Oh, for the democratization of poetry! For the populace, for the youth, for the wild boys and girls of every generation! Let us celebrate direct emotion, purity of expression, raw feeling represented with the rawest of words. Let us celebrate New York, with its Beat Generations, its midnight cafés, its solid and sordid history of every type and era of class revolution. And let us not forget the individual artists and activists who spend their lives keeping New York's perpetual revolutions alive. Anne Lombardo Ardolino, known on the Internet (where she manages EastVillagePoetry.com) as Anntelope, embodies this spirit: in her presence, in her life, in her songs and art, and particularly in her poetry. In I Can Sing Fire, her first book, we see what she s been working on for decades: an aesthetic that is base but never banal, crude and sophisticated, and counterculture in a way that embraces the poetic tradition. In short, she's brought us a book which is pure rock 'n' roll. You'll find I Can Sing Fire is an easy read: it slams through you like a concert, leaving you pumped for more art, unable to distinguish words from action. You'll find that you keep returning to it. Despite its immediate clarity, it can't be called simple: there's enough here to pull you back many times over.

I Can Sing Fire

Literature & Fiction

Ardolino, Anne Lombardo

Poetry

Unlikely Books

As a Registered Nurse, Belinda Subraman has worked in several difficult areas, but from 2001 to 2007 she was working as a hospice nurse. Hospice is the art of preparation, and when Belinda's own father reached his final days in 2008, she took what preparation she had and flew back to Carolina to assist him in his passage. No doubt she was more aware than most of us that no preparation is adequate. Unlikely Books is privileged to present the resulting book of poetry, Blue Rooms, Black Holes, White Lights. It is not an easy book of poetry to read. It is easy enough to understand—though Belinda's extensive poetic education is clear, this is essentially plain-language poetry, written to be accessible by anyone. But Belinda's brutal analysis of her grief brings the reader's own tragedies into sharp definition. The book mercilessly explores the author's most painful memories, and aspires to share the most fundamental aspects of human experience with the reader. It is by turns discomfiting and comforting, in the way that great poetry is meant to be. Blue Rooms, Black Holes, White Lights contains thirty poems by Belinda Subraman and five full-color images by César Ivan. This second edition includes a ten-page afterword from the author, detailing the creation of the book.

Blue Rooms, Black Holes, White Lights

Subraman, Belinda

My Hands Were Clean

Bradley, Tom

Genre Fiction

Including the complete collaborative poems of Sheila E. Murphy and the late Michelle Greenblatt; three free-verse poems and 59 American ghazals. With a Foreword by Vincent A. Cellucci.

Ghazals 1-59 and Other Poems

Murphy, Sheila E.

Greenblatt, Michelle

'Thank the gods for poets like Varn who stand undaunted at the prospect of unmasking the “bloodied face of history” as inextricably tied to the most pervasive prophecies of religion—those stories that leave “not a creature…unshivering.” Varn’s Apocalyptics shies from neither grandiosity nor grotesquery, neither high nor low society, for isn’t it precisely the blood—some stranger’s bodily fluid—that is to save? From “dumpster diving,” ghosts take flight. From “rancid butter,” a flock of magpies. Enter this text prepared to rub shoulders with archetypes amidst a house of mirrors in darkness, to open old tomes with your teeth and drool enough to smudge creation. And of all the “thou shalt nots” you can recover from the rubble, only remember one: Do not be afraid.' —Dylan Krieger, author of "Giving Godhead 'While reading the poems in Derick Varn’s Apocalyptics “we mend our own spines,” we experience what is human as being “sore from all the changes.” These poems put flesh and muscle on the spaces of time between, the slippage that makes up, desire and disappointment in human nature. The poems remind the reader, through form and content, that the erosion of time shapes us into who we are, individually and as a culture. Varn cuts away the dead weight in language and experience to give the reader the essential, the existential mortar needed to mend “mal-shaped minds.” The poems Varn has crafted in this book are “thick bread,” oxygen that will turn the knot in a belly “into something akin to a heart” that mends bones of broken men and women. Poetry lovers (new and old) will feast on the breath in these readable, human poems and heal into themselves.' —Rich Murphy, author of "Americana" and "Body Politic" 'When each heartbeat is a floodlight, poems erupt like those in C. Derick Varn’s Apocalyptics. Wittgenstein said, and as used as epigraph to one poem, “You get tragedy where the tree, instead of bending, breaks.” Some of these poems “bend” but some also go all the way to “break.” The results transcend tragedy, though. How can it be otherwise when the results are poems, including some that set “language on fire”—as in “You’re always / claiming the high road as it washes / away.”' —Eileen R. Tabios, author of Murder Death Resurrection

Apocalyptics

Varn, C. Derick

New and Selected Poems by El Pasoan poet Belinda Subraman, covering work from 1986 to 2018. Including the full text of the chapbooks "Notes from a Human Warehouse Engineer" and "Late Night in the Psyche Ward."

Left Hand Dharma: New and Selected Poems

The first book of poetry by Kayla Rodney focuses on her experiences with New Orleans, tragedy, and hurricanes, especially Katrina.

Swimming Home

Rodney, Kayla

Typescenes is a collection of 25 prose poems you can dance to. These choreopoems work together to form a picture, analysis, and interrogation of Black American male mental health. A foreword by Jonathan J. Detrixhe, Ph.D., and prefaces by the author and publisher, put the work into context for further study.

Typescenes

Brown, Rodney A.

fata morgana

Chace, Joel

"The bad boys of poetry are back! In this second collaboration we see Vincent Cellucci and Christopher Shipman still enjoying their high jinx, surprising 
metaphors, attention to sound and deep investment in place. But they also have grown and deepened; the "former reprobates" now take on fatherhood, 
jobs, moving, and aging. getting away with everything is an immensely lively book." 
-Beth Ann Fennelly, author of Heating & Cooling: 52 Micro-Memoirs

getting away with everything

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Books by Unlikely Books