From the Inside Quietly

Literature & Fiction

Amezcua, Eloisa

Poetry

Sundress Publications

At turns both funny and devestating, Marcel Brouwers' debut collection, The Old Cities, takes you on a linguistic adventure around the world and home again. The poems here are playful, smart, and never boring. This is a collection any lover of language and travel should own. "Marcel Brouwers' debut collection The Old Cities is a travelogue of local and national curiosities, and in that the poems range so freely, there is a glide to this work, a welcoming ease. In that every subject in poetry, considered both carefully and freely, is as skewed as we are, these poems reveal, piecemeal--what other way, honestly, do we live out most of our lives--who we are at our least pretentious and most lively. The reader of these poems will find a plurality of intimated joys and sorrows. And, as well, a voice that is never merely shrewd but, and more consistently than any reader has a right to expect, ready at any moment to redress the ironies it registers so aptly. I love this book because it is in love with oddness. And it's word-wise: just read the first poem: not a received noun or a stock phrase that isn't affectively queried. If language got us into this mess, these poems seem to say, language will have to get us out." -William Olsen, author of Sand Theory "One of my teachers in graduate school once told me that a 'decent' first book of poems only needs about three 'very good' poems. If this is true, then it must be that Marcel Brouwers' debut collection The Old Cities is an exceptional book. There are echoes of, among others, Frost and William Matthews--not bad company--but these poems are all Brouwers. His voice is equally compassionate and ironic, his vision equally expansive and precise, evidenced in a poem about his country: "Children who die go down as heroes/ gone down." Humor often sidles up to grief in these poems, but it's the pathos that rings the loudest: 'I'm not in favor of the end/ but it's hard to think of what's missing, a love/ that wishes it be different and how it ultimately is.' Just one of many beautiful moments The Old Cities possesses." -Alexander Long, author of Still Life

The Old Cities

Brouwers, Marcel

Gabriel Smith is a black man in a dress. Always in full makeup, he ridicules, inspires, and entertains; he is both mother and father, pageant and relief.
 Tortured by his zealous father, Gabriel moves to Cleveland, Ohio, to start a new life. Soon, he learns that his presence, despite giving order to those closest to him, incites fear and hatred. As past and present collide, Gabriel becomes the mirror that reflects the lives of the people surrounding him, the spectacle that isn't as bad as the histories they want to escape completely.
 Set against the backdrop of a city recovering from one of the worst race riots in history, The Butterfly Lady is filled with pain encased in the blues. This stunning first novel wrestles with the horrors of love and the consequences of being black, gay, and male.
 Advance praise for The Butterfly Lady:
 In The Butterfly Lady, Hoey, clearly driven by love for his characters and a passion to understand their lives, weaves a cocoon of community. Fearless, in the tradition of Morrison, he looks under beds and throws open closet doors to present truth – drawing the reader in to the place where lives crash. - Anton Nimblett, author of Sections of an Orange
 The Butterfly Lady riffs from the page in bursts and twists, conflagrating image, sound, language and character in a literary mimicry of jazz ... Danny Hoey's confident prose takes the reader into the heart of Cleveland's inner-city where its inhabitants face sometimes unanswerable questions of sexuality, identity, and race. - Britta Coleman, author of Potter Springs, winner of the Lone Star Scribe Award
 Danny M. Hoey, Jr.'s The Butterfly Lady presents haunting characters that ask - demand - a great deal: Understand and embrace the complications and nuances of African-American identity. Arm yourself with these revelations. This is a terrific novel; devastating and hopeful because Hoey so unflinchingly educates the reader. He writes with the fierceness and truth of James Baldwin and has given us a story that lingers and informs long after the last sentence. - Dana Johnson, author of Elsewhere, California and Break Any Woman Down, winner of the Flannery O’Connor Award

The Butterfly Lady

Danny M. Hoey, Jr.

