A prolific poet, David Case rarely sent his work to journals; instead, he shared his poems, often via email, with friends around the world. As years passed, poems were added to and deleted from The Tarnation of Faust, the manuscript he worked on most of his adult life. This book includes substantial sections from that manuscript, as well as some of the best of the hundreds of poems uncollected at the time of the poet's death.

The Tarnation of Faust

Literature & Fiction

Case, David Allen

Poetry

Gunpowder Press

The long-awaited first book of poetry from Santa Barbara's current Poet Laureate.

Mouth & Fruit

Yost, Chryss

Barry Spacks (1931 - 2014), the author of eleven previous collections of poetry, taught for 21 years at MIT and 32 years at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Shaping Water is the final book of poems collected and organized by the poet during his lifetime.

Shaping Water

Spacks, Professor Barry

Original Face is a collection of poems by Jim Peterson. Original Face is a collection of poems by Jim Peterson.Original Face is a collection of poems by Jim Peterson.Original Face is a collection of poems by Jim Peterson.

Original Face

PETERSON, JIM

The Shoreline Voices Project, published by Gunpowder Press, showcases the poetic voices of the Central California Coast, including Santa Barbara and surrounding communities. Collections are created in partnership with local institutions. "Rare Feather" collects poems by more than three dozen Santa Barbara area poets on the subject of birds and art, inspired by the FLOCK exhibit of contemporary art curated by Nancy Gifford at Ganna Walska Lotusland, including Ronald Aden Alexander, Diane August, Domenica Bianca, Gudrun Bortman, Laure-Anne Bosselaar, Kurt Brown, Mary Brown, Susan Chiavelli, Garth Craven, Jacqueline Craven, Fran Davis, Carol DeCanio, Michelle Detorie, John Elliott, Kimbrough Ernest, Tessa Flanagan, Friday Gretchen, Lucille Janssen, Richard Jarrette, Gabriella Klein, Lois Klein, Wendy Wilder Larsen, Perie Longo, Glenna Luschei, Kathee Miller, Enid Osborn, Melinda Palacio, Christine Penko, John Ridland, RBS, Sojourner Kincaid Rolle, Linda Saccoccio, Fernando Salinas, George Singer, Emma Trelles, Mark Whitehurst,,George Yatchisin, and Chryss Yost.

Rare Feather: Poems of Birds and Art (Shoreline Voices Project)

Instead of Sadness, poems by Catherine Abbey Hodges, is the winner of the inaugural Barry Spacks Poetry Prize. The Spacks Prize honors poet and teacher Barry Spacks, Santa Barbara's first Poet Laureate, who valued poems with clarity of image, precision of language, and emotional resonnance.

Instead of Sadness

Hodges, Catherine Abbey

I love the title of this book...and I love the innovative mischief of its poems. Let it be known: a true poetic intelligence and imagination lives between its covers. Thomas Lux, author of To the Left of Time Burning Down Disneyland is a remarkable work--poems that move in propulsive leaps, that crackle like fire. Olsson's lines unfurl with an almost molecular agitation, zinging at the speed of synapses as sparks fly from flints. These poems are wrought in the great invisible furnace of the psyche. Marsha de la O, author of Antidote for Night For Burning Down Disneyland, Kurt Olsson has risked the hazards of childhood and adulthood--both "lethal as an alley in a kung-fu movie"--gleaning from memory's usual store of shame and humiliation quality tinder to stoke the purifying, transformative flames of his often apocalyptic imagination. The resulting poems, freed of the dross of self-pity and sentiment, are playful, absurd, vulnerable, provocative, disquieting, and at times necessarily repugnant...but they are never ordinary, and, like their author, they never flinch. Mark Drew, editor of The Gettysburg Review Kurt Olsson is the author of one previous collection of poetry, What Kills What Kills Us(Silverfish Review Press). He lives and works just outside of Washington, D.C.

Burning Down Disneyland

Olsson, Kurt

Rarely does one encounter a book whose moral symmetry finds such eloquence and form in lines spare enough to encompass our deepest questions, yet taut enough to sustain us through grief, through the terrors of doubt and oblivion. By undertaking one of our greatest and abiding symbols, The Tower of Babel, Nan Cohen confidently asserts we speak our histories and lives in the bright language of poetry and in the dazzling prophecies of our songs. --Major Jackson, author of Holding Company Unfinished City is a collection of sensual, thoughtful poems illustrating the tender mercies that animate our human lives. Bookish in the best possible way, Cohen interrogates the Good Book as she probes the compassion and grace inherent in creations and creators. She returns to the story of Eve's creation, refashioning it in each chapter as she reminds us our survival requires careful eyes, patience, a willingness to repeat, to wait, to engage with the unfairness and asymmetries of Time's Arrow in all its forms. --Judith Baumel, author of The Kangaroo Girl

Unfinished City

Cohen, Nan

There is a brilliant subtlety to this witnessing, a knowing tenderness that explores our relationships with the natural world and those we love. These poems exalt the moment and explore the geography of memory, with a spare clarity that evokes our finest lyric poets' imaginations.
 --Lee Herrick, author of Gardening Secrets of the Dead
Because she's honed the art of looking inward and outward at the same time in Raft of Days, Catherine Abbey Hodges writes poems that manage to be small and also large, quiet while eventful, realistic yet reverent, both evocative and clear. Her poetry produces more than pleasure. It is an antidote to despair.
--Susan Cohen, author of A Different Wakeful Animal
In Catherine Abbey Hodges' second collection of poems, . . . the complexities of faith huddle close to the ordinary work of cooking, making lists, and keeping a steady breath. This is an authentic and beautiful book.
 --Emma Trelles, author of Tropicalia

Raft of Days

The Ghosts of Small Animals by Michelle Bonczek Evory was selected as winner of the 2018 Barry Spacks Poetry Prize. The Ghosts of Small Animals by Michelle Bonczek Evory was selected as winner of the 2018 Barry Spacks Poetry Prize.

The Ghosts of Lost Animals

Bonczek Evory, Michelle

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Books by Gunpowder Press