COLLEGE
STEPHEN AKEY
$12.95, 128 pages
ISBN 0-914061-55-0
This account of the author's years at Glassboro College, the University
of Connecticut, and Columbia University is a classic coming of age tale, with
unusual depth, frame of reference, humor, sadness, and candor—a
stunning debut.
LIBRARY
STEPHEN AKEY
hardcover $21.95, 144 pages
ISBN 0-914061-91-7
In coruscating prose, Stephen Akey's Library depicts,
more vividly than it ever has been done, a culture that most of us know only
through hearsay and cliché: the interior workings of a public library.
Drawing on his experiences in the New York Public Library as well as the Brooklyn
library system, Akey is illuminating, profound, and frequently hilarious.
COMMANDMENTS AT ELEVEN
GILBERT ALLEN
$12.95, 80 pages
ISBN 0-914061-46-1
In his second collection for Orchises (see entry below), Gilbert
Allen's voice finds a new intensity and immediacy. Published in leading journals,
these poems mark the establishment of Gilbert Allen as a permanent part of the
current landscape.
DRIVING TO DISTRACTION
GILBERT ALLEN
$14.95, 64pages
ISBN 0-914061-92-5
Robert Morgan writes: "Gilbert Allen has fun with words.
It is a pleasure to watch him hit nail after nail on the head. These are poems
of delightful wit and wise laughter. Allen has come into the fullness of his
voice and vision, and found the idiom of our time, in these poems of the all-too-human
comedy, of humanity."
SECOND CHANCES
GILBERT ALLEN
$10.00, 80 pages
ISBN 0-914061-20-8
Four sections of poems by the author of In Everything
focusing on the author's life, whose particulars are renewed by the tender
retrospect of his gaze.
SERIOUS JOY
MARK ANDERSON
$10.00, 56 pages
ISBN 0-914061-14-3
A series of perfectly controlled, brilliant meditative
poems with central images of trees and fire. Mark Anderson teaches English
at Rhode Island college.
DREAMS OF A WORK
L.
S. ASEKOFF
hardcover $18.95, 80 pages
ISBN 0-914061-47-X
Three sections of poems that never lose sight of the
transcendent possibilities of our contemporary world even as they reflect
its decay and its ability to humiliate. An important literary debut.
NORTH STAR
L.
S. ASEKOFF
hardcover $20.00, 96 pages
ISBN 0-914061-57-7
Alfred Corn writes: "In L. S. Asekoff's field of vision,
stars, roses, swans, and mirrors have left the walled garden of Symbolisme,
ventured into contemporary sites of upheaval, and put on the black leather
of Surrealism without, I think, ever relinquishing a fundamental cultivation
and refinement. Reading these poems, you'll be briefly reminded of Asekoff's
exacting precursors—Kafka, Desnos, Celan, Joseph Cornell, Plath, Jabes—but
finally these are only assistants in an interior cinema of which Asekoff
is the indisputable auteur."
THE PLATONIC BLOW
W. H. AUDEN
$5.00, 8 pages
ISBN 0-914061-04-6
The authoritative text of a long suppressed homoerotic
masterpiece by the famous British poet, followed by a previously uncollected
haiku.
A VERY SMALL WORLD
J. T. BARBARESE
$14.95, 90 pages
ISBN 1-932535-02-0
J.T. Barbarese’s poems have appeared in The Atlantic Monthly, Boulevard, The Georgia Review, The Denver Quarterly, The Cortland Review, and Poetry, and in the anthology, The Italian-American Reader (Morrow, 2003). “Every page of this book bears the thumbprint of J. T. Barbarese, a poet whose original slant—“to see the extraordinary / wither into life / and tell its story”—gives us the pleasures of his saying. A Very Small World provides durable rewards to its readers and rereaders.” –Daniel Hoffman
THE ACCIDENT PRONE MAN
FRANZ
K. BASKETT
$12.95, 64 pages
ISBN 0-914061-40-2
A collection of pithy, aphoristic poems whose bite is
as funny as it is shrewd. Franz Baskett teaches at the University of Mississippi
in Jackson.
THE FROZEN SEA
JOE
DAVID BELLAMY
$5.95, 48 pages
ISBN 0-914061-06-2
The title for this collection of lyric poems on mortality comes
from Kafka: "Art is as an ax for the frozen sea within us." Joe David
Bellamy is the author of Suzi Sinzinnati, winner of numerous literary
prizes and the editor of Fiction International.
NAVIGATING THE DISTANCES
BRUCE BENNETT
hardcover $24.95, 178 pages
ISBN 0-914061-79-8
"This generous harvest of [Bennett's] new and selected poems will nourish
mind, heart, and funnybone," wrote X. J. Kennedy. For its exuberance, clarity,
wit, distinction, and variety, Booklist gave this extraordinarily
enjoyable collection a starred review.
TAKING OFF
BRUCE
BENNETT
$10.00, 64 pages
ISBN 0-914061-26-7
Poems, parodies, and palimpsest—a satiric view of well-known
poems and poets, with counterpointed glances at the current literary scene.
FOOTNOTES TO AN UNFINISHED POEM
STEPHEN BERG
$12.95, 60 pages
ISBN 0-914061-82-8
Absolutely modernist in its conception, this remarkable book lets us glimpse
a poem, "Here," through the footnotes written about it. It tells a
dramatic and exciting story "slant." Allusive, learned, by turns ethereal
and vulgar, Footnotes to an Unfinished Poem is Stephen Berg's masterpiece.