United States

Gathered: Contemporary Quaker Poets, the first anthology of its kind, seeks to give the best Quaker poets writing today a voice in contemporary letters. Many anthologies of writing from other spiritual traditions have been published in recent years, and this Quaker collection will be an important addition to the conversation. The poets presented in Gathered come from all points on the Quaker cultural spectrum. There are Quakers from all over the United States and Quakers from abroad. There are liberal Quakers and conservative Quakers. There are lifelong Quakers, Quakers from hybrid spiritual backgrounds, and those who were once part of Quaker society but have since moved on down other paths. While all of these poets have been touched in some way by the Quaker way of life, the work presented here is not religious or devotional in the traditional sense. Many poems address Quaker culture and spirituality, but they question those traditions, taking a broader view of the human condition and the experiencing of living in our complex, often troubling world, where there are no easy answers. Contributors include poets such as David Ray, Maria Melendez, Dawn Potter, Laura McCullough, Ellen Wehle, Maryhelen Snyder, Jennifer Luebbers, Errol Hess, Heidi Hart, Sarah Sarai, and many others.

Gathered: Contemporary Quaker Poets

"There's a tensile strength of line here-predominantly pentameter-that underscores the ease of the poetic idiom: just as the heartfelt yet disciplined feeling-life of the content underwrites this collection's larger themes of Judaism and its ancient traditions. The Hardship Post has a good deal on its mind as well as the load in its heart. Polish history and heritage may be one personal focus, but displacement and identity are the greater subjects. First books don't usually take on the world at this level of seriousness and skill." -Stanley Plumly "I admire Jehanne Dubrow's poems not only for the poise and beauty of her lines, but also for the way she grapples with big subjects: inheritance and home, the cultural and the personal. A bearer of tradition, she also knows what it's like to lose herself in modernity. 'I don't belong where bodies separate / from minds like sand trying to leave behind / the sea.' Poems become strands of continuity stretched almost to breaking by mobility. Dubrow seems to have lived everywhere-and that is precisely where The Hardship Post should be read." -David Mason "At the place where the cruelties of history and those of story intersect, Jehanne Dubrow has staked a claim. These are poems of emotional intensity under formal control. An impressive first collection." -Linda Pastan

The Hardship Post

Dubrow, Jehanne

"Miniature celebrations of place, the writings in Nowhere Else But Here (ital) deftly maneuver through imagined spaces and bustling Manhattan streets, the impossible page and the architecture of Japanese homes. Here, place is questioned and subdued: it is the hot gloss of sun on concrete." -Lily Hoang, Author of Unfinished "The writing in Not Somewhere Else But Here is at turns haunting and infused with a deep magic. The work carries the reader from Beirut to Vermont, from Japan into dream worlds, bodies as maps. Landscapes are often treacherous, populated with 'mouths of razor-wild men', enchanted with 'fists opened to explosions of diatomic stars,' and each woman in this collection navigates those spaces with a deft grace. Step into the worlds they have summoned." -Margaret Bashaar, Editor of Hyacinth Girl Press

Not Somewhere Else But Here: A Contemporary Anthology of Women and Place

As much memento as memento mori, Kristen Eliason's Picture Dictionary resists easy summaries. This full-color collection, straddling the lines of denotation and connotation, will force you to rethink the nature of language, observation, beauty, and grief. "At first glance, this astonishing book appears to be an ingenious account of a young American's year in Japan, told through a 'picture dictionary" of anecdotes, usage notes and etiquette tips. But as this tale unfolds, a second, shadow narrative begins rising to the surface: an unbearably abrupt and severe loss suffered in another time and place. Suddenly the surface narrative, with its sour-sweet tastes, its new syllables, its nets of oranges, pink shirts and pickled plums, feels alive with pain, pain pricking through the skin of this text in nervy, exquisite relays. Eliason's Picture Dictionary is a ravishing book about the inability of the heart to die with the dead, the sad burden of coming to know world in all its various and devastating beauty. - Joyelle McSweeney "'Most of this doesn't translate,' Kristen Eliason's clear-eyed elegy Picture Dictionary must finally concede: not those beautifully impenetrable kanji characters, not the misfired conversations between the American girl in flight and her Japanese hosts, and certainly not the grief that follows a lover's accidental death. This book attempts to wrestle what cannot be translated into some kind of order - not to explain or to solve anything, but to contain sorrow by giving it a comprehensible structure. As we proceed through the narrative parcellated into minute components in Eliason's dictionary, we piece together a life - that is to say, we remember, and that act of remembrance offers itself as a bulwark against the ineluctable solitude of human experience." - Kimberly Johnson

Picture Dictionary

Eliason, Kristen

Literary

Till the Tide: An Anthology of Mermaid Poetry

Confluence

Marchetti, Sandra

Stationed Near the Gateway

Bashaar, Margaret

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