Bøger udgivet af Poet's Press

Second volume of poetry by Thomas D. Jones, a New Jersey-born poet now residing in Rhode Island. Lyrics and philosophical musings in the spirit of Whitman and Jeffers; narratives ranging from Madame Butterfly to Egyptian mummies.

CRACKERS AT MIDNIGHT. New Poems 2015-2107 by Brett Rutherford. This book's title-poem - a small recollection of a hungry boy meeting his grandmother for a secret feast of saltine crackers and butter - is a metaphor for the book itself: a feast of poetic narratives and visions that the reader can savor, indulging in "just one more" until the last page is turned. Two story-poems come from the Pennsylvania landscape: the tale of Pittsburgh's radioactive millionaire who haunts Allegheny Cemetery, and the childhood memory of a visiting Rabbi who makes a Golem-monster in rural Scottdale. The feast, however, also spans continents and eras, as the poet takes us to the grave of Leonardo da Vinci in France, the exhumation of Goethe's body in Weimar, a flamingo sacrifice by the Emperor Nero, ancient Alexandrian gossip about ibises, and a shattering visit to the home of Emily Dickinson in Amherst. Sometimes the poems inhabit a strange, visionary world, overhearing a prayer on Cyprus from a hunted archbishop, visioning Eldorado rising from a glacial lake, or penetrating the psychology of the Egyptian Pharaoh Snofru. A cluster of nature poems from Edinboro Lake in Northwestern Pennsylvania, and some melancholy contemplations on "The Loved Dead," round out this collection of 40 poems.

Emilie Glen (1906-1995) was best known as a poet, but she started her writing career in fiction, first published in H.L. Mencken's The American Mercury, Prairie Schooner, and other magazines. In these nineteen short stories, Glen presents a portrait of mid-20th century America, using penetrating character portraits to show a world already nearly-gone, its customs and manners as odd to some of us as those of an Amazonian people. A keen observer of manners and of the human drama, Emilie Glen centers sometimes on family drama: a high-stakes croquet game among heirs, the prize a Bermuda resort hotel; a mother and daughter competing for the same man; an Irish mother and daughter trapped in poverty in Hells' Kitchen, each wanting "the best"; and a wealthy matron in the Hamptons determined to stop her son from marrying a Latina girl. From a time when religion ruled the heartland, Glen writes about a town struggling with the worst preacher ever; a minister fired for his liberal values during the McCarthy era; and a woman forced to choose between becoming a minister's wife, or being ordained herself to take over her father's church. Other stories are wonderful character portraits: a country woman whose life is changed when she comes into possession of the Encyclopaedia Britannica; a bored office worker with a secret hobby of purse-snatching; a businessman who would rather be a street beggar; the man determined to be top of the pecking order among the Central Park bird-watchers; a young girl determined to get her first ballet shoes; a dancer locked in a fierce rivalry and obsession over a Siamese cat; a husband and wife living off the earnings of a child model; an industrialist whose entire existence is defined by ladies' feet; and a desperate song-writer knocking on the doors of music publishers. This volume also includes "From This Window," Glen's experiment in prose poetry.

Poet Vincent Spina has lived most of his life between two continents: North and South America. As one would suspect, therefore, there is a degree of "Spanglish" not only in the language of these poems but in the allusions to South American poets: namely, Cesar Vallejo and Pablo Neruda, but mostly Vallejo, much of whose poetry borders the line of what is possible to express in words and the inexpressible that waits just beyond. Juan Ramón Jiménez, a Spanish poet, asked in his poetry for the name of things (el nombre exacto de las cosas). And this exact name, the one we may never pronounce, is what Spina alludes to in these poems: the long name of things, the name that is born with us at our birth and grows as we grow and dies with us when we die. This is the name that defines us or indentifies us at our essence -- if there is an essence. There is another continent involved in these poems, too: Italy, the country of the poet's grandparents, which he visited while working on this book. As Spina elaborates: "I grew up with ways of thinking that were not 'wholly' American but rather had leaked into my consciousness -- perhaps my conscience -- through other sources. The last part of the book deals with other sources and their meanings. For instance, the tarantella is not the folksy stereotypical dance with which an Italian American wedding ends. Its rhythm is hypnotic. Its purpose is to put the dancers into a trance in which rituals of life and death are reenacted: moments of love, of passion, of honor. Its name refers to a tarantula--really a large spider--because within the trance the dancers thrash around their arms and legs like those of a frenzied spider. Thus, my aim was to "de-stereotype" the dance and "reveal" its original "mystery". Heidegger writes that for the Greeks, truth was revelation. Thus I wished in these poems to unveil certain truths about my people and about myself."

