"Allyson Shaw's poetry wrestles fearlessly with strong angels, and invokes the aid of some great provocateurs - William Blake and Sylvia Plath among them. The drama is terrific here: Shaw has a righteous quarrel with the order of things, and at the same time her language displays a tender, eloquent love of this world. Passion and pattern strike a rare accord in these poems." - Judith Grossman, author of How Aliens Think

The Bon-bon and Love Token

Literature & Fiction

Allyson Shaw

Poetry

Web del Sol Association

These eleven stories--E. R. Catalano's winning story, "News from My Father," and ten ﬁnalists--show the range possible in the contemporary literary short story and offer a snapshot of some of the best writing by established and emerging literary talents. From a pool of over six hundred stories, some published in very well-known journals, and many unpublished, our panel of readers selected these ten finalists, the best of the best, in 2004. E.R. Catalano's winning story, "News from My Father," was chosen from these finalists by our 2004 judge, Robert Olen Butler himself, who has this to say about the story: "'News from My Father' is a clear winner. The author has a ﬁne--and all too rare--grasp of the essential characteristic of outstanding literary fiction, the need for manifest yearning in the central character. The narrative voice is clean and fluent and the story never loses sight of the human truths beneath the surface." Including stories by: Thomas P. Balazs, E. R. Catalano, Ariana-Sophia Kartsonis, Roy Kesey, Glorida DeVidas Kirchheimer, Karen Kovacik, Dylan Landis, Kelly Magee, Lynn Veach Sadler, Marianne Taylor, and Charles Yu.

The Robert Olen Butler Prize Stories 2004

Contemporary

In a fierce landscape, where "small mammals hurt / each other to stay alive" these poems--violent and lovely, transcendental and desperate--snap us awake, jar us into new senses. In Julianne Buchsbaum's stunning new collection, the "train ride out is not / the train ride in." Expect this ride to change you: these poems are abductions.

A Little Night Comes

Julianne Buchsbaum

Essays & Correspondence

"Nin Andrews explodes the iconography of our childhoods as she creates a new series of Dick and Jane readers--this time earmarked for adults who desperately need a vocabulary for a different time. With edgy humor and deep understanding of the shadows we all cast, she gives us a Dick and Jane we can't resist. The bizarre nature of the world she creates is what initially draws us in, but what keeps us there is our growing knowledge that it's our world too." -- Joyce Dyer

Midlife Crisis with Dick and Jane

Nin Andrews

These twelve short stories--Matthew J. Sullivan's winning story, "Unfound," and eleven ﬁnalists--show the range possible in the contemporary literary short story and offer a snapshot of some of the most compelling writing by established and emerging literary talents. From a pool of over five hundred stories, some published in very well-known journals and magazines, and many unpublished, our panel of readers selected these ﬁnalists, the best of the best, for the 2005 Robert Olen Butler Prize for a Short Story. Matthew J. Sullivan's winning story, "Unfound," was chosen from these ﬁnalists by our judge, Pulitzer Prize winner Robert Olen Butler. Here you'll find stories by: Cheryl Alu, Jacob M. Appel, Kerry Dolan, Alicia Gifford, Alison Lee Kinney, Phil Lamarche, Cris Mazza, Jeff Parker, Bill Pettitt, Peter Paul Smith, Matthew J. Sullivan, and Alia Yunis.

The 2005 Robert Olen Butler Prize Stories

YOUR LIFE IS A MOVIE contains some of the most provocative thinking about media, film and culture you're likely to encounter anytime soon. Drawn from scholars, political pundits, filmmakers and film critics-ranging from the famous to the relatively obscure-this anthology of interviews and essays covers a wide range of topics and issues, and is a must-read for anyone concerned about the direction of film and media in modern culture. Thought-provoking and often controversial, this is the kind of book that can change your view of the world. YOUR LIFE IS A MOVIE is a compilation of essays and interviews from SolPix-the film and media webzine published by the WebDelSol (www.webdelsol.com) media complex. Contributors: Eric Alterman, Ray Carney, Patricia Ducey, Timothy Dugdale, Shelley Friedman, Todd Gitlin, T. B. Meek, Kayoko Mitsumatsu, Michael Neff, Rob Nilsson, Nicholas Rombes, Mike Shen and Don Thompson. Editors: Don Thompson and Nicholas Rombes

