Bøger udgivet af RED HEN PR

"Sagan¿s richly sensual writing blends elements of mature insight with deeply felt experience. These are poems of an examined life with moments of Zen clarity throughout. It is, in fact, the clarity that drives these poems. The language is careful but deliberate, exquisitely crafted and emotionally moving. One gets the sense that her desire to write poetry comes from the desire to give permanent voice to something in the experience of life ¿ to find ourselves spoken for in art gives dignity to our pain, our anger, our lust, and our losses. This is what poetry is about. When Miriam Sagan casts her imaginative eye on something, it stares back."¿Jeanie C. Williams, Southwest Book Views

A review of Modern Love and Other Tall Tales:With prose as clean as Hemingway¿s and a Kafka-esque sense of the absurd, Greg Boyd delivers a memorable book in Modern Love and Other Tall Tales. But these tales are not quite so ¿tall¿ as the title might suggest; in fact, their distinction lies in the way they negotiate a fine line between veracity and the farcical.Each narrator seems to fancy himself ¿the rational one¿ while elaborating the most bizarre situation with little or no comment. Boyd exploits this irony by mingling a crushing sense of isolation with a host of eccentric, straight-faced characters whose predicaments become the reader¿s source of stupefaction and endless mirth. In ¿Horny,¿ a man walks around town carrying a heavy wood cross on his back, convinced that suffering will erase his primal instincts; ¿listen¿ is a one-sided conversation in which the narrator formulates a sad and defensive logic that falls on dead ears or¿as one might imagine¿no ears at all; and ¿The Further Adventures of Tom, Huck, and Jim¿ transports Twain¿s classic characters to Southern California and brings us hilariously up to date.But Modern Love isn¿t just one laugh after another. Though Boyd makes light of unfortunate circumstances, there is an underlying feeling of loneliness and sadness throughout, as if his characters¿ idiosyncrasies were born from an acute sense of helplessness or an inability to participate in or relate to typical activities. The characters themselves seem real but flimsy, as if they will at any moment be blown off the page by a Kafkan ill wind, as if they were all once, as in ¿Unglued,¿ ¿shy and sickly, largely ignored by the other children.¿Boyd¿s writing, like his characters, is straightforward and descriptive. There¿s no need for verbal trickery here because the author¿s imagination provides us with more than enough to digest. In Modern Love it¿s quite possible to become so engrossed in a story that you forget yoüre actually reading at all.

What happens when one hundred poets from across the country all follow the same ¿recipe¿ for creating a poem? If you think the result is one hundred identical poems, then you haven¿t seen Mischief, Caprice, and Other Poetic Strategies, an anthology edited by Terry Wolverton from Red Hen Press.The collection includes nationally recognized poets such as Michael Waters and Richard Garcia, Los Angeles notables such as Alicia Vogl Saenz and Jim Natal, poets from Canada, Mexico, and India, and a twelve-year-old and eight-year-old¿all writing in response to the same set of instructions. The ¿recipe,¿ called the Twenty Little Poetry Projects, was devised by poet Jim Simmerman and first made its nationwide debut in The Practice of Poetry, a 1992 collection edited by Robin Behn and Chase Twitchell. Simmerman devised the exercise, he says, to encourage his poetry students to explore ¿free-for-all wackiness, inventive play, and the sheer oddities of language itself.¿¿Too many poems,¿ asserts Terry Wolverton, ¿suffer for their earnestness, an overabundance of sincerity, which sometimes means you tell the reader what they already know. A good poem shows the reader something new, and to do that, sometimes the poet needs to think differently.¿ Wolverton, an instructor of creative writing herself and founder of Writers At Work, a writing center in Los Angeles, has long used the Twenty Little Poetry Projects herself to ¿disrupt whatever habits one may be in with regard to writing poems.¿ The result is a poem in which ¿the journey to arrive at the content is unexpected, entertaining, and provocative.¿ She predicts that students will have a great time with the book, which will demonstrate that ¿poems can be playful and serious at the same time.¿

