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¿Visitations, hallucinations and redemptions figure large in the emotional events of the lives of the characters in Mark Blickley¿s new short fiction collection, Sacred Misfits, where we witness souls seeking relief and transformation in something or someone outside of themselves. They may take their first steps toward it in spite of madness, or because of it, against their better judgement, or against the strictures of social convention¿yet the solutions arrived by these marvelously original, tenderly examined souls¿whether they¿re looking for a miracle, relief from loneliness, or Marlon Brando have a bit of real magic to them that leave an indelible impression on the reader as well.¿¿Lucia Nevai

"Chungmi Kim explores the themes of longing and displacement in a culture she sees as both askew¿like seeing 'the mountain upside down'¿and engaging, as in her title poem, 'Glacier Lily,' where identity is born not of the purity of nostalgia but of the coloring of age, vibrant and transforming, as are all of the poems in this collection."¿James Ragan"Chungmi Kim¿s passion, empathy, and lyric voice bring us diverse communities: from Hollywood to South Central L.A.; from Korea to America. We see what she sees: 'the mountain upside down,' but the very next moment we are lifted skyward by her words. Chungmi Kim¿s poems find us again and again, but never in the same way."¿Russell C. Leong

"Laurel Ann Bogen is an admirable poet with a distinctive voice. In this fascinating book, again and again she transforms her moments of joy, the wounds she has suffered, into a mouth, speaking her terse and immaculate poems, and often, miraculously, breaking into song." ¿Edward Field

¿This is an impressive first book full of meaty poems and wry surprises. Even the so called literary poems¿`Circe,¿ `To Anna Karenina,¿ `Note¿¿are substantive and fresh. Thomas¿s reach is broad and daring, from the shtetls of her forebears to the abuses of today¿s petrochemical industry. Mourning the murdered Lithuanian Jews of the Holocaust and celebrating the cholesterol-rich menu of the River Run café intercut with local scandals are made to seem appropriate apposites in this lively collection.¿¿Maxine Kumin¿This delightful¿and long overdue¿collection of poems shows Susan Thomas at her delicious best: `So many ways / to eat chicken: / fricasseed and boiled / sautéed with herbs and shallots / roasted, stuffed with mushrooms . . .¿ Hard not to make a culinary comparison about the range and variety of these poems¿poems about history, family history, landscape, myth, fairy tale; the whole world is here to be savored and enjoyed. A state of blessed gluttony¿that¿s how I felt after reading this debut collection. Now I¿m greedy for more.¿¿Jane Shore¿Perhaps it is, as she says, `necessity fueled by / the impossible,¿ that makes State of Blessed Gluttony such a superb experience of a ravenous imagination. Here, after all, we find art, fairy tales, history, a murdered girl, King Kong, Penelope, mad plumbers, ghosts, even objects themselves in a dialogue that tells us they exist now, in the fabulous world created by Susan Thomas¿s terrific vision. Which is to say that this is a book that redefines our own world, and so ourselves, enrichng us with its particulars, broadening us its vision, so that, like her, we find a way to `refuse to be a blur / on desire¿s muffled horizion.¿¿¿Richard Jackson

Chris Abani's Dog Woman is a mesmerizing, haunting, and sometimes subversive exploration of the personal and cultural politics of disempowerment and power. In these heart rousing and lyrically complex poems, the poet enacts the reconstruction of his feminized selves, and his personae struggle to re-form and transform both themselves and the difficult worlds they inhabit. At turns, earthy, enigmatic, devout, outraged, and compassionate, these elemental women's voices ring true, as they sing siren songs, dirges, and hosannas, and as they navigate into new and unknown territories of human will and endurance. Dog Woman is a daring, trailblazing, and important book; it's a vital addition to the poetry of our times.

