Search results for ""Sarabande Books, Incorporated""

Edith Pearlman manages to combine subtlety with extravagance, understatement with spectacle, drawing our focus to the eccentricities of those who would prefer to remain unnoticed. . . . Confronted with unexpected obstacles, these characters exchange the blurring comfort of routine with spontaneity and improvisation . . . . Full of vivid, intricate, nuanced portraits, confidently focused, restrained and yet spirited, saturated with a powerful imaginative sympathy, How to Fall is a remarkable collection by a remarkable writer. —From the Foreword by Joanna Scott How to Fall is a darkly humorous collection that welcomes the world’s immense variety with confidence. Spanning no fewer than four countries in sixty years, these sixteen stories flesh out the complexities of people who, at first glance, live ordinary, unremarkable lives. Widowers, old men, estranged spouses, young restaurant workers, career women and Jewish grandmothers are all at the center of Pearlman’s cool, studied observation. Each character is rendered with such unpredictable intricacy that they often astonish themselves just as much as the reader. Many of the stories either begin or wind their way back to one, mythical, two-by-three-mile Massachusetts town—Godolphin, a place that “called itself a town but was really a leafy wedge of Boston.” Edith Pearlman has published over 100 stories in national magazines, literary journals, anthologies and online publications. Her work has appeared in The Best American Short Stories, The O. Henry Prize collection, New Stories from the South: The Year’s Best and The Pushcart Prize collection. Her first collection of stories, Vaquita, won the Drue Heinz Prize for Literature, and her second, Love Among the Greats, won the Spokane Prize for Fiction. She now lives in Brookline, Massachusetts.

Read more less

Uncompromising, hypnotic and darkly humorous, Other Electricities charts a new and strange direction in American fiction. “Like Franklin’s discovery of the electricity we do know, Monson’s luminous, galvanized book represents a paradigm shift. The frequencies of the novel have been scrambled and redefined by this elegant experiment. Other Electricities is a new physics of prose, a lyric string theory of charged and sparkling sentences. What a kite! What a key!”—Michael Martone “Monson is tuned in to our crackling, chaotic, juiced-up times like no other young writer I know. Other Electricities is necessary reading.”—Robert Olen Butler Meet “Yr Protagonist”: radio amateur, sometime vandal and “at times, perhaps the author” of Monson’s category-defying collection: I know about phones. While our dad was upstairs broadcasting something to the world, and we were listening in, or trying to find his frequency and listen to his voice . . . we would give up and go out in the snow with a phone rigged with alligator clips so we could listen in on others’ conversations. There’s something nearly sexual about this, hearing what other people are saying to their lovers, children, cousins, psychics, pastors. . . . The cumulative effect of this stunningly original collection seems to work on the reader in the same way—we follow glimpses of dispossessed lives in the snow-buried reaches of Michigan’s Keweenaw Peninsula, where nearly everyone seems to be slipping away under the ice to disappear forever. Through an unsettling, almost crazed gestalt of sketches, short stories, lists, indices and radio schematics, Monson presents a world where weather, landscape, radio waves and electricity are characters in themselves, affecting a community held together by the memories of those they have lost. Ander Monson is the editor of DIAGRAM and the New Michigan Press. He teaches at Grand Valley State University and lives in Michigan. Tupelo Press recently published his poetry collection, Elegies for Descent and Dreams of Weather.

Read more less

A fifth collection by this "fiction writer in a poet's body."

Read more less

Cate Marvin uses language the way a gymnast uses her body; she is a formalist who has thoroughly learned the pleasures and gains of abandon. But it is her excursions into wild image and passionate song that win the reader's heart. The heart is central in World's Tallest Disaster, which is essentially a book of love poems—love lost and found, love requited, love abandoned and betrayed. What Cate Marvin has done in her remarkably assured and powerful first collection is to remind us in fresh terms of the news that stays news: that our desire is "Not a sea of longing,// but the brack of wanting what's physical/ to help us forget we are physical." "Violently passionate and firmly symmetrical, like tango or the blues, these poems-at first-are about sexual passion. . . . But in the great tradition of love poetry, these poems don't stop with love. They move from eros to imagination. Or they thrash between the two. . . . This is an encouraging book in the context of American poetry's fashions or factions, because it evades categories. [Marvin's] is an urgent as well as an artful voice."—from the Foreword by Robert Pinsky Marketing Plans o Author tour in Ohio, Kentucky, and NYC o Brochure and postcard mailings o Advertisements in key literary and trade magazinesBook tour dates including: o Cincinnati o Louisville o New York City Cate Marvin was born in Washington, D.C. She received her B.A. from Marlboro College in Vermont, and holds two M.F.A.s: one from the University of Houston in poetry, the other from the Iowa Writers' Workshop in fiction. She has been awarded scholarships to attend both Bread Loaf and Sewanee Writers' Conferences. Her poems have appeared in such magazines as New England Review, The Antioch Review, The Paris Review, The Georgia Review, and Ploughshares, among others. She is lives in Cincinnati, Ohio, and is currently a Ph.D. candidate in English at the university there.

