In the darkness of a May night in the middle of rural Ohio, Ray Stanton is thrown, naked and injured, from a pickup truck. For hours, he struggles to get back to town, unable to make sense of what has just happened until, half-conscious and in pain, he collapses at the door of his neighbor, Mae Reeves.  So begins Cry Uncle, a novel of small-town politics, racism, and love, the soul-searching story of a man who learns what really matters in life. A "re-engineer," Ray has recently moved to Brighton and just begun his new job firing workers at the local textile mill as he undertakes to modernize the plant. For Ray, the job seems ethical if not noble. If he does well, the Windy Oaks shirt factory might have a chance to survive NAFTA and outsourcing, and so might the mill town of Brighton. But many think otherwise.  Part mystery, part love story, the tale hinges on both revenge and redemption. Cry Uncle introduces us to Ray, a white man newly separated and unfettered, and the Reeves women, Mae and Kayla, mother and daughter, one black and the other biracial. These three characters, dogged by a cop who is always one step ahead of everyone, confront the leader of the "punks" who tortured Ray. As Ray's behavior becomes-even to himself-new and unpredictable, this suspenseful and meditative novel asks telling questions: Who do we choose to be when no one is looking? Do we fight? Or do we cry uncle? A prize-winning poet, Alan Michael Parker, Davidson, North Carolina, is associate professor of English and director of the creative writing program at Davidson College. He is the author of Love Song with Motor Vehicles, The Vandals, and Days Like Prose.

Cry Uncle

Literature & Fiction

Parker, Alan Michael

Literary

UNIVERSITY PRESS OF MISSISSIPPI

Just for fun, the vandals toss monkey wrenches into the machinery of life, wreaking poetic havoc.

Vandals

Poetry

BOA Editions, Ltd.

Days Like Prose

History & Criticism

ALEF Books

In Love Song with Motor Vehicles, Alan Michael Parker marshals a penetrating wit and sharp irony that mirrors that of Charles Simic and John Berryman. Parker’s robust imagination explores the music in places poetry doesn’t usually travel. His poems find their epiphanies early on, and, most strikingly, do not close at their endings but, rather, open.Alan Michael Parker is the author of two books of poetry, and co-editor of two scholarly works, The Routledge Anthology of Cross-Gendered Verse and Who’s Who in 20th Century World Poetry (Routledge Books). In 2000, his poems were included in all three major volumes of "younger American poets" (Carnegie Mellon University Press, University of Southern Illinois Press, and University of New England Press).

Love Song with Motor Vehicles (American Poets Continuum)

The Imaginary Poets presents exceptional work from major poets who delight in assuming a new persona. But the book's ultimate goal is to explore the nature of creativity: what is it to make a poem? to make up a poet? To ""translate"" a workis that rewriting or writing? What about translating a work that never existed? What does it mean if you create the creator? In the tradition of Pessoa and Borges, The Imaginary Poets delves delightedly into the very act of invention with a wink, a smile and tremendous respect for the art.Translate a poem into English, offer a biography of the poet, and then write a short essay in which the poem, the poet, and the corpus are consideredand make all of it up, without once indicating you have done so. Thus charged were the twenty-two contributors to this volume, who in response produced poems ""translated"" from eighteen languages including Dirja, Vietnamese, Yiddish, and even from Egyptian hieroglyphs, poems that may be read in the grand literary tradition of heteronyms and alter egos...Alan Michael Parker
Contributors include Aliki Barnstone, Josh Bell, Laure-Anne Bosselaar, Martha Collins, Annie Finch, Judith Hall, Barbara Hamby, Jennifer Michael Hecht, Garrett Hongo, Andrew Hudgins, David Kirby, Maxine Kumin, Khaled Mattawa, D.A. Powell, Kevin Prufer, Anna Rabinowitz, Victoria Redel, David St. John, Mark Strand, Thom Ward, Rosanna Warren, and Eleanor Wilner

The Imaginary Poets

Tupelo Press

Elephants &amp; Butterflies combines the imaginative forays of The Vandals with the more meditative approach of Love Song with Motor Vehicles. Both wild and calm, boisterous and quiet, the poems in Elephants &amp; Butterflies use surprise, song, and startling metaphor while allowing the ideas to simmer just below the surface of the lyric. The poems manage the difficult task of being highly readable and accessible, while still containing complex philosophical and personal knowledge.
Alan Michael Parker (www.amparker.com) teaches at Davidson College in Davidson, North Carolina. He also teaches at Queens University, where he is core faculty in the low-residency MFA program.

