Rare Space by Leslie Anne mcilroy is the winner of the 2001 Word Press Poetry Prize and comes highly recommended by Poet Laureate Billy Collins. The author has already been recognized as one of the most promising poets of her generation with her inclusion in the definitive anthology American Poetry: The Next Generation (Carnegie Mellon University Press, 2000). The publication of Rare Space, her first full-length collection, confirms this promise.

Rare Space

Literature & Fiction

Mcilroy, Leslie Anne

Poetry

WordTech Communications

Salvaged Maxims

Leslie, Naton

In the late 1600s, in Salem, Mass., unruly young girls were diagnosed medically as victims of witchcraft. Eventually, more than 200 people were accused of practicing witchcraft. Twenty were executed--nineteen by hanging, one by crushing. Salem in Séance by Susana H. Case is a narrative exploration of these shocking events, depicting this tumultuous time with powerful detail.

Salem in S Ance

Case, Susana H.

The lyric poems of Kathleen M. McCann's BARN SOUR are anything but bitter; their music lingers sweetly and long in the ear. "Kate McCann's poetry speaks brightly, deeply, about nature and our human role in the wide fabric of the world. Her deft handling of language, pace, imagery and all the tricks of poetry is a joy to read!"-John J. Ronan "BARN SOUR is all about risk, the pull and counterweight of the familiar to the spirit's need to surge forward. Kathleen McCann understands both sides of the balance, urging 'Let go the fight within and listen...' - to rain, to breath, to shell knocking shell on her intimately observed South Shore - while confronting the past's 'tempered hook.' Often elegiac, sometimes stoic, McCann's poems offer language for a troubled world that is never devoid of hope."-Joyce Peseroff "Memories so bitter: The adult child sitting with the ache of her childhood, with the demented grandmother, and the TV on New Year's Eve. As the ball descends in Times Square the grandmother calls 'get a pan and a spoon' and the lonely pair open the front door 'to the coal sky, banging the spuds pan through the burly cold.' That the reader concludes the only beauty in these scenes to be in the telling. And the telling is so fine, so true."-Barbara de la Cuesta

Barn Sour

McCann, Kathleen M.

BLOOMING WILD SO CLOSE TO HOME by Lois Klein is a book of poems about a World War II orphan who will do just that. Walk with her as she grows up and matures as a woman and a poet. "Lois Klein is a master of the lean, pared down image, the metaphor threaded through in a way that brings a surprise at the finish. Her complex play of words and internal rhymes make each poem a delight. Read in sequence, the poems begin in youth's disappointment and rise in the last section toward new joy and all that the body had waited for--a metaphysical satisfaction beyond words."--Selden Edwards "If I am '...shipwrecked/And glad of it," it will be because I have a copy of Blooming Wild with me. These poems not only sing but dance, pulling you in to glide and spin, then sail to insightful, precise landings. Best of all, Klein makes sure that her words, however private in their terrors and joys, loves and losses, belong to us all. With iron grip and memory's bite, her '...voices/gone beyond the burden/of human worlds' inhabit is, body, mind and spirit. Thank you, Lois Klein!"--Ellen Chavez Kelley "BLOOMING WILD SO CLOSE TO HOME begins in childhood, recounting its innocence and simplicity, but soon the complexities of life overtake the child who is 'engulfed' by responsibilities. In sculptured verse, recognizing the value of compression and restraint, Lois Klein glimpses evidence of loss everywhere, but does not despair. Rather, she finds comfort, inspiration, and even wisdom in the natural world. And with tender eroticism, returning to her opening theme, she proclaims: 'I felt like the child I had been and wished to be again, more body than mind.' These gemlike poems both dazzle and delight."--Kurt Brown

Blooming Wild So Close to Home

Klein, Lois

Kathleen Aponick's BRIGHT REALM is bright indeed with the richness of the world, "the journeying,/its unknowable end." "To read a book of poems is to engage with a sensibility: living inside a poet's head, seeing as she does, thinking as she thinks, feeling as she feels. Kathleen Aponick's poems acquaint the reader with a speaker aware simultaneously of the tactile present as experienced in the natural world, of the haunting enigmas of the ever-present past, and of the menaces of the future, both personal and public. In clear, precise language, Aponick conveys the paradox of continuity in the light of change. Her speaker feels the presence of past lives and senses the inevitable losses of the future, yet the poems beautifully remind us: 'The day's a gift with velvet moss- /covered rocks, / the clearest air, / highbush blueberries, / dragonflies, / black mushrooms, / worlds of lichens...' (from 'Interlude at Elliott Laurel'). Her book, BRIGHT REALM, is also a gift." - Joan Aleshire "The stories shaped by the poems of BRIGHT REALM issue from the real life of a person vulnerable to the loss, grief, and joy that anyone who has deeply loved other people can understand, and through their courage and clarity affirm a persistent hard-won human interconnectedness."- Michael Ryan "Kathleen Aponick has given us poems that will endure. Her lines plunge deep into the pool of memory and place. She honors the immediate and lasting history that we and our families make. The poems flow from her journey, open-ended as long as there is something in this world to see, hear, and feel. Amid trials and stresses, she locates and identifies the essential joy in our encounters with others and nature. The poems are full of river currents, ponds, forests, and clearings-and though she has lived inland for most of her life, the borderland of ocean coast looms large for the response it draws from us. Beneath the surfaces, the details, are fundamental truths about how we live and the choices we make." - Paul Marion