Read more less

Judith Slater's debut collection, The Baby Can Sing and Other Stories, was selected by Stuart Dybek as the 1998 Winner of the Mary McCarthy Prize in Short Fiction.The Baby Can Sing and Other Stories introduces a writer who approaches the world at a surprisingly oblique angle. Judith Slater writes in a prose dance, dramatizing the lives of ordinary people who wonder what they can do to bring more passion into their lives, or at least less loneliness.The characters in these stories are a diverse bunch-a floral clerk with aspirations of being a ballet dancer, a photographer volunteering to take the pictures at his ex-girlfriendÕs wedding, a father playing the role of reluctant chaperon at his daughter's school dance-but all of them are alert to the moments of possibility, transcendence, and sometimes even magic that exist just under the surface of ordinary life.Slater is unafraid to employ the surreal or absurd twist: in the title story, a woman creates a perfect baby in her mind; in "Phil's Third Eye," a chance encounter at a Laundromat ends in a bizarre battle of wills; in "Our New Life," a woman finds that her former therapist has decided to make the same drastic change in her own life as she had encouraged in her patient's, and a strange challenge is issued to decide who has taken the greater risk; the narrator of "Soft Money," worried about job security in the large corporation she works for, hits upon a unique solution to the problem of downsizing.In vivid, witty prose, Judith Slater presents a world where people come together and make do, as they learn to live with the odd possibilities in life.Judith Slater grew up in Oregon and received her M.F.A. in creative writing from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. Her stories have appeared in Redbook, Seventeen, Greensboro Review, Sonora Review, American Literary Review, Beloit Fiction Journal, and Colorado Review, among other magazines. She is an associate professor of English at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, where she lives during the academic year. She spends her summers in Ashland, Oregon."Judith Slater is a writer whose work rings true to experience: her observation of the world is keen, reported

Read more less

A hip New Yorker confronts the accident of middle age.

Read more less

Becky Hagenston's debut collection, A Gram of Mars was selected by A.M. Homes as the 1997 Winner of the Mary McCarthy Prize in Short Fiction, these stories portray the modern family as one that refuses to be fashionably dysfunctional. In the hyphenated, divorced, and step-parented context of the late twentieth century, Hagenston reminds us, it is the minister and his wife in a small town in Maryland who are unconventional. These stories, conveyed with spirited, conversational prose, prove that the meaning of family prevails. In "Holding the Fort," a husband's infidelity dissolves his marriage but not the couple's emotional ties. And in "A Gram of Mars," an adult daughter responds to her divorced father's anguish upon learning of his ex-wife's remarriage, and the whole fractured family reconvenes for an evening: "Beside me, my father is breathing slow and regular as a child, and I wonder suddenly if he's fallen asleep. But his eyes are open, fixed on the road. For a moment, I believe I know what he's thinking-he has seen the woman he loves, and his daughter is beside him, and for now everything is just as simple as that. . . . When he sighs, I lean back in my seat and try to think of nothing. The sky vaults over us and silence settles down, like a pact we've made together, like a precious, immeasurable weight."Hagenston manages, with subtle emotional logic, to turn the joke of the dysfunctional family on its head. As one character says, "If something can begin millions of years ago on Mars and somehow, miraculously, find its way to my father-then why not something simpler, like happiness, which happens every day right here on earth?"Becky Hagenston grew up in Maryland and received her MFA from the University of Arizona. Her stories have appeared in or are forthcoming from such journals as TriQuarterly, Shenandoah, The Crescent Review, Antietam Review, Folio, Press, and Carolina Quarterly. One of her stories was included in Prize Stories 1996: The O'Henry Awards. She lives in Las Cruces, New Mexico.

Read more less

"It is impossible for me to write about the imagination; it is like asking a fish to describe the sea," Mary Ruefle announces at the start of her essay. With wit and intellectual abandon, Ruefle draws inspiration from Wittgenstein, Shakespeare, Jesus, Steve Jobs, Johnny Cash, and Emily Dickson to explore her subject. The chapbook features original interior illustrations.Mary Ruefle is the author of numerous volumes of poetry and prose, including Madness, Rack, and Honey: Collected Lectures, a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award in Criticism, and Selected Poems, winner of the William Carlos Williams Award from the Poetry Society of America.

Read more less

From Whitney Collins, the award-winning author of Big Bad, come twenty-three new dark and derelict (and hilarious) tales about—you guessed it—love.  With Ricky, Collins applies her sharp eye, black humor, and generous heart to love stories (and the stories we tell ourselves about love). Among the wacky, tacky, lovesick, and lovelorn characters are: Ilona, the misanthropic mother and unhappy fiancé who is increasingly transfixed by a rash of local shark attacks; Imogen, the sperm bank client who cultivates the love she madly desires inside herself; and Aurora Flood, the coma survivor on a mission to plant a sacred seed from the Olive Garden. Blending elements of southern gothic, speculative fiction, and horror, Ricky & Other Love Stories is political and personal, bitter and sweet: ultimately, a lot like love.

Read more less

2021 Winner of the Kathryn A. Morton Prize in Poetry “The book is intimate, expansive, and in moments, willfully hopeful.” —Victoria Chang, winner of the PEN Voelcker Award for OBIT Here are poems with music matched to matter, so that reading them often involves both swoon and startle: “When it folds open, the rule-less rile / of sky,” Evans, writes, “the comets and giants. And also: / books, chamomile, and more kissing.” Panoramic in time and space, Lives knows each of us, our ordinary lives and our occupancy within history and the universe, our yearning for connection: “And if I turned to you now, my one wet muscle run dry, would you / turn to me? And what else could my heart be for if not to try?”