Elephants & Butterflies (American Poets Continuum)

Whether about the moon or hotel sex, politics or poppy seeds, Alan Michael Parker's poems are always tender and eccentric and nuanced. In his eighth collection, with metaphysical fortitude the poet continues to deliberate -- in all sorts of poems, some unpunctuated, some in prose, and some the first-person lyrics well loved by his longtime readers -- upon what our daily lives mean. And how do we sing and praise and grieve all at once?

The Ladder: Poems

The Committee on Town Happiness consists of ninety-nine linked stories about disappearing townsfolk. Air balloons are launched to search for the missing, galas proliferate, laws are imposed ad absurdum, and a guerilla group forms as the Committee shapes the future of small-town America in this biting examination of modern bureaucracy.
Alan Michael Parker is the author of two previous novels and seven collections of poems. His awards include three Pushcart Prizes and the 2012 North Carolina Book Award. Professor of English at Davidson College, he also teaches in the Queens University MFA program. He lives in Davidson, North Carolina.

The Committee on Town Happiness

Humor & Satire

Dzanc Books

In light of her impending death, thirteen-year-old Beatrice Danzig has changed her name to Christmas. She’s at the center of Christmas in July, a novel in ten stories told by ten residents of suburban Saxon Hills: the bored wife of a senior softball slugger, a socialite with a glitter fixation, a beekeeping hermit, a young runaway who can’t outrun her past. The novel explores each of these people’s lives before and after meeting Christmas―as well as Mr. Ramirez’s mustache, The Wizard of Oz, cults and terrorists, Brown v. Board of Education, a band named Wagawagawaga, and the mystery of Aunt Nikki, Christmas’s guardian, who sleeps in a closet to keep her demons, real and imagined, at bay. Through ten unique voices, veteran author Alan Michael Parker charts the wreckage of a troubled teen in a small town, exposing the residents’ secrets and their all-too-human hearts.

Christmas in July

United States

Product Description Playful and inventive, The Age of Discovery is a work of enduring beauty filled with tenderness and surprise. Alan Michael Parker’s latest collection puts him amongst poets such as Amichai, Mistral and Neruda, adding a new voice to the greats of love poetry. Innovative in form, Parker challenges the reader to go beyond the comforts of nostalgia. “The boarded-up video store/makes sadness look pretty”, he writes, suggesting that change can be surprisingly redeeming in many circumstances.These poems take note of the time of day, carrying the reader through the many moods accompanying each hour. A resolute sense of the present day lingers as well, as Parker roams from the Biblical to the digital. This investigation of loneliness and change over time is sure to create a sense of where we stand in this new digital age; possibly closer to love than ever before. Review The Age of Discovery is a devastating take on the ways we stave off panic. Mythic, precise as a statistician, Alan Michael Parker eyes the virtual data, “bottomless as coffee”; the culture, on the cusp of cancellation. (“I love you more with every hit,” he writes, both acknowledgment and threat.) Parker lays bare the limits of nostalgia, where “the boarded-up video store / makes sadness look pretty”― the farce that art transforms, and the truth of it, too. In The Age of Discovery, Alan Michael Parker, line by startling line, has written a wry, deeply humane collection for our uncivil age. --Randall MannWith The Age of Discovery, Alan Michael Parker locates a new register. Throughout this collection are poems that resonate with humor blending through heartbreak, that sound this poet’s singular voice, and that, ultimately, sustain with Parker’s signature, enviable imagination. --Jon Pineda, Little Anodynes and Let’s No One Get Hurt About the Author ALAN MICHAEL PARKER is the author or editor of eighteen books, including three collections of poems with Tupelo Press as well as four novels; he teaches at Davidson College.

The Age of Discovery

Humor & Entertainment

Humor

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