Los Nietos Press is proud to present this second collection of poems from Lorine Parks."Wonderful, Parks weaves her signature extensions of metaphor and mystery, geography and myth" - RICK SMITH"Persons of Interest is a fascinating, chilling and remarkably clear-eyed navigation along the tightrope world that we all must walk." -FRANK KEARNS"Among these poems we get, as part of the bargain, the wonderful "Old Woman"series. Women of all ages will empathize. Women writers of all ages will be jealous they hadn't thought of it first. I know I am." - SUZANNE LUMMIS

Persons of Interest

Literature & Fiction

Parks, Lorine

Poetry

Los Nietos Press

A must read for any Beatles fan, Clifton Snider’s book of poems, "The Beatle Bump," is an inspired, unique look at the greatest rock ‘n’ roll band of all time. Written in the years after the murder of John Lennon, "The Beatle Bump" explores the Beatles as an archetypal, in the Jungian sense, world-wide phenomenon. The poems, often irreverent and playful as were the Beatles themselves, are written in a variety of forms—free verse, song lyrics, nonsense verse, a sonnet, and even a couple of fan letters. "The Beatle Bump" is both a time capsule and a work of lasting art.

The Beatle Bump

Snider, Clifton

"He says, ‘I will never hurt you.’ That’s the moment that I know. There will be pain. The only question now, how deep the cut goes." “Linda Singer poems persuade that all poems are love poems, either by inclusion or difference. Her poems of love lived, gathered, and survived, extract the sweetness of the water of life whether it be in the form of cruel ice or evasive vapor. While mapping the strange dances between angels and crows, she convinces that in passion, loss, and struggle, selfless ‘wingless' love is the only true reward.” — Gary Jacobelly, playwright and poet "Linda Singer is a story teller. She captures the reader with her “smoldering dreams/ of pleasure and sanction and consent.” This is not a roses and violins book of love poems. It’s the bloody, giddy, real deal." — Elaine Mintzer

Wingless: Poems by Linda Singer

Singer, Linda

Born in El Paso, Texas, an area rich with tales of Pancho Villa and Benito Juarez, Yolanda Adele's first experience with English was as a Kindergarten student in East LA. "The House on New Jersey Street" and "Gypsies Stole My Heart" illuminate the world of a "latch-key kid" whose frequent companion after school was only her imagination.	Adele crafts her stories with flourishes of dialogue that come from a place of truth. "An Inflatable Idea" and "Mi Tía Bruja" underscore her perspective of love, humor, and optimism. At the same time, she does not shy away from the painful memories of a sometimes-absent father and a hard-working mother who ate dinner separately in front of the TV. In a story of profound love, "The Santa in My Life," she shares an underlying hurt, and decades later its resolution, "Tick, Tick, Tick." 	The arc of Adele's life tracks the cultural changes of American society. Coming of age in the turbulence of the early 1960s, she married her high school sweetheart before graduating herself, two days before he left for boot camp with the Marines. Their family now includes two married daughters, six grandchildren, four great-grandchildren, and many treasured in-laws.

History, Mystery, and Loving Memories

Biographies & Memoirs

Adele, Yolanda Yudico

Community & Culture

To read Star Chasing is to embark on a meditation on family, growing up, love, and society, through dreamlike images that are almost whispered. His poems speak of loneliness, isolation, the desire to reach across, the search for connection.

Star Chasing: Poems

Thomas, Thomas R.

Dutch Girl From Jakarta: From Indonesian Concentration Camp to Freedom

Zeeman, Maria

Behind the Red Curtain, a Memoir is a true-life account told in the voice of a growing teenager. In this harrowing tale of coping and survival, the author walks readers into the metamorphosed world of a Vietnamese family inside fallen Saigon during the period following the end of the Vietnam War. No details were spared within and without this broken world after an abrupt change of regimes of international consequences. Within the context of this bigger drama is the author's private journey of coming of age in an uncertain time.

