Three new books of poetry from Madville Publishing

The Pendulum Moves Off by Theodore Haddin

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.

Will be released January 16, 2024.

The Book of Failures by Neil Shepard

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.

Will be released January 16, 2024.

a poem is a house by Linda Ravenswood

Winner of the 2022 Arthur Smith Prize

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.

Will be released January 16, 2024.

The mission of Madville Publishing is to produce, publish, and market literary works of the highest quality that reflect the diversity of the modern English-speaking world. We seek to publish poetry, fiction, and creative nonfiction by notable and emerging authors who display diversity in ethnicity, gender, age, and worldview, and whose work exhibits the full range of this diversity. Our goal is to discover and showcase works that might otherwise be overlooked, to provide opportunity for voices that might otherwise be unheard.