Bøger udgivet af Unsolicited Press

Pomegranate Odyssey is a celebration of women in fairy tales and mythology through a series of narrative and lyrical poems. From Rapunzel to Persephone and girlhood to womanhood, Calkin explores the evolution of the archetypal female protagonist in classic literature and modern culture.

"and for too long after" is a hybrid memoir combining poetry with creative nonfiction. It tells the story of a narrator in her late twenties making peace with her past. The narrative begins with two sisters sitting across from each other at a restaurant near Indianapolis, the eldest having just found her first gray hair. This simple sign of aging comes to life in the hands of a narrator who never expected to survive her adolescence. Through a series of poems, she recounts her lifelong battle with mental illness, culminating in a long poem detailing a recent hospitalization for suicidal ideation. The setting changes in the middle section. The narrator climbs Croagh Patrick in Ireland, and her struggles as a novice climber are interwoven with more flashback-style poems. She shows how her father's addiction, her mother's explosive temper, and her own sexual trauma left her unable to trust others. Also, in this section, the narrator describes how seeking a BDSM partner and building a power exchange relationship helped her recover.We return to Indiana in the final section. As the meal ends, the narrator begins to bring all the threads of her story together again. Just as her sister chooses to save the gray hair rather than throw it away, the narrator chooses to accept her past. But she also chooses not to let it take control. She has faced her self-destructive side, and it will never completely be gone, but it's not going to stop her from moving forward.

Utah's first Poet Laureate David Lee wrote, "If you want to read a book filled with love, life, and razor wit based on incredible observation and perception, written in some of the sharpest, best-crafted lines you'll find out there anywhere on the vast horizon of poetry, brimming with the freshest imagery and figurative language you've seen in eons, this just might be your lucky day."Little Acres is that book -- a chapbook really -- of 40 trim pