Linda Kraus

Listening to the Silence
Poems of Love, Remembrance, and Survival

"Love, Remembrance, and Survival are the organizing themes of this collection, but the inspirations for the various poems are legion: from coming of age to coming to a certain age; from the bewildering vicissitudes of destiny to the beauties that surprise us in the quiet moments of our lives; from soul-deadening loss to the acknowledgement of grace.

Each person’s kaleidoscope of emotions and passions shifts dramatically with the encroachment of time. The prism of distance is sometimes required for sympathy to emerge and be recognized. This collection, the work of many years, is my attempt to share some of those perspectives.

I hope that they will challenge readers to look critically at beliefs (mine and their own) and to reflect upon our defining—and uniting—epiphanies. I hope that poet and reader will sometimes merge into one voice, at times crying as one against injustice and pain, at other times crying as one in praise of the beauty and love which sustain us."
    -Linda Kraus

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ISBN: 979-8320314969

Linda E. Chown

Annie: How She Came To Be

Annie, a traveler, arrives from time’s nowful shoals, staking her claim at the intersection of mystery and motion. These poems are a song of soft whisper memories. Part confessional, part spell, they hint at an honest path through the life of Linda Chown and her beguiling creation. Somehow, they also manage to be the story of every woman I ever loved. Try holding onto her and she disappears into the puff from whence she came. I will return to these poems again and again, not for answers, but communion. I will return to better understand the questions that matter.
    -Jeff Weddle, winner of the Eudora Welty Prize and author of Driving the Lost Highway.

“Try not to know too much at the beginning,” Linda E. Chown advises in her intimate short poetry collection, Annie: How She Came to Be. Chown’s “Annie” walks through time, Padua, Montana, Kathmandu, Monterey Bay, Paris, Capitola—turns “her head toward Cordoba …to sing life-lifting Saetas...” Chown effortlessly pairs unexpected imagery and wording to move the familiar into the profound—“She knew answers came out / Delirious and direct like muffins rising...” In the tradition of Emily Dickenson and E.E. Cummings, full of gumption and purpose, Chown’s work builds a beautiful poetic bridge toward a universal anchoring of the self—“[knows] purply that “why” is not a question / But an answer coming forth deeply.”
    -Jane Muschenetz, author of All the Bad Girls Wear Russian Accents.

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ISBN: 979-8879760255

Scott Ferry and Daniel McGinn

Fill Me With Birds

The collaborative collection Fill Me With Birds lilts and tilts as Scott Ferry and Daniel McGinn call and respond. “When an image keeps coming back to mind / there’s no escaping”—they volley images and themes between poems, circling and returning and building. Jesus, family, a father who talks in his sleep, a mother rocking her child in “her milk-wet / arms” weave together on Ferry and McGinn’s pages turning us all to “light and strata.” You won’t want to miss how each word “hums and dances.”
        —Allison Blevins, author of Cataloguing Pain

Fill Me With Birds filled me with delight. This fascinating collaboration between Scott Ferry and Daniel McGinn grabbed me from the first page! These two, seasoned poets play off each other, like a poetic game of call and response. They’ve created poems rich with imagery and juxtaposed with candor, pushing each other to new heights. Much like the birds, they soar. ]
         —Alexis Rhone Fancher, author of Brazen, Triggered, and The Dead Kid Poems

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ISBN: 979-8874141325

John Yamrus

People (and other bad ideas)

For more than 5 decades John Yamrus has been a fixture on the small press literary scene. Recent years have seen his reputation expand internationally, with new editions and new translations. In this latest volume, the ultra-prolific Yamrus continues with the snarky humor and neo-noir poetry that have made him a cult favorite. A note to the reader: these poems ain’t your blue-hair’d grandma’s poems...read ‘em at your own risk!

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ISBN: 979-8867501563

John Sheirer

For Now
 One Hundred 100-Word Stories

"John Sheirer’s Stumbling Through Adulthood: Linked Stories showed his immense skill for traditional-length short stories. For Now: One Hundred 100-Word Stories shows equal facility with the microfiction form. These stories range from gentle humor so light it might float off the page in a soft breeze to dense, powerful tales that threaten to sink through the book’s cover and bore directly into the earth’s molten core. “Here, in these finely wrought tales, is a universal current of humanity that connects us all.” – Robert Scotellaro, author of Ways to Read the World.

“Unsettling in their precise focus, Sheirer’s brief and crystalline works sharpen the reader’s awareness of the irrevocable. – Gina Barreca, author of They Used to Call Me Snow White, but I Drifted.

“With so many big stories in such compact spaces, John Sheirer will titillate and delight you.” – Joshua Michael Stewart, author of Love Something and Break Every String

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ISBN: 979-8218259945

Christian Livermore

The Very Special Dead

A powerful blend of fable and realism, The Very Special Dead examines lost love and the ruins of the American Dream. Three men in a haunted New England fishing village are so demoralized with debt, terminal illness and bereavement that they swap bodies with three revenants they meet one night on a marshy road. The men are left in the bodies of the dead, watching their families and lives helplessly from outside and trying desperately to get back. The women get left behind and have to clean up the mess their men have left in their wake. Beautiful, heartbreaking, and stunningly imaginative, Livermore grapples with what it is to love, to lose, and, ultimately, to live.

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ISBN: 979-8852079206 (softcover only)

Jeffrey M. Feingold

The Black Hole Pastrami and other stories

Sixteen linked short stories that explore love, loss, family, and cultural legacies in this imaginative engaging debut. The stories, written in first person, have the feeling of autobiography, with many examining family relations and Ukrainian Jewish heritage. The tales range from heartbreakingly poignant to hilariously humorous.