This book is a retracing of landscape, heritage and culture, spanning continents and time. Interspersed with quotations from Columbus's journal, de Weever recounts and visits her native British Guiana as seen by its conquerors and ravishers, and by its survivors. Rich with the flora and fauna of island and Amazon, the book poses native against the encounter with the native. The eyes of the caiman look out from the waters, while the visiting European artist paints delicate watercolors of butterflies and lush tropical plants. Some of the poems inhabit the oppressed within our northern borders, such as Tituba, accused witch of Salem, or the lynched Native American Jacqueline Peters. In retracing her own heritage and origins, de Weever invites us to confront the beauty, and violence, of the hemisphere we share.

This eleventh collection of Jack Veasey's poetry spotlights a lesser-known aspect of the work of this Pennsylvania poet. Known as a chronicler of urban working-class life, and described by FactSheet 5 as "blunt, cutting narratives that make you wonder how we can possibly accept things as they are," Veasey gains even more power in the surprising vein of poems in foxed forms. Exploring formal poetic forms since the early 1980s, Veasey found working in sonnets and other forms proved ideal for exploring a far greater range of subjects, some that had been, for him, "too big to tackle." This collection gathers the best of the poet's works in form. Some are hilarious, some dark and disturbing, some poignant and touching: all have a clarity and striking musicality not found much in contemporary poetry.

Here is Brett Rutherford's first new compendium of poems in seven years. Following on The Gods As They Are On Their Planets (2005) and Poems from Providence (1991), this book is a must for fans of this neo-Romantic American poet. The 94 new poems and revisions in this collection range from a dark-shadowed childhood in the coal and coke region of Western Pennsylvania, to New York City and Providence, Rhode Island. The jolting sequence titled "Out Home" is a poetic memoir of broken families and childhood terrors, and the imminent threat of kidnapping and mutilation by "Doctor Jones," a crazed surgeon who roams the countryside in a sinister roadster. The small boy of these poems is already a self-styled outsider, defining his difference from the crushing environment around him. In "Past the Millennium" and "Ars Poetica," the full-grown poet soars, with politically-charged poems on Solzhenitsyn, the self-immolation of Czech martyr Jan Palach, and the imagined overtaking of Bush and Cheney by "The Black Huntsman." Rutherford walks in Poe's footsteps on a Hudson River pier, visits ancient Rome for a chat with the law-giving King Numa Pompilius, and puts Poe to work tracking down a cemetery spectre in 1848 Providence. Two historic verse plays give voice to the mad Carlota, Empress of Mexico, and two Austrian policemen with an unexpected prisoner on their hands. Humor abounds in this volume, too, from the possessed sex toys in "A Night in Eddie's Apartment," skeptical Martians refusing to believe there's life on Earth, nine-year-old Dante meeting Beatrice in Providence's Federal Hill, and a surrealist adventure across Europe as a lost sock-puppet searches for its owner, meeting Sigmund Freud along the way. A sequence of poems on Love and Eros titled "Love Spells" plumbs the depths of desire and obsession, and presents several powerful elegies, culminating with the poignant "The Loft on Fourteenth Street." The erotic poems, some set in Ancient Greece and some in the present, are frank and often amusing, perhaps some comfort for those who think the fun ends at thirty. Ending the book is a clump of supernatural poems, as expected from this heir of Poe and Lovecraft: a story-length poem, "Dawn," presents the ennui of a 300-year-old vampire; the birth and education of the feared witch Keziah Mason; wind elementals attack the headquarters of Bain Capital in Boston; and Elder Gods arrive to make humans their playthings. An Expectation of Presences is a wide-ranging and startling collection, romantic, defiant, and bracingly hopeful.

