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Earth Abides
A classic in science fiction's end-of-the-world genre. As much wisdom about philosophy and society as you'll find anywhere, all in a gripping novel that never flags.
by George
In this enchanting, multifaceted novel, a shy boy begins to uncover the secrets of his family of vaudeville performers when he finds a ventriloquist's dummy belonging to his late grandfather. (In keeping with his family's off-kilter understanding of reality, the boy was named after the dummy.) A shift from magical realism to psychological realism halfway through the book may at first disappoint fans of the former genre, but ultimately fits perfectly with the human George's choice to break the family pattern of sacrificing truth to illusion.
The Best American Short Stories 1999
A particularly fine installment of this annual series, the 1999 anthology includes a wide spectrum of styles and ethnic backgrounds, with emotionally compelling tales that leave the reader with much to ponder. Standouts include Nathan Englander's 'The Tumblers', which casts the shadow of the Holocaust over Yiddish folklore's mythical village of Chelm; Sheila Kohler's 'Africans', a quietly chilling account of a family's disintegration under apartheid; and Heidi Julavits' 'Marry the One Who Gets There First', an unlikely love story told through wedding-album outtakes.
Award-Winning Tales
This enjoyable collection of short fiction in the Western genre features the top stories from the Cowboy Up contest sponsored by Moonlight Mesa Associates. The book includes adventure tales, humor, and romance, in settings both modern and historical.
Alex Haley’s Queen: The Story of an American Family
In this epic historical novel, Haley, the author of Roots, traces his lineage on his father's side from the love affair of an Irish-American plantation owner and a black slave. Though the cast of characters becomes overcrowded in places, this saga provides a grand overview of America's tortured racial history from Andrew Jackson's presidency through the Civil War and Reconstruction. Queen, the author's grandmother, survives incredible trials to see her children reach heights she could never have imagined.
A Working Man’s Apocrypha
In this short story collection, tornados real and metaphorical rip through the lives of not-so-ordinary people, flinging them into unexpected intimacies and tearing away identities once thought airtight. Luvaas' poetic prose is powerful as the Santa Ana winds yet delicate enough to limn the silences that speak louder than words, as in the title story, where the bond between a widow and her dying handyman is too profound to risk actual words of love.
A Changed Man
Part novel of ideas, part romantic comedy, this book begins with a young skinhead walking into the office of World Brotherhood Watch, a human-rights group run by a Holocaust survivor, and saying he wants to help them "save guys like me from becoming guys like me." The events that follow reveal each character to be a very human mix of vanity and genuine altruism, with the latter most often emerging in small moments away from the spotlight. The novel raises provocative questions about the tension between service to grand causes and caring for the individuals in one's personal life, though Prose could have accomplished more with this theme by introducing a true villain to raise the stakes in the conflicts between characters.
Swallow
This chapbook won the 2008 Flip Kelly Poetry Prize from Amsterdam Press. Award-winning poet Ellaraine Lockie says of this collection, "Jendi Reiter's poems are arrows that plunge dead center into the hearts of feminism, religion, death, the interior of mental health and psychotherapy. Her humor and satire here are as sharply honed as her indignation." Email the author for purchasing information.
Miller, Reiter & Robbins: Three New Poets
Miller, Reiter & Robbins were all discovered by Hanging Loose magazine. "Distinctive voices even in their earliest efforts." Order from Amazon or directly from Jendi Reiter for $9.
Barbie at 50
Jendi Reiter's second award-winning chapbook won the 2010 Cervena Barva Press Poetry Contest. Notable poet Afaa Michael Weaver calls this collection "poems of a life more real than any doll's, as they point up the grace of having confronted the problematic entanglements that attempt to derail a woman making her way through the puzzles of maturing in the last fifty years." Experienced editor Lori Desrosiers calls it "an inventive re-imagining of the fairytale woman...replete with surprise and peppered with humor."
What We Have Learned to Love
Raw, tender poems of gay male love and lust, and the blurry line between them. This chapbook won the 2008-09 Stonewall Competition from BrickHouse Books.
What the Living Do
Autobiographical collection is an elegy to the poet's brother, who died young from AIDS. These verses are poignant and true.
What She Said
Provocative poetry chapbook by a Palestinian-American writer whose creative and academic work on Middle Eastern and women's issues has been widely anthologized. The title poem in this collection was a finalist in our 2004 War Poetry Contest.
