Literary Nonfiction. Memoir. In this first volume of her two-volume memoir, prize-winning poet Sharon Doubiago writes an extraordinary memoir of growing up in the 1940s and 50s in South Central Los Angeles and the desert mountain town of Ramona. MY FATHER'S LOVE addresses the current controversies of memory and memoir and sets new standards for the genre by adhering to historical records, letters, diaries, interviews, and a drive to know the unfabricated truth, while weaving these, in stunning language and imagery with remembering and reliving. This book attempts to understand her family rooted deep in the history of America, in both its Southern aristocracy and its victims. It looks at the world through the eyes of a child who knows what love is, a girl labeled beautiful, a victim of rape, incest and psychological terrorism, depicting the genesis of an American epic poet. It will change your perspective of the world forever.

My Father's Love: Portrait of the Poet As a Young Girl, Volume 1

Literature & Fiction

Doubiago, Sharon

History & Criticism

Wild Ocean Press

Fiction. Lynn Jeffress's collection of short stories in THE DALI CODE & OTHER PARIS STORIES is not the usual view of Paris. Salvador Dali, alive and mysterious in Paris, controls the weather from his Montmartre museum; a dwarf lover and his American consort star in a Paris elder porn film; an American house husband, trapped in Paris, escapes to a second life in his privately owned virtual L.A. nightclub; Gertrude Stein's Paris apartment at 27 rue de Fleurus becomes the site of a modern day haunting. Postcard Paris is invisible in these stories, but each bizarre and often comic tale mirrors something exquisitely surreal that is absolutely worth knowing. Or not.

The Dali Code & Other Paris Stories

Jeffress, Lynn

Literary

Literary Nonfiction. Memoir. "My soul looks back," James Baldwin said, "and wonders how I got over." Volume two of Sharon Doubiago's memoir, MY FATHER'S LOVE, reveals the legacy of her father's sexual and psychological abuse that continued throughout his life and the toxic effects it has had on the lives of everyone in the family. How family secrets ripple through succeeding generations with devastating results, how family myths become more powerful than truth, how they are maintained at any cost, and how denial blinds us to what we do not want to, or cannot bear to see. Most of us never realize we are in denial but Doubiago is not most of us, for she is a poet of exceptional power and insight. This is a book about all of us, how we deceive ourselves and others, believe what we want to believe, what we are conditioned to believe, how we are, as R. D. Laing put it, "destroying ourselves with violence masquerading as love." America collectively is suffering from Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. MY FATHER'S LOVE helps us "to get over."

My Father's Love, Volume II: The Legacy

Poetry

Poetry. Native American Studies. RED WILLOW PEOPLE is like sacred text from the great spirit, great mother earth, wisdom beyond knowing, Holy Writ. As Cynthia Hogue, author of The Incognito Body and Or Consequence, writes: "One enters Devreaux Baker's haunting new collection, RED WILLOW PEOPLE, as one would sacred terrain. These poems are spare, tactile and textured, but they hover between worlds: 'I do not know why the ghost of the woman from the pueblo / visits me,' one speaker confesses. This visitation is a gift, but it carries with it the task of journeying to that 'core place / where bone meets spirit,' 'the other side of air,' through time and 'beyond knowing.' RED WILLOW PEOPLE is a book of visionary medicine, for though Baker walks through 'the thin field / of grief,' she does so to instruct and heal, walking in a rare beauty and in magic to write these gorgeously wise poems."

Red Willow People

Baker, Devreaux

Poetry. "Julie Rogers's HOUSE OF THE UNEXPECTED is a brilliant gathering from a life of making poems. I've stood in awe at the solitary pursuit of such art, of such a poet. This is just the beginning.... She articulates the inarticulate," writes poet and author Sharon Doubiago. HOUSE OF THE UNEXPECTED deeply examines the world and the human experience, revealing, according to poet, translator and activist Jack Hirschman, "political and personal vision, and a truly visionary leap of imagination, the brilliance of which resonates through all the love poems." Personal experience, extended periods of self-reflection in solitude, fine-tuned observation, and a startling willingness to reveal what often remains hidden mark these poems, like a map of the consciousness learning to know itself. Beat poet Michael McClure reflects, "Few poems are written as close to the heart; no extra words just soul meanings as they are bodily enacted...the good and the agonizing memories. HOUSE OF THE UNEXPECTED has politics and clarity. Especially the love poems are brave." Contact with the inner and outer worlds signifies Julie Rogers's poetry. Artist and poet Agneta Falk observes, "She does look you in the eye & heart, never afraid of going deep into the darkest spaces, making light of them. The language is vibrant & sparse in its expression of complexity and passion. This is such a profound & delightful collection of poems—you'll want to return again & again. HOUSE OF THE UNEXPECTED lives up to its title. It's a treasure."

