Bøger udgivet af Brick Road Poetry Press, Inc.

"Laura Isabela Amsel's Brief Campaign of Sting and Sweet explores the personal sting of a difficult father, breast cancer, and an unexpected divorce, as well as the more general sting of habitat loss and climate change, yet the sweet remains-horses and birds and flowers survive the squeeze of suburban development, and the poet's own travels and memories of travel begin to open the present up to new possibilities. Amsel distinguishes herself by her linguistic exuberance and craft, her risk-taking and her ear for nuance, for cadence and resonance. The poems in Brief Campaign achieve a complex and formal-if grief-shadowed-beauty."-Jon Davis, founder of the Institute of American Indian Arts' MFA Program and author of fourteen poetry collections, including Above the Bejeweled City and Fearless Now and Nameless"Laura Isabela Amsel's beautiful poems tap emotion like spiles in maple trunks. She knows the natural world like few do, shares her loot with us wing flutter by quiet slither before the inevitable bite. Her imagery transports the reader to a place one might only have in muscle memory. Amsel reminds us that we are all part of something larger and more layered than our self-made human boxes. An extraordinary collection worthy of rereading time and again." -Amanda Boyden, author of the international bestselling novels Pretty Little Dirty, Babylon Rolling, and the memoir I Got the Dog "In A Brief Campaign of Sting and Sweet, 'seeing sharpens / into sudden spectacle.' Laura Isabela Amsel's intrepid debut collection forages the open country of the heart, plucking out, in Auden's phrase, 'the images...that hurt and connect.' Here are poems that, 'hum in [the] mouth's hive'; that pulse with ecological attention; that search, sear, sting, supply the balm, and stitch open wounds into song. With this compelling book, Amsel claims her place as a poet in full possession of her gift." -Michael Pickard, Ph.D., Eudora Welty Chair of Southern Literature, Millsaps College

In Lisa Titus' debut collection First Time, Every Time, the everyday becomes something mythic. "Feral and alive like the hot breath of birth," these poems straddle "the empty space between panic and bliss." There is playfulness and humor as well as devotion to craft. I felt like an intruder spying on the most intimate moments in the lives of the people who populate these poems. Sometimes I wasn't prepared for what I encountered, but this unexpectedness is part of the journey.-Jason Irwin, Author of The History of Our VagranciesFirst Time, Every Time is a ride-along with an earth goddess disguised as a bartender, poet, mother, lover and teacher. Tactile, nervy, sticky, glimmering and foreboding, Titus is incapable of spinning without belief, incanting, manifesting and celebrating the flawed and feckless life of the loving and well-loved, polishing and releasing the threads of the everyday heartbreaks and torpor. This book is a walk in the woods, a drink with a friend, a hand on your back. -Louisa Lam, Collaborator, Asian American Modernism with Abang-guard

Written during the early months of the Covid-19 pandemic, Joan Baranow's Reading Szymborska in a Time of Plague contemplates the dread uncertainty of our life. Describing hospitalized sufferers, she writes: "A patient, no longer struggling, is wheeled away. / Another sits up, accepts the bent straw between his lips." Likewise, her tough-minded yet always loving vision of domestic life invites us to inhabit a level of self-scrutiny that leaves us heartened even if also often troubled. And yet, despite the losses mourned throughout this book, the poet's humor and hopefulness prevail. In "Advice from a Moth" she exhorts us to "enjoy the erratic path." Deeply satisfying, Baranow's unaffected language is as clear and natural as a tumbler of spring water. She possesses a scrupulously honed poetic gift that is precious and rare. Arnold Rampersad, Stanford UniversityAuthor, The Life of Langston Hughes (2 vols.) Joan Baranow's Reading Szymborska in a Time of Plague opens with poems about months of isolation with her spouse and college-age son during the 2020-21 pandemic. Instead of anger or boredom, her poems express tenderness with images of care and repair. They explore the natural world, paying special attention to shunned creatures: an iguana that lost its tail, insects, even a baby rat whose life she spares. In Baranow's sequence "Summer Ghazals" she asks herself about mysteries of illness, life, and death. A series of heart-thumping elegies follows soon after the ghazals. Read this wonderful book. Read all of it from "Traveling in Tiger Rain" to its final poem "Prayer," where she implores: "Let quiet hours pass without a stir / while the earth repairs." Susan TerrisAuthor of Familiar Tense"I'm there as much as here," Joan Baranow tells us, staring into a Japanese print. In richly musical and compassionate poems, Baranow reconciles our daily lives with our desirous imaginings: "most of life comes at you / while scrambling eggs in the pan." Whether writing elegies or confronting her own mortality, Baranow leans toward community for consolation and renewal, taking note of "trees sending mycorrhizal / messages underground // like teenagers vibrating / under their clothes." Literary, political, and erotic, Reading Szymborska in a Time of Plague considers "What blunderous creatures we are, / holding cell phones to our heads," the poet's voice brimming with anxiety and affection. Michael WatersAuthor of CAW

MIRACLE STRIP, a poetry collection by Matt Layne, is a hybrid of the written and spoken word. Each piece of the collection has an embellished QR code which, when scanned, transforms you from reader into listener. In the campfire tradition of storytelling, the first line of the book invites you to "tell me your story, and I will tell you mine," and like a couple of backwoods adventurers, you and the poet travel together through intricate memories of the deep south and the ghosts who haunt its environs as you journey through MIRACLE STRIP.

