Fiction & Poetry
Appetites
by Charles Rafferty
"Though it might not be yet apparent, what the world hungers for—not just the poetry world but all sentient beings—are the rapturous, precise, lyrical revelations in Charles Rafferty's Appetites, a startling collection full of poems that chart desire through an abandoned couch transformed into redeeming ecstasy, that channel the 'popcorned and sawdusty air' of the circus tent where folks gather to turn away from themselves, that show us the subversive art of souvenir-taking in the form of a sliver of Picasso's signature smuggled under a fingernail, and that give us a 'Prelude' for our time. In the vein of Stephen Dobyns and Denis Johnson, but ever original and even more expertly-crafted, Rafferty is a major American poet. If you don't know his work yet, you owe yourself this chapbook."
—Ravi Shankar
Women against Tyranny: Poems of Resistance during the Holocaust
by Davi Walders
Women Against Tyranny: Poems of Resistance during the Holocaust tells the forgotten stories of women, from a variety of cultural and religious backgrounds, who resisted throughout Europe during World War II.
Among these women of resistance are Dr. Rita Levi Montalcini, a recipient of the Nobel Prize in Medicine; Dr. Roza Papo, the first female general in Tito's army; Emilie Schindler, Oskar Schindler's wife, who saved hundreds of people but was unacknowledged in Schindler's List; and Magda Trocme, "mother" and leader of Chambon sur-Lignon, the French village which hid thousands of Jews and other refugees. These incredible women are just a few of the heroines populating the pages of Walders' remarkable collection.
The Jane Poems
by Ronald Moran
In an early poem in his latest collection, The Jane Poems, Ronald Moran recounts how, as a lovestruck young man hoping to catch his chosen girl's eye, he once spent an afternoon "mowing the same / patch of lawn over and over"—shirtless, just in case she should happen by. This awkward "offering of my unrehearsed / goods in early summer" was the prelude to a successful marriage that endured for half a century.
Moran's wife, Jane, passed away in 2009, and The Jane Poems captures, in a poetry that is sometimes wry, sometimes deeply poignant, their difficult final years together and Moran's struggle to cope with her death. He addresses illness, memory, death, and mourning in ways both frank and moving.
Waiting
by Ronald Moran
"Bodiless, like wisps of smoke on windless days / they rose," begins one poem in Ronald Moran’s latest collection, Waiting. "Not the holy spirit or the granules of the past, / but strands of memory freed up of their own will." With his trademark blend of poignancy and humor, and what a fellow poet has called the "quiet fireworks" of his language, Moran has drawn together many floating strands—not just memories, but also dreams, emotions, events, reactions, musings, images—and woven them into poetry.
I Dream My Brother Plays Baseball
by Lisa L. Siedlarz
"Siedlarz’s debut collection of poems about her brother's life as a soldier in Afghanistan shimmers like the heat over desert sand where civilians and soldiers alike are caught and often destroyed by powers that cannot be controlled. Set in a terrain 'where nothing continues to bloom,' poems from the brother's voice give a graphic picture of the gritty day-to-day life of both American and Afghani soldiers fighting an unending war. However, the poems reveal that in this unforgiving land where even 'poppies smack their red faces in the breeze,' the human spirit refuses to let laughter and celebration get swallowed."
—Vivian Shipley, author of When There Is No Shore, winner Connecticut Book Award for Poetry
Wolf Heart
by Karon Luddy
Karon Luddy is an exciting talent, the product of a vivid, conflicted experience of Upstate South Carolina by a quick, rebellious temperament. In this respect, these free-verse poems are highly original as a body yet not without precedent in American literature. For example, there is Stephen Crane's rebellion against the Methodist religion of his mother in The Black Riders and Other Lines, a savagely compressed Whitman or extenuated Dickinson. The pleasure of Luddy's "Family Reunion" derives from combining "Mama's closing statement to God," "big-hearted heathen" Aunt Margaret's "chocolate silk pie," and "my father's dented flask." In another poem, delirium tremens is pronounced a symptom of the father's attempted escape from hospital "Naked as Adam." But when discharged, his eyes shine "like black marbles he'd won from the Devil."
The Blurring of Time
by Ronald Moran
"Ronald Moran has a remarkable sense of belovedness and belongingness. The quiet intensity of these poems pierced me like an old-fashioned red rose....What haunted me most, and served as my guide, as I traveled through this stormcloud of a book, was the tick of a ghostly watch"
--Karon Luddy, author of Spelldown and Wolf Heart
Saying These Things
by Ronald Moran
"Ron Moran's poetry immediately leaps from the page to the feet and ankles of the reader's experience. You're on the sidewalk with his characters, you're a flash dancer in his every scenario. He stole one of your monologues right out of your own phone conversation—how does he do that? Across the board, and no matter the particular style of the Moran day, his poems are the view across the street, the dinner beside you at the restaurant, and they are, if you were a poet, too, the outrageously creative language experience you wish you'd have in you."
--Jennifer Bosveld, Pudding House Publications
"Lefty" and Other Stories
by John Doble
"We graduated from high school, both of us in the bottom half of our class, and barely got into college together, the state university, the only place two working class kids with lousy grades even considered. We got in because of our test scores and because any state resident who remotely qualified was admitted. We commuted of course, no money for a dorm. And our grades were lousy. At the end of freshman year, we almost flunked out together: Doc did, and I would have, except I cheated on our science final and got a D instead of an F. He could have cheated too but didn't. And so, because of his honesty, because he played it ramrod straight, Doc was bounced out of college and into the army."
--from "Two Letters from the Doctor," in "Lefty" and Other Stories