Read more less

The highly anticipated, first full-length essay collection from acclaimed poet Kiki Petrosino. Bright: A Memoir, the first full-length essay collection from acclaimed poet Kiki Petrosino, is a work of lyric nonfiction, offering glimpses of a life lived between cultural worlds. “Bright,” a slang term used to describe light-skinned people of interracial American ancestry, becomes the starting point for an extended meditation on the author’s upbringing in a mixed Black and Italian American family. Alternating moments of memoir, archival research, close reading and reverie, this work contemplates the enduring, deeply personal legacies of enslavement and racial discrimination in America. Situated at the luminous crossroads where public and private histories collide, Bright asks important questions about love, heritage, identity and creativity.

Read more less

In her groundbreaking and most politicized collection, Kathleen Ossip takes a hard look at the U.S.A. as it now stands. She meditates on our various responses to our country—whether ironic, infantile, righteous, or defeated. Her diction is both high and low, her tone both elegant and straightforward. The book’s crowning achievement, its anchor, and its centerpiece is the poem “July.” In a generous fifty pages, Ossip recounts a road trip from Bemidji, MN, to Key West, FL, with her daughter riding shotgun. Inspired by images that flick across their car windows and nurtured by intimate conversation and plenty of time to think, the poem has an entertaining cinematic sweep. There are poems based on bumper stickers, the names of churches, little shops. Traveling tests her beliefs, and Ossip fully discloses her doubts and confusions. Ossip is an unconventional, mighty magician with words.

Read more less

This is a book of ghost stories, and for the most part, ghosts are jealous monsters, intent upon our destruction. They never appear overtly here, yet we gradually become aware of the spirits in haunted houses in the way they tread over creaky floors, slam doors, and issue sudden gusts of wind. These poems are Koan-like—the fewer the words, the more charged they are. The engine driving the sense of haunting and loss is money, which Davis describes as “federal bone” boiling around us. Bison in Nebraska are reduced to bones, “seven/standing men/tall” fodder for the fertilizer used by farmers in the 1800s. There is, too, an equality to the hauntings—every instance has its moment, and persists, despite being in the past, present, or future. Index of Haunted Houses is spooky and sad—a stunning debut, one that will surprise, convince, and most of all, delight.

Read more less

In these inventive short stories, characters must navigate an impossible world: America as we know it. Two estranged brothers on a road trip attempt to reconcile but end up at a Revolutionary War reenactment camp; a young woman moves in with her boyfriend and discovers an eerily personalized seduction manual on his bookshelf; a middle-aged Korean-American father attends college courses and is either blessed or haunted by the presence of Edward Moon, an eccentric billionaire who also happens to be “the most successful Korean in America.” Playfully engaging with genres like science fiction, the fairy tale, and the Gothic tale, the interconnected short stories of Impossible Children pit tiny heroes against tiny villains; the result is a stunning mapping of geography, heritage, immigration, freedom, and the mysterious forces behind epic ruins and epic successes.

Read more less

Amelia Martens's prose poems reveal expansive ideas in compressed language. From the domestic to the geopolitical, from the mundane to the miraculous, these brief vignettes take the form of prayers, parables, confessions, and revelations. Intimate and urgent, Martens's poems are strange, darkly funny, and utterly beguiling.Amelia Martens is the author of the chapbooks Purgatory (Black Lawrence Press, 2012), Clatter (Floating Wolf Quarterly, 2013), and A Series of Faults (Finishing Line Press, 2014). She received an MFA in Creative Writing from Indiana University, and lives in Paducah, Kentucky, where she teaches at West Kentucky Community & Technical College.

Read more less

An Indie Next Pick for July 2017 "7 Best Books of July," Men's Journal "10 Titles to Pick Up Now," O, The Oprah Magazine "Most Anticipated Books of 2017," The Millions "A unique, poetic critical appreciation of Marcel Marceau.... A fascinating book.... Readers will marvel not only at Marceau, but at the book itself, which displays such command of the material and such perfect pitch." —Kirkus Reviews, starred review As a fledgling radio producer, Shawn Wen became fascinated by the one subject who seemed impossible to put on air: French mime Marcel Marceau, the internationally acclaimed “artist of silence.” At the height of his fame, Marceau was synonymous with Bip, the red-lipped, white-faced mute in a sailor suit who conjured scenes, stories, and sweeping emotion through the gestures of his body alone. Influenced by Charlie Chaplin’s Little Tramp, credited with inspiring Michael Jackson’s Moonwalk, Marceau attempted in his performances to “reveal the fundamental essences of humanity.” Beyond Bip, Marceau was a Jewish Holocaust survivor and member of the French resistance; a bombastic iconoclast; a collector of failed marriages, masks, antique knives and doting fans; an impassioned workaholic who performed into his eighties and died deeply in debt soon after leaving the stage. In precise, jewel-like scenes and vignettes, A Twenty Minute Silence Followed by Applause pays homage to the singular genius of a mostly-forgotten art form. Drawing on interviews, archival research, and meticulously observed performances, Wen translates the gestural language of mime into a lyric written portrait by turns whimsical, melancholic, and haunting.Shawn Wen is a writer, radio producer, and multimedia artist. Her writing has appeared in The New Inquiry, The Seneca Review, The Iowa Review, The White Review, and the anthology City by City: Dispatches from the American Metropolis (Faber and Faber, 2015). Her radio work has been broadcast on This American Life, Freakonomics Radio, and Marketplace. She is the recipient of numerous fellowships, including the Ford Foundation Professional Journalism Training Fellowship and the Royce Fellowship.

