Elrod • Roberta Schultz • Maureen Seaton • Gregg Shapiro • L.J. Sysko • Nicole Tallman • Kerry Trautman • Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer • Dan Vera • Isaiah Vianese • Donna Vorreyer • Julie Marie Wade • Jennifer Wheelock • Yvonne Zipter

Dustin Brookshire (he/him) a finalist for the 2021 Scotti Merrill Award, is the founder/editor of Limp Wrist, curator of the Wild & Precious Life Series (a Zoom-based poetry reading series), program director for Reading Queer, and founding chapter president of the South Florida Poets. He is the author of three chapbooks: Never Picked First for Playtime (Harbor Editions, 2023), Love Most of You Too (Harbor Editions, 2021) and To The One Who Raped Me (Sibling Rivalry Press, 2012). Visit him online at www.dustinbrookshire.com.

Julie E. Bloemeke (she/her) is the 2021 Georgia Author of the Year Finalist for Poetry. Her debut full-length collection Slide to Unlock (Sibling Rivalry Press, 2020) was also chosen as a 2021 Book All Georgians Should Read. Winner of the 2022 Third Coast Poetry Prize and a finalist for the 2020 Fischer Prize, her work has appeared in numerous anthologies and publications including Writer’s Chronicle, Prairie Schooner, Cortland Review, Gulf Coast, EcoTheo Review, and others. An associate editor for South Carolina Review and a Virginia Center for the Creative Arts fellow, she is also a freelance writer and editor. Visit her online at www.jebloemeke.com

The Dog Years of Reeducation

Poems by Jianqing Zheng

ISBN: 978-1-956440-39-3 paperback $19.95

ISBN: 978-1-956440-40-9 ebook $9.99 84 pp. February 2023

In the Chinese Cultural Revolution, millions of middle school and high school graduates, called the zhiqing or Educated Youth, were sent up to the mountains and down to the countryside to receive reeducation from the poor peasants. With deep conviction that they would play an important role in the transformation of rural China, the zhiqing became field hands, never realizing that reeducation was both a physical and psychological challenge. This collection of poetry is the representation of those reeducation years in the fields. Half a century has passed, but memories remain fresh, each a page of suffering, cheering, or dreaming to turn.

What people are saying about The Dog Years of Reeducation by Jianqing Zheng

Jianqing Zheng’s startling collection of poems, a reliving of the author’s experience as a young scholar relocated to a farm, summons nature as companion. The poet’s exile is “a double plow”: “plain laughter / flavor / of plain life”; “We remain silent as if / we must accept the fact that / our bodies deserve / bending or transplanting / like rice seedlings.”

As from the work of the great Russian poet Anna Akhmatova, we absorb history absorb it the only way we can: as experience. Dazzle of fireflies, leeches glomming to legs in rice paddies. Hard work and rest, lit with hand-rolled smokes. Each night “the moon peeks through / the broken window.” And, finally, there is this compelling invitation: “Tell me when you want to smell the scent of new rice, and I will bring you a whole bag of it grown with my muddy hands. It’s my sweat of love.”

Angela Ball, author of Talking Pillow

What I like best about Zheng’s poems is nearly every line has an image: I see what he’s saying verbal movies. He shows, rather than tells. I’m entertained by what he says and by the way he says his what. Unforgettable pictures: “Our husky voices / sandpaper the muggy heat,” “Straw hats float like life preservers / in a white sea of cotton,” a roommate bubbling snores, and “Light recedes / field to field / into a big tomato / toothed in half by hills.”

DC Berry, author of Yes, Cancer French Kisses

What will wake the reader here and keep attention from beginning to end is the series of original and important metaphors that reveal how deeply Jianqing Zheng’s memory was cast within the confines of his reeducation. In Zheng’s book, we experience the actual human side through the author’s keen perceptions, as well as compelling moves in the writing of his poetry.

Theodore Haddin, author of By a Doorway, in the Garden

Jianqing Zheng is the author of A Way of Looking and two poetry chapbooks, editor of Conversations with Dana Gioia, Sonia Sanchez’s Poetic Spirit through Haiku, and five other books. He received the 2019 Gerald Cable Book Prize and two literary arts fellowships from the Mississippi Arts Commission, among other awards and honors. He is professor of English at Mississippi Valley State University, where he serves as editor of the Journal of Ethnic American Literature and Valley Voices and is the former editor of Poetry South. A reeducated youth in the Chinese Cultural Revolution, Zheng has lived in Mississippi since 1991.

Biggest Little Girl

a novel by Jodi Angel

ISBN: 978-1-956440-41-6 paperback $21.95

ISBN: 978-1-956440-42-3 ebook $9.99

216 pp.

March 2023

In Biggest Little Girl, 14-year-old Joey has run away from home in smalltown California in search of anything better. She’s got a few dollars and a bus ticket north, but at a truck stop just 30 miles from home, she meets Jerry with his gold watch and wad of cash. Jerry buys Joey a hamburger and offers her a job in Reno making deliveries and desperate for someone to trust, she accepts. In Reno, the Biggest Little City in the World, shacked up in a motel, Jerry cuts off Joey’s hair, gives her new clothes, and sends her out to run envelopes into casinos in exchange for money. Joey makes a new group of friends at the motel, all teenagers, and when Joey falls for the ringleader, Amber, they all start making big plans to scam Jerry and run to Portland like a makeshift family. It doesn’t take long before everything starts to dissolve when the suppliers get shorted, Jerry gets desperate, and the future becomes a gamble with a deck that has already been stacked against her.

This is a survival story.

What people are saying about Biggest Little Girl :

Jodi Angel is a rock star. Jodi Angel is one of my literary idols. Anything she writes is solid gold wrapped in black leather. This novel is gorgeous.

—Luis Alberto Urrea, author of The House of Broken Angels and The Water Museum

Every sentence of Biggest Little Girl is pure poetry. Gritty, beautiful, and raw, Jodi Angel takes her characters and her readers on one hell of a ride. Hold on.

—Jennifer Pashley, author of The Watcher, The Scamp, and The Conjurer

Jodi Angel is the author of two story collections, The History of Vegas and You Only Get Letters from Jail, which was named as a Best Book of 2013 by Esquire. Her work has appeared in Esquire, Tin House, One Story, Zoetrope: All-Story, Electric Literature Recommended Reading, and Byliner, among other publications and anthologies. Her short story, “Snuff,” was selected for inclusion in The Best American Mystery Stories 2014. She grew up in a small town in Northern California in a family of girls.

The Green Mage

A novel by Michael Simms

ISBN: 978-1-956440-18-8 paperback $21.95

ISBN: 978-1-956440-19-5 ebook $9.99

326 pp. March 2023

Volume One of The Talon Trilogy

Norbert Oldfoot is a simple mage who makes his living traveling the Bekla River Road, selling trade goods, performing healing magic, and singing traditional songs of heroes. He becomes friends with Kerttu, a coppersmith who has developed a new alloy which is perfect for manufacturing swords. When Kerttu is kidnapped by the evil Wizard Ludek, Kerttu’s teenage daughter Tessia, a skilled hunter, recruits three friends, including Norbert, and sets out on a quest to find a legendary dragon who lives in the mountains. With the help of the dragon, Tessia plans to save her father. Little do they know that in order to save Kerttu, they will first have to save the kingdom.

Original cover art by Andrew Dunn “Tessia meets the Dragon.”

“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.”

–Peter Makuck, author of Wins and Losses: Stories

Original, deftly crafted, The Green Mage: The First Chronicle of Tessia Dragonqueen is a fun and fascinating read from start to finish, and debuts novelist Michael Simms new heroic fantasy series The Talon Trilogy. Populated throughout with interesting characters and unexpected plot twists, The Green Mage will prove to be an immediate and enduringly appreciated pick for personal reading lists of dedicated action/adventure fantasy fans and community library Science Fiction & Fantasy collections.

–Midwest Review of Books

Born and raised in Texas, Michael Simms has worked as a squire and armorer to a Hungarian fencing master, stable hand, gardener, forager, estate agent, college teacher, editor, publisher, technical writer, lexicographer, political organizer, and literary impresario. He is the author of seven collections of poetry and a textbook about poetry. In 2011 Simms was recognized by the Pennsylvania State Legislature for his contribution to the arts. Simms and his wife Eva live in the Pittsburgh neighborhood of Mount Washington overlooking the confluence of the Allegheny and Monongahela Rivers.

Before All Who Have Ever Seen This Disappear

A novel by Michael Gills

ISBN: 978-1-956440-31-7 paperback $21.95

ISBN: 978-1-956440-32-4 ebook $9.99

274 pp.

March 21, 2023

Before All Who Have Ever Seen This Disappear, Michael Gills’ fifth novel, plumbs the depths of the Stepwell family tendency toward theatrical catastrophe. When Weldon Stepwell, bareknuckled catcher for the Danville Little Johns and town florist, has his leg amputated in a woodcutting accident, the team shows up on the hospital lawn to give blood, pray, and curse God. Mostly they gather to be with the stricken wife, daughter, and son and wait to see if their teammate will live through the night. One teammate is sent to retrieve the leg, and just what on earth do you do with such a thing? Rural Arkansas in 1950, they are men who’d just whipped Hitler and come home to play ball, volunteer firemen, rural mail carriers, the stray senator-tobe, hardware store workers, and fish farmers. Spanning three generations, they just can’t seem to outrun whatever it is that stalks their periphery. Finally, an adult grandson must contend with the Stepwell business in the form of a plague that comes on them and the world from nowhere. Quarantined between a gleaming football stadium on one side of the road and the city cemetery on the other, a moment comes when they must walk out under the sun and re-commune. A story that dives as deep as you like into the abyss, then fights its way out with all the hope and grace this life allows.

What people are saying about Before All Who Have Ever Seen This Disappear :

Michael Gills can flat out write fine sentences. His writing is part Old Testament prophet, part Cormac McCarthy. It’s not as violent as either, but it’s not without its moments of violence, betrayal, and the attendant tragedies those things bring. All of Gills’ novels are rooted in the Stepwell family’s history, which is dark and shiny in turns. This, his fifth novel, Before All Who Have Seen This Disappear, is, to some extent a baseball novel, but not as much about baseball as the cover might lead us to believe. Like all good baseball novels, it’s about life, love, loss, and most of the time rallying, finding enough strength to persevere. This season, 1949, after the war against Hitler has been won, is cut short by the buck saw that takes Weldon Stepwell’s leg, and soon his marriage. It does not end with a shot into the gap with the winning run in scoring position. No, Weldon, like the mighty Casey, strikes out. He’s “sorry to beat the band. Sorry like no one’s business. The sorriest man on a planet full to the sorry brim with sorry people.” And yet, his grandson Joey forgives him, as we are wont to do, and loves him to the end of his days. This novel will leave you a bit bruised and battered, but it also will help you find your way through the dark times, past and yet to come. Rick Campbell, author of Sometimes the Light and Gunshot, Peacock, Dog

Michael Gills’ brand-spanking-new novel begins with an avalanche and never slackens pace thereafter. These pages jangle with incident, present a pageant of unforgettable personages, and speak a language of ruefully humorous lament and celebration. Every phrase exhibits the generous outlook of its author. Every sentence reveals and affirms a surprising truth we already know. The ornery humor is truthfully mordant, energized by sprightly melancholy. Fred Chappell,

Arkansas native Michael Gills is the author of eleven books of fiction and nonfiction, including the novel New Harmony (Raw Dog Screaming Press), Book 4 of the Go Love Quartet. A fourth collection of short fiction, Burning Down My Father’s House, will be published by Texas Review Press in 2023. Other work has been nominated for the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction and won the Southern Humanities Review’s Theodore Hoefner Prize for Fiction, Southern Review’s Best Debut of the Year, recognition in the Best American Short Stories and Pushcart Prize Anthology, and inclusion in New Stories from The South: The Year’s Best. His undergraduate novel writing workshop has been featured in USA Today, and several of his students have gone on to publish books of their own, including Emi Wright’s Alegría (Madville Publishing, 2021). Gills is a Distinguished Honors Professor at the University of Utah, where he lives in the hills with his wife of thirty-four years, Jill.

Turbulence & Fluids

poems by karla k. morton (2010 Texas Poet Laureate)

WINNER OF THE 2023 Paris Book Festival for Poetry

Grand Prize Short List for the 2024 Eric Hoffer Awards

ISBN: 978-1-956440-33-1 paperback $19.95

ISBN: 978-1-956440-34-8 ebook $9.99

92 pp.

April 2023

Immediately in karla morton’s poetry collection, Turbulence & Fluids, the tables are turned as the waters of the Earth speak first. Not only do they speak in their power and vulnerability, but in relationship to the humans that use and so often abuse them. This tells us the speaker of these poems is in close relationship to the natural world, especially water’s lifegiving necessity in the dry Texas of the poet’s childhood. In “Fish Multiplication,” with a reverence and gratitude found throughout the book, morton writes, “I hope when they pull their chairs / up to the table, they taste / the prayer of thanks / that flowed through those gills…”

Equally powerful in these poems is the force of the speaker’s voice, which pulses with color, range, passion, and ironic humor. This voice dares us to live fully, to crack open our hearts, to chance it all: “Dare to be lotus. / Dare to live down among this mucked mire. / The world needs the hope of your struggle. / Do not be consumed / rather be the fight, / be your one perfect bloom…” Also paramount for the poet is the family in community, even the four-legged variety: watering new sod beside her father in an unforeseen drought; moving him to a care facility, his guiding voice ever in her ear; making chow-chow in a hot kitchen; lifting and mourning the beloved dog (“be

his

Equal to this expansive voice and heart is an overarching spirituality, a Christian echo that never proselytizes, but girds and deepens the speaker’s worldview.

It’s fitting that the book flows poem to poem, with no section breaks to interrupt the movement as the speaker recounts not only the geographical but ancestral waters from which she rises, as in “Shine Shine Shine” and “Washita River”: “What magic breaks a river / through earth and flint and time; / what makes our lives eternal / but each legend of bloodline.” We each have this river of time and history and blood within us and, despite being drenched in grief as our losses mount, we and these poems travel and sing with it and in it.

Linda Parsons, author of Candescent and This Shaky Earth

karla k. morton is a professional speaker, award - winning author, photographer, the 2010 Texas Poet Laureate, and a member of the Texas Institute of Letters. Described as "one of the more adventurous voices in American poetry," she has been featured on Good Morning Texas, NPR, PBS, ABC News, CBS News and in countless newspapers, blogs, and magazines.

dove-like with

soul”).

With Access to Tools Poems by Dana Wildsmith

ISBN: 978-1-956440-37-9 paperback $17.95

ISBN: 978-1-956440-38-6 ebook $9.99

64 pp.

May 2023

In the same spirit as the iconic The Last Whole Earth Catalog: access to tools, Dana Wildsmith’s With Access to Tools offers a means for navigating a new time of change. Opening with a series of odes to traditional tools, each tool is inextricably bound to the hand and heart of the worker. The book then shifts, as has our world, to cyber tools which work at a physical remove that echoes the pandemic’s societal disruption. The book concludes with persona poems offering a note of hope through the strength of individual cerebral tools.

What People are saying about With Access to Tools:

With Access to Tools is beautifully crafted, strong, and wise. It is filled with amazing insights. Dana Wildsmith’s ability to see the truth in things and speak of it with such eloquence and quietness is a true gift to us all. This book gives us new and important paths to move through the world. It is unforgettable.

—Philip Lee Williams, author of Eden’s Last Horizon: Poems for the Earth

With Access to Tools is an elegiac owner’s manual that helps readers “bushwhack through the thick” of a virus-fueled world, except this is no ordinary how-to guide. No. Wildsmith’s musical and striking sonnets, ballads, and songs veritably lift from the page to form an ars poetica that instructs and delights us while speaking to our collective trauma, where every poem finds “a home for grief, / stitching it like squares for a quilt.” These poems are a joy of cadenced verse and memory that honor the work of writing and will fill you up with anticipation and hope.

Marianne Worthington, editor of Still: The Journal and author of The Girl Singer: Poems

This is a book that is both practical and is also a serious work of art. It rightly attends to our daily chores and the hands-on tools we need to feed ourselves, yet presents those humble tools the hoe, for instance in stately, metrically precise sonnets. The tools of our modern world are also presented, often through wordplay that signals the limits of such tools, because their claims for immediacy clash with reality. However, With Access to Tools wisely and lovingly suggests we need not saddle ourselves with a perceived dilemma between these stances. The ways and doings of an earlier time still matter, just as the ways of our present time matter and ask for our response. One response, voiced here with great affection, is poetry that ancient art that builds a bridge between two realms that seem to oppose each other, but are, in fact versions of the same thing. The poems here present a reality that is fierce and grave, yet subject to whimsy. Only true art can capture such a paradox, and this fine book proves the claim, and does so with some wonderful rhymes along the way. Maurice Manning, author of Railsplitter and One Man’s Dark

Dana Wildsmith is the author of six collections of poetry, a novel, Jumping, and an environmental memoir, Back to Abnormal: Surviving with an Old Farm in the New South, which was the finalist for Georgia Author of the Year. Wildsmith has served as Artist-inResidence for Devils Tower National Park, Grand Canyon National Park, and Everglades National Park. She is a Fellow of the Hambidge Center for Science and Creative Arts. Wildsmith works as an English literacy instructor for Lanier Technical College. She lives with her husband on an old farm in the toe of the Appalachians.

STAY

Hybrid flash essay by Sarah Leamy

HONORABLE MENTION FROM RED HEN PRESS 2020 QUILL PRIZE

ISBN: 978-1-956440-43-0 paperback $19.95

ISBN: 978-1-956440-44-7 ebook $9.99 152 pp.

May 2023

STAY is a hybrid visual story of a British tomboy & clown negotiating place/identity, trauma/neurodiversity, friendship/play, sexuality, and violence. Mixing illustration, photography, and narrative non-fiction, this experimental work transcends the binary, bravely imagining a world that makes space for all of us. What happens when an awkward and shy tomboy doesn't always feel safe at home or at school? Leamy has fantasies of another life and at 18 she finally takes flight. She leaves her small town to study languages and migration patterns in London before setting out with a rucksack, teddy bear (John), and juggling toys to hitch across Europe and the States. Leamy begins to wonder: Will she ever find her people, her place, her purpose? Or will each new home be forever as inconsistently hospitable as the first?

What people are saying about Stay:

Stay offers an eloquent exploration of the need to stay in motion and of the emotional and psychological forces that allow us to stay centered and afloat even amid great turmoil and change. Leamy’s eclectic yet carefully cultivated style casts a story not bound by ordinary expectations.—David

Sarah Leamy knows that all good writing starts with questions and that all excellent writing maintains the questions, enlarging and propelling them from page to page.—Nance Van Winckel, author of Sister Zero (2022, Slant Books)

Sarah Leamy's work is remarkable in its execution, asking the difficult questions of who we are and who we could be. A truly astonishing piece.—Monica Prince, author of Roadmap: A Choreopoem

Sarah Leamy is a gender-queer writer, editor, and non-traditional academic, currently living on the road. She is the author of When No One's Looking (2011), Lucky Shot (2012), Lucky Find (2014), Van Life (2016), Hidden (2021), and G'Dog (2022).

http://www.sarahleamy.com/

Deutsch author of Once Before Sunset

Splinter

Finalist for the 2022 Arthur Smith Poetry Prize Poems by Susan O’Dell Underwood

ISBN: 978-1-956440-29-4 paperback $18.95

ISBN: 978-1-956440-30-0 ebook $9.99 92 pp.

