Fluffing The Concrete: Making The Most Of Foreign Prison-or Anything Else

Humor & Entertainment

Dryden, Mack

Humor

Texas Review Press

A mysterious woman comes out of the wheat fields late one night to complicate the life of Chief Ranger Aldo Springer, recently banished to Fort Pawnee National Historical Site in central Kansas.  She demands asylum and backs up her demand by threatening to jump from the highest point in the historical sitea crow’s nest halfway up the hundred-foot mast of the fort’s flag pole.  Against his judgment, Springer conceals her from the security forces of the state hospital, from which she escaped, and risks everything he cherishes to pursue a murderer along a cold trail. In this well-conceived and vivid manuscript, the charming Aldo Springer, Chief Park Ranger at Fort Pawnee National Historic Site in Kansas, is in the awkward position of providing cover for Amanda Lowenthal, a 28-year-old escapee from the Pawnee State Hospital for the criminally insane, who murdered her family when she was fourteen. This is a genuinely successful piece of storytelling and character development. It’s humorous and well-paced and structures plausible scenes of intensity and moments of tenderness.”Publisher’s Weekly Steve Sherwood's finely crafted No Asylum is about escape.  Those who escape justice need to be imprisoned.  Those in prisons, most often of their own making, need to escape.  Aldo Springer, a National Park Service ranger, divorced, banished from his beloved Rocky Mountains to the Fort Pawnee National Historic site in Kansas, and loathed by his superintendent, lives without much hope. Serving time in this purgatory, a particularly hot summer in Kansas, he learns to act on his instincts, broaden his heart, take chances, and escape to the small slice of heaven he can create from truth, trust, and love.”Thomas Fox Averill

No Asylum

Literature & Fiction

Sherwood, Steve

Literary

Say It Hot Volume II: Industrial Strength is a collection of essays on American poets, fiction writers, nonfiction writers, and issues of interest to artists and academics. A companion volume to Say It Hot, these essays are brutally honest and acutely intelligent. From the book: “Literary authors these days no longer make livings off their work. Their books are not to be found in bookstores, and the books are rarely printed by major New York publishing houses. No one reads their works except for other literary authors and the professors who are evaluating their tenure and promotion folders at the colleges and universities at which they are employed, and it’s a minor miracle if a literary book from a small press sells a thousand copies. Fiction writers from wealth write about writing or they write about the ridiculous “sufferings” of the rich. Fiction writers from the lower classes write about the primordial filth from which they’ve physically escaped but from which they’ll never mentally be able to leave behind. Like war veterans, people who’ve fought it out in the miasma of poverty and blue- collar hell can never get the stink out of their skins, try as they may. Just like people who haven’t been to war can spot vets who have, middle-class people and the rich can spot people who’ve grown up poor, no matter what their position in life or the quality of their designer suits. Those suits just don’t fit right, and the neckties make them fidget and sweat. What the well-heeled authors and the working-class writers have in common is that they’ve been trained not to pronounce moral judgment.”

Say It Hot, Volume II:: Industrial Strength Essays on American Writers

Williamson, Eric Miles

History & Criticism

This anthology gathers the strong voices of accomplished poets reaching into and beyond nostalgia to remember, to honor, and to document through figurative imagery their experiences of Mexico and the vibrant border areas before the ravages of narco-violence. Locals Listen to the Mariachi Band at El Jardin in San Miguel You see their silhouettes along the stone wall or arm in arm below the glow of garden lights huddled like foothills, earth you could plant maize in. Cowboy hats and serapes, the smell of beer and cinnamon churros. You think of family and language how the music rolls through your hips to the sweat behind your knees. How it rushes through you, to a place you still don’t know. ―Lois P. Jones

Goodbye, Mexico: Poems of Remembrance

United States

An Ivorybill in Arkansas, which human guilt has conjured up from extinction; mud daubers toting “stunned spiders” to their nests on a screened porch in Louisiana; a whale shark off the Yucatan whose spots tell its story in indecipherable Braille; conchs harvested from an undersea garden in the Caymans; stray dogs in Athens, ancient gods in disguise―the lives of these creatures and others entwine with ours in The Garden of the Fugitives. Loosely based on the story of Eve, this collection of poems takes the reader from Eden into a fallen world. Exploring the tense relationships between women and men, mothers and daughters, and human beings and other species, these poems lead to Pompeii’s memorial to the “ash people” in The Garden of the Fugitives, where parents and children, inside their husks of plaster, never stop dying to the singing of bees. WISTERIA Oozing perfume, the vine kills exquisitely in such high style. The trees have no idea what’s happening to them.

