Poetry. Ronald Johnson (1935-1998), one of the most original American poets of the last century, wrote poems that were striking for both their minute observation as well as for their formal invention. Guy Davenport describes Johnson's work as being "poetry with a passion for exact, even scientific scrutiny." This volume, edited by Peter O'Leary, is a collection of Johnson's final poems, condensed and cosmic mediations on death and the natural world—"the halftones of reality/of veritable life/a various weave of stuff."

The Shrubberies

Literature & Fiction

JOHNSON, RONALD

Poetry

Flood Editions

Poetry. GONE TO EARTH is Pam Rehm's first book in six years, and one of startling clarity and precision. These poems address isolation and companionship in modern life, and search for what is necessary- in regards to both poetry and belief. In praise of her previous work, Robert Creely has said, "She makes each edge of sound, of a word's various meanings, articulate with impeccable art." Rehm is the author of four previous volumes of poetry including TO GIVE IT UP, a winner of the 1994 National Poetry Series award.

Gone To Earth

Rehm, Pam

Poetry. ON THE CAVE YOU LIVE IN is Philip Jenks' first full-length collection. His poems are both intimate and strange, encompassing personal history and the politics of Appalachia, epileptic seizures and Baptist glossolalia, memory cells and Kentucky coal mines. His cave describes the limits of what's known, and his poems explore the "spaces between the aura and the jolt." "At various turns hieratic and profane, their blur the blur--in equal parts--of the confessed and the prophetic, these poems direct us to the language that starts just past 'that point/ where nothing is not.' Cassandra lives there; and Stein--and so does Philip Jenks"--Carl Phillips.

On the Cave You Live In

Jenks, Philip

Poetry. Tom Pickard's poems are by turns erotic and political, pastoral and urban. They make use of everyday speech with formal inventiveness and sophistication. He is the author of six individual volumes of poetry, including FUCKWIND, available at SPD. "Song sings itself in these poems. Their heart is clarity, spoken. Why shouldn't the music lead and the heart follow-and mind be the wonder of their witness? This is a great poetry made of such common life, each word a step along the way"-Robert Creeley.

Hole in the Wall: New & Selected Poems

Pickard, Tom

Fiction. Largely set in Boston, Fanny Howe's ECONOMICS examines with an unwavering eye the necessary errors of the 1960s liberalism and consequences of cold war politics. A white liberal couple adopts a black child with troubling results; two old friends from the Kennedy campaign meet years later to discover how different their lives have become; a separated working-class couple drives to the Cape in order to collect the prize from an instant lotto game. In each story, love is eroded by class expectations and financial pressures, by racial tensions and ideological hypocrisies. As a result ECONOMICS offers a raw portrait of the last three decades that is at once comic and devastating.

Economics (Flood Editions)

HOWE, FANNY

Contemporary

Poetry. Hoover writes of ceaseless change in life and culture, seeking to capture "the unrelenting/rush of things/in their freezing." These poems glide seamlessly from philosophy to family to American landscapes, all observed with keen wit as well as melancholy. Gillian Conoley has accurately referred to the "appetitive inclusionary impulse" of Hoover's work. Yet for all its exuberance, WINTER (MIRROR) expresses quiet wonder at the impenetrable surfaces of experience: "Simple things like bread,/you can't even think about them." "There is a cool precision in these poems, a striking aptness in the marrying of word to word. And in many of them, there is an unexpected tenderness only half-masked by Hoover's allegiance to exploring and mapping language's inherent imperfection"--Mary Jo Bang on "Viridian."

Winter (Mirror)

Hoover, Paul

Poetry. Drawing equally on Buddhist sutras and country blues, William Fuller's SADLY derives compassion from its ironic vision. Quick and sometimes elusive, these poems observe fluctuations in economic markets, the weather, and human consciousness. "Despite the confession that the 'nonexistence of essences is a pain in my heart,' these poems remain confident of 'the insubordination of many/ thousand aggregates swirling up the light pole.' And they generously share that confidence with the reader in return for a politic hope: 'if we could only stand back/ as "they" rather than "us."' Hitting the marvelous heights of his earlier collection, AETHER, SADLY finds Fuller's 'sloping toward heaven/ but not parasitic on it'"—Simon Perril.

Sadly

William Fuller

As in Every Deafness

Foust, Graham W.

Poetry. Simply one of the most admired and imitated poets of her generation, Lisa Jarnot's third volume of poetry does what only Jarnot can do. Decidedly lyrical, always reliant on repetition and rhythm, what emergies in this book is a catalog of loves and laments: "Just the eldergrass and him, the fog, unpoliced and safe inside the train, the thoughts of rain, Apollo, and the sun..." As Stan Brackage has said of Jarnot, "[H]er words are never severed from the means that engendered them; and the consequent meanings are never detached from the meditative drama of each whole poem."

Black Dog Songs (Flood Editions)

Jarnot, Lisa

Poetry. SURFACES is John Tipton's first full-length collection of poems. Here is a world of Cartesian precision, where matrices and Markov chains are revealed by the lattice of snowfall and the improbable order of ants. Yet the irrational and the absurd are not exiled from these poems, warping and defining their contours instead: "here the geography is the horizon here / Oklahoma moves him in ways he regrets . . ."

Surfaces (Flood Editions)

Tipton, John

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

Books by Flood Editions