June 2023

On a collective level, the human diaspora is incalculable. Our leaving and resettling are as ancient as we are, whether immigrant, refugee, exile, or pioneer. In Splinter, Susan O’Dell Underwood’s poems trace the unique experiences of the Appalachian diaspora. Splinter suggests the deep ambivalence in the breaking away, a sundering which can never be mended. These poems test the emotional spectrum, weighing the joyful possibilities and sorrows of leaving against the obligation of those who stay “home,” grateful yet bereft in an altered place.

What people are saying about Splinter :

Susan O’Dell Underwood’s poetry shares a deep understanding of the signs and symbols of Appalachian life in the twenty-first century, how our voices change from one situation to the next and, as happens in “Assimilation,” the dread we feel at being asked, “Where in the hell are you from?” Art and the feeling of lived experience converge through ingenious allusions to Allen Ginsberg in “Holler” and Tillie Olsen in “I Stand Here Frying Okra.” Underwood’s vision is unfailingly wise and expansive, and the joy and laughter in these poems provide a counterweight to the knowledge that so many loved people are gone and not returning. Splinter offers readers an irresistible music of time and place, of “Exile,” where each of us comes into our own being: “We bloomed out of the barn loft’s hay mow / like one-at-a-time petals dropping.”

Jesse Graves, author of Merciful Days and Said-Songs: Essays on Poetry and Place

"Everybody lived closer to the ground then," says Susan O'Dell Underwood at the beginning of Splinter, her rich evocation of Appalachia the land, the people, the animals and the changes that occur as its sons and daughters leave to find different lives, but who cannot forget that fireflies were once lightning bugs and cicadas were jarflies. Beauty and darkness are woven throughout these pages, and they will leave you with a moving portrait of a place forever changed.

—Barbara Hamby, author of Bird Odyssey and On the Street of Divine Love: New and Selected Poems

Susan O'Dell Underwood is a native of East Tennessee, where she has lived most of her life. She's the director of creative writing at Carson-Newman University. She has published one earlier collection, The Book of Awe (Iris Press, 2018), a novel, Genesis Road (Madville Publishing, 2022), and two chapbooks. Her poems and fiction have appeared in journals and anthologies such as A Southern Poetry Anthology: Tennessee, Oxford American, Alaska Quarterly Review, Tupelo Quarterly, and Still: The Journal

Valediction

Poems and Prose by Linda Parsons

ISBN: 978-1-956440-61-4 paperback $19.95

ISBN: 978-1-956440-62-1 ebook $9.99 June 2023

Paul Éluard writes, “There is another world and it is in this one.” Within these worlds, we travel outward and inward, straddling our lives’ oppositions: parental/relationship struggle and loss, home and away, isolation and reconnection, the spiritual/mystical realm and physicality always balancing grief and reemergence, hello and goodbye. The hybrid nature of Linda Parsons' sixth collection, Valediction, with poems, diptychs, and micro essays, brings those oppositions into focus and reconciliation and grounds her in the earth under her feet, especially in her gardening meditations. In this striving, we are balanced and grounded with her as she lifts the veil on what it means to live and create fully, even in the face of impermanence.

Praise for Valediction

Linda Parsons has written a book we sorely need lyric meditations composed with an impeccable ear, explorations of family love and loss, flowering and decline, sunderings and difficult reunion. Combining sure-handed verse with prose poems of drastic intensity, Valediction reminds us the world is a cutting garden worthy of relentless tending and care. These hard-won poems are the harvest of a talent in high season.—Bobby C. Rogers, author of Shift Work and Paper Anniversary

For the poet, a garden is world enough. The bee, the singed leaf, the needful dirt, the worm. The tiger lily, fireworks. The moss, its slug. We may enter our gardens thinking we will control the earth, curate it, but we walk out realizing that we’re just another bug with song. (Thank God.) In Valediction the master Tennessean poet Linda Parsons gives us not just her song but the whole oratorio out from the center of her Knoxville yard she broadcasts the glory of her evening hour, joining in with cicadas and hawks, figs and frost, black widows, and all the ghosts of her ascendants living inside her, the perfect cacophony of love. This book is transcendent Rebecca Gayle Howell, author of American Purgatory and A Winter Breviary

“After the long virus winter, how can I be / anything but sun-warm skin and bone / down to my brightening folds, / down to the naked earth”? These lines highlight the many acts of transfiguration found inside this excellent collection by Linda Parsons. Steeped within the natural world, the poems explore the “mired muddy lake bottom of childhood” and weave throughout the collection a series titled “visitations” in which memories and the deceased meld into the present. The poems here are joyful, but it’s a joy that comes hard-earned and clear-eyed. Be they about swimming off the coast of Cuba, reminiscing about the loss of a friend while sledding, or simply tending to the backyard garden, these poems do what all great poems do they risk wonder despite loss. As Parsons writes in “October Foot Washing”: “For what is the earth but a tangled bouquet / lit to its core, what am I but a conduit / of ions.” Valediction, which is the act of saying farewell, pulses with lyrical energy. This collection showcases a poet whose talents, insights, and rhythms are at their height. Charlotte Pence, author of Code

Poet, playwright, essayist, and editor, Linda Parsons is the poetry editor for Madville Publishing and the copy editor for Chapter 16, the literary website of Humanities Tennessee. Published in such journals as The Georgia Review, Iowa Review, Prairie Schooner, Southern Poetry Review, Terrain, The Chattahoochee Review, Baltimore Review, and Shenandoah, her fifth poetry collection is Candescent (Iris Press, 2019). Five of her plays have been produced by Flying Anvil Theatre in Knoxville, Tennessee, where she lives and gardens.

Cover art by Gary Heatherly, author photo (below) by Kelly Norrell

All Night, All Day: Life, Death & Angels

Edited by Susan Cushman, foreword by Sophy Burnham

ISBN: 978-1-956440-45-4 paperback $19.95

ISBN: 978-1-956440-46-1 ebook $9.99

June 2023

There is something mystical about holding the hand of a person who is “crossing over.” It can be heartbreaking, of course, but also very holy and beautiful. Some of the pieces in this collection share the experience of personal loss when a loved one dies. Often the presence of an angel or another mystical experience is shared. But not only in death there are also stories here of the way the mystical world interacts with us in daily life. And not only angels, but also mothers, fathers, sisters, grandfathers, friends, and even a homeless man and a dog.

Contributors:

Cassandra King – Suzanne Henley – River Jordan – Sally Palmer Thomason – Natasha Trethewey –Sonja Livingston – Johnnie Bernhard – Frederica Mathewes-Green – Angela Jackson-Brown – Christa Allan – Renea Winchester – Jacqueline Allen Trimble – Mandy Haynes – Wendy Reed – Lisa Gornick – Jennifer Horne – Ann Fisher-Wirth – Averyell Kessler – Lauren Camp – Cathy Smith Bowers – Nancy Dorman-Hickson – Joanna Siebert – Susan Cushman – Claire Fullerton – Julie Cantrell

What people are saying about All Night, All Day: Life, Death & Angels

All Night, All Day is a gracefully executed anthology of hope, a merciful reminder we are not alone in this world. Each story, poem, and essay: a feather knitted upon an angel’s wing.

Robert Gwaltney, award-winning author of The Cicada Tree All Night, All Day is an inspirational collection of personal essays, stories, and poems by outstanding women authors who write about the appearance of the divine in their lives. Some of these angels come to save a life or change a flat tire. Some appear to warn people, tell them what to do, suggest more vegetables and maybe better shoes. They appear as a tap of intuition, a whisper, a whoosh of warmth, a rainbow, or an act of kindness. They are the stranger ministering to you in the hospital, the sound of voices singing in the attic, the sudden light at the window, the man by the side of the road. They are nurses and sometimes they are you. In this stunning anthology which explores so many heartwarming brushes with celestial beings, all these angels are messengers come to assure us we are not alone, and we are loved.

Margaret McMullan, award-winning author of Where the Angels Lived All Night, All Day is an anthology to be savored. This collection includes powerful first-hand accounts, interwoven with short fiction and poetry, beautifully exploring the themes of life, death, and angels. Jewels include Cassandra King Conroy's unforgettable tale. It takes courage to write the raw truth of last moments, as Renea Winchester did in her touching story of her mother’s death titled “Waiting for Her Angel.” I loved Mandy Haynes’ heartwarming story, “Rose’s Angel” (plus, she's a lovely person!). “The End” by Lisa Gornick is an intimate, touching tale. I shed tears over Susan Cushman’s “Hitting the Wall.” Within this collection are remembrances and memorials, which pay homage to a loved one or to a mystical experience. At the end, Claire Fullerton’s beautiful, final words offer the hope of peace. Crafting an anthology is an art. Susan Cushman has done a big topic justice the sum of the parts is greater for having been compiled together. Savor this book…for its wisdom, humor, and truth.

Carol Van Den Hende, award-winning author of Orchid Blooming and Goodbye, Orchid Stories that evoke a sense of peace, reassurance, and safety, as well as strength and encouragement through reported angelic activities. These stories tell of unexpected humanity and love in the lives of those who needed affirmation of spirituality in the human world. The presence of angels is recounted through brilliant and descriptive imagery and intriguing yet identifiable characterization.

Francine Rodriguez, award-winning author of A Woman’s Story Life, death, and angel stories are usually only shared with those whom we trust and only during the quiet hours of our souls. Susan Cushman is the finder and sharer of these stories. She is the editor and the force behind All Night, All Day. She has collected a wide spectrum of authors and encouraged them to contribute their personal stories and poems, thereby giving us a glimpse into their souls and the unspoken truths of our universal beliefs. The reader is treated with a wide range of storytelling and writing styles each pointing a way to introspection, restoration, and healing. In the hush of a still night there is a soft beauty in the laughter and tears the reader will discover as love gently laps at the door of all the things we hold dear.

Donna Keel Armer, author of Solo in Salento: A Memoir

Susan Cushman is author of five books two novels, two memoirs (most recently Pilgrim Interrupted), and a short story collection and editor of three previous anthologies, including Southern Writers on Writing. A native of Jackson, Mississippi, Susan lives in Memphis with her husband of 53 years. Susan has not yet seen angels in person, but she has a growing relationship with her guardian angel, who has been with her in at least two near-death experiences.

L elya Dorch e and the Coney Island Cure

a novel by David

Rothman

ISBN: 978-1-956440-47-8 paperback $20.95

ISBN: 978-1-956440-48-5 ebook $9.99

July 2023

In April 2020, at the height of the pandemic in New York City, Andrew, the assistant director of a funeral home one mile from Elmhurst Hospital, the “epicenter of the epicenter,” meets a legendary Coney Island witch doctor (Lelya Dorche), who makes him an offer that could better his chances of keeping his COVID-positive elderly parents and his severely asthmatic 13-year-old son, Miro, off the ever-expanding list of virus mortalities. To keep up his end of the bargain, Andrew will have to find his way to Bulgaria (no small task considering that there’s a ban on passenger flights to Europe) to secure 10 liters of a rare Macedonian pine sap, a key ingredient of Lelya Dorche’s proven remedy.

Praise for Lelya Dorche and the Coney Island Cure by David Rothman

David Rothman’s Lelya Dorche and the Coney Island Cure is one of the first COVID-19 novels and it is an adventure, a family drama, and very funny. This is the New York of real people: denizens of Queens and Brooklyn, not Manhattan day traders, not Brooklyn hipsters, but the immigrants, the Jews, the Muslims, and Hindus. Rothman has imagined a melting pot of a novel with a Roma witchdoctor, a Filipino nurse, a Jewish funeral home director, and an alcoholic Ukrainian smuggler in a race against time to save lives outside the official realms of government and capitalism. Like the Coney Island Cyclone that makes an appearance in the early pages of the book, once you get on this ride, you wouldn’t want to get off even if you could. John Talbird, author of The World Out There

"Sometimes life puts you in the darkest corner,” and what corner could be darker than a vicious virus which (at that point) h ad no cure or even treatment? Lelya Dorche and the Coney Island Cure is bright, and moving, illustrating how will, magical thinking, and the power of love can overcome the insurmountable. Guided by his sister’s ghost, warm, pragmatic Andrew risks it all to save his family. With sharp prose, an endearing cast of characters, and the haunting background of Coney Island, David Rothman’s novel reiterates the biggest lesson that came with the global pandemic: Love is absolutely everything. Claudia Zuluaga, author of Fort Starlight Rothman treads a fine line between reality and fantasticality when he portrays a mental health break, as many people’s mental health problems were exacerbated during COVID and by grief, too. Andrew, the narrator, is semi-unreliable, and yet, he is also smart, sensitive, and capable in many ways. I also like the way it shows how people in desperate situations will search out whatever they think might help, whether there is much evidence of that fact or not. It feels like a book rooted in parental love and the gap between helping and hurting and being overbearing in the process.—Mike Hilbig, author of Judgment Day & Other White Lies

David Rothman teaches writing for the City University of New York. A novella, The Lower East Side Tenement Reclamation Association, won the Omnidawn 2018 fabulist fiction prize and was published in 2020. A short story, “Guided by Voices” won a fiction prize with Glimmer Train Other short stories were published in such journals as Hybrido, The Prague Review, Newtown Literary, The Piltdown Review, among others. He is the drummer for the NYC-based band, The Edukators, and is a proud resident of Jackson Heights, Queens.

ECHOES

or , T he Insistence of Memory (a novel)

by Tom Shachtman

ISBN: 978-1-956440-49-2 paperback $22.95

ISBN: 978-1-956440-50-8 ebook $9.99 August 22, 2023

Ell, a millennial of European and Mexican heritage, has one humorous children’s book published, but her more serious writing projects are stalled, her boyfriend has dumped her, and she is deeply frightened by a recurring dream. To solve her problems, she delves into family mysteries Civil War-era slaveholding, madness, and theft of artifacts. The key to all, previously unknown to Ell but remarkable, is a female Confederate warrior ancestor whose nightmare echoes her own. By tracing both of their dreams to ancient times, and by using insights from modern genetic theory, Ell solves the mysteries and enables herself to move forward.

What people are saying about Echoes or, The Insistence of Memory:

"Ell’s own searching identity merges with that of her rediscovered Warrior Princess as the novel moves beyond its characters to explore how our notions of history and memory are comprised of an infinity of fragments that interrelate in many ways."

Tom Shachtman has published forty books, most recently The Memoir of the Minotaur (Madville Publishing, 2020). His histories include The Day America Crashed, Skyscraper Dreams, Absolute Zero and the Conquest of Cold, and The Founding Fortunes; his social analyses, Rumspringa and The Inarticulate Society; non-fiction children’s books such as Growing Up Masai; and an eclectic trilogy of short novels about sea lions, Beachmaster, Wavebender, and Driftwhistler. His awardwinning documentaries have aired on ABC, CBS, NBC, PBS, and BBC. He holds degrees in experimental psychology and in drama and has taught writing at NYU and lectured at Harvard, Georgia Tech, the Library of Congress, Stanford, and other institutions.

Kenneth Knoespel, poet and professor emeritus in history and literature, Georgia Tech

Passport Stamps:

Searching the World for a War to Call Home

A memoir by Sean D. Carberry

ISBN: 978-1-956440-55-3 paperback $22.95

ISBN: 978-1-956440-56-0 ebook $9.99 August 15, 2023

A candid, darkly comic, and emotionally naked tale of a former NPR journalist who driven by grief, loss, and the desire to find his “tribe” seeks solace in the world’s most dangerous places and his pursuit to join the ranks of combat-tested war correspondents. The learning curve of reporting in hostile environments is steep and at times comical, at others nearly fatal. He encounters a lot of dust, ragged infrastructure, weaponry, scary driving, whiskey, lust, and way too much food poisoning. When the assignment ends, he is left to confront the mental and emotional impact of the years of danger, death, and destruction.

What people are saying about Passport Stamps:

“I wasn’t who I was because I was a journalist, I was a journalist because of who I am.” We need such journalists. Sean Carberry has written a brave book for which there are no passport stamps the soul highs and lows of intoxicating faith leaping around dangerous combat zones on a years-long adrenalin rush. This is a clarion call for better mental health treatment after a confusing exodus from that world, where writing knits together that which is frayed and keeps indelible experiences on the shelves of story, always.—Jacki Lyden, author of Daughter of the Queen of Sheba and former NPR host and correspondent

Passport Stamps brings to mind Gale Garnett’s “We’ll Sing in the Sunshine.” Carberry describes the evanescence of sunshine and darkness followed by the inevitable being “on the way” of a journalist. Carberry’s world is a tattered web of people and places: Serbia, Russia, Egypt, Columbia, Lebanon, Syria, Yemen, Afghanistan our simultaneously horrifying yet alluring broken globe. Passport Stamps records Carberry’s memories accounts which make the reader ache for his forgotten life, real or imagined. It is a sharp, raking marvelous travel book, an autobiography rich with detail and ponderings about life.—Sam Pickering, author of The Gate in the Garden Wall, and “The Truth”

A lot of journalists come back from covering war and disaster and write the book about what they saw.

Sean Carberry tells a different story about what goes on inside of such a reporter's mind out there. Hopes, dreams, fears, embarrassment, hard lessons. It's all there, and it's quite a yarn. John Donvan, former ABC News correspondent, filmmaker, and author of In a Different Key: The Story of Autism

Sean Carberry is an award-winning journalist, writer, and editor. In his more than 15 years as a radio and print journalist, he has traveled to dozens of countries, including the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Iraq, Libya, Sudan, Syria, and Yemen. He was NPR's last Kabul-based correspondent in 2012 through 2014. After that, he spent several years working for the Defense Department Office of Inspector General, writing and editing oversight reports on counterterrorism operations, before returning to journalism. In a previous life, he was a Gold Record-winning recording engineer and producer. He has a B.A. from Lehigh University and an M.P.A. from the Harvard Kennedy School. He lives in Washington, D.C. with his cat Squeak who he rescued from the streets of Kabul.

A NEW ILLUSTRATED EDITION OF THE AWARD WINNING NOVELLA

No Evil I s Wide : Graphic Novel

by Randall Watson with art by Charles Moody

Winner of the DaVinci Eye Award for 2024, presented by the Eric Hoffer Awards Committee

ISBN: 978-1-956440-57-7 paperback $22.95

ISBN: 978-1-956440-58-4 ebook $9.99

118 pp.

