Possible Crocodiles, Book of the Year for 2010 (Alabama Poetry Society) is Barry Mark's debut full-length poetry book. The poems are witty, self-deprecating, and vulnerable. The collection demands your attention from the first word to the last, always hooking you along on a journey comprised of unexpected twists and meaningful rewards. Barry Marks is a Birmingham attorney whose poetry, fiction, articles and essays have been published in nearly 100 journals, magazines and periodicals over the last 30 years. Mr. Marks was 1998 Alabama State Poetry Society Poet of the Year and his chapbook, There is Nothing Oppressive as a Good Man, won the Society's 2003 Morris Chapbook Competition. A member of the Big Table Poets, his work is featured in that group's anthologies, Poems from the Big Table and Einstein at the Odeon Cafe. He is a past president of the Alabama State Poetry Society and a former Board member of the Alabama Writer's Conclave.

Possible Crocodiles

Literature & Fiction

Marks, Barry

Poetry

Brick Road Poetry Press

Water-Rites deals with cycles of love, loss and the cruelty and beauty found in nature and in humankind. [Ann Michael] plumbs the depths of loss and looks carefully at her surroundings to glean further meanings....The creatures that people her book are also guides, not as easy symbols, but as part of what life at the edge of the wood, and at the edge of the world, offers if observed....The book becomes host to an awareness that nothing can be avoided—we must live here on earth with or without gods or a god.    —Beatrix Gates, author of In the Open   Water-Rites is a meticulous weaving of lyric poems that reinterpret the themes of loss and grief via a language of love and regeneration...the mysteries found in the questions a child asks of her god and the universe, the yearnings found in the questions an adult asks of her body, her mind, and her heart.  The tension . . . happens between the need to hold on to what was and the drive to open her arms to the future…. [In] a series of love poems to her recently-deceased friend, David Dunn . . . the reader is given a microcosm of the [collection] as a whole; the living, the dying, the naming, the water—the endless cycles of life.   —Elena Georgiou, author of Mercy Mercy Me  Ann Michael has found a vast universe in very small places, and every poem is a return to a much-loved landscape. One thinks of William Blake’s “To see a World in a Grain of Sand/And a Heaven in a wild Flower.”   —Harry Humes, author of August Evening with Trumpet   Ann Michael says, “There is nothing wonderful here,” but clearly, she’s wrong, as Water-Rites contains many wonders:  goldfinches, “lovely in the lost way of beautiful things,” the richness of beans that “lie warm / one inch below the earth; uncounted yet,” an ordinary robin’s egg, a yellow-shafted flicker in black and gold tail feathers.  Michael takes us on a journey through the woods of loss and grief in poems that are as clean and clear as water running over stone.  “I know what I daily know,” says Ann Michael, and now we, her readers, know these things, too.  —Barbara Crooker, author of Radiance, Line Dance, and More

Water-Rites

Michael, Ann E.

Bad Behavior catalogs the range and shades of our shared humanity. Michael Steffen’s unblinking gaze is often ironic, which makes his capacity for tenderness even more impressive, as he gives voice to a flood-ruined farmer at a pawn shop, or imagines a convict’s botched execution, a worker having to listen to himself being fired in corporate double-speak, or shows us a son caring for his ill mother. Steffen imagines the past with its unfixable wrongs “stalking us, bumming cigarettes/wearing holes in its shoes,” as if to suggest it is ourselves we give to or refuse. And it is indeed ourselves these poems give back to us, newly tenacious, tenuous and aware. -Betsy Sholl, author, most recently, of Rough Cradle (Alice James Books, 2009)

