Bøger udgivet af Jackleg Press

In Past Lives, each line leaps to the next in glorious unpredictability, forming a latticework of surprise. In the world of V. Joshua Adams, we have competitive knitting, beer commercials, cabriolets, and mandolin players breaking ukulele players' fingers. To employ a Pavement title, Adams's poems are "slanted and enchanted" their surrealist strangeness is sometimes meditative and sometimes mercurial with acrobatic associative jumps. These are poems of wit, inquiry, and sonic vigor that examine issues of being, textuality, and the imaginative act. Past Lives is "swift-winged and sharp" and "darkly bright" as its sentences spin with wryness: "Even the language of ruin gets run-down," "The question filled me with dread, / which was better than nothing," and the following excerpt, from which the title Past Lives arises: "A lot of people have past lives they are covering up. / For example, I was once an Episcopalian." Though Adams's poems aren't overtly emotional, he extends his antennae into a range of consciousness including desire and darkness; or, to use a phrase from Mark Doty, they are a "logarithm of decay and rekindling." -Simone Muench

"A captivating biographical novel... with Mrs. Lowe-Porter, Jo Salas has achieved the writing triumph that her never-met but vividly imagined grandmother-in-law hoped to write...a magnificent literary achievement." --BookTribA fascinating reimagining of the overlooked, complicated life of Thomas Mann's translator, Helen Lowe-PorterThe literary giant Thomas Mann balked at a female translator, but he might well owe his standing in the Western canon to a little-known American woman, Helen Lowe-Porter. Based closely on historical source material, Jo Salas's novel Mrs. Lowe-Porter sympathetically reveals a brilliant woman's struggle to be appreciated as a translator and find her voice in a male-dominated culture. Married to the charming classicist Elias Lowe, whom she met and fell in love with while in Munich, the story weaves one woman's journey as her husband Elias's career soars and her translation work earns Mann the Nobel Prize. The novel celebrates Helen Lowe-Porter as she learns to risk stepping out from the long shadow of the dominating men of her life to become a person of letters in her own right.

Recalling Joni Mitchell's famous lyric "They paved paradise, put up a parking lot," Solastalgia is a heart-wrenching and harrowing overview of environmental destruction. Though it is an ominous exploration of the Anthropocene era and the ways humans have contributed to the changing climate and landscape, it spends much of its time honoring all the strange and wondrous creatures-"may you outlast us"- that humans, both intentionally and unwittingly, are shoving toward extinction's cliff. Solastalgia is an eloquent tribute to all the awe-inspiring flora and fauna that we have failed as a species. I love this book not only for its incisive eco-eye but also for its dazzling language terrains. Using language as the tool to effect change, these poems make you want to be better, do better.¿Simone Muench

Winner of the Anisfield-Wolf Book AwardGibbons's first novel takes place in east Texas in 1910 during the time of white rule-not by law but by lynch mob. Amid the suffocating racism and fear, half-Choctaw, half-white Reuben Sweetbitter and Martha Clarke, a white woman, fall in love. Forbidden to be seen together, they escape to the town of Harriet, where an influential friend of Martha helps them settle down and raise a family. Atypical of love stories, this realistic work maintains a historical perspective in lending the couple short-lived happiness. Martha's brother James comes for vengeance, and Reuben flees to the forest, which has always been his refuge from the white world. Reuben and Martha's love is strong, but, dishearteningly, racism is stronger. Timely in the subject of interracial love, this authentic, richly detailed novel plumbs sacrifice, fear, and the loss of one's identity, bringing the anguish of the two young lovers to life. Highly recommended.-Library Journal

Yours Creature is composed of epistolary poems in the voice of Mary Shelley. Often written as missives to her famous literary mother, Wollstonecraft, the poems address months, years, and her own monstrous creation as they contend with exile, transience, and desire. These poems ask us to imagine the physical elements of Shelley's existence in language that is both luminous and visceral. This is not a book that simply recreates a past, but one that transcends time as it threads together the loss and violence that history has asked women to suppress. The poems recognize the unspoken pairing of scarcity and creation; they explore how the monstrous is born out of rejection. Yours, Creature responds to a literary and historical narrative, but the poems exist as lyric, singing of the pleasure of creation and its transformative power.