August 15, 2023

No Evil Is Wide is the violent story of an unnamed narrator, the prostitute he is tasked to “find,” and Carpenter Wells, a man who has lost his soul and wanders, empty, unable to quench his desire. The remembrances of the narrator revolve around sexual awakening, family distance, and dissolution how they crumble to common and inevitable animalism. It is filled with philosophical epistles to the reader that concretize the themes of the work. The narrative that allows the reader purchase within the text begins with the narrator locating the unnamed girl while the world devolves into a chaotic madness of bombings and destruction not dissimilar to contemporary existence. This chaos serves as an uncanny reminder of the everyday violence we overlook.

Praise for Randall Watson’s novella, No Evil I s Wide : just read [this] novella and loved it. gorgeous sentences. so lush even for all its darkness. something sort of noir-ish about it. i was so touched . . . Nance Van Winckel, author of Our Foreigner, Book of No Ledge, and Pacific Walkers

I would not have picked the winner I have were anyone to try and tell me what it was about, what it was like, what it was. And in a way I am still struggling to figure out how to describe [it] except to say it is a work of art. Sometimes reminiscent of Cormac McCarthy, sometimes Kem Nunn, there is to this work the kind of ambition, the sort of bravery and insight and quality of writing and mind behind it that all defy easy summation. The language to this, its pace, its architecture, its audacity and cruel bone-jarring brutality and the cold and loving and miserable and strong-hearted vision of it just blew me away. Period. This was a meaningful, powerful, flat-out, go-for-the-throat read on all fronts. And what makes it especially strong is that throughout this dark dark dark story there is a strand of hope, unbeatable, undeniable, unquenchable hope, despite the ugly and graphic and deadly world the story inhabits. Brett Lott, former editor of Quarterly West, and of Crazy Horse

The poetry of this book is astounding. It reads like a glorious symphony sounds, even triumphing over the cruelness of the world depicted within. The story is complex and not for the fan of light reading, for this reads much more like classical literature. Watson’s story centers around an unnamed narrator and his obsession with a prostitute in a world filled with evil. In between the story of finding her, the author weaves the philosophy and beliefs of the narrator. The book will challenge you at every turn. Julia Picks 1

Charles Moody’s work has appeared in venues all over Texas. His art has also been featured as the cover for numerous literary and musical publications, most notably works by Naomi Shihab Nye, Randall Watson, and the German group, Beehover.

Everybody Here I s Kin

A novel by BettyJoyce Nash

ISBN: 978 - 1 - 956440 - 35 - 5 paperback $2 2 .95

ISBN: 978 - 1 - 956440 - 3 6 - 2 ebook $9.99 September 19, 2023

2024 Eric Hoffer Award, First Runner Up in the Commercial Fiction Category

On Boneyard Island, Georgia, where everyone’s weirdly kin, 13-year-old Lucille is marooned when her mother goes AWOL with an old flame, leaving Lucille with only her father’s ashes, two half-siblings, and Will, the misanthropic manager of the island’s only motel. The abandonment kills hope of Lucille’s promised snorkeling trip to the Florida Reef before ocean heat kills the coral and illusions she’s harbored about her mother’s sanity. Everybody Here Is Kin explores the lives of this sinking family, the island community, and fears of exposing wounds, old and new, when natural disaster forces them to trust, and depend on, strangers.

Praise for Everybody Here Is Kin

In her beautiful Everybody Here Is Kin, BettyJoyce Nash has laid bare the ways our blood betrays and restores us. The book is a powerful exploration of love’s shadowy forms and the ways our relationships are as shaped by desire as they are by the places we’ve called home, the places we keep running from and toward.

Bret Anthony Johnston, author of Remember Me Like This

In Everybody Here Is Kin, BettyJoyce Nash tells a coming-of-age tale that challenges notions of motherhood, both familial and as guardians of the Earth. Lucille is a girl on the brink of adolescence whose intelligence is matched only by her intuitive knowledge of the natural world where she’s been left to monitor her two younger stepsiblings. This story transcends time and place and will be a joy for anyone who loves this transient world.

Massey, author of The

This novel makes your heart swell, waterlogged with love and admiration. BettyJoyce Nash’s heroine, 13-year-old Lucille, worries about the planet sinking into the ocean, even as everyone in her life is going under, including the cranky motel manager, Will. Whom can she save and whom can she trust? Living inside Lucille’s head is a rare treat in BettyJoyce Nash’s astute, funny, and poignant book.

—Mary Kay Zuravleff, author of Man Alive!

BettyJoyce Nash’s writing has appeared in journals including North Dakota Quarterly and Across the Margin, as well as in newspapers, magazines, and online; her fiction has been recognized with fellowships from MacDowell (2013), The Ragdale Foundation (2015), and VCCA (2018). In 2014, she was selected as the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts fiction fellow to the Tyrone Guthrie Center in Ireland. She’s taught writing at the University of Richmond, the Albemarle Charlottesville Regional Jail, and several community writing centers; she now teaches at WriterHouse, a nonprofit literary arts center in Charlottesville, Virginia.

Gale

Girl from Blind River, Rising and Other Stories

Ring of Earth (stories)

by William Woolfitt

ISBN: 978-1-956440-59-1 paperback $20.95

ISBN: 978-1-956440-60-7 ebook $9.99 September 19, 2023

Humankind confronts its fraught relationship with the natural world in the stories of Ring of Earth, where William Woolfitt traces the history of survival and resistance in his home region of Appalachia. Woolfitt’s characters find ways to reclaim, repossess, and re-sacralize what’s been taken from them, to reckon with the destruction of their environments, cultures, homes, and bodies. “The Sinks of Gandy” is based on historical accounts of a woman who shot one of the last eastern elks near Spruce Knob in the 1830s; in “Fire Season,” a dying father watches through his window the red spruce forests burning. Clay eaters, orphans, child miners, immigrant laborers, and the victims of illegal sterilizations are among the survivors in Ring of Earth who bear witness to our broken land as they search for the hope and the mystery that might still be “running and running beneath the shell of the earth.”

Original cover photo “Golden Pockets” by Erin Case Praise for Ring of Earth:

The rich quiet of William Woolfitt’s unforgettable Ring of Earth shines darkly with the overlooked and wasted energies of youth and decay in rural America. But there’s also hope here. Listen for it in Woolfitt’s concise lyricisms as he listens for consolation in Earth’s small souls and silences: hearts of trees, eyes of whirligig beetles, wordless water whorls. Such deep empathy does he feel for other beings that his human characters physically experience the anguish of sick waters and trees afire, an intimate mirroring conveyed with the precise obliqueness of Raymond Carver. Mandy-Suzanne Wong, author of The Box Ring of Earth is full of gorgeous, surprising stories. At times, William Woolfitt seems capable of hearing the songs in the hearts of ghosts, and he can put them on the page for you. Yet all his characters, historical and contemporary, are fiercely alive. This book springs from a deep sense of place, and keen knowledge of both the grit and sweetness of Appalachian lives. This is a work of extraordinary imagination. Laura Long, author of Out of Peel Tree

In Ring of Earth, Will Woolfitt gives us stories that feel at once modern and as ancient as the Appalachian Mountains, pulsing with life, and love, and memory, and tradition, but also not looking away from the hard things. Woolfitt’s control of language will charm the reader, pull them in, and fill their hearts. Natalie Sypolt, author of The Sound of Holding Your Breath

Woolfitt's language is muscular, fresh, and sharp enough to slice open our vision. Cathryn Hankla, author of Fortune Teller Miracle Fish

I can't stop thinking about this cast of hog farmers, coal miners, country doctors, and children straining against prescribed futures all of them finely drawn characters who move fitfully against the backdrop of an ailing landscape. Lyrical and deeply moving, these stories are both a paean to the solace we find in nature and a warning against its thoughtless destruction. Veronica Montes, author of Benedicta Takes Wing

Sad and evocative, Woolfitt’s collection is reminiscent of early Ron Rash, Breece Pancake, and, at its best, Fred Chappell. Ring of Earth’s Appalachian folk struggle on hard yet striking landscapes, go hungry, dream of beach vacations, work in dirty mines, and sleep on shared blankets before fires that are always dying. Women work beside men, give birth to stillborn babies, and cater to partners who hibernate long winters in rooms that reek of despair. And yet, amidst the wreck of land and body, these pieces flare. Despite their lyric hunger and darkness, there is light, if only for a moment. Michael Gills, author of Before All Who Have Ever Seen This Disappear

William Woolfitt’s fiction chapbook, The Boy with Fire in His Mouth (2014), won the Epiphany Editions contest judged by Darin Strauss. He has also written several books of poems, including Spring Up Everlasting (Mercer University Press, 2020). His short stories and essays have been published in Tin House, Best Small Fictions, The Cincinnati Review, Appalachian Review, Epoch, Michigan Quarterly Review, and elsewhere. After growing up in West Virginia, Woolfitt relocated to another part of Appalachia Cleveland, Tennessee, where he lives with his family and teaches college writing classes.

“ The Truth ”

Familiar essays by Sam Pickering

ISBN: 978-1-956440-27-0 paperback $20.95

ISBN: 978-1-956440-28-7 ebook $9.99 October 17, 2023

This summer Sam Pickering and his wife Vicki attended a pro-fessional wrestling match in a small arena in Nova Scotia. They sat in folding chairs on the front row. They ate “Montreal Sausages” drowning in ketchup and awash with onions. They cheered heroes and laughed at villains. In the middle of one match, a naughty wrestler leaned over the ropes and staring at Sam, said, “If you keep laughing that hard, old-timer, you’ll have a heart attack.” “What?” Sam said to Vicki. “Oldtimer? Not me. That poor man had better see an eye doctor before he gets hurt.”

What people are saying about “The Truth”:

I’ve been reading Sam Pickering’s essays for nearly fifty years, and they have always been for me a touchstone, a place to go home. Now, in his 34th book, he seems even more comfortable in the genre the personal essay that he has so beautifully embraced and made utterly his own. These essays are uplifting, poetical, sometimes melancholy, always hugely entertaining. Pickering is an American original, and he’s writing here at the top of his form.

Jay

Parini, author of Borges and Me

Sam Pickering isn’t bright-eyed, bushy-tailed, and naïve. His world, and pages, however, are green with life. In this collection of essays, he celebrates friendships and the memories of friendships. He rummages through closets of books, some so wormeaten they are wondrously nourishing. He cures aches and pains by turning them into words. He meanders days and places and looking closely at life finds it intriguing. Under his pen, the imagination soars and the familiar becomes richly appealing, at once both familiar and unfamiliar. He is not a self-help writer, but his essays lighten one’s steps and make a person, even a vegan, want to eat a Montreal Sausage and cheer villains, and heroes, at a country wrestling match. Although Sam Pickering lives in Connecticut, he has long been a member of the Fellowship of Southern Writers.

and Vicki

Cover art is Estella Canziani’s The Piper of Dreams, The Medici Society, Grafton Street, Bond Street, London

Sam

Pickering with companions Jack, Suzie, and Mia in Connecticut near the Fenton River.

Photo by Eliza Pickering.

Pa’l Otro Lado

Pa ’ l Otro Lado a nd o ther t ales of b ad h ombres & n asty w omen by Juan Ochoa

ISBN: 978-1-956440-53-9 paperback $20.95

ISBN: 978-1-956440-54-6 ebook $9.99 October 17, 2023

Pa’l Otro Lado, a prequel to Mariguano, spans five generations of violence and tragedy in the Cortina family while narrating their forced migration to the United States from Northern Mexico. It is the tale of every working-class family who has come to realize that “you just can’t win.” Hunger and poverty drive the characters in this novel to abandon all hopes of attaining the American Dream and to resign themselves simply to survive. P’al Otro Lado is full of the baddest hombres and the nastiest women we all know, love, and call family

Pa’l Otro Lado and other tales of bad hombres & nasty women early reviews:

Pa’l Otro Lado is an engaging story collection with an airy narrator that makes the story breeze along effortlessly with a lot of local flavor and mixing of Spanish with English, but it also harkens back to a more classical element of tragedy as well. It reads like the fall of a great house in ancient literature, except for the fact that this family is a Mexican family living on both sides of the border and never being given an opportunity to flourish, except while engaging into a life of crime. Mike Hilbig, author of Judgment Day & Other White Lies

Ochoa’s novel is a fast moving, exciting, whimsical, often crazy-sad and hilarious ride into the lives of extraordinary, and yet somehow ordinary people on both sides of the border. The landscape is vivid, and the language goes effortlessly and poetically back-and-forth between Mexican dialects and English. The depth of characterization allows us to love these people, sometimes pity them, but never do we find them boring. The prose is so smooth that it feels as if we’re not reading at all, but watching a movie in our head, one that engages us so deeply that we don’t want it to end. Daniel Chacón, author of Kafka in a Skirt and Hotel Juárez: Stories, Rooms, and Loops

Juan Ochoa has captured the soul of a family, as their dreams and hopes for a better life in the U.S. are trampled and ground to dust while they struggle to survive in this well-crafted generational tale that follows the migration of the Cortina family from Mexico to the United States. The Cortinas face a constant battle for survival in this world, colliding head-on with the gods of violence and poverty that attach themselves to the family members and follow them on their continuing journey far away from Northern Mexico. The Cortinas come to the painful realization that the best possible outcome in their lives could only be their endurance through struggles pushed to the extreme and the continuing impact of trauma. This family embodies all of our families who have faced isolation, confusion, and bitterness, and often, resignation as their hopes for a better future are destroyed. Francine Rodriguez, author of A Woman Like Me and A Woman’s Story

Juan Ochoa is the author of Mariguano, a novel set in the drug trafficking world of the Texas/Mexico border circa 1980s. His short stories and essays appear in numerous journals. He teaches writing at South Texas College in McAllen. Ochoa is a licensed Mexican lawyer with an MFA in creative writing. He is currently writing the final volume in the trilogy El Penal.

Juan Ochoa

Original cover art and design by Edgar Torres

The Pendulum Moves Off

poems by Theodore Haddin

ISBN: 978-1-956440-67-6 paperback $18.95

ISBN: 978-1-956440-68-3 ebook $9.99

104 pp.

January 16, 2024

From a boy’s first acquaintance with nature and the meaning of time to witnessing climate change and desolating wars, Theodore Haddin’s poems in The Pendulum Moves Off celebrate the lives of humans and Earth’s other animal inhabitants with longing, exuberance, and awakening. Time is in the clock as well as in nature, and our extraction of the natural world diminishes us as well. In truth, “tock and tick” are not forever, but the call of art and music and Haddin’s love of rivers in this beautiful and thought-provoking collection remind us of a better way of life we have yet to discover.

Praise for Theodore Haddin:

From houses, woods, and rivers of memory, Ted Haddin in this new collection brings home for us poems of redemption and restoration, reminding us of the numinous character of everyday life, lived in communion with mockingbirds, dragonflies, foxes, gardenias, and trout. Under the hand of the pendulum of time, in the midst of our “agony of uncertainty,” the poems teach us how to live with clear eyes, to walk with grace and a gentleness that might heal ourselves and our world. Like the clear waters of Walden Pond, Ted Haddin’s new poetry reflects the skies of our necessary hopes for the future.

Theodore Haddin’s poems ask us to see Earth as a garden on the brink of ruin, but a garden nevertheless, full of beauty and possibility. They urge us that it is high time for clarity and kindness, humility and restraint, love and reconnection.

James Mersmann, author of Straying Toward Home

Theodore Haddin’s pendulum is in sync with the stories he tells, poem after poem. He understands that rhythm and narrative must work together, or poetry is never achieved. Many are the images Haddin employs in this fine book, but none as striking as that of the violin: “We sing with strings in our / lonely rooms. One day someone hears music from all we’ve done.” Whether frog or fox by the road or a broken heart, h is poems that are stories ring true, and I am embraced by the sound and silence of knowing his world, which is ours as well.

Jim Barnes, author of Sundown Explains Nothing: New and Selected Poems

Like the pendulum of the title poem, Theodore Haddin’s poems move us, and move within us, with the expressive coherence of a literary vision deeply realized and generously shared. This book’s unpretentious power grows from a lyricism that deftly blends perception and introspection. Readers who open their minds and hearts to Haddin’s poetry will find the journey richly rewarding. A wonderful collection in every respect.

Donald Beagle, author of What Must Arise

Theodore Haddin is a poet, editor, and emeritus professor from the University of Alabama at Birmingham. Previous collections are By a Doorway, in the Garden and the chapbook The River and the Road. His poems have appeared in such journals as The Birmingham Poetry Review, Chariton Review, Valley Voices, POMPA, and Poetry South and in three anthologies. Reviews on American literature and poetry have been published in Valley Voices, The Anniston Star, Birmingham Poetry Review, and Southern Humanities Review, among others. A professionally trained violinist, Haddin has performed locally and supported music organizations including the Arianna String Quartet and individuals in Berlin and St. Louis. At UAB, he founded and directed The Humanities Forum, now named in his honor as The Theodore Haddin Forum for the Arts and Sciences.

Michael Sowder, author of House Under the Moon

a poem is a house

WINNER OF THE 2022 ARTHUR SMITH PRIZE by linda ravenswood

ISBN: 978-1-956440-65-2 paperback $18.95

ISBN: 978-1-956440-66-9 ebook $9.99

January 16, 2024

Linda Ravenswood’s magnificent [collection] a poem is a house is a work of address. It speaks to complex figures dwelling in the inscape and the outscape of the text. It acknowledges its imagination. The speaker and, perhaps, the writer and/or the reader are actively involved … floating, dissolving, life-making, jagged, transparent, transformative … These are some of the existential conditions that the work carries, [in] glaciers of text, broken into bodies of different shapes, densities, colors, rhythms, destinations, desires.

—Juan Felipé Herrera, U.S. Poet Laureate (2015-2017) and author of Notes on the Assemblage

This book is a revelation. Ravenswood shows us that a poem is a house as well as a housefire, a history, a family, a stranger, a choir. Stunning poems such as "The children turn themselves into ICE" and "names of Malinche / names of her children" are full of command and compassion, grit and grace. This is a visionary urgency. I love this book.

Lee Herrick, California Poet Laureate and author of Scar and Flower

a poem is a house pushes against the borders of poetry to emphasize how all borders are a construct: geopolitical, literary, and personal. Each poem in this outstanding collection reinvents itself, employing a range of forms, such as visual poems and broken poetry cycles, to recreate vivid details of the speaker’s experiences as a Californian with mixed Indigenous, European, and Mexican ancestry. Readers experience a state of bardo, a sense of existing between states: between different cultures, between safety and violence, and perhaps most of all, between past and present. Like memory itself, these poems thrive on elision, repetition, and reversal. a poem is a house is a dazzling accomplishment that presents a new and unique poetic vision.

