Poetry. Gay & Lesbian Studies. Bill Kushner spins the loose narrative of a lonely ten-year-old Billy whose father is away at war, and who develops a remarkable and touching friendship with his imaginary companion, Abraham Lincoln. This work concludes with the long poem, "Born," that awarded Kushner a New York Foundation of the Arts fellowship. Lisa Jarnot writes, "Taking dictation from the tender haunted places in the heart, Bill Kushner conjures a voice simultaneously innocent and wise." "Memory being abandoned buildings, talented lips, the hairy embrace of Lincoln...A hell of a book," notes Anselm Berrigan. "Kushner takes the New York school aesthetic back to its rich gay roots. Kushner is a master poet of loneliness, evoking childhood, casting it in a cool, benevolent, magical light"--Publishers Weekly.

In Sunsetland with You

Literature & Fiction

Kushner, Bill

Poetry

Straw Gate Books

Poetry. LGBT Studies. HEART STONER BINGO explores that nebulous and mysterious ground between pop culture, fact, fiction, and desire. Its prose poems riff and sample like a DJ on the flotsam and jetsam of colloquialisms lifted from the newspaper and speculation, a la language poetry. A beat, a sing-song, rap and repetition. Investigating the ground of the unknown and cracks and crevices lurking beneath the reading surface: a former heavy metal fan gets philosophical, a working-class-raised-now-academic reconciles a past—it happens in ways un-pedantic or in your face. The quiet moments bubble to the cap of the poems and lead to a real-world, real-time, real-people sophisticated epiphany. An elevation of high and low culture done wrong and rite at the same time.

Heart Stoner Bingo

Gray, Stephanie

Poetry. In his tenth book, BRAINLIFTS, long-time New York poet Tom Savage writes and riffs off films, music, dance and art with a sustained aphoristic style, each thought exploding and reverberating in a complex music. Of Tom's work Dean Kostos writes that Tom's idiom "can become a trapdoor through which we fall, finding other structures and ways of speaking." Bernadette Mayer writes, "He transforms the pretty rational souls of stuff into the pretty anti-rational souls, leaping elliptically, sometimes elliptically logically from perception so quickly to its part and art." Alice Notley writes, "I've been reading Tom Savage's poems for a long time and have come to realize that I need each new book."

Brainlifts

Savage, Tom

Poetry. "Valerie Fox's idiosyncratic and often hilarious poems, with their playful shifts of syntax and thought, are shadowed over by a mysterious grace.. [Here is] a guide to seeing the world in a new and brilliant way. This is a poetry of multiple pleasures and surprises, rigorous to the core yet forever blissful"-Lewis Warsh. "If you think life came without a manual--you are holding it. Here, in The Rorschach Factory, are Valerie Fox's schematics, instructions, model kits, psychic consultations, advice. Patient  and entertaining explanations; god in a Zen garden, channeling Audubon, Axl Rose, Tennessee Williams, the Cheshire Cat. Valerie Fox is Eurydice not looking back, with James Dean as Orpheus. This is a book to place with your important ones." - Leonard GontarekFox has lived and traveled around the world, teaching at several colleges and universities including Sophia University in Tokyo, Japan. She is a founding co-editor of 6ix. She is currently Visiting Professor in the Department of English and Philosophy at Drexel University in her home state of Pennsylvania and now resides in New Jersey.

The Rorschach Factory

Fox, Valerie

Poetry. African and African American Studies. THE DREAM DETECTIVE spins rapidly from sociopolitical satire to elliptical ruminations seasoned with riffs on the body, family, exotic locales, music, and more. "Simmering just below the (non)linear narrative is an imaginative idiom challenging semantics and syntactical structures--an oppositional poetics. THE DREAM DETECTIVE successfully sneaks across cultural and ethnic boundaries," notes Randall Horton. "David Mills is a poet of lyric comic mystic worldly independence. His work ranges from meditative to satirical to gently outrageous, a reflective and varied wit running (punning) through his poem-by-poem characterizations of mind," writes Anselm Berrigan.

The Dream Detective

Mills, David

Poetry. Fiction. Literary Nonfiction. THE RED ROOM: WRITINGS FROM PRESS 1 features short fiction, poetry and opinion from the first three volumes of Press 1, the magazine of innovative writing. Contributors include Bill Kushner, Jayne Pupek, Maurice Oliver, Lewis Warsh, Changming Yuan, Ruth Altmann, Stephanie Gray, Sean Lovelace, Nicole Cartwright Denison, Leonard Gontarek, Andrew Mossin, Lydia Cortes, Lynn Levin, Meg Pokrass, Elizabeth Thorpe, Miriam Kotzin, John Grey, John Vick, and many others.

The Red Room: Writings from Press 1

History & Criticism

Poetry. Native American Studies. "[DEEP RED GUILD] takes the reader inside the mind of a born poet."—Brenda Coultas "These short, interlocking lyric poems/songs and prose/prose-like pieces are alternately intuitive; acutely concrete; fast, voluble and associative; or meditative in an eloquent, nearly silent way."—Peter Bushyeager "[These poems] are right out in the open, site-specific, indelible, challenging, up close and—as they say—personal. Her attention level is through the ceiling, whether asleep or awake. I've been reading her poems for two decades and this is her best and most beautiful work."—Lewis Warsh

Deep Red Guild

Fortune, Merry

Poetry. RADIOCARTOGRAPHY charts a love affair with a city while mapping an imaginative landscape both densely allusive and as immediate as cracks in the sidewalk."There is a deep, post-ironic sensitivity to McDonough's work that combines skepticism with empathy."—John Deming"His passionate lyric complexities are infused with that impalpable literary energy which is the hallmark of good poetry ... a pleasure to read, and an even greater pleasure to read again."—Tony Towle

Radiocartography

McDonough, Michael

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