Behind the Red Curtain: a Memoir

Basrai, Hong-My

The women in Acts of Contritionface society’s devaluation, from parents, from elders, from all who assume authority of them. Some can look back and laugh, some find luck in their escape from harm, some engineer their own good fortune. They battle oppressions as simple as gender stereotyping, as complex as prerequisites to friendship or love. What all the characters come to understand is that silence places them at greater risk than speaking out. They progress toward freedom through the telling of their stories. 
“Acts of Contrition is a great collection, one I read in a single sitting, the stories sly and engaging, hilariously dark and always surprising. The women of Victoria Waddle's fiction are characters I'd spend much more time with—they are brutally honest, have excellent talents at remembering, and they soldier on with grace and humor and wine." 
—Susan Straight, author of eight novels, including Highwire Moon, and one memoir, In the Country of Women 
“In ‘Solvent,’ one of the later stories in this collection, a reformed Evangelical-Christian-turned-New-agey-vegan-spiritual pyramid scheme saleswoman demonstrates the effectiveness of a caustic cleaning product over an heirloom dining table to a pair of tipsy Mormon missionary boys and a mother-daughter team of Jehovah’s Witnesses. In this one anecdote, the entire collection is distilled.” 
—Cati Porter, author of The Body at a Loss, Director of Inlandia Institute 
“I love Victoria Waddle’s Acts of Contrition for the way it sees life not as mundane but as meaningful. What a lesser writer might have missed about the meaning of those moments that pass us by, Waddle is able to explore, and her stories are extraordinary. They are magic. They draw out both the absurdity of personal mythologies found in tarot cards, prayers, and omens and the wonder in them as well. They find the magic in the extraordinary and in the every day.” 
—John Brantingham, Poet Laureate of Sequoia and Kings Canyon National Park

Acts of Contrition

Waddle, Victoria

Literary

"Tales of an Inland Empire Girl is a searing, beautiful memoir that illuminates the struggles of parents who are beaten down by life and their arduous working-class jobs and of children who are trapped in the middle of their parents' battles. A compelling read-raw, honest, and hopeful. I wish this book existed when I was growing up. It would have been my life preserver." 
-liz gonzález, author of Dancing in the Santa Ana Winds\n"In her first novel, Juanita E. Mantz goes back to the old house to unshackle the ghosts that still inhabit the charred curtains and broken windows of her youth. We meet The Wonder Twins, a Wolfman Jack stand in, The Flintstones, a young Wonder Woman with tinfoil wristbands & Nancy Drew incognito via unexpected introductions into Mantz's life growing up in The Inland Empire. This is as creative as autobiography gets without veering from the hard truths herein. Maybe you saw the cartoon once, and thought it fantasy, but read this book and then firmly believe that underdogs can fly." -Dennis Callaci, author of 100 Cassettes\n"Tales of an Inland Empire Girl is deep and funny and true. A remarkable story of resilience and love told in bright prose, and written from a place of rigorous vulnerability that draws us in from the start." 
-Brett Paesel, author of Los Angeles Times bestseller, Mommies Who Drink\n"Mantz takes readers into a deeper journey of a childhood and coming of age filled with turbulence and tight-knit family love, and she writes with blazing grit, flashing joy-de-vivre, and an occasional comic overtone that feels natural coming from this self-professed punk-rock girl. This collection of stories spares no stone unturned, no watershed truth - both hard and celebratory - unexamined. And through it all, shines an anthem call of what matters most in life: the unbreakable bonds of family, and this family's enduring love for one another."-Ruth Nolan, born in the IE and editor of No Place for a Puritan: the Literature of California's Deserts\n"Tales of an Inland Empire Girl, set in the fast-growing Eastern region of Southern California and told in Mantz's smack-in-your-face honesty, lures one into the places of childhood--of first home and lasting memories. One learns to live, however awkward life might be, in a house 'the color of dirt', finding a place to call one's own in a Plastic Cheese chair, and love, even through girl fights. Through dexterous use of language, Mantz tosses her readers into a reality where a little girl finds herself in tears of frustration and shame with two left shoes, a drunken dad and screaming mom, but loves deeply anyway, and deals with her situations with twin-powered bravado and punk rock: 'I feel as if I could dance forever, ' says Mantz."-Hồng-Mỹ Basrai, author of Behind the Red Curtain

Tales of an Inland Empire Girl

Mantz, Juanita E

Arts & Literature

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Books by Los Nietos Press