—Charlotte Pence, 2022 Arthur Smith Prize Judge and author of Code

a poem is a house reminds me that we write with the ancestors and carriers of our collective experiences looking over our shoulders and giving us a voice to tell their stories. Sometimes we recognize that these stories are sometimes really our own. This poetry speaks to the alienation of a group of people, and the individuals themselves, from community, family, and often the self. The voice I hear is one fighting erasure and alienation from “the other society.” This society we view at a distance as we are separated from it by birth. The words in this collection of poetry suggest that some of us spend our lives pondering the justification for the distance while being told the reasons. The questions still remain unanswered as we move toward an inevitable death

Francine Rodriguez, author of A Woman’s Story

linda ravenswood BFA MA, PhD abd is a poet and performance artist from Los Angeles. Her accolades include an Oxford Prize in Poetry (2022) and the Edwin Markham Prize in Poetry (2023). She is the founding editor of The Los Angeles Press, est. 2018, and the co-founder of the Poet Laureate program in Glendale, California. Her recent collections include Cantadora letters from California (Eyewear London/The Black Spring Press Group, 2023), The Stan Poems (Pedestrian Press, 2022), Tlacuilx Tongues in Quarantine (HINCHAS Press, 2021), and XLA Poets (HINCHAS Press, 2020). Find her at thelosangelespress.com

The Book of Failures

poems by Neil Shepard

ISBN: 978-1-956440-69-0 paperback $18.95

ISBN: 978-1-956440-70-6 ebook $9.99

January 16, 2024

Amid the tensions of family and community and the struggles with desire and disappointment out of which art is made, there is all this profusion: an unstoppable spring, the orange flash of a fox, figs and honey in a Greek harbor town, and a pianist conjuring lost love in his figured solos our ravenous lives teetering on the edge of today’s sadness. In his ninth poetry collection, The Book of Failures, Neil Shepard wanders urban and rural landscapes, from American coastlines to foreign shores, the sudden signposts deciphering what’s won, what’s lost. Though the tone is often elegiac in this prismatic book of human strivings, it is woven with wit and wisdom enough to illuminate the night sky and bring unexpected levity to his many discoveries.

Praise for The Book of Failures by Neil Shepard:

Neil Shepard sustains a masterful dialectic in The Book of Failures which weds jeremiads to rejoicings with masterful “negative capability,” immersing himself in “uncertainties, mysteries, doubt” with hard-won ease. Moving wisdom concatenates in his catalogs, while archetypal precepts resonate with fresh relevance, as in these lines that conclude his poem “There Is No Sadness”: “And on into the world where generations begat / and beget and t here is no ending, is there, except / for something upending as elegy in which / we inherit no sadness like today’s sadness.” In poem after poem, Shepard chronicles bittersweet “mysteries” by “singing” their lyrical news. “Just let me sing,” he beseeches in “Like Blue Behind A Daytime Moon,” “That’s all I can do.” And so he does in unabashed acknowledgement of Qoheleth’s dispatch in Ecclesiastes that “there is nothing new under the sun,” while simultaneously accomplishing that which poets of each new age are challenged to perform, namely divining new verbal “salt” that makes new. Chard deNiord, author of In My Unknowing

This is an extraordinary book, its wise and luminous poems circling the disquiet and agitation at the edges of thought as narrator after narrator investigates and probes the many ways we perceive ourselves to fail in the eyes of others. Yet even as one narrator brilliantly describes his feelings of erasure as “auditioning for a bit part in anonymity,” another admits, “I like it here on the edge / of empire” and still another holds “a grudge against / business as usual.” Reading Shepard’s beautifully crafted poems, which are alive with the music of colloquial American speech, I was reminded of the metaphysician Leo Bronstein’s observations on failure and success, that one is not the opposite of the other: “Success is to be the achievement of a goal known, open, given. Failure, achievement of a goal not known yet, hidden and to be discovered. Friendship is to know this. Prophesy is about this. Spirituality means this.” The Book of Failures understands and beautifully articulates this wisdom. Its narrators resist easy wins, holding out for something larger and deeper, braver and more daring than what we think of as success, what the final narrator of the book calls “a stubborn green.” Susan Mitchell, author of Erotikon

At once nomadic and deeply rooted in place, these wide-ranging poems take us from rural Vermont to New York City, from Ireland to Corsica, from the freedom of travel to the shock of 2020’s lockdown. Vulnerable and wise, The Book of Failures laments what separates son from father, nation from nation, human from the beyond-human world even as it explores stunning moments of connection, as in witnessing the nesting dance of wood storks and egrets, “the dusting / of wings with swamp wind, leaves, thistle.” Shepard carries us “to the edge” here, where our own “small matter expands into the gathering immensity,” acknowledging the inseparable beauty and terror of the human experience: “life is as gorgeous and ravenous as it always was,” Shepard writes, “and still there is no consolation.” Sandra Meek, author of Still

Neil Shepard attends to birds and politics and art and jazz “with the verve of someone / Auditioning Broadway // for a bit part in anonymity.” In poems “lit with an inner privacy,” Shepard displays “the full light of language” as he reconciles the planet’s self-renewing seasons with aging and death, the creative impulse with the pandemic lockdown, and attempts to speak “an identifying phrase against / erasure.” The Book of Failures is a strong addition to a body of work of “untranslatable intimacy” crafted during the past three decades by one of our finest poets. Michael Waters, author of Sinnerman

Neil Shepard’s eighth book, How It Is: Selected Poems, was published in 2018 by Salmon Poetry (Ireland); he edited the anthology Vermont Poets and Their Craft in 2019 (Green Writers Press, VT). His poems appear in Poetry Daily, Verse Daily, and Poem-a-Day, as well as in many literary magazines, including Harvard Review, New American Writing, New England Review, Paris Review, Ploughshares, Sewanee Review, and Southern Review. He edited the Green Mountains Review for many years and currently edits the online journal Plant-Human Quarterly. These days, he splits time between Vermont and NYC where, until the pandemic, he taught poetry workshops at Poets House.

Windkeep: Volume Two of the Talon Trilogy

by Michael Simms

ISBN: 978-1-956440-71-3 paperback $22.95

ISBN: 978-1-956440-72-0 ebook $9.99 February 20, 2024

Windkeep is book two in a YA fantasy series about Tessia the Dragon Queen and her loyal advisor and friend Norbert Oldfoot, a gentle mage who has no desire to wield the powerful magics he probably could use if he were not such a good person. Norbert is the selfdeprecating narrator of the story, as he was for book 1, The Green Mage.

Windkeep opens with a bored Queen Tessia seven years after the events of book 1. The kingdom is suffering a devastating drought, and when a traveler comes to town, Bastian, he tells tales of the kingdoms and peoples to the north, including weather witches, who could bring rain, Tessia and her ministers believe him.

Tessia, Tyrmiss the dragon, and Norbert set off with a few others to set the kingdom to rights through diplomacy, and of course, it all goes terribly wrong when they run afoul of a magic that turns all but Norbert into magically mismatched creatures. Can Norbert return his friends to their own shapes? And beyond that, will he and his magically transformed friends be able to save the kingdom?

Original cover art by Andrew Dunn “Windkeep.”

–Peter Makuck, author of Wins and Losses: Stories

After Camus

a novel by Jay Neugeboren

ISBN: 978-1-956440-73-7 paperback $21.95

ISBN: 978-1-956440-74-4 ebook $9.99

February 20, 2024

A troubled marriage and love story set against the background of the AIDS pandemic, and the American wars in Vietnam and Iraq lie at the heart of After Camus. Saul Davidoff and Tolle Riordan, who meet during a protest against the Vietnam War, marry, live through the Plague Years of the AIDS epidemic, raise a family … and burn out. Camus is a hero to both of them: Tolle, a young dancer and choreographer, has a liaison with him in Paris shortly before his death; Saul, inspired by Camus’s The Plague, becomes an infectious disease (and AIDS) doctor … and Camus becomes a ghostly presence central to our story. Hoping to repair their marriage, Tolle and Saul return to a village in the South of France where they lived when they were first in love, and where Camus lived when recovering from a siege of tuberculosis. The novel draws a vivid portrait of a marriage that spans a series of historical events: from the Vietnam war through the AIDs epidemic and Gulf War, to the Iraq War and the advent of the right wing Le Pen movement in France. After Camus is both a fictional meditation on recent history and a compelling tale of how various forms of love and friendship do and do not survive in times of social and political upheaval. In this novel of enchantments, internationally acclaimed author Jay Neugeboren is at the peak of his powers as a master storyteller.

JAY NEUGEBOREN is the author of 22 books, including five prize-winning novels, four collections of awardwinning stories, and two prize-winning books of non-fiction. His stories and essays have appeared widely in The New York Review of Books, The Atlantic Monthly, The American Scholar, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Ploughshares, Tablet, and Commonweal, among others, and have been reprinted in more than 50 anthologies, including Best American Short Stories, and The O. Henry Prize Stories. He is the recipient of fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Massachusetts Council on the Arts, and is the only author to have won six consecutive Syndicated Fiction Prizes. His archive is housed at the Harry Ransom Humanities Center in Austin, Texas.

Praise After Camus :

You need real courage to write Albert Camus as a fictional character. Jay Neugeboren, one of the best American writers of the 20th century and doing even better work in the 21st, has what it takes and more.

Madison Smart Bell, author of All Souls’ Rising, The Haiti Trilogy, and other books

I am in this book’s target audience: the world conjured by the words: Paris, Sartre, de Beauvoir, and Café de Flore sparked my imagination when I was seventeen and Albert Camus (well, his memory!) was a college crush. This elegant, passionate book will expand my circle: It thrusts mid-twentieth century people, places, and ideas into the complexities of our moment they shine anew!

Sherry Turkle, Professor MIT, author of Reclaiming Conversation and The Empathy Diaries

After Camus offers the consolations of philosophy, the conflicts of history and the conflagrations of sex. Jay Neugeboren has written a heady, powerful novel.

Margo Jefferson, Pulitzer Prize winning author of Constructing a Nervous System and Negroland

The Intimacy of Spoons

poems by Jim Minick

ISBN: 978-1-956440-75-1 paperback $18.95

ISBN: 978-1-956440-76-8 ebook $9.99

March 1, 2024

The Intimacy of Spoons explores the many metaphors of the spoon: from love and marriage to the spoon of a grave that holds our bodies; from the darkness of loss and night, where “the Big Dipper is nothing but / the oldest spoon pointing us home”; to the darkness of lungs transformed into art. The poems cover a wide variety of topics cultural, political, familial, and natural and always, underlying these poems is the song of birds with broken wings or clear voices, avian muses filling our forests now or long gone. There are nods to Basho and Thoreau, to Eliot and Frost, Dickinson and Milton, this last, a long poem that retells the story of Adam and Eve from the point of view of Mal, the apple. Likewise, The Intimacy of Spoons shares a variety of forms, from sonnet, sestina, and villanelle to syllabics, lyrics, and a ballad. At the center of the book is the long poem, “Elegy for My Body,” which uses wordplay and contrasting voices to explore mortality, because “You can’t really do time; / it simply does us, / or undoes us, / us beings in the time being being beings / on Times Squared / waiting for the big ball to fall.” The poems of The Intimacy of Spoons return us to everyday stories and objects, common yet profound, that we touch so often and that enter us with every meal and every breath.

Jim Minick is the author or editor of eight books, including Without Warning: The Tornado of Udall, Kansas (nonfiction), Fire Is Your Water (novel), and The Blueberry Years: A Memoir of Farm and Family. His work has appeared in many publications, including the New York Times, Poets & Writers, Oxford American, Orion, Shenandoah, Appalachian Journal, Wind, and The Sun. He serves as coeditor of Pine Mountain Sand & Gravel

Praise for The Intimacy of Spoons by Jim Minick:

Minick works out a kind of peace, a form of grace, informed by a deep and loving knowledge of place, tended to with compassion and praise and a cleareyed gaze that lets nothing escape.

Todd Davis, author of Coffin Honey

Listening to the rain “with one ear,” Minick extends a hand to those who want to find their “way back into the earth.”

Minick’s own bright song traces the tender fascination he has sustained over a lifetime.

The Intimacy of Spoons reminds us that we are surrounded by the miraculous.

Amy Wright, author of Paper Concert

Cathryn Hankla, author of Immortal Stuff

Doug Van Gundy, author of A Charm Against Forgetting

Each poem is a spoonful of medicine to administer healing to our broken world.

Nickole Brown, author of To Those Who Were Our First Gods

Original cover art by Suzanne Stryk

Incantations

Poems by Darnell Arnoult

ISBN: 978-1-956440-77-5 paperback $18.95

ISBN: 978-1-956440-78-2 ebook $9.99 March 19, 2024

Out of grief, upheaval, derision, disappointment, and change of all kinds from the intimate to the mythic Incantations both admonishes and rails. Darnell Arnoult's evocative collection unleashes frustration and longing in tongues of fire. And while her poems walk heaven’s blues home in a rush of images, real and imagined, they point to an undergirding optimism and path toward healing and hope where joy lies “dazed and waiting.” The spells cast here are beyond magic, beyond human no less than urgent, no more than what’s necessary to begin again.

Praise for Incantations by Darnell Arnoult:

Darnell Arnoult has written some of the South’s most memorable poems of the past quartercentury, and Incantations is her most evocative and mysterious book. This collection shimmers and sparks with an electricity I hear in “that thin, wild mercury sound, metallic and gold and whatever that conjures up” that Bob Dylan envisioned. Arnoult offers strange and beautiful images steeped in sonic and metaphorical richness: “Sun rhythms over a howling serpent telling / you rain is long gone and her children, / light as Venus and drunk as owls, / flood judgment.” These glorious poems manage to be both sharp-edged and lush, a parabolic book of paradoxes, and as “Morning” reminds us, “Glory talks in a hard language.” Listen. Let the widening spell of Incantations transport you through dark portals and back into the welcome and needed light. Jesse Graves, author of Merciful Days and Said-Songs: Essays on Poetry and Place

The poems that make up this mesmerizing collection are born from the deepest kinds of grief grief that comes from worlds burning, from death that dances and glides, from widowhood with its “slaughtered and emptied heart.” Our lives are transient; everything changes form, moving from one existence into another before disappearing into the past. As Darnell Arnoult tells us in Incantations, “the human gaze licks itself / with the fascination of sorrow.” Yet she also rejoices in the curative properties of language, how it can bewitch and rescue us from despair. There is salvation in here, and therein lies the magic in this gorgeous and mysterious collection. These poems truly are incantations charms for remembrance, for protection and rebirth, and always for love, no matter how it may shift its shape. Denton Loving, author of Tamp

These poems boom and sing. They are tooth and balm and gut. They howl into vine-covered chasms and plumb the depths of human sorrow while traversing a landscape of shadow and ghost. There is an impossible frailty to the world Darnell Arnoult conjures and an impossible strength. Here are prayers wrought of gravel and old pine, choked weeds and rising water but also of marsh birds and shimmering grasses. A thunderous collection. Blazing and true. Sonja Livingston, author of Ghostbread

Darnell Arnoult is the author of the novel Sufficient Grace (Simon & Schuster) and two poetry collections, What Travels With Us and Galaxie Wagon (LSU Press), with shorter works in journals and anthologies. She has received the SIBA Poetry Book of the Year Prize, the Weatherford Award, the Thomas and Lillie D. Chaffin Award, and the Mary Frances Hobson Award in Arts and Letters and was nominated for a Pushcart Prize. She lives with her family in Mebane, NC. For more about Darnell and her workshops, visit darnellarnoult.net

Fantastic Imaginary Creatures:

An Anthology of Contemporary Prose Poems

edited by Gerry LaFemina

ISBN: 978-1-956440-81-2 paperback $20.95

ISBN: 978-1-956440-82-9 ebook $9.99

122 pp.

May 21, 2024

The prose poem is the literary sphinx, the literary chimera, minotaur, gryphon–part one thing, part another and at their best, they’re magical, mythical. Fantastic Imaginary Creatures collects the best contemporary prose poems that demonstrate the potentiality and plasticity the form allows. Some of these poems have been previously published, and some are brand spanking new.

The Contributors:

Valerie Bacharach, Ujjvala Bagal-Rahn, Ned Balbo, Madeleine Barnes, Michelle Boczek Evory, Rick Campbell, Joseph Capista, Gary Ciocco, TS Coody, Jim Daniels, Anthony DiMatteo, gary fincke, Jeff Friedman, Molly Fuller, Joy Gaines-Friedler, George Guida, Luke Hankins, Gretchen Heyer, Tom Hunley, Anna Jacobson, Peter Johnson, Richard Jordan, Elizabeth Kerlikowske, Gerry LaFemina, Joseph Lerner, Geri Lipschultz, Lorette C. Luzajic, Gary McDowell, Kathleen McGookey, Jennifer Militello, Robert Miltner, Erin Murphy, kerry neville, Robert Perchan, Christine Rhein, Jane Satterfield, Katherine Smith, Joshua Michael Stewart, Virgil Suárez, Matthew Thorburn, Eric Torgersen, Patricia Valdata, Elinor Ann Walker, Greg Watson, Cathy Wittmeyer, George Yatchisin, Michael T. Young

Gerry LaFemina’s latest work, The Pursuit: A Meditation on Happiness (Madville 2022), is a collection of essays. His 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/

photo by Mercedes LaFemina

Dust Storms May Exist

poems by Ben Groner III

ISBN: 978-1-956440-85-0 paperback $19.95

ISBN: 978-1-956440-86-7 ebook $9.99

106 pp.

May 21, 2024

2024 Winner American Fiction Award Winner Poetry: Religions – Finalist Poetry: Narrative

Dust Storms May Exist follows the trajectory of a 10,000-mile road trip, exploring the geography, music, and history of America while mapping its astonishments and disillusionments. Ben Groner III searches for a dead father, wrestles with belief and doubt, yearns for sensuality, and recalls the freedom and loneliness of traveling in South America. Bluegrass and cowboy songs seep across the pages as he moves through canyons, bayous, cornfields, museums, gas stations, dance halls, and memory’s refracting landscapes. These poems are a reckoning with what his country is and could be, a meditation on the palpability of absence, a discovery of the searing border between friendship and love, a realization that longing revolves at the core of all experience.

This is a stunner of a book, one that created the quietest of spaces where I could immerse myself in Ben Groner’s many sojourns across exquisite terrains made even more so by his unwavering curiosity, his keen ear, and his reverent wonder. I’m grateful for poems and poets like this. I’m grateful for the reminder to slow down, to take notice, and as the final words of the book suggest, to step into my own life.

—Destiny O. Birdsong, author of Negotiations and Nobody’s Magic

Dust Storms May Exist is a powerful book of odes and elegies, reflections on a father gone too soon and a country seemingly unraveling, like the “Untied States” on a sign remembered from a road trip. These are poems of travel and exploration, weathering storms of many kinds along the journey, always delivering a sense of rich and meaningful arrival.

Jesse Graves, author of Merciful Days and Tennessee Landscape with Blighted Pine

Dust Storms May Exist is a stunning collection “drenched in gladness” and gorgeous imagery, striking that delicate balance between beauty and ache at the seam of each poem. Ben Groner III is a poet who pierces each moment with reverence and brilliant examinations of the human spirit.… This book continually held my attention and my heart.

