"The poems in January O’Neil’s Underlife offer masterfully complex portraits of childhood—both through the speaker’s memory and observations of her own children. She writes equally well about sex, marriage, rural life, and the suburbs with candid observations and evocative imagery. O’Neil’s collection is substantial, playful, and compassionate—even when dealing with difficult themes such as alcoholism and racism.  Her narrative threads take surprising and enigmatic leaps, yet are always clear, accessible, wonderfully real."
—Denise Duhamel

“In those places where we keep our childhoods and our children are all the magnificent and malicious ingredients of our lives. In her first collection, January Gill O’Neil praises life with a subtle wisdom wrapped inside the most delicious language. Underlife is an exact eloquence, an excellent beginning.”
—Afaa Michael Weaver

“These poems honor the human mystery. They celebrate the oneness of two great truths: that we are each other, and that we are each alone. They evoke love and loss, hurt and daily courage. These rare triumphs of spirit come alive through experience. Here are the dying father, the damaged child, the distraught and enduring mother, caught in the turn of their days by the brother who writes his heart out in these beautiful poems. Passionate feeling and powerful subject fuse their energy. The poet empowers us by enlarging our understanding.”
— Marie Ponsot

“I feel like a privileged guest in Bherwani’s ‘anonymous gazebo.’ It is a deeply moving place to be, a real place as well as an internal stage on which a powerful family drama is played out in originally conceived, highly personal poems that make universal connections. The slightest taste of Bherwani’s potent concentrate of distilled grief is overpowering.”
— Chard deNiord

Legaspi, like William Carlos Williams, can find poetry anywhere.  And like his mentor Pablo Neruda he seems able to locate the mysterious and the magical in the most common and overlooked objects.  His little poem “The Socks” is the most amazing poem on that subject I have encountered since Neruda’s great ode on the same subject, and while paying tribute to his Chilean master, Legaspi takes the poem in an entirely different direction . . . It is difficult to overestimate the daring and resourcefulness required to complete successfully this astonishingly original book.  I believe this collection of poetry, so rich in the dailiness of the world and what wisdom we can draw from it, is ample evidence that Joseph O. Legaspi has arrived at a place none of his ancestors in life or in poetry have ever journeyed, and we his readers are the richer for it . . .
—Philip Levine

Poems forged from a devotion and keenness about the sometimes violent transformations from boyhood to manhood. It takes a good measure of courage to pass so slowly through anguish, but it takes an equal, if not greater amount of courage to move wholly and convincingly through joy. In Imago, such courage is clear, and Joseph O. Legaspi has the abundant poetic skill to describe it.
—Patrick Rosal

The poems in Imago are surreal, strangely erotic and absolutely necessary . . . The narratives tackle the familiar themes of racial and sexual identity with vivid imagery and wild juxtapositions. In short, these immigrant narratives sizzle! The book opens to this amazing first sentence: As soon as we became men, my brother and I wore skirts. The family tales are over the top. The father is an unforgettable character; he is larger than life and is always eating--munching on mackerel or "slurping eggyolk." A compelling first book and a fun read!
—Marilyn Chin

WE AREN'T WHO WE ARE and this world isn't either
by Christine Korfhage
(author bio)
Foreword by Liz Rosenberg
Poetry
148 pp
6 x 9.25
Paperback
1-933880-04-X

978-1-933880-04-4
November 2007
$16.00

Whitman showed us what a glorious mess it is to be human, Korfhage extends the journey. . . . Her poetry is quirky, colloquial, feminine, as many-eyed as the fly on the wall. We Aren’t Who We Are is as fast-paced and dramatic as any novel. Korfhage divides it not into seven parts but seven “chapters.” It tells the story of a life. How wonderful it is that she sounds like no one else! The poems are unabashedly autobiographical . . . Her language is deliberately colloquial, like the marvelous poets Marie Howe and Sharon Olds. It is elegant and achingly honest . . . always forging her own way.
—Liz Rosenberg

