Search results for ""Loom Press""

"The poems in Millrat are full of blessed and flawed humanity, based on author Michael Casey’s experience working in a textile mill in Lowell, Massachusetts, in the 1960s. This is a 25th anniversary edition of the book, with additional poems plus commentary by early reviewers and contemporary writers. The book gained national attention when first released in 1996. Poet Michael Casey writes, “My writing about the mills stemmed from the jobs during summers from college, undergrad school at the Lowell Technological Institute (LTI, now University of Massachusetts, Lowell) and then later when on leave from the State University of New York in Buffalo. A friend told me not to give the phony impression that the jobs there were at that time my career. Mention that here in compliance. I did not always work at a textile mill but for a book’s setting in Lowell, the textile mill was appropriate. Lowell was where the other American revolution began. History. The Industrial Revolution. For any writer at any time you are apt to write about what you are doing. I have to say think of Robert Frost and apple picking or Fred Voss at the airplane factory and writing about factory work is not restricted to men. I can recommend here the wonderful books by Inez Holden. Author Jeanne Schinto wrote in The Nation magazine: “In 1972, when Michael Casey was twenty-four, he won the Yale Younger Poets award with a book called Obscenities. Stanley Kunitz called it “the first significant book of poems written by an American to spring from the war in Vietnam.” . . . “Casey didn’t see action in Vietnam; he was in the military police, assigned to the highway patrol and gate-guard duty. So it’s no wonder that very little of Obscenities is about combat; instead, many of the poems illuminate the Army’s pecking order and its hyper-logical nonsense. In Millrat, Casey explores the mill hierarchy, at times even more complex than the military’s, since the rules there are less rigid and the consequences of disobeying them less certain. You may not lose your job, but you may lose face, which is often more valued. . . .” Poet Helena Minton says, “Michael Casey’s Millrat, first published twenty-five years ago by Adastra Press in western Massachusetts, is a novel distilled, spoken in a series of distinctly American voices. These laconic, but visceral poems, with their blunt language, immerse us in the world of a textile mill, featuring characters whose mishaps, trials and escapades sometimes land them “on the outside lookin in.” “In deceptively simple, yet startlingly original lines, Casey uses true sleight-of-hand. The job at the mill involves heavy machinery, dangerous chemicals and working with others who can’t be counted on for much of anything. Even moments of downtime—at the coffee truck, a softball game, a picnic, or signing up for the company betting pool, with its byzantine rules—are fraught with complications. On first reading, we might be tempted look at the world of the millrat as absurd, but it is all too real, and we laugh at our own peril. Thanks to Loom Press, Millrat will remain in print. It already has the feel of a classic, and should be widely read and re-read."

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In these poems and short prose pieces Chath pierSath describes in vivid detail his refugee journey, resettlement in the United States, return to Cambodia, and continuing effort to find meaning and fulfillment in his adopted country. His bold compositions document the damage done to the Cambodian people by political fanatics and the after-effects in a nation still struggling to regain its balance. Through the author's eyes, soul, and mind, we experience his challenges and often joy as he embraces American freedom and, in the spirit of Walt Whitman, celebrates his life as a gay man, exploring "the body electric" and the ensuing ecstasies and at times despair. This is the voice of the new American who sounds much like the classic newcomer to the U.S., the immigrant who gets the job done as sung in Hamilton. He adds his stories to the big bag of American culture in a fresh voice that resonates around the globe, for he is truly an international artist. Through his intense personal history, as well as his leadership in social work and independent ethnography, Chath has channelled community and identity into all of his creativity -- Rain Taxi. As Buddhists, the dead who are not properly buried are doomed to suffer in the hell realm as hungry ghosts. Through literary expression, pierSath reunites social bonds and allows for souls to be reincarnated -- Mary Thi Pham and Jonathan H. X. Lee, Southeast Asian Diaspora in the United States. . . Chath explores memory and illusion, many of the works being derived from his own journals looking at family, love, disappointment and even hate. . . excavating memories and juxtaposing them with historical moments . . . The cyclical nature of history, that is perpetually written and erased, is often in the hands of power -- and here the artist re-claims a small part. -- javaarts.org, review of Khmer Lessons art exhibition.