—Tiana Clark, author of I Can't Talk About the Trees Without the Blood

Vastness in all its forms sky, land, time, ache, faith, even language itself is at the heart of Ben Groner’s first collection, Dust Storms May Exist. From Bolivia to Chile, from Cana to Capernaum and with so much “shimmering and shifting / around us” Groner asks, “Where can one ground oneself?” Maybe there’s no comforting, enveloping answer but, instead, only this radiant life where strangers all sons and daughters sometimes find themselves in shared spaces, marveling, attuned to the same mysteries.

Jeff Hardin, author of A Clearing Space in the Middle of Being

Ben Groner III received Texas A&M University's 2014 Gordone Award for undergraduate poetry and two Pushcart Prize nominations. His poems have been published in Whale Road Review, GASHER, The South Carolina Review, The Shore, Rust & Moth, Cheat River Review, and elsewhere. He is a former bookseller at Parnassus Books in Nashville, Tennessee, where he lives with his wife and son. You can read more of his work at bengroner.com

The Lesser Madonnas

11 short stories by A. Rooney

ISBN: 978-1-956440-87-4 paperback $20.95

ISBN: 978-1-956440-88-1 ebook $9.99

160 pp.

June 18, 2024

The Lesser Madonnas is a linked collection of short stories about working class and immigrant life in Denver, CO. These stories highlight the real conflicts people have with identity and just getting by in a society that was not built specifically for them. The strength of this collection is the characters, who are all fully developed. The stories showcase the author’s ability to empathize and occupy the spaces of many different kinds of people without being insensitive. It avoids politicizing these conflicts and instead focuses on the human side of how to survive within a major American city amidst a struggling economy and the challenges of daily life. These stories demonstrate a real range of conflicts and lifestyles, and the author handles all of them equally with care.

Praise for The Lesser Madonnas: Linked stories by A. Rooney:

A. Rooney paints a well-crafted portrait of eleven women’s inner lives and motivations as they encounter life and each other at the Bel-Care Motel. He leads us on a journey of thwarted idealism and ever-shifting identities as the women’s everyday experiences and hopes for the future are both real and complicated and lead us to the truth that we are all foreigners here facing the unknown, and we all have the ability to self-destruct.

Francine Rodriguez, author of A Woman’s Story

In The Lesser Madonnas, Rooney has let us into the lives of eleven women connected by more than the motel they frequent: women who suffer. As Mrs. Brown says in her story, “Women have had to suffer for centuries, maybe since the beginning.” Nisha from India follows the life of a Bollywood actress in “The Madhuris of Denver,” and later is filled with regret: “I went on to become Nisha Banerjee, of the Bel-Care motel of Denver, with no children and a Bengali husband with crooked teeth.”

We know these women, we see them tending bar, styling hair, and cleaning the motel rooms; women who struggle day to day with what life throws at them; victims, but overcomers.

—Traci Hales, Author and Radio Show Host

A. Rooney (we call him Andy) taught writing at Jindal Global University in Sonipat, India, and now lives in Denver, Colorado. His novel, The Autobiography of Francis N. Stein: The Last Promethean, was published in 2019 by Madville Publishing. He has published a collection of stories, The Colorado Motet (Ghost Road Press) and a novella, Fall of the Rock Dove (Main Street Rag). His stories and poems have appeared in journals, magazines, and websites all over the world.

Tasting Flight

poems

Yiskah Rosenfeld

R UNNER - UP FOR THE 2022 A RTHUR S MITH P OETRY P RIZE

ISBN: 978-1-956440-83-6 paperback $19.95

ISBN: 978-1-956440-84-3 ebook $9.99

June 18, 2024

A yearning dominates the vibrant poems in Tasting Flight, specifically the desire to be enough. Of course, though, one is always enough. The observant, insightful, and confident speaker in these poems knows this truth intellectually but searches to internalize such knowledge. All of the poems are deeply rooted in the lyrical tradition, following the switchbacks and curves of a mind always in motion, perhaps contemplating the beauty of moths at night or the intricacies of raising a child. Whatever the subject, Tasting Flight is a book that sings back to the exploding stars.

Charlotte Pence, author of Code and judge for the 2022 Arthur Smith Prize

The poems in this collection are confidently crafted, spiritually and emotionally insightful and precise, and intelligent all at once. Yiskah Rosenfeld does not shy away from the hardest subject matter and makes language equal to it. “On Becoming a Woman,” a moving and surprising mother/daughter poem, is the best I’ve read on this subject. Rooted in the origin myths of Genesis when the Divine “stepped out of itself onto the slick, dark lid of otherness,” Tasting Flight unflinchingly questions, complicates, and celebrates what it means to be a woman and to be deeply, imperfectly, human.

This collection begins with its hands in the dirt, in the muck of anger and refusal, the underground where seeds disintegrate so something new, something nourishing can grow. Yiskah Rosenfeld’s poems are meticulous, vivid, and poignant. They scrape the heart with surgical precision, bridging generations, awash in light, enwombed in darkness. Prepared with love, seasoned with grief, midrash, and kabbalah, Tasting Flight is a rich meal that begs for slow chewing and gradual digestion.

Yiskah Rosenfeld holds an MFA in poetry from Mills College and an MA in jurisprudence and social policy from UC Berkeley. She is also a proud rabbinical school dropout. A Pushcart Prize nominee, her awards include the Anna Davidson Rosenberg Award and the Reuben Rose Memorial Prize. Tasting Flight was the 2022 Arthur Smith Prize runner-up and a finalist for the Wheelbarrow Books Poetry Prize. Rosenfeld is the author of Naked Beside Fish (Finishing Line Press, 2024). Poems appear in The Seattle Review, The Bitter Oleander, Lilith Magazine, RATTLE, December Magazine, Cottonwood, and elsewhere. Her writings have appeared in anthologies such as Wild Gods: An Anthology of Ecstatic Poetry, Why to these Rocks: 50 Years of Poems from the Community of Writers, and Yentl’s Revenge: the Next Wave of Jewish Feminism. Rosenfeld taught literature at Temple University and was the poet-in-residence on the Arad Arts Project in Israel and the Brandeis Collegiate Institute in California. She lives in the San Francisco Bay area, where she balances solo parenting with teaching workshops on spirituality, feminism, and creative writing.

Author photo by Cheshire Isaacs

—Joy Ladin, National Jewish Book Award winner and author of Book of Anna and Shekhinah Speaks

Diane Elliot, author of The Voice Is

The Monosexual

by Dean Monti

ISBN: 978-1-956440-89-8 paperback $20.95

ISBN: 978-1-956440-90-4 ebook $9.99

222 pp., July 16, 2024

The Monosexual tells the story of Vincent Cappellini, an obsessed ultra-monogamist who struggles when his relationship with the love of his life abruptly ends. Twiceburned once in love and once by the sun he faces a host of challenges to his selfappointed sense of identity. Sunburn, bad sushi, a Sinatra karaoke contest, and the road rage fury of a woman scorned are but a few of the trials Vincent will endure while facing the ultimate test to his monosexuality a new woman in his life.

“The Monosexual is a funny, fast-paced, and engaging novel. The characters and the premise are zany and witty.”

Dana Spiotta, author of Wayward , and Innocents and Others

“Vincent’s need to pathologize his own lost love with a self-diagnosis involving a made-up clinical term thus both legitimizing his plight and making it as wholly his own as if it had never happened to any other guy before strikes a nice 21stcentury note and makes The Monosexual seem wittily suited to its times.”

Jonathan Dee, author of A Thousand Pardons and The Privileges

Dean Monti started writing at age two, but nothing legible until age five. Since then, his fiction has appeared in several literary journals in print and online. His critically-acclaimed novel, The Sweep of the Second Hand, was published by Academy Chicago Publishers and reprinted in paperback by Penguin. In addition to other novels, he is the author of several full-length and one-act plays and has had works staged in Chicago and Norfolk, Virginia. His short story “Why Dogs Don't Talk” was adapted as a stage play and short film. Additionally, Monti has also taught creative writing at Columbia College in Chicago and at College of DuPage. He lives in Glen Ellyn with his wife, Julie and two difficult but sometimes loveable cats.

What people said about Dean Monti's The Sweep of the Second Hand

“Consistently fresh and funny, with some scenes that are downright hilarious.”

“A deft page-turner… utterly captivating in its madness.”

The Wall Street Journal

The Baltimore Sun

“Monti begs comparison with Woody Allen and Nick Hornby.” Library Journal

“Monti has a gift for laidback humor.” Kirkus Reviews

“Entertaining… would make a nice romantic comedy starring John Cusack.”

Hartford Courant

The Life of Kim and the Behavior of Men: Human Bondage in the After - market of War

by Rod Davis

ISBN: 978-1-956440-79-9 paperback $22.95

ISBN: 978-1-956440-80-5 ebook $9.99

300 pp., July 16, 2024

WINNER OF AN INTERNATIONAL IMPACT BOOK AWARD, and American Fiction Awards Finalist

A Moving and well-written war drama. Kirkus Reviews

In 1970, Second Lieutenant Thomas Jefferson Hobbes, fresh out of college and ROTC, finds himself sent to South Korea instead of the expected Vietnam. His arrival at Kimpo Air Base turns his destiny from a war zone to another face of warfare, the destructive interactions between soldiers and camp followers, aka men and women, that are a part of conquest and occupation throughout history and around the world. Utterly unprepared, he follows trails and carves his own, his soul and sense of humanity falling to levels of hell that even Dante would find daunting.

A beautiful young Korean working girl, known only as Miss Kim, becomes Hobbes’s partner and his guide into deception and danger. Pushing through his 13-month tour, he becomes a part of the thoughtless, predatory subculture that binds him to the love of his life, but at an impossible price.

Praise for The Life of Kim and the Behavior of Men: Human Bondage in the After - market of War by Rod Davis

Rod Davis has shown us what countless American war movies have not the tragic results of G.I.’s stationed in a foreign land, where poor and desperate young women routinely become prey for the soldiers far from home. Nonfiction writers have documented this ugly truth before, but Davis does something more powerful by creating a set of unforgettable characters who give flesh and bone to the unintended consequences of the U.S. military presence in Korea 20 years after hostilities ended. The Life of Kim and the Behavior of Men illustrates all too well the social cost and darker side of empire.

Sean Mitchell, award - winning writer for the Los Angeles Times and author of the upcoming memoir Irresistible Calling

War is hell, but it’s also a trap as Rod Davis eloquently demonstrates in his novel The Life of Kim and the Behavior of Men. Davis’s narrator LT Thomas Jefferson Hobbes finds himself deployed to Korea, not Viet Nam as he had expected. Although the assignment may guarantee that Hobbes won’t witness mass slaughter (or be killed himself) he witnesses another kind of slow, methodical slaughter of people’s souls. The economic system that thrives around a war machine crushes and kills, and as Hobbes narrates his own story we can only hope that by telling it he can salvage himself and make some sense of the fate of the bar girl Kim whom he loves. He is presented with a true Hobbesian choice the necessity of accepting one of two equally objectionable alternatives and one must wonder how we ourselves would fare under those circumstances.

Helen Thompson, author of Marfa Modern ; Texas Made/Texas Modern; and Santa Fe Modern

It’s 1970 and LT Thomas Jefferson Hobbes is shipped out not to Vietnam as expected but to Korea, where GIs have way too much time on their hands. And more importantly for this compelling and unflinching portrait of Ugly Americanism, where temptations for grift are irresistible. Hobbes watches fretfully while a supply officer peddles pilfered PX goods and runs a drug ring, a mess sergeant sells steaks on the sly to local restaurants, and an army dentist treats local women for sexual favors. A chief attractio n to the soldiers is bar girls rented by the hour or, better yet, set up in hootches for a pittance per month. Hobbes has a moral compass, but he’s also part of the crowd, and his agonized attachment to “Kim” is the twisted heart of his story. The tragic consequences that follow make this novel march at double-time to a very big ending.

C.W. Smith, Distinguished Professor Emeritus at SMU, former marine, Dedman family, and author of Girl Flees Circus

Rod Davis once more finds darkness in light and a harrowing path for the reader and his protagonist to navigate. This tale of U.S. troops in Korea during the Vietnam Era holds truths which, sadly, continued for decades. His narrator is no hero but concisel y illuminates the short, brutish path he follows through a tour in post-war Korea so real you can smell the ondol charcoal in the alleyways and taste the kimchi. He, like us, the readers, can escape but the women and their accomplices are doomed. Though fictional, this is an important piece of history the Korean and US leadership would rather we all forget.

Perry Jefferies, First Sergeant (retired), US Army. Once an Imjim Scout, now an artist and farmer

Thoughtful with dark, more-than-entertaining humor, would be a good way to describe The Life of Kim and the Behavior of Men. Rod Davis calls on his own experience as a first lieutenant who found himself in South Korea instead of Vietnam, and he writes convincingly about the rocky relationship between LT Thomas Jefferson Hobbes and Kim, a young working girl who almost survives what can be called “after-market of wars.” This is a better read than Catch-22.

Bill Helmer, former Playboy editor and author of St. Valentine’s Day Massacre

This is a rare find of a novel that reveals the truths of the lives of American soldiers stationed in Korea during the Vietnam War era with gritty realism, authenticity, and compassion. The interwoven love story between a young officer and a business girl struggling for a better life will haunt you for a long time.

Wondra Chang, author of Sonju , Kirkus Starred Review historical novel

This novel moves quickly, and the dialogue helps keep the reader centered on the conflicts and events at hand. Yet, there are passages of deep reflection interspersed that help people see the boredom and rebellion that naturally spring up in institutions centered on hierarchy and public displays of obedience. Hobbes is a narrator who becomes equally intellectually engaging as he is challenging, as he constantly rightly critiques a system and then wrongly fails to transcend his own critique.

Mike Hilbig, author of Judgment Day & Other White Lies

Award-winning writer Rod Davis is the author of East of Texas, West of Hell, the sequel to South, America, described as “a triumph of Southern noir.” He is also the author of Corina’s Way, winner of the fiction prize in the inaugural PEN Southwest Book Awards for 2000-2005, and of American Voudou: Journey into a Hidden World, selected as one of the “Exceptional Books of 1998” by Bookman Book Review Syndicate. A long-time journalist and magazine editor, he is a member of PEN America, the Texas Institute of Letters, and was formerly on the board of directors of the National Book Critics Circle. He served as an Army first lieutenant in South Korea in the Vietnam Era.

The Lakes of Southern Hollow

by Steve Yates

ISBN: 978-1-956440-91-1 paperback $24.95

ISBN: 978-1-956440-92-8 ebook $9.99

266 pp.

July 16, 2024

Casey, Tyndall, and Devon kids from Southern Hollow subdivision have been falling in and out of love with each other, and always at the wrong time. It’s a Thursday night in September 2019, their senior year. Anything seems possible. And Casey’s band, New Wave Vultures, packs them in on teen night at the Cedar Shake, a club on the square in downtown Springfield, Missouri. While all three feel trapped in the Ozarks, the coming pandemic is about to show them the grinding limits of true confinement and the power of music, love, friendship, and courage.

Praise for The Lakes of Southern Hollow , by Steve Yates:

This hard-hitting gut punch of a novel blew me away. Think Ozark meets Daisy Jones and the Six with an unlikely heroine Tyndall, on the autism spectrum, who saves lives at Saint Martin’s Hospital and elsewhere. The Lakes of Southern Hollow is ultimately an uplifting story about a wild group of forever friends struggling with addiction, fame, sexual longing, mental illness, a pandemic, Trumpers, evangelical zealots, and finally Lord help them redemption.—Margaret McMullan, author of Sources of Light

In Steve Yates' The Lakes of Southern Hollow, we see characters strive, struggle, and wish. Above all, Yates has written characters we want to keep reading. There’s real electricity here in the pizazz of the dialogue and in the lilt of the musical prose.The Lakes of Southern Hollow is told with humor and fire. Olivia Clare Friedman, author of Here Lies

Steve Yates is the award-winning author of The Legend of the Albino Farm: A Novel (Unbridled Books), Some Kinds of Love: Stories (University of Massachusetts Press / Juniper Prize Winner), and Morkan’s Quarry: A Novel (Moon City Press). His novella, Sandy and Wayne, was chosen by New York Times-bestselling author Lauren Groff as the inaugural winner of the Knickerbocker Prize, published in a letter press edition by Big Fiction and later published as a book by Dock Street Press. He is associate director / marketing director of University Press of Mississippi, and lives in Flowood with his wife, Tammy.

The Majestic Leo Marble

by R.J. Lee

ISBN: 978-1-956440-93-5 paperback $22.95

ISBN: 978-1-956440-94-2 ebook $9.99

August 20, 2024

2024 INTERNATIONAL PULPWOOD QUEENS AND TIMBER GUYS BOOK CLUB READING NATION BONUS BOOK OF THE MONTH FOR SEPTEMBER 2024

Leo Marble quickens in the womb during a Broadway show, but his life is lived in the Deep South in conservative Mississippi and laid-back New Orleans. He eventually emerges from the closet to become a journalist and advocate for gay rights and visibility. Along the way, he experiences heartache on an international scale, but keeps his indomitable spirit alive with show tune concerts at his spinet, eventually falling in love with a dedicated meteorologist with higher math skills.

Praise for The Majestic Leo Marble, the new novel by R.J. Lee:

A richly textured saga of a gay everyman moving from self-doubt to pride.

Kirkus Reviews

In this heartfelt coming-of-age tale, Lee examines the complex journey of a tender soul who is navigating a challenging world. Readers feel every emotion as this young man learns to never let anyone stop him from living his most authentic life. By the end, we are cheering his resilience, strength, and courage, as we all celebrate the beauty of unconditional love.

Julie Cantrell, New York Times and USA Today bestselling author of Perennials

A poignant and tender coming-of-age novel, R. J. Lee’s, The Majestic Leo Marble, follows its endearing protagonist from the womb through young adulthood. Set to the musical score of Rodgers and Hammerstein’s Carousel, Lee’s pitch perfect aria recounts early gay rights activism and the AIDS crisis through the compelling voice of the charming Leo Marble.

Robert Gwaltney, award winning author of The Cicada Tree, and Georgia Author of the Year

Leo Marble, a journalist for the Times-Picayune in New Orleans, advocates for a gay coalition in Crescent City. The novel discusses the political fight with Anita Bryant and a boycott of Florida orange juice, and it feels like an important book for the current era, especially in its relation to the teaching scandals surrounding gay people who have been unfairly accused of grooming children…. The way that teachers are leveraged in the anti-gay crusade in this story offers a striking comparison to the current taboos against drag queens and trans people.

Mike Hilbig, author of Judgment Day & Other White Lies

R. J. Lee was born and grew up in Natchez, Mississippi, and graduated from Sewanee (University of the South) with a B.A. in English and Creative Writing. Though he now lives in Oxford, Mississippi, he lived for thirty years in New Orleans during which he worked in journalism, advertising, and tourist commission work writing and publishing 16 novels from 1992 to the present. The Majestic Leo Marble is his 17th book.

