Poetry. Winner of the 2013 Next Generation Indie Book Awards in the category of poetry! The poems of THE APHASIA CAFÉ write the lives of individuals who, because of stroke or dementia, have lost all or part of their ability to use language, exploring what happens to self when language, the tool we use to construct who we are, suddenly fractures along one of its many fault lines. Sections of APHASIA CAFÉ also explore language and self-identity in relation to family life, political violence, bigotry, shame, and redemption.

The Aphasia Cafe

Literature & Fiction

McGuire, Dawn

Poetry

IF SF Publishing

Poetry. Two words make the prosodic "line," three lines make a "lyrica," linked lyrica make a serial poem. More koan than haiku, THE LYRICA POEMS work that thin vein where words are mistaken for things. Hannon's poems are insects gathered at the crack of sap, blood, a trail of crumbs. They dissolve a thing, carry it off.

the lyrica poems, 2003-2010

Hannon, Michael

Poetry. A TALE OF TWO HEADS is a series of phantasmagorically compressed dream lyrics, one extraordinary poem linked to another in a progression that is, for a reader, like watching someone become a poet right in front of their eyes.

A Tale of Two Heads

King, Sally

Fiction. >2014 Finalist Award in the GENERAL FICTION/NOVEL category of the 2014 Next Generation Indie Book Awards! Set in a village in central France, an American man attempts to sit quietly in a room by himself for one hour, a method promoted by the 17th century philospher Blaise Pascal as the prescription for all mankind's ills. Tempted by almost everything--fine wines, the grandeur of French cuisine, the beauty of the countryside, our hero soldiers on in pursuit of his special brand of solitude and uncertainty, despite the distractions of neighbors and a highly intelligent female companion.  "...a narrative of literary beauty and philosophical depth "―Renate Stendhal, LAMBDA Award-winning writer and editor  "Fuller makes something wonderful here, out of almost nothing: the attempt to sit quietly in a room alone for a least one hour. That he does so in a small village in the middle of France makes it all the more remarkable. Nothing will get in the way of his journey...not love or friendship, not fine wine or cigarettes, not Marcel Duchamp or the grandeur of French cuisine. Lovable and exasperating, a courageous weakling, MONSIEUR AMBIVALENCE is a friend to all of us who cannot seem to live with ourselves, but who cannot stop hoping to believe that someday we can."―Jean-Pierre Bezoux

Monsieur Ambivalence: A post-literate fable

Fuller, Thomas

Poetry. By "getting it out and writing it down," Sam Haskins paid attention to a turbulent personal and professional life through poetry. Songwriters were an obvious influence—Dylan, John Prine, Randy Newman, Joni Mitchell—but Haskins found his own voice in a series of poems that seem as if they were written just yesterday. Unpretenious but aware, lively and thoughtful, Haskins's poems work as a social document of a specific time and place, and as pure literary expressions.

Sam Haskins, Attorney: Poems 1970-1980

HASKINS, Sam

The Classical World

Fiction. The hero of Thomas Fuller's new book walks around while asking one big question after another--what is truth, what is beauty, what is justice--on his journey through the classical world. Along the way he comes into contact with people--a cave guide in the ancient city of Matera, a taxi cab driver in Naples, the imperious owner of a grand hotel in Rome, among others--so modern they're ancient and so ancient they're modern. When he ditches his male sidekick for a female muse, the trip takes on an entirely different dimension, as our hero edges closer and closer and closer to asking the oldest philosophical question in the world: what is the best way to live one's life, knowing there's no right answer. Tender, funny, profane, outrageous, THE CLASSICAL WORLD is a quixotic excursion for which there's no tour guide other than the self. "If Heraclitus had a great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great grandson he'd no doubt think like Thomas Fuller."--Anonymous

Poetry. With photography by Joan Scott. Claire Scott's great accomplishment is in knowing how to make poetry out of every part of her life. She's patient enough to hold opposites to the breaking point, and then to keep going toward that frontier where real poetry takes place. Each poem in WAITING TO BE CALLED lives in a world where nothing's sacred and yet everything's sacred. Just when you think she's taking you to a place too dark to enter, Claire makes you laugh. And when you think a poem's too funny to be a poem, Claire can make you cry. Scott's a poet who knows all the dance steps, but is never confined by any one of them, able to tease her own unique electricity out of ordinary human experience where grief and despair, joy and happiness, tragedy and comedy co- exist, where every word comes to new life and means something that it's never meant before. "A brilliant, eccentric, unique voice with a range that encompasses childhood violence and a God who comes to therapy. Claire Scott's lean, beautifully crafted language dares to be cynical about the world but is never without a deep compassion. These are poems that will be read over and over again as a seismograph of our time."—Kim Chernin "Just a note to let you know how much I love your poems, and appreciate your work. That you highlight and embrace 'the messiness of life in all its heavenly madness,' is indeed challenging—yet, helps us live a little closer to the truth."—Linda Van Leuven "Claire Scott's poems are very well made. Familiar with the mad, yet stated so sanely."—Richard Stansberger, Poetry Editor, Red Savina Review

