Poetry. A collection of 55 poems that rip through the raw and uncensored mine fields of life, lust and war among family, friends, acquaintances, and the author himself. While they don't emerge victorious, each of the muses exhibits--as the title indicates--a complex bravery. "He writes from the consciousness of the bombed and 'the living narrator.' World-weary, grieving, cynical, ironic, raging, from the real to the surreal, A COMPLEX BRAVERY is of the drek of our world gone mad. "Not Me in Nablus" is one of the most important poems of this era."--Sharon Doubiago. "Lipton's poems are a gang that takes no prisoners: his voice is direct, his tone is clear, his diction is ironic but his irony is earned and felt-through."--Ilya Kaminsky.

A Complex Bravery

Literature & Fiction

Lipton, Robert

Poetry

Marick Press

Poetry. This is the first book of poetry by Caroline Maun, a Wayne State University professor of critical literacies. "Caroline Maun's THE SLEEPING is a compelling and intimate exploration of the self. In language that is at the same time sophisticated and coherent, Maun offers startling images of her body as it is acted upon by the doctor, the rapist, the lover. Perhaps the most remarkable aspect of the volume is Maun's ability to recall private places and through them create universal images of childhood, sexuality, and death."--Mary Jane Lupton, author of Menstruation and Psychoanalysis. Maun is also editor of THE COLLECTED POEMS OF EVELYN SCOTT, published by the National Poetry Foundation.

The Sleeping

Caroline Maun

Emily Ate the Wind

Fiction. Poetry. EMILY ATE THE WIND tells the story of the drinkers, gamblers, lifelong friends, and frustrated lovers whose lives revolve around The Bar. Told in a series of vignettes, love letters, question and answer formats, newspaper clippings, short stories, and prose poems, the familiar dramas of these characters' lives unfold with deft, poetic strokes. From sweeping lyricism to gritty realist scenes, Peter Conners follows these characters from childhood to adulthood, from marriage to war, through loyalty and the shock of betrayal. "Sparks of brilliant images light up the compressed worlds Peter Conners creates with words. Music is made with whispers and curses, belches and laughter, pronouncements and asides and sly retorts. Startling lists transform into unsettling truths. The performances in EMILY ATE THE WIND are dazzling"--Joanna Scott.

Conners, Peter

Poetry. "Should we have stayed at home, wherever that may be?" a traveler writes in a notebook at the end of Elizabeth Bishop's "Questions of Travel." The poems in NEVER NIGHT ask the same question as they travel textual geographies from wheat farm to boreal forest, from a cave become fallout shelter to a spy satellite's view of a wrecked oil tanker, from a gold mine's tailings to a child burying a dead guinea pig. Whether investigating a derailed train, a two-headed moose fetus or a melting glacier, these poems reveal wounded earth giving birth to shimmering form, death held at bay without artifice in the meditations of a child's new words. "NEVER NIGHT is a hymn to life, a meditation on day and night, on the seasons, on nature and on love. Alaska may be real chilly in the winter but these beautiful poems are more than warm. Apparently poetry can change climate..."--Adam Zagajewski.

Never Night

Burleson, Derick

Poetry. "These poems are sure-footed, engaging, broad in subject matter but grounded in the poet's wary detective-mind. I have a strong feeling for the most 'psychological' of the poems, and those with psychological twists in the last stanza. The poems in this collection feel emotionally complete. An irresistible reading experience and revelation. Fortunate Arrival!"--Sandra McPherson.