FACING THE FACTS
LAURIE BLAUNER
$14.95, 79 pages
ISBN 0-914061-89-5
Tender and quietly assertive, Facing the Facts starts "in the small
room of the heart" and makes that space an arena of connection and mystery
that imposes itself unforgettably on the reader's consciousness.
WUTHERING HEIGHTS
EMILY BRONTË
$100, per two volume set; 764 pages
ISBN 978-1932535-14-3.
A facsimile of the rare and virtually unobtainable 1847 Thomas Cautley Newby edition of Emily Brontë's Wuthering Heights in two volumes, as issued in 1847. The set is bound in heavy, F grade buckram in sewn signatures. ISBN = 978-1932535-14-3. The price is $100 per set.
This is a textually significant book. Until 1976 all reprints of this novel were based on an 1850 version edited by Emily Bronte's sister Charlotte. To accommodate the wishes of the firm then reprinting Wuthering Heights, Charlotte Brontë reparagraphed the novel, made what she felt were clarifications in dialogue, and repaired some of Newby's typographical errors. While these alterations may be of interest in themselves, they deviate from the text that the author wrote. The closest text to Emily Brontë's manuscript is this version.
CAMINO CIELO
CHRISTOPHER
BUCKLEY
hardcover $21.95; pbk $12.95, 86 pages
hardcover ISBN 0-914061-58-5; paper ISBN 0-914061-59-3
Camino Cielo shimmers with the only life we can call real:
that which memory and imagination interpret, impinge upon, and merge with the
present. The vitality of these poems springs as much from Christopher Buckley's
understanding as from the surprising and tender aptness of his particulars:
" "simonized Chryslers and Oldsmobiles," "the fluted columns at Persepolis,"
and "dragonflies as iridescent as gasoline"—offered so generously from the
abundance of the "dreaming world" that it becomes also our own.
ACADEMIC SOCIALISM
MICHAEL
J. BUGEJA
hardcover $22.95, 168 pages
ISBN 0-914061-42-9
This study of the ways in which lack of administrative
accountability in academe undercut the very values that the academy is
supposed to foster will anger many and stir many others—both inside the
university and out—to action.
AFTER OZ
MICHAEL
J. BUGEJA
$11.95, 80 pages
ISBN 0-914061-32-5
The second collection of poetry by the author of the
author of the acclaimed Platonic Love is as formally adept as his
first while focusing on "our essential gullibility and innocence."
PLATONIC LOVE
MICHAEL
J. BUGEJA
$10.00, 80 pages
ISBN 0-914061-21-6
The subject is love and its manifestations on the self.
Tough minded looks at the endearing, Platonic Love is Michael Bugeja's
first regularly published American collection.
THE VISIONARY
MICHAEL
J. BUGEJA
$10.00, 64 pages
ISBN 0-914061-50-8
Early and intimate poems by the author of The Art
and Craft of Poetry, these studies in growth and love will touch with
their inspiration and inspire by their linguistic and formal perfection.
THE MILLION DOLLAR HOLE
MICHAEL CASEY
$12.95, 72 pages
ISBN 0-914061-86-0
This is poetry written from the gut—authentic, vernacular, witty,
unforgettable. Michael Casey's first book, Obscenities, winner of
the 1972 Yale Younger Poets Award, was one of the best selling collections
of poetry of the 1970's. The Million Dollar Hole is in that same
tough tradition.
SAY WHEN
MARK CRAVER
paperback, $14.95, 72 pages
ISBN 1-932535-01-2
Lucie Brock-Broido wrote of Mark Craver’s last volume that Craver “left us the poetry of an engaged observer one who is wildly conscious of the authentic, and of the deeply human. He charm us with the manifestations of things and, like the Balladeers, Black Mountain Poets, and Beats before him, renders the quotidian world newly charged with the power of wit, self-deprecatory self-awareness, and an often ecstatic eye. As he puts it in one of the Dylan-like poems [in this book] ‘The concert is not over.’”
SEVEN CROWNS FOR THE WHITE LADY OF THE OTHER WORLD
AND BLOOD POEMS
MARK
CRAVER
$10.00, 80 pages
ISBN 0-914061-25-9
An elaborate sonnet sequence by the author of The
Problem of Grace, Seven Crowns for the White Lady of the Other World and
Blood Poems displays Mark Craver's gifts for form, for surprising turn
of phrase, and for the modest seriousness that serves the larger purposes
of his poetry.
THEY COME FOR WHAT YOU LOVE
MARK
CRAVER
paperback $12.95, 64 pages
ISBN 0-914061-64-X
An abecedarian and other formal innovations mark these
poems whose apparently rough surface conceals a delicacy of mind and sentiment
that always surprises and delights.
AFTER THE SOLSTICE
FRED
DINGS
$12.95, 64 pages
ISBN 0-914061-34-8
Richard Howard writes, "There is a distinct and honorable
lineage, to which Mr. Dings has added a lovely note of his own, in our
American poetry, a traceable bloodline from Whitman to James Wright, the
constituted willingness to hold out the words, vessels of varying capacity,
and to stand patiently until night fills them. Exultant rarely, elegiac
readily, these new poems by Fred Dings seek a naturalized habitation of
the self—no, for the self, and their search is the making of them:
luminous, doleful, blessing."