¿American girlhood, with its anorexia and Girl Scout merit badges, piano recitals and razored self-mutilations, is the shattered `glass town¿ of Lisa Russ Spaar¿s magical poems. Setting out to `heal the old rifts-- / heaven and earth, girl / and dream,¿ Spaar records the rituals of a tribe we recognize chiefly by its fierce determination to survive¿girls, bent first on perfection, then, on returning from the banishment of our preoccupation with their bodies, their beauty.¿What a marvel this book is! In language that manages to be both ardent and elegant, Spaar gives witness to marvelous mythologies in which `the old story: / the world for my body, / my body for the world,¿ is cancelled in a moment¿s reckoning, and Rapunzel saves herself.¿¿Dorothy Barresi

¿Like the mystery bruise of the title poem, these memento mori are livid imprints left behind by collisions with life, tattooed reminders of emotional confrontations. But Terry Wolverton is a survivor of her deep passions. Her heart beats on despite its contusions and pulses underneath the corpus of her experience like a wellspring of life under the painful intimations of mortality. This is a remarkable body of work.¿¿Michael Lassell, author of A Flame for the Touch That Matters¿Terry Wolverton¿s passionate achievement crackles with unsparing revelations from the dark side of the American Dream¿epidemics, urban unrest, and a girlhood which might have been conjured in the imagination of Norman Rockwell¿s diabolical twin. Into this end-of-the-century landscape, peopled by casualties, survivors, and warriors, she direcfts the manifold redeeming powers of poetry: to bear witness, to exorcise, to shore up¿and hold fast among us¿memories of those lost.¿¿Suzanne Lummis, author of In Danger¿In Mystery Bruise, poems of loss and troubled adolescence give way to songs of healing and self-assertiveness. Terry Wolverton looks us straight in the eye, channels raw experience into lean columns, staunch forms. Her poems sting with the truth, the toxic times we live in, yet offer hope, instruct us how to reshape who we are.¿¿David Trinidad, author of Answer Song

"This book is a brouhaha of fun and cleverness, where many of the poems are double-edged with humor and lasting wisdom. ... These poems are delivered with the perfect clarity of everyday language."¿The Cafe Review"Brewer is the most consistently dark-side-of-the-moon poet around...his...athletic style exactly suits the subject."¿Hugh Fox, Small Press Review (Review of Presently A Beast)"I love the edgy laughter I hear on almost every page...There's a 'camaraderie of betrayal, lust, and song'."¿David Kirby

"Doubts and secret disappointments are the knots that secure this hammock...stretch out...hang suspended...But beware: do not...relax." ¿Melody Stevenson "I like [Gale's] gutsy sensuality--even snow banks have thighs...a dream like quality...rich with haunting images." ¿Lyn Lifshin

¿John Domini is one of those rare writers who doesn¿t bend his characters towards his own pre-determined ends, but follows where they lead. In lesser hands, Domini¿s people would have been drowned in bathos. But Domini honors them with a generous but unsentimental imagination, giving us lives worth knowing about, layered portrayals of the obdurate world and our own terrifying self-betrayals. His profound, unflinching attention reminds us how closely together fiction, at its best, can unite justice with mercy.¿¿Jay Cantor¿John Domini¿s densely textured stories teem with compelling inner and outer life. He is a master at capturing the complex workings of minds under stress and the hard-edged negotiations we make with fate when our backs are against a wall. He knows how women and men can behave with one another. The stories move swiftly and sinuously, emerging from the everyday to coil around a reader¿s heart.¿¿Floyd Skloot¿Fiery, crackling prose. Domini¿s writing wields a double-bladed humor that is both fearsomely entertaining and pleasurably dark. Highway Trade is a sharp and compassionate work; unforgettable.¿¿Diana Abu-Jaber