Hurricane Baby: Stories

by Julie Liddell Whitehead

ISBN: 978-1-956440-95-9 paperback $20.95

ISBN: 978-1-956440-96-6 ebook $9.99

August 20, 2024

In 2005, Wendy Magnum of Hattiesburg, Mississippi suffers remorse after having an intimate encounter with Judd McKay, a friend her husband, Ray, trusted with his family during Hurricane Katrina. Tommy Hebert turns to alcohol to handle what he saw in searchand-rescue in Metairie, Louisiana. Mike Seabrook's relationships with his God and his wife, Dinah, are tested after he loses a patient in his emergency room in Slidell, Louisiana. Lori King goes into premature labor as a result of the storm, and her husband, James, discovers that his best friend died trying to protect the Kings' home in Kenner, Louisiana from looters.

Praise for Hurricane Baby : Stories by Julie Liddell Whitehead

From the opening story with the storm ferociously blowing through to the days, weeks, and months of Katrina’s aftermath, Julie Whitehead’s characters are in it deep. As I read, I kept thinking I shouldn’t be having this much fun, but these are stories about living amid upheaval what happens when lives are turned upside down and given a good shake which are the best kind to read, if not to live. Whitehead’s characters pull you into the mess and muck of their lives as they figure out how to “get back to normal,” but "normal” often looks different after tragedy. I loved Hurricane Baby, which is a necessary and fresh addition to Hurricane Katrina literature. Mary Miller author of Biloxi: A Novel and Always Happy Hour: Stories

Julie Whitehead’s journalistic skill packs the stories of Hurricane Baby with detail and authenticity. She transforms the term hurricane from a noun into a pulsing country and citizenry of its own. There is a baby in a carrier pulled from his Louisiana mother and house shards, another infant born too soon in the atmospheric cloak of low pressure. The wind upends a Mississippi woman’s idea of herself as ferociously as it does her property. Whitehead’s work illuminates how a storm’s story can’t help but be an epic human story as well. Ellen Ann Fentress, author of The Steps We Take: A Memoir of Southern Reckoning

If you lived through Hurricane Katrina, then these stories by Julie Whitehead will set your pulse racing and flood you with adrenaline. Filled with jarring reality, plain-spoken truths, soulful yearnings, outright fear, courage and its traumatic aftermath, these tales must not be binged but marveled at, one by one. You will not forget them.—Steve Yates, author of The Legend of the Albino Farm and Sandy and Wayne

The conflicts in these stories ring true. A storm is something incredibly difficult to get over, and it continues to affect lives after the eye has passed through. These stories describe the aftereffects of the storm, and the metaphor of the “hurricane baby” weaves its way throughout, reminding us that as a hurricane changes lives, so childbirth also uproots lives in both good and bad ways.—Mike Hilbig, author of Judgment Day & Other White Lies

Part of the beauty of Hurricane Baby is Julie Whitehead’s careful attention to how southerners live and thrive in context to the natural disasters that shape and overwhelm our narratives. These are stories that shine a light on the sometimes quiet, sometimes loud resilience of everyday people. C.T. Salazar, Author of Headless John the Baptist Hitchhiking: poems

Julie Liddell Whitehead lives and writes from Mississippi. An award-winning freelance writer, Julie covered disasters from 9/11 to Hurricane Katrina throughout her career. She writes on mental health, mental health education, and mental health advocacy. She has a bachelor’s degree in communication, with a journalism emphasis, and a master’s degree in English, both from Mississippi State University. In August 2021, she completed her MFA from Mississippi University for Women.

My Youth and Early Deaths

by Allen Stein

ISBN: 9781956440973 paperback $22.95

ISBN: 9781956440980 ebook $9.99

September 16, 2024

Late one night in the summer of 1897, Morris Massimo Levy, nearly sixteen, of mixed Italian-Catholic and East-European Jewish background, watches as the father of the girl he loves is dropped from the Brooklyn Bridge by the notorious Jewish gang leader (and actual historical figure) Monk Eastman. The event helps propel Morris into a dangerous involvement in the notorious wars between the ethnic gangs of the Lower East Side of New York City and prompts his initiation, despite his idealistic impulses, into the ruthless means one often needed to survive and flourish in early modern America.

What readers are saying about My Youth and Early Deaths by Allen Stein : The saga of a first-generation Jewish/Italian American boy in New York City, Allen Stein’s novel, My Youth and Early Deaths, moves with an inescapable swiftness that parallels Morris’s coming of age once pressured into service by a mob boss. Handsome, strong, and almost fatally self-assured, the sixteen-year-old is inexorably drawn into inner-city gangster war, meanwhile endangering those most dear to him, in particular, Esther, the girl he loves, and a Socialist teacher whose kindness and affection offer a bridge to Morris’s dying mother, who immigrated to the U.S. with Socialist ideals. Stein’s prose is electric in this period piece from the turn of the last century. The novel offers rich material for current deliberations about the ways poor immigrant families and ethnic minorities are often trapped by corrupt systems or left to drown. My Youth and Early Deaths ripples with energy and passion.

Elaine Neil Orr, author of Swimming Between Worlds

Allen Stein was born in the Bronx and is Professor Emeritus of English at North Carolina State University. His stories and poems have appeared in numerous journals, among them The Hudson Review, Poet Lore, Prairie Schooner, Valparaiso Review and Salmagundi. He is also the author of two poetry collections, Your Funeral Is Very Important to Us and Unsettled Subjects: New Poems on Classic American Literature

The Academy of Reality

by Steve Putnam

ISBN: 978 - 1 - 956440 - 99 - 7 paperback $ 2 2 .95

ISBN: 978 - 1 - 963695 - 00 - 7 ebook $9.99

October 17, 2024

A quest for institutional survival, two subversive corporate employees, Sid Sidney a technician and Mia Monroe a would-be shadow artist, get caught up in the undertow of office-speak and bastardized metrics tracking printer glitches, insurance profits, lab’s birdseed expenses, and pigeons’ ping pong scores. HR makes things worse, tasking Sid and Mia to co-author an employee benefits booklet, Fifty Places to Picnic.

Mia’s bio clock and Sid’s world population clock blip in-the-moment numbers on tablets, a battle of Darwinian proportions. Although humans and pigeons already overpopulate the Institute, Mia wants a baby.

Praise for The Academy of Reality by Steve Putnam :

The Institute is every working stiff’s nightmare: an insurance and investment conglomerate driven by arbitrary metrics and governed by equally arbitrary rules, such as one that reimburses staff for expenditures on pomegranates and dates, but not on apples and raisins. Inside the belly of this dystopian enterprise, subversive employees Sid and Mia are tasked with writing a morale-boosting booklet, Fifty Places to Picnic, that takes them on “outings” into the warrens of the corporate campus from its rotunda to its cellar. The pair guide readers of Steve Putnam’s delightfully madcap novel, The Academy of Reality, as the author skewers the Orwellian technocracy that the American workplace is rapidly becoming. A literary tale as zany as it is unsettling, featuring pigeons named Penguin and computerized therapists gone berserk, Putnam’s debut serves up a compelling tale of post-industrial mayhem. The Academy of Reality is simultaneously gripping entertainment, powerful warning and incentive to quit one’s job and read.

Jacob M. Appel, author of Einstein’s Beach House

The Academy of Reality is a delightful romantic romp through corporate America a pointed, poignant screwball comedy for the 21st century. Steve Putnam is a gifted and original writer and a master storyteller!

Jay Neugeboren, award-winning author of After Camus and Imagining Robert

Immediately distinctive writing, with a deadpan, linguistically inventive voice that has a dark view of the world.… it's brilliant and should be praised as unlike anything that's gone before.

Roger King, author of Horizontal Hotel, A Girl from Zanaibar, Love and Fatigue in America

Steve Putnam living the dream: Farm kid, Navy E3, small-town GM mechanic, framing carpenter, and an onsite printer tech at a large corporate account. When the printers were all working, he hid out in a chain link cage, his basement shop, and wrote the first draft of The Academy of Reality. No one at Corporate knew they were funding a novel about the strange ways of big business. For outstanding customer service, Putnam won “Tech of the Year” and a trip to Arizona. (As a novel-in-progress, a version of this novel was shortlisted in the Pirate’s Alley Faulkner Society Competition in New Orleans.)

Wild Wind: Poems

and Stories

Inspired by the Songs of Robert Earl Keen

PREFACE BY WILLY BRAUN OF RECKLESS KELLY

edited by Sandra Johnson Cooper and Ron Cooper

ISBN: 978-1-963695-01-4 paperback $22.95

ISBN: 978-1-963695-02-1 ebook $9.99

November 19, 2024

This anthology of poems and short stories is an homage to Texas singer/song-writer Robert Earl Keen, who stands in the songwriter/storyteller tradition of Townes Van Zandt, Guy Clark, John Prine, and Keen's contemporaries Lyle Lovett and James McMurtry. The poems and short stories here are each inspired by Keen's songs, some expansions of themes of Keen's songs, others move in creative directions suggested by the characters in his work. Keen's songs are impressive for their literary sensibility (he was an English major at Texas A&M University) and have influenced many songwriters as well as authors of fiction and poetry.

What an amazing storyteller/songwriter with songs so full of life, humor and often a deeper undercurrent of pathos and humanity. He’s a national treasure whose work will endure. Patterson Hood of Drive By Truckers

“The Road Goes on Forever” was like a baseball bat hitting me on the side of the head, because I know those people in that song. It’s a great live song.—Joe Ely, Texas singer-songwriter, author of “Me and Billy the Kid”

Robert Earl Keen’s touch with lyrics is obvious. Every song is a story with a unique physical setting. It’s the music, however, that delivers those lyrics as a seamless, extremely musical whole. Each song has its own framework, supporting the story in every way and creating a rich scene in the listener’s mind. Kathy Barwick, bluegrass and folk multi-instrumentalist

I saw Robert on Austin City Limits around 1986, and I've listened to him ever since. That's around the time I started writing songs. Music like his is what took me to Nashville a few years later. Bigger Piece of Sky is one of my top ten albums. I think he's one of the all time best songwriters I ever heard. Chris Knight, Singer/Songwriter and honorary Texan

Contributors:

Preface: Willy Braun

Poetry: Alan Birkelbach – Rick Campbell – Greg Clary – Andrew E. Coats – Rupert Fike – Cal Freeman – Carol Kraus – karla k. morton – Jeff Newberry – Garrison M. Somers

Fiction: Heath Bowen – Michael Cody – Ron Cooper – Sandra Cooper – Patrick

Michael Finn – Scott Gould – Donna Wojnar Dzurilla – Bobby Horecka – Patti

Meredith

Memoir: Kimberly Parish Davis

Screenplay: Janna Jones

South Carolina natives Sandra Johnson Cooper and Ron Cooper have lived in Florida since 1988 and have been fans of Robert Earl Keen for nearly as long. They both teach at the College of Central Florida where Sandra specializes in American literature, and Ron specializes in philosophy and world religions.

Amanda Chimera : Poems

by Mary B. Moore

WINNER OF THE 2023 ARTHUR SMITH POETRY PRIZE

ISBN: 978-1-963695-05-2 paperback $19.95

ISBN: 978-1-963695-06-9 ebook $9.99

January 21, 2025

Amanda Chimera by Mary B. Moore explores our hybrid nature as body and something else––mind, soul, spirit through poems spoken by and about the persona Amanda. Haunted by her vanished twin, Gloria, who died in utero and some of whose DNA she absorbed, Amanda views herself as hybrid and thus as a monster, a carrier of the dead. Grounded in nature’s grace and variety, domestic life, and family dynamics, poems on art and myth focus on hybrid creatures, paralleling Amanda and Gloria. The sisters’ relationship is as varied as the poems’ tones: as Amanda says, she “likes a mixed diction.” Sometimes loving or sorrowful, sometimes witty and wry, the work revels in image and word music.

P raise for Amanda Chimera : Poems by Mary B. Moore

Inside every woman is another woman, a vanished twin, not so invisible as erased. We know her, don't we? The other self, the monster, who we hate to love. The sister. The mother. The Earth. The little girl we once were, the one who learned shame. Amanda Chimera has come to remind us that it is our life’s work, loving her, letting go of the many forms of self-hate we inherit. Here is a spiritually urgent myth, as delightful as it is fierce, ensuring Mary B. Moore’s place as an essential feminist poet of the Appalachian tradition.—Rebecca Gayle Howell, author of American Purgatory

“Vertigo is her dance”: combining classical erudition with a postmodern sensibility through the story of a twin who absorbed her dead sister’s DNA in utero, Mary B. Moore explores the mysteries of identity, doubleness, agency, and biological/generational destiny as she peels apart layers of consciousness and time.—Claire Bateman, author of Wonders of the Invisible World

Amanda Chimera offers rich evidence of a poet who has come into her own. Using the duality of Amanda, and the “monstrous” ghost of her vanished twin, Gloria, Moore illuminates the shadowy corridors of personhood, individuality, and consciousness in language both incisive and frolicking. —Frank Paino, author of Dark Octaves

In Amanda Chimera, Mary B. Moore addresses an unsettling truth something’s inside her that’s not her. In poems composed of coursing blood, the budding limbs of a fetus, a flower, a bird the reader is introduced to Amanda and her twin absorbed in utero. The challenge of a lifetime is to fearlessly explore our shadow selves, and Moore has done this brilliantly. —Robert Carr, author of The Heavy of Human Clouds

A search for wholeness that is more a celebration of the flawed, the broken, the incomplete. With deep empathy, surprise, and language rich and playful as Hopkins, Amanda Chimera is a brilliant whiplash of a book that delights and challenges. Lauren Slaughter, author of Spectacle

Mary B. Moore’s published books include Dear If, Orison Books 2021; Flicker, Dogfish Head Award, 2016; The Book of Snow, Cleveland State U Poetry Center, 1998; and the prize-winning chapbooks Amanda and the Man Soul and Eating the Light. Poems appear lately in Birmingham Poetry Review, POETRY, Tahoma Literary Review, Nimrod, Prairie Schooner, NELLE, Terrain, Calyx, Still: The Journal, Crosswinds, and more. She has won NELLE’s Three Sisters Prize, Birmingham Poetry Review’s Collins Prize, and the second-place award in Nimrod’s 2017 Pablo Neruda Prize. She is a native Californian and was a professor at Marshall University in Huntington, West Virginia, where she now lives.

O Lucky Day : Poems

by Patricia Clark

ISBN: 978-1-963695-07-6 paperback $19.95

ISBN: 978-1-963695-08-3 ebook $9.99 January 21, 2025

Patricia Clark’s latest poetry collection O Lucky Day explores her concerns about family and mortality, silence and loneliness, widening to include losses in the natural world. These sorrows often emerge along with an exuberance found in the sensual pleasures of taste and touch. Clark trains herself “to disappear, into the shagbark / hickory, the scarred maple, / the viburnum just about to flower.” She knows that whatever upheaval we bring to the world, and ourselves, “something was broken, then healed, then / transformed.” She advises us to “loaf and ponder,” but also to rise with the rustling grasses in lament of environmental degradation, voicing our insistence for reverence of what remains. These lyric poems of intensity and acute detail render the physical world in its tattered glory.

Original cover art is Still Life with Clementine Jos Van Riswick, www.josvanriswick.com

Praise for O Lucky Day : Poems by Patricia Clark

O Lucky Day by Patricia Clark makes a reader feel luckier in every possible way. Life feels richer, more available somehow nearer and dearer in a traumatic time of too many conflicts. We need this wisdom, cheer, and truthful gaze.—Naomi Shihab Nye, author of Grace Notes: Poems about Families

In the poems of Patricia Clark’s fine new book, O Lucky Day, the title’s enthusiasm is tempered by the knowledge of losses and inflected with subtle surprises of survival. There’s a buoyant yet quiet sense of wonder rippling through these poems… but it’s the natural world that provides Clark with her richest variety of beauty, fragility, and obstinate song.—David Baker, author of Whale Fall and Swift: New & Selected Poems

From the first poem “Oxygen” and throughout the book, these contemplative poems will breathe new life into your soul. Patricia Clark’s poems are rich with metaphors and filled with fresh ways of looking at the everyday. I highly recommend this new collection by one of Michigan’s finest and best known poets.—M.L. Liebler, author of Underneath My American Face: Five Decades of Selected Poetry

Patricia Clark is the author of six volumes of poetry, including Sunday Rising, The Canopy, and most recently Self-Portrait with a Million Dollars. Her work has appeared in The Atlantic, Gettysburg Review, Poetry, and Slate, among others. Awards include a Creative Artist Grant in Michigan, the Mississippi Review Prize, the Gwendolyn Brooks Prize, and co-winner of the Lucille Medwick Prize from the Poetry Society of America. She also received the 2018 Book of the Year Award from the Poetry Society of Virginia for The Canopy. Patricia was professor in the Department of Writing at Grand Valley State University, where she was the university's poet-in-residence. She was also poet laureate of the city of Grand Rapids from 2005-2007. Her poem “Astronomy ‘In Perfect Silence’” was chosen to go to the moon on the NASA/Space X launch in November 2024 as part of the Lunar Codex.

The Blessed Isle

The Talon Trilogy , Volume Three by Michael

Simms

ISBN: 978-1-963695-09-0 paperback $24.95

ISBN: 978-1-963695-10-6 ebook $9.99 February 18, 2025

When the dragon Tyrmiss returns to the kingdom to ask Tessia and Norbert to help save the Western Dragons from extermination, the two heroes begin the greatest adventure of their lives, one that will take them into the underworld to plead with Mnuurluth, Lord Death himself, whom they have unknowingly been serving all along.

The Blessed Isle is the third and final volume in The Talon Trilogy Volume One is The Green Mage, and Volume Two is Windkeep.

Praise for The Talon Trilogy

So, this is what you get when a perceptive, sensitive, and transformative poet tries his hand at wizards and warriors / dungeons and dragons: an imperfect, occasionally buffoonish, and self-doubting wizard, a dragon who is centuries ahead of her human antagonists evolutionarily, and a strategically talented and fierce feminist warrior who nonetheless comes to question her battlefield triumphs. We happily accompany this trio and their faithful followers through victory and defeat, across strange, enchanted landscapes, as they struggle against evil, treacherous foes to make the world better by restoring peace, tranquility, and prosperity. Michael Simms has created an enduring alter-ego, the Green Mage Norbert Oldfoot, who rises from his original status as an itinerant troubadour and nightclub entertainer to become a valued member of Queen Tessia’s court. Time and time again, he risks his domestic happiness and peace of mind to help preserve the kingdom of Dragonja and neighboring regions, deploying judiciously his originally meager but developing magical abilities.

Paul Schwartz, author of The Rosendale Suite and The Night I Shot Peter White

A young man who slipped into petty crime is surrounded by a circle of his neighbors, who subject him to a public treatment that looks eerily like the denunciation sessions practiced in China during the Cultural Revolution. But instead of shaming the fellow, people shower him with praise and love. Features like these are prized in fantasy because they invite us to envision how life could be.