Read more less

From Farinelli, the eighteenth century castrato who brought down opera houses with his high C, to the recording of "Johnny B. Goode" affixed to the Voyager spacecraft, Let Me Clear My Throat dissects the whys and hows of popular voices, making them hum with significance and emotion. There are murders of punk rock crows, impressionists, and rebel yells; Howard Dean's "BYAH!" and Marlon Brando's "Stella!" and a stock film yawp that has made cameos in movies from A Star is Born to Spaceballs. The voice is thought's incarnating instrument and Elena Passarello's essays are a riotous deconstruction of the ways the sounds we make both express and shape who we are—the annotated soundtrack of us giving voice to ourselves. Elena Passarello is an actor and writer originally from Charleston, South Carolina. She studied nonfiction at the University of Pittsburgh and the University of Iowa, and her essays have appeared in Creative Nonfiction, Gulf Coast, Slate, Iowa Review, The Normal School, Literary Bird Journal, Ninth Letter, and in the music writing anthology Pop Till the World Falls Apart. She has performed in several regional theaters in the East and Midwest, originating roles in the premieres of Christopher Durang's Mrs. Bob Cratchit's Wild Christmas Binge and David Turkel's Wild Signs and Holler. In 2011 she became the first woman winner of the annual Stella Screaming Contest in New Orleans.

Read more less

The ultimate subject of Maya C. Popa’s stunning debut collection is violence. American Faith begins with its manifestation in our country: a destructive administration, a history of cruelty and extermination, and a love of firearms. The violence naturally extends to the personal. What for some is routine can feel like an assault: a TSA agent wipes down a bra tucked in a traveler’s suitcase, adding, “…prettiest terrorist I’ve seen all day.” Tentatively, the title poem casts light on the unrevealed future, a solution that includes faith: “…the days, impatient, fresh beasts, appeal to me—/ You are here. You must believe in something.”

Read more less

Is it possible for poetry to be simultaneously raw and elegant, direct and oblique, hurtful and consoling? Yes, says Dear Delinquent, Ann Townsend's incandescent new collection. "My heart presses my ribcage like an octagon fist," she writes, taking on the persona of both betrayed and betrayer. Through poems that masterfully recall the styles of Sylvia Plath or Philip Larkin, Townsend convinces us that, even if its most destructive forms, love is the driving force behind all behavior.

Read more less

Readers of Make/Shift will find themselves confronting moments in which status and ceremony are shown to be destabilized, contingent—sorting through the suddenly unfamiliar contents of a time capsule, hanging poolside with parents while their hockey player sons devastate a hotel, and wandering the memory palace of a traumatized valedictorian during a commencement address—all while flash vignettes based on corporate slogans saturate the story collection with greater and greater frequency, like the commercials of a TV movie.

Read more less

Mothers Over Nangarhar is an unusual and powerful war narrative, focusing less on the front lines of combat and more on the home front, a perspective our American cultural canon has largely ignored after 222 years at war. In her stunning poetry debut, Pamela Hart concentrates on the fears and psychological battles suffered by parents, lovers, and friends during a soldier’s absence and return home, if indeed there’s a return. With honest grit and compassionate imagination, Hart describes her own experience having a son overseas, incorporating lyric meditations, photography, news articles, support group meetings, family interviews, oral histories, and classic literature to construct a documentary-style narrative very much situated in the now. Blending reality with absurdism and guided openly by a Calvino kind of logic, Hart reveals to us a crucial American point of view.

Read more less

In Brood, Kimiko Hahn trains her eye on the commonplace—clothespins, bees, papaya, perfume, poached eggs, a sponge, fire, sand dollars—and reveals their very essence in concise evocative language. Underlying these little gems is a sense of loss, a mother's death or a longing for childhood. "Brood" connotes the bundling of family or beasts, but also dark thinking, and both are at play here where the less said, the better. Kimiko Hahn is the author of ten books of poetry, including most recently, Brain Fever (Norton, 2014). She has received numerous honors, including the PSA's Shelley Memorial Prize, the PEN/Voelcker Award, and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, Guggenheim Foundation, and New York Foundation for the Arts. She is a distinguished professor in creative writing at Queens College (CUNY) and lives in Forest Hills, New York.

Read more less

Karyna MyGlynn takes readers on tour through the half-haunted house of the contemporary American psyche with wit, whimsy, and candid confession. Disappointing lovers surface in the bedroom; in the bathroom, "the drained tub ticks with mollusks & lobsters;" revenge fantasies and death lurk in the basement where they rightly belong. With lush imagery and au courant asides, Hothouse surprises and delights.Karyna McGlynn is the author of I Have to Go Back to 1994 and Kill a Girl and three chapbooks. She is currently a Visiting Assistant Professor of Creative Writing and Translation at Oberlin College.

Read more less

Ordinary people seek connections to the natural world and each other in the poems of The Heronry, a collection that presents a series of spiritual encounters in the form of praise poems, lyric portraiture, and meditations on faith and belief.Mark Jarman is the author of ten poetry collections. He lives in Nashville, Tennessee.