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The Shape of Wind on Water is Ann Fox Chandonnet’s substantial collection of new and selected poems, some from her rural childhood in Massachusetts, and many from her thirty-four years in Alaska. Place has always been important to her. In 1968, her first book of poems was published in Madison, Wisc. In the following years, she wrote two cookbooks, four food histories, and a tourist guide to the Panhandle. She also founded the Literary Artists Guild of Alaska. Ann Fox Chandonnet grew up on a 180-acre apple and dairy farm in Dracut, Mass. Then there were four years in California, followed by a rich life indoors and out in Alaska. She has worked as an English teacher in Kodiak, Alaska, and a police reporter in Juneau. Chandonnet has two grown sons and three lovely granddaughters. She and her husband of fifty-six years are “retired” to Lake St. Louis, Missouri, where they share Ann’s rescue dog, Gypsy Rose.

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Shift whistles at the soap factory and the shipyard, along with the changing tides, mark the rhythms of life in the beach town. This is a world of fast food, double dates, and Saturday morning haircuts at the barber shop-a world as seemingly uncomplicated as a summer night's ride on a carousel. A lonely girl from "away" seeks connection with high school classmates who give no notice; a harried salesman confronts his deepest fear; a middle-aged woman reckons with unfulfilled dreams; and a man returns for a class reunion and finds himself face to face with something beyond his imagining. In Beach Town, David Daniel recreates the seaside town of North Weybridge, recalling in stories poignant and sometimes mysterious, the loves and losses, the magic and hard realities of clam diggers, sailors, barmaids and disillusioned lovers, characters revealed in moments of crisis or enlightenment.

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Prize-winning prose and poetry by alumni and students of University College Cork in Ireland and University of Massachusetts, Lowell, in the U.S. This collection of stories, essays, and poems by emerging and established writers is introduced by U.S. Ambassador to Ireland Claire Cronin and the Republic of Ireland's Ambassador to the U.S. David Mulhall. Defined broadly, the theme of the book is learning and education, both formal and informal as described by the authors. Both universities are critical to their home communities, and the selections showcase the talent on campus now and among the graduates of the schools. The writers investigate their respective locales and document memorable learning experiences in a wide array of situations, from sailing voyages to strife-torn countries and among the familiar people in their lives as well as characters imganied.

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On the cusp of becoming a teenager, Charlie Gargiulo lived through the planned destruction of the Little Canada neighborhood of Lowell, Mass., in the 1960s. This is his story. He went on to become a legendary community organizer who led efforts to ensure people would have decent housing and a fair chance to earn a living and make a happy life for themselves.

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Have you ever wondered what it would be like to be a mayor? Well after serving three terms as a mayor and being a local and regional government official for over thirty-five years I think I know. So I wrote this book to pull the curtain back just enough to let you peak in and know as well. After you read this book you will know how political capital is used to make government work. You will also learn that you can tell a lot about how a person will govern by the kind of campaign they run to win an election. You will also see how circumstances can affect leadership and how public engagement can be a full contact sport. What is it like working with unions and dealing with the press or managing a fragmented government? I have been fortunate in that my career has spanned over some very interesting times and events. I was the first modern day Mayor for the City of Methuen after a charter change was approved to create a city form of government. The way the city was governed changed dramatically and the way government officials interacted and made decisions had to adjust as well. What happens and how does a city respond when one of your largest employers in your city, Malden Mills, is destroyed by fire? How do you protect the jobs and the economy of your city? What happens when your community has term limits and you need to leave before the job is done? It is a fascinating life with funny memories and memorable events that leads to a rewarding life.

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In 1972, Michael Casey won the Yale Younger Poets Prize for Obscenities, a collection of poems drawn from his military experience during the Vietnam War. In his foreword to the book, judge Stanley Kunitz called the work a kind of anti-poetry that befits a kind of war empty of any kind of glory and the first significant book of poems written by an American to spring from the war in Vietnam. Its raw depictions of wars mundanity and obscenity resonated with a broad audience, and Obscenities went into a mass market paperback edition, and was stocked in drugstores as well as bookstores. In the decades since, Caseys poetry has continued to document the places of his work and life. Then and now, his poems foreground the voices around him over that of a single author; they are the words of young American conscripts and their Vietnamese counterparts, co-workers and bosses, neighbours and strangers. His compressed sketches and unadorned monologues have appeared in The New York Times, The Nation, and Rolling Stone. There It Is: New and Selected Poems presents, for the first time, a full tour through Caseys work, from his 1972 debut to 2011s Check Points, together with new and uncollected work from the late 60s on. Here are all the locations of Caseys life and work -- Lowell to Landing Zone, dye house to desk -- and an ensemble cast with a lot to say. The publication of Michael Casey's New and Selected Poems, with his quirky portraits of ordinary Americans, is an event to celebrate. Like a photographer snapping pictures relentlessly, he must have written a poem about everyone he ever met with dead-on realism. Compared to him, the Spoon River Anthology is a work for kiddies.

