Road of Five Churches: Stories

Stephanie Dickinson

Rain Mountain Press

Songs For The Extinction Of Winter

Literature & Fiction

Rob Cook

Poetry

Rosalind Palermo Stevenson's Insect Dreams is a stunning story, half historical fiction, half fever dream in which the noted naturalist Maria Sibylla Merian (1647-1717) travels from Holland to Surinam in South America. What brings her to the New World is a passion for the unknown: There are creatures that no one has seen. Creatures that have not been classified, counted, entered in the journals and the record books of science, whose shapes defy the patterns of logical construction, whose colors are as if from other worlds, self-regenerating, pure, infinite complexity and variety, sketched by God, painted by angels, life miraculously breathed into them, life, alive, free, that no one has seen, that she, she must see. The juxtaposition of memories from Holland, the interjection of the slave trade, Merian s explorations in the New World, possible love, possible impossible beasts, form a vast yet condensed canvas, told in the most sensuous language. Merian is in love with the details of the world, and so is Stevenson. Jeff VanderMeer, Locus OnLine

Insect Dreams

Rosalind Palermo Stevenson

In his second collection of poetry, Gil Fagiani is a rook, the deepest bucket of whale sh*t in the deepest part of the ocean, as the epigram tells us. The reader follows the poet through freshman year at Pennsylvania Military College, Class of 1967, where the spotlight is on the time-honored discipline that transforms young men into elite warriors. We sit with him on the third floor of Howell Hall, zipped up in his cadet blouse/hair cut back to the bone. PMC is located in the heart of the decaying city of Chester, Pennsylvania. Fagiani sets these vastly different worlds into a brilliant counterpoint: one is antiseptic and ordered, the other, shabby and chaotic. In Local Girls the daughters of immigrant Ukranians and Poles who pull double shifts/in front of the blast furnaces/of Penn State Casting speed past the cadets, a cloud of gray locusts, in banged-up Chevies. While organized violence is bred at PMC, the violence that spills from the town is fitful and random. We visit Ukranian Hall, where somebody smashes a glass pitcher/and waves the bloody handle. And The Chester Arms is the bar where cadets and the locals collide, and the Isley Brothers preach/the gospel of pussy while customers slug it out. An aura of presentiment hovers over Rooks: military escalation in Vietnam, political assassinations, burning cities, the larger social conflagration about to engulf America. The imagery of these poems is full of sh*t-on-a-shingle, grenade throws, latrines, swagger sticks, but there are also golden-yellow/daisy faces/crushed in the imprints/of tank treads. Fagiani's language, sometimes gritty and humorous, is always energized and passionate. He suspends his poems often in midair, shocking them into silence.

Rooks

Gil Fagiani

<p>With an urban anthropologist's sense of the rich hodgepodge that constitutes a culture, and a pilgrim's sense of discovery and wonderment, Philip Dacey delivers his New York City to us in this enormously appealing series of sonnets he calls postcards. As ever, he demonstrates how form can harness the inchoate, discipline the disparate. Dacey collects the city's language, he limns its neighborhoods, and he does so with wit and elan. If eros can be thought of as life-fulness, these poems are erotic. Stephen Dunn</p>

The New York Postcard Sonnets

Philip Dacey

Corn Goddess is about the sacred teenage time when a body blossoms and is maimed, about prairie and ramshackle farms and desolate cow lanes, the dirt s remembering of recluses and long ago animal sex, about mothers, those angry and strong Midwestern women who feed their daughters the bone soup of self-hatred, and fathers who hunt the silver foxes running through farm girls  imaginations. Corn Goddess describes the struggle to escape the seduction of gunnysacks and summer afternoons spent lying on cut hay after the balers have been through, of green corn and mystery growing in every direction, a fecund claustrophobia, and the darkness encountered once a wider world is found.

Corn Goddess

Songs for the Extinction of Winter: Poems

Cook, Rob

The Short Imposition of Living: Poems

Keuter, Matthew

Poetry. Literary Nonfiction. Part Charlie Chaplin, part Rimbaud, visionary poet Rob Cook recreates childhood and young adulthood in one of the funniest yet emotionally potent collections to appear. DIARY OF TADPOLE THE DIRTBAG is biography compressed into a series of darkly humorous vignettes—bristling, self- deprecating, yet celebratory. A long- haired Tadpole at last emerges from the miasma of his boyhood in an ill- fitting green trench coat. His saving graces are his acute vision (although his eyesight is bad along with a host of other maladies)and his humor, gloriously his own. Although he fails, he wants to become the Einstein of Failure.

Diary of Tadpole the Dirtbag, Second Edition

A Blanquito in El Barrio

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