William Heyen
Straight's Suite for Craig Cotter & Frank O'Hara

Poetry. Paper, Perfect Bound. 86pp.
$14.95 plus S&H
2012, ISBN 978-1-936419-11-1

The 52 lyrics that make up William Heyen's newest collection of poetry are at once a nod to the progenitor of American poetry of sexuality and the body, Walt Whitman, and a communication addressed to the late Frank O'Hara, famed member of the New York School of poets in the 1950s and 1960s. Heyen asks O'Hara how "I might get my poem to be its subject,/ not just be about it," which in some ways is the project of all art.

Lydia S. Rosner
The Russian Writer's Daughter

Memoir. Paper, Perfect Bound. 104pp.
$15.95 plus S&H
2012, ISBN 978-1-936419-10-4

The Russian Writer's Daughter by Lydia S. Rosner is a collection of lively autobiographical stories about growing up in a Russian-American Jewish household in the stifling political atmosphere of the Red Scare. At the center of these memories is Lyduce's father, whose complex personality mixes a passion for social justice, the desire to protect his family, and intellectual snobbery. In this revelatory memoir, international politics shadow a child's gradual awakening to her father's humanity. As she tells her family's story, Rosner shows how complicated autobiography can be, more a matter of pursuing the truth than asserting it.

John Palen
Small Economies

Short Fiction. Paper, perfect bound, 58 pp
$13.95 plus s&h
2012, ISBN 978-1-936419-09-8

Small Economies's short stories and flash fictions are economical in narration but comprehensive in their suggestion of the past, present, and future lives of their characters. The moments they contain are set against the background of diverse public spaces: the institutions, stores, factories, restaurants, even the street corners where people must come together and choose to serve, reject, or compete against one another. Palen writes with a poet's sensitivity to language and the physical, as well as empathy for all of his characters. The stories convey his clear conception of the sometimes devastating outcomes produced by the exchanges, material and intangible, people make and fail to make.

Susan Azar Porterfield
Kibbe

Poetry. Paper, perfect bound, 62 pp
13.95 plus s&h
2012, ISBN 978-1-936419-08-1

The pieces that make up Kibbe document a life spent journeying "Between Two Worlds": the author's America and the Lebanon of her family heritage. We recognize the people in these poems even when they are distant from our homes and our minds: the fathers and mothers, the dictators, even the stranger driving the taxi through Beirut. Thanks to Porterfield's healing art, we find ourselves with them in the end, in a shared space where reconciliation and compassion are our only options.

Susan Kolodny
After The Firestorm

Poetry. Paper, perfect bound, 62 pp
$13.95 plus s&h
2011, ISBN 978-1-936419-07-4

Susan Kolodny draws on her work as a clinical psychoanalyst in her first collection of poetry, After the Firestorm. Kolodny's evocative style arises from an imagination both sensory and analytical. The poems suggest the unity of love and suffering, and walk a difficult line between the pleasures of the physical world and its dormant, invisible dimensions. Kolodny is a brilliant observer of nature, at once attentive and inquisitive, whose haunting questions provide a starting point for her lyrical investigations into the losses and traumas we all experience.

Eleanor Lerman
Janet Planet

Fiction. Paper, perfect bound, 208 pp
$17.95 plus s&h
2011, ISBN 978-1-936419-067

Janet Planet is a unique work that attempts to showcase the young and rebellious spirit of a Woodstock generation that eventually grew up-and away-from those glorious hippie days. In the novel, Janet Harris-known as Janet Planet-is the reader's guide into and out of the psychedelic years as she joins Jorge Castelan (a fictionalized Castaneda) and his circle of women and then falls into the new age movement of alternative spirituality. Set in the hippie haven of Woodstock, Janet embarks on her own spiritual journey into the mystery that lies beyond life.