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Paris Paint Box, New and Selected Poems, brings together over forty-five years of poetry by Helena Minton. The book opens with a sequence about the life and work of the French Impressionist painter, Berthe Morisot. Additional new poems focus on everyday moments, and meditations on the past. In selections from her previous work, poems touch on family, gardens, New England history and landscapes, and the Alaska wilderness. In a quiet but determined voice, the poet draws the reader into her world with direct, spare language and a keen eye to detail.

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Thirteen stories set in and around the Merrimack Valley in Massachusetts, this volume is not in its third printing.

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In this debut collection of poems, Sarah Alcott Anderson of Exeter, N.H., explores love, longing, loss, marriage, children, and place through her own experiences. ""In mostly plainspoken poems, I explore interior and exterior landscapes--from childhood to motherhood, New England to Ireland--in the hope of honoring that we are here right now,"" she says. Poet Matt Miller in the foreword writes that Anderson's lines seem ""at times spun from a sugared lightning, at other times are as plain and enriched as Irish bog or New Hampshire granite, line and lyric come together to insist against a silence the world would have the poet embrace.

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Cummiskey Alley brings together the best of Tom Sextons poems about the place where he was born and grew up, the mill-lined river city of Lowell, Massachusetts -- a place he never took his eye off, no matter his location. For most of his life hes been in Alaska, writing, teaching, editing a respected literary journal, and always observing the large and small wonders in the world. Hes filled many books with poems that tell us what hes seen and heard and felt. In the Northwest and around the Pacific Rim, Sexton is known as a premier poet of the natural world, from birds to mountains. But theres another side to this writer, a deep investigator and lyrical beat reporter whose subject is his working-class, ethnic-American hometown where hes returned regularly, sometimes anonymously to better absorb the facts and fill the blotter at the night desk in the hall of records. The poems hes drawn from memory and recent inspection stand for the experience of a thousand small industrial cities that were made by immigrants and often got knocked down by merciless economic winds, only to get their legs back under them and move forward. As universal as they may be, places like Lowell need a literature to call their own. The New York Times described Sexton as an atavistic avatar of how to look hard yet write simply. Merrimack Valley Magazine wrote: Each poem unveils something new, and at times breathtaking, about one of the Merrimack Valleys most diverse and interesting places . . . Sextons characters, relationships, and places spring from the page, brought to life by a tiny gesture or minute detail.

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The photographs in this book were taken between 1982 through 1985. At that time Ireland had one of the poorest economies and highest rate of emigration in Europe. And across the border the Northern Ireland economy was being crippled by ongoing sectarian violence, the English army occupation, and hunger strikes against Margaret Thatchers IRA policies. This all began to change in the mid-1980s with the rise of the Celtic Tiger, brought about by new economic policies that welcomed foreign high-tech companies to Ireland. And later, in the 1990s, the Good Friday Agreement finally brought peace to Northern Ireland. This book is a snapshot of life in the Irelands before Good Friday and the Celtic Tiger. Mostly gone now but not forgotten. With North & South Ireland: Before Good Friday and the Celtic Tiger, James Higgins adds to his remarkable photography portfolio a set of astonishing images of people and places on an island that was on the cusp of enormous change. Hes cracked open a time capsule to reveal the enduring beauty, emotional power, and arresting visual facts of a land in two parts whose boundary lines fade under the photographers eye. In the middle 1980s, Higgins travelled to Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland several times. Initially, he was not searching for ancestors or out to explore a popular world destination. Rather, beginning with his first journey he was drawn in by Irish soulfulness. He did touch his roots among relatives in County Leitrim, but his curiosity sent him around the island to see what he could see, to find what he could find. He preserved what entered his mind. These images give us Ireland from top to bottom in those years before the giant tech companies transformed the economy and before the peace accords in the North, which calmed the Troubles that had destabilized the society there for decades. Many Americans, in particular, will recognise in these photographs the land of origin of their forebears or the place they themselves toured in the 1960s, 70s, and 80s. In their fixed form, Higgins photographs are timeless in the way the Irish sea and fields and faces hold time.

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In “Northwest of Boston," Stephen O'Connor's characters live the human drama fully in stories that range from the humorous to the poignant. They go to the crossroads to face their demons, come to terms with the fleeting nature of life and love, and find the courage to follow their own compass. For some, that means an evolution; for others, a steadfast embrace of a world that is passing away.

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Eric Linder has been writing poems for over forty years. In his first full-length collection his insight, humour, and precise lines combine to make poems that you will want to go back to time and again. With a clear eye and open heart, he gets to the nub of situations, personalities, and lifes puzzles, laying out the absurdities and sublime moments common to all of us. His work has appeared in The Quarterly, Harvard Magazine, and Light Year: The Annual of Light Verse and Funny Poems. He lives in Eastham on Cape Cod and recently discovered a meteorite in his back yard while digging turnips.

