Literary Nonfiction. Essays. In the first installment of the two-volume collection WHERE THE STREETS ARE PAVED WITH RUST, journalist and former Obama and Clinton campaign advisor Bruce Fisher explores wealth, poverty, hopes, and illusions in America's struggling north. In these essays about Rust Belt communities, Fisher carefully but vigorously challenges. He tackles real-estate developers; knocks liberals who won't embrace metro government; excoriates conservatives for their racist code-words; nudges us to revisit the debate between Heidegger and Cassirer; and explains the brilliance of streetcars and urban wildlife, the persistence of black male workforce exclusion, the centrality of water quality, and many other issues that shape cities. Fisher takes deep dives into data, scholarship, and history--as he does nearly weekly for The Public, Western New York's leading independent weekly newspaper. Fisher's scope is broad, he wears his erudition lightly, and his work is ever about crossing boundaries--in celebration of what's to be found across the line. "The financial decline of the middle class is the issue of our time. Bruce Fisher's WHERE THE STREETS ARE PAVED WITH RUST is a must read for anyone seriously trying to understand why it happened and how to fix it."--Ted Kaufman "To understand Rust Belt politics, you can't do better than to read Bruce Fisher's excellent essay collection. A multi-generational son of Buffalo, Fisher brings erudition, wit, and heart to these studies, with a deep understanding of regional history, cultural geography, and public policy. Forget the Big Foot journalists suddenly traveling around interviewing random locals at the diner in the Age of Trump. Local journalist Bruce Fisher tells you everything you need to know, through the prism of Buffalo, about culture and politics in flyover country."--Catherine Tumber

Where The Streets Are Paved With Rust: Essays From America's Broken Heartland, Vol. 1

Literature & Fiction

FISHER, BRUCE

Essays & Correspondence

Foundlings Press

Poetry. Literary Nonfiction. CONSTANT STRANGER spotlights the accomplishments and enduring influence of the poet Frank Stanford (1948-1978). The book comprises a mix of republished and brand-new tributes, translations, recollections, critical essays, interviews, and more. "CONSTANT STRANGER collects 'tributes' and dedicatory poems by Wright, Ralph Adamo, Forrest Gander, Ada Limón and others; recollections; literary-critical studies; a handful of poems translated into Spanish; and 'after Frank Stanford,' twenty-one poems by mostly young poets clearly both intrigued and troubled by Stanford's unsettling legacy. Some of the most compelling pieces in the volume scratch at or, in the case of Ginny Crouch Stanford's spellbinding prose poem 'Requiem,' explode the myth of this 'swamprat Rimbaud' (as Lorenzo Thomas called him) without diminishing the pull of his poetic imagination or the lure of his storytelling powers. Others demonstrate how the striking imagery, forceful rhythms and complex allusiveness of his best poems transcend any pigeonholing of his work as Southern regionalism. Two critical essays tackle the multiple registers and stream-of-consciousness structure of The Battlefield, a work that one admirer opined might be 'our Ulysses.' "Despite such bold comparisons and a growing number of young acolytes, Stanford remains on the margins of American literature, particularly in the academy. Two fine studies in this volume by young American scholars who completed postgraduate work on Stanford--not in New Haven or Berkeley but rather in Dublin and Lund--only reaffirm the outsider status of his advocates. Yet Stanford's work once attracted admiring responses from John Berryman and Allen Ginsberg and has continued to fascinate such different near-contemporaries as Ellen Gilchrist and Eileen Myles. The diverse voices assembled in CONSTANT STRANGER suggest the time is right for common readers to discover this 'poet's poet' as well."--Leo A. Lensing, The Times Literary Supplement "CONSTANT STRANGER offers readers a place to explore and to problematize the wholly unique effects of his poems, and to grapple with the charismatic but flawed poet behind them... As a whole, CONSTANT STRANGER creates the sensation that to commune with Frank Stanford is to become lost in a labyrinth of poetry, personality, and myth, which itself is woven into an idealized, rural South... The anthology is an excellent catalyst and aid to continue puzzling over Frank Stanford."--Jack Christian, Rain Taxi Review Contributors include Ralph Adamo, Donald Berger, Adam Clay, Gerry Crinnin, Paul Dean, Leo Dunsker, Noah Falck, Patricio Ferrari, Forrest Gander, Zack Grabosky, Anya Groner, Graciela Susana Guglielmone, R.S. Gwynn, Terrance Hayes, Canese Jarboe, Justin Karcher, Sophie Klahr, Ada Limon, Ata Moharreri, Bridget O'Bernstein, Murray Shuggars, Ginny Crouch Stanford, Steve Stern, Jody Stewart, Leon Stokesbury, Bronwen Tate, Brad Trumpfheller, A.P. Walton, Chet Weise, John Wood, C.D. Wright, David Wright.