THE LATIN ODES OF JEAN DORAT
translated by DAVID R. SLAVITT
hardcover $20.00, 94 pages
ISBN 0-914061-80-1
Jean Dorat (1508-1588) was a member of the Pleiade group in France,
a group that included such luminaries as Pierre de Ronsard and Joachim
duBellay. However, because he wrote in Latin, his work has not been as
widely read as theirs. This energetic, judicious selection of his poems,
which includes two works in the original Latin, corrects that deficiency.
David R. Slavitt's elegant translations are poetic achievements in their
own right.
KINKY
DENISE
DUHAMEL
$12.95, 96 pages
ISBN 0-914061-61-5
"If there is a better young poet than Denise Duhamel
in the USA, don't tell me. I can't take it, I can barely take her! Frank
O'Hara said something about only 3 American poets being better than the
movies, but I think Duhamel would make him add a 4th."—Bill Knott. Forty-six
barbed and sparkling poems about one of America's iconographic toys—one
which we all know and love.
THE PAWLESS PAPERS
ROBERT
FAGEN
hardcover $24.95, 192 pages
ISBN 0-914061-33-X
A portrait of the scientist as a young man—a lyrical
and satirical dramatization of forces that shaped a first rate mind, with
a somewhat different twist: the hero does not become a writer.
OYSTER'S LAST STAND
ROBERT
N. FEINSTEIN, illustrated by Trygve Olson
$10.00, 96 pages
ISBN 0-914061-44-5
The third in Feinstein's beloved "Oyster" series, this
collection of light verse is also illustrated by Trygve Olson.
SON OF AN OYSTER
ROBERT
N. FEINSTEIN, illustrated by Trygve Olson
$10.00, 86 pages
ISBN 0-914061-09-7
Light verse on a variety of subjects, from the space
race to the proper delivery of newspapers, the vagaries of English spelling
and the hardiness of lilies, in a variety of verse forms—double dactyls,
spoonerisms, ballads.
WHAT SHE KNEW
PETER
FILKINS
paperback $12.95, 64 pages
paperback: ISBN 0-914061-66-6
Richard Wilbur writes: "There are breathtaking phrases
in this fine collection, as when a flock of symbolic geese rise from the
earth in "a garland of distress that honks and shudders,' or falling snow
is seen as 'an intricate message/ about the reticence of winter.' But in
general, Peter Filkins's work avoids bravura; it has a quieter virtuosity
which makes the total evocation of a Brueghel look easy...and subtly blends,
in many a poem, concrete description and flow and memory of ideas."
PATTERNS OF DESCENT
RICHARD
FOERSTER
hardcover $21.95; pbk $12.95, 96 pages
hardcover ISBN 0-914061-36-4; paper ISBN 0-914061-37-2
Explorations of the self that reach out into public experience,
this second collection continues the deft artistry and measured grace of
tone that characterized Richard Foerster's first collection, Sudden
Harbor.
SUDDEN HARBOR
RICHARD
FOERSTER
$11.95, 96 pages
ISBN 0-914061-28-3
Michael Waters writes: "The true subject of Richard Foerster's
elegant and moving poems is the yearning that brim each soul that 'verges
on becoming what it must.' Sudden Harbor is exquisitely wrought,
fluid with tenderness and memorable."
THE PENTUM MISSION
JOE
FONTANA
hardcover $24.95, 400 pages
hardcover: ISBN 0-914061-72-0
As the international intelligence community scrambles
to cover up the compromising circumstances of the murder of an American
agent in a London hotel, a determined U.S. Justice Department official
embarks on a 24 hour collision course with a mysterious American spy, a
mafia mistress with a grudge, and a Russian godfather. The resulting explosions
of murder, betrayal, and revenge tighten the drama of Joe Fontana's bold
debut as one of the masters of the novel of international intrigue.
PSALMBOOK FOR THE WHITE BUTTERFLY
WRITING DOWN THE LIGHT
JAY
BRADFORD FOWLER, JR.
Butterfly: $5.00, 64 pages
Writing: $5.00, 48 pages
Butterfly: ISBN 0-914061-03-8; Writing: ISBN 0-914061-05-4
Published widely in magazines and anthologies, Jay Bradford
Fowler's free verse captures, in sly transcendence, higher worlds of perception
that give his poetry the force of a mystic vision.
THE YELLOW WALLPAPER
CHARLOTTE
PERKINS GILMAN
$2.00, 16 pages
ISBN 0-914061-16-X
This unforgettable tale of madness and repression, first
published in The New England Magazine in January 1892, was praised
by William Dean Howells as a tale to "chill the blood," but it has also
been viewed as a study in progressive madness, a text that destroys itself
in the telling, and an early instance of feminist fiction.
THE ALPHABET OF DESIRE
BARBARA HAMBY
$14.95, 103 pages
ISBN 1-932535-10-1
“Lusty, unselfconscious, musical, and fresh, these poems are about the ‘underground chaos packed tight inside everyone’ as we absorb the information daily cast down on us from satellites overhead . . . . ” –Library Journal
SONG OF THE MOON
JUDITH
HARRIS
$3.50, 16 pages
ISBN 0-914061-00-3
A chapbook of subtly feminist poems that exemplify this
poet's ability to explore through alternative voices personae that speak
for the many facets of the human spirit.
NOTES ON GRAMMAR
DEE ANN HOLISKY
$49.95, 640 pages
hardcover ISBN 0-914061-31-3
A presentation of English grammar from the perspective of a linguist,
Notes on Grammar is not a prescriptive handbook but rather a clarification
of the ways in which grammar makes meaning and shapes expectation.
