Unique stories about shoes and their memories as diverse as the women who write them. Jane Weitzman from Stuart Weitzman Shoes If there s a woman who s not fixated on shoes, chances are she has no feet or lives on a hot desert island where footwear is superfluous. As we go through life, the fixation may mutate from the annual delight with a new pair of dress-up Mary Janes, to height-and-leg enhancing heels and boots to anything that feels good on aging feet. But attention to what goes on our feet often has significance beyond the beautiful and practical. This book promises to depict the full gamut of shoe-ness in an entertaining and illuminating fashion. Jane Brody, Science Writer for New York Times Savvy, smart, sophistication, style. Shoes are the source of power that drive a woman s performance, and It s All About Shoes captivates the passion behind all of this! It s a real winner! Eric Mudick from Eric s Shoes I remember in college that someone had a poster with a variation on Eleanor Roosevelt s famous slogan Great minds talk about ideas, average minds talk about events, small minds talk about people, miniscule minds talk about shoes. This attitude is belied in It s All About Shoes, which proves that great minds talk about shoes, and that shoes themselves can stand for ideas, events and people. In the essays, poems and reflections in this collection, shoes mean many things; they are, as the book s divisions show, icons of the past, present, and future; they are memories and hopes, desires and fears, images of ourselves and others, symbols of moments in life and time. They lure readers into their closets to imagine what their own shoes might say, though I doubt many readers can express these meanings as eloquently and evocatively as the authors in this book. For everyone who thinks about what she puts on her feet, it s a must read. Angela Jane Weisl, Professor, Seton Hall University

It's All About Shoes

Literature & Fiction

Laskin, Pamela

Poetry

Plain View Press, LLC

Bob Pfeiffer's second poetry collection dares us to be "good to one another," to be "serious about experience," and "to enjoy / the smallest fragments of life." It's a book about fatherhood, citizenship, and--first and foremost--love. At turns funny, at turns enraged by injustice, these clear-eyed and kindhearted poems achieve hopefulness without falling into naivety. Indeed, they recognize that "There is the world we have, / and the world we want," and that a huge gulf exists between the two. Poetry, though, offers us, we who reside in that first world, a way to access the second, its joys and miracles, and we're lucky to have Bob Pfeiffer to show us the way. -- James Davis May, author of Unquiet Things
In The Inexhaustible Before, his powerfully moving second collection of poems, Bob Pfeiffer writes, "This world is divided into two types of people: those with empathy for the living...and those without." Unquestionably the poems of this book express empathy at every turn: for past girlfriends, polar bears, animals struck by cars, tsunami victims, a mother diagnosed with cancer, a girlfriend become wife, a baby daughter...Underpinning the voice of this emotionally rich book is a belief in our shared humanity and the ultimate hope for redemption through love. -- Beth Gylys, author of Sky Blue Enough to Drink

The Inexhaustible Before

Pfeiffer, Robert

What a remarkable, sweeping collection from writer Ute Carson! This inspired arrangement of poetry, conveys the richness and poignancy of every life stage. Drawing from remarkable experience and striking particulars, she ultimately conveys the light of gratitude--"the clearing you spy / beyond a forest thicket." The poems are love songs to family and life itself, cyclical loss answered always by powerful renewal. --Judith Austin Mills, author of Accidental Joy, a Streak of Poetry and the Texas Revolution Trilogy
Ute Carson's poems are gifts she "lift[s] out one by one / and gingerly hold[s]them up / to the silver light of sunset." These poems are infused with the joys of grandparenting and the consolations that nature and memory offer while clear-eyed in their contemplation of aging and death. Standing in the tension between cherishing and letting go, her voice rings true in these poems as she says: "I know this is the life. / I would want no other." --Carol Denson, poet

Reflections: New and Selected Poems

Ute Carson

Parenting & Relationships

Shells, ears, damaged mirrors... the images in Karolyn Redoute's powerful new book, Whispers from the Aural World, conjure a mysterious emotional landscape that is as real as the lost city of Detroit where she grew up, and as heartbreaking as the silence between parents and children or, later on, between lovers. At times reading these poems I felt as if the Lady of Shallot had returned in the twenty-first century to speak to us again of the shadow world of personal isolation. Redoute makes us feel that there's hope, that through the discipline of poetry we can force the shards of broken glass into focus and find our whole reflections again. -- Maura Stanton, author of Immortal Sofa The poems in Karolyn Redoute's new collection, Whispers from the Aural World, are powerful and evocative. They deal honestly with family, with the people and places of childhood, with the weight of memory. They ask the reader to confront all the things said, and left unsaid, to look into mirrors and through windows, within and without, in hope of movement towards healing. -- Robert Pfeiffer, author of Bend, Break and The Inexhaustible Before Prophecy and memory exist on the same plane in Whispers from the Aural World by Karolyn Redoute. Children pause in the space between hours, a father drives a house like a car, and a staircase patiently anticipates turning into a story. With homegrown mysticism, Redoute discovers magic in the corners of rooms and in the corners of the mind, building a delicate bridge across childhood loss and wonder to an adult understanding of identity. -- James Cihlar, author of The Shadowgraph

