After years of medicated struggle, 34-year-old Zoe quits her office job and moves into a trailer with her boyfriend in rural Maine against her family's wishes and her doctor's advice. After all, she has big plans with Gordy, a goateed vegetarian with thoughtful eyes and a job at a yoga studio and, as it turns out, an unfortunate desire to always be in control. But when a late-night argument turns violent, Zoe runs away in search of a mystical beach house she recalls from childhood, only to discover that in order to find it, she must reckon with her past. In electric prose that burns with wit and intelligence, Miss Portland explores what it means to give up everything in order to recover who you are.

Miss Portland: A Novel

Literature & Fiction

David Ebenbach

United States

Orison Books

Literary short stories by established and emerging writers.Excerpts:
David McDannald Stealing Chickens I don't know why he said such things. You have a principle of being honest and then there's the hard reality of your mother having a heart attack.
 R. Cross Glioblastoma "You're totally f--ed." "As in dying?" "As in that, yes."
 Wesley Straton Earthquake Whisky When he tells these stories, they could be from someone else's life: in New Zealand he is quiet, and he expects the country to be quiet in return. Generally, it obliges.
 Clark Knowles In Dublin It was terribly quiet, impossibly so for such a big city, with so much unfolding everywhere, with so many intersecting lives.
 Scott Gloden The Birds of Basra "Online! You can go online and find exactly where you're from. That's how I learned I was Mexican," she said.
 Katrin Gibb A History of Regressing Our move from Chicago to a newly developed suburb in Kentucky meant little to me at that age, but my brother was going into high school that fall and responded by throwing his fork across the room.
 Abhijith Ravinutala A Pothole for Sailaja Sailaja did not admit to being a particularly religious person, as she took pride in her computer engineering degree and equated it with a necessary suspension of superstitious beliefs.
 Laura Roque Lady-Ghost Roles I was always relaxed by Delkis's house, ongoing fights or not, with its distant rumble of laundry, like a whale constantly clearing its throat below us.
 Ben Nadler Shalom Bayit I used to get a lot of drinking done while she wrote reports. Now, there was nothing to do but go to sleep.
 Michael Caleb Tasker All Gone Now By early afternoon the heat was crushing. When I was younger it used to rain every afternoon.
 Kent Wascom Interview by Jennifer Levasseur and Kevin Rabalais I like having the prompt of history. History can give you a narrative shape, and finding the shape of a story is the most difficult thing for me.
 Peter Sheehy Things Frozen Then We'll meet dogs, we'll meet neighborhood people. The flowers will begin to bloom. I will remember these walks until I am as old as he is and maybe longer.
 David Ebenbach All of This Is Water "You're all quite welcome." She stepped back from the door and sort of bowed us in. It was the first time in my life that knowing a Finnish person had made me a VIP.

Glimmer Train Stories, #105

Kent Wascom

David McDannald

R. Cross

Wesley Straton

Clark Knowles

Scott Golden

Katrin Gibb

Abhijith Ravinutala

Laura Roque

Ben Nadler

Michael Caleb Tasker

Peter Sheehy

Glimmer Train Press, Inc.

In his much-anticipated second poetry collection, David Ebenbach addresses the full scope of the human condition--past, present, and future. Exploring the vast sweep of history, from our ancient evolutionary origins to our future archaeological remains, Ebenbach's deceptively light-handed poems penetrate to the core of what it means to be human, a brief but exquisite being, full of appetites both healthy and harmful.

Some Unimaginable Animal

Poetry

Review\n"'The world is on its way to you' writes David Ebenbach, and the world in these pages is one made of equal parts grit and tenderness. It's a world of work, violence, politics, and little apocalypses, but also singing, birdwatching, prayer, and flowers bursting into bloom. At one point, a 'worker lowers / his bag of tools / through the cherry blossoms'―and this might be an apt metaphor for the perspective of this evocative book: behind the world's tough machinery is an undeniable beauty, and these poems are made by a poet skilled enough to help us see it." --Matthew Olzmann\n"There’s something reassuring about the way David Ebenbach writes about even the most troubling issues of our time. His poems, often deceptively gentle, offer a kind of tender good humor born of long-suffering patience." ―Ron Charles, The Washington Post 
"David Ebenbach's poems in What's Left to Us by Evening are funny, engaging, kind, generous-spirited, moving, clever, even childlike. It's almost easy to forget he's writing again and again about a world-wide pandemic, a bitterly-contested election, earth-threatening climate change―in short, the apocalypse. In this book, 'our children / ask for pie' while the poet carries with him the consciousness of great and irretrievable loss, 'the passport / of someone who died.' Ebenbach talks to us in such a way that we can't help but look. He hits all of our world's pressure points in a simple, straightforward, yet wholly imaginative and unforgettable fashion." --Dana Roeser\n"David Ebenbach asks us to look on as 'from the scaffolding / the worker lowers / his bag of tools / through the cherry blossoms.' The blossoms may put one in mind of Imagist poets, but Ebenbach won't settle for mere imagism. He suggests, as Walter Benjamin did, that every monument to civilization is a monument to barbarism. And yet however starkly aware he is of the human world's exploitations and injustices, he won't settle either for facile, fashionable despair. Considering an abandoned subway tunnel, Ebenbach claims that 'we light this expanse of / soda bottles and human waste and see the verdant / potential,' just as elsewhere he notes 'that joy is not passive, / but something / you move toward, / however awkward.' Precious few current poets move in that direction more deftly or affectingly than Ebenbach." --Sydney Lea\nHow does one live in a world that is both beautiful and broken―a world of cherry blossoms and gun violence, fellowship and political enmity, plague and rebirth? What's Left to Us by Evening, David Ebenbach's unsparing and timely new poetry collection, examines the obligation―and privilege―of carrying all these things. The wide-ranging influences on the poems in Ebenbach's third collection include Judaism, the Asian poetic tradition, the natural and built environments, and current events.

What's Left to Us by Evening

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by David Ebenbach. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by David Ebenbach