Poetry. African & African American Studies. Edited by Lenard D. Moore. "A literal and metaphorical groundbreaker, this unique and indispensable collection contains a brilliant array of haiku by five members of the Carolina African American Writers Collective, including founder and guiding spirit Lenard D. Moore, who serves as its editor. In the deft hands of Gideon Young, Sheila Smith McKoy, Crystal Simone Smith, and L. Teresa Church, we find strands of lyrical precision intertwined with earthy and treasured mundanities against a backdrop of emotionally transporting moments. Long before ecocriticism and ecopoetics entered their current vogue state, Moore shattered preconceptions by exploring the connections between Japanese and African American aesthetics. In this volume, we see his extraordinary skill as a revelatory poet in dialogue with four gifted writers who have been nurtured by his example and become literary leaders in their own right."--Lauri RameyContributors: Lenard D. Moore, L. Teresa Church, Crystal Simone Smith, Sheila Smith McKoy, Gideon Young

One Window’s Light

Literature & Fiction

History & Criticism

Unicorn Press (NC)

Poetry. "In these bracing meditations on matriarchal inheritance and the nature of the real, Lynn Otto breaks open pervasive, inherited silences, the 'prickered vines' that 'hold one so still.' By putting into motion various methods of perception, Otto transforms habitual stillness into 'survivable distance.' She has written a rare and moving kind of lyric autobiography--one rich with the shifting, the gaps, the push and pull of an alert, multitudinous mind."--Mary Szybist "Lynn Otto's powerful collection, REAL DAUGHTER, reminds me that what appears quiet and straightforward can yield a high order of surprise. These subtle, smart poems explore essential questions: What is it to be real, as in authentic? What can we expect, and what should we expect, of ourselves, for ourselves, and in relation to loved ones? Otto's poems move with elegant precision, wit, and a distinctive music. As lyrical inquiries into the tensions between mothers and daughters, religious belief and felt doubt, ritual that both binds and separates us, Otto's work brings to mind W. H. Auden's description of poetry as the clear expression of mixed feelings. REAL DAUGHTER is a lucent exploration of familial love and its entanglements, and of the challenges of being a self among others."--Michele Glazer "In her compelling debut collection, Lynn Otto explores inherent complications of family, our ache to understand our attachments. Our allegiances are multiple and continually in flux. What happens when they are at odds with one another? How do we hold on and simultaneously let go? The carefully wrought, often heart-rending poems in REAL DAUGHTER address these questions."--Andrea Hollander "'How is it,' Lynn Otto asks, 'we each learn / one story, and every sentence ever after / sounds to us like it belongs to it?' In other words, what is the nature of meaning? REAL DAUGHTER relentlessly and movingly poses this most essential question, as it examines mortality, perception, time, and filial affection in a clear, ruminative voice that remembers and imagines at the same time."--Christopher Howell

Real Daughter

Otto, Lynn

Poetry

Poetry. "In poems quietly fierce, meticulously observed, faithfully rendered, musically tempered; in the uncanny ability to evoke both the presence of the past, its once molten iron, and its abandonment by time, Julie Swarstad Johnson raises a 'host of silent voices praising every shadow.' In these graceful poems, Claudia Emerson has found an heir. PENNSYLVANIA FURNACE is fired by the haunting beauty and revelation of its resonant images, 'finding use / not in the thing itself, but in what / it opened...'"--Eleanor Wilner"As Julie Swarstad Johnson journeys east from present-day Arizona, her poems travel both geography and time, arriving in a pre-Civil War Pennsylvania crowded with steel mills and ironworks. There, other voices rise up to join hers, allowing the poet to plumb experiences beyond those of her singular self--a woodcutter struggling to support her family cord by cord, an ironmaster's daughter trading the fetters of her father for those of a husband. Built on careful research and evocative place-based observations, PENNSYLVANIA FURNACE is a book of incandescent intelligence that searches and burns bright as the sunshot furnace of the desert, as the smelter's molten ore."--Jessica Jacobs

Pennsylvania Furnace (First Book)

Johnson, Julie Swarstad

VALLEY OF WANT is a song in celebration of the difficulty of naming, of seeing, of putting one's finger on the elusive thing one feels is true. Graceful and witty, these poems are grounded in the thrilling stillness of nature and the contours of human connection through our self-performances, through our monsters, through our stories, through the language that makes us unmistakably ourselves. Poetry.

Valley of Want

White, Ross

This stunning debut poetry collection announces the distinctive voice of an emerging American poet. Amber Adams, a veteran of the Army Reserves who was deployed under Operation Iraqi Freedom, writes of the marks left by war in a new and startling way. BECOMING RIBBONS presents four acts that weave together themes of love, trauma, loss, and grief. Early poems in the collection reflect on Amber's marriage to Marine Bradley Adams and her own upcoming deployment. In evocative, perceptive poems, Amber describes Bradley's injury in Al-Anbar province. The collection explores the way war and trauma changes Amber and Bradley's relationship, and finally grapples with the end of their marriage, Bradley's death by suicide, and the need to memorialize those who have gone. Amber Adams traces a remarkable emotional landscape from our contemporary social terrain. As of the publication of this volume, America has been at war for over two decades, in which the personal, inexorable aftermath of war has cracked into the lives of many Americans. Readers will see friends, family, loved ones, and themselves in the challenging lyric moments presented in this collection. "It's a book of love and loss and survival, full of hard-earned wisdom. With lyric beauty and immense skill, BECOMING RIBBONS explores the interior of a profoundly layered wartime experience."--Brian Turner, author of Here, Bullet "Adams, in this masterful, beautifully-crafted collection, challenges the facades of safety our institutions represent-- marriage, war, freedom, our temporary bodies."--Jenny Molberg, author of Refusal "No one in recent memory has written out of the military experience with such nuance, such knowledge, and such tenderness as Amber Adams has in this book."--Bin Ramke, author of Earth on Earth Poetry.

