John Palen
Small Economies

Short Fiction. Paper, perfect bound, 58 pp
$13.95 plus s&h
2011, 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
2011, 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.

Jane O. Wayne (St. Louis)
The Other Place You Live

Poetry. Paper, perfect bound, 80 pp
$14.95 plus s&h
2010, ISBN 0-932412-97-3

The Other Place You Live explores "the world's slow unwinding." With intensity of language and a bounty of imagery, Jane O. Wayne reveals those other places wherever she is in the world. The poems move effortlessly from metaphor to metaphor, gradually building an atmosphere of dark disquiet, then suddenly revealing, as by moonlight, the burnished joy at the heart of things. This is a book of serious riches and profound human pleasures.

Andrei Guruianu (Illinois)
Metal and Plum: A Memoir

Prose. Paper, perfect bound, 124 pp.
$16.95 plus s&h
2010, ISBN 978-0932412-966

This extraordinary memoir captures cultural dislocation and hope. Guruianu eloquently conveys the impact of immigration on his family, contrasting the hardships of Ceausescu's Romania with the challenges of adaptation to the United States.

Jeanne Larsen (Virginia)
Why We Make Gardens (& Other Poems)

Poetry. Paper, perfect bound, 74 pp.
$14.95 plus s&h
2010, ISBN 978-0932412-959

Jeanne Larsen offers us poems filled with sustenance and surprise. In precise, meditative language, she investigates a full range of experience and feeling, from bodily desire to rage to astonishment at the wonders (and betrayals) we find in the world.

Jayne Pupek (Virginia)
The Livelihood of Crows

Poetry. Paper, perfect bound, 90 pp.
$15.95 plus s&h
2010, ISBN 978-0932412-942

In Jayne Pupek’s poetry, we experience the slipperiness of language, of meaning, of life. She offers stories of mystery, luck, and particularly a humane understanding for the lapse in judgment and love. Her poems are filled with notes and reminders that you might well need to hear.

Garnett Kilberg Cohen (Illinois)
How We Move the Air

Short fiction. Paper, perfect bound, 110 pp
$16.95 plus s&h
2010, ISBN 978-0932412-935

How We Move the Air tells the story of musician Jake Doyle’s suicide and how, over time, it affected those who knew him. In seven linked stories, Garnett Kilberg Cohen explores the complex ways in which people choose to remember—or not remember—the past.

Geof Hewitt (Vermont)
The Perfect Heart: Selected & New Poems

Poetry. Paper, perfect bound, 110 pp
$16.95 plus s&h
2010, ISBN 978-0932412-928

The Perfect Heart documents 45 years of extraordinary work by a poet who, according to David Ray, “is a true heir of Frost and Carruth, their tonalities and breadth of concern and vision, and shares their grounding in mythic Vermont. [Hewitt] is open to a multitude of leadings, never with restricted agendas, and fearlessly takes the reader along as a trusted friend and confidante. This book could aptly be called Love Tokens, for that’s what most of the poems are. This is a collection to celebrate with each reading.”

Don Cellini (Michigan)
Translate into English

Poetry. Paper, perfect bound, 70 pp.
$14.95 plus s&h
2008, ISBN 978-0932412-911

Translate into English is framed with grammatical instructions from a turn-of-the-century Spanish lesson book. Possessing a rare elegance and integrity, Cellini’s poems are intelligent and clever while capturing subtle emotions. From the compelling concept to the fine execution of these poetic vignettes—each work, each poem, every page is necessary to the whole. And the whole is a unique and beautiful experience.

Susan Slaviero (Illinois)
Cyborgia

Poetry. Paper, perfect bound, 78 pp
$14.95 plus s&h
2010, ISBN 978-0932412-904

Melding the language of sci-fi and sensuality,Susan Slaviero’s redolent, ambitious debut wallows delightfully in its rhythm and vocabulary yet remains sharp and meticulous. In this lyric guide to cyborg feminism—complete with robosexuality and teledildonics—Slaviero traverses traditional female tropes, including fairy-tale heroines, mermaids, and brides. Full of lucent wit, imagination, intelligence, and a scathing playfulness.

Myra Sklarew (Washington, D.C.)
Harmless

Poetry. Paper, perfect bound, 92 pp
$15.95 plus s&h
2010, ISBN 978-0932412-898

Sklarew’s tenth collection of poetry distills the experience of a life spent in the pursuit of truth. Trained as a biologist, Sklarew draws upon the discourses of science and the arts in equal measure; also versed in history, she is haunted by the cruelties of the 20th century, even as she affirms the present moment and holds out the promise of renewal. This moving book has something important to say, and it says it in beautiful language marked by extraordinary musicality.

William Heyen (New York)
The Angel Voices: A Poem

Poetry. Paper, perfect bound, 66 pp.
$14.95 plus s&h
2010, ISBN 978-0932412-881

In this visionary and prophetic work, Heyen searches through images of grace and beauty as well as the grotesque, such as furrows dug to “drain off / human fat / the pyres congealed / with firefolk / villages of them / cities of them….”

Robin Chapman and Jeri McCormick, eds. (Wisconsin)
Love Over 60: an anthology of women's poems

Poetry. Paper, perfect bound, 126 pp
$16.95 plus s&h
2010, ISBN 978-0932412-874

This diverse anthology includes work by more than 80 poets, some well known and others relatively unknown, all over the age of 60. These poems speak of love in particular lives and details. Each poet writes out of her real experience, belonging to this historical time, from a vast array of loving (or nonloving) exchanges—and so each reader will find individual patterns, nuances, and voices. The whole contributes to defining and refining that elusive word, love, in our time, caught in language and breathed into the poems.

Betsy Johnson-Miller (Avon, MN)
Rain When You Want Rain

Poetry. Paper, perfect bound, 74 pp
$14.95 plus s&h
2010, ISBN 978-0932412-867

Writing about life’s absurdities, Betsy Johnson-Miller infuses her lines with a winning sense of eros. In this beautifully crafted collection, she explores the fragile grace earned by finding a necessary voice in contrasts: mother/daughter, husband/wife, humor/sadness, faith/skepticism, the world of the flesh/the world of the spirit, and so much more.

Geraldine Zetzel (Cambridge, MA)
Mapping the Sands

Poetry. Paper, perfect bound, 76 pp
$14.95 plus s&h
2010, ISBN 978-0932412-850

This book is a record, not so much of making life one’s own as of allowing it to emerge. Evoking the journey of a long life, Geraldine Zetzel’s accomplished poems express a potent, often playful imagination that reaches through strictures of propriety and convention to the bedrock of connection. This is mature work in a world where there is great thirst for it.

Penelope Scambly Schott (Portland, OR)
Six Lips

Poetry. Paper, perfect bound, 88 pp.
$15.95 plus s&h
2010, ISBN+13 978-0932412-843

Six Lips is an imagistic and offbeat approach to the old standards of love, death, and the planet where they happen. The poems are feisty, thoughtful, fun to read; they riot with original and often dreamlike images: monkeys "who have learned to speak in words," a "broom of violets," and even a child as a horse. The speaker of these poems is nothing if not multiple and shape-shifting. Nimble and tender, sensuous and biting, deliciously daring, and always grounded in felt experience, Penelope Scambly Schott’s poems take us on wild and glorious flights of womanhood.