BELOW TWO SKIES
TIMOTHY
HOUGHTON
$11.95, 80 pages
ISBN 0-914061-30-5
Roadside stands, a pileated woodpecker, plus memories
of events past and present form the subject matter of these lyrical meditations
that open into explorations of consciousness.
DROP LIGHT
TIMOTHY HOUGHTON
$14.95, 79 pages
ISBN 10932535-05-5
Deeply felt and perfectly pitched, Timothy Houghton’s third collection from Orchises continues the exact match of language and form that marked his previous ones, with a gentle outward looking gaze.
RIDING UNTOUCHED
TIMOTHY
HOUGHTON
hardcover $21.95, 80 pages
ISBN 0-914061-68-2
In Riding Untouched, Timothy Houghton expands
the reach of his previous work, so that to the fine discrimination of Below
Two Skies is added a consciousness of the scientific and geopolitical
universe we all inhabit.
PARADISE FOR THE PORTUGUESE QUEEN
BENJAMIN
IVRY
paperback $12.95, 80 pages
paperback: ISBN 0-914061-69-0
By turns satirical and intensely musical, Paradise
for the Portuguese Queen is the first book of poems by a widely published
poet and writer. Muriel Spark comments: "Deeply observant, Ivry is a lyrical
intellectual. He experiences his reading and reads his experiences. At
times he is reminiscent of Auden. The music of his verses is real and felt
music."
SILKY THEFTS
MICHAEL JENNINGS
paperback, $14.95, 64 pages
ISBN 1-932535-12-9
Silky Thefts is a story of deserts and gardens, place and displacement, love and loss, time and the timeless. It posits a morally complex, troubled world, yet one where beauty still abides and the authenticity of voice and experience remains a viability—one man’s record of travel, a song of the self.
ULYSSES
JAMES
JOYCE
hardcover $75.00
ISBN 0-914061-70-4
A reproduction of the first edition published in 1922
in Paris, in full size but in a hardcover, sewn binding, stamped to resemble
the lettering on the paper covers done by Shakespeare and Company. After
many attempts to produce an authoritative text, free of typographical error
and embodying Joyce's corrections, it seems that the experience of reading
the book as it first appeared—typographical mistakes, bad type and all—most
enables contemporary readers to experience Joyce's masterpiece as its first
excited readers did.
ENDANGERED
SPECIES
FIELD
STONES
ROBERT KINSLEY
Species: $5.95, 64 pages
Stones: $12.95, 64 pages
Species: ISBN 0-914061-08-9, Stones: ISBN 0-914061-60-7
Domestic and local particulars are the subjects of these
poems, based on the author's life in Ohio. Robert Kinsley is an editor
at The Ohio Review and teaches English at Ohio University.
BIG-LEG MUSIC
DAVID
KIRBY
$12.95, 80 pages
ISBN 0-914061-48-8
In this collection of some of the most startling and
intelligent poetry being written these days, David Kirby uses the surreal
and seemingly unrelated to make new connections. Unlike much verse that
might be so described, these poems are absolutely lucid, with a sense of
closure that never wholly closes the subject.
I THINK I AM GOING TO CALL MY WIFE PARAGUAY
DAVID KIRBY
paperback $18.95, 202 pages
ISBN 0-914061-98-4
The essence of David Kirby—pithy instances, some never before in book form—of work by one of the most original poets writing today. “David Kirby has been writing very original and moving poems for at least twenty years, but this new book is his most daring and successful. The world that Kirby takes into his imagination and the one that arises from it merge to become a creation like no other, something like the world we inhabit but funnier and more full of wonder and terror. He has evolved a poetic vision that seems able to include anything, and when he lets it sweep him across the face of Europe and America, the results are astonishing.” –Philip Levine.
MY TWENTIETH CENTURY
DAVID
KIRBY
$13.95, 128 pages
ISBN 0-914061-76-3
David Kirby's voice is like no other. If Stevie Smith and Allen
Ginsberg and Don DeLillo and Martin Scorsese had all been born in and then met
again in Louisiana and started talking, the result would be something close.
Compulsively readable, hysterically funny, moving, wise, and clever, this collection
consists wholly of the "memory poems" that made Big-Leg Music one of
the most outstanding and enjoyed books of 1995.
THE TRAVELLING LIBRARY
DAVID KIRBY
paperback $12.95, 80 pages ISBN 0-914061-88-7
hardcover—special boxed, signed, limited edition $45.00 ISBN 0-914061-87-9
Three long poems, each composed of discrete shorter ones, in the author's most
engaging, shrewd, memorably humorous style: "The T-F Way of Life,"
"Mr. Eyeball Plucker is Everywhere," and "The Travelling Library."
Hold on to your mind! It's about to be remastered!
CHOKECHERRIES: NEW AND SELECTED POEMS 1966-1999
PETER KLAPPERT
$17.95, 183 pages
ISBN 0-914061-81-X
Chokecherries brings together selections from four of Peter
Klappert's previous collections: Lugging Vegetables to Nantucket, winner
of the 1971 Yale Younger Poets Award; Circular Stairs, Distress in the
Mirrors, lyric explorations of the shadow or psychological double;
and his widely admired, 200-page study of Parisian life in the penumbra
of World War II, The Idiot Princess of the Last Dynasty, parts of
which first appeared as Non Sequitur O'Connor. In addition, the
book contains a section of uncollected poems that display Klappert's wit
and lyricism as well as half of a new long poem,
Scattering Carl, which
the author has been working on for his entire life.