Read more less

Seated one, loved by the lavishing comband fingers of another woman demon-strating how attention and technique coalesceinto art. Where to gowhen the mother is gone.All occupations form to replace her.What relief to be a girl again for an hour,beneath the practiced wrists of her avatar.Paula Bohince is the author of The Children and Incident at the Edge of Bayonet Woods. Her poems have appeared in the New Yorker, the New York Review of Books, Poetry, Granta, the Nation, and elsewhere.

Read more less

"Smote is a book of the dark reality of our daily existence; it is a book of abiding grace."—Robert Olen ButlerI release you like the crank-addled truck driverreleases his cargo at the midnight dockuntil the warehouse is one in a trailof crumbs, little light left on behind him. James Kimbrell is the author of The Gatehouse Heaven and My Psychic, and the co-translator of Three Poets of Modern Korea. He been the recipient of the Discovery/The Nation Award, a Whiting Award, a fellowship from the NEA, and a Morton Prize.

Read more less

"Reading these poems is an uncanny experience. . . . We enter into this book alert to possibility, and leave knowing how asleep we've been."—Nick Flynn Of all the meanings of exposed I think my favorite is the raw nerve shivering bug-like in the lamp light while the surgeon arranges his dainty knives. You can get close to that. You can brush its wriggling limb and hear the scream. You can lie there on the table, say, "little nerve oh nerve it'll be all right; there there, there there.

Read more less

Selected by Marie Howe for the 2011 Kathryn A. Morton Prize, Easy Math is anxious and exuberant both. Lauren Shapiro’s poems are Aesop stood on end, wry fables that defy our instinct to find a moral to the story. Instead, she offers us a gimlet eye to the disappointments of the world, tall tale-telling by turns rickety, defiant, and brave. “There are an infinite number of ways to torture the soul with hopefulness” Shapiro says, so we settle for ways to survive—crooked grins, twisted logic, and equations of jello shots, amusement parks, and post-it notes that never add up. “Everyone has something to say / about love and impermanence and waste.” She says it better than most. "Shapiro specializes in snappy, poignant retorts to the problems of pop culture. Joan Rivers, Lindsay Lohan, and even the wily Jersey Shore crew inhabit her crackling new volume of poems, winner of the Kathryn A. Morton Prize in Poetry.... Shapiro guides readers into uncomfortable but evocative settings, from a surreal ESL classroom and plague-ridden Marseilles to a hotel workout room. Imagination does not just take flight here; it rides the airport shuttle bus and connects travelers from different continents." --Booklist "Lauren Shapiro can downshift from the sublime to the profane and back again in less than five seconds. Energy and joy create these metaphors, and if they are in discourse with postmodern malaise, they almost win the argument." —Marie Howe

Read more less

The stories in Rise are fairytales, except that the witch, lucky Hans, and the frog prince are characters at the fringes of everyday life. There are rockets, swells of starlings, and children who disappear into thin air. L. Annette Binder writes magical tales with authority and restraint, and we believe her stories, every one. "The complex interweaving of themes, rendered through precise detail, is akin to a powerful subterranean disturbance that sends seismographs jumping but leaves few visible effects." —Starred Review, Publishers Weekly "L. Annette Binder’s Rise is a wondrous debut collection of her stories, any one of which could be an example of the form at its best." —ForeWord Reviews, Selected as summer 2012 best book of debut fiction "Binder has gone so deeply, and with such mystical brilliance and loyalty, into her own world that she has brought mine to me in high relief. She both casts a spell and breaks it. To experience Rise is to experience wonder." —Laura Kasischke "Three years ago I read a story titled 'Dead Languages.' I came out of my chair. I've been in standing ovation position reading every subsequent story written by L. Annette Binder. They came exquisitely one by one, and now you are damn lucky to have them all in one wondrous volume: Rise. —Michelle Latiolais “L. Annette Binder is a stunningly talented writer. Her stories are the stories of outsiders, gripping and heartfelt, heightened with hidden undertones of the surreal. It is this tension that makes the worlds she creates so vibrant, and allows her readers to see so deeply into these characters' souls. Rise is a beautiful book, and Binder’s words cut clear and straight to the bone.” —Hannah Tinti

Read more less

A private eye turned moderately successful poet leads readers on a satiric, hopeful tour of how to make a life in the arts, while still having a life. Revealing, hilarious, and peppered with sly takes on the ins and outs of contemporary American poetry (chapters include "The Silence of the Iambs," "The Revisionarium, Ask Dr. Frankenpoem," and "The Periodic Table of Poetic Elements"), Jeffrey Skinner offers advice, candor, and wit. Revision is the process a poem endures to become its best self. Or, if you are the poet, you are the process a poem endures to become its best self. Endures because a first draft, like all other objects in the universe, has inertia and would prefer to stay where it is. The poet must not collaborate. Best self because the poem is more like a person than a thing, and does not strenuously object to personification. Yo, poem. But let's not get carried away. It's your poem and you can treat it as you wish; sweet talk it; push it around if that's what it takes. Alfred Hitchcock notoriously said of the actors in his movies, "They are cattle." Jeffrey Skinner is the author of five books of poetry, most recently Salt Water Amnesia (Ausable Press, 2005). His poems have appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, The Nation, The American Poetry Review, Poetry, BOMB, and The Paris Review, and his work has earned awards from the National Endowment for the Arts, The Ingram Merrill Foundation, and the Howard Foundation.