Waiting to Burn
Memorable chapbook whose poems are always about so much more than their literal subject matter. Cleland trusts her readers to recognize the story of an unhappy marriage in a cat's transformation into a dog, or the divine-human power struggle over forbidden knowledge in a guided tour of a factory. This book was one of the three winners of the 2006 Templar Poetry Pamphlet and Collection Competition. Their book design and materials are above-average.
Up from the Root Cellar
The root vegetable, as metaphor for the unearthing of secrets and the renewal of aging bodies, unifies this satisfying chapbook from Cervena Barva Press. In Woodworth's inventive poems, nuns peeling potatoes could be fantasizing about Marilyn Monroe's striptease; a woman puzzled by hints of her father's infidelity might try to call her childhood home by speaking into a rose shaped like an antique telephone.
Unraveling at the Name
Speaking in sonnets seems as natural as breathing for this author, whose effortless mastery of poetic forms is employed to tell the story of a young woman's discovery of her lesbian identity. Some explicit passages.
Two Black Eyes and a Patch of Hair Missing
In this earthy, revelatory poetry collection from Main Street Rag Publishing, bodies eat, sweat, climax, and die. Some of them are stuffed. All are handled with reverence. Humorous or embarrassing moments open up suddenly into a vision of fellowship that levels social distinctions.
The World’s Wife
The wives of mythic figures get their say at last.
The Voodoo Doll Parade
The profane becomes sacred under this poet's unflinching attention, in earthy poems about illness, sex, and prayer (and sometimes all three tangled up in bed together). The heart of this chapbook is a series of unforgettable narratives about homeless and mentally disabled clients of The Dining Room, a soup kitchen in Oregon where the author volunteered. This book was selected by Terry Wolverton for the Main Street Rag Author's Choice Chapbook Series.
The Real Politics of Lipstick
Winner of the 2010 Slipstream Poetry Chapbook Competition, this collection of prose poems and flash fictions is indeed about the "realpolitik" of our sexuality as it collides with poverty and loss and makes a beautiful explosion. Dead fathers return as jaunty ghosts, budding teenagers remind mothers of the sexy stockings they renounced, tough girls find power in submission and abandonment. This is the honky-tonk woman as sacred prostitute, speaking in tongues as men "plowed away the weight of hard hurt lives" in union with her body but not, perhaps, her elusive soul. Small typeface makes the page look less inviting, but close reading will be rewarded.
The Radiant
Austere moments of beauty illuminate this collection whose theme is finding peace in the midst of suffering. Though battered by a lover's betrayal and the onset of multiple sclerosis, the speaker of these poems is renewed by the transcendent qualities of nature and her own courage in seeing clearly. Winner of the 2003 Levis Poetry Prize from Four Way Books.
The Owl Question
Lyrical imagery full of personal wisdom characterizes this winner of the May Swenson Poetry Award. Shearin can be bluntly honest about our flaws and disappointments without sounding cynical. "My mother once explained:/ we can't all be beautiful; even a gaunt field/ feels the cold kiss of morning."
The Next Ancient World
Winner of the Tupelo Press Judge's Prize in Poetry. Historian of science applies her rational and witty perspective to our dilemmas at the turn of the millennium.
The Most of It
Like Socrates, the narrator of these engaging prose-poems asks innocent-seeming questions about our habitual ways of thinking, but the reader who takes up the challenge will find the territory shift suddenly from featherbrained whimsy to a profoundly unsettling realization of the emptiness of language and the ego, ending with a return to childlike humility that facilitates a spiritual awakening.
The Moon Reflected Fire
Vietnam veteran's searing, lyrical, dark-humored poems relate the surreal horrors and feverish pleasures of that war to a wider tradition of Western moral and literary struggles with our capacity for destruction. Anderson weaves a tapestry of connections between the Trojan War, Vietnam, and the drug-fueled violence of our streets. Winner of the 1994 Kate Tufts Discovery Award. Don't miss his most recent collection, Blues for Unemployed Secret Police.
the lake has no saint
Repeated images of old houses, vines, and being underwater give this poetry chapbook the blurry, yearning atmosphere of a recurring dream, where one searches for the lost or never-known phrase that would make sense of a cloud of memories. Even as Waite offers compelling glimpses of discovering a masculine self within a body born female, womanhood exerts its tidal pull through domestic scenes with a female lover who seems perpetually on the verge of vanishing. This collection won the Snowbound Series Chapbook Award from Tupelo Press.