Garden of the Fugitives: Poems

Havird, Ashley Mace

Poetry

The Gold Piano tells the story of Emerson Wainwright, a young man whose idyllic life in a small North Carolina town is turned upside down after his father is caught on videotape in a homosexual act at the county hospital. To escape from his hometown and its painful memories, Emerson enrolls at an under-funded historically black college a hundred miles away, attending on a minority grant. As the only white student living on campus, he struggles with his loneliness and his role as an outsider. His relationship with his roommate, a black activist from Brooklyn, is challenged when Emerson begins to fall in love with Zena, a gifted black artist. The novel’s final scenes bring a quiet but hopeful sense of resolution to Emerson’s quest to define himself and find his place in the world.

The Gold Piano: A Novel

Beauty Strip considers the landscapes and living things of Appalachia, protests the industrialization that leaves ruin in its wake, and celebrates the human capacity to remake, redeem, and find shelters and homes. Part sketchbook, part dreambook, Beauty Strip maps and ruminates on, haunts and is haunted by, the mountaintop removal sites and mill towns, the salt-works and bloomeries, that have scarred the land from West Virginia to Virginia to Tennessee.Our Lady of the Mills The painter dodges the filthy clumps,despises their chilblained faces,rabbit-eyes, broken teeth. He easesinto the stone church, the one workhe will give them: the virgin, charcoal-lined,comfort for the people in their hoursat the furnace and the spools. With paregoric and tonic bitters,he endures the church’s stained light,cold arches, and eye-sockets. Empty,unpainted, the dreadful ovals will tellwhat she felt when she touched her son,cool and rigid as marble awaiting the chisel,pale as threadbare muslin, spilt cream.

Beauty Strip: Poems (The TRP Southern Poetry Breakthrough Series)

Woolfitt, William Kelley

This collection, Morton’s tenth, is a bold book of poetry delving into risks. It’s the moving forward; the constant discovery of new things. Using a combination of quotes, mythological images, and exquisite metaphors from nature, Morton delivers poems that describe the absolute urgency of giving one’s heart over to life, the burning drive to have faith in the world, the insistence that everything, in its own way, is holy. This book is unfettered joy. Tending Fires I wanted to write a sonnet last night, because that’s what lovers do, but the fire needed tending, and all I could think of were your shoulders, and that’s not romantic, so I put on another log, and thought about that hot summer day underneath that oak, when our shoulders brushed, and I blushed at the nearness of you, and how we made love that night . . . still . . . that’s not what I wanted to write . . . But it’s you; you, my love. You are my night and my morning, and the hot coals beneath these logs . . . hear them hiss and whisper like cicadas―cicadas of the trees, and the summer, and of all things that burn.

Constant State of Leaping

Morton, Karla K.

Lucas has inherited his mother's bakery, as well as her obsession for baking sourdough: a bread conceived by wild strains of yeast, and ripened until its flavor becomes both pungent and startling.  Running the family business was a safe bet for Lucas, and a lucrative one at that; but when he finds that his soul has become infused with the same untamable character of the sourdough itself, he discovers that a safe bet can be the most dangerous thing a person can dare to make.“The masterful way Benjamin Ludwig establishes and stays true to an analogy ultimately sells the integrity of the idea and creates a continuing sense of surprise in a subject that has been exhaustively treated and in two characters who are less than perfect, but who somehow are remarkable in their ordinariness and the genuine passion they find for each other and in their journey of self-discovery. The truth is that I didn’t want to like this story, but Ludwig made me love it by remaining faithful to his characters and allowing them to carry the tale, while they develop and round out into credible and evocative, convincingly empathetic individuals who moved me with the genuineness of their hearts.”―Clay Reynolds, Series Judge

Sourdough: A Novella

Ludwig, Benjamin

Contemporary

Set in the suburbs and cities of the Midwest, Mid-South, and Texas, these stories explore the lives of characters biracial, black, white, and all sorts of in-between. The intersections and collisions of contemporary life are in full effect here, where the distinctions between fast food and fine art, noble and naked ambitions, reality and reality shows have become impossible to distinguish. Read these stories and understand why Steve Yarbrough said Williams “writes like Paul Auster if he were funnier or like Stanley Elkin might have if he’d ever been able to stop laughing.” " Tom Williams has done the near impossible in penning a book that is both undeniably entertaining and deeply thoughtful, Millhauser meets Bukowski meets Ellison." --Alan Heathcock, author of Volt “Sure, we need the nudge of category to help us all think straight, but we also need the rangy trickster, Tom Williams, to do the bang-up boundary work of imaginary anthropology in these deadpan dead-on gems. These infiltrating texts take us sideways, through and through, turn us inside-out.” . --Michael Martone, author of Michael Martone and Four for a Quarter

Among The Wild Mulattos and Other Tales

Williams, Tom

Humor & Satire

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