"The Necessary Poetics of Atheism" collects poems and essays by three award-winning contemporary poets who demonstrate how atheism informs their poetics: as "a vehicle of political protest" in the work of MartIn Espada, as a form of activism and secular goodness in Lauren Marie Schmidt's poems, and as an aesthetic confrontation of a theistic worldview in J. D. Schraffenberger's writing. An enlightening foreword by the atheist philosopher Andrew Sneddon and a compelling introduction by poet Heid E. Erdrich invite us to read these "uneasy, contentious, complex, powerful, triumphant voices that allow goodness to shine without God." Espada asks, "Where, then, does an atheist poet put his or her faith? Where do we find our salvation? Some poets would say: Poetry." Put your faith in "The Necessary Poetics of Atheism" and find salvation in these provocative pages.

The Necessary Poetics of Atheism: Essays and Poems

Literature & Fiction

Espada, Martín

Schraffenberger, J. D.

Schmidt, Lauren Marie

Essays & Correspondence

Twelve Winters Press

With linguistic precision and visual dexterity, Starfish explores the bottomless depths of human intimacy and loss, reconciled against the vastness of the ocean and infinity of the cosmos. What if we had to pick: "The ocean or the stars. / A reputation in truth telling or a prize in diplomacy?" ("Elements of Style"). At times rendered through the perception of a "year-rounder" residing in a tourist locale, its poems offer close-up portraits of individuals bounded by shorelines yet attuned to expansive horizons. Alert to how elemental symbols delight as well as unsettle us, the book as a whole weighs the ceaseless negotiation of our actions against the limits of temporality.

Starfish

Uchmanowicz, Pauline

Poetry

Hektr Pastrovich, a journalist and poet, travels to the front of a war his country has been fighting for nine years in search of an enigmatic traveler who calls himself the Prince of Ithaka. Along the way he meets Helena, a beautiful and captivating woman who becomes a mystery to Hektr as well. Men of Winter is a revisionist work drawing from Homer's Iliad and Odyssey, set in early twentieth-Century Russia. It features a Preface by the author, in addition to an Interview, Afterword and Discussion Questions that make it ideal for book clubs and classroom study.

Men of Winter

Ted Morrissey

Literary

In the novel An Untimely Frost, or The Authoress, set in 1830s London, American author Jefferson Wheelwright seeks out the reclusive English novelist Margaret T. Haeley, creator of Dunkelraum's monster and widow of the poet Stephen Haeley. The story is inspired by Washington Irving's rumored courtship of Mary Shelley, author of Frankenstein. The book also includes the author's essay "Researching the Rhythms of Voice" and discussion questions.

An Untimely Frost

Morrissey, Ted

An anthology of poems, prose poems and flash fiction centering on the theme of things that are extinguished or extinct, from jukeboxes to insects to languages, and more. Editor John McCarthy has brought into existence the work of 37 contributors.

Extinguished & Extinct

Contemporary

"Weeping with an Ancient God" is a novella set in the Marquesas Islands in the summer of 1842. The protagonist, Melvill, has jumped ship from the whaler Acushnet into a wild, savage and exotically beautiful land. Melvill contemplates his dangerous present, his sad past and his wholly uncertain future on an island teeming with cannibals.The novella is based on author Herman Melville's real-life adventures as a young seaman. It includes nine illustrations by Adam G. Perschbacher, and a conversation with the author by Beth Gilstrap.

Weeping with an Ancient God

Part fable, part portal, "The Endless Unbegun" moves through prose and poetry, the past and the present, the mystical and the carnal, to tell a love story through many lifetimes. The twenty-first-century romance of Jon and Marisol opens into the sixth-century friendship of Radegunde and Fortunatus, which opens into poems that speak intimately of connection-with others, with the future we engender, and with the Earth that sustains us. Here, poetry meets myth in timeless writing that recognizes and renews the soul.

The Endless Unbegun

Webster, Rachel Jamison

I AM BARBARELLA: STORIES is a collection narrated by characters at the fringes of contemporary society-working-class characters with a raging taste for self-destruction. Many of the stories take place in Charlotte, North Carolina-a place people rarely end up on purpose. These characters aren't bankers or old money, nor entirely belles or rednecks, but some kind of poetry in between, always stumbling, and trying to survive. These are stories of how folks press on and reinvent themselves in a time when textile manufacturing is dead, and most of their friends and family have long since moved on.

I Am Barbarella

Gilstrap, Beth

On this road trip, the past is a boneyard, up ahead is the end of the line, and along the way Myra Stark and Pinkie are driving a 1984 Plymouth Turismo from Minnesota through Wisconsin. The travelers pick up a battered hitchhiker, follow a detour into the darkly comic Stark family history, and veer off track more than once. "Road Trip" is a narrative of disappointment and failed rescues; about the ghosts that haunt us and the relationships we leave behind.

Road Trip

D'Amico, Lynette

Ninety-three days ago a girl went missing, only to be found in a suitcase, two bullets behind her right ear. Hayden Fuller worked that case and now he's working another that's eerily similar: a missing young woman, no ransom note, and clues pointing to a high school guidance counselor. Fuller, an ex-hockey player drummed out of the NHL for taking salacious pix of a cheating husband (and teammate), now finds himself slipping back into Maple Leaf Gardens and clashing with a demimonde of corrupt CEOs, gangsters, prostitutes, and porn. With the help of a maverick reporter, tough guy Fuller navigates a host of double crosses and betrayals. But will he find the girl in time? 94, 95, 96 days and counting . . . "A fun thriller, and thrilling fun," says Thomas Fox Averill, author of A Carol Dickens Christmas. This Book Club Edition includes the full text of the novel, plus a preview of the new Hayden Fuller Mystery, A Fourth Face; the author's touching and humorous memoir "Toronto, 1965: Cheap Amusement's Beat"; and the author's Playlist of Selected Jazz titles to accompany the prologue and chapters.

Cheap Amusements: A Hayden Fuller Mystery (Book Club Edition)

Tracey, Grant

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