Sandpaper Blankets is a collection of poetry for and about women in various stages of their lives. Themes include discovering solitude and overcoming the guilt of enjoying that solitude. This is a book for spiritual searchers.

Sandpaper Blankets

Literature & Fiction

Waters, Mary N.

Poetry

Sand Paper Press

PRIVATE ROOMS is a book of poetry for those who don't ordinarily like poetry, as well as those who do. Mary Waters' first book of poetry, SANDPAPER BLANKETS, has frequently been compared to "reading a woman's private journals." 
PRIVATE ROOMS finds the strange in the ordinary and the ordinary in the strange. Readers will discover tales of having too much "stuff," being "the responsible one," teaching our children things we don't really believe, learning the difference between loneliness and solitude, and discovering the importance of not throwing away the weed-eater when everything appears to be coming up roses.

Private Rooms

Poetry. The English poet George Herbert (1593-1633) developed simple, auric figures and parables that chart the trajectories of hope and despair. In THE SWEETNESS OF HERBERT, his second book of poetry from Sand Paper Press, Stuart Krimko uses a wide range of formal techniques in an attempt to test the efficacy of Herbert's existential coping methods. The boredom of daily life, the almost-certain entropic effects of the passage of time, and the surprising enthusiasm that is somehow born of these conditions all come under review. No formal rock is left unturned, as Krimko uses and abuses rhyme, enjambment, syntax, and varied diction like grimy wooden playthings. References to Judy Blume, Rogaine, spring break, William Blake, Gabriel, the Commodore 64, and the poet's own name are made, exemplifying Krimko's belief that, "Even when the world is menacing, it sings."

The Sweetness of Herbert

Krimko, Stuart

Poetry. JOKER presents a world comfortably isolated from the sensibilities of American life. Set in Key West, Haskell's poems address end-of-the-road promise and frustration marked by dazzling sea and sky, pervasive alcoholism, and an uneasy social hierarchy of tourists, real-estate speculators, and service-industry workers. By turns candid and deceitful, maudlin and maddeningly reticent, Haskell's masked narratives are full of wry insight into the technological and political upheavals of "this lucky accidental country."

Joker

Haskell, Arlo

Fiction. FIRE AT THE END OF THE RAINBOW is a candid and discomfiting jaunt through Shawn Vandor's real life. Here are tales of revolving-door lust gone awry and strange encounters in the homes of Hollywood and Harvard stars. Through paeans to prostitutes, recreational drug use, sphincter failure, and the joys of buying jewelry at Tiffany & Co., Vandor shares a humorous and humiliating look at the quotidian misadventures of a single American man.

Fire at the End of the Rainbow

Vandor, Shawn

Contemporary

Poetry. In Harry Mathews's first collection of poetry in nearly 20 years, a legend of the American avant-garde unveils compelling anomalies including the prose sestina, didactic gastronomy, and a haiku sequence--a diary of discrete (if not so discreet) late-night improvisations on the familiar Japanese three-line form. The central section collects poems of terse lyricism devoted to the unpredictable deviations between intention and desire--the landscape of the new tourism: "Where is it I came from / And where is it I'm stranded? / Part of the maps is black / And the rest's in borrowed language."

The New Tourism

MATHEWS, Harry

Poetry. Latino/Latina Studies. Bilingual Edition. Translated from the Spanish by Stuart Krimko. In his final two books, Héctor Viel Temperley sought to create a complete world, a surreal realm of profound spirituality that would be attained through intensely physical experience. In "Crawl," the first of two book-length poems included here, a swimmer pulls his body alongside an urban coast, pounded by thunderstorms. His determined strokes establish the rhythm for an ecstatic meditation upon spirit and flesh, a tireless quest for secrets located "between the eye that trembles / and the eye of the abyss." Viel Temperley's pursuit would take on even greater urgency in "Hospital Británico," written as the poet recovered from brain surgery, and named for the facility in which he was treated. This final, kaleidoscopic opus is a radical and literal recreation of his life's work, a "version" of his present embedded by "splinters" from his past—boxers, pimps, sailors, sharks, and swimmers—that crests toward the future with the inexorable power of prayer. With an introduction by translator Stuart Krimko, and Viel Temperley's sole published interview (with filmmaker and author Sergio Bizzio), this bilingual edition introduces the English-speaking public to one of Argentina's most original and elusive poets.