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Opening with a response to the Covid-19 pandemic, Lockdown Letters & Other Poems ranges near and far in the authors catalogue. While spared the devastating effects of the disease, he offers a view of the way daily life changes and new risks are confronted as people try to maintain routines. The book shifts to work inspired by travel -- local, global, and beyond -- routes giving rise to memorable observations and insights. More place poems and a cycle of sports pieces round out the volume, with its theme of home-and-away.

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Richard Gregg was a twentieth-century pacificist and social philosopher. He was among the first Americas to study with Mohandas Gandhi in India and later wrote The Power of Non-Violence, the essential guide t to peaceful protest that informed the methods of Martin Luther King, Jr., in the American civil rights movement and inspired many other activisits. Gregg's holistic vision of a peaceful and compassionate world combine nonviolence, environmental sustanibility, and simple living.

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Osborndale Ivanhoe was a bull who became an unlikely celebrity. He defied expectations and challenged long-establishednotions of what constituted a championHolstein. But his fame was dependent on one man’s stubborn insistence that the animalwas, indeed, special. Carla Panciera spentyears with her father and his famous herdtraveling from county fair to county fair,and answering the same questions: “Is that Aldo Panciera?” and “Are you Aldo’s daughter?” This memoir is based on the real man and his very real effort to make a living at what he loved. He was a demanding teacher and an unappeasable boss, but he was also a father who finished night milking and took his daughter for sled rides down a frozen hillside, or for a spin on the local carnival’s Ferris wheel, or who paused, plowing fields, to pick her the first wildflowers of the season. Barnflower is about a man and his work and what that life demanded of his family. Read about the bond between a father and daughter and their love for the kind of life they shared, a kind of life that is both a critical and a vanishing part of our history.

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The Wild Goose was a hand-made magazine of verse written and edited by John Boyle O’Reilly aboard the Hougoumont, the last ship to transport British convicts to Australia. O’Reilly (1844-1890) was an Irish Fenian sentenced to life imprisonment for infiltrating the British army and attempted mutiny. O’Reilly escaped from Australia aboard a whaling ship and settled in Boston where he rose to become an editor of The Pilot, a noted poet, and abolitionist.In a sense, these poems are a little magazine conceived of and drafted in 2018 and 2019 when Gallagher was a poet-in-residence at the Heinrich Boll Cottage, on Achill Island, County Mayo, Ireland. In addition to a sequence on O’Reilly, the poems in this book engage the Irish landscape, and the history and myth that formed the identity of some of the Gallagher’s ancestors until British colonialism and associated famine took them to Massachusetts.

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Artist Linda Hoffman saved an orchard and reshaped her life at Old Frog Pond Farm in Harvard, Massachusetts. When she moved to the farm she didn't know anything about apple-growing. More than twenty years later, the farm is one of the few organic pick-your-own orchards in New England, as well as a hub for a thriving community of visual artists, writers, and spiritual seekers. Hoffman, the mother of three children, a Zen practitioner, and a breast cancer survivor, has now written about her extraordinary journey in The Artist and the Orchard: A Memoir.

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"With Voices of Dogtown, James R. Scrimgeour has written an imaginative insiders guide to New Englands most enigmatic setting. Dogtowns distinctive terrain provides the backstitching to a tapestry that Scrimgeour has woven through with the voices of the area's doomed souls and the many scholars and artists the land has inspired. The result is a deeply researched and thoroughly imagined collection celebrating Dogtowns unique character and its unshakeable effect upon those who venture to know this mysterious place. Elyssa East, author of Dogtown: Death and Enchantment in a New England Ghost Town. Dogtown was and is uniquely New England. Scrimgeour leads us there down a two-lane roadone lane paved with historical research and the other lane paved with the embodied experience of being in a place, seeing its shadows, hearing its ghosts. The walk is a bit out of the way and perhaps a bit overgrown, and theres a good chance of collecting what Scrimgeour calls the Dogtown bug, but its just that bugthe voices we bring back with usthat we remember long after the end of the trip. Brian Clements, co-editor of Bullets into Bells: Poets and Citizens Respond to Gun Violence. The voices in these poems . . . bring Dogtown alive in a multi- dimensional way that comes as close, in my judgement, as anyone has come so far to capturing the complete essence of Dogtown. When I finish reading these poems, when I have heard all the voices they contain, I think of Dogtown as if it is a sentient, breathing organism, and I marvel at my appreciation and understanding not only of the experience of Dogtown in particular, but also of the experience of place in general. Carl Carlsen, author of Brickyard Stories: a Lynn Neighborhood and Its Traditions"