Read more less

Lia Purpura’s essays are full of joy in the act of intense observation; they’re also deliciously subversive and alert to the ways language gets locked and loaded by culture. These elegant, conversational excursions refuse to let a reader slide over anything, from the tiniest shards of beach glass to barren big-box wastelands. They detonate distractedness, superficiality, artificiality. In the process, Purpura inhabits many stances: metaphysician and biologist, sensualist and witness—all in service of illuminating that which Virginia Woolf called “moments of being”—previously unworded but palpably felt states of existence and knowing. Rough Likeness finds worlds in the minute, and crafts monuments to beauty and strangeness.

Read more less

2010 ForeWord Book of the Year, Essay Silver Medalist, 2011 IPPY Awards in Multi-Cultural Adult Fiction 2011 American Book Award “Vaswani is a confident writer whose unflinching eye shows the reader the beauty grounded in the mundane.”San Francisco Chronicle “Vaswani’s voice is witty, sharp, innovative, unique.”Chitra Banerjee You Have Given Me a Country is an emotionally powerful exploration of blurred borders, identity, and what it means to be multicultural. Combining memoir, history, and fiction, the book follows the paths of the author's Irish-Catholic mother and Sindhi-Indian father on their journey toward each other and the biracial child they create. Neela Vaswani's second full-length work thematically echoes such books as The Color of Water, Running in the Family, or Motiba's Tatoos, but it is entirely unique in approach, voice, and story. The book reveals the self as a culmination of all that went before it, a brilliant new weave of two varied, yet ultimately universal backgrounds that spans continents, generations, languages, wars, and, at the center of it all, family. Neela Vaswani is the author of the short story collection Where the Long Grass Bends (Sarabande Books, 2004). Recipient of a 2006 O. Henry Prize, her fiction and nonfiction have been widely anthologized and published in journals such as Epoch, Shenandoah, and Prairie Schooner. She lives in New York City.

Read more less

"Ultimately, the lyrics in Hoodwinked read as odes to mortality. They marvel nonstop, unsentimentally, and with necessary ambivalence, at the world as given and the human inability to consistently rise to the exhausting challenge of making every second count. These poems constantly acknowledge that 'all flesh is grass.' They make us hear the wondrous, terrifying hum of impending obliteration, while at the same time never growing immune to beauty, never ceasing to be curious about what the grass itself makes of our common temporal conundrum." —Amy Gerstler, from the introduction Inherent untrustworthiness—of received opinion, the trompe l’oeil deceptions of nature, and the workings of our own unfaithful minds—is given its proper menace in David Hernandez’ Hoodwinked. In poems that range from the backyard to Iraq and back again, Hernandez disturbs the surface of contemporary life to reveal barely submerged worlds that, impossible to fathom, make fools of us all.

Read more less

"Michael Mazur's approach to the Inferno gave me inspiration and guidance in understanding Dante. The monotypes, nourished by the artist's intense engagement with the poetry, are themselves acts of translation, embodying vital principles."—Robert Pinsky, from the preface A unique collection that revisits Dante's classic with translations by former Poet Laureate Robert Pinsky and full-color artwork by internationally renowned artist Michael Mazur. This rare and stunning collaboration is sure to be sought by both collectors and readers alike.

Read more less

“Barot’s Want is dexterous and thrilling, and his capacious and generous vision shows us how the eye survives ‘to correct the heart.’”—Michael Collier “In Rick Barot’s hands every poem casts at least two luminous shadows. Want is masterfully merciless and merciful at the same time.”—Terrance Hayes

Read more less

“He brings something ancient and compelling . . . a kind of rare Sephardic wisdom, a brilliance traveling at the speed of Los Angeles light. He is one of America’s very best poets. A true visionary.”—Tomaz Salamun “Angel’s poems are deceptively quiet, deceptively calm. Beneath their carefully constructed surfaces, they are wild, even intimidating. The power of restraint in poetry cannot be overestimated. . . . These poems burn from within.”—Carol Muske-Dukes, LA Times With the publication of his award-winning volumes, Anxious Latitudes, Neither World, and Twice Removed, Ralph Angel has won the admiration of readers of contemporary poetry for the extraordinary abstract lyricism of his poems. There is a superb grace, speculative intelligence, and a wry philosophical wisdom to Angel’s poetry. There are few poets so accomplished at creating an elegant yet innovative and provocative voice. Now, in Ralph Angel’s Exceptions and Melancholies: Poems 1986–2006, we find ourselves again in the presence of poetry that will move us even closer to a new and renewed promise of the American sublime. As Mark Doty has written, “These are the poems of a casual, down-to-earth philosopher who’s been spun around and turned inside out by loss, by the desolation of life in the late [and early] hours of the century. . . . Angel’s poems are stamped indelibly with the mark of a unique, shaping imagination, and they’re fresh with news of how it feels to live right now. He creates himself and his poems’ characters, strange people in a strangely familiar place. We recognize them, of course, as well we might since they are ourselves and the city where they live is ours. Ralph Angel is the author of three previous collections of poetry: Anxious Latitudes; Neither World, which received the 1995 James Laughlin Award of The Academy of American Poets; and Twice Removed; as well as a translation of Federico García Lorca’s Poem of the Deep Song. Angel’s poems have appeared in scores of magazines and anthologies, both here and abroad, and recent literary awards include a gift from the Elgin Cox Trust, a Pushcart Prize, the 2003 Willis Barnstone Poetry Translation Prize, a Fulbright Foundation fellowship, and the Bess Hokin Award of the Modern Poetry Association. Mr. Angel is the Edith R. White Distinguished Professor of English and Creative Writing at the University of Redlands, and a member of the MFA Program in Writing faculty at Vermont College. Originally from Seattle, he lives in Los Angeles.

