Meet Kinky at the intersection of domesticity and eroticism, the sacred crossroads of American womanhood. There’s more dirt than you think in Kinky’s house and it’s worth the effort to help her uncover it. This is a hilarious and illuminating, dark and beautiful, subversive and honest collection of intimate poetry. It’s well worth the time to make Kinky’s acquaintance.

Kinky Keeps the House Clean

Literature & Fiction

Deweese, Mari

Poetry

Nixes Mate Books

Comes To This is a landmark for the strange times we live in. More profoundly, Jeff Weddle is a word warrior of the soil and of the air we breathe. This new collection highlights his humanity and his tender moments but there is also his call for resistance in poems. Kind, moving, at times joyful, at times dark, Comes to This is an unapologetic, no-holds barred homage to Bukowski and Ginsberg. The battle against depraved conformity, monstrous greed, and coolcomplacency begins anew. Jeff Weddle’s poetry is armed and dangerous.

Comes To This

Weddle, Jeff

Nixes Mate is a navigational hazard in Boston Harbor where, during the Colonial period, pirates and mutineers were gibbeted. Thirty years later out of the ashes of the 1980s Allston zine scene Philip Borenstein, Michael McInnis and Annie Pluto started new journal of hand-crafted artisanal literature. As they edited this anthology, a theme emerged that surprised them ... Death &amp; Rebirth, those twin-barreled human indulgences. It was if an estranged microburst, a love sick hurricane came through shuttling tree branches, pedestrians, small animals, unhinged children along with various signs, portents, carriages, bicycles and small cars, enmeshed in a chiaroscuro of words and light, sifted thorugh the ecliptic sluice of the Charles River.

Nixes Mate Review: Anthology 2016-17

McInnis, Michael

Mark Borczon’s He Was A Good Father is a hard-earned devotion to the facts. In these poems you sense a man’s life being redeemed before your eyes. With every word you can feel the effort of a wise man rising from bed. His pean to John Henry, working-class hero, will make you bust a gut laughing and, in the same breath, gasp in pain. And don’t miss “Bottom Shelf Vodka...”, a love poem so piercing in its purity it will stop you from reading. Spread the word, this book is a long-awaited celebration. — Geoff Peterson, author of 3:30: Nocturnes and Etudes

He was a Good Father

Borczon, Mark

“I have to keep looking; try to see more, speak more, turn away less,” says Lisa DeSiro in her fine first book, Labor. And this is what her poems do: they keep their eyes peeled, their ears open, and their hearts receptive. (Boston street bustle comes vividly alive in many of these poems.) But receptivity demands a tolerance for paradox, and DeSiro’s poems—in disarmingly simple, idiomatic language—plumb the secrets of the world’s contradictions. “Go ahead, enjoy this day” begins a poem titled “9/11 Anniversary, Public Garden.” At home with the prose poem as well as the tightly rhymed lyric, DeSiro distills memorable music from the most colloquial moments—“We were all thumbs on our dumb phones”—and offers readers a vibrant panoply of sights and sounds, captured and conveyed in her impressively taut writing. — Steven Cramer, author of Clangings and Goodbye to the Orchard

Labor

DeSiro, Lisa

Anne Elezabeth Pluto’s Lubbock Electric is a gushing exploration of life in which she gives you, the reader her world to make your own. You can dive into poem after poem and swim with familiarity, frequently learning new strokes. Einstein maintained that the definition of genius is taking the complex and making it simple, and this is precisely what Pluto has achieved in this stimulating collection. The skeleton of this book is cast swiftly with the introduction of the resplendent Peregrine. A poem constructed using admirable craft that pulls you into the poet’s emotional, mental and physical world. Pluto’s verve and acute awareness delivering the reader to a wealth of love and compassion. Annie Pluto has an inbuilt ability to poetically emote a specific feeling, situation or scene with admirable craft. Between the lines of the poem, Love Letter to Lubbock, the poet has placed a seat for every reader. This heartfelt and warm, cleverly woven tapestry delivers wishes, regrets, celebrations, acknowledgments and love with extraordinary economy. The subtlety Pluto masters in delivering a history lesson in The Home Borough, rides in tandem with the poet’s utilitarian ability to ground the reader. The poems in Lubbock Elecctric ride on a conveyor of poetic pleasures that underlie the current of seriousness that will ground each reader. Gene Barry – Poet and Psychotherapist; author of Stones in their Shoes, Unfinished Business and Working Days; Founder of the Blackwater Poetry Festival; publisher and editor at Rebel Poetry.

Lubbock Electric

Pluto, Anne Elezabeth

In her new book of poems I Wish Francisco Franco Would Love Me Gloria Mindock continues her examination of brutality and its toll on humanity. Here, her resurrected Francisco Franco leaps from her imagination to ridicule and condemn all dictators who believe they have the right to control and murder at will. Her poem "The Fruit Fly" reminds one of Osip Mandelstam's famous takedown of Stalin. Satirical, powerful, lush and even at times displaying a certain beauty history can still carry, I Wish Francisco Franco Would Love Me will leave you thinking and changed.-- Tim Suermondt, author of The World Doesn't Know You

I Wish Francisco Franco Would Love Me

Mindock, Gloria

Mark DeCarteret’s poems wear their elegant disillusionment lightly, as if they knew that only by losing our projections do we see clearly: “The same ad for dawn again. How I’ve mastered/ its theme song but not the game show that follows.” These lovingly made poems, charged with wit and uncanny insights into our quotidian, linger on all that’s unstill: the sea, deer, the self. “Anything not solid is at a loss” until the poet endows it with language. Giving the lie to the book’s title are the signs of vocation everywhere evident in these savvy and unsparing pages. — Askold Melnyczuk, founder of AGNI

For Lack of a Calling

DeCarteret, Mark

In her impressive first collection, Liljegren retells the Lucy stories from the iconic tv show, revealing depths and a darker side behind the slapstick. With great skill and exquisite language, Liljegren takes us through a series of episodes and imagined therapy sessions, complete with dream analysis, a Rorshach test, role reversal, and free association - associations that lead always to Ethel, and the endurance of women’s friendship. Liljegren reveals the courage behind the humor, the power dynamics of marriage, the conflict between the good wife and the professional woman, of how we become the roles we play. We love Lucy, these poems say, because we know she is us. Cheryl Savageau, author of Dirtroad Home and Mother/Land

Slapstick: The Lucy Poems

Liljegren, Taylor

I love the joy and heartbreak in Karen Friedland’s Places That Are Gone. Bachelor apartments, Man Ray, that glorious music of the “early 90s,” the trees in an old man’s yard: all impermanent in a world that the speaker mourns and embraces. We know this world, where in early spring, there’s “far too much tenderness” and yet, we persist by “pounding and pruning and hoping again.” The imagery is immediate and real; the animals, the people, the trees with all “the desperation of the roots,” are still capable of love. Karen Friedland creates a holy space in Places That Are Gone with a concentration that never loses sight of the fact that “. . .all you ever really wanted/was a home. . . .” — Jennifer Martelli, author of My Tarantella

Places That Are Gone

Friedland, Karen

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