'52 PICK-UP
PETER
KLAPPERT
$5.00, 128 pages
ISBN 0-914061-02-X
An experimental poem—narrative as screenplay, with voice
and image tracks, by turns irreverent, comic, extravagant—a coffee table
book in 8 x 5 format. Peter Klappert won the Yale prize for Lugging
Vegetables to Nantucket and also has published The Idiot Princess
of the Last Dynasty in Knopf's poetry series.
WIND RAIN AND STARS AND THE GRASS GROWING
GREG
KUZMA
hardcover $21.95; pbk $12.95, 112 pages
hardcover ISBN 0-914061-39-0; paper ISBN 0-914061-39-9
A large collection containing some of this amazingly
productive and vigorous poet's best and most characteristic work, hitherto
available only in back issues of Poetry and The New Yorker.
The subjects are the immediate, the tone lyrical in freshly forthright
way.
LETTERS OF RING LARDNER
Ed.
CLIFFORD M. CARUTHERS
hardcover $29.95
ISBN 0-914061-52-6
The only collection of letters of one of America's greatest
humorists and short story writers, this book is a miniature biography of
Ring Lardner using primary source materials and a portrait of the golden
age of American letters, the 1920's. Illustrated with sixteen pages of
rare photos and designed to imitate the famous Lardner books for Scribners.
COMPLAINT IN THE GARDEN
RANDALL MANN
$14.95, 55 pages
ISBN 1-932023-12-7
This is the Zoo Press edition of Randall Mann’s first collection, which Orchises continues to make available. About Complaint in the Garden, Henri Cole wrote, “How easily I get lost in these poems of Florida. … Formally polished, yet openly erotic, these poems make art out of the artlessness of love and life.”
OVER THE SUMMER WATER
ELIZABETH McFARLAND
Preface by Daniel Hoffman
paperback, $14.95, 63 pages
ISBN 9781932535150
Elizabeth McFarland (1922-2005) brought poetry into the lives of millions. As poetry editor of The Ladies’ Home Journal from 1948 to 1961, she published new work by many noted poets and by the soon-to-be-famous young. Her own poems, which appeared there and elsewhere, embody purity of feeling in purity of diction and musical structure, and have the fingerprint of her individual style. They are gathered by her husband, Daniel Hoffman, whose preface illuminates their distinctive lyric virtues and her exceptional editorial career. About the collection itself, Rachel Hadas said, “I am intrigued by the wit that knows what to put in and what to leave out, and the curbed but no less strong sensuality.” Reading these poems “is like going back into a burnished world of spare, sculpted language, exquisite taste, and delicate suggestion.”
THE TAY BRIDGE DISASTER AND OTHER POETIC GEMS
WILLIAM McGONAGALL
$12.95, 63 pages
ISBN 0-914061-84-4
These are some of the most inept poems ever written. Rhythmically clumsy,
full of strained rhymes and misunderstood notions of prosody, their thought
is banal in the extreme. McGonagall never met a cliche he didn't like well
enough to butcher. His work is so bad a kind of genius creeps into it.
Loved by Ogden Nash, Dorothy Parker, and W. H. Auden, plus generations
who have long since tired of Julia Moore and Edgar Guest, The Tay Bridge
Disaster and Other Poetic Gems will appall and lift the spirit.
A CITIZEN'S HANDBOOK
LARRY
MOFFI
$6.95, 48 pages
ISBN 0-914061-10-0
Warm, shrewd poems whose humanity and quiet humor create
a world of judgment tempered by understanding, vitality made more poignant
by the passage of time.
BELIEVE IT OR NOT
JEAN
MONAHAN
$12.95, 96 pages
ISBN 0-914061-77-1
About this extraordinary collection, Vijay Sehsadri writes:
"Jean Monahan's poems have a fine appetite for the world's idiosyncrasies—for
the odd facts that illuminate the entire landscape of our inner lives;
and their effortless lyricism gives her striking material a high and lustrous
permanence. These poems are by turns tender and violent, ruefully intelligent
and well-informed, and absolutely authentic."
MAULED ILLUSIONIST
JEAN MONAHAN
$14.95, 96 pages
ISBN 1-932535-08-X
This is Jean Monahan’s third book. Molly Peacock writes, “Flashes of wisdom and candor pierce the fretwork design of Jean Monahan’s spare, beautiful poems. Mauled Illusionist is eloquent, lyrical, clear-eyed, and tender.”
BOTTOM IS BACK
RICHARD
MOORE, with introduction by X. J. Kennedy
$11.95, 96 pages
ISBN 0-914061-43-7
Fearless and savage, the poetry of Richard Moore mixes
common sense and outlandishness in a way that will either captivate you
or put you wholly off. No apologies.
NO MORE BOTTOM
RICHARD
MOORE
$10.00, 64 pages
ISBN 0-914061-22-4
Devastating looks at Eros and aging done in savagely
comic verse. Richard Moore is the author of five other books and has published
in every major national magazine—whose files supplied some of the work
in this collection.
PYGMIES AND PYRAMIDS
RICHARD
MOORE
paperback $12.95, 80 pages
paperback: ISBN 0-914061-71-2
More poems by a writer whose illusions never call attention
to themselves and whose extreme formal rigor passes so quietly by the reader
that the art is almost unnoticed. A sustained and savvy collection of pointed,
insightful, curmudgeonly, subtle, witty, provocative, and perpendicularly
singular on statues, academe, love, ambition, and the arts.
NATURE TALKS BACK
ROBERT L. NADEAU, with
illustrations
$5.00, 96 pages
ISBN 0-914061-01-1
A cogent argument showing how new trends in science provide a
philosophical basis for an anti-nuclear stance, with an extensive bibliography.
