In the poem "Edgewise," a rooftop encounter with a determined weed leads to a momentary vision of wilderness encroaching on domesticity. The struggle to make and hold a place for oneself amid the world s claims and counterclaims, to navigate among moving objects and not be displaced, is at the heart of many of the sixty-five poems in Stuart Miller s first collection.  The vantage points are many. In "Home," a child hears the buried disjunction of his parents lives in his mother s curse and his father s idle whistling. In "Madeleine," a new arrival from Cuba enters the classroom like a guided missile, blowing up the numbing routines of her fellow students. "Shadowline" summons the memory of a dark, quiet neighborhood now hot real estate whose "lone police car / checking a break-in. Its hoodlight / strobing dead space" has given way to "flashlit faces, / crowding past orange squares / of neon and nylon." In "Port of Entry," an expectant immigrant to America, boiling his egg, is cautioned that he s headed for a world "of noise and names, / changed and familiar. / Your open door. Your prison."  In the end, however, these poems are not weighted toward contingency and flux. They are pitched on relatedness, connection. They are themselves locations, lineaments of firm ground. What alternative world could we inhabit, after all? As the subway rider in another poem recognizes: "If you see through everything, / you ll see nothing but ghosts."

Edgewise

Literature & Fiction

Stuart Miller

Poetry

Other Islands Press

<p>In his second collection of short stories, Of Cypress &amp; Sunflowers, Henry Henkel sends his characters on a quest for identity as they struggle to make peace with the ghosts of the past. A young man searches for the elusive mother who abandoned him; an Italian priest is haunted by his transgressions; three social outcasts decide to reinvent themselves in a small Florida town; a little boy witnesses a battle between Good and Evil at Easter Mass; a retired Lieutenant Colonel tries to make sense of his lonely existence through a Platonic dialogue with his neighbor's guest; a young woman decides to give the man who deserted her a second chance. Henkel's stories are metaphors for the fundamental struggles of all humanity: the search for true love; the hope of reprieve from loneliness and alienation; the thirst for a place in the community; the desire to understand one's true nature. Henkel places these struggles within the greater context of free will and the choices his characters make between good and evil, trust and deception, empathy and selfishness.</p>

Of Cypress & Sunflowers

Henkel, Henry

Short Stories & Anthologies

<p>"Known to the world primarily as a brilliant divorce attorney, Raoul Felder is also the author of a warmly engaging memoir...and this new collection of sharply-observed, evocative and moving stories that constitute, in essence, 'reflections' of urban life of 20th-century New York." --Joyce Carol Oates---In his debut collection of short stories, Dancers on a Dark Street, Raoul Felder, best known as one of America's most powerful attorneys, proves himself a masterful storyteller. Drawing from a broad cast of characters, he creates vivid and unusual portraits of people struggling with loneliness and alienation, some striving to establish themselves in a new world, others working as hard as they can to deny their past. Some fall prey to hubris: assured of their infallibility, they venture into dangerous territory, only to discover the harrowing consequences of their actions. We meet newcomers to America filled with dreams of limitless possibilities who devolve into disillusioned transplants; Cold War survivors adjusting to a new world order; and lovers navigating the fragile framework of their relationships. With great poignancy, Felder describes the lives of people in transition few with money, some with disabilities from post-WWII Europe to New York City's immigrant neighborhoods that are "much the same as the shtetls of Poland but without the hoofbeats of marauding Cossacks in the distance." Deftly, he traces the intergenerational connections that draw families together. Using humor, pathos, and compassion, Felder reveals the triumphs and failings of his characters as they search for love, justice and a sense of place in an unforgiving world.</p>

Dancers on a Dark Street

Raoul Felder

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Books by Other Islands Press