The Fortunate Islands

Susan Kelly-DeWitt

Fiction. In a language all his own, a language driven by stutterance and repetition, Joshua Kornreich evokes and seduces the reader into a boyhood mythography where things are not what they always seem to be. At the center of this world stands Kornreich's boy, a hypersensitive kid whose eyes and ears are struggling to make sense of a world fissured by his parents' marital unrest and his own invisible place in that familial world. What Kornreich's boy-narrator is fascinated with most compulsively--the household dustbuster, the backyard tree, the bushes that separate one backyard from another, not to mention the mysterious brown residue that resides at the bottom of the deep end of the family's backyard pool--is also the source of his most startling revelations. A first novel unlike any other, The Boy Who Killed Caterpillars is a book of lingual daring and domestic disturbance that belongs on the shelf next to Gordon Lish's Peru, not only for the singular way that it deals with the subject matter of childhood violence, but also for the sheer force and torque of its sentences.

The Boy Who Killed Caterpillars

Kornreich, Joshua

Genre Fiction

Poetry. Limited edition of 250 numbered copies. A collection of 21 poems that rip through the world-weary, grieving daily life of a poet and a man. As the original Odyssey by Homer, Franz Wright, reports more than with the dream language with the language of poetry the story of his life, the relationship to his father, to his wife and the world inside and outside of him. With delicacy he interns himself in those worlds sometimes overwhelmed by nostalgia and sometimes illuminated with an underglow of joy as in Elizabeth's Eyes or quiet happiness as in THE CATFISH. As a wise Telemachus he walks, reflects and expresses a sovereign balance of mind in "unseen supervision", "between time of ingestion and time of departure: undisturbed, unafraid, as all things are passing—the unknown bird spoke: who will remember? And why should I care? I had my time. I got to be here."

The Catfish

Wright, Franz

Poetry. Robert Fanning is a graduate of the University of Michigan and Sarah Lawrence College. His poems have appeared in Poetry, Ploughshares, the Atlanta Review, and several other journals. His chapbook Old Bright Wheel was the winner of the Ledge Press Chapbook Award. "Robert Fanning's poems originate from some uncanny place between a fevered imagination and a keen intellect. They are musical, dangerous poems-both sparing and wild. This poet searches for language and meaning in a mysterious world. What the poems offer, instead, is more mystery"-Laura Kasischke. "Passionate and accomplished-this poet's ear is beautifully tuned-THE SEED THIEVES is an urgent, nervous, tender, and brilliant first book. Read it for joy!"-Thomas Lux. "Tonight, my satellite,/boot up, log on, give me long, slow/sentences. Lean out your window, describe/your present world. Decipher every bright thing/across the immediate sky, over the currents/and moonlit contours of your country"-from the book.

The Seed Thieves

Fanning, Robert

Poetry. WHITE HOLES is a sequence of poems that attempts to give speech, broken as it might be, to the grief that is felt in the wake of a mother's death. Here, in James Hart's left-behind world, what isn't said--what can't be said--carries as much weight as what is said. There is a delicate balance in these poems between language and articulation and the fractured space, both psychic and visible, that must be entered and accounted for in the aftermath of the mother's absence. It was Beckett who made the claim that "you must go on, I can't go on, I'll go on." This book seizes hold of this declaration and makes from it an artifact that both holy and wholly Hart's own. James Hart III lives and works in Detroit, where he runs a poetry series at the Zeitgeist Gallery on Michigan Avenue. He is also author of The Watchable Book.

White Holes

Hart, James

Poetry. Daniel Padilla's SOLUTE is the first book from a young poet who is, as he says in one poem, standing "at the threshold of desire/ throwing Molotov cocktails/ at the door." In these spare, quiet, yet passionate poems, Padilla speaks of his own need--his "hunger for ink"--to make from this desire an artifact of language charged with meaning. Even when Padilla's speakers prove immobile, or unmoving, the body still exists, there is the "I am" of presence, and the body remains "ambitious/ with desire." Padilla's subjects long for transformation in a world that seems frozen in immutability: "she shudders at a thought/ circles never end// stares into the smoke/ for sparks." Padilla, and all those for whom he speaks, may seem to stand, unable to move past liminalities and into the fullness of being, but it is exactly this inertia that lends them the protean energy of desire.

Solute

Padilla, Daniel

History & Criticism

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