Bad Behavior

Steffen, Michael

What an astonishing book. Do not miss this. So much calls out to Susanna Lang, "from the back door, from the place they found on the map" - from the richest recesses and most heartbreaking locales on earth, from careful daily attention, deftly woven melodies of knowing and needing to know - you can't read these poems without becoming part of larger history, deeper community, instantly. See "Sunday, the Windows Open." See "Rice." See "Ghazal." These poems, huge in their urgency, massive in their tender care and embrace--elements intertwined as the braided loaves in "Bread." This book deserves a bow. Naomi Shihab Nye, author of You and Yours, Fuel and Words Under the Words These are the poems of someone for whom history almost always takes the form of biography, whether in the life of an ancestor or of a contemporary, whether on the streets of her beloved Chicago or those of Baghdad. For Susanna Lang, history is so intimate that every life touches our own, if we pay attention--even that of a five thousand year old woman who ate, "the same fruit / I eat every morning." Because these poems are rendered with such honesty and compassion, we are invited not only to savor life but to revere it. With remarkable artistry, Lang reminds us that while we may not always wish it, we belong to each other. J. Stephen RhodesSusanna Lang's gracefully deceptive homages to rivers of ancestry and tomorrow weave complex, multi-layered narratives seamlessly, quietly. All threads quilted into dense sonic blankets rich in song and elegy. The quiet surprise, the solo dance all humans share, blurring lines of memory. Gwendolyn Brooks strove to find "the extraordinary in the ordinary." Lang mines the personal and historical geographies of a global citizenry, our collective missteps and buried laughter. Lang observes the tenuous ritual of living and our struggle to make sense of it, somehow. These are the incessant muted pleas of hope in endless wartime, whether the enemy is nature, ideology or self. This is a sensuous, effervescent collection. Quraysh Ali Lansana

Tracing the Lines

Lang, Susanna

“Ace Boggess’s The Prisoners gives voice to those forgotten Americans behind the ever increasing miles of razor wire. Complicated with the mixed emotions of regret and defiance, of loss and perseverance, of hope and frustration, these aren’t just persona poems, nor are they just poems of witness; rather these poems are metaphors, too, for the way each of us may feel jailed by circumstance only to find a kind of freedom in the possibilities of poetry.” —Gerry LaFemina, author of Vanishing Horizon and Notes for the Novice Ventriloquist

The Prisoners

Boggess, Ace

In Carol Tyx’s Rising to the Rim, we are in the presence of a thoughtful and loving sensibility that speaks in a language both energetic and simply put, language that opens a door and invites us in to marvel at what these poems notice—from a red tomato hidden behind its leaves to a revelation in old hiking boots, from the loneliness of an empty house to the red surprise of a raspberry patch ready to give today “what you missed yesterday.” Time and again these poems suggest a mature poet, who has raised children and seen her parents through the end of their lives, a poet who rages deliberately at injustice and muses quietly at falling leaves or the love of a father for his young son. In this moving collection, Carol Tyx observes with great skill and invites us to watch as well, as if such attention and such singing are the practice needed “to learn/how to love everything.” James McKean There is a wise observer in these poems, someone very awake to significant, visionary elements and possibilities in experience—“trying not to close / trying to taste this late afternoon” or “tell me how one moment / stands out, luminous and wet.” Carol Tyx always convinces me in her painterly attention to things that happen, that are, in the world, and her manner and voice are characteristically refreshing, as in “The easiest way to make sure / you love someone well is to / love everything, but we know / how hard that is, don’t we?” The tenderness is unforced. This is a clear and fearless poet who can talk quite naturally to her loneliness, to her bladder, to her bed. Alert to dramas in lives other than her own, she is also unsparing in recording darker moments, diminishments, inevitable declines. Her sometimes stark sadness, her gift for the celebratory, make this a distinctive collection of poems. Michael Dennis Browne

Rising to the Rim

Tyx, Carol

Like a quirky photographer, David Oates has captured moments from life—funny, ironic wistful, poignant, odd, warm, happy and beautiful—and distilled them into short, evocative poems. David is the author of a previous book of similar poems, "Shifting with my Sandwich Hand," and one of stories and poems, "Night of the Potato." He has worked as a reporter, columnist, photographer, comic-strip writer, teacher, poetry-slam organizer and emcee, and editor and publisher of "Monkey," a magazine of satire and slam poetry. He hosted the public-radio shows "Front Porch Stories" and "Great Apes," and is currently the host and producer of Wordland on WUGA, Athens, GA.