We Aren’t Who We Are, claims Christine Korfhage in her rich, substantial first collection. This may be the only claim in the book I’d dispute, at least with regard to its author: though the voice here reports on a vast and potentially bewildering array of joy and loss and love and heartbreak and suffering and release and rootedness and dispersal—for all of that, the speaker seems somehow to have remained rock-solid. I scarcely mean that these are merely stoical writings; Korfhage is too passionate for such a stance. Rather . . . they display a genuinely grown-up sensibility. Praise be to the poet for such a model!
—Sydney Lea

Christine Korfhage’s golden poems . . . use memory and obsession for her poetry the way Vermeer employed a camera obscura for his painting. She examines spiritual and psychological conditions through the lens of passionate living. But because her poems act as a camera obscura, it is an upside-down lens. Korfhage’s poems invert the brilliant specifics of experience into meaning, bringing the dross of mere accuracy into the light of profundity, and making a true art of candor.
—Molly Peacock

THROUGH A GATE OF TREES
by Susan Jackson
(author bio)
Foreword by Molly Peacock
Poetry
94 pp
6 x 9.25
Paperback
1-933880-02-3

978-1-933880-02-7
March 2007
$16.00

Through a Gate of Trees is about the mental discipline it takes for a social being to insist on the difference between social bonds and being bound . . . The poems take place all over the world, yet wherever they are, the situations are domestic, and the stanzas flood with memory, with obligations, and with the dilemma of how to recognize what exists underneath the pleasant surface of things . . .
—Molly Peacock

Brilliant.?Beautiful.?Written with wit and wisdom.?The poems are sensual, serious, witty and deep.?I highly recommend it. I can't praise this book enough.
—Marjory Bassett, Chair of the National Arts Club Literary Committee

Located exactly on the sharpened razor’s edge of vision . . . so fine, uncompromising and exacting a gift . . .
—Deena Metzger

"I thought I had pierced / the world's secret language / with my broken stick," Susan Jackson writes, describing her younger self.? Now the mature poet does just that in these perceptive, well crafted, and deeply felt poems.
—Linda Pastan

AGAINST WHICH
by Ross Gay
(author bio)
Foreword by Gerald Stern
Poetry
72 pp
6 x 9.25
Paperback
1-933880-00-7

978-1-933880-00-6
October 2006
$16.00

What Ross Gay sees, what he sings about, is a crippled woman taking a walk in her wheel-chair through the agency of the poet’s strong hands; or two brothers embracing in the death chamber, and the untranslatable song between them; or recovery from pain coalescing with the beginning of spring; or the glorious sexy vision of an ankle, or a midriff; or the blue whale’s deep-sea love scream; or football season in late October.  He also sings about the rage and violence inside and the urge to destroy; and the horror of Alzheimer’s; and murder; and cancer; and butchered animals and cannibalism; and lynching; and the bullet’s journey—almost, almost too neatly the reverse side of the coin, as if one could prove the other—or lived by the other—as if, in the dream of light, he cannot allow himself to forget the darkness, he is so given over to the honest and accurate rendering, or as if he allows himself a final affirmation so long as he admits, or incorporates, the negative...
—Gerald Stern

Whether he’s talking about the pain of slavery or a child being beaten up on a playground, Ross Gay’s Against Which suggests poetry as the way by which we might understand “birth’s phantom limb.”  It makes me think of poetry in an entirely new way.
—Toi Derricotte

What a hammer, what a velvet wrecking ball, what a rip tooth saw Against Which is!  Ross Gay is a terrific poet of enormous energies and gifts whose poems both “terrify and comfort,” as Berryman put it. This is a book with which we must reckon: read it live.
—Thomas Lux

ForeWord Book of the Year Honorable Mention 2006

THE SILENCE OF MEN
Poems by Richard Jeffrey Newman
(author bio)
Foreword by Yusef Komunyakaa
Poetry
104 pp
6 x 9.25
Paperback
0-9723045-8-4

