Fiction. PLEASE STAY ON THE TRAIL: A COLLECTION OF COLORADO FICTION collects 10 stories from 10 of the state's most invigorating contemporary voices. This book was designed to showcase the rich writing talent located in the state, and the selected stories highlight a variety of short fiction formats. Six of the ten authors collected have previously published or forthcoming full length books. The authors range in accomplishment; from Denver's Poet Laureate, Chris Ransick, to Alison Flowers-a recent graduate of Regis University's undergraduate degree program. Editor Matthew Hudson writes: "More than twenty Colorado universities and colleges teach fiction writing, several of which publish their own highly regarded literary journals...I never found a collection like this, and when I didn't, I did some research and decided to create one." PLEASE STAY ON THE TRAIL is a finalist for a 2007 Colorado Book Award in the anthology/collection category.

Please Stay On The Trail: A Collection of Colorado Fiction

Literature & Fiction

United States

Black Ocean

Cultural Writing. Politics. Memoir. What started as the angry scribblings of a caterer in Florida evolved into much more as the infamous Al-Qaeda soon became Scott Creney's closest confidante in this accidental memoir of letters to the world's most notorious terror organization. Scott lived in Florida in 2004 and worked as a caterer. In a world were nothing seemed to make sense anymore, and even television seemed like another hostile face of humanity, Scott began writing to someone whom he imagined was as bitter and confused as he: Al-Qaeda. Alone, in debt and utterly broke, Scott's day-to-day struggles to stay afloat, both financially and mentally, are a fascinating look at America from an outsider's perspective. Through engaging and at times disarmingly beautiful prose, Scott represents the voice of a new class of Americans-college-educated, but in debt and often unemployed. He is a member of an emerging generation of Americans who are worse-off than their parents, and who are struggling just to clear the poverty line. He puts his finger on the pulse of what it means to be an American, and how confused those meanings have become to all of us.

Dear Al-Qaeda: Letters to the World's Most Notorious Terror Organization

Creney, Scott

Essays & Correspondence

The first full-length collection from Cisewski showcases the best work from this Minneapolis-based poet who has graced the pages of literary journals across the country for the past decade. These poems, full of charm and wit, demonstrate an airy playfulness even as they confront isolation and loss. We were lucky enough to lure her from the bright lights of more prominent poetry contests and prizes, and it is with great enthusiasm that we present her work to you.

Upon Arrival

Cisewski, Paula

Poetry

Poetry. THE MAN SUIT, a darkly comic debut from poet Zachary Schomburg, assembles a macabre cast of doppelgängers, talking animals and dead presidents in poems that explore concepts of identity, truth and fate. The resulting body of work walks a dynamic line—often reading like anecdotal fables or cautionary tales in the form of prose poems. Through it all, Schomburg balances irony with sincerity; wit with candor; and a playful tone with the knowledge of inevitable sorrow. "The often funny yet haunting prose and verse poems of this eagerly anticipated debut deal with the subtle and unexpected ways things can transform, usually just beneath an observer's awareness.... Schomburg may be one of the sincerest surrealists around."—Publishers Weekly "Zachary Schomburg is a wildly imaginative poet who will take you many places you've never been or even dreamed of, always with grace and quirky humor. Whether you are caught in Abraham Lincoln's Death Scene or the Sea of Japan, you are certain to enjoy the original vision of this highly entertaining poet. It's a book like no other."—James Tate "Zachary Schomburg's THE MAN SUIT comes to us from the past but it is a thoroughly new book. It comes to us out of the familiar and it strikes us in the face with its novelty. You will recognize your own history, the history of our nation, the influence of Mad Magazine and Benjamin Peret. And underneath it all, and what holds it all together, however unlikely, is the deep and abiding love of the little things that make up our days."—Matthew Rohrer "It is a rare and fine thing when a poet momentarily affiliates his words and his cadences with the entirety of a world, thus freeing his poem from all burden of mediation, all transgression. In our own era, René Char and Pablo Neruda come most vividly to mind in this regard. With THE MAN SUIT, Zachary Schomburg, quietly but with deep conviction, begins to join their company. His book is a blessing."—Donald Revell

The Man Suit

Schomburg, Zachary

Poetry. OBJECTS FOR A FOG DEATH is a series of odes to images and objects, and to the "you" responsible for distancing these images and objects from mortal relationships. With this distance comes a profound desire and a heightening awareness of earthly proximity. Through the accompanying hypnagogic verses, oceans quiet the voice while disorientation hurls it into a temporary place—hovering overhead or shying away in the murk. Is a river an object? Is fog an object? Or for that matter, is fog a place? Behind this book lies a call for rescue from confinement and immobility, from the ineffability of touch. Out of this fog springs forth the coeval shriek of something that will not be reduced to love.