"Flannery O'Connor has written that 'Fiction operates through the senses. . . The first and most obvious characteristic of fiction is that it deals with reality through what can be seen, heard, smelt, tasted, and touched.' Doug Lawson's story collection is a banquet for the senses, though the winds of change are often chilly enough to make us shiver, and what is served up is there not only to sustain us, but to surprise us. His characters are contemporary, but their struggles are timeless. A Patrimony of Fishes contains some beautiful descriptions of the physical world, paired with some disconcerting observations about the ways of the heart. It's a wonderful collection."¿Ann Beattie

Nearly everyone in America, no matter what political persuasion, would agree that as a nation we need to have adequate public schools. In fact, nearly everyone would also agree that our schools should be more than merely adequate. They should be superior. In Two Americas, Two Educations, Cummins will describe what superb, or even simply adequate, schools would look like, and second, how those schools might be funded. Cummins is not intending to lay down a final blueprint but to present the case for superb schools and explain how they can become a reality.

Tokyo Bay Traffic, set in a geographically extended Tokyo, follows three characters through the illusory world of TokyoÆs hostess clubs and a newly built theme park, Fresh Style New York (F.S.N.Y). Kang, a hard-working accountant, doesnÆt at first stand out from the group with which he spends his waking life. In The Tuna Club, for example, he cheers the hostesses in unison with his fellow colleagues. Like everyone else, he returns home dead drunk. But directed by an undefined desire to escape, Kang convinces a colleague to accompany him to an avant-garde strip club in F.S.N.Y, a theme park on a man-made island off the coast of Tokyo and site of the dance theater, The Club of the Perfect Fragment. The performances he sees at the club obsess Kang and he returns alone a few nights later. Leaving the theater, mesmerized, he loses himself in the more desolate streets of F.S.N.Y.Beneath the overhead ramps to the Brooklyn Bridge Barge, Kang crosses paths with Livia, a dancer and one of F.S.N.Y.Æs few permanent residents. Livia, daughter of an American GI and a Japanese army base hostess, has only recently left her Okinawan hometown in search of a better life in Tokyo. She quickly finds work in F.S.N.Y., choreographing dances and performing at the Club of the Perfect Fragment. Although fully engaged in her work at the club, she is subject to bouts of temporary amnesia. In the early morning hours both Kang and Livia are audience to an unorthodox performance on a deserted city corner: an old bum repeatedly inflates nude \u201cplay-dolls\u201d until they burst. Kang is driven to pick up the pieces…Then there is Ki-ku-ko, the one-eyed hostess, who approaches every situation like an improvisation. Even when in the hospital recuperating from the accident in which a small pebble struck her, blinding her in one eye, Ki-ku-ko exhibits eccentric behavior. Unable to recognize their daughter or control her wildness, her parents force her to leave their house and set up on her own. Soon after, she begins working as a hostess. Like a performance artist, Ki-ku-ko develops multiple personas. Either sheÆs working in disguise as Jaki-O at the hostess club Fu-fuÆs (Feline Unlimited) or sheÆs experimenting with customers in the self-constructed erotic landscape in her one-bedroom apartment.The story culminates in two meetings: the first in the form of a dance of power between Ki-ku-ko and Livia. The second meeting is between Kang and the ineffable erotic energy he had heretofore been at such pains to neutralize.At the heart of the novel is Tokyo Bay itself — its polluted waters harboring an elusive flotilla: boats rocking with a group of illicit pleasure seekers.

The 2009-2019 Council of Literary Magazines and Presses Directory

¿In Sholeh Wolpe¿s Rooftops of Tehran , an unforgettable cast of characters emerges, from the morality policeman with the poison razor blade to the crow-girls flapping their black garments, from the woman with the bee-swarm tattoo emerging from her crotch to the author as a young girl on a Tehran rooftop with a God¿s eye view `hovering above a city / where beatings, cheatings, prayers, songs, / and kindness are all one color¿s shades.¿ Here is a delicious book of poems, redolent of saffron and stained with pomegranate in its vision of Iran and of the immigrant life in California. Wolpe¿s poems are at once humorous, sad, and sexy, which is to say that they are capriciously human, human even in that they dream of wings and are always threatening to take flight.¿¿Tony Barnstone, Award winning poet and translator, author of The Golem of Los Angeles

The Golem of Los Angeles is the 2006 Benjamin Saltman Poetry Award winning poetry collection by Tony Barnstone."