978-0-9723045-8-0
May 2006
$16.00

If beauty resides in truth, then there are moments of severe beauty and tantalizing energy in Richard Newman’s The Silence of Men . . . Why a silence of men? Does this silence exist between fathers and sons, brothers, or between most men and women? Is it natural or unnatural? Oftentimes, we are silent about what we witness. But Richard Newman’s narrator suggests that there’s inherent strength in the telling and sharing, in a dialogue. His poetry dares us, as men, as human beings, to share what we have experienced and imagined—the good and the bad . . . dialogue is what makes each of us whole. Not in a gush, but through a measured language that embraces art. Also, the speaker suggests that we are responsible for what we know, for what we’ve witnessed and dreamt, and for what we don’t say to ourselves and each other . . . The Silence of Men is daring: there’s a moral gesture at the heart this collection, but the poetry isn’t moralistic or didactic. In fact, when the narrator says, “I’m not being hard on myself,” we know that the whole journey has been about freedom, renewal, and release.
—Yusef Komunyakaa

From Korea to Manhattan, and from the haunted voices still rising from the concentration camps, Richard Jeffrey Newman’s The Silence of Men exposes the violence of men toward men, and men toward women, and the tenderness also, the resounding tenderness. His is an unremitting empathy, as uncommon as it is necessary. Such a brave debut.
—Robin Behn

THE DISHEVELED BED
by Andrea Carter Brown
(author bio)
Foreword by Brooks Haxton
Poetry
104 pp
6 x 9.25
Paperback
0-9723045-3-3

978-0-9723045-3-5
March 2006
$16.00

Brown records the disappointment and courage of a woman unable to bear the children she and her husband want. Without hedges or illusions, the poems present the crucial details of clinical visits, miscarriage, mourning, and the difficulty of sustaining and reconstructing oneself, one’s marriage, and the world. The Disheveled Bed, reverberates with the complexities of a whole life, tested by its particular turnings. The poems celebrate the strength of mind and the art that find truths in experience unblurred by evasion . . . In the background . . . textures of city living the country and the seaside are interwoven with family relationships and the difficult chosen love of married life. When in the title poem the poet hears the songs of the birds under her window, we feel with her: “the random yet orderly / rise and fall of their songs rising as high / as our high-rise home.”  It’s an equally miraculous privilege, as a reader of these vital poems, to find myself in earshot.
—Brooks Haxton

Andrea Carter Brown’s remarkable debut book, The Disheveled Bed, may be disheveled in circumstance, but never in craft or intensity. The poems here amount to the chapters in a love story. Filled with passionate craft, a collected wisdom, and the heartbreaking story of a woman and a man in search of a child who find themselves instead, The Disheveled Bed is the first book of poems every poet dreams of: naturally intelligent, unself-conscious, yet knowing, and with a full chiaroscuro of hope and pain. It is like a banquet set among shadows. Here, sit, read and feast.
—Molly Peacock

The precision and wit of ?Brown's language transform events that are almost aggressively mundane into exemplars of human enterprise. Her book joins those which subject the increasing medicalization of contemporary life to poetry's scrutiny. But above all, she is a nature poet of urban life.
—Marilyn Hacker

THE SINGERS I PREFER
Poems by Christian Barter
(author bio)
Foreword by Sydney Lea
Poetry
88 pp
6 x 8
Paperback
0-9723045-4-1

978-0-9723045-4-2
June 2005
$14.00

I've been listening to Christian Barter's strong and subtle voice for some years now, and to read his first full volume is to recall, among other things, that this poet is also a first-rate musician. His are the capacities of the best jazz improvisers: an awareness of and respect for his predecessors; an instinct for just the right "change"; and that indefinable gift to howl in pain at the moon even as the virtuosity and beauty of the howling indicate the player's love of life. One of the most impressive debuts I know.
—Sydney Lea

The ability to draw an honest bead on one’s personal history and on history in general is uncommon. Christian Barter is an uncommon poet, one who in poem after poem goes beyond the anecdotal and into the domain of the searched soul. His talent is at the service of an inquisitive urge that won’t quit but that recognizes how limitation assails us at each turn. In his best poems he makes a reader feel both the awe and the pity of time.
—Baron Wormser

