Winner of the 2000 Perugia Press Prize, The Work of Hands is a sophisticated collection of poems about the intersection of childhood innocence and North American injustice. Anderson's outlook respects and broadens the lives of immigrants, children, racial minorities, the poor, the disadvantaged. The poems are concise but not rushed, the voice calm but never vague, the language lyrical and pointed but never overstated.

The Work of Hands

Literature & Fiction

Catherine Anderson

Poetry

Perugia Press

Winner of the 2001 Perugia Press Prize, A Wound On Stone by Faye George reflects the emotional history of a woman who grew up during the Great Depression and World War II, knowing many forms of political and personal hardship. Taken together the poems tell the story of coming to terms with loss and are a cry to regain meaning and personal identity. A Wound On Stone ends with the paradoxical understanding that although they may never heal, "wounds wear out." One must go on, not with hope's illusions, but with a bitterly won and liberating consciousness. These are poems of keen observation by a woman longing to be more than just an observer. George uses haunting, evocative images that move from passionate and open to tight and hushed, particularly the image of a mother wrapping a child in a blanket of nettles. A Wound On Stone is an elegantly presented book filled with magical language and apt references to mythology.

A Wound on Stone

Faye George

Winner of the 2002 Perugia Press Prize, the Publishing Triangle Audre Lorde Poetry Prize, and Lambda Literary Award Finalist, Red  introduces the visceral and seductive voice of poet Melanie Braverman. The shape of the book and many of the poems in it mimic the expanding spiral of Cape Cod, where Braverman lives. This peninsular shoreline setting informs her poetry, poetry that is unselfconsciously about the search for love and security in the face of grief and within a community. In Cusp, Braverman writes, watch the bird hover and dip / and disappear below the horizon of the tall grass, wait then, just wait: / before the sky loses its light for good, and your hands grow unusually chill / in the new air, the head of the heron will bob like a buoy back out of the grass.... Written with raw energy and astonishing images, Red showcases Braverman's acute sensitivity to her atmosphere, both natural and peopled, and is evidence of a gifted, powerful voice.

Melanie Braverman

Winner of the 2003 Perugia Press Prize, SEAMLESS is the impressive debut poetry collection by Linda Tomol Pennisi. The poems approach the slippery and subtle areas between beauty and darkness, between sanity and disorientation, between hunger and survival, and in so doing create a coherent story about the grace and fragility of being human. Pennisi's light touch and restraint set these poems apart. Her language is masterful, varied, musical, sexy, and precise.

Seamless

Linda Tomol Pennisi

Winner of the 2004 Perugia Press Prize, as well as the 2008 Thomas and Lillie D. Chaffin Award for Appalachian Writing, Kettle Bottom was named an American Booksellers Association Book Sense Top Ten Poetry Book for 2005. It also was the Ohioana Library Association Poetry Book of the Year, and a finalist for the Weatherford Award of the Appalachian Studies Association. It was selected for inclusion in The Pushcart Prize XXX:Best of the Small Presses. 
Based on the historical and social events of the West Virginia coal mine wars of 1920-1921, Kettle Bottom imagines the stories of miners, their wives, children, sisters, and mothers; of mountaineers, Italian immigrants, and Black families. These people organized for safe working conditions in opposition to the mine company owners and their agents. Fisher listened closely and the result is a book of vivid, rhythmic, heartfelt poems that address a violent time with honesty, levity, and compassion. Kettle Bottom is about how a community lived in the presence of constant danger and the choices the residents made. These are people to look to today.

Kettle Bottom

Gilliam, Diane

Winner of the 2005 Perugia Press Prize, Carol Edelstein's new book of poetry, The Disappearing Letters, approaches familiar poetic themes love and loss with intuitive animation. The poet takes a direct view of the oblique and a slanted look at the obvious, creating a landscape with springs of great joy and also dry places where loss, wistfully remembered, is confronted and transcended. Edelstein is a poet of the first order; she can harness her innate spontaneity to produce finely wrought, imaginative poetry. The Disappearing Letters is an elegy to what's come before us and a celebration of the living.

The Disappearing Letters

Carol Edelstein

Winner of the 2006 Perugia Press Prize, and runner-up for the James Laughlin Award of the Academy of American Poets, Lamb will take your breath away. With electric imagery, Frannie Lindsay writes about the devotion that binds together a family in pain. When love is uncertain, how does caretaking erode? How does it continue? Each poem in Lamb is a small quest for a right answer, and for a reconciliation between the speaker and her mother and father, and within her body. Ellen Bass calls these poems “hymns of praise for the love we are able to wrest from our flawed lives.” Throughout the poems, animals serve as expressions of vulnerability and mortality; they are “hapless objects” whose unconditional loyalty, free of familial obligation, teaches the necessary lessons about tenderness and atonement. By caring for animals and then her aging parents, the speaker ultimately releases herself, stepping away from the power her parents hold over her: not in forgiveness, but in a solemn declaration of freedom. Lamb is a deft and memorable portrait of girlhood and aging.

Lamb

Frannie Lindsay

Winner of the 2007 Perugia Press Prize, Beg No Pardon is extroverted, declarative, jazzy, and vital. This collection commands attention from the first word to the last. Brimming with personality and attitude in the very best sense pride, dignity, and graceful indignation poet Lynne Thompson speaks about the search for legacy, love of legacy, and joy of legacy. The poems depict a progress in which she tries to find, or to create, through birth family and family of choice, through erotic encounters and relationships, through the music and language of her hybrid culture, and through the act of writing itself, a place to feel at home. Beg No Pardon is about the formation of identity from a little-known and complicated beginning, both personally and culturally. At times alarming and sexy, at times sorrowful and bitter, Beg No Pardon describes a vivid world of Afro-Caribbean heritage and late 20th century life.

Beg No Pardon

Thompson, Lynne

Winner of the 2008 Perugia Press Prize and the 2009 L.L. Winship/PEN New England Award, Two Minutes of Light, introduces Nancy K. Pearson, a poet with a powerful hand and ear. In this book, she writes about a descent into the madness of addiction, suicide attempts, and self-mutilation, and the foil to these destructive ways is art itself the poet's gift of finding small beauty in unlikely places and transforming it into poetry. With stunning imagination, acute mindfulness, downright spunk, and not one ounce of sentimentality or gratuitousness, Pearson mines this despair for its minutes of light that provide rungs toward a more livable life. While immersed in the world of psychiatric wards, crack motels, selling drugs, even cutting off a finger, the poet, almost unnervingly, writes about sea grass, milkweed, ghost crabs, fruit seeds, and wild lilies. Pearson's genius is her curiously ironic voice, the immediacy of her images, and her fearless attitude.

Two Minutes of Light

Pearson, Nancy K.

Winner of the prestigious James Laughlin Award of the Academy of American Poets and the 2009 Perugia Press Prize, this collection is life-affirming but without illusions. How to Live on Bread and Music, showcases poet Jennifer K. Sweeney's mature consciousness and circumspect intelligence. The book takes us on a physical and spiritual trip, symbolized in recurring images of the train. Exploring broad themes such as identity formation, nostalgia, and impermanence, the poet passes through risk to find refuge in the sensory world. Afaa M. Weaver says, These are poems that tell us we move forward in moments when motion seems all too risky and stillness all too intolerable.

How to Live on Bread and Music

Sweeney, Jennifer K.

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