Ragged Lion: A Tribute to Jack Micheline

Vagabond Press

Bestseller

Cronin, M.T.C.

"I was having lunch with Dexter DeWitt. This in itself was a questionable activity on my part." So begins Code Green, whose anti-hero Chip Stone engages in quite a few questionable activities. Stone works as a male nurse in a psychiatric hospital and has almost as many behavioral issues as the residents he cares for. These include DeWitt, a cultural critic gone bonkers; Tim Valentine, who snacks on light bulbs; Philip Nolan, who contends (correctly) that he's a character in a book; and Glinda Moon, an anorexic witch. As the violence at his workplace intensifies, the confused Stone sets out on a desperate but comical odyssey to find his estranged wife - and himself. His wanderings take him through a netherworld where he meets old friends, new enemies and one very unusual sister-in-law. He discovers that the line between the sane and the not-so-sane is more gossamer than even he had suspected. With wild characters and gaudy, entertaining prose, this engaging work offers a bumptious blend of humor and pathos well-suited to the new millenium.

Code Green

Literature & Fiction

Jenkins, Greg

Contemporary

Poetry. LIVES is a lyrical, passionate, and occasionally ironical account of life in a modern world of infinite possibility. Filled with vivid imagery of work, love, dreams, and death, these poems celebrate the phenomenal aspects of existence while acknowledging the futility of our continual search for meaning. They confront both reality and the beyond, communicating powerful truths about eternal situations. Lucas Hunt has won a John Steinbeck Award for poetry. His poems have been published in Confrontation, The Iconoclast, Hidden Oaks, Proteus, Mad Poets Review, and Meet the Writers. "There is a kind of Keatsian ardor underlying his Eliotesque grapplings with the existential void...Lucas Hunt's LIVES marks the debut of a very fine poet"--Southhampton Press. "...insights into the uniqueness of not only individual life, but also the seemingly commonplace phenomena that affect it"--Midwest Book Review.

Lives

Hunt, Lucas

Poetry

<p>Fiction. Latino/Latina Studies. Based on the author's experiences of traveling between two unique cultures on different continents, and of living under both democratic and totalitarian regimes, THE ROOM WITH CLOSETS is a fascinating and innovative volume of short stories. These tales, all tied together by common threads, travel the literary landscape from grim political reality to joyous flights of fantasy and humor. Join Ignacio Jose Conti, his extended family, and his friends to obtain a deeper understanding of life, love, and human nature. A. Pablo Iannone, born and raised in Argentina, left his homeland as a result of political upheaval while a university student. He teaches philosophy at Central Connecticut State University, and has published several books including Philosophy as Diplomacy and Dictionary of World Philosophy. THE ROOM WITH CLOSETS was awarded the 2007 Independent Book Publishers Award for Multicultural Fiction. "An unforgettable portrait of human struggle, survival, and wry insight"--Midwest Book Review.</p>

The Room with Closets

Pablo A. Iannone

<p>Fiction. Watt, the eldest son in a rural family of five, has tracked a buck for the past six months. Following the kill, he teaches his kid brother the proper way to dress a deer . . . but the blood ritual has just begun. DRIVEN OR FORCED ONWARD BY OR AS IF BY WIND OR WATER leads us into a feral, yet calculated, labyrinth of consciousness, language and structure. Mysterious forces propel this imploding text, pregnant with meaning, through a cacophony of slaughter, sacrifices, and rites of initiation. Mollere weaves a tapestry of dream and wakefulness in this paean to violence, this mythical search for harmony. "Into a literary firmament where innovation is extremely rare comes this audaciously imagined, artistically executed, remarkable, remarkable fiction"--David Madden, author of The Suicide's Wife. "Mollere writes from the dead zones on the radio dial, where there are no stations"--Chris Pusateri, author of ANON & Berserker Alphabetics.</p>

Driven or Forced Onward by or As If by Wind or Water

Mollere, Edgar

Shuntarō Tanikawa was born in 1931 in Tokyo. Since publishing his debut collection Two Billion Light Years of Solitude in 1952, he has emerged as the leading voice of contemporary Japanese poetry. His poems are well known not just among readers of poetry; he has passionate fans throughout all of Japan. In addition to writing poetry, Tanikawa has been active in many other realms of literature. He has translated Mother Goose and Charles Shultz's Peanuts, has written the innovative picture books Myself and Songs Playing with Words, and has penned the lyrics for the theme song to Astro Boy and numerous schools across the nation. Tanikawa has taken the position of a liberal poet in his political and social outlook. As for contemporary Japanese poetry, on 3 continents and in some 15 languages the name and poems of Shuntarō Tanikawa come first to mind. At 81, his energy and art continue to bubble out of a poetic Fountain of Youth. Following the Vagabond Watashi, two more Tanikawa translations by William I. Elliott and Kazuo Kawamura are forthcoming. Their first volume as co-translators of this revered poet appeared in 1975. "Across a variety of poems and in a varietyof forms Tanikawa explores the connections between the self and words, that treacherous medium that promises to mirror or even explain reality but instead is one more layer of the puzzle needing explanation. Nothing in this book is simple. Unlikely things are placed together and each of them forces us to open further doors. In this process the poet or the I is not the one with knowledge or answers but merely the one leading us and himself into further self questioning. The immense seriousness of this poetry, locating its search for reality outside the quest for accidental memories, with no hint of any desperate desire to assert a truth as my truth, with no ego getting in the way, enables Tanikawa to achieve the purity and strength of poetry at its finest. His poems have no formula. They aren't dredged up by swallowing a memory pill or by decorating a pre-given content with word-play and metaphor. Without being sentimental, they are fearless of risking that accusation. Equally they don't proceed from any rigid avoidance of meaning, familiar sentence structure, or even a cliché if the cliché is true or necessary at that point in the poem. Unconcerned about academia or fashion, Tanikawa's poems, based in a genuine reverence before the world, have the simplicity and complexity of a very human voice." -Peter Boyle

Watashi

Tanikawa, Shuntaro

Alibi (Japanese Edition)

Arts & Photography

Brennan, Michael

History & Criticism

Suite for Percy Granger

Wilkinson, Jessica L.

'Eelahroo (Long Ago) Nyah (Looking) Möbö-Möbö (Future)' is the most recent collection from Australia's foremost experimental and political poet and one of the best known contemporary Aboriginal Australian writers, Lionel G. Fogarty.  "Sometimes angry, defiant, sometimes sad, and always in love with people and country, Lionel Fogarty is cosmically off the scales, holds multitudes, is wise, riddling, and funny too. Like all romantics the word is energy, wilderness and invention, but the modern is where he's going. If these poems were dice, they're all loaded. There's no voice comes close to this intensity. And if you want something predictable and 'correct' (in terms of language and rhetoric) go elsewhere. 'Here comes the tranquility incarnation.'" -Adam Aitken  "Once again Lionel Fogarty presents a collection of poems unique in the telling. From bar room brawls to constitutional referendums, past loves and hopes for the future, these new poems obliterate the landscape, holding the reader in a place of Aboriginal contemplation." -Ali Cobby Eckermann

Eelahroo (Long Ago) Nyah (Looking) Möbö-Möbö (Future)

Fogarty, Lionel G.

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