Academy of American Poets The Lenore Marshall Prize Finalist 2006

THE FORK WITHOUT HUNGER
by Laurie Lamon
(author bio)
Foreword by Donald Hall
Poetry
49 pp
6 x 9.25
Paperback
0-9723045-5-X

978-0-9723045-5-9
July 2005
$14.00

The Fork Without Hunger is a book that takes continual joy in the natural world. Yet throughout these luxuriant lyrics physical pain runs like an underground river. Pain is unpunctuated; a constant presence, a motion under the earth’s surface—but that surface is cherished. As ever, poetry happens, or reaches its uttermost, in the human collisions of contrary feeling. Torment twists in an oscillation of opposing currents—celebrations of flowers and dogs, of love and loss . . . Page after page, line after line, Lamon’s language retains its purity, its chastity, its precisions . . . Her poems are rare in their perfection of epithet, their delicacy of design, their cadence of attack . . .
—Donald Hall

Life teaches us that regret is born along with love, that disappointment is hope's twin, that death starts with birth, and pain with pleasure. In The Fork Without Hunger, Laurie Lamon makes a music that persuades not only my mind but my senses to accept this duality from both sides at once, but still to believe that “the world could end in light.” Here is an enormously mature and expressive book, which I don't recommend for unfeeling readers.
—Peter Davison, The Atlantic Monthly

With rare precision and intelligence—and, rarer still, with genuine imagination—Laurie Lamon navigates the subtly terrifying, elegiac waters of the poems in The Fork Without Hunger. In this very impressive debut, Lamon’s poems, with their quirky grace, seems near some mysterious and beautiful eruption . . .
—David Daniel, Ploughshares

The Witter Bryner Foundation Fellowship 2007
The Independent Publisher Book Award Honorable Mention 2006, Arlin G. Meyer Prize Finalist 2005

AN IMPERFECT LOVER
Poems and watercolors by Georgianna Orsini
(author bio)
Introduction by Robert Phillips and Essay by Molly Peacock
Poetry & Watercolors
72 pp
6 x 9.25
Paperback
0-9707186-7-5

978-0-9707186-7-9
May 2004
$14.00

Orsini has chosen an apt title . . . because the world of any such intense imagination contains much imperfection—imperfect family life, in which affection is withheld; imperfect relationships, imperfect health. Yet creativity has been the vehicle for rescue to a more perfect vision, like the arrival of the great golden ship which is the book’s final picture. Orsini’s talent is the ability to say a profound thing in a very simple way.
—Robert Phillips

Unobsessed with line breaks, never in her life having used "workshop" as a verb, creating musical and psychological rhythms in her poetry that allow each image to spin in a vortex of feeling, Orsini composes poems about emotional states that are so palpable they are nearly tactile. Entirely witty and wise as a grown-up companion, she still inhabits that girlhood world of her imagination . . .
—Molly Peacock

Here from a high priestess of “beach plums” and “green corn moons,” from one wholly enamored of the natural world, are vibrant and musical lines that veer from the erotic to the quirkily appealing in poems given with exacting wit and sometimes delectable wickedness. Wry, wise, dry-eyed, full of metaphoric daring, and evoking recollections in her garden of paradox and nuance, Orsini offers a plenitude of joy, but not a scintilla of easy comfort in her art and artifices as she weaves her narrative for us, her ardent admirers.
—Colette Inez

ForeWord Book of the Year Honorable Mention 2005

SOFT BOX
Poems by Celia Bland
(author bio)
Foreword by Jane Cooper
Poetry
67 pp
6 x 9.25
Paperback
0-9707186-9-1

978-0-9707186-9-1
April 2004
$14.00

This poet writes like a woman with a mission. Her collection resounds with an honesty that is at once brutal and determined. Soft Box speaks for itself and does not speak softly. Celia Bland writes like a woman possessed and the result is bewitching.
—Foreword Magazine 2005