¿Lisa Krueger¿s shimmering first collection of poems, Rebloom, is a hymn to the gifts and weight of daily life. Lisa Krueger weaves with stunning simplicity the love, loss, and longing of being, and of being wife, mother, sister, and daughter. She renders daily illuminations behind the veil of everyday routine, the miracles of joy and sorrow. In Rebloom, the final movement amazes us with the great comfort of nature, of the earth, where she seizes renewal of life in the presence of death. Flowers, stem, earth, she sees the whole, and the whole is what heals. By digging, Lisa Krueger aerates the soil of her life, of this our life.¿ ¿Maureen Reed

"Proceed With Passion: Engaging Students in Meaningful Education is filled with bold approaches to giving students the ingredients they most lack in their schooling¿a sense of purpose, a reason for wanting to learn and, ultimately, a passion to help others."¿Arianna Huffington"Schools and environmental organizations need young people like Anna Cummins with the intelligence and commitment to get things done. Her two chapters in this book are a welcome addition to the eco canon."¿Jeremy Jackson"The title of this book captures Emily Cummins's life and work¿passion and engagement in meaningful service."¿Claudia Villegas-Avalos"Our educational system badly needs some bold thinking. Paul Cummins's vision of what American education could be is imaginative and inspiring."¿Howard Zinn

When a woman breaks all the rules, she is often punished. In the case of Marie Girard, whose transgressions include prostitution, unwed motherhood, divorce and setting fire to her home, punishment includes ex-communication from the Catholic Church, incarceration in mental institutions and electroshock therapy.In this novel in poems, author Terry Wolverton suggests that the social institutions--the family, the Church, the medical establishment--that were supposed to protect Marie instead failed her. She contrasts the society into which Marie was born--early-Twentieth Century Detroit--with the culture of the Wendat Indians who'd lived in the same region hundreds of years earlier; the Wendat believed that madness was the result of "unfulfilled desires."In seventy-three vivid and lyrical poems, Embers contends that women's "bad" behavior may in fact be justifiable resistance against systems that exploit and endanger women.

As a writer of drama and short fiction, Edwards¿ first collection of poetry is influenced by the character sketches of her earlier prose works, while maintaining a strong sense of lyricism. Like her influences, Sharon Olds, Rainer Rilke, and Sylvia Plath, Edwards¿ poetry derives force from its candor and observational simplicity. A Kentucky native, Edwards continues in the tradition of great pastoral voices such as Robert Frost, drawing from his metaphorical, lyric and structural paradigms. Reading The Farmer¿s Daughter evokes fields of space, filled with light and soft shadows.

This new and necessary book¿a collection of author profiles, literary journalism and speculative pieces about the Southland's writing and publishing scene¿aims to capture the Southern California of here and now. We want to get at the Los Angeles that came after the gumshoes, the wisecracking Englishmen, after the Boosters, the Beats, and the boozers, after the despairing heroines of Joan Didion and the coked-up rich kids of Bret Easton Ellis.

"Susan McCabe's Swirl is a constantly provocative and often wildly inventive debut collection of poetry. Edgy and wise, sly and disarming, these poems are both cinemagraphic and kaliedescopic in their workings. Profoundly gestural and always powerful, Swirl introduces to American poetry a memorable and compelling new voice." -David St. John "Every sentence in Susan McCabe's gorgeous poems is a sounding. Her lines haunt the far side of memory-for "remembering is learning," though of the most difficult kind; without its shadow side, "there is no presence." Aswirl with the necessarily figurative conjurations of hidden, internal objects, Swirl mingles melancholy and metaphor to form a full-fledged yet emotionally bottomless reality. This poet doesn't force anything: she is always already at the heart of imaginative fecundity, expanding, morphing like a "creature / drowning in blue whose limbs / loosen and pitch hooks." She both searches the shadows with relentless honesty and joys in language. Her gift to the reader is immense." -Calvin Bedient