Waiting to be Called

Scott, Claire

History & Criticism

Literary Nonfiction. California Interest. Photography. What would it be like to discover your very own ghost town? To stumble upon the place by accident and feel it grow more and more mysterious with every step you take? The buildings, still standing tall with their importance, abandoned, every window broken; heavy equipment in chains, rusting in plain sight; weeds taking over the premises; the feeling that everyone's just left yesterday or the day before. It's this chance encounter with Mare Island, the first naval base the US opened on the Pacific Ocean, once the shipbuilding capital of the western world, home and workplace to over 50,000 people but shuttered by an act of Congress on April Fools' Day, 1996, that leads the writer to make up stories about what he's seeing, and to ask himself questions about his own life that he wouldn't have otherwise asked. MARE ISLAND is part documentary in words and pictures of a place the writer calls, "the Stonehenge of the American empire," and part self-portrait, an extremely personal encounter with the past, present, and a possible future. Established in 1854, Mare Island Naval Shipyard was the first US Navy base on the Pacific Ocean. 514 ships were built at Mare Island and thousands of other vessels overhauled in dry dock during its colorful heyday. Once considered America's military shipbuilding capital, Mare Island was registered as a California Historical Landmark in 1960, and parts of the base were declared a National Historic Landmark District in 1975. "Bombing along the highway at the north edge of San Francisco Bay, as we moderns are wont to do, the turnoff to Mare Island passes in a blink, and most of us don't think twice. But Brooks Roddan takes the exit—and finds himself in a sprawling, ghostly monument to the American Empire. Slow down now and walk with him on this provocative meditation on power, impermanence, and the stories we tell ourselves about ourselves."—Jay Harris, Former Publisher of Mother Jones

Mare Island

Roddan, Brooks

Poetry. In this new collection by the award-winning poet and neurologist Dawn McGuire, the American Dream is an ironic construct at the end of Empire. Here, returning soldiers bring "hazardous materials" home in their bodies and minds; while home is increasingly a battleground of addiction and disaffection. In "Limbics," the book's middle section, the neurological "old brain" speaks. Jealousy, rage, and anxious intuition overwhelm all reason; while desire is that resistless force by which we are "first made / inflamed, destroyed / then raised to aerial ash / again and again." In "Ghosts," the final section, inevitable losses of love, will, memory, and capacity become the psyche's "missing children." They haunt us, and sometimes steal our names.These poems confront deeper wounds in body, mind, and body politic, wounds that science can neither name nor remedy. There is strong medicine here, transgressive and redemptive. "McGuire's poems intercept the reader in an 'emergency room' of language, then roll in the crash cart, starting with this heart-shock title: AMERICAN DREAM WITH EXIT WOUND. McGuire is inspired by her work with post 9/11 vets, by her brain research as a neurologist and her immersion in myth. You will take your life in your hands as you read these super-charged poems-and you will…'come to' with an exit wound: by which I mean to say a whole new consciousness of what poetry is, what poetry can do, and how poetry urgently matters."—Carol Muske-Dukes "It's taken almost five hundred years for science to awaken from its post- Cartesian love affair with rationality, and re-acknowledge what the Greeks knew: the gods are an unruly lot. Their Olympus is the untamable, amoral, 'limbic' core from which our most base and most exalted passions arise. McGuire, both a neuroscientist and a classics-infused poet, lights up the limbic brain, then makes it sing like a drunken Caruso."—David Shaddock

American Dream With Exit Wound

<ul>
<li>Award-Winner in the LGBTQ: Non-Fiction category of the 2018 International Book Awards</li>
<li>
NOMINATED for a 2018 LAMBDA LITERARY AWARD in the LESBIAN MEMOIR category.</li>
<li>Finalist for 2018 Best Book Awards in the LGTBQ Non-Fiction category</li>
</ul>
 With 130 evocative vintage photographs Winner of a 2016 WNBA Award, juried by Deirdre Bair. From Paris's famous opera house to its gossip-rich salons,KISS ME AGAIN, PARIS celebrates youth at the end of the 1970s, when women werein fashion and every woman, gay or straight, fell in love with women. Author Renate Stendhal ekes out a living as a culturaljournalist in Europe's most cultured city. She walks Paris at night dressed asa boy, has friends and lovers among artists and writers, and falls under the spellof the mercurial actress Claude, who has all of Paris talking. At the sametime, she finds herself in the crosshairs of an alluring stranger who seems toappear everywhere and nowhere at once. There are mysteries with and withoutclues. Is sexual obsession a way to avoid the risk of love? Filled with sensuality, style, romance, and suspense,Stendhal plays with the concept of memoir as a genre and transports the readerto another time and place. No matter what age you are, you'll be young and inlove again when you reach the last page. Includes 130 vintage photographs.

Kiss Me Again, Paris A Memoir

Biographies & Memoirs

STENDHAL, Renate

Professionals & Academics

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