This account of coming of age, marrying, giving birth is different from any other that I have read: It is violently original. Sometimes raw and tough, sometimes startling in their beauty and sense of necessity, these poems, which read like swift, migratory chapters, are wildly gifted.
—Jean Valentine

Celia Bland makes of her poems a new world, newly opened to us. She strikes us where we live, in poems to which nothing human is alien: eternal delight, mental action, moral integrity. Love of true speech, the minded boy, the embodied memory drives her forward to discover the whole person undenied. She is doing the work our language needs.
—Marie Ponsot

She possesses a thrilling sense of the erotics of everyday things; her deft particulars fetch us. She resists the pallid entitlements of relationship stuff, and keeps her lyrics rueful reminders that each person, despite kinfolk and connections, is radically alone in the world of desire and shortcoming. Sometimes gloriously alone, as she feels her way through her own complexities: vigilant, detailed, intellectually joyous.
—Robert Kelly 

ForeWord Book of the Year Silver Award 2004

RATTLE
Poems by Eloise Bruce
(author bio)
Foreword by Julie Agoos
Poetry
76 pp
6 x 9.25
Paperback
0-9707186-8-3

978-0-9707186-8-6
April 2004
$14.00

Rattle is a book of poems charged equally by the spirits of pleasure and pain; of “stories beyond number” from a southern childhood in the American past recalled and improvised and conjured by a poet in love with the world’s sounds, “the emphatic hurry, hurry, hurry” of the warbler, and of the rattle . . . Bruce joins oral traditions to literary ones—sestina to the blues, Baptist hymn to wandering monologue. Her ear is for this minute, for the body, for your voice and mine, for the absent, the beloved, the hilarious, the perverse . . .
—Julie Agoos

These poems are straightforward, unaffected and deeply felt; I am called by Eloise Bruce’s tenderness and joy and grieving, as by a selkie.
—Jean Valentine

What a simmering, rich and alive book Rattle is. Full of the spirit of place and kin, Southern food, Southern violence, loyalty and love, guilt and laughter. Haunted by the dead, transplanted North, riddled with myth, these poems emanate the wisdom of survival. They are a big pleasure to read.
—Alicia Ostriker

MOMENTUM
by Catherine Doty
(author bio)
Foreword by Baron Wormser
Poetry
68 pp
6 x 9.25
Paperback
0-9723045-0-9

978-0-9723045-0-9
October 2004
$14.00

. . . a book of intense and affectionate metaphor. There are “dust storms/in the canister of sugar,” aquariums evolve inevitably into “twenty-five gallons of well-lit bouillabaisse,” and her father’s revving of an outboard motor mounted in an oil drum says all that can be said about going nowhere. The magical and the daily keep turning vividly into each other, and Doty can hardly decide which she loves more.
—James Richardson

. . . At its best, poetry manages the feat of being unerring and fallible at the same time, of communicating a simultaneous sense of the rich shakiness of the present moment and the hard weight of the past. Over and over, Catherine Doty succeeds in poems that are engaging, shrewd and brimming with actual feeling. When I write "actual" I mean neither emotionally tethered nor shouting but willing to endure and celebrate the real emotional skeins and stains that constitute real lives. She has the knack and she knows how to use it.
—Baron Wormser

. . . Employing brief, almost journalistic sketches punctuated by passionate language, Doty creates a virtual photo album that begins in 1960s Paterson, New Jersey . . . Personal as her poems are, they have the power to evoke memories in anyone who has ever been a child. Recalling her childhood home in Paterson, Doty celebrates those small, seemingly insignificant details that define not just a space but a life . . .”
—The New York Times

ForeWord Book of the Year Bronze Award 2004
Paterson Poetry Prize Finalist 2005

SILK ELEGY
by Sondra Gash
(author bio)
Foreword by Molly Peacock
Poetry
123 pp
6 x 9.25
Paperback
0-9707186-1-6