Mike Vargo, author of Ancient Footprints

and Bighorns

Original cover art by Andrew Dunn

The Tears of Things

poems by Catherine Hamrick

ISBN: 978-1-963695-11-3 paperback $19.95

ISBN: 978-1-963695-12-0 ebook $9.99 February 18, 2025

“Whatever life hands me love, land, or loss a way to acceptance means embracing earthly cycles, authentic connections to others, and the comforting puzzle of words,” says Catherine Hamrick. Processing depression and the loss of her parents, she explores the therapeutic value of nature and poetry in The Tears of Things. This collection charts her movement through changing relationships, landscapes, and gardens in the Midwest and Deep South. Seamus Heaney’s interpretation of The Aeneid’s famous line sunt lacrimae rerum “there are tears at the heart of things” underpins Hamrick’s sensibility. Observing seasonal flourishes and decay reminds us that love, joy, longing, sorrow, and gratitude arise from life’s imperfection and brevity.

Praise for The Tears of Things: Poems by Catherine Hamrick

These poems mine deeply for a richness in both language and imagery that cuts against the flatness of much contemporary poetry. With deep roots in nature poetry like Mary Oliver’s, as well as in memories of childhood and the excited and worried journeys of adult life, The Tears of Things renders the world in full they are what we find everywhere we look.

Jesse Graves, author of Merciful Days and Tennessee Landscape with Blighted Pine

In precise language and detailed imagery, Catherine Hamrick traces cycles of human illness and loss over four seasons. The persistence of memory and the insistence on perseverance to understand, to make peace, to come out on the other side is rewarded by a fifth season, a lagniappe of acceptance and joy.

Jay Lamar, editor of Old Enough: Southern Women Artists and Writers on Creativity and Aging

The Tears of Things is a stunning journey into Catherine Hamrick’s relationship with nature. Her beautiful, sensual poems waste no words, evoking images that stir something deeper. Take your time experiencing these rich creations. You will want to taste them more than once.

T.K. Thorne, author of The Magic City Stories Trilogy and Behind the Magic Curtain

A content strategist, copywriter, and editor, Catherine Hamrick previously worked at Southern Living, Cooking Light, Southern Accents, Victoria, Better Homes and Gardens, and Meredith Books. She also taught writing and communication arts at several colleges and universities. Her poetry has appeared in The Blue Mountain Review, Appalachian Places, Pine Mountain Sand & Gravel, storySouth, The Citron Review, and elsewhere. Find her online at catherinehamrick.com

Santa Fe Trail : Chasing the Big West

poems and songs by karla k. morton and Alan Birkelbach with music by Michael Martin Murphey

ISBN: 978-1-963695-XX-X hardback $29.95

ISBN: 978-1-963695-XX-X ebook $9.99

ISBN: 978-1-963695-XX-X audiobook $XX.XX

March 18, 2025

The Santa Fe Trail began in 1821 when William Becknell headed west with a wagon full of goods. While this trail was used by voyageurs and American Natives for years, Becknell’s trip opened the American West. So many headed out with stories of their own that became inseparable poems and music. This book/audiobook aims to preserve the 200-year history of the trail by culturally carrying it into the future with the words of former Texas Poets Laureate karla k. morton and Alan Birkelbach and the music of Michael Martin Murphey. This is the essence of America moving into a new world.

karla k. morton has sixteen books, with The National Parks: A Century of Grace most historic - there’s no other poetry book written in - situ by poets who traveled to all 63 National Parks. Morton and fellow Texas Poet Laureate and co - author Alan Birkelbach give a percen t age of their royalties back to the Parks. Her work’s published in American Life in Poetry , Alaska Quarterly Review , Southword , Arkansas Review , descant , Boulevard , Comstock Review , Atlanta Review , Lascaux Review , Grub Street , New Ohio Review , and The Southern Review . She's the 2010 Texas State Poet Laureate and nominee for the National Cowgirl Hall of Fame.

Alan Birkelbach, a Texas native of British-German heritage, is a member of the Texas Institute of Letters, Western Writers of America, National Park Foundation, and The Academy of American Poets. He is a Spur Award Winner, two-time international Indie Book Award Finalist, winner of North Texas Book Festival Award, Pushcart Prize Nominee, and editor for several editions of the TCU Press Texas Poet Laureate Series. He was appointed by the Texas Legislature as the 2005 Poet Laureate of Texas. He currently lives in Raton, New Mexico in the shadow of the Sangre de Cristo Mountains.

Original cover art by Bob

Santa Fe Trail

Once upon a time they saidthe west was wide.

I headed from Missouri to ride and ride.

I found there in the cactus, a horseshoe in the sand full of buck and promise, burning in my hand.

Santa Fe, far away the trail is marked in stone. I hold my luck and it holds me. I’m headed down to red Raton.

kk and AB

Bose Bell

The Horizon Never Forgets

poems by Steven T. Moore

ISBN: 978-1-963695-15-1 paperback $19.95

ISBN: 978-1-963695-16-8 ebook $9.99

March 18, 2025

James Baldwin, author and civil rights activist, stated that to be Black in America and relatively conscious is to be in a state of rage almost all of the time. In this audacious debut poetry collection, The Horizon Never Forgets, Steven Moore offers us drops of honey in the tender moments we sometimes experience, especially a mother’s love. But also, drops of fire and rage when he writes about being Black, when the world ignores the pain and refuses to address the ongoing struggle to live while bearing the weight of racism. Readers feel the rage, the burn, the fury of the Black experience, and the urgency for change but also the uplift and hope that still reside within love's possibilities.

Original cover art: End of the World by Emily Rankin

Praise for The Horizon Never Forgets: Poems by Steven T. Moore

Steven T. Moore leads us down into a painful labyrinth, to the heartbreaking things one human can do to another. Yet, just when all hope seems lost, Moore returns to the image of his mother. This is not a political work. It is a humanitarian work that only a poet of Moore’s caliber could do. This is the universal desire to open the heart that boundless, colorless, greater good that beats within us all.—karla k. morton, 2010 Texas State Poet Laureate and author of Turbulents & Fluids

The pages of The Horizon Never Forgets are torn apart by love, hate, racism, and honesty. Steven T. Moore confronts us with a combination of hard realism and lyrical forgiveness. Into this poet’s world we are taken, and the only way out is to listen. Earl S. Braggs, author of Moving to Neptune, New & Selected

Steven Moore’s vision is clear, even as time and family and justice slip underneath him. In The Horizon Never Forgets, Moore writes for his mother and her “lifetime of fighting / for her sons to be free.” Here he is able to stay with pain personal and systemic and so allows his readers to do the same. Leah Naomi Green, author of The More Extravagant Feast and winner of the 2019 Walt Whitman Award

My ideal poem starts by tugging at my sleeve. Within just a few lines, the tugging becomes so persistent that I have to look more closely at what I previously ignored. By the end of the poem, my brief encounter leaves me staring with some kind of wonder or astonishment. Afterwards there remains much to think and feel in poetic aftershocks. This is the kind of quiet, plain-spoken, and devastating poetry Steven Moore delivers again and again in The Horizon Never Forgets Albert Haley, author of Exotic and winner of the 2007 Rattle Poetry Prize

This unflinching collection of poems reveals the complexity of Black male rage, giving us insight into debilitating horrors of negotiating medical, educational, cultural, interpersonal, and structural racism. Perhaps this powerful collection opens up space for the possibility of transcendence for all who empathize with the struggle. Cherise A. Pollard, author of Outsiders

Steven Moore often says that his mother is the wellspring of his poetry. She read and recited poetry to him before his birth and through his growing-up years in locales as varied as Central America and Gurnee, Illinois. Moore received his B.A. in English from the University of Wisconsin-Parkside, and his M.A. and Ph.D. are from the University of Nebraska. The recipient of several teaching and scholarly awards, he is a university professor of English who often teaches poetry workshops and a class called Bon Appétit: Savoring Poetry & Good Cooking. While writing poetry, he immerses himself in jazz, the blues, and the spirit of Langston Hughes. Published widely in literary journals, he is also a bestselling children’s author and the author of two scholarly books examining Black rage.

Shadow Family

a novel by Wayne Caldwell

ISBN: 978-1-963695-13-7 paperback $24.95

ISBN: 978-1-963695-14-4 ebook $9.99 6x9”, 354pp. March 18, 2025

Shadow Family is the story of a birth mother, an adoptive mother, and their struggles with life’s pitfalls. Their son, after searching diligently for his birth mother, brings them together in the end. Told in these three voices, it is a story of perseverance and, ultimately, hope.

Shadow Family invites readers to reflect on the boundaries of family, highlighting the differences between genetics and the environment in terms of what makes a good parent. It deals with themes of trauma and regret, showing how these things change people. Each character experiences pivotal moments that cause them to flip a switch, almost as if they die several times while dealing with the losses of relationships as the book moves forward. Each character voice is distinct, offering various lenses through which readers may view events. This book is deeply emotional, deeply real, and everyone is left to wonder how they would handle these situations and extend grace to the imperfect humans they find here.

Mike Hilbig, author of Judgment Day and Other White Lies

Wayne Caldwell is the author of two novels, Cataloochee (2007) and Requiem by Fire (2010; reissued 2020), and two volumes of poems, Woodsmoke (2021) and River Road (2024). He has won the Thomas Wolfe Memorial Literary Award from the WNC Historical Association and the James Still Award from the Fellowship of Southern Writers.

author photo by Mary Caldwell

Praise for Shadow Family by Wayne Caldwell

The Wrong Side of the Tracks: Stories

edited by Luanne Smith, Michael Gills, T.E. Wilderson, and Siobhan Wright

ISBN: 978-1-963695-03-8 paperback $24.95

ISBN: 978-1-963695-04-5 ebook $9.99

March 2025

The call for submissions for this anthology said, “We seldom see stories dealing with working class and poverty class characters from both rural and urban settings brought together. What are the similarities and differences with the struggles in both locations? What does a look at them together tell us about our lives? Class can simply be the backdrop of the story, though; place, rural or urban, simply the setting. These are the stories they chose.

Streets of Nashville

a novel by Michael Amos Cody

ISBN: 978-1-963695-17-5 paperback $22.95

ISBN: 978-1-963695-18-2 ebook $9.99

April 15, 2025

In Streets of Nashville, Ezra MacRae has a nearly encyclopedic knowledge of songs and their writers, and he has moved from the North Carolina mountains to Nashville’s Music Row with the dream of becoming part of that songwriting world. Yet just as he is out on the town to celebrate his first good fortune after several years of trying a staff songwriting contract with an independent music publisher he witnesses the man who signed on the dotted lines with him gunned down with three others outside his Music Row office. The masked gunman spares Ezra. But why?

Praise for The Streets of Nashville by Michael Amos Cody

Michael Amos Cody does a fantastic job creating interesting and empathetic characters, especially his protagonist Ezra, a budding songwriter whose perilous odyssey through the streets of Nashville is much more than grist for the mill it’s also a heart-rending exploration of music, violence, and the power of friendship. Streets of Nashville is an intelligent, heartfelt novel with plenty of authenticity to make it sing. Cody is a talented new voice in Southern fiction whose stories will appear on bookshelves for many years to come.

C.W.

Blackwell, author of Hard Mountain Clay

An elegantly written, mysterious and electric crime novel. Michael Amos Cody’s experience as a Nashville songwriter and Ezra MacRae’s encyclopedic knowledge of country music bring Streets of Nashville to life.

—Alex Kenna, author of What Meets the Eye and Burn This Night

Michael Amos Cody was born in the South Carolina Lowcountry and raised in the North Carolina highlands. He spent his twenties writing songs in Nashville and his thirties in school. He’s the author of the novel Gabriel’s Songbook (Pisgah Press) and short fiction that has appeared in Yemassee, Tampa Review, Still: The Journal, and elsewhere. His short story collection, A Twilight Reel (Pisgah Press) won the Short Story / Anthology category of the Feathered Quill Book Awards 2022. Cody lives with his wife Leesa in Jonesborough, Tennessee, and teaches in the Department of Literature and Language at East Tennessee State University.

Flowers of the Heavens

Poems by Joyce Compton Brown

ISBN: 978-1-963695-37-3 paperback $19.95

ISBN: 978-1-963695-38-0 ebook $9.99

April 15, 2025

Flowers of the Heavens by Joyce Compton Brown explores the South and its history through the lens of her family. These poems recognize within this history the holiness of life and the nobility of the human spirit, while remaining conscious of the necessity of breaking up the South’s old and stubborn mores. The collection is an elegy to the past, an appreciation of present moments, and an acceptance of the finite in the flowing of time which carries us through Earth’s cycles and our own. Brown documents a life lived through awareness of those moments of wonder, large and small, a life lived in both sorrow and in joy.

Praise for Flowers of the Heavens by Joyce Compton Brown

In Joyce Compton Brown’s new collection, Flowers of the Heavens, we are enriched and enthralled by her insightful, image-laden poems from and about the rural South. These poems avoid simple nostalgia by their careful attention to surprising detail and their willingness to look critically at the past and its legacy.

Pauletta Hansel, author of Heartbreak Tree, winner of the Poetry Society of Virginia’s 2023 North American Book Award

Joyce Compton Brown’s new poetry collection Flowers of the Heavens evokes memories without relying on sentimentality. Never nostalgic, consistently thoughtful, Brown’s work offers inviting considerations of how we decide what we hold on to.

Thomas Alan Holmes, author of In the Backhoe’s Shadow

These poems are such a gift of resilience and wisdom, shining the absolute richest patina while sharing the most profound details of an observed life. This is a book of lullabies about tragedies. We are soothed and swaddled, but the truth “of raw survival” is the haunting melody.

Susan O’Dell Underwood, author of Splinter and Genesis Road

Joyce Compton Brown is a poet of a particular place, people, time, and of a woman’s perspective. In Flowers of the Heavens, her poetic voice achieves its fullest, most fearless expression.

Joan Barasovska, author of Orange Tulips

Joyce Compton Brown was born into an agrarian German/Scots-Irish farm family in Iredell County, North Carolina. Appalachian State University confirmed her love for the mountains and Appalachian music, where she took classes in the Child Ballads and other subjects under the founder of the Appalachian Studies Association, Cratis Williams, and acquired her first banjo. Between bouts of paper grading at Gardner-Webb University, she welcomed chances to learn at Berea College and Hindman Settlement School writing workshops. Her early writing focuses on her Southern family roots and stories she heard as a child. Later writing, though based in specificity, strives for a sense of universality. She is the author of four previous books of poetry, most recently Hard-Packet Clay

Drum the Double Sun Algoems

poems by Daniel Manuel Mendoza

ISBN: 978-1-963695-19-9 paperback $19.95

ISBN: 978-1-963695-20-5 ebook $9.99 April 15, 2025

Drum the Double Sun Algoems is a book of poems that provides a tour of surrealist portraits of the working-class through the barrooms, cafes, apartments, motels, and highways of South Texas and the Midwest. These “algoems” range from prophetic lyricism to absurdist poems of social and political protest, incorporating the symbols and metaphors of Aztec philosophy and western art. Through childhood to adulthood, Daniel Manuel Mendoza seeks to gain a closeness with the reader as he peers deep into the heart of what it means to be a Chicano poet in the 21st century.

Praise for Drum the Double Sun Algoems by Daniel Manuel Mendoza

In Daniel Manuel Mendoza’s America, sons find freedom in fathers whose forearms are “soiled with engine grease,” philosophers seek virtue in the “legs of working women,” and wanderers contemplate the nature of love in “city streets weighted / In loss and the choked promises / Of the past.” The sense of an ending is always near, rearing its head around every half-empty street corner, every somnambulant neighborhood, every desolate highway, and yet, Mendoza never demands pity from his readers. Rather, through measured lyricism, candid tones, and a multitude of voices infused with the symbolic, we discover a joyful meditation of the lives of those too often neglected and unjustly forgotten. From Chicago to all along the border of the Rio Grande Valley, Drum the Double Sun is as ripe with “sleep and cigarettes” as it is with hearts as “heavy / As a smash of doves.” Once you traversed the end of Mendoza’s debut collection, hauling the exhumed remnants of memory, you will realize that if you truly want to cleanse your soul, you must first be willing to get your hands dirty.

Esteban Rodrí guez, author of

Lote ría

Daniel Manuel Mendoza's collection of "algoems" is offbeat, in tune, formidable. It's a robust investigation and inventory of a life lived in the dust of South Texas and bearing the imprint of different American cities Chicago, D.C., Denver and even ancient Mexico. It's singular, strange, beautiful. Mendoza makes it breathe, makes the reader feel alive, too, which is what it's all about. You'll find it hard to put down.

Stephen D. Gutierrez, author of Captain Chicano Draws a Line in the American Sand

Daniel Manuel Mendoza was born in Hammond, Indiana, and raised in Hebbronville, Texas. He is the author of Stray Dogs: Interviews with Working-Class Writers (Down & Out Books, 2016). His work has appeared in Boulevard, Pleiades, and Alchemy, among others. He lives in the Texas Rio Grande Valley.

Incidental Pollen

Poems by Ellen Austin - Li

ISBN: 978-1-963695-25-0 paperback $19.95

ISBN: 978-1-963695-26-7 ebook $9.99 May 21, 2025

RUNNER-UP FOR THE 2023 ARTHUR SMITH POETRY PRIZE

Incidental pollen refers to pollen that collects on bees as they forage for nectar like the cumulative life experiences we cannot help but carry. The hive serves as a thematic thread in this collection that explores the space between past and present, shame and redemption, grief and resilience. Poetic forms lend meaning like the villanelle that captures the grief-driven magical thinking of the speaker. Are recurring red fox sightings visitations from her deceased father and nephew? Trauma and loss appear in these tonally rich and imagistic poems, but the arc ultimately centers on the search for belonging, the attempt to recreate home.

Praise for Incidental Pollen: Poems by Ellen Austin Li

In Incidental Pollen, the presence of the bee hovers over lives, dreams, memory, and beloved dead a conduit for poems that speak a language “native to wounds.” Some formal, some tightly structured free verse, these poems at last look fear in the face and refuse to stay silent. Lean in and listen to them hum.

Meg Kearney, author of All Morning the Crows and The Ice Storm

“We eat what we need,” Ellen Austin-Li writes in the opening poem of her remarkable first full-length collection, Incidental Pollen These powerful poems are rich with sensory, musical, and emotional detail and yet they ache with hunger. Her work is a reminder of the ways in which art in all its forms has the power to feed in how it connects us with each other and with the world.

—Pauletta Hansel, author of Heartbreak Tree, winner of the Poetry Society of Virginia’s 2023 North American Book Award

Ellen Austin-Li's first full-length collection, Incidental Pollen a 2023 Trio Award finalist, a 2024 Wisconsin Poetry Series semi-finalist, and runner-up for the Arthur Smith Poetry Prize is forthcoming from Madville Publishing. Finishing Line Press published her two chapbooks, Firefly (2019) and Lockdown: Scenes From Early in the Pandemic (2021). Her work appears in Artemis, Thimble Literary, The Maine Review, Salamander, Lily Poetry Review, Rust & Moth, and many other places. She’s a Best of the Net nominee and holds an MFA in poetry from the Solstice Low-Residency Program. Ellen co-founded the monthly reading series, "Poetry Night at Sitwell's," in Cincinnati, where she lives.

