THE SLAUGHTERHOUSE POEMS, Dave Newman’s first full-length poetry collection, is a series of narrative poems that tell the stories of people often kept behind the scenes in American literature – slaughterhouse workers, bowling-alley managers, strippers, prisoners dreaming of better lives. Written in the spirit of world poets like Nicanor Parra and Nazim Hikmet, coupled with American grittiness, Newman’s poems hold a place of their own – real, heartfelt, true.

The Slaughterhouse Poems

Dave Newman

White Gorilla Press

Literature & Fiction

Newman, Dave

Poetry

Junkette is the story of Claire Cunningham, a woman navigating disasters— natural and of her own making. Claire is a bartender in pre-Katrina New Orleans, a college graduate whose heroin addiction parallels the swirling fortunes of her sinking city. She knows she needs to get clean, but despite being smart enough to see all the angles, she can’t quite find a way out. “In Junkette, every bag of dope is a bag of sunshine, until it turns into a hurricane.. Everybody is a potential lover until the love is gone. Junkette is the kind of book that makes you happy to be sad because Shotland is beatific but not a beatnik, and she knows that living is a tragedy and love is hard-earned. I haven’t read a book this wonderful since Barry Hannah dropped Ray on us all those years ago. Shotland hit my heart in the exact same way, with the exact same breath of awe.” – Lori Jakiela, author of The Bridge to Take When Things Get Serious “New Orleans —mermaid city—is a drug for the protagonist of Junkette. Claire tends bar, hangs out with dealers, and is willing to die a little each day, all so she can stay inside the petal-dream of her adopted city. In the end she doesn’t know where the city’s moist air ends and her own skin begins. Junkette is a provocative, literate and magnolia-skinned first novel.” – Maureen Gibbon, author of Swimming Sweet Arrow and Thief

Junkette

Shotland, Sarah

Literary

THE POEM FACTORY is where you end up when the world no longer wants you. These are poems set in the corners of America seldom mentioned in poetry. Waitresses and strippers, truck drivers and store managers, outsider poets and welders fill the pages with their lyrical insights, their midnight desires, their miseries and their hope. Here are the good times against the bad times. In The Poem Factory, Frank O’Hara is the world’s laziest mover and Walt Whitman is a guiding light. Wal-Mart looms and the student loan people want their money back. Temp work is a career choice. Getting your teeth cleaned is a luxury. Written in the spirit of world poets like Nicanor Parra and Nazim Hikmet, coupled with pure American Grit, Newman’s poems start where most poems stop. He tells truths we’re all embarrassed to know. “Dave Newman is an immense talent!” —Donald Ray Pollock, The Devil All the Time and Knockemstiff “Dave Newman is the truth about America. He is lyrical and outrageous and tells the saddest stories I know. In The Poem Factory, he shows our great decline and how we don’t know how to fall. This is a beautiful, powerful book.”—Mohammed Pouchek

The Poem Factory

Muskrat Friday Dinner is an honest exploration of what it takes to live a creative life right now. These poems are wry and thoughtful, shot through with self-deprecating sincerity and an insistent intelligence that is as kind as it is incisive. Silsbe captures the comradery of the drinking life as well as the loneliness. He confronts the challenges of balancing the demands and disappointments of work and love and family across decades and miles with both humor and insight. His is a Pittsburgh where people work hard, laugh long, drink well, and make the best art they can in the time they are allowed. "There is in these poems the sound of old records, the crackle of the needle riding warped vinyl, the fullness of that delicate, spinning thing. These poems smell of cheap, warm beer and the long-gone smoke from steel mills and cigarettes. Take this book into the next dive bar you walk into and press it into the bartender's closed fist. Watch that fist open up. See the nod of the head, the recognition in these poems of everything that is real and necessary in our world." — Peter Markus, author of The Fish and the Not Fish

Muskrat Friday Dinner

Silsbe, Scott

Hello, My Name is Henry is a heartfelt exploration of small-town life in the Rust Belt. It's about how hard it is leave home, even when you know home is a dead-end. The main character Henry works the graveyard shift in a convenience store, dealing with drunks and drug addicts while dreaming of a way out. When a chance accident brings Henry's past into focus, the question of whether he can build a future beyond Brooksville's dilapidated downtown becomes more urgent than ever. This is the first novel by Micah Schnabel, who is both a founding member of the band Two Cow Garage and a prolific solo artist. The book's prose reflects the same incisive emotional observations and keen attention to detail long seen in his lyrics. "A heart-wrecking novel about those who remain in a dying midwestern town. A story of the forgotten and passed-by. Henry, the graveyard-shift cashier at a mini-mart, will stay with the reader for months after the last page is finished." — Willy Vlautin, author of the novels The Motel Life, Northline, Lean on Pete, The Free, and Don't Skip Out On Me. "A perceptive depiction of reality addressing the dissolution of the American Dream mythos. The disarming familiarity of the writing humanizes the political/economic causes that fuel the narrative." — Julien Baker, musician (Sprained Ankle, Turn Out The Lights)

Hello, My Name is Henry

Schnabel, Micah

The Clown Watches The Clock

Contemporary

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Books by White Gorilla Press

See the best price to sell, buy or rent books by the White Gorilla Press publisher. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

The Slaughterhouse Poems

The Slaughterhouse Poems

Junkette

The Poem Factory

Muskrat Friday Dinner

Hello, My Name is Henry

The Clown Watches The Clock