The Job of Being Everybody
The craftsmanship of these poems sneaks up on you, colloquial free verse initially disguising the deep intelligence of their observations about human nature. "You can know your building if you're interested/ in sadness," he writes of New York apartment life. How grateful we should be that he takes an interest.
The Imaginary Poets
The brilliant idea behind this Tupelo Press anthology: ask 22 leading poets to invent an alter ego, "translate" one of his or her poems, and write a short bio and critical essay about the "author". From David Kirby inventing a lost Scandinavian language for his fisherman-poet "Kevnor", to Victoria Redel discussing the feminist implications of the poems "Tzadie Rackel" sewed into her dishrags, these deadpan critical essays play with the conventions of academic poetry and criticism, in the same way that Cindy Sherman's imaginary film stills trick us into "recognizing" characters and poses that are so archetypical that we think we've really seen the movie. If you've ever found the museum placards more interesting than the modern art they describe, this book will make you laugh and think.
The Hospital Poems
A powerful contribution to the literature of disability, this autobiography in verse exposes a childhood spent at the mercy of medical "experts", who performed invasive and ultimately futile surgeries to correct his uneven legs. With dark humor and an insistence on facts over rhetoric, Ferris restores dignity to the bodies of those whom the establishment treats as problems to be fixed. This book won the 2004 Main Street Rag Poetry Book Award.
The Hat City after Men Stopped Wearing Hats
Rich with local detail, these elegiac poems capture a working-class Polish-American boyhood in the 1960s, and pay tribute to neighborhood characters who are lovingly individuated yet acquire universal resonance from the way the poet brings their ordinary lives to light. The mood of aging and decline is leavened by a sense that love is as real as pain. This book won the 2006 Word Works Washington Prize.
The Glass Violin
This Australian poet truly does see the universe in a grain of sand—as well as in a tram ticket, a Caesarian scar, the names of Australian military operations, a shabby bear in the Soviet zoo, a wren visiting a dead friend's garden, and myriad other small details of modern life that she turns into windows on the human condition, in verses both whimsical and profound.
The Feast: Prose Poem Sequences
A modern-day Jonah leads us from the belly of the whale into surreal cityscapes, sinister carnivals, and intersections with the world of Greek myths. Winner of the 2005 William Rockhill Nelson Award for best poetry book by a Missouri writer.
The Divine Salt
The spirit of St. Francis of Assisi presides over these plain-spoken poems, written from the perspective of a mental hospital orderly. Blair's kind and understated voice is a refreshing contrast to the melodramatic tone of much poetry about mental illness.
The Dead Alive and Busy
These carefully structured poems, tinged with classical allusions, honor the sick and dying with the poet's patient vigil and unflinching observation of the body's joys and failures. Winner of the 2001 Kingsley Tufts Award.
The Cow
The Cow is like putting Western Literature through a sausage-making machine. The Cow is about being a girl and also a person. Is it possible? "Alimenting the world perpetuates it. Duh. Plus 'the world' is itself a food." The integrated self equals sanity and civilization (whose machinery creates the slaughterhouse), yet the body is constantly disintegrating, eating and being eaten, being penetrated and giving birth. With manic humor and desperate honesty, Reines finds hope by facing the extremes of embodiment without judgment or disgust. Winner of the 2006 Alberta Prize from FENCE Books.
The Case Against Happiness
The genially bewildered characters in this unique first collection of poetry try and fail to fit themselves into the American dream of personal satisfaction, but only because they are genuinely groping for a more substantial mode of existence that always remains just beyond the margins of thought and language. Pecqueur's wild associative leaps mirror his inability to find the coherent, contented self that the Enlightenment promised. This book won the 2005 Kinereth Gensler Award from Alice James Books.
The Carcinogenic Bride
When the Big C meets the Big D, all you can do is laugh. At least, that's where poet Cindy Hochman's survival instinct takes her. Packed with more puns than a Snickers bar has peanuts, this chapbook from Thin Air Media Press brings energetic wit to bear on those modern monsters, breast cancer and divorce. To order a copy ($5.00), email Cindy at poet2680@aol.com.