Thirty-Three Hats for Julia, the latest book by poet-physician Dr. Sarah Bein is slated for release by Red Hen Press in January of 2008. This book chronicles Dr. Bein's experience in medical school at Stanford University and into residency at UCLA, traversing the space between illness and health. The poems are written both from the perspective of the patient as well as from the perspective of physician, in the hopes of collapsing those boundaries to foster empathy and communication. Her interest in medicine since the beginning of her career has been with those patients who endure chronic or life-limiting illness, which brought forth her story about Julia, detailed in a prose piece which comprises the third section of this book and is the book's namesake. Julia is a girl whose final days she shares, recounting the most sacred moments of her life, as well as conjuring the now-ghosts of a future she will not see. In her thoughts we see her attempt at reason; she looks in metaphor, verse, and abstraction for a cause, an explanation for this last role she plays. She relishes in narrative, in the narrative of her own life and the lives she would have lived, her thirty-three hats. This is where Dr. Bein's narrative takes on that transformative capacity in its power to invent, through imagination, and with hope, to heal.

Jack FoleyÆs The Dancer and the Dance: A Book of Distinctions deliberately challenges many conventional ways of thinking about poetry. Though extremely scholarly and aware of the \u201ctradition,\u201d Foley offers readings rooted in a consciousness which is simultaneously non academic and open to the new. \u201cThe self of this book,\u201d he writes, \u201cis not a unity but a multiplicity. Many people would agree with this idea of selfhood—the self as a \u2018multiplicity of voicesÆ—but clarification is still required as to how the concept of the self as multiplicity affects literary criticism, how it affects our actual reading of poems. It may be that the self we postulate as we read a poem contradicts the self we experience in the world; it is also possible that familiar poems may be experienced anew by being read in the light of multiplicity.\u201d FoleyÆs explorations lead him into radically new readings of \u201ccanonic\u201d work by poets such as Keats, Yeats and Mallarm\u00e9, into the world of opera, free jazz, New Formalism, and the writing of song lyrics, into \u201cethnic\u201d literature, theater, and finally into problems of \u201cspoken word\u201d and \u201cslam poetry.\u201d Throughout, his point of view, initially controversial, becomes finally compelling. \u201cIt is possible,\u201d he says quietly about the whole of Western culture, \u201cthat Plato was wrong, and that we must make an effort to think in a different way if we are to encounter reality at all.\u201d

Including fourteen selections from the poetry journal, RATTLE Conversations offers rare insight into the lives and thoughts of some of the most notable American poets of our time. Informative and intimate, the conversations look beyond the academic minutia and into the heart of what we love - the passion that compels poetry, and the process that completes it. These poets explore not what they wrote, but why they had to write it, and how it came to be. As such, RATTLE Conversations serves as an indispensable guide and companion to anyone who appreciates the art and experience of writing.CONVERSATIONS WITHDaniel Berrigan, Hayden Carruth, Lucille Clifton, Sam Hamill, Jane Hirshfield, Yusef Komunyakaa, Jack Kornfield, Li-Young Lee, Philip Levine, Sharon Olds, Gregory Orr, Luis J. Rodriguez, Alan Shapiro, Diane Wakoski