THE POTATO EATERS
LEONARD NATHAN
$12.95, 96 pages
ISBN 0-914061-75-5
Jonathan Holden called Nathan one of the fifteen most accomplished
poets in America. Czeslaw Milosz writes, "Leonard Nathan seems to me one of
the most interesting American poets...His poetry is warm, humane, and I find
his voice deeply moving." After a hiatus of a decade, Nathan emerges with his
strongest collection yet. The Potato Eaters frames the felt world so
intensely and palpably that every poem, while faithful to the circumstances
that gave it birth, has the sudden force of icon.
RAGGED SONNETS
LEONARD NATHAN
$14.95, 96 pages
ISBN 978-1-932535-18-1
“This small volume holds for me the beginning and end of Leonard’s writing career,” writes the author’s widow, Carol Nathan. “I see these ‘Ragged Sonnets’ as his final word on form, content and memory.” They are in fact the last work from a poet whose words are revered by Jonathan Holden, Ted Kooser, and a growing number of discriminating readers.
RESTARTING THE WORLD
LEONARD NATHAN
$14.95, 96 pages
ISBN 1-932535-06-3
Ted Kooser writes: “For nearly fifty years, the distinguished American poet Leonard Nathan, without kowtowing to passing literary fashions, has steadily assembled a deeply moving and wide-ranging body of work.” This Nathan’s latest book, done at over eighty, with all the verve and freshness of one discovering the craft.
TEARS OF THE OLD MAGICIAN
LEONARD NATHAN
$14.95, 72 pages
ISBN 0-914061-93-3
Four groups of nine line poems that continue to exhibit what
Ted Kooser calls Leonard Nathan's "wholly independent and original vision
. . . a great gift of wisdom, beauty and profound insight."
SUDDEN THAW
PEGGY O’BRIEN
$14.95, 96 pages
ISBN 0-914061-99-2
”Peggy O’Brien’s first book,” writes Michael Longley, “opens with a taut sonnet sequence that laments her father, and closes with an intrepid examination of what she calls ‘the gauze of mother daughter / Love, that knit of wills.’ Between these impressive and affecting suites she treats us to a many-angled account of her discovery of herself as an artist. There’s anger and agitation, sorrow and grievance in these poems, but also an erotic tinge, humour and delight.”
FULL NOVA
CALEY O'DWYER
$12.95, 80 pages
ISBN 0-914061-85-2
Thomas Lux writes: "Caley O'Dwyer writes at an odd and wonderful angle.
He not only tells the truth slant but also shines a playful, deadly serious,
and singular light on it too. This is a terrific first book by a young
poet on fire with his art."
IS THIS THE END OF LITTLE RICO?
DANIEL
ORT
$12.95, 72 pages
ISBN 0-914061-73-9
Two looks at the role of storytelling in the life of
an ordinary and not so ordinary man, followed by a personal meditation
on mortality and art and — astonishingly — amnesia.
MY MOTHER ALWAYS CALLED ME BY MY BROTHER'S NAME
DANIEL
ORT
$14.95, 128 pages
ISBN 0-914061-45-3
hardcover, limited edition, signed—$40.00
More clever essays on computers, cinnamon rolls, family
life, and dying from the author of Ort Bran.
ORT BRAN
DANIEL
ORT
hardcover $20.00; pbk $14.95, 128 pages
hardcover: ISBN 0-914061-18-6; paperback ISBN 0-914061-12-7
Amused looks at hospitals, commercials, cocktail parties,
cats vs. dogs, weddings, and a variety of contemporary phenomena from a
wry personal viewpoint. Some of these essays were previously published
in The New York Times, to which the author, a professor at South
Connecticut State University, frequently contributes.
HEARTWOOD
ERIC
PANKEY
$12.95, 72 pages
ISBN 0-914061-78-X
Published to high praise in 1988, Eric Pankey's second
volume is reissued to meet the demands of readers, libraries, and fans.
The lyric, tough-minded, restrained poems stand out in an age of easy lyricism
and sentimental preoccupation.
ASKANCE AND STRANGELY:
NEW AND SELECTED POEMS
EDMUND
PENNANT
hardcover $24.95, 192 pages
ISBN 0-914061-35-6
A gathering of the author's four previous collections—I,
Too, Jehovah; Dream's Navel; Misapprehensions and The Wildebeest
of Carmine Street, together with new poems, sensuality understood in
tranquility.
THE WILDEBEEST OF CARMINE STREET
EDMUND
PENNANT
$10.00, 80 pages
ISBN 0-914061-17-8
Intense and loving looks that speak to the tensity of
relationships and the unending struggle between the flesh and the mind,
by a writer whose maturity has produced his best and strongest work.
SENSE AND NONSENSE
LAURENCE
PERRINE
$10.00, 64 pages
ISBN 0-914061-41-9
X. J. Kennedy called Laurence Perrine's first collection
of limericks "Far and away the best collection of original limericks I
know." His second collection is just as good, with a slightly more scabrous
edge.
POEMS
JOHN POCH
$14.95, 64 pages
ISBN 1-932535-00-4
B. H. Fairchild writes: “With the kind of appetite for language that Glenn Gould had for the sculptured lines of Bach and Schoenberg, John Poch with this book announces his presence among a group of younger poets who, contrary to current literary fashion, are rediscovering the interior life of poetic language and the powers of what Eliot called the auditory imagination. Stunningly articulate, Poch ranges within a wide repertoire of forms and meters—orthodox and experimental—and like Gould, he has the head and hands for it. Read, listen, enjoy.”
