"Reading, Just Drive, Robert Cooperman's poetic saga of driving cab in NYC, seems to me a variation of a Taoist theme I used to explain my years working as a barman, 'If you stay in one place long enough, everything that can happen, will.' The fares Bob describes, his fellow hacks, the crazy dispatcher, will all be familiar to anyone who has worked in the service industry or who regularly enjoys good narrative poetry. Wherever it is you need to go in this 'Divine Comedy' of the human condition, Just Drive, takes you there. Hop in and enjoy the ride. And don't forget the tip." --Alan Catlin, award winning poet of Alien Nation

Just Drive

Literature & Fiction

Cooperman, Robert

Poetry

Brick Road Poetry Press, Inc.

Poetry. BATTLE SLEEP by Shannon Tate Jonas is the winner of the 2014 Brick Road Poetry Book Award. In his stunning first collection BATTLE SLEEP, Shannon Jonas's poems casts such deep spells that their abiding voicings go under as well, as if poetry were also beneath the surfaces, an interior face of change. And the spells break, as they must, mid-lyric, again and again, for wounds, for losses and betrayals and exiles so willingly heard out that distance becomes a welcome medium. Frank Stanford summoned not from literary consensus but from a living consciousness. The dead and the alive, not drowning. And forgiveness as boundary crosser unto perpetuity. There is searing consolation here, the sort that returns trust to poetry. -William Olsen, author of AVENUE OF VANISHING

Battle Sleep

Jonas, Shannon Tate

Advance Praise for AMBUSHING WATER by Danielle Hanson   Danielle Hanson must be the incarnation of Gaston Bachelard's ideal poet, a poet who acutely observes a world as she makes it new. With a vocabulary of images as diverse as slugs, animals, flowers, constellations and emotions, as well as startling situations, she brings us a surrealistic vision that also reads like a rational explanation. A poem titled "Eating His Dead Wife" gives us one side, a bird eating the reflection of a building gives us another. When she travels, her succinct, epigrammatic descriptions reveal more than most poets can in much longer poems: "The cobblestones were tense and / looking for crumbs. The sea / waiting to devour the sun," she says about Puerto Angel. This is an amazing first book, book I cherish, for every page I turn makes me see the world differently, astoundingly, reverently. It's a book that never ends.   --Richard Jackson, author of fourteen books of poems, including TRAVERSINGS, with Robert Vivian, OUT OF PLACE (Ben Franklin Award), and RESONANCE (Eric Hoffer Award).   Danielle Hanson's new book AMBUSHING WATER has a deliberate clarity that vibrates through her music and imagery like a crystal glass tapped gently with the bright butter knife. Danielle has always written the most original, provocative yet inevitable love poems. She is simply brilliant.   --Norman Dubie, international recipient of the 2016 Griffin Poetry Prize and author of twenty-eight collections of poetry, including THE QUOTATIONS OF BONE.   So often in this collection, the circumstance in a single poem offers an unlikely though compelling route into intimacy--"eating his dead wife's ashes / in his cereal every morning" for example--until the circumstances build to near breaking and the poems show themselves as a constant, valiant, smart struggle to keep the always-vulnerable speaker above water. So many new words are quietly and easily introduced to the world--earthfish, rainstars, mooncat, slugquistadores, sky-puddles--which seems appropriate in these efforts at finding new places to find purchase, new ways to hold on. The poems repeatedly find that new ground, and as readers we hold on just as firmly as the speaker every time.   --Alberto Rios, Arizona's first poet laureate and author of ten books and chapbooks of poetry, including A SMALL STORY ABOUT THE SKY, three collections of short stories, and a memoir.   AMBUSHING WATER is compelling in its restraint: lyricism is deepened and amplified in these often short, always indelible poems. Danielle Hanson writes of the mysteries of the natural world: "How laughable is the moon / as an equal sign." This interrogation of worlds, inner and outer, the self and the earth, gives this collection its transformative power and renders everything new and strange and beautiful.   --Paul Guest, author of four full-length poetry collections, including MY INDEX OF SLIGHTLY HORRIFYING KNOWLEDGE, and a memoir, ONE MORE THEORY ABOUT HAPPINESS.

Ambushing Water

Hanson, Danielle

Steve McDonald's CREDO is an accomplished, thoughtful, and infinitely engaging book. The beautifully crafted poems of this, McDonald's second full-length collection, take us many places: correctional facilities, Catholic churches, Jeffers's Hawk Tower, and Costco, but above all remain deeply rooted in soil, like the poems of Seamus Heaney. Each of the twelve sections of the book--the twelve "steps"--moves between the conviction that all life is transitory and the equally strong conviction that there is "immortality," or as McDonald defines it, a "once more, one more breath." Intelligent, honest, straightforward, these poems are a joy to spend time with. Each one reaffirms the faith that poetry matters. --Gail Wronsky, author of IMPERFECT PASTORALSCREDO is an intimate and beautiful collection drawn from one man's life. But it goes far beyond that to show us the commonality of our lives, rooted in rich physicality, growing in failure and humility and the heart breaking open. Through vivid language and well-chosen images, these poems bring us closer together. In the opening poem, "Step 1," Steve McDonald writes about reading a child's storybook to inmates at a women's prison, and we too become those listeners, gathered round, "wide-open eyes of lifers / brimming at the well of story." --Ellen Bass, author of LIKE A BEGGARThese are the poems of idea and story, dense with the images of daily life, its tattoos and churches, its children and rain. They follow the pattern of a man's recovery, his laughter and grief, his landscape and hope, his nostalgia and his desire. --Joseph Millar, author of KINGDOM

