Wilson Wiley Variations

Literature & Fiction

Lovell, Thoreau

Poetry

Wet Cement Press

Without Dragons Even the Emperor Would Be Lonely is a book of Ensos, Parables & Koans in the Zen tradition. Each piece is an enso (painting) and handwritten text created together in a single sitting. Poet Uche Nduka has said about Without Dragons, "I sense a call to dream deeply while awake. I feel a call to defy the fetters of logic/reason. Both darkening and radiant, there is radical fruition in the probing of depths in this confluence of words and colors . . . This is a beautiful book for our perilous time and beyond." A book that captures "The hurricane's eye of feeling, /" in the words of Pulitzer Prize winning poet Forrest Gander, the "whirl inside whirl, world / within world in John High's / lush color incantations / hang like moons over the road / of his handwritten words / and their moments of attention / come alive within us as though / we were all nested in each other."

Without Dragons Even the Emperor Would Be Lonely: Ensos, Parables & Koans

High, Ninso John

If Brit Washburn were a painter she would be like Vermeer, following a certain slant of illumination into a dimly lit interior, drawing our attention to the pear on the table, or the child's tiny curled hand. Here is a poetry of clarity and finely wrought detail, that never fails to render what is present, regardless of its tragedy or beauty, and insisting on both. The poems in Notwithstanding, hover, as the title suggests, between the presence of what is, despite that which is not. A lover whom we long for despite our leaving, the golden child we knew inside the troubled young man, the lives we build that fail to nurture us, what we ate, remembered, forgot to remember. Few poets venture into the shadows of romantic love and motherhood with the courage that Washburn brings, examining a decade of choices and their results with a clear-eyed measure. The language here is constantly pressing against the safe path, arguing for a life that is lived fully, tragically, joyously. What is the pleasure of now, these poems ask, the taste of ripe fruit, a child's embrace? And what if now is all we have?

Notwithstanding

Washburn, Brit

A hybrid novella of prose poems, collages, and drawings.

Orphan of the Moon: Notebook of a Girl in a Moscow Station

Comics & Graphic Novels

Libin, Andrea Clark

Graphic Novels

Meant to be seen more than read, this visual tour-de-force is emotionally engaging, intellectually stimulating, and just plain fun to flip through. Influenced by Mallarmé, Guillaume Apollinaire's calligrammes and Pierre Reverdy's early poems, Sohn explores the page as space and the "image" the poem can leave in that space. His interest is in the abstract or conceptual use of the page as well as the relation between text and image, especially how it plays out in artist's books. Contemporary parallels to his work can be found in Roger Giroux, Anne-Marie Albiach, André du Bouchet and the painter Pierre Tal Coat.

Still Forms: Visible Poetry

Arts & Photography

Sohn, Michael

Graphic Design

"People have long told stories like our story but most never quite as long." And so begins Earl S. Braggs complex jazz memoir of growing up black and poor in rural North Carolina. What is long about Braggs' story is not its length but how deeply the roots of race and history reach through the narrative in every unexpected direction. From the haphazard pleasures of a childhood in a rural shack in segregated "fishtown" to the civil unrest of Wilmington NC in the Civil Rights Era to the poet's coming of age as a writer in San Francisco. In the midst of familiar injustices, Braggs blows open our conceptions about good and bad, revealing violence where we expect safety and friendships where we expect derision. A white man presses a revolver into the boy's head, the bookmobile lady stops so he can get on. While the borders of Hampstead were segregated black and white, the design of this narrative never is.

A Boy Named Boy: Growing Up Black in "Whitetown" During the 1960s, Hampstead, NC

Biographies & Memoirs

Braggs, Earl S

Community & Culture

Long Rain is an exquisite collection of five line poems (tanka) and short prose (haibun), organized around the elements: Earth, Wind, Fire and Water. Here, Moore expands on the rich history of African-American writers such as Richard Wright, Sonya Sanchez and James Emanuel, creating a masterful transformation of the Japanese tradition into a sharply observant and quietly defiant poetry of the Black experience in America.

Long Rain

Moore, Lenard D.

Thank You for Being

Bachman, Merle

Dispatches

Jackson, Richard

The Scrolls of a Temple Sweeper

High, John

Literary

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Books by Wet Cement Press