Read more less

“Without self-absorption, Tall traces the self’s emergence in a place which she recognized from the start as her testing place.”—Seamus Heaney “In the literature of place, Deborah Tall’s book stands out for its delicacy, range of learning, and refreshing frankness.”—Phillip Lopate In her third book of nonfiction, Deborah Tall explores the genealogy of the missing. Haunted by her orphaned father’s abandonment by his extended family, his secretive, walled-off trauma and absent history, she sets off in pursuit of the family he claims not to have. From the dutiful happiness of Levittown in the 1950s to a stricken former shtetl in Ukraine, we follow Tall’s journey through evasions and lies. Reflecting on family secrecy, postwar American culture, and the urge for roots, Tall’s search uncovers not just a missing family but an understanding of the part family and history play in identity. A Family of Strangers is Tall’s life’s work, told in such exacting, elegant language that the suppressed past vividly asserts its place in the present. Deborah Tall is the author of four books of poems, most recently Summons, published by Sarabande Books after Charles Simic chose it for the Kathryn A. Morton Poetry Prize. She has also published two previous two books of nonfiction, The Island of the White Cow: Memories of an Irish Island and From Where We Stand: Recovering a Sense of Place, and co-edited the anthology The Poet's Notebook with Stephen Kuusisto and David Weiss. Tall has taught writing and literature at Hobart and William Smith Colleges and edited its literary journal, Seneca Review, since 1982. She lives in Ithaca, New York, with her husband David Weiss and their two daughters.

Read more less

“[Sallie] Bingham writes with an austere and unerring knowledge of what it is to be human and transgressive.”—Paula Fox “Restrained and wise, these lovely stories unfold like lavender-scented linens, quieting the fretful mind.”—Joe Ashby Porter Forty-year veteran of the novel, noted feminist, and author of over ten books, Sallie Bingham returns with Red Car, a collection written in her signature style—discreet, sly prose circling taboo subjects. Her new offering is about love enjoyed, whether alone or with lovers, sensual or familial, comedic or tragic, often with a wry twist. Sallie Bingham lives in Santa Fe, New Mexico.

Read more less

There is something utterly in thrall here, honey-slow and fixated. Driven by obsession—in particular, obsession with the legendary French poet, Robert Desnos—Muench’s identification with a true self beyond the self’s known truth is startling. —from the introduction by Carol Muske-Dukes “Simone’s poems have a confidence and sophistication of what I like to call intentionality. Also wit, grace, poise, and a relationship to writing beyond self-referential feeling.” —Anne Waldman “Lush, sprouting, sensuous images line-by-line, adopting myth freely, Muench’s poems are volatile explosives, circling beauty.”—James Tate

Read more less

Through a partnership to promote wider access to literary voices of Mexican artists in the United States and American writers in Mexico, the National Endowment for the Arts, the United States Embassy in Mexico, and Mexico’s National Fund for Culture and the Arts have joined together to support a proposed three-year program of anthology publication and public outreach activities. In the first year, Sarabande has been named publisher of the poetry anthologies. “We are pleased to introduce readers to the best of contemporary Mexican and American poetry through these comprehensive bilingual anthologies,” states National Endowment for the Arts Chairman Dana Gioia. “I believe they will quickly become essential volumes for poetry lovers and grant new insight into both cultures.” Contributors include: Kay Ryan, Larry Levis, Thomas Lux, Marilyn Nelson, Ron Silliman, Molly Peacock, Amy Uyematsu, Jorie Graham, Judith Ortiz Cofer, Naomi Shihab Nye, and more.

Read more less

“Wright has a hunk of the ineffable in his teeth and he won’t let go. In poem after poem, he plumbs our deepest relationships with nature, time, love, death, creation. Wright’s search breaks all the barriers of time, space, action, for its dramatic narrative simply refuses to acknowledge the usual unities, as though all time were this time, all places this place and all actions one.”—Philip Levine, from his citation for the 1996 Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize. Charles Wright was named chancellor of The Academy of American Poets in 1999 and has won a Pulitzer Prize, a National Book Critics Circle Prize and a Los Angeles Times Book Prize. Since 1983, he has been at the University of Virginia.

Read more less

"Nystrom’s gift as a poet is that she doesn’t stop looking, and her poems make sure it is all still there for us to see."—Eamon Grennan The landscape of Torn Sky is South Dakota, a place of extremes, where parched land meets frigid air and exiled Native Americans still struggle to live in peace alongside ranchers. Nystrom’s poems weave together the voices of her childhood with ghosts of the last two tumultuous centuries and articulate with such subtle and unsentimental grace that each side is understood. Debra Nystrom was born in Pierre, South Dakota. She is the author of one previous book, A Quarter Turn. She lives in Charlottesville, Virginia, and teaches at the University of Virginia.