20th Anniversary Edition of the most startling collection of poems ever published about the Ocean State. Autumn musings, graveyard happenings, bad behavior by Greek gods, and a general atmosphere of neo-Romantic rebellion make this a dangerous book.

This riveting narrative poem -- which might be called a mini-epic -- mines little-known aspects of World War II history into a melange of African invasions, angry Egyptian gods, rampant Mormon warriors, and the lord of sleepwalkers, Dr. Calilgari. The book is decorated with a collage of The Egyptian Book of the Dead, Mormon mythology, and nazi-era iconography.

Arthur Erbe's Continuum illustrates the ways time affects our lives. The poems explore how each month, day, moment and memory shapes how we think about the passing of the hours. Recalling past moments links what we recall with how we think about events that happened years ago. Poems in this collection explore how certain months evoke incidents, how specific days record an event, how time passes during one day. The content of the poems follows specific forms. Some poems are long and slim; other follow a thought process in a looser pattern, and others find their own form, following the meaning of the experience recorded. In the poem "One Second," the speaker says, "time makes no difference here/today and yesterday are the same/Yet I travel here with chosen words/arranged to recreate a place."The "place" is created by the poet with the words that describe a continuum from his early life to the present to memories of special places such as Yeats' gravestone in Sligo, Ireland and the Odeon Café in Zurich, Switzerland. The journey through time evokes feelings of delight, discovery, loneliness, regret, and dream-like situations. Although most of the poems explore the real world, there are occasions when the poems contain elements of surrealism. However, reading about the journey gives a sense of a life lived, of introspective desires and how we cannot escape from time.

Chamber Music, first published in September 2001, is re-issued here with new material: the poet's last, posthumous poems (Memorial to the Moon) and a memoir by poet Mary Ferrari. This 152-page book brings together the poet's best mature work, plus her own selections of the best poems from her earlier books, Rapunzel (1971), One-Armed Flyer (1976), Journeys Around One Point (1980), The Crossing (1984), Calendar House (1990), and Enemy on the Way to School (1994). Annette believed that Chamber Music in 2001 would be her last book, but the final group of poems added for this edition demonstrate that she was still in peak form. This finely-etched, spare poetry, influenced greatly by the example of her early teacher, Kenneth Koch, intersperses the everyday with the surrealistic, walks bravely among her worlds: childhood in Nazi Germany, boarding school in England, family life and the discovery of poetry writing in America, and her final years overshadowed by 9/11 and her own confrontation with mortality.

In Beware the House, poet Susanna Rich book-ends a wide-ranging collection of life story-poems between two Gothic, haunted houses, the first a surreal nightmare; the second, the mock-Gothic harpsichord-punctuated world of TV's The Addams Family. Unease, discomfort, and pain belong between two haunted places (confused birth and sardonic death), and Rich shares deeply personal accounts of her Hungarian-immigrant grandmother, obsessed in old age with Franz Liszt as an imaginary lover; and a disintegrating mother in the throes of dementia. At the center of the book are poems like glass shards of modern living, a keen and concise language palette turning the everyday into the extraordinary. Like a gypsy dance, these poems careen off common experiences - the grandmother's kitchen, the captive butterfly, a rebellion of trees, the driven car and the rubbernecked accident. And there are villains: the predatory boor repulsed, the unteachable student lesson-taught, the empty soul of the CEO laid bare, the bad president as piñata, the lecherous poetry professor, the restless Dybbuk.