Constant Stranger: After Frank Stanford

History & Criticism

Poetry. "Ansie Baird's new book is a lovely mix of wit, emotional range, and craft--a craft that responds to each of its poetic occasions in a voice that has been tutored through her earlier collections to be sharp, humorous, intelligent, able to be at once acerbic and honestly emotional. PORCH WATCH--with its implication of constant vigil--is full of warm appreciations of friends, of elegies that compose the broken heart into a right ritual of mourning: into, indeed, a style of blessing, each one scattered where she wants all her friends' ashes to be scattered 'in the fields of praise.' I love the jaunty fortitude of these poems, each one demonstrating (without a trace of self pity or self indulgence) how a rendered life, shadows and all, can be taken on, fully engaged with. 'True things,' she says, 'make up the miracles of your life.' Her poems are just such big-hearted, open-eyed true things."--Eamon Grennan

Porch Watch

Baird, Ansie

Poetry

Poetry. Winner of the Foundlings Press Wallace Award for poetry chapbooks. Nicholas Molbert's GOODNESS GRACIOUS explores creation, distance, landscapes, and the passing of lives. As cover artist Edreys Wajed puts it, "These poems are light as feathers, hit hard as bricks." "'Tell me the Lord's no better a creator / than we are,' challenges the stunning opener, 'Hurricane Season.' 'I've taken things too &amp; / moved them to what I thought were better places.' GOODNESS GRACIOUS follows life in a small Louisiana town through a series of evocative vignettes: fishing trout out of Bayou DuLarge, disposing of canefield rats flattened by a tractor, or an unkindness of ravens keeping watch over an above-ground pool. Nicholas Molbert has a knack for noting period brands--Natty Light, Eggos, Sketchers, Swifter--quirky particulars that offset the eternal grief attached to losing a family patriarch. As climate change and American industry apply ever more pressure to rural communities, these poems wear dirt under their fingernails and blood on their sleeves; they are vital, beautifully shaped, and timely."--Sandra Beasley "Charged with memory and desire, haunted by heaven and lineage, Nicholas Molbert's poems are sluiced with physical and spiritual longing, unexpectedly tender, sometimes funny, and always moving. He pairs gritty details and startling images in lines alive with lyrical pulses: 'See the neighbor's girl scraping / flattened canefield rats / from tractor ruts with paper / twice-halved,' and 'lay them in a penny-layered / shoebox like the bones of small gods...' His Gulf is intricately painted, one of bayous and creosote and catfish, one of blue collar work and roughneck truths, one of dreams and unlikely redemptions, where the beauty and danger of the natural world is juxtaposed with the human, where an 'electric knife's bijou blades / sing to softbelly,' just before a girl cuts 'through the tender canal / of her wrist between / radius and ulna,' and where 'Let there bes' are heard alongside 'rig talk.' Molbert's GOODNESS GRACIOUS is an assured debut."--Mark Wagenaar "GOODNESS GRACIOUS indeed! Molbert vividly reimagines the southern Louisiana of his youth and turns a keen, questioning eye toward manhood, faith, family, and love. These lyrical, emotionally resonant poems draw readers into evocative memories and storytelling. Not afraid of hope, humor, or the whims that make us human, this debut collection shines like sunlight on the waters of the Gulf."--Janice N. Harrington

Goodness Gracious

Molbert, Nicholas

Poetry. California Interest. Latinx Studies. Jewish Studies. Strays is a project celebrating language loved, lost, and rediscovered. Printed and hand-bound in Buffalo by the Foundlings team, books in the Strays series capture experiments, excerpts, odd sequences, found poetry, and material from the cutting floor. Strays hang together, and are never sold individually--only in packs. Each cover features the poet's interpretation of the Foundlings logo and brandmark, Wally. PACK 2 (WINTER 2019) includes three individual, hand-bound books by Ralph Angel, Robin Lee Jordan, and Ata Moharreri.

Strays Pack 2 (Winter 2019)

Angel, Ralph

Jordan, Robin Lee

Moharreri, Ata

Strays Pack 3: Ramon Garcia, Richard Jackson, Jakob Maier

Jackson, Richard

García, Ramón

Maier, Jakob

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