"Gaylord Brewer¿s Barbaric Mercies is a book of extraordinary and delightful individuality. Alternately aggressive, outrageous, whimsical, and heartfelt, the poems are never predictable but always authentic. The author has such a genius for phrasing that there are many lines that make the reader stop and sigh or smile. A dark and delicious volume."¿Dana Gioia"Barbaric Mercies, Mr. Brewer¿s finest book of poems yet, seamlessly weaves a rich tapestry between landscape and longing, the poet¿s big heart for language and his voracious appetite for making an impact on this life. This is a visionary collection, a lasting celebration to travel, leaving familiar turf for the unfamiliar, reveling in the simple beauty of words, gestures, images. If there is anything 'barbaric' about this book and these poems, it is their striving to make an indelible impact on our consciousness as readers. Their taking hold of our imaginations and our moods hearkens back to Whitman¿s 'barbaric yawp,' that shouting/singing only the best poets seem to do rather effortlessly and with resounding ability."¿Virgil Suárez

These poems come from a place of separation. They are written by an exile who is a father. We hear the deaths of brother and wife, the juxtaposition of cradle and casket, the burial shovel with the baby bottle. It is American to look forward with roots backward. To embrace the country that supported the oppression of one's homeland. All this Majid Naficy does with the paired down lucid crafted language of a poet who speaks slowly and clearly, who evince surprise at being alive.

¿It is a difficult thing to write simply and eloquently with quiet and intense passion in ways that are unflinchingly personal but also fold the reader into the depths of history and myth. This is partly what Adrianne Kalfopouloüs poems do for me. They are also celebrations reminding me how words can perform acts of affirmation and joy no matter what griefs or complex experiences they contain. These poems attain the beauty of ritual.¿ ¿T. Alan Broughton

"With this luminous tribute to Wilma Elizabeth McDaniel Peters is in top form. His steely eyed, poignant testimony unearths the midden heap of his rural past, evoking the pungency of that past with all of its stench and sweetness."¿Edward Field"Peters, a master of the poetic close-up, here closes the loop on his many decades of writing. That he recalls so much of his early life so vividly is an enviable feat of discipline and imagination."¿Jim Cory

In the series Seeds of Truth Petra Eiko has written an inspiring story about the connection between the body and the mind. Petra Eiko's books are available individually in eight parts: Is, Wisdom, Vision, Sound, Power, Sex, Fear, and Heart. These books help promote both self-understanding and the acquisition of wisdom. Each book in the series marks important stages of growth in every person's life.

¿John Domini has brilliantly turned one of literary fiction¿s neatest tricks: he has vividly and accurately evoked a past time and milieüthe alternative cultural scene of the mid- 70s¿and in the process he has illuminated our own times with dazzling clarity. Talking Heads: 77 also manages to be both cutting-edge innovative and splendidly readable. This book is a flat-out delight." ¿Robert Olen Butler, author of A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain, Pulitzer Prize in Fiction 1993 ¿Talking Heads: 77 reminds us of a generation¿s crushing loss of idealism. Through an impassioned post-Watergate journalist whose interior angst is articulated in illusory news columns for a fantasized issue of his alternative newspaper, John Domini captures the kind of innocence it once took to believe in our quixotic convictions, to believe we could invoke change, to believe we couldn¿t be perverted or corrupted. Simultaneously he recreates the visceral disillusionment that had engulfed many of us by the time the 70¿s were over.¿ ¿Cris Mazza, author of Girl Beside Him and Is It Sexual Harassment Yet? ¿John Domini is fiction¿s own Greil Marcus, revealing the secret history that has made us all; in Talking Heads: 77, Kit Viddich is our tour guide, a reporter raking the muck to find the ore, and exploring the cellars, by starlight. The cellars, the basement, the closet, the underground¿John Domini knows that the dank oubliettes of our world are the places of darkness and death, and also the wellsprings, the very life of our culture.¿ ¿Brian Bouldrey author of Love, the Magician, The Genius of Desire and the essay collection Monster: Adventures in American Machismo

In the series Seeds of Truth Petra Eiko has written an inspiring story about the connection between the body and the mind. Petra Eiko's books are available individually in eight parts: Is, Wisdom, Vision, Sound, Power, Sex, Fear, and Heart. These books help promote both self-understanding and the acquisition of wisdom. Each book in the series marks important stages of growth in every person's life.