Drunken Robins

Oates, David

Marks Dr, Barry

Written in the form of memoir or an old time shipping log, Pain Diary: Working Methadone &amp; The Life &amp; Times of the Man Sawed in Half can be viewed as two free-flowing, stream of consciousness, confessional poems. Both are set in sea-faring locations: New Bedford, home of Herman Melville and birthplace of Moby Dick; and Plymouth, where the Pilgrims settled alongside the Indian tribes of Massachusetts. "Working Methadone," evocatively begins with a section entitled "Call Me Ishmael. I Mean...Call Me, Ishmael!" and is set in a methadone clinic directly across from the Moby Dick Marina. A group home for adolescents provides the background for "The Life &amp; Times of the Man Sawed in Half." In both, Joseph Reich, poet and social worker, explores his work experience with the "chemically dependent," the alienated and ostracized, and integrates it with his own cathartic empathy. Influenced by and echoing such wide-ranging and eclectic sources as Whitman, Cummings, Plath, Kerouac, Ginsberg, Bukowski, Nietzsche, Camus, Sartre, Dostoevsky, and Jim Morrison, among many others, Reich's style and point of view rises out of his own years on the road when, as Bob Dylan put it, "the only thing I knew how to do was to keep on keeping on," which included such jobs as cab driver, grave digger, roofer, long-haul trucker, and, "for a bit of a time, hustling the streets in the black market of San Francisco." While "Pain Diary" is a clinical term for the log kept by patients and clients to detail the moments when they feel most desperate and in crisis, the term is also an excellent descriptive for this one-of-a-kind poetry that seems to spring out of raw emotion in language that is, at one and the same time, natural, spontaneous and desperate--the language of survival.

Pain Diary: Working Methadone & The Life & Times of the Man Sawed in Half

Reich, Joseph D.

M. Ayodele Heath is a poet so fierce, so tender, so (rightly) angry, so generous of heart and spirit that I am 1) grateful, and 2) reminded again and again why I love poetry, why I have reason to love poetry: because it can be like this! — Thomas Lux, author of God Particles In this electrifying first collection of poems, Ayodele Heath explores “otherness” -- Black otherness, Southern otherness, African otherness, his otherness which becomes our otherness and everyone's otherness -- with such heat and such heart and such precision and magic that the words fairly fly off the page. This is language swooning and falling in love with itself; “consonants sharp as fangs and clean/ as bone.” Here are poems “burning the pages in my eyes;” poems that are sharp, hip, sassy and smart as whips, taut as drums; poems full of beauty and horror and passion, unpredictable at every turn. This is the kind of poetry that keeps poetry alive. — Cecilia Woloch, author of Carpathia The words of M. Ayodele Heath are ‘a foam which knows no foreign shore.’ With his latest collection, Otherness, Heath bathes us in pools flooded with humankind’s purest mind. A golden tongued man teaching the tone deaf to dance, his beat filled heart pulsing arrhythmic codes to the misbegotten, one eye witnesses the gore and the other praises glory. Open this book and allow this high priest of prosody to reveal the secrets of okra seeds germinating beneath the djembe’s skin. — Robert Earl Price poet/ playwright M. Ayodele Heath’s Otherness is many-voiced, peopled with a rich and real throng of speakers clamoring to have their say. Heath seems part stage director, part mimic, part ventriloquist as he channels and divines and ultimately bears witness to this subject of “otherness,” the history and repercussions of race in America and abroad. His ear is outrageously good, his music rangy, unswerving, and often dizzyingly ambitious. This is a remarkable first collection. — Paula McLain, author of Less of Her, Stumble, Gorgeous and The Paris Wife

Otherness

Heath, M. Ayodele

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Books by Brick Road Poetry Press

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

Possible Crocodiles

Water-Rites

Bad Behavior

Tracing the Lines

The Prisoners

Rising to the Rim

Drunken Robins

Possible Crocodiles

Pain Diary: Working Methadone & The Life & Times of the Man Sawed in Half

Otherness