House of the Unexpected

Rogers, Julie

Poetry. "MOTHER SPEAKS HER NAME is classic in theme, operatic in structure, beautiful, fundamental...the very heart of a man's life and vision--all the gender myths and hells of the eons. Frank Adams writes from the shadows, from the darkness, a survivor's tale in verse. MOTHER SPEAKS HER NAME is powerful poetry, poetry asking to be heard"--Sharon Doubiago.

Mother Speaks Her Name

Adams, Frank

Poetry. LGBT Studies. "Frank Adams tells a lover's tale in verse. This tribute to a lover long dead from AIDS touches what is most human in all of us. It is a story of love, desire, disease, mortality and loss exposing the human spirit as it maintains through the worst, and keeps going. Frank Adams is a poet whose gift is large enough for these subjects"&mdash;Sharon Doubiago.

Love Remembered

Literary Nonfiction. Memoir. There are many books about Charles Bukowski, but none like this one. Linda King's LOVING &amp; HATING CHARLES BUKOWSKI looks at Bukowski from the other side of the mirror. It is raw, it is raucous, it is a no-holds- barred account of their five-year, on- again off-again relationship, a relationship so intense and passionate, so deep and so tender, that it makes your heart ache to watch it flame up and then flame out. This is not a scholarly examination of Bukowski but it deepens and enriches our understanding of the man and his world, written from the heart with love. It is funny, it is tragic, it is exuberant, it is heartbreaking, it is an important addition to our knowledge not only of the poet laueate of the underclass, but of the whole underground literary scene in LA and elsewhere in the 1970s, told from the perspective of a strong, liberated woman, an artist in her own right, who gave as good as she got.

Loving & Hating Charles Bukowski

KING, LINDA

Poetry. THE VISIT is not only a major artistic achievement, but an important story / history about injustice, the corruption and abuse of power, and the devastation it wreaks on individuals, cultures and classes, and the corrosive influences it has not only on the victims—the minorities and the helpless—but upon those who wield power and dominate and define the ruling culture. And, as always, it is the children who suffer the most. It is a careful, complex and brilliant examination / cross-examination of one man's horrific journey from abused child to incarcerated prisoner of the very system that abused him and later convicted him of a crime he claims he did not commit. Guilty or innocent is not the issue here so much as the perversion of power and systemic abuse of those who are helpless against the dominant Church and State.

The Visit

Poetry. With collages by the author. Doren Robbins' unique voice of existential disgust and cynicism comes through in a relentless damning of our culture, politics and state of being. And yet, it is hilarious, laugh-out-loud funny, the absurdity of the human condition splayed on the pages of TWIN EXTRA for our examination. "As out there as on an LA freeway. Pushing the mind, the language, the knowable, the absurdities, the 'dipshitalore,' the passions, the maturity of a surrealist—one's self and one's reality. His intellectual, linguistic, vast roaming in these poems will blow you away in recognition, gratitude, and awe…What an accomplishment! What joy!"—Sharon Doubiago "TWIN EXTRA is a delicatessen Walt Whitman, satirical yet dead- serious and playing for keeps, coming to grips with the infernal system of life in an ironically and grotesquely distorted American hell … Doren Robbins' poems bring to mind the self-revelatory stanzas in Whitman's 'Crossing Brooklyn Ferry,' but now the river is underground, the ferry has become Rimbaud's Drunken Boat, and the city's an infernal ruins populated with labyrinthine memories of alienated and damaged souls caught in the contradictions generated by dystopian capitalism."—Uri Hertz

Twin Extra

Robbins, Doren

United States

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