In the series Seeds of Truth Petra Eiko has written an inspiring story about the connection between the body and the mind. Petra Eiko's books are available individually in eight parts: Is, Wisdom, Vision, Sound, Power, Sex, Fear, and Heart. These books help promote both self-understanding and the acquisition of wisdom. Each book in the series marks important stages of growth in every person's life.

In the series Seeds of Truth Petra Eiko has written an inspiring story about the connection between the body and the mind. Petra Eiko's books are available individually in eight parts: Is, Wisdom, Vision, Sound, Power, Sex, Fear, and Heart. These books help promote both self-understanding and the acquisition of wisdom. Each book in the series marks important stages of growth in every person's life.

In the series Seeds of Truth Petra Eiko has written an inspiring story about the connection between the body and the mind. Petra Eiko's books are available individually in eight parts: Is, Wisdom, Vision, Sound, Power, Sex, Fear, and Heart. These books help promote both self-understanding and the acquisition of wisdom. Each book in the series marks important stages of growth in every person's life.

The poems in The Gentle Man were composed between 1999 and 2001. The title poem speaks to those of us who seek to simplify our lives by enriching what it is we give to others, especially what we offer them in kindness and devotion. If the very act of love is patient and wise, then those who are fortunate enough to receive it are blessed by its gift and know, quite naturally, what to offer in return.And yet, when that love somehow cannot be met through blindness, happenstance, history, remorse, or sorrow, we are habitually haunted by past apparitions who remind us that our need for affection, and a place called home, is an inclination not easily forgotten. Be they ¿Broken Heats,¿ ¿Photograph (circa 1960),¿ ¿Your Father¿s Ghost,¿ ¿Last Request,¿ or ¿Locomotive to Hell,¿ these poems address what it means to constantly search for meaning both inside and outside of ourselves¿to travel down tracks in an attempt to discover or rediscover our identity. By doing so, we examine what went wrong in our testament to friendship and love and how we can still approach the longing and desire that resides in each of us, applying for ¿Forgiveness¿ as a starting point.If by the mere act of consequence, we can keep the solemn prayer alive¿this striving for peace through reconciliation, then we ultimately retain a chance at the relief that so often escapes us and keeps us at bay with ourselves along the dangerous curves we face. Perhaps, then, ¿The Cost of Being Me¿ will not be so great, the sacrifice so difficult to bear, as we turn the bedcovers down and read the next page of the book we continue to write, night after night after night. And in the end, hopefully, certainly mercifully, we come to understand that ¿The Gentle Man¿ and what he entails is all we¿ve ever wished to know¿and become.

¿Each of these marvelous poems engages as instantly as a photograph: you read two or three words and yoüre on the scene, recoiling in horror as Trotsky is murdered or twisting uncomfortably as your daughter buys her first bra. There¿s no need to `develop¿ Stephen Gibson¿s pictures; they enter your mind so fast that you can¿t help feeling that what¿s happening on the page has already happened and that, very likely, you were there when it did. He¿s a poet for other poets to learn from, for no one else writing today uses language as economically or to more immediate effect.¿¿David Kirby

¿Wedding in October is a rich and gorgeous novel, deeply rooted in memory, delicately constructed, filled with subtle and compelling characters. While grappling with universal themes and events, Geoffrey Clark creates a world that is unmistakably Midwestern: fertile and expansive, plain-spoken and harshly beautiful. Wedding in October will lay claim to readers¿ minds and hearts, its hold both gentle and utterly tenacious.¿¿Susan Dodd¿Geoffrey Clark formulated into words those sublime experiences that habitually leave no trace in the compartments of our consciousness save a film whose images have silvered.¿¿Dennis Must