Bright Realm

Aponick, Kathleen

The stark prose poems of Kim Triedman's HADESTOWN document the dark beauty that emerges from the deepest depths of humanity's underworld. "In his final penitential labor, the Greek hero Heracles descends into the underworld to capture Cerberus, the nether region's three-headed guard dog--the West's primordial pit-bull. In HADESTOWN, her wildly evocative and dazzlingly associative sequence of prose poems, Kim Triedman transforms the hero's descent into a fraught road trip plumbing the cultural, social, and psychological depths. Part mythic quest, part post-apocalyptic travel narrative, HADESTOWN is a palimpsest that overlays traditional storytelling with shadows of immigrant passages and the dire conflicting histories of our own moment. In doing so, she has carried into the light a vision of our contemporary underworld. Euripides meets Blade Runner. Becket meets Survivor."-Daniel Tobin "A gritty gut-punch of a book, HADESTOWN deliberately enervates Herakles' great myth of suffering. Scattering the scraps of what-has-happened, it fixes a red-eyed gaze on a squalid present. Where gods would stride, Kim Triedman gives us skittish know-it-alls. Where the epic would arrive with brazen clarity, this arresting prose poem obfuscates with a menacing, sooty dust. As I read, I was certain that here, the fragmentary is as endangered by a bald coherence as it is by further disintegration; thus, the poet urges we clutch the shards, no matter how they might cut."-Douglas Kearney "Kim Triedman's HADESTOWN is a topographical map of need and satisfaction. To read this book is to embark on a journey and to see the landscape anew...or as Triedman's speaker says, "...we know we've never been here before, that the trip has only just begun. There will be stranger things than kelp." Here is a resilient addition to the tradition of prose poetry."-Jericho Brown

Hadestown

Triedman, Kim

Hypnotic and provocative by turns, SHADOW PLAY retraces a journey across Asia in search of the marriage that faltered in its wake. Part love poem, part elegy, Jody Bolz's new book enacts the conflict between memory and estrangement. In his introduction, novelist Vikram Chandra writes: "an extraordinary act of literary ventriloquism...a conversation among the many selves that were once bound up in love. The poem, in all its formal inventiveness and variety, is an incarnation of the ineluctable passage of time itself." "SHADOW PLAY explores a failed early marriage in an altogether original way, combining the momentum of memoir with the music of poetry. This book is lush with landscape and with psychological insight. 'What sense will you make of the heart's slow progress...?' Bolz asks, even as she shows us the answer."--Linda Pastan "Here, finally, is a travel poem worth the ticket. Had it been written just after the trip occurred, we would have gotten the sights but none of the light and shadows-the sounds but nothing of how time and living reverberate in, through, and between us. There is a hard-won stillness at the center of this book, the kind of stillness a reader finds when a fine poet has figured things out and hasn't been crushed by the discovery. That grace is the heart of Bolz's SHADOW PLAY."--Cornelius Eady "Which of us hasn't been tormented with thoughts of someone we loved long ago? 'I shall tell you of the first root of our love,' says Francesca to Dante in Canto V of his 'Inferno.' SHADOW PLAY explores such longing between a sensible married woman and a ghost from when she was young, back-packing through Asia. Bolz writes that she is 'looking for a route / through time: a silver line / extending itself steadily / even as it disappears.' The resulting poetry is lovely and accessible."--John Balaban

Shadow Play

Bolz, Jody

A lust for life, for immersion, and for connection: these are the passions that drive the energetic poems and striking photographs of Dawn Schout's WANDERLUST.

Wanderlust

Schout, Dawn

It’s precisely due to the fact that May uses poetry as a means of analysis, and not solely as a means of communication, and even less as an end in itself, that his writing can be considered so unique.

It Doesn't Work Like That

May, R.A.

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