Whispers from the Aural World

Karolyn Redoute

Religion & Spirituality

Time and Tide: An Atlas for the Grieving crystallizes grief and transforms the horrors of 2020 into poetry. In doing so, it creates a brief historical and philosophical summary of a "saturnine cycle" we will never forget.

TIME and TIDE: An Atlas for the Grieving

Thompson-Slaughter, Denise

Marriages and Other Dilemmas, by Kitty Beer, balances 16 short stories with a 50 page memoir. With heroines of every age, the stories are dynamic, dark, sexy, and humorous, and the frank and open memoir adds insight to the experience. In the stories, she explores consequential events in the lives of ordinary people, revealing her love for life and the idiosyncrasies that make life profoundly interesting. Crisp writing and a jaunty tone take the reader on a journey to the outer edges of desire, love and revenge. In her memoir, Beer takes an honest and insightful look back on her life, filled with "mistakes, thrills, fears, bliss, and delusion," overcoming the grief of misfortune with good nature and resoluteness. While Beer's trio of thriller novels reflect on her passion for the environment, Marriages and Other Dilemmas skillfully reflects on her personal life and observations of the world around her.

Marriages and Other Dilemmas: Collected Stories and a Memoir

Humor & Entertainment

Beer, Kitty

Humor

Say Anything

Rossi, Lee

"...this new world fraught with enormous new challenges weighted down with inherited old world problems, needs new navigational tools, new tongues unafraid of truth, and new poets with hearts and words almost too big for the treasure chests they beat in. You can find all of that and a hint of raw sugarcane in these pages." Frank X Walker, Editor of PLUCK! The Journal of Affrilachian Arts &amp; Culture; Author of Affrilachia, When Winter Come, Black Box and more. "In Of Jíbaros and Hillbillies, Ricardo Nazario y Colón connects the dots between Puerto Rico and Affrilachia, creating a route that is poetic narrative, grito, reflection and canción. The writing is muscular, intimately masculine, yet able to fully embrace a female essence-in poems that reference the Great Mother or in intimate connection with a woman the poet desires. The present legacy of racism, sexism, eco-exploitation, and colonialism, of psychic damage suffered in war-all are articulated here. In a favorite piece, Nazario y Colón crafts an ode/psalm to his spirit brother, Frank X Walker, where the ties that connect are lovingly etched." Lisa Alvarado, Author of Raw Silk Suture and Sister Chicas "Fierce and must read it slowly." Rane Arroyo, Poet, recent titles include: The Buried Sea: New &amp; Selected Poems, and The Sky's Weight

Of Jibaros and Hillbillies

Nazario y Colon, Ricardo

United States

In these two major suites of poems, Sarah Zale has composed an epic, an eye-opening, heartrending book that should be read and read again. Hers is a singular and gently courageous voice, one from which we may all draw sustenance and wisdom.  Sam Hamill  Sarah Zale's first book, The Art of Folding, is worthy of significant notice: her poetic sequence examines our personal responsibilities in a time of war and our relationship to atrocity. She softens the hard line of inquiry with compassionate listening and attentive observation. H.K. Hummel  Sarah Zale's The Art of Folding is a masterful work of sustained and interwoven lyrics, at once political and intimate, in which the gestures of daily life are seen as if for the first time in the light of history: folding and unfolding ordinary laundry and something more-cranes, folded and real, wounds, visible and invisible. What we have here is sheer lyric utterance: history and memory, personal disclosure, in a language at once compelling and transparent. These poems are haunted by Nuremberg, Spencer Tracy and Marlene Dietrich, the Wizard of Oz, Camelot, Jerusalem, and there is also Palestine. This poet writes back to Jabès, Siamanto, Amichai and Darwish, and calls forth a most ancient and moral imperative: that poets write of their time, and of the call to the best of humanity. That she struggles toward the boundary between Israel and Palestine is a mark of her seriousness. That she achieves this is a mark of her power. Carolyn Forché Sarah Zale has written a book of hauntingly straightforward and stark, yet inviting poems. Her unique voice and music will captivate you, her images draw you in from the beginning (shirt, ironing, hair), as this important and necessary book gains momentum with each poem.  Martha Silano

The Art of Folding

Zale, Sarah

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