The Book of Folly
The mother goddess of female confessional poets, Sexton brings back the truths that lie on the other side of madness. The sonnet sequence "Angels of the Love Affair" presents a visceral depiction of psychosis that is almost unbearably real.
Textbook Illustrations of the Human Body
This poet's voice is eminently likeable, humble and wise. Whether he is finding spiritual wonder in nature's complexity, or working his way to reconciliation with aging parents, Estreich's gift for elegant and original phrases never seems like showing off. This book won the 2003 Rhea & Seymour Gorsline Poetry Competition from Cloudbank Books.
Sun, Moon, Salt
Winner of the 1992 Word Works Washington Prize, this debut collection was reissued in 2010. If this book could be summed up in one word, it would be the title of the opening poem, "Tongue", that place where language and sex meet. White delights in the body's unique shapes, textures, and tastes, inviting us to experience familiar features as strange and wonderful. The generous range of these poems also extends to Northeastern small-town life, the constraints of female roles, and a grown woman's empathetic insights into her parents' struggles.
Subject to Change
Accomplished collection of lively contemporary formal verse, ranging from a punning ode to the Nissan Stanza to a crown of sonnets that depicts the birth of feminism ("Notes from the Good-Girl Chronicles, 1963").
Steel Womb Revisited
Plain-spoken poetry stands up for working-class America with humor, lucidity, and political outrage. Douglass is the publisher of the acclaimed small press Main Street Rag.
Soot
Plain-spoken and passionate narrative poetry in the tradition of Philip Levine seeks out moments of tenderness and joy amid the grit and grind of mass society. Co-winner of the 2009 Keystone Chapbook Prize from Seven Kitchens Press.
Sonnets from Aesop
Witty sonnets by an award-winning poet retell 100 fables from Aesop, including many lesser-known tales worth rediscovering. Lively watercolor illustrations for each tale are sure to delight both adults and children. A great read-aloud book. Sonnets from Aesop received an IPPY (Independent Publisher Book Award) as one of the ten "Outstanding Books of the Year" published by an independent press in 2005. Acclaimed formalist Annie Finch says, "What more could Aesop have wished than to address the 21st century in these dry, whimsical sonnets complemented by a series of soft, edgy watercolors. This beautifully produced book is a rare treat."
Sonatina
This award-winning Israeli poet's new collection pairs themes of high art and nature's simple beauty. By turns political, pastoral and erotic, Simon uses musical metaphors to evoke compassion and nostalgia for his homeland and its people.
Slouching Towards Guantanamo
In his second full-length collection from Main Street Rag, Ferris interrogates America's concept of "the normal" and finds it wanting. His own disability is the lens through which this prophetic poet brings every other shade of inequality into focus, asking us to shed the burden of our ego so that differences between ourselves and others can simply coexist without comparison or judgment. Notwithstanding the spiritual weight they carry, these poems are playful, musical, satirical and passionate.
Searching for the Spring: Poetic Reflections of Maine
Plain-spoken, meditative poems bring to life the culture and terrain of rural Maine, and demonstrate the spiritual rewards of love and attention to one's native landscape.
Scattered Risks
Like a modern St. Francis, this poet is a sister to all the beasts and plants that grace her southwestern landscape, and unfailingly finds the perfectly textured and surprising words to bring them to life for the reader. Uschuk is a prophet of the wilderness that we are fast destroying; few poems pass without a reminder of the human warfare and greed that lurk at Eden's edge. She invites us to feel the "velvet shoulders" of the bat rays in the aquarium's touch pool, then to question our right to have "these benign inmates confined to concrete/ entertaining us with their lives." Totemic illustrations by James G. Davis enhance this volume from Wings Press, Texas' oldest small press.
Red
Lesbian poet's first collection moves easily between the erotic and the elegiac in a voice that is fresh and wide-open as her Cape Cod landscape. Braverman invites the reader into a community of friends and lovers who embrace life despite the risk of loss. Elegantly designed by Perugia Press, this book won their 2002 contest as well as the Publishing Triangle Audre Lorde Poetry Prize.
Quiver of Arrows: Selected Poems, 1986-2006
Intricate lyrics from the poet's eight collections marry austere classicism to sensual passion. Eros, for Phillips, is always shadowed by loss, yet for that very reason also points to a radiant, barely describable landscape beyond death, as the speaker of these poems renounces all illusions about the cost of his devotion to another man.
