Poetry. "David Till has produced in OVAL a collection that encompasses the full circle of experience.... The 58 poems take a wide range of forms and lengths, including everything from the expressionistic, fragmentary ABOUT TROUT (`...Go stardust / One goes off hot inside / yr dream hand'), to the joyous occasional piece TWO POEMS FOR THEIR WEDDING: (`I could say: dogwood are like moonlight, / or like wedding gowns in the dark church; / but to me, / they are cold banks of snow in the mountains...' The disparate quality of the poems is offset by Till's consistently gentle, grounded sensibility....")--Maria Browning, THE NASHVILLE SCENE. Whether Till is imagining the bitter heart of a bruised apple ("a quarter note alone / at the lake's edge"), or writing of the loneliness of time's passing ("home / where everything you see shines with absence / where you weep for your father's eyes, the starry / nights of love, your son's blond hair"), he presents the life he has seen and lived in a plain-spoken vocabulary and with an unaffected voice. This collection sings with a quiet enthusiasm for the natural world. David Till is emeritus professor of English at Austin Peay State University, where he has taught poetry and literature since 1971.

Oval

Literature & Fiction

Till, David

Poetry

Zone 3 Press

Poetry. "In Andrew Kozma's poems, the world is intriguingly askew: `The desert sky opens like the mouth of a dying fish.' Cafes undress, walls merge with air, and rooms speak, sometimes even returning one's gaze, projecting strange images that will shadow you like portraits whose eyes follow you around the room and even into the street. Kozma is at his best evoking those odd moments of disorientation when the stuff of your life transforms, seeming to submerge into a matrix of dream--`those moments air becomes solid and you stare through ice / like a man in a glacier....'"--J. Allyn Rosser.

City of Regret

Kozma, Andrew

Poetry. "The metaphorical richness of Leigh Anne Couch's HOUSES FLY AWAY is in service to and informed by a marvelous richness and complexity of mind and heart. From body as body to body as embodiment of spirit, line by line and poem by poem, Couch renews and enlarges our sense of possibility both on the page and in the world. Houses Fly Away is a book to cherish"--Alan Shapiro.

Houses Fly Away

Couch, Leigh Anne

Poetry. Winner of the 2008 Zone 3 First Book Award in Poetry, selected by Phillis Levin. "Immeasurable immensities reside in MEASURING THE DARK, Kate Gleason's richly imagined earthbound book of poems, where nervy intelligence and bittersweet insight are recurrent features in an ever-changing landscape"--Phillis Levin.

Measuring the Dark

Gleason, Kate

Poetry. "Graceful, tensile, and electric, IF YOU HAVE GHOSTS is a haunting and haunted book. John Pursley III's prodigious gifts for metaphor, imagery, and an elliptical narrative reminiscent of Larry Levis are amply displayed in this guide through liquid time. We encounter a fire that 'sounded like my mother snapping sheets / Onto the bed as they came out of the dryer,' Chet Baker's 'androgynous melody' that is 'like the false-front store / that never closes, & fools no one,' a lollipop dropped by a child in an airport that explodes 'in a confusion of ruby shards.' Empathetically felt, played out in a deeply nuanced syntax, these poems both reveal and complicate our troubled, troubling world"--Beth Ann Fennelly.

If You Have Ghosts

Pursley III, John

Literary Nonfiction. Memoir. "Part affecting memoir, part lyric meditation on water, part cultural critique, but finally about all that is unquenchable in the human experience, Nicole Walker has created a book that is truly sui generis. By turns wry, elegiac, and always elegant in its precision and force, Walker investigates all that is contradictory and curious in the micro climate of her immediate family and the macro climate of Utah to create not a dry treatise, not a windless flight of experimental prose, but a natural history of thirst in all its manifestations, at once compulsively readable and intensely personal."—Robin Hemley

Quench Your Thirst with Salt

Biographies & Memoirs

Walker, Nicole

Community & Culture

Poetry. Winner of the 2014 PEN New England Award in Poetry and finalist for the Massachusetts Book Award. "In her magnificent debut collection, Karen Skolfield made me fall in love with poetry all over again, reminding me of its divine power to find the extraordinary in the seemingly ordinary. She understands that poetry does not exist independently; it is pulled out of all we see, without pretense or artifice, and not in the obvious and expected ways either. Her poems surprise with each turn of the line; they foray into the unexpected discoveries and dimensions. After reading her poems, I will never again look at a baby, a fossil, a painting, a key, a homunculus—or myself—as I had before. If poetry is meant to challenge and change our perceptions of the world and ourselves, then Karen is by all means an extraordinary poet."—Richard Blanco

Frost in the Low Areas

Skolfield, Karen

Literary Nonfiction. Memoir. "Like Persephone, Kate Schmitt is dragged to the Underworld, not by Hades but by her own DNA. This beautiful and heartbreaking memoir is addressed to the grandmother she never knew, a woman she resembles and whose demons she also shares. With meticulous, poetic language Schmitt describes her descent and her return to the world. 'My body is both castle and battlefield,' she says, and the ensuing siege pits one woman against the deepest impulses of her own blood. The magic of this book is that a true heroine emerges, one who has braved the snares of the past and stepped into the present moment completely herself."—Barbara Hamby

Singing Bones

Schmitt, Kate

History & Criticism

Poetry. "This stunning debut collection links images and observations that absolutely claim their moments, nudging the reader into a persistent sense of mystery, possibility, and sometimes the tease of threat. In the tradition of Magic Realism, it blurs the boundaries between the quotidian and the fantastic, stretching and blending, until the reader might well wonder, 'I know where I've landed, but how did I get here?' Kramer's poems have extraordinary authority; every sentence is shapely and urgent, every passage exquisitely textured, every provocation earned and convincing. It is impossible, then, to resist or question a single one of their flights."—Leslie Ullman MUSEUM OF DISTANCE is an Ovidian adventure, in which thousands of images play a kind of dream-tag, each one prompting the next. Though flashes of autobiography appear occasionally, the book is very far from the typical stories-from-my-life collection. Instead, Ashley Seitz Kramer is committed to evoking the fungibility of experience as processed by imagination. 'I made my own bicycle / from cereal boxes…I made a photograph from broken seashells. / I made a bat-house from orange peels.' Kramer's world is akin to the world of Dean Young—a world in which everything is changing before you know it. Kramer's poems are like seeds—'each with a desire to sprout, each with genuine thirst.'"—Mark Halliday

Museum of Distance

Kramer, Ashley Seitz

Literary Nonfiction. "FLUTTER POINT's essays are palpably haunted by the past and future of our species and planet. But Anderson does something rare and even hopeful, even so: his ruminations pry apart our default intuitions about humanness and animality, the natural and built environments, art, language, and the body, and hold them apart like parentheses for us, to find a little space inside. In that space, these essays search for truthful, appropriate kinds of mourning and pleasure, presence and detachment. The brilliance of FLUTTER POINT is that what results are fresh new forms of the essay—moving, intelligent, relentless, still, and made exactly for our time."—Kristin Dombek "Erik Anderson, in these very edgy essays of FLUTTER POINT, mines the rich ore of the 'or,' back slashing, back and forth, through the porous membranes of punctuated category, the skeletal strata of this gelatinous and layered world. To 'decide' is to cut, to sever, and Anderson is a katana smith par excellence, folding fluid steel, folding it back on itself again and again, peening home the sudden stunning serration less, it seems, than a molecule thick, while still separating out those old infinite spaces between the stars and the anxious quantum angstroms buzzing at the center of our very beings."—Michael Martone

FLUTTER POINT

Anderson, Erik

Essays & Correspondence

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