Electric Dreams

a novel by Goutham Rao

ISBN: 978-1-963695-23-6 paperback $22.95

ISBN: 978-1-963695-24-3 ebook $9.99

May 21, 2025

Simon Galves is a new writing instructor in a small college town. He settles into a dull but peaceful life until he is caught in a sudden storm and is struck by lightning. Remarkably, he survives with some injuries, and even more remarkably, the strike uncovers a compulsive desire to play the piano. Through flashbacks, we learn of Simon’s troubled childhood and his strained relationship with his distant mother, Helen. Through his piano obsession, he falls in love with Jenna, a music professor and pianist. Shortly after her death, Simon learns the truth about his mother.

Goutham Rao is a practicing family physician, researcher in cardiovascular prevention, endowed professor of medicine at Case Western Reserve University, and author of more than a hundred publications, including five books. He has taught writing skills to physicians and other health care professionals for more than twenty years. Within a large health care system, Dr. Rao is responsible for promoting wellness and preventing burnout among physicians. During the height of the pandemic, he personally found creative writing therapeutic and started and leads a group called “Words for Wellness,” which brings together health care professionals to discover the value of writing as both a creative outlet and a means to promote wellness. Dr. Rao grew up in Halifax, Nova Scotia, and lives outside Cleveland.

The Ballads of Niam

A novel by Amit Verma

ISBN: 978-1-963695-27-4 paperback $22.95

ISBN: 978-1-963695-28-1 ebook $9.99

June 18, 2025

The Ballads of Niam bridges the lives of people who have traversed great distances and time to be where they are. Their lives have all been shaped by events over which they have no control. However, none of them is a passive spectator or a hapless, irreprehensible victim of circumstances. Each one of them has fought his, her, or its, battles. The biggest battle they are fighting, though, without being aware of it, is the fight against non-existence. This, more than anything else is what is common among them.

Amit Verma is an award-winning author (2022 International Book Award New Age finalist) of well-received works of literary fiction, The Lives and the Times (Satyam Books, 2011), The Lives and the Times II (Satyam Books, 2016), and A Quiver in the Purlieu (Madville Publishing, 2021). He obtained his B.Tech. degree from IIT-BHU (formerly ITBHU), India, M.S. from Vanderbilt University, and Ph.D. from Georgia Institute of Technology Since 2006, he has been a faculty member at Texas A&M University-Kingsville. Before that, he was a postdoctoral scholar at the UARC at the NASA Ames Research Center and senior officer at a steel plant. Some of his other writings and interviews can be accessed at amitvermaauthor.com.

Nameless as the Minnows

Poems by Connie Jordan Green

ISBN: 978-1-963695-29-8 paperback $19.95

ISBN: 978-1-963695-30-4 ebook $9.99 June 18, 2025

In Nameless as the Minnows, poems move through an early consideration of one’s yet unrealized self being washed toward a faceless future, into an exploration of growth and resilience through family and loss, and farther into the miracles of forming a new family and finding one’s true name among the wonders of the natural world, culminating in the spirit yet reaching toward the stars, the universe, still questioning the unknowable and praising “the small rituals of becoming and being.”

Praise for Nameless as the Minnows: Poems by Connie Jordan Green

All of Connie Jordan Green’s work shines with the same light she describes in a portrait of a young girl peeling potatoes the kind of light that might be the sun rising but may just as easily be the sun setting. Regardless, we are all the better for basking in the glow.

Denton

Loving, author of Tamp

In Nameless as the Minnows, Connie Jordan Green’s throaty verse illuminates the grit and unflinching spirit of rural America, each carefully crafted line skillfully depicting the power of family and the pride and comfort that can be drawn from the people and places we call home.

This book testifies that aging is not anathema to fascination and childlike wonder. Connie Jordan Green is masterful as she puts us into the skin which covers not her static self-portrait, but the still-shifting pulse of dynamic living.

Susan O’Dell Underwood, author of Splinter and Genesis Road

Connie Jordan Green’s voice is that of a soul at peace, sharpened by a mind conditioned, out of necessity, to look at absence, loss, deprivation, or need and then to get busy doing the hard work of wrestling blessing from and offering blessing for this unkempt, unquenchable, sometimes dwindling, often unbearable, always sacred space we share.

Jeff Hardin, author of Watermark and A Clearing Space in the Middle of Being

Connie Jordan Green Connie is the author of novels for young people, poetry chapbooks and collections, and a personal newspaper column that ran for more than 42 years. Her poetry and prose have appeared in numerous journals and anthologies. She is the recipient of awards for her writing including induction into the East Tennessee Writers Hall of Fame, a Tribute to the Arts Award from the Oak Ridge Arts Council, and inclusion in Listen Here: Women Writing in Appalachia (Univ Press of Kentucky, 2003). She taught creative writing for the University of Tennessee and continues to teach at various workshops.

Kari Gunter-Seymour, Ohio Poet Laureate, author of Dirt Songs

Plain Folk: Notes on American Folk Music

Editors: Bob Kunzinger and Drew Lopenzina

ISBN: XXX-X-XXXXXX-XX-X paperback $XX.XX

ISBN: XXX-X-XXXXXX-XX-X ebook $9.99 December 3, 2024

The roots of American folk music defy time and place, elude genre and category, and are as diverse as both the immigrants and native inhabitants of this country. If traditional folk music consists of the songs, styles, and themes passed down through generations, contemporary folk music continues this American record of lives, loves, struggles, triumphs, and tragedies informing our collective human existence. From the sorrow songs to Delta blues, bluegrass, gospel, Appalachian mountain music, Native drum circles, Cajun, Hip Hop, and more, American Folk Music reflects back at us something deep and unshakeable about who we are, in ways few other art forms or even historical records can.

We called for essays that carry forward this notion of American folk music what it means to us as individuals, as Americans, and how it continues to give shape, expression, and meaning to our lives. The judges are currently curating this collection. Details as we have them.

The Editors

Bob Kunzinger is the author of works, including The Iron Scar: A Father and Son in Siberia (2022), A Third Place: Notes in Nature (2019), Blessed Twilight: The Life of Vincent van Gogh (2018), and Penance (2008), still a popular book in Prague, the subject of the narrative. He has taught American Culture in Russia, Prague, Amsterdam, and Norway, and Creative Writing, Art Appreciation, English, and Humanities in the Hampton Roads, Virginia, area for more than thirty years. While he owns several guitars and made a living playing the folk circuit during and after college, his callouses have retreated.

Drew Lopenzina is Professor of English at Old Dominion University who teaches in the intersections of Early American and Native American literatures. He is the author of Through an Indian’s Looking Glass: A Cultural Biography of William Apess, Pequot (2017), described as a “tour de force” by the journal Native American and Indigenous Studies. His other books include Red Ink: Native Americans Picking up the Pen in the Colonial Period (2012) and The Routledge Introduction to Native American Literature (2020). Lopenzina plays guitar and mandolin and is part of the duo Wine Dark Sea, known in the Tidewater area around Norfolk, VA, for their epic acoustic folk and harmonies.

T he Lady of the House

A novel by Kat ie Sanyal

ISBN: 978-1-963695-31-1 paperback $22.95

ISBN: 978-1-963695-32-8 ebook $9.99 July 16, 2025

After inheriting her late grandmother’s property in the deep forests of Georgia, twenty-two-year-old Clara Graham is forced to return to the beautiful, magical house where she lived briefly during childhood. But as she finds herself submerged in the dark secrets her grandmother left behind, she must face her own terrifying childhood memories that have come crawling back into the light, demanding a reckoning.

HISTOR

Praise for The Lady of the House , a novel by Katie Sanyal

Katie Sanyal's haunted debut novel, Lady of the House, sojourns knee-deep into Flannery O'Connor country. Killer tornadoes and godly racists and illicit skeletons in every closet make us pee our collective pants. Face to face with the “...terrible and wonderful things within [our] hearts.” Sanyal's beautiful monsters “…inhabit a place beyond past or present, the open sea of memory.”

Michael Gills, author of Before All Who Have Ever Seen This Disappear

Katie Sanyal is a debut novelist from Utah with roots in Georgia. She is an English major currently studying at the University of Utah. When she is not writing, she is reading, and when she is not reading, she can be found enjoying Salt Lake City with her friends and family.

- ME : Evocative Autoethnography for the Creative Writer

Toni Viva Muñoz editor

ISBN: 978-1-963695-33-5 hard cover $28.95

ISBN: 978-1-963695-34-2 ebook $9.99 8 x 8”, July 16, 2025

Autoethnography gives the creative writing student permission to incorporate themselves into the overall American literary and historical metanarratives. By applying this research methodology, in the form of ethnographic research, students can connect their personal experiences and position themselves in the wider cultural, political, and social ontology. When auto-ethnography moves beyond methodology and takes the form of creative writing, the student is given agency to be both creative and scholarly, and the resulting works demonstrate value in both areas simultaneously

A visiting assistant professor and director of CUSLAI (Center for U.S.-Latin America Initiatives) at the University of Texas at Dallas, Harry W. Bass Jr. School of Arts, Humanities, and Technology, Toni Viva Muñoz completed her Ph.D. in 2021, where her dissertation, Double Hybridization and Bordercanx Literary Works: How the United States Turned Mexican Americans into the Forgotten People, became a hybrid work on a distinct population within the Latinx community.

In 2020, she established the Community Digital Archive Project to record the oral histories of this community. Utilizing her concept of “double hybridization” and autoethnography research methodology resulted in her children’s book, El Bowie Bakery, currently under contract with Texas Christian University Press. Her other works have been featured in Borders in Globalization Review and Columbia Journal. In 2020, she won the Blue Mesa Review Nonfiction Prize for “Border Sisters” and has presented articles at The University Culture Centre in Bialystok, Poland, and the University of Barcelona, Spain. She was selected as a 2022-2023 Mellon Applied History Fellow and is working on her next children’s book.

The Meaning of the Murder

by Walter B. Levis

ISBN: 978-1-963695-35-9 paperback $22 95

ISBN: 978-1-963695-36-6 ebook $9.99 August 20, 2025

Terrorism seldom touches the lives of ordinary Americans, but when Eliana Golden was thirteen years old, her father, a bank compliance officer, disappeared. He was scheduled to testify in a money laundering case that involved terrorism funding. Her mother, who feared retribution for whistle-blowing, had tried to talk her father out of testifying, but he refused to back down, citing Talmudic commands to righteousness the core of the Jewish tradition in which Eliana and her two sisters were being raised. Years later, after surprising her family by becoming a cop, Eliana meets a mysterious and alluring soldier whose meditations on the moral ambiguity of violence offer hope that Eliana and her sisters can achieve a small measure of peace with the past.

The Meaning of the Murder is the multi-layered story of a family recovering from trauma, a detective determined to solve a crime, and the price we pay for safety in the global war on terror.

P raise for The Meaning of the Murder by Walter B. Levis

The Meaning of the Murder is both a compelling story, populated with strikingly memorable characters, and also a nuanced and deeply intelligent examination of violence. Walter Levis has written a first-rate crime novel.

—Lou Berney, author of November Road

Walter Levis’ exquisitely crafted, utterly enthralling The Meaning of the Murder probes the relationship between love and violence in a searing, original way. His gorgeously textured novel also makes us understand the ways our private lives are now inextri cably linked to lethal worldly forces. This is an astonishing and necessary novel.

Jay Neugeboren, author of After Camus and Imagining Robert

Walter B. Levis, a former crime reporter, lives in New York City. His articles have appeared in The NY Daily News, The National Law Journal, The Chicago Reporter, The Chicago Lawyer, The New Republic, Show Business Magazine, and The New Yorker, among others. He is author of the novel Moments of Doubt. His short stories have appeared widely and have been chosen for a Henfield Prize and nominated for a Pushcart Prize. walterblevis.com

After Arson: New & Selected Essays

by Gary Fincke

ISBN: 978-1-963695-21-2 paperback $24.95

ISBN: 978-1-963695-22-9 ebook $9.99 August 20, 2025

This essay collection spans a lifetime’s worth of characters, settings, themes, and ways of organizing. It is, after all, a collection of Gary Fincke’s best work. Yet, for the variety of content covered, from coming-of-age to family to nuclear weapons to space exploration to mass shootings to rock attacks on cars to the author’s mother’s obsession with potato chips, this collection has a durable thread that ties them all together: the need to observe and record everything. Struggle and resilience. Fear and pleasure. Faith and despair. Love and loathing. All of those tensions are closely examined within the shadow cast by death. As Gary Fincke writes, “Somewhere, early every day, I think the acolyte of terror dreams our bodies as it decides the exact address for delight.” This “thinking,” in essay after essay, is brilliantly articulated in an ever-evolving, contemporary style. The metaphors are beautiful, the prose is clipped and clean, and the reader is constantly surprised by the connections Fincke draws like the one between his daughter and Charles Manson. A panorama of screams, another of hearts, another of headlights, all of them transformed into memoir. The subjects as varied as a four-part exploration of different kinds of hands, a meditation on terror and the fireworks American children know as Sparklers, and eulogies seeded by love of potato chips and crossword puzzles. Like the best essays, all of these “discover” in an intimate, personal way.

Praise for After Arson: New & Selected Essays by Gary Fincke

These straightforward and often beautifully interwoven essays by an outstanding storyteller and poet go straight to the heart of our common humanity. With candor, compassion, and an unobtrusive erudition, they probe the varieties of human vulnerability and remind us of the vigilance all real love requires. Robert Atwan, Series Editor, Best American Essays

Gary Fincke has published five collections of essays, Including The Darkness Call, which won the Robert C. Jones Prize (Pleiades Press, 2018). Individual essays have been reprinted in Best American Essays and The Pushcart Prize. His short story collections have been published by Coffee House, Missouri, and West Virginia and have won the Flannery O’Connor Prize and the Elixir Press Fiction Prize. Collections of his poetry have won book prizes offered by Ohio State, Michigan State, Arkansas, Stephen. F. Austin, and Jacar.

Author photo by Aaron Fincke

Curious Men : Lost in the Congo

by Bob Kunzinger

ISBN: 978-1-963695-XX-X paperback $21.95

ISBN: 978-1-963695-XX-X ebook $9.99 Memoir

September 16, 2025

An experienced adventurer partners with an innocent nineteen-year-old to plan a journey on the most dangerous river in the world. What starts as one man's dream ends up as another man’s nightmare. It was a time when pushing our limits knew no boundaries and being nineteen had no restrictions.

Praise for Curious Men: Lost in the Congo by Bob Kunzinger

Bob Kunzinger as an especially gifted writer who is able to engage and keep his reader's thoughtful attention from beginning to end.—Midwest Book Reviews

Engaging memorable to say the least. Sharon Dilworth, author of Women Drinking Benedictine

“How to Die in the Congo” [from Curious Men] is one of the best essays I’ve read in my life. Bill Thompson, former Editor of Alabama Literary Review

Bob Kunzinger is one of the finest non-fiction writers working today.—Amazon Reviews

A work which should be read by anyone coming of age or who has already done so.—S.E. Hinton, author of The Outsiders and Rumblefish

In “Nowhere to Be Found” from Curious Men, Bob Kunzinger laces beautiful prose and sentiment into some of the finest writing we have published Palooka Magazine

Bob Kunzinger's work “Unfinished” [from Curious Men] deserves the Pushcart Prize for nonfiction. Matador Review

of A Third Place:

I find in these times, I really need the prose and acuity and poetic soul of someone like Bob Kunzinger, who has mastered the art of turning time into the essay, which is his gift to his readers. A truly redemptive writer working at the top of his game

Jackie Lyden, author, Daughter of the Queen of Sheeba, and former host and correspondent, NPR News

Bob Kunzinger is the author of a dozen non-fiction works, including The Iron Scar: A Father and Son in Siberia, and Out of Nowhere: Scenes from St. Petersburg. His work has appeared in many publications. He lives along the Rappahannock River in Virginia.

Momma May Be Mad: A Memoir

by Kerry Neville

ISBN: 978-1-963695-XX-X paperback $21.95

ISBN: 978-1-963695-XX-X ebook $9.99 Memoir

October 15, 2025

Momma May Be Mad: A Memoir is an inventive and striking memoir about motherhood, madness, and the grace of second and third chances. Kerry Neville shares the story of how she was caught in the perfect storm of bipolar disorder, anorexia, and alcoholism when her children were young and her marriage failing and how she found her way back to joy and hope. Electric shock therapy, hospitalizations, and even an exorcism were desperate, if failed, lifelines. But even in that dark chaos, she held fast to an abiding belief in love and fought to regain her own life and her life with her children.

Praise for Momma May Be Mad: A Memoir by Kerry Neville

Kerry Neville makes of dark matter a truly stunning memoir of hope and renewal, a work shot through with light, like a stained-glass window. Devoid of even one moment of sentimentality or falseness, the writing is as cleareyed as it is memorable. She sees beyond surfaces, down to depths, up to immensities. The exactitude in her deployment of the brittle medium called language is not just constantly impressive but is uplifting and replenishing. This unflinchingly courageous book from a writer whose work I love gives life to the profound truth that art can be redemptive.

Kerry Neville is the author of two collections of stories, Necessary Lies, which received the G. S. Sharat Chandra Prize and was named a ForeWord Magazine Short Story Book of the Year, and Remember to Forget Me. Her work has appeared in publications such as The Gettysburg Review, Epoch, TriQuarterly, Brevity, The Washington Post, The Irish Times, and elsewhere. Her fiction and nonfiction have been named Notables in Best American Short Stories and Best American Essays. She received her Ph D in creative writing and literature from University of Houston. She was a Fulbright Fellow at University of Limerick in Ireland, where she was visiting faculty in the M.A. Creative Writing Program. She lives in Milledgeville, Georgia, and teaches at Georgia College and State University.

Author photo by Melissa Gerrior

Joseph O’Connor, award-winning author of Star of the Sea and Ghost Light

D YING LIGHT

by Johnathan Paul with art by Andrew Dunn

ISBN: 978-1-948692-66-3 paperback $22.95

ISBN: 978-1-948692-67-0 ebook $9.99 October 15, 2025

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 filmmaking. Johnathan wrote the first story set in the fictional town of Fairview in 1998 and has quietly expanded that world ever since. Fairview Chronicles was the first of many titles set in this fantastic universe filled with mystical horrors, now rebranded as Night Fables. 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 Night Fables 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.

Pawn Shop Blues on Guitar

Stories by Earl S. Braggs

ISBN: 978-1-948692-XX-X paperback $20.95

ISBN: 978-1-948692-XX-X ebook $9.99 November 18, 2025

Collection of Magically real stories set In the American south.

Earl S. Braggs is the author of 14 books of poetry and a memoir, A Boy Named Boy.