Objects for a Fog Death

Doxsee, Julie

This series of poems by Black Ocean Press' Poetry Editor in Chicago embodies its title perfectly as it explores the paradox of form and function in life and language. Quiet without being subdued, intelligent without being obtuse, and deeply affecting without resorting to melodrama, this book carries itself into the reader with arresting honesty and simplicity that is at once harsh and elegant. "Her spare lyrics emphasize the role of the individual surrounded with the ineffable qualities of silence and empty space: 'If there is a footnote to absence,' she writes, 'it is the beating heart.'"-Coldfront Magazine.

A Useless Window

Adams, Carrie Olivia

Poetry. "Rauan Klassnik's HOLY LAND is not a book for the faint of heart. His poems—dreamlike fables that conflate the domestic and quotidian with the dangerous and the perverse—are bathed in tears and blood: a trip to the bank becomes a journey to Auschwitz; bullets and gore find equivalence in rivers, birds and lush grass. In Klassnik's startling vision, 'the world knows what you want, and it knows what you need. It brings you bodies. And it brings you a gun."—Gary Young

Holy Land

Klassnik, Rauan

Contemporary

Poetry. Translated from the Swedish by Johannes Göransson. In this, her first single-volume collection to be published in English, Aase Berg works a wicked necromancy in her poems. Filling each page with fluids and viscera she plunges into the palpable, pulsating center of our psyche—pulling up fistfuls of nightmares at once strange and familiar. To read this book is to glimpse the ecstasy you always suspected lay at the heart of every rapturous horror. WITH DEER [Hos rådjur] was Berg's first full-length book of poetry, originally published in Sweden in 1996. Since then she has published four more books in her native language, exploring the divine terror throbbing beneath the surface of a naturalistic and barely human world. "Oh, you have taken it too far, Aase Berg, on this field trip to dismember an apocalyptic body that is self-bomb, culture-bomb; you are scratching at the interior of the bomb that has no exterior. Amusedly, bombastically, terrifyingly you scratch. Johannes Görannson's translation is lush and boldly guttural and the two of you have my intestines by a leash. 'One by one you turned my faces up / toward the sun's surface / and drank them like deer water.'"—Cathy Wagner

With Deer

Berg, Aase

History & Criticism

Poetry. SCAPE, a poised and attentive debut collection by Joshua Harmon, engages with various landscapes--from the constructed and debased world of parking lots, potato chip factories, and cul-de-sac traceries to the "rural equation" of woods, fields, and "clouds' crumpled page" to create a series of conversations and engagements with the idea of the natural. Through his precise observations, Harmon defines landscape--the word and the idea--through an insightful and meticulous relationship with language. For Harmon, landscape is never static; instead his poems map a constantly changing terrain, in which the interior is imposed on the exterior as a frame for seeing it. "In SCAPE, Joshua Harmon reaches deep into the resources of our rich English, renewing the language and creating from it a physical and emotional world completely his own: his incisive and richly musical stanzas have an ever-returning vigor and freshness"--Lydia Davis.

Scape

Harmon, Joshua

Poetry. SCARY, NO SCARY, the follow-up to Zachary Schomburg's acclaimed first collection of poems THE MAN SUIT, is a book of skeleton gloves and skeleton keys—at once dark and playful. With loneliness and levity Schomburg takes the reader on a tour through a liminal world of dream-logic, informed by its own myth and folklore. Here there are new kinds of trees and new ways of naming the ages; jaguars and an abandoned hotel on the horizon. This book will crawl inside your chest and pump lava through your blood.

Scary, No Scary

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Books by Black Ocean