On a rainy afternoon in 1985, Corey Moore, a single, thirty-eight-year-old New York psychologist runs into his childhood girlfriend on the corner of Fifth Avenue and Eleventh Street, just up from Washington Square. Gina, an actress, is twice divorced and focused on her career. Corey attends her opening that evening, and three months later, they marry. Things donÆt go smoothly, though, as they hadnÆt twenty years earlier. Together, they buy an old house in Connecticut, thinking they might shore up their own sagging connection in the process of renovation. By means of flashback, the reader observes Corey and Gina as adolescents. We meet CoreyÆs music teacher, with whom Corey is involved, sexually. We meet the boys Gina uses to act out against the Catholic strangle hold of her parents. This backstory reaches a climax that blows all these relationships apart and marks Corey and Gina for life.Bored with the house restoration, Gina brings an actor friend to Connecticut one weekend. Jack and Corey hit it off from the start, and Corey is startled and dismayed at the intensity of his feelings for Jack. The novel follows their relationship over the succeeding three years, as a secret is revealed that changes everything for the two men.That Was Then is a story of adolescent confusion and trauma and its effect on adult lives. It is also a story of withholding and the damage that can come of it. Ultimately, it is a story of love appearing in unexpected and varied forms.

From its headwaters in Calabasas to the tidal mouth in San Pedro, the Los Angeles River is many things-an open air art gallery, a wildlife corridor, a history lesson, a storm drain, and a metaphor for missed chances balanced against the hope of future possibilities. Once integrated into one of the largest estuary and floodplain systems in California, the L.A. River now waits for rediscovery and renewal. Many people do not know it is there at all, and few can accurately recall its history. Río de Dios changes that, blending science, history, art, and poetry to explore the complex and contradictory worlds of the Los Angeles River. A fresh, vivid synthesis of the culture and biology of the river, this book investigates its pockets of still-wild habitat, honors its losses, and celebrates its evolving future.

Leaving Resurrection is one woman's love poem to the Alaskan places and people that have taken possession of her soul. Eva Saulitis writes with great honesty about her vulnerability and fears, about her excitement and discoveries, and about her passionate love for the wild. She inspires us with her boldness, she invites us to eagerly accept challenges, she opens us to the willing embrace of adventure, and she takes us into the hidden glories of Alaska as few other writers have done.These gentle, richly perceptive, beautifully rendered stories take readers straight to the heart of Alaska. And like all fine writing, it leaves you aching for more. Eva Saulitis writes deeply from the spirit of Margaret Murie, and she shows us that the soul of wildness is still very much alive in the north country.The wild country of Alaska has always attracted women of extraordinary strength and character, women with a keen eye for the land's beauty and a heart strong enough for its challenges, women equal to the measure of the Alaskan land itself. Eva Saulitis and Leaving Resurrection are wonderful reminders that the tradition lives on.

Sparrows. Migration. Borders. Bodies. Blurring languages and metamorphosizing landscapes. In Histories of Bodies, Mariko Nagai traces the memory of loss, grief, death and family, seeking to define love in its multifaceted manifestations, each definition shifting, taking flight, then landing, only to be exiled out of the origin. From New York to Amsterdam to Boston to Tokyo, each landscape, whether temporal or imaginary, is rendered out of memory, then wrought into unsettling language of sorrow. In these poems, the world is consistently shifting, and what remains, at the end, is temporary migration of a sparrow, suddenly landing, then disappearing into the urban landscape.

The Islands Project: Poems For Sappho is a book-length collection of poems intended as a conversation with and investigation of the life of Sappho as can be imagined from her work and historical circumstances. The poems attempt a meeting between a contemporary woman poet and one from antiquity, both of them adrift in time. What can a lesbian poet know of her supposed progenitor? If Sappho is only fragments, is not a lesbian tradition in poetry the same, or does it only feel that way? The Islands Project investigates these questions and deals, at the same time, with the death of the poet¿s mother.

Avocations collects the best of Sam Hamill's prose on poetry over the last 18 years, presenting insightful readings of Kenneth Rexroth, Denise Levertov, Odysseas Elytis, Matsuo Basho, Kobayashi Issa, John Logan and many others together with critical commentary on poetry in translation and the practice of poetry in general.