In eleven fearless, wide-ranging stories, The Sexual Lives of Suburbanites offers us a sometimes absurdist, sometimes satirical but always fresh glimpse into the things that trouble us most. From materialism to regrets and everything in-between, Stenson dissects suburban milieu. Whether narrated by e-trading infants or drug addicts, the characters' worlds unfold with energy and surprise. Variously whimsical, obsessive, charming, and dark, the stories also break your heart.

The rain-sodden, southern world of David Wesley Williams' Everybody Knows overflows with satiric fun as it churns up a rich detritus of Biblical allusions, political backstory, musical opinions, literary puns, and local anecdotes. The story, set a decade hence, introduces a raft of characters, too, including musicians, an escaped felon, a tyrannical governor atop his state's old electric chair, various and likable sidekicks and mistresses, and even a writer, the ironic double of the work's author, whose enthusiasm for his subject matter spills over into strongly opinionated footnotes. And that's all before the pirates arrive. Original, energetic, and obsessive, Everybody Knows recalls the worlds of Faulkner, Welty, Flannery O'Connor, Kurt Vonnegut, and John Kennedy Toole in its broad wit and sorrowful joy.

Finalist, 2022 Foreword INDIES Book of the Year Award ¿¿The opening poem, "Cuban Polymita," from which the title Fixed Star arises, serves as the scaffolding device for Frischkorn's manuscript. Like the beautiful painted snails it references, the book, too, is a series of spirals: mainly, a pair of sonnet coronas whose recursive lines twine through the manuscript, both framing and bracing it. Navigating splits in language, geography, government, culture, and family-Frischkorn guides us through poems that are, contrapuntally, both luxuriant and lean. Swirling through this compact, honed manuscript is a series of citations (Shakespeare, John Cage, Muriel Rukeyser, John Keats, Normando Hernández González), and geographies (Cuba, Spain, Florida, Pennsylvania) that create transit across decades and differing terrains. Constellated with Latin jazz, jasper, sea glass, bougainvillea, contradanza, and coral reefs, Fixed Star is a brilliant treatise on violence, division, loss, longing, and the search for song. ¿Simone Muench

Acclaimed children''s book author Cornelia Maude Spelman''s memoir of her family springs from a meeting and subsequent friendship with the late, legendary New Yorker editor William Maxwell in the 1920s. When Spelman hints at what she thinks of as the failure of her parents'' lives, he counters that "in a good novel one doesn''t look for a success story, but for a story that moves one with its human drama and richness of experience." Maxwell encourages her to tell her mother''s story at their final meeting. Missing is Spelman''s response to Maxwell''s wisdom. With the pacing of the mystery novels her mother loved and using everything from letters and interviews to the family''s quotidian paper trail-medical records, telegrams, and other oft-overlooked clues to a family''s history-Spelman reconstructs her mother''s life and untimely death. Along the way, she unravels mysteries of her family, including the fate of her long-lost older brother. Spelman skillfully draws the reader into the elation and sorrow that accompanies the discovery of a family''s past. A profoundly loving yet honest elegy, Missing is complex and beautiful like the mother it memorializes.

Blue Boy tells the story of an art historian with gargantuan ambition and hubris. A greedy tyrant, Gabriel Rhab regards most of the people around him, family and colleagues included, as existing to serve him, though, unfortunately, they have their own ambitions and appetites, which sometimes get in the way. Though a satire, the story offers both fun and empathy, as the intensely inward-gazing world of academic rivalry, the sadness of art history, the futility of theory, and the ludic aspects of domestic life are explored from various points of view with hard intelligence and psychological depth. 

Barbara Cully's poetics mix humor with a deadpan delivery, an aching love for all things tiny, the desire to face geology, the surreal, the built environment, and the horrors of human culture-with bravery. A style that treats beauty with elegy and is in love with all things shoreline, desert, and ocean.Poet Boyer Rickel notes, "Barbara Cully's meditations in Back Apart range widely in subject and temperament: from ambushed troops in Afghanistan to the shorelines of her California youth, from Kristallnacht to our present ecological degradations. Driven by an unstable, seeking impulse, "the desire to look and to look away," the poems remain in flux, animated by a constant reckoning of self in history, in landscape, and especially among others."