Credo

Steve McDonald

"Erin Murphy's invented form, the demi-sonnet, is small but alarmingly penetrative....These poems, simultaneously eerie and straightforward, exert a cumulative effect as they disclose the haunted domestic." --Claire Bateman, author of SCAPE and LOCALS "Murphy chisels words down to their musical rawness, providing us a poetry so well-wrought it is unforgettable, a charm against time's erasure." --James Allen Hall, author of NOW YOU'RE THE ENEMY ASSISTED LIVING by Erin Murphy is comprised of seventy-two demi-sonnets, a seven-line poetic form that she devised. The poems encompass the life span experience, ranging from childhood to aging and caregiving. A section is devoted to poems based on Murphy's late mother-in-law, Ann Palmer De Prospo, an accomplished pianist who was the leader of the Major Bowes All-Girl Band in the 1930s. De Prospo died in 2013 at the age of 99. Poems from this Brick Road Prize-winning collection have appeared in BARRELHOUSE, REVIEW AMERICANA, THE SUMMERSET REVIEW, CHEAT RIVER REVIEW, and elsewhere. A selection of the poems was published in the chapbook REMORSE CODE as part of the Seven Kitchens Press Keystone Chapbook Series. Erin Murphy is the author of six previous collections of poetry, including ANCILLA (Lamar University Press) and editor of three anthologies, including MAKING POEMS: FORTY POEMS WITH COMMENTARY BY THE POETS (SUNY Press) and the forthcoming BODIES OF TRUTH: PERSONAL NARRATIVES ON ILLNESS, DISABILITY, AND MEDICINE (University of Nebraska Press). Her awards include the Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Prize, the Foley Poetry Award, the National Writers' Union Poetry Award judged by Donald Hall, and The Normal School Poetry Prize judged by Nick Flynn. She is professor of English and creative writing at Penn State University, Altoona College. Learn more at www.erin-murphy.com.

Assisted Living

Murphy, Erin

In a kind of literary trompe l'oeil, Jackie Craven's marvelous first full-length collection is ultimately about the invisible--and only sometimes benign--subterfuge beneath what appears authentic. Sassy or respectful, elegiac or terse, her poems give us a world paradoxically "dark and bright, strange, [yet] familiar." Whether in the guise of investigating various particulars of creating art, or exploring the complicated emotional layers within human relationships, Craven reveals secrets, keeping me turning pages, wanting more of her fine work. --Andrea Hollander, author of BLUE MISTAKEN FOR SKY This book is a life, a collection of interwoven lives, revealed by imagination. It is a meditation on childhood, age, artistic vision, family and death. The language is crisp, inventive, and the poems brilliantly shaped, full of surprise and a sense of the finality of their form, which often seems like precise dramatic timing. And with this mastery of the art, a sense of lives grasped and held close. It is hard to believe that this is a first book, it is so wonderfully accomplished. --Barry Goldensohn, author of SNAKE IN THE SPINE, WOLF IN THE HEART Jackie Craven is a triple threat: her poems are visually acute, sonically gorgeous, and imaginatively transporting. She herself is a Master. Open anywhere, and you won't want to stop. BUY. THIS. BOOK. --Barbara Ungar, author of CHARLOTTE BRONTË, YOU RUINED MY LIFE and IMMORTAL MEDUSA

Secret Formulas & Techniques of the Masters

Craven, Jackie

Gary Stein is a poet in the spirit of Blake, Frost, and William Carlos Williams. In Stein's poetry, the ideas are always in little things that touch larger things, and the world is revealed in a squirrel dying, a car being washed, a clock falling from a wall. To read poems such as "The Cremationist's Day Off," "Travels in Time," and "On My 50th Birthday" is to know you are in the presence of a poet who is a master of language. TOURING THE SHADOW FACTORY is a magnificent book.--Miles David Moore, author of THE BEARS OF PARIS AND ROLLERCOASTERWhat tours, what shadows in what factory are here, in these haunting poems of memory, love, and legend? Stein's poems focus on the father, now a shade, a gifted, patient carver and craftsman who "knew the soul of wood" and long ago brought his young son into his workshop. The poet-son, now grown, pursues the craft of words, of story-making, of would not wood, with kindred, altered skills. And wonders and blesses, in his turn, what shadows and what skills, what callings, his own now-grown sons will now pursue.--Judith McCombs, author of THE HABIT OF FIRE: POEMS SELECTED & NEWGary Stein's TOURING THE SHADOW FACTORY is a meditation on time, memory, and loss--from the ghosts of the past to "the soft blur of the] future." In poems both precise and masterfully understated, Stein explores the human condition of being in many times at once, carrying our childhoods with us as we age, expectant about what might be coming: "Each night the next miracle." --Maggie Smith, author of THE WELL SPEAKS OF ITS OWN POISON & GOOD BONES