Becoming Ribbons

Self-Help

Adams, Amber

Death & Grief

Map Is Not Territory

Maloney, Dennis

Poetry. Winner of the Unicorn Press First Book Award. In SELF-PORTRAIT IN DYSTOPIAN LANDSCAPE, Stephen Lackaye explores post- industrial disquiet in the Rust Belt. The figures in his poems try to reckon a subtle menace that lingers just beyond sure sight. A man who knows he is being watched contemplates the life of his voyeur. A laborer returning home hears a trap clap shut on someone in the woods and wonders if he can save the victim—if there is indeed someone to save. A youth recollects his early education in hand-to-hand combat, unsure of what violence he was ever capable of. Lackaye anneals these stories in a bright lyrical fire. These poems prompt us to distinguish the darkness within from the darkness without, to recover from the ruinous landscape the outlines of one's own self. "In his masterful and powerful debut collection of poems, SELF-PORTRAIT IN DYSTOPIAN LANDSCAPE, Stephen Lackaye's sweeping and muscular meditations enfold the piercing reflections of their speaker with luminous broad-stroked sketches of his passage through the urban (and a few natural) landscapes of this precarious time. This is an incisive, deeply wise, and illuminating collection of poems—a superb new voice has joined the ever-shifting landscape of contemporary American poetry."—David St. John "Bereft and lost as Odysseus going home, the singer of these poems wanders a place where a butterfly is a knife, a brother a ghost, and 'all that's possible betrays us.' The hero of Stephen Lackaye's SELF-PORTRAIT IN DYSTOPIAN LANDSCAPE is a cunning warrior left to his wits, and poem after poem deepens the story of his survival. What rings out in the end astounds me—something tender and lovely and new. What an amazing poet, what a gorgeous book."—Steve Scafidi "Very few young poets are brave enough to embrace silence in order to listen intently to the murmurings of the mind. Stephen Lackaye is one of them, and his extraordinary debut, SELF- PORTRAIT IN DYSTOPIAN LANDSCAPE, embodies that bravery and wisdom. This book is a life- affirming instrument of truth. By means of sly wit, arresting imagery, and a mature lyric craft, it persuades us to transcend the intimate and public wreckages of our present moment."—David Roderick

Self-Portrait in Dystopian Landscape

Lackaye, Stephen

Poetry. What is the spirit of our age, and what are the consequences of that spirit? THE POLITE SOCIETY pursues these questions, urging readers to ignore politics in its infamous, decadent sense and focus instead on how we might still work together to flourish together. "Seamlessly the beautiful poems of Ross White's THE POLITE SOCIETY traverse the page, but then, reading, you are struck by the sense of language as suddenly all the more mysterious—language, that is, as the ultimate system, frighteningly capable of both negotiation and song. If 'the system' threatens an all-encompassing politics, which it might, resistance is found in ourselves, our own imaginations. These poems are the proof." —Sally Keith

The Polite Society

Poetry. VIGIL is an ode to creating--to following a path from a dimly-lit home through a quiet wood, to the banks of a watercourse and back again. This collection, Chiyuma Elliott's second, is set across a range of physical and formal landscapes that are visited by charming spirits, Ambition, Love, Ghost, and Bird. In the company of these guides, VIGIL contemplates life, loss, and what sustains us. These poems are devotions to the kinds of vigils each of us has known: telling stories about the stars, planting a garden, and awaiting a lover's late-night return home. Introspective while eschewing isolation, VIGIL untangles the complexities of love, loss, and healing.

Vigil

Elliott, Chiyuma

Poetry. Collaboration. "This collaboration is a triumph. The language is so sharp and the description so precise, each poem unveils images that leave you with a kind of synesthesia. One sense stirs another until the world of the book becomes your own. You see things you didn't know you've been wanting and waiting to see: Spanish Moss lashing dragonflies, an afternoon's impersonal reverie. You cannot rest, nor should you. As you read these poems reverberating at every turn, you wish there was more of you to absorb every chord they strike. ACCORDING TO DISCRETION is electrifying."—Erica Dawson, author of The Small Blades Hurt "The poems in ACCORDING TO DISCRETION wander the world and send back reports full of marvelous observations. We are treated to a statue of the Madonna and her child being sniffed by a curious dog in Spain, coffins being hammered shut in Normandy, lids flying off trash cans in homage to the jazz musician Charles Mingus in Greenwich, money being burned to pay tribute to a dead relative in Taiwan, and peat smoke drifting over junipers shellacked by sleet in Ireland. In a poem about America's Bicentennial, several people sit on top of cars 'waiting for something miraculous' to happen. Readers of ACCORDING TO DISCRETION don't have to wait; poem after poem deliver accounts of the miraculous in everyday events. This collection, which often draws inspiration from jazz musicians, abstract expressionist painters, and other writers, is full of surprises that will delight readers for years to come."—Henry Hart, author of Background Radiation "Allen Jih and Adam Vines' ACCORDING TO DISCRETION is a series of relay races, each poet adding a burst of speed as the baton is passed on and then passed back with dizzying panache. But it's also an energetic anatomy of middle-class American life with a realist's reluctant appreciation of the surreality that surrounds us: 'You wish it all to be a simple hallucination.' Meanwhile nature serenely goes about its business of unknowningly chastising human artifice. ACCORDING TO DISCRETION is vibrant and enthralling poetry."—Andrew Hudgins, author of A Clown at Midnight

According to Discretion

Vines, Adam

Jih, Allen

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