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"Have you ever wondered what it would be like to be a mayor? Well after serving three terms as a mayor and being a local and regional government official for over thirty-five years I think I know. So I wrote this book to pull the curtain back just enough to let you peak in and know as well. After you read this book you will know how political capital is used to make government work. You will also learn that you can tell a lot about how a person will govern by the kind of campaign they run to win an election. You will also see how circumstances can affect leadership and how public engagement can be a full contact sport. What is it like working with unions and dealing with the press or managing a fragmented government? I have been fortunate in that my career has spanned over some very interesting times and events. I was the first modern day Mayor for the City of Methuen after a charter change was approved to create a city form of government. The way the city was governed changed dramatically and the way government officials interacted and made decisions had to adjust as well. What happens and how does a city respond when one of your largest employers in your city, Malden Mills, is destroyed by fire? How do you protect the jobs and the economy of your city? What happens when your community has term limits and you need to leave before the job is done? It is a fascinating life with funny memories and memorable events that leads to a rewarding life. I hope you enjoy the story."

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Nestor, why does this creature hate me so much? Why does she hate my blood? Minerva Herrera, a young Colombian woman and devout Catholic, is the love of Nestor McCorleys life. And although twelve years of parochial school have left Nestor with mixed feelings about God and the Church, he and Minerva marry after a brief courtship. She quickly becomes pregnant and the couple enjoy a happy domestic life. But in the late stages of her pregnancy, as Minerva is lighting a candle to the Blessed Virgin, she is confronted in the church by a frightening woman who hurls a shocking curse at her and her unborn child. In the weeks following the incident, ominous things begin to happen. With his marriage on the rocks and his wifes health at risk, Nestor begins to search for answers. Who is this woman? Is someone seeking revenge for something in Nestors past? Is Minervas former lover trying to get her back? Nestor enlists the help of a priest as he revisits his Catholic grammar school and combs the city for answers. Everyone he meets becomes a suspect as Nestors life begins to unravel, and his worst nightmares become real.

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Interviews with people in Lawrence and Lowell, Massachusetts (the Merrimack River Valley) who experienced the sickness and pandemic living restrictions of Covid-19 in 2020 and 2021, plus diary excerpts from residents who reported on their daily fears, hopes, and challenges. Produced by the Lawrence History Center, Phillips Academy Andover, and University of Massachusetts, Lowell (UML). This is the first published documentary about the impact of the pandemic. Interviews were conducted by Sociology students at UML, students at Phillips Academy, and community activists in Lawrence. The two working-class, highly diverse cities in eastern Massachusetts had sustained high level rates of infection with the related disruption of employment, education, and normal community life. The interviews offer a useful case study of the effects of Covid in one region.

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Mary E. Folsom Blair was just a name on a listing sheet when young writer Phil Primack bought her Epping, New Hampshire, property in 1974. As he learned more about this lifelong teacher, Quaker, and early advocate for outdoor education, his reporter bones began to twitch. Over decades, Primack talked to her former students and relatives, tracking down Mary’s most accurate life record: letters and journals dating 1897, when she was fifteen. Her sharp mind and creative soul grapple with the social restraints of her time and “the pain this world holds for a woman.” Mary pens her hopes and bares her despair as young chums die, her classroom ways are challenged, relationships with men and women end until—resigned to her fate as “spinster that was, is and ever shall be”—she meets her Hero on ice. With her collected papers preserved at the Radcliffe Institute of Advanced Study, Mary Folsom Blair will teach in a digital forever.

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Atlantic Currents: Connecting Cork and Lowell brings together sixty\-five writers from both sides of the Atlantic Ocean whose stories, poems, essays, songs, and parts of novels come to us in familiar voices. While we recognize the sound and sense in these works because of the well\-traveled routes between Ireland and America, there is much to discover in today s writing from both places. Complex relationships, sublime joy in small and large matters, destabilizing external forces, the hunger for harmony, snares of history, transcendent moments in special locations, the simple attempt to get through it all every day all this and more the reader will find. Spurred by a desire to make a strong bond between two historic cities whose modern resurgence has been driven in large part by commitments to lifelong, experiential, community\-based learning and teaching. The organizers of Cork Learning City and Lowell: City of Learning found each other two years ago and set about collaborating in the spirit of UNESCO s Learning Cities global network. With this anthology, the connecting thread is made stronger through the now entwined writing and reading in both places.

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