Touring the Shadow Factory

Stein, Gary

It's a pleasure to welcome this assured new poetry collection from Raphael Kosek. Large as its title is--AMERICAN MYTHOLOGY--the poems rise to its challenge. Whether orchestrating her response to landscapes actual or painted (her startling poems on the work of Georgia O'Keeffe offer a splendid set of meditations on what's going on in any O'Keeffe painting), or navigating with skill, feeling, and clear-eyed courage the choppy waters of personal relationships, the reader can always trust the authenticity both of thought, observation and feeling. What I admire throughout, is the sense of urgency under an often deceptively quiet surface, at once absorbed and appalled by the ordinary day. "Isn't everything we do serious?" she asks--and these poems acknowledge the truth of this, while remaining light of touch, deft of manner, clean of language, with a ripple of anxious muscle under their skin, so that "truth comes unexpected," for it is "truth" she's after. --Eamon Grennan, author of THERE NOW Raphael Kosek's AMERICAN MYTHOLOGY is a fine debut collection. The mythology she explores is as much personal as it is national. In the title poem, she says, "I've never been out west / but the frontier is in my bones." Kosek assesses her world with a painterly eye. She writes of the "murderous beauty of bright things" and tells us "the Black Hills are not really black / but green and gray like Cezanne's mountains." Elsewhere, she says, "I want to write the poem . . . that won't stop bleeding." And she has. Repeatedly. --Charles Rafferty, author of THE SMOKE OF HORSES Raphael Helena Kosek investigates sacred spaces in AMERICAN MYTHOLOGY, dismantling domestic landscapes, paintings by Georgia O'Keeffe, and archetypes of the western frontier, where buffalo and antelope roam. As with grace, "The truth comes unexpected," she reminds us--in the course of finding a missing button, "while washing parsley at the sink," observing the "stark calligraphy" of crows in flight or hanging a "faded military flag." Crisscrossing multiple terrains of heart and imagination, and as declared in "Ars Poetica," hers are poems "that will break your window." --Pauline Uchmanowicz, author of STARFISH

American Mythology

Kosek, Raphael

"Remarkable actress and dazzling poet Beth Ruscio knows both the many masks we wear and those singular performances we each live to give. In SPEAKING PARTS, her powerful and deeply moving new collection of poems, we become the audience to the self and its many faces, some public and some familial, some romantic, yet some hidden until, at last, they are suddenly revealed. The elegant enactments and lyrical mediations of Speaking Parts remind us that to speak for others also allows us to speak most eloquently for those many interior aspects of ourselves. In this inventive and precisely staged book of poetry, those disparate voices braid together into a single luminous choir." -David St. John, author of THE AURORAS "Buoying us fearlessly through theatrical make-up sessions, costume changes, death, love, and itchy wigs, the luminous poems in Beth Ruscio's debut collection SPEAKING PARTS speak to us in a language that's inviting, insightful, and alive. Even while acknowledging that 'sorrow bleaches us, ' and observing that there's a 'grammar of danger in the color if ice, ' these poems somehow always uplift. Confident and poised, they own the stage of these pages. I am on my feet, applauding them and their maker." -Gail Wronsky, author of IMPERFECT PASTORALS "Reading SPEAKING PARTS, I'm reminded of Marlon Brando's response to the praise lavished on his (arguably spectacular) acting skills: 'Everybody acts, ' he'd shrug. Precisely! In Beth Ruscio's ingenious, turn-on-a-dime poems, performance is all. There is no 'true' self for her speaker to uncover, and no canned epiphanies for readers, either. There are only the unsparing imperatives of improvisation-timing, cunning, abandon, ruse. Each moment's desire met and then deflected. What does it take to play our/selves? Everything." -Dorothy Barresi, author of WHAT WE DID WHILE WE MADE MORE GUNS

Speaking Parts

Ruscio, Beth

"Ace Boggess's ESCAPE ENVY is a book of reckoning, a poetry collection that takes clear-eyed but tender measure of what we lose when we lose ourselves-to addiction, heartache, incarceration, and to time's ravenous passage. In richly layered love poems, elegies, and portraits of minor catastrophes, Boggess examines what imprisons us and what can set us free. Sometimes, the beauty of a rose garden saves us as "[w]e breathe in until we suffocate / from pleasure." Sometimes, a person's recollected love continues, despite long absence, to salvage us "again & again ad infinitum." And always, there are poems, like these poems, offering us succor, singing us home." -Francesca Bell, author of BRIGHT STAIN

Escape Envy

Boggess, Ace

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