978-0-9707186-1-7
December 2002
$14.00

Silk Elegy is the story of a family fabric that is almost rent in half and its rescuing restoration, not through miracles, but through steadiness of human connection—the human weave. Gash always keeps in mind a larger story, that of the history of anti-Semitism that brings the Bronskys to Paterson, and of the beginnings of the labor movement that was to hold the silk industry accountable for its workers. This book is not a collection of poems, but a single poem, standing on the integrity of its parts, just as individuals’ integrities create a social fabric . . .
—Molly Peacock

From the world of early-twentieth century immigrant experience, Sondra Gash has fashioned a compelling work of art. She respects history in her summoning up of the world of the silk factories; she respects narrative in her piecing together several points of view to tell a complex story. Best of all, her words throb with the delicate, relentless energy of the human pulse. You can hear these people and see them and feel deeply for them. She scants neither the bright opportunity America presented nor the suffering that opportunity could occasion. Silk Elegy shows that the genre of the long poem is alive and well.
—Baron Wormser

Sondra Gash’s Silk Elegy is a family saga, a story of memory and madness, of the nascent labor movement, of love, growth and healing, told mainly in the voice of a girl—so says her mother—“from a long line of rhapsodic women.” Silk Elegy is poignant and beautiful in its feel for detail, the sad and rich textures of life. I read it in one sitting, and it brought a lost world to life for me.
—Alicia Ostriker

Paterson Poetry Prize Finalist 2003

THE PALACE OF ASHES
by Sherry Fairchok
(author bio)
Foreword by Thomas Lux
Poetry
67 pp
6 x 9.25
Paperback
0-9707186-3-2

978-0-9707186-3-1
January 2003
$14.00

There are many subjects in this book I have never read about in poems before—young girls, for example, asked by their riding instructor to help her breed a mare. The poet’s job was to guide the stallion’s penis into the “gray suede pucker of her sex.” There are other poems about horses and birds and birding . . . but they all circle back to, include in some way, the weight, the emotional and psychological atmosphere of place . . . so often, in these poems, place is metaphor. And that explains their tremendous resonance, their sadness as well as their joy . . . you will remember these towns because you are from these towns . . . these poems will help you see them . . . or mourn them, as you need. That’s part of poetry’s job. This poet has done her job brilliantly.
—Thomas Lux

Out of palaces of ash, Fairchok discovers substantial fire. Out of coal-veined Pennsylvania, she elicits heat and warmth. Out of transformative witnessing stitched with hunger, she has us experience horses and birds, life and nature, through sheer astonishment . . . Such lusciousness. Such longing. A fire burns deeply in these poems.
—Patrick Lawler

Sherry Fairchok’s steady gaze is faithful to the numinous truth of things, and her voice so restrained that the power of feeling within it strikes deep and lasts. Each poem is a world, a story so in love with the details—the sound of human voices, the taste of food, the look of dusty lilacs—that I am taken in utterly.
—Marie Howe

ForeWord Book of the Year Finalist 2003

EYELEVEL
Fifty Histories
by Christopher Matthews
(author bio)
Foreword by Sydney Lea
Poetry
103 pp
6 x 9.25
Paperback
0-9723045-1-7

978-0-9723045-1-1
December 2003
$14.00

The unrootedness of modern life, then, is as patent in Eyelevel as in The Waste Land, save that Matthews’s renderings spare us the least trace of Eliot’s Olympian condescension. His sympathy for the derelict is as great as for the aesthete; his identification is equally with the IBM drone and the trained stage actor; on and on. His grasp of the great vacany left in our collective contemporary souls by some deep and nameless Desire is as sure, as democratic, as heartbreaking as it could ever be . . .
—Sydney Lea

In his own words, Christopher Matthews’s poems “reach the dark things that lie stark beyond” us. In his musical, richly storied poems we encounter, to quote him again, a “mind peeled for the word.” He is the latest treasure to reach these shores from Ireland.
—Mark Jarman

Here is an authentic voice, and an important one. Christopher Matthews has a wide range of referents and an impressive flexibility of diction; these fifty parts cohere into an enlarging whole, and the story his histories tell is both humane and fierce. There are many masters echoed here, and an adept manipulation of cultural relics, as well as a forward-facing and ”eyelevel” scrutiny of what will come. It’s as though Browning were green again. A genuine poet, and a rewarding read.
—Nicholas Delbanco 