Your Life is a Movie

Humor & Entertainment

Movies

Winner of the Del Sol Press 2005 Poetry Prize, David Ray Vance's poetry collection combines science and art gloriously. Mary Jo Bang, the Prize Judge, has this to say about VITREOUS: "Part rewritten 1934 medical text, part Keatsian reflection, this is the logical offspring of the long-awaited meeting of science and art; a marriage of equals where each half maintains its primary allegiance: the poetic to the common lyrical language of emotion and memory, the medical to its narrowly appropriated lexicon of intraocular, cornea, and Placido's disc. Mr. Vance has woven these two competing word streams into a meditation on sight and risk. Think of it as an item in the cupboard of the scientifically sublime. Think of Ronald Johnson's ARK. VITREOUS is utterly fascinating in its reach, and exquisitely tender. And important, because it answers again today's recurrent question, Can form be further broken and still be a poem? The answer (of course) is yes." * "The Korean character for "citizen" is based upon the image of an eye pierced by an arrow. The citizen, thus, is one whose vision has been wounded by the state; how can we see clearly when we're in the midst, in the thick of things? David Ray Vance's startling and rewarding debut is a kind of exhibition--a virtual museum of poetic and found texts--concerned with the vulnerability of the eye, the I's aperture, the world's window, the self's permeable edge." --Mark Doty "VITREOUS dazzles in the way the first pictures of the earth must have dazzled. This amazing collection exists in the vast distance between the body and the body perceived. Each poem makes alien both the form and function of our most essential organs through its innate understanding that we will succumb as easily to pollutants as we do to that caressing hand on our cheek. David Ray Vance, in this stunning book, offers a clinical yet intimate look at our modes of perceiving our haunting and vulnerable physicality." --Claudia Rankine

Vitreous

Vance, David Ray

"What a strange and intense book this is! David Blair has a wild, restless imagination and he uses language like saw, a hammer, a velvet whip. He can write incredibly tender (and original) love poems and enfilading satirical poems, as well as many of the many other "kinds" of poems between those poles, and they all seem entirely at home, indeed, need to be in this book together. His music, his diction, his refusal to use (ever!) cliches, his syntax all drive his poems and their hearts forward. That is where his poems go: forward. He will be in the company of the best poets of his generation." --Thomas Lux "Nothing can remain horizontal or vertical for long" might as well be David Blair's mini ars poetica. A commitment to the pleasures and terrors of change, you might say. I have been reading Blair's poems for about ten years now--struck always by his unique pitch and tone, the tensile muscularity of his syntax and vibrational accents. His diction is totally unboxed. He reminds me a bit of August Kleinzahler or John Yau in this--a karaoke of urban hullabaloo sung slightly off the beat, all for the sake of swing....David Blair's acceptance of the world is signaled by his stylishness, provoked by the people and things he encounters. His brain knows that it's living in an animal body. And it moves among all these other minds and bodies in motion. Changed by the smallest of changes. Unbalanced but at ease. This poet's energy reminds me of Edwin Denby's comments about De Kooning's paintings from the 1930s: "He wanted everything in the picture out of equilibrium except spontaneously all of it...a miraculous force and weight of presence moving from all over the canvas at once." These poems want that, too. --David Rivard, /Boston Review/ "David Blair's work is both public and discreet, somewhere between black box theatre and a blind date with an utterly beguiling stranger. His poems are dinner parties, intimate and sumptuous, arranged with great care and yet full of unforeseen turns: the pope gives way to 'the first red coils of the peonies' and a the hair of a lost aviator becomes 'brown, fibrous light.' How refreshingly unlike contemporary poetry this book is; a pleasure. --D. A. Powell

Ascension Days

Blair, David

In language at once candid and layered, calm and devastating, terrifying and gorgeous, the poems in Allegra Wong's first collection, A PURE BEAD, cut deep to the heart, reveal small and piercing dramas of human joy and suffering as if through a diorama's eye-hole. These vivid poem-worlds expand emotionally and intellectually; give off shocks; attract, disturb, unsettle, and finally allow a tender and profound beauty to emerge. Here is nothing less than the complex, psychologically accurate world of humankind. Put your eye to these dioramas: you won't be able to stop looking. "By rendering humans in extremis, the poems in Allegra Wong's A PURE BEAD find out the human heart in all its contradictory nature. In every poem, there are images that stop your breath, drop as if into still water, and form circles that spread wide, reach far. A PURE BEAD is a pure gift to the reader: stunning language and masterful craft in the service of human truths." --Joan Houlihan "These poems, by turns (and sometimes simultaneously) horrifying and extraordinarily tender, make a powerful case for the way elegant structure, haunting images, and vivid, beautifully controlled language can transform even the most appalling subject matter into compelling and unforgettable art. At its sweetest and most touching, Allegra Wong's A PURE BEAD never lapses into sentimentality; and even at its most disturbing, it's a joy to read." --Lloyd Schwartz

A Pure Bead

Wong, Allegra

THE MOST LYRICAL POEMS (mostly in prose) that I have read in years. A silver-tongued “I” with little concern for itself, so wakeful and watchful is it embodied, and so attuned to its bounty of fabulous perceptions. A first collection brought to a nearly translucent state of shine. —C.D. WRIGHT  TORCH LAKE & OTHER POEMS is the most original and exciting collection given American poetry since Larry Levis’ Elegy. There’s more juice, scope, imagination and sheer vitality in this work than in twenty run-of-the-mill collections. —GRAY JACOBIK

Torch Lake & Other Poems

JOHNSON, BRIAN

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Books by Web del Sol Association