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ISBN: 979-8388289186

Jerome Berglund

Funny Pages

An assembly of free verse and short form poetry in the spirit of haiku, senryu, and tanka exploring romance via disparate snapshotted moments, through the lenses of history’s most celebrated literary lovers, as well as by examining the tropes and language of the cinema. 63 pages in length, with 1-3 poems to each page — 37 of them having been previously published in 24 prestigious magazines and journals including the Asahi Shimbun, Bear Creek Haiku, and Fresh Out Magazine; a piece within also won a Vermilion writing prompt competition — the book is dedicated to Joseph Severn, who accompanied John Keats on his final voyage to Italy. This is Berglund’s second full-length collection of poetry by a publisher, following Bathtub Poems from Setu Press; he has also shared a micro chapbook through the Origami Poem Project.

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ISBN: 979-8393056377

Lindsay Adkins

Fixing the Halo

In this short poetry collection, Lindsay Adkins uses personas and reimaginings to examine how religion (specifically Catholicism) and tradition have impacted her life, as well as the lives of women who came before her. Equal measures reverent and defiant, these poems expose the difficult and raw truths behind stories we think we know by amplifying often-ignored voices with a feminist megaphone. In weaving family history with Biblical references and allegories, the poet reclaims a faith she can call her own.

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ISBN: 979-8390182475

Scott Ferry, Lillian Necakov, Lauren Scharhag

Midnight Glossolalia

In Midnight Glossolalia, three poets braid their voices into a kingdom of dark matter, speaking in tongues on subjects both modern and mystical. These 63 poems are an alchemical brew composed of gods, ghosts, UFOs, alternate dimensions, ancestors, science, technology, math, music, nature, and Fruit Loops. They are the chemtrails of lost songs, a muffled heart piano swelling with the mystery of existence.

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ISBN: 979-8374839227

John Yamrus

Twenty Four Poems

Twenty four all-new poems by the master of modern poetry noir. Yamrus doesn't waste a word.

“He is writing about the moments between the moments.
In the hands of a lesser poet and observer, those disappear into the mush of our half-memories... the moments between the moments are what constitute by far the greatest portion of our lives.

What he understands, that so many people miss, is that in a sense he certainly is writing about “nothing special” unless you are able to see the world for what it is.

What we get from Twenty Four Poems is a gift. He is showing us how to view the world and our lives. This collection, like all of his work, is both nothing special and most certainly exceptional.”

- John Brantingham

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ISBN: 979-8361202973

Rick Paar

God Bless America and Breakfast Burritos to Go

After stumbling on a festival for rescued greyhounds, Rick Paar, psychologist and writer, goes on a road trip to find how to be happy. He discovers his answer among people he meets on the way: protesters at Crawford Texas, true believers at the UFO Museum, mundane life in Los Alamos home of the Manhattan Project, artists in a rundown town in New Mexico, and especially in the hard-earned lessons from a ruptured relationship with his son.

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ISBN: 979-8357187574

Linda Kraus

Popcorn Icons
and Other Poems Celebrating Movies

This anthology of poems is a celebration of various aspects of the moviegoer’s experience, which can often be complex or surprising, even disquieting. Many of the poems are homages to beloved classic movies including wonderful silent movies; others examine more contemporary cinema. Some poems address the discussions and obsessions of cinephiles, those odd zealots whose excitement for movies and knowledge of their history are often extraordinary.

Some familiar titles: Citizen Kane, The Godfather, Some Like it Hot. Some less familiar: The Battleship Potemkin, Pather Panchali, Wind River, and Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans. Marilyn, Garbo, and Hitchcock are recognized, and so is the allure of the Oscar.

Above all, the reader will be treated to poems which resonate with the poet’s mad passion for cinema as an art form rather than as a casual entertainment. Hopefully readers will want to revisit some of their favorite movies and perhaps see them through a different lens.

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ISBN: 979-8831102918

Jane Yolen and Peter Tacy

The Black Dog Poems

This book is for David Stemple and Barbara Buchtel Tacy, now lost, but not yet gone; and for three wonderful black dogs (Mandy,a black lab who was Jane’s dog during her high school and college years, Tilly (who belongs to Jane’s friend Terri Windling and semi-adopted as a muse by Jane), and Peter’s standard poodle, the ineffable Gracie) who did for us what dogs can uniquely do; helping us cope, and reminding us to celebrate even the saddest moments our lucky lives.

Three pets; two marriages, full of living and love; and one late in life reunion of old friends who first met through poetry, sixty-three years ago, and are doing so all over again in a marriage of hearts, poetry, and minds.  

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ISBN: 978-0997529883

Peter Urkowitz

Fake Zodiac Signs: An Astro-illogical Guidebook

We are all familiar with the twelve zodiac signs, those powerful constellations among which the sun and moon rotate throughout the year, determining the fates of those born under them, as expounded by the learned astrologers through a process as opaque as it is inexplicable. But it turns out there are other zodiac signs, somewhat more disorganized, that have just as much predictive potency as their more popular cousins. Which is to say, none at all.

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ISBN: 978-0997529869

Richard Horton

Sticks & Bones

“I have to say at this point I think Richard has found an amazing form for his work. These paragraphs, loaded with texture and temperature and personality and sound...this is about an idiosyncratic America...or say, a Midwestern Gothic”

-Beth Filson, Host, Straw Dog Writers Night Out.

Michael Alves

My Father is Voting for Donald Trump
and Other Reasons My Life is Falling Apart