GLORIOUS
by Joan Cusack Handler
(author bio)
Foreword by Afaa Michael Weaver
Poetry
106 pp
8.25 x 8.5
Paperback
0-9707186-4-0

978-0-9707186-4-8
September 2003
$14.00

Glorious  takes the broad and dangerous campaign into the heart of betrayal and loss, dangerous inasmuch as humanity would rather not believe the deepest depths of its own cruelty, the way it seeks its own ending by murdering its promise. In this shimmering collection, Joan Handler shows us the gems that come from pain in the fragile fibers of her spirit, as the poems fall like pearls fleeing their binding string to be reborn . . . The spirit of the book lives as the poet lives, seeking and then knowing and seeking again . . .
—Afaa Michael Weaver

Crowned by the protean, sensuous language that whiplashes across its pages, Glorious is glorious . . . With her sinewy humor, bravura honesty and fierce excess, Handler becomes a warrior goddess of the psycho-poetics she champions. Her canny insights and uncanny intuition reinvigorate our world.
—Molly Peacock

Joan Cusack Handler . . . writes of the body’s unapologetic continuing . . . with a largesse that volleys between tender and roaring. Her lines blow wide, her metaphors tree tall as she roots the whole oaken structure in her signature loamy sexuality . . . She renders the psychological spiritual and back again . . . Few writers . . . have dared this kind of generosity, and . . . confronted Spirit with such fervent audacity and won.
—Maureen Seaton, The Boston Review

Chicago Book and Media Show Honorable Mention 2003

SO CLOSE
by Peggy Penn
(author bio)
Foreword by Molly Peacock
Poetry
91 pp
6 x 9.25
Paperback
0-9678856-4-7
978-0-9678856-4-3
November 2001
$14.00

On the editorial equivalent of sleepless nights, I find solace in remembering I was the first to publish Ms. Penn—her vital, enriching poems, ever since that initial ursine visitation in The Paris Review, persuaded me that the music of So Close can be the sweetest as well as the swiftest medicine to the soul.
—Richard Howard

Calling a book of poems So Close insists on intimacy in our age of irony. In Peggy Penn’s work, people, ideas, and metaphors all come so close to one another that gaps are closed, cool distances become warm, and the world achieves an easeful rapport. In Penn’s realms, earthiness combines with delicacy, intellectual and social ideas unite with physical and sexual play, health enters the castle of sickness, age roams childhood, and the purity of childhood passions infuses all adult experiences. For this poet a tête-à-tête between two beings—even between two states of being—becomes an ars poetica . . . Penn lures all emotions to her poems, to thrive in the presence of syllabic magic and frank human utterance...
—Molly Peacock

Peggy Penn’s poems tap into the language of the heart with lyric insistence. Elegant and gutsy, these poems combine formal invention with high-spirited speech. So Close grapples with the daily muck and marvel of life—death and birth, abstinence and passion, sickness and regeneration. A much-anticipated volume of poems!
—Elise Paschen

The Foreword Book of the Year Finalist 2001

SNAKESKIN STILETTOS
by Moyra Donaldson
(author bio)
Foreword by Medbh McGuckian
Poetry
66 pp
6 x 9.25
Paperback
0-9707186-0-8
978-0-9707186-0-0
August 2002
$14.00

The publication of Moyra’s  first collection . . . represents the discovery of a writer who, I believe, can go on to become one of Northern Ireland’s most accessible and popular poets. I know this is a big build- up but I am certain this work will be read and treasured by housewives, taxi drivers and professors. This writer has the surest of touches. Her work is so well crafted. The words come out almost perfectly. Each word is like a solid piece of rock that’s in just the right place at the right time. There is not a letter overwritten or wasted . . . And all conveyed with feeling and human guts into the bargain.
—Martin Lynch