In Robert Tremmel's sly, playful poems, the naked man contains multitudes: alternately bodied and bodiless, Muse and mused-upon, happy to disrupt life on earth and observe it from afar. When the man is, as in "Saturday Night," "out in his garden / with an open bottle of Budweiser / and an old pie pan / from Baker's Square," his vision is cosmic, as he also ponders "his drinking buddies / the slugs, already / stirring deep beneath / the lettuce leaves." In "Somewhere There is This Lake," the boundary between the earthly and the sacred is even more thrillingly tangled, to the point where there is no more boundary. The man realizes his boss's mind is "completely riddled / with bullet points / and she is pointedly / ignorant of the riddle / and infinite points / that are the naked man / himself, sitting there / in a straight-backed / chair, silently / watching the drama / and the riddle / of the infinite points / that are the woman / sitting in front of him." If the naked man has indeed returned (from exile? the future? the great beyond?), he also never left. Through his eyes, all things are not just possible but probable. -Michael Diebert, author of LIFE OUTSIDE THE SET

"ESCAPE ENVY is a book of reckoning, a poetry collection that takes clear-eyed but tender measure of what we lose when we lose ourselves . . ." -Francesca Bell

"Remarkable actress and dazzling poet, Beth Ruscio knows both the many masks we wear and those singular performances we each live to give. In SPEAKING PARTS, her powerful collection of poems, we become the audience to the self and its many faces . . ." -David St. John, author of THE AURORAS

Gary Stein is a poet in the spirit of Blake, Frost, and William Carlos Williams. In Stein's poetry, the ideas are always in little things that touch larger things, and the world is revealed in a squirrel dying, a car being washed, a clock falling from a wall. To read poems such as "The Cremationist's Day Off," "Travels in Time," and "On My 50th Birthday" is to know you are in the presence of a poet who is a master of language. TOURING THE SHADOW FACTORY is a magnificent book.-Miles David Moore, author of THE BEARS OF PARIS AND ROLLERCOASTERWhat tours, what shadows in what factory are here, in these haunting poems of memory, love, and legend? Stein's poems focus on the father, now a shade, a gifted, patient carver and craftsman who "knew the soul of wood" and long ago brought his young son into his workshop. The poet-son, now grown, pursues the craft of words, of story-making, of would not wood, with kindred, altered skills. And wonders and blesses, in his turn, what shadows and what skills, what callings, his own now-grown sons will now pursue.-Judith McCombs, author of THE HABIT OF FIRE: POEMS SELECTED & NEWGary Stein's TOURING THE SHADOW FACTORY is a meditation on time, memory, and loss-from the ghosts of the past to "the soft blur of [the] future." In poems both precise and masterfully understated, Stein explores the human condition of being in many times at once, carrying our childhoods with us as we age, expectant about what might be coming: "Each night the next miracle." -Maggie Smith, author of THE WELL SPEAKS OF ITS OWN POISON & GOOD BONES

ULTRA DEEP FIELD is a direct follow-up to Ace Boggess’s previous collection of poetry THE PRISONERS (Brick Road, 2014), composed of poems written during Boggess's last year in lock-up in a West Virginia penitentiary, his year on parole, and his first year of freedom. They reflect his journey from the smallness of inmate life to the seeming vastness of the world (and universe) beyond.Ace Boggess is a freelance writer and editor living in Charleston, West Virginia. He spent five years in a West Virginia penitentiary, during which he wrote the poems that became his previous poetry collection, THE PRISONERS (Brick Road, 2014).  ULTRA DEEP FIELD is his third book of poetry. His other books include THE BEAUTIFUL GIRL WHOSE WISH WAS NOT FULFILLED (Highwire Press, 2003) and the novel A SONG WITHOUT A MELODY (Hyperborea, 2016). He has worked as a reporter, a customer-service rep for a phone bank, a sales clerk in record store with accompanying head shop and adult room, and security guard. His writing has appeared in HARVARD REVIEW, NOTRE DAME REVIEW, LUMINA, MID-AMERICAN REVIEW, RIVER STYX, RATTLE, NORTH DAKOTA QUARTERLY, and hundreds of other journals. He received a fellowship from the West Virginia Commission on the Arts.