Read more less

"Discipline, humility, kindness. These qualities cohere in the best mentors, bundled into an overarching approach to the art of writing. It is not, I think, coincidence that the writers in this collection remember these qualities best when speaking of their mentors as people, as fellow pilgrims who helped them on the way. In some sense, whether consciously or not, we seek out mentors who learn how to live—as an artist, and as a human being."—from the Introduction by Jeffrey Skinner Lee Martin is the author of a collection of stories, The Least You Need to Know (Sarabande, 1996), a memoir From Our House (Dutton 2000), and a novel Just Enough Haughty, also forthcoming from Dutton. He teaches in the creative writing program at the University of North Texas where he also edits the American Literary Review. Jeffrey Skinner is currently Director of Creative Writing at the University of Louisville. His published collections of poetry include The Company of Heaven (University of Pittsburgh Press, 1992), Late Stars (Wesleyan University Press, 1985), and A Guide to Forgetting (Graywolf Press, 1988), which was a National Poetry Series selection. Contributors include: Michael Collier on William Meredith Jay McInerney on Raymond Carver Tess Gallagher on Theodore Roethke and Stanley Kunitz Reginald Shepherd on Alvin Feinman Dana Gioia on Elizabeth Bishop Maura Stanton on Vert Rutsala and John Berryman Elizabeth Graver on Annie Dillard, Angela Carter, Stanley Elkin, and others Sylvia Watanabe on Dorothy Vella David Huddle on Peter Taylor David Wojahn on James L. White Erin McGraw on John L’Heureux CONTENTS PREFACE by Lee Martin, vii INTRODUCTION: The Scrupulous Philanthropy of Expertise by Jeffrey Skinner, xi MICHAEL COLLIER An Exact Ratio, 3 The Farrier, 12 JAY MCINERNEY Raymond Carver: A Still, Small Voice, 15 Getting in Touch with Your Child, 24 TESS GALLAGHER Two Mentors: From Orphanhood to Spirit-Companion, 39 Behave, 45 DAVID HUDDLE What about Those Good People?, 51 Backstory, 57 REGINALD SHEPHERD T

Read more less

In her fourth book of poems, Deborah Tall serves up, as Charles Simic remarks, "a huge feast of words and images." Spare, charged, eloquently complex, her poems distill emotion to its precipitate. In "Cottage by the Beach, Normandy," loneliness is this: A dozen tulips/erect in the centerpiece,/ hold their allotment of empty air. In "Winter Solstice," war yields, A hillside of markers,/a showroom of tombs./The bushes fruited with ice. Summons is a call to speak out—in the face of violence, cruelty, and loss—and a summoning up of the forces of nature and humanity that console. "The art of prosody, of which Deborah Tall is a master, is a jeweler’s art. It is about ascertaining the weight of words, measuring each one of them in turn against silence and time. . . . As we read, line by line, sounds turn into music, words and images grow in meaning. If you believe this is what all poets do anyway, you are wrong. Only the best of them know how to make us reread with increasing pleasure a few lines of poetry."—from the foreword by Charles Simic Marketing Plans: o Author tour NYC, Boston, NY State and New England o Advertisements in key literary and trade magazines Deborah Tall is the author of three previous books of poems (most recently Come Wind, Come Weather from State Street Press) and two books of nonfiction: The Island of the White Cow: Memories of an Irish Island (Atheneum, 1986) and From Where We Stand: Recovering a Sense of Place (Knopf, 1993). Tall is the editor of the Seneca Review and co-editor of the anthology The Poet’s Notebook (Norton, 1995). She has taught writing and literature at Hobart and William Smith Colleges since 1982 and lives in Ithaca, New York.

Read more less

Robert Clinton was born and raised in upstate New York. He studied at Union College and received an MFA in creative writing from Goddard College in 1979. He has worked at many jobs in many places, mostly as a carpenter and cabinet-maker, and is currently a designer for a custom cabinet shop in Boston. His poems have appeared in journals such as Anteaus, Prairie Schooner, The Atlantic Monthly and Ploughshares,"Perhaps what's so refreshing about Taking Eden is that it fits into no neat category. There's a sensitivity in it to the natural world, but the phrase 'nature poetry' certainly doesn't apply; many of the poems use a narrative structure, yet 'narrative poetry,' too, seems inaccurate. The surreal leaves its tracks throughout the book, but they are as delicate as the traces left by subatomic particles in a Wilson's cloud chamber, dispersing as soon as they are seen, reabsorbed into the other events of these poems. Clinton's imagination is multidimensional, and the pleasures of Taking Eden are accordingly complex. While the poems here share some qualities-an alertness couched in simple diction, often-they do not predict one another. This is especially admirable in a first book. . . . Robert Clinton is a poet with a unique outlook. . . . Taking Eden has a maturity that bodes well for Clinton's future work: these poems grow more like oak than ailanthus; they are dense and strong."-The Boston Book Review"Many of the thirty-nine poems in Robert Clinton's first book of poetry, Taking Eden, seem at once autobiographical and universally appealing."-Independent Publisher"'Some days are holidays of silence,' Clinton writes in 'My Father;' his most introspective and lonely short work owes much to the early Mark Strand. His more narrative poems relate visionary, solitary encounters with bearers of wisdom, frequently father-substitutes but sometimes the speaker's own father, who form an understated lineage: 'The men I know / born in labor all of them // go along the rock / the way I go without / much hesitation.' In 'Treetops,' a 'son who will remain unborn' finds the poet 'in the shade of the house collecting stones,' 'he stands up, / pushing the house into the

Read more less