It is a rare pleasure to come across a poetry that is a source of simple enjoyment . . . uniquely valuable in a social as well as a literary sense, charting as it so subtly does the emergence of a delightful, sensitive, all-embracing personality from a repressive religious environment . . . Her determination is to explore the realities . . . of living itself; then of living peculiarly as a married woman . . .  The most attractive, never mind seductive, quality of this first collection is its honesty, a convincing intimacy of tone, rewarding us with the sense that we are being offered the truth and given a key to some of the most secret rooms of a heart . . .
—Medbh McGuckian

GRUB
by Martin Mooney
(author bio)
Poetry
87 pp
6 x 9.25
Paperback
0-9678856-7-1
978-0-9678856-7-4
June 2002
$14.00

A fine collection . . . lyrical but never precious, moving but never mawkish, political but never hectoring . . . a very impressive debut.
—John Dunne

One mark of the genuine poet is the ability to revel in language and, at the same time, to query it. It’s canny and uncanny; it’s a high-wire act though the poet is the first to say that it’s only words . . .  Mooney’s account of young people from Belfast adrift in amoral London at the end of the twentieth century is powerful and haunting stuff. Through a quietly masterful range of forms Mooney shows a number of souls sinking inevitably in a world that makes the seediness T. S. Eliot once observed seem like a nursery school . . .  shrewd and matter-of-fact as it notes how the wheels of crime and justice grind up some bodies just as other bodies manipulate the process or flee elsewhere...
—Baron Wormser

KAZIMIERZ SQUARE
by Karen Chase
(author bio)
Foreword by Amy Clampitt
Poetry
74 pp
6 x 9.25
Paperback
0-9678856-0-4
978-0-9678856-0-5
November 2000
$14.00

Karen Chase’s poems modulate from the humorous to the erotic, and then to the elegiac…All is held together by her skill and intensity. No line sleeps in these poems in which moments of real experience are isolated and made incandescent.
—Billy Collins

…An actual tour through Poland…culminated in the demonic astonishments of “Kazimierz Square,” the long poem that give this collection its title. Strong stuff it undoubtedly is…I have a natural admiration for the raw power of its demonic imagery. But that raw power ought not to mislead a reader as to the distinctive cadence of the language itself. Karen Chase’s gift for turning a phrase, her ear for the throaty music to be found in the lower registers of English speech, are uniquely hers, to be listened for with pleasure.
—Amy Clampitt

Lyric and eros armed with a “tattered” shield of humor—Karen Chase is present in her life and our times.
—Andrei Codrescu

A DAY THIS LIT
by Howard Levy
(author bio)
Foreword by Baron Wormser
Poetry
75 pp
6 x 9.25
Paperback
0-9678856-1-2
978-0-9678856-1-2
September 2000
$14.00

Howard Levy’s A Day This Lit plays with a light in nature that is close to the bone, and the human psyche’s relationship to art; but this wonderful collection also penetrates light’s other side, its twin — darkness — to celebrate the mystery of things. These well- made poems go deep.
—Yusef Kommunyakaa

…Levy’s evocation of Mozart’s musical pieces and his life and times are uncanny in their ability to portray in words the gift of feelings that reside in the world of pure sound…This is a remarkable imaginative accomplishment… Levy can segue in the course of three poems from Kabbalism to “Joe Adcock, Power Hitter of the Braves” to some letters from Mozart to Haydn… threading the poems is an unashamed humanity, a willingness to look scrupulously and yet rejoice in the small and large mysteries…This book has poems that are keepers, poems that can look in the face of time without flinching.
—Baron Wormser

A Day This Lit is a book that travels in shafts of light. It turns in its own currents and illuminations; it offers us a landscape – actual, emotional, ideational – that resembles the brilliant, liquid structures of music…This most luminous of landscapes, this book so filled with sun and elegance, is also rounded by suffering, doubt and loss. These substantial shadows haunt the lit world that works constantly, and almost successfully, to transform them. The result is a book both glittering and severe, a book that I read with great pleasure and great admiration.
—Lynn Emanuel