George Dila (Ludington, MI)
Nothing More To Tell

Trade Paperback, 100 pp.
$15.95 plus s&h
2011, ISBN 978-1-936419-05-0

Nothing More to Tell brings together short stories that reflect the combined effects of history, family, and society on the men and women of Michigan's small towns and big cities. Dila's prose presents us with a view of middle-aged, middle-class men that is at once ruthlessly honest and understanding. Their lives are tightly woven chains of successes and failures, which culminate in episodes that are sometimes comic, often catastrophic. The pieces in this collection will sometimes cause laughter, sometimes outrage; but they are unflinching in their demand for compassion.

Sophia Rivkin (Michigan)
Naked Woman Listening at Keyhole

Poetry. Paper, perfect bound, 44 pp.
$13.95 plus s&h
2011, ISBN 978-1936419-043

Sophia Rivkin’s poetry simmers with visceral energy and surreal leaps. It is made of the dark soup of her Russian heritage, the light broth of her word play, and the sustaining whimsy of her artist’s eye.

Stacie Leatherman (Ohio)
Stranger Air

Poetry. Paper, perfect bound, 84 pp.
$14.95 plus s&h
2011, ISBN 978-1936419-036

Stacie Leatherman’s dynamic poems inhabit the cusp between the domestic and the utterly strange. To read them is to travel where we haven’t been before, where things seem lost or on the verge of disappearing.

Mary Winegarden (San Francisco, CA)
The Translator's Sister

Poetry. Paper, perfect bound, 81 pp
$14.95 plus s&h
2011, ISBN 0-932419-02-9

In response to the unexpected death of her sister Katharine Washburn, Mary Winegarden has taken on the challenge of translating their lives into living language. Using phrases from Washburn’s work as her foil, Winegarden creates a moving meditation on the bonds of sisterhood. Crossing boundaries between prose and poetry, fiction and memoir, convention and experimentation, The Translator’s Sister  resonates with the intimacy and humor of remembered details, with loss translated into art. This shimmering conversation will sweep you in.

Howard Schwartz (St. Louis, MO)
Breathing in the Dark

Poetry. Paper, perfect bound, 92 pp
$15.95 plus s&h
2011, ISBN 978-1936419-005

Howard Schwartz is a contemporary master of the parable, the short lyric and the tale. In Breathing in the Dark, he has multiplied his dreams, his myths, and his stories into poems that grow quietly and firmly from the secret root stock of his imagination. That side of Judaism and that side of poetry which is dream-like, mythical, and memory-ridden is Schwartz’s domain. Breathing in the Dark is a book of human tenderness, gentle humor, and more than a dash of mysticism. To read these poems is to enter a state of meditation in which the two worlds of ordinary life and that of spirit are combined.

Also available in laminated hardcover for $24.95 plus s&h

Paul Dickey (Omaha, NE)
They Say This Is How Death Came into the World

Poetry. Paper, perfect bound, 78 pp
$14.95 plus s&h
2011, ISBN 0-932412-99-7

Paul Dickey’s poems demonstrate perfectly how irony and wit can serve as little bits of salvation in a world that may not be entirely against us, but isn’t much for us, either. The poems in They Say This Is How Death Came into the World are full of sly twists and turns, surprising nuances, and witty insights. At once profound and mischievous, wicked and accurate, serious and comic, they offer a reflection of reality that appears at first glance to be a fun-house mirror.

Sally Rosen Kindred (Columbia, MD)
No Eden

Poetry. Paper, perfect bound, 70 pp
$14.95 plus s&h
2011, ISBN 0-932412-97-8

The poems in No Eden merge the landscapes of a rainy girlhood in the American South and the mythic world of Noah and the Flood. In these poems, a backyard stretches between a mother and daughter--the lessons of "distance tender and biblical." The Carolina yard opens to hold the fruits of Eve and Lilith, the flight of Noah's raven and dove, the small terrors of curbs and classrooms. These are poems of a "family awake through a storm," an intimate theology of floods, loss, and betrayal.