Poetry. "Almost no one is good at both short and long poems, but Alice Friman is. Her poems 'Turnip' and 'Cherries' have sharp language, imagination and alert observation. INVERTED FIRE is good, a must" --Leo Connellan.

INVERTED FIRE

Literature & Fiction

Friman, Alice

History & Criticism

BkMk Press at the University of Missouri-Kansas City

Poetry. Gay / Lesbian. "Compressed as these spare lyrics are, they open to an unmistakable amplitude: the life of feeling honored, observed, sung. "...luck could sing from every word on this page," Trish Reeves writes; these moving and genuine poems are the readers' good fortune" --Mark Doty.

IN THE KNEES OF THE GODS

Reeves, Trish

Poetry

Poetry. In this moving book of poems,John Knoepfle transforms a search for his Irish roots into a meditationon human suffering and survival. The whole book is a prayer againstfamine and the gratuitous cruelty inflicted on the innocent, both theIrish of the last century and the Central Americans of today"--KathleenNorris.

PRAYER AGAINST FAMINE AND OTHER IRISH POEMS

Knoepfle, John

Fiction. African American Studies. African American women protagonists lose and find love, confront sanity and craziness, and strive to make sense of their lives in North Carolina. A Jehovah's Witness girl goes door-to-door with an expert field-service partner from up north. At a call center, operator Sheila fields a caller's uncomfortable questions under a ruthless supervisor's eye. Forty-something Aunt Ginny surprises the family by finding a husband, but soon she gives them more to talk about. Pulitzer-Prize winner Edward P. Jones writes "Watts offers an impressive debut that promises only wonderful work to come." Fiction writer Marly Swick agrees: "Each story seems, at the same time, to be a breath of fresh air and an instant classic." Author Alyce Miller notes that "Watts writes with a penetrating eye for the extraordinary moments in the lives of ordinary people. As I read, I found myself holding my breath."

We Are Taking Only What We Need

Watts, Stephanie

United States

Fiction. Jewish Studies. Montaigne Medal Finalist. Winner of the G. S. Sharat Chandra Prize for Short Fiction, selected by Marge Piercy. HEIRLOOMS begins in the French seaside city of Saint-Malo, in 1939, and ends in the American Midwest in 1989. In these linked stories, the war reverberates through four generations of a Jewish family. Inspired by the author's family stories as well as extensive research, HEIRLOOMS explores assumptions about love, duty, memory and truth.

Heirlooms: Stories

Hall, Rachel

Genre Fiction

Poetry. Many of these poems are set in the mid-twentieth century and feature such personae as writers Truman Capote and Tennessee Williams and photographer Roman Vishniac, as well as less-public figures in Brooklyn, Nebraska, and elsewhere, all of whom confront the wounds of love, family, history, and time. "In poem after poem," David Jauss writes, Aizenberg "reveals an astonishingly wide-ranging and deeply empathetic imagination, not to mention the eye of a painter and the ear of a musician." "Aizenberg's vision is clear, her language exact, and her music is perfectly pitched," writes Betsy Sholl, a past poet laureate of Maine. "These are keenly intelligent poems navigating the distance and circuitous route between grief and its redemption." Poet Kathy Fagan writes, "Aizenberg's Quiet City reminds us how the wounds of history keep on wounding both in our homes and the larger world."

Quiet City

Aizenberg, Susan

Fiction. Set against a wild and haunting landscape, the short fiction in this collection spotlights the struggles of everyday individuals to overcome the ghosts they have inherited from Romania's communist past. The book won BkMk's G. S. Sharat Chandra Prize for Short Fiction, selected by PEN/Faulkner finalist Lorraine M. López, who writes, "Myka's characters release uncountable fibers, connecting them to one another in the linked narratives, binding them to the harshly beguiling Romania they inhabit and that inhabits them."

King of the Gypsies

Myka, Lenore

Poetry. Winner of the John Ciardi Prize for Poetry, selected by Alice Friman. Barker's poems capture what life is like on the other side of the English teacher's desk, how she reacts to her students' lives and their genuine if not always reverential responses to the literature she aspires to teach. Barker's poems are funny, frightening, moving, and playful (as shown by the title's reference to Wallace Stevens' famous poem, "Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird." "It would be easy to say this is a book about teaching—it is!—but it's also a book about how our experience of reading humanizes us and shapes our experience of the world and other people."—Kevin Prufer "In this classroom, no one is exempt. Not the students, not the reader, and—bless her—not the teacher."—Alice Friman

One Blackbird at a Time

Barker, Wendy

Poetry. Native American Studies. This anthology explores how the Middle East has captured the imaginations of a significant group of Native American poets, most of whom have traveled to the Middle East (broadly defined to include the Arab world, Israel, Turkey, Afghanistan). What qualities of the region drew them there? What did they see? How did their cultural perspectives as Native Americans inform their reactions and insights? Three thematic sections—Place, People, Spirit—feature poems and notes inspired by the poets' experiences of Middle Eastern cultures. Contributors include Jim Barnes, Kimberly Blaeser, Trevino L. Brings Plenty, Natalie Diaz, Diane Glancy, Joy Harjo, Allison Hedge Coke, Travis Hedge Coke, Linda Hogan, LeAnne Howe, Bojan Louis, Craig Santos Perez, Linda Rodriguez, Kim Shuck, and James Thomas Stevens.

The World Is One Place: Native American Poets Visit the Middle East

Poetry. Native American Studies. These poems explore American identity and the powers of myth, faith, doubt, and the environment, and the music of these poems resonate with strains of the English, Spanish, and Diné languages. Louis, who has worked as a construction worker and electrician, moves fluently between the literal and symbolic dimensions of work, as he writes in the poem "Electricity": "Any laborer gathered for a tear-out / agrees the pleasure of opening walls/is the view of what's no longer behind." "It takes only the ring of the opening poems in CURRENTS to realize this book does exactly what one hopes a first book will do, bring alive a new, original voice. It's a voice Bojan Lewis not only sustains, but builds, the way, say, a young Sonny Rollins, might shape and vary a singular solo that flows through song after song: raw, kinetic, authentic, a poetry in which language has in common with music the visceral feel of the breathing body behind it."—Stuart Dybek "Bojan Louis' CURRENTS is piercing and polyglot. From the first stark poem, spoken in the voice of a hard-living construction worker in Alaska who regards the sea and thinks of Jonah ('bowel-held / and undigested'), to the last in the voice of Xipe Totec (Nahuatl for Our Lord The Flayed One, as Louis' useful notes tell us), we are swept into a fierce and sublime poetry, part incantatory vision, part caustic critique of government cruelty and injustice toward indigenous peoples. By turns a protest of the earth's poisoning, and as in the title poem, a prayer offered in the Diné 'tradition and knowing,' what CURRENTS crystallizes in these taut poetic concentrates goes straight to our souls: 'The prayer, the prayed to, the offering / and the offered; / the bent back and the harvest.'"—Cynthia Hogue "CURRENTS is charged and luminous under 'butane flame dawn.' Bojan Louis 'stickframesnightmares' into song — in attempt to heal and jolt awake stories in blisteringholler above his homelands of pot-holed desert highways andreservation borders. An electrician by trade, Diné poet Bojan Louis'debut is a multilingual ceremony of electricity, earth and memory,where brokenness is the ground from which our stories continuereaching for Hózhó."—Sherwin Bitsui

Currents

Louis, Bojan

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Books by BkMk Press at the University of Missouri-Kansas City