The Last Books of Hector Viel Temperley

Viel Temperley, Hector

Poetry. Fiction. Art. Latino/Latina Studies. Translated from the Spanish by Stuart Krimko. As the Argentine economy went into freefall at the end of the last millennium, two young women—Fernanda Laguna and Cecilia Pavón—met and became friends. Fernanda, a painter and poet who also publishes fiction under the nom de plume Dalia Rosetti, and Cecilia, a poet and translator, soon forged the radically creative partnership now known as Belleza y Felicidad. As Belleza emerged into a movement and inspired a community, Fernanda and Cecilia broadcast its ethos—"a complete program of resistance," as César Aira once described it—through a prodigious output of poetry and fiction. Now a generous selection of this work is available in English for the first time. With an introduction by translator Stuart Krimko, this authoritative volume transmits the urgency and passionate feeling at the heart of one of the most exciting artistic and literary movements to emerge from South America in recent decades. "BELLEZA Y FELICIDAD, both the place and the idea, live on in the irresistible pleasures of Cecilia's and Fernanda's poems and stories. Upon revisiting them now I find that they are in fact high-precision lenses for seeing the daily utopias of reality."—César Aira "Fernanda Laguna and Cecilia Pavón are legendary writers, domesticating the world in order to make it the subject of their 'domestic' poetry. They are voracious and understand everything. Stuart Krimko's translations capture the totalizing effect of their writings beautifully."—Chris Kraus "This book is a paradise of love. Eminent, charismatic, &amp; frolicsome, it's also the magic transcription of a friendship, i.e. a romance (several!), the kind I spent my misspent youth envying in Montaigne &amp; La Boetie. Ecstatics of childlike candor &amp; polymorphous grace, Fernanda Laguna &amp; Cecilia Pavón are absolute women, guileless dreamers, saints in sneakers, on sidewalks, in jail, in Zara, on buses, in nightclubs, in bed, about to turn 29, &amp; 37, &amp; 7. I can't wait for everyone in america to read this book &amp; never be the same again."—Ariana Reines

Belleza y Felicidad: Selected Writings of Fernanda Laguna and Cecilia Pavon

Pavon, Cecilia

Laguna, Fernanda

WINNER of the FLORIDA BOOK AWARD Phillip and Dana Zimmerman Gold Medal for Florida Nonfiction WINNER of the President's Award | Florida Authors &amp; Publishers Association The dramatic story of South Florida's oldest Jewish community and a major addition to the history of this unique island city. Long before Miami was on the map, Key West had Florida's largest economy and an influential Jewish community. Jews who settled here as peddlers in the nineteenth century joined a bilingual and progressive city that became the launching pad for the revolution that toppled the Spanish Empire in Cuba. As dozens of local Jews collaborated with José Martí's rebels, they built relationships that supported thriving Jewish communities in Key West and Havana at the turn of the twentieth century. During the 1920s, when anti-immigration hysteria swept the United States, Key West's Jews resisted the immigration quotas and established "the southernmost terminal of the Jewish underground," smuggling Jewish aliens in small boats across the Florida Straits to safety in Key West. But these and other Jewish exploits were kept secret as Ku Klux Klan leaders infiltrated local law enforcement and government. Many Jews left Key West during the 1930s and their stories were ignored or forgotten by the mythmakers that reinvented Key West as a tourist mecca. Arlo Haskell's The Jews of Key West is is an entertaining and authoritative account of Key West's Jewish community from 1823-1969. Illustrated with over 100 images, it brings to life a history that had long been forgotten.

THE JEWS OF KEY WEST: Smugglers, Cigar Makers, and Revolutionaries (1823-1969)

History & Criticism

Poetry. Art. Preface by Arlo Haskell. Introduction by Daniel Levin Becker. Harry Mathews (1930-2017) was among the most inventive and unorthodox writers of his generation. His novels earned comparisons to Vladimir Nabokov and Thomas Pynchon and bear the mark of one who learned "never to settle for results that are merely reassuring." But Mathews was a poet first, and he prized poetry for its transformational and redemptive power. COLLECTED POEMS: 1946-2016 gathers seven prior collections, together with poems never before published in book form. Poems dedicated to John Ashbery, James Schuyler, and Kenneth Koch show Mathews's origins and commonalities with the poets of the New York School. Others reveal his obsession with the puzzles that animate the Oulipo, the famous French group of writers and mathematicians, in which Mathews was long the sole Ameri-can member. But Mathews's work transcends these affiliations. His maverick avant-gardism is all his own, nourished by wellsprings of romanticism and metaphysical fervor, in dialogue with literature, music, and art from the medieval to the modern period. For Mathews, it was "much more interesting to be curious about a riddle than to find its solution." His ability to fuse the world of facts with invented wildernesses of his imagining will give readers much to untangle, while his sensuality, wit, and affection for life's beauties, sorrows, and absurdities are their own rewards. COLLECTED POEMS: 1946-2016 augments and clarifies the extraordinary achievement of a singular American writer.

Collected Poems: 1946-2016

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