THE BRIGHTER THE VEIL
LIA
PURPURA
$12.95, 80 pages
ISBN 0-914061-56-9
Lia Purpura's first collection of poetry has the depth
and poise of an artist in complete control of her materials, yet with an
enlivening respect for the mystery behind our daily life.
PC-WRITE FOR STUDENTS
JOHN N. ROGERS
$5.00, 48 pages
ISBN 0-914061-19-4
A lucid presentation of how to use this popular—and free—"shareware"
word processing program, together with hints on how word processing in general
can make a student writer's, or any writer's, job easier.
THE CLOCK MADE OF CONFETTI
MICHAEL SALCMAN
paperback, $14.95, 104 pages
ISBN 1-932535-11-2
About this stunning collection Thomas Lux said: “This is a long awaited collection. Michael Salcman is a poet of enormous range and passions—from painting to neurosurgery. What I love most about his poems is the figurative microscope he builds into each poem so the reader can see it all: focused, alter, alive.”
THE BATTLEFIELD PHOTOGRAPHER
CARMINE SARRACINO
paperback, $14.95, 80 pages
ISBN 9781932535167
Focused on the lives of ordinary soldiers in the American Civil War, The Battlefield Photographer is a collection of brilliant lyrics and monologues that reveal in all its human dimensions one of the central episodes in American history.
THE IDEA OF THE ORDINARY
CARMINE SARRACINO
$14.95, 88 pages
ISBN 0-914061-97-6
Daniel Hoffman writes: "Carmine Sarracino's The Idea of the Ordinary reveals a Whitman-like openness to the details of life in poems that range from
the acculturation of his Italian-America family to his imagining Kafka in Berlin.
These poems have the momentum of their narrative strength, yet are infused with
a delicate lyricism. This is an impressive book by a poet well worth watching."
UNFLUX
TIMOTHY SHEA
$12.95, 79 pages
ISBN 0-914061-83-6
An extraordinary collection, absolutely itself and unlike anything
else you have read. Elliptical, half language poetry, half religious meditation,
with surprising connections, and an astonishing and intense originality.
And it's all earned.
FRANKENSTEIN
MARY
SHELLEY
$6.00, 240 pages
ISBN 0-914061-07-0
Mary Shelley's famous novel has been the basis of studies
of significant literary, scientific, dramatic, psychological, sociological,
and historical interest; the authoritative 1831 text has been here supplemented
by poems and essays from this century.
HIEROGLYPHICS IN NEON
SUE WILLIAM SILVERMAN
$14.95, 71 pages
ISBN 1-932535-09-8
“Sue William Silverman’s collection is a bracing debut—rangy, restless, and giddy with lush particulars. Geography and memory fuse into a single landscape, encompassing everything from the West Indies to the Negev, Yucatan to the Jersey Shore. It is rare to encounter a first book of poetry so willing to embrace the incantatory powers of the language¸ or so capable of using them to map the self .” — David Wojahn . Sue William Silverman’s first memoir, Because I Remember Terror, Father, I Remember You, won the Association of Writers & Writing Programs Award Series in creative nonfiction and is published with the University of Georgia Press. Her second memoir is Love Sick: One Woman’s Journey Through Sexual Addiction (W. W. Norton). This is her first collection of poetry.
DEATHS THAT TRAVEL WITH THE WEATHER
LOUIE
SKIPPER
hardcover $25.00; pbk $10.00, 64 pages
hardcover ISBN 0-914061-29-1; paper ISBN 0-914061-24-0
A narrative book-length poem whose immediate subject
is growing up in the rural South whose somber tone is relieved by flashes
of craziness that once again turn the poem in upon itself. Even as it moves
through territory immediately familiar to aficionados, Louie Skipper's
work has a voice and rhythm all its own.
PYTHAGORAS IN LOVE
LEE SLONIMSKY
paperback, $14.95, 64 pages
ISBN 1-932535-13-6
X. J. Kennedy writes: “Although it is said that there’s poetry in mathematics, Lee Slonimsky is among those rare poets who bring the history of mathematics into poetry. In ‘The Last Digit of Pi’ and other fine sonnets, Slonimsky discovers startling mathematical metaphors in the natural world. His work strikes me as unique in current American poetry.”
BEYOND THE GATE: NEW AND SELECTED POEMS
STEPHEN STEPANCHEV
$14.95, 90 pages
ISBN 1-32535-07-1
Still writing at ninety, Stephen Stepanchev here gathers poems from his previous collections, many from Black Sparrow Press and hard to find, together with more recent poetry. Cosmopolitan, immediate, and wry, these poems have appeared in The New Yorker, Poetry, The New Criterion, and other first rank journals.
SEVEN HORIZONS
STEPHEN STEPANCHEV
$12.95, 80 pages
ISBN 0-914061-63-1
Cosmopolitan, ironic, tender, and philosophical, these poems further
Stepanchev's reputation as a master of the concise lyric.
THE DOG'S HEART
ELAINE TERRANOVA
$14.95, 79 pages
ISBN 0-914061-90-9
Edward Hirsch writes: "Elaine Terranova identifies those times when something
goes wrong, when things break down, and she illuminates them with a warmly sympathetic
imagination. The Dog's Heart—her best book thus far—is a work
that flashes with moments and flares with memories, that burns with a steady
human light."
HADJI MURAD
LEO TOLSTOY
hardcover $20.00; pbk $6.00, 128 pages
hardcover 0-914061-53-4; pbk 0-914061-54-2
The great realistic Russian novelist's Chechnian story of revenge,
called by Harold Bloom, Tolstoy's "most Shakespearean work," in the acclaimed
Maude translation. Introduced by John Burt Foster, Jr.
PROPER MYTH
WILLIAM
F. VAN WERT
paperback $12.95, 64 pages
paperback: ISBN 0-914061-67-4
Classical myth informs the shape of contemporary life
in these shrewd and controversial meditations on human relationships. "From
the painful force of Dido's long meditation through the author's own consciousness
of myth's meaning, Van Wert examines the history of the race, women with
men, foremost, from a feminist perspective properly and often in these
poems, improperly as well. Once again, his heady poetry seems infinitely
various in its tones and complexities. Once again, Van Wert is as rich
as his sources."
OARLESS BOATS, VACANT LOTS
JON
VEINBERG
$12.95, 64 pages
ISBN 0-914061-74-7
Lyrical poems set in mid-coast California—quiet, humane,
sweet-tempered, biting—a whisper of a book.
NORTHWEST PASSAGE
REBECCA WARNER
$14.95, 91 pages
ISBN 1-932535-04-7
The first collection of poetry by a fresh new voice, sprightly, various, informed by history and formally playful. David Lehman writes, “Lively, smart, and witty, Rebecca Warner’s poems are the real thing.”
BIRDS OF HOBOKEN
WILLIAM
WENTHE
$12.95, 80 pages
ISBN 0-914061-49-6
A first collection of poetry by a widely published young writer,
Birds of Hoboken moves from Virginia to New Jersey in its urban and urbane
lyricism.
ETHAN FROME
EDITH
WHARTON
$2.75, 96 pages
ISBN 0-914061-23-2
Edith Wharton's classic novel of frustrated passion in
nineteenth century New England in a freshly set version, with an introduction
by Connie Bellamy.
THE IMPORTANCE OF BEING EARNEST
OSCAR
WILDE
hardcover $19.95; pbk $7.95, 176 pages
hardcover: ISBN 0-914061-11-9; paperback ISBN 0-914061-12-7
The most perfect comedy in the English language is here reprinted
from the scarce 1899 edition published by Leonard Smithers. Wilde carefully
revised the text for this edition, "in full command of the play," according
to his biographer Richard Ellmann. Hardcover w/o dust jacket, as issued.
HELEN
C. K. WILLIAMS
$50.00. A hardcover limited signed edition of 250 copies, published
by Orchises Press and Press of the Nightowl. 32 pages
ISBN 0-914061-27-5
A four part poem set in 12 point Joanna (letterpress) by Dwight
Agner. The subject is love and mortality, the lines in the manner of Williams's
award-winning Flesh and Blood.
FOOLS AND CROWS
TERRI WITEK
$14.95, 79 pages
ISBN 0-914061-94-1
Terri Witek's Fools and Crows takes the ancient discipline of ekphrasis—a
poet's description of a work of art-to a new level of intensity. In her explorations
of Renaissance paintings, of Roman Catholic holy cards, of the Vision of Our
Lady of Fatima, the poet locates the matter and spirit of the human condition,
our desires to connect, to worship, to elude death. These lyric unveilings and
expositions recall the beautiful exactitudes of Marianne Moore's poetry. They
are the elucidations of a luminous intelligence, shadowed by grief and joy.
—Mark Jarman
THE SHIPWRECK DRESS
TERRI WITEK
paperback, $14.95, 96 pages
ISBN 1-932535-17-4
About Terri Witek’s third volume of poetry Molly Peacock said, “With the brilliant certainty of her intuition, Terri Witek spins the silken sculptures of her new collection, The Shipwreck Dress. I never thought of the soul as needing something to wear, but Witek has created a kind of soul-clothing in these miraculous poems. Internal, instinctive, and yet knowingly crafted, every poem renews another aspect of her idea that the outer wrappings we know as clothing are really inner structures. As Witek sensuously explores the most ancient connections between text and textile, she turns her poems into stunning, subtle word-kimonos. Vivid with color, deeply sensuous, and sharply intelligent, The Shipwreck Dress shows Terri Witek at the height of her powers.” The cover features art by Cyriaco Lopes.
DENIABILITY
GEORGE WITTE
$14.95, 91 pages
ISBN 978-1-932535-19-8
The poems in Deniability utilize the vocabularies of bureaucracy and religion, exploring how the former co-opts the ancient latter, to such consequential effect. With wit and formal acuity balanced by emotion, Deniability considers what we lose when we abdicate the power of language, and so surrender to the seductive language of power.
THE HURTLING
JOHN WITTE
$14.95, 77 pages
ISBN 1-932535-03-9
“Fierce, controlled, inventive, forward-rushing, refusing punctuation to make free with syntax, John Witte’s cycle of severely unrepetitive thee-line stanza pomes left me with endless questions and durable satisfaction. There are poems here—‘As If’ is one—which I will never forget.” – Ursula K. LeGuin.
VOICE LOCK PUPPET
ALI YÜCE
Translated from the Turkish by Sinan Toprak and Gerry LaFemina, with facing
pages in Turkish
$14.95, 95 pages
ISBN 0-914061-95-X
This is the first appearance in English of the poems of Ali Yüce, an important
voice in modern Turkish letters. Yüce's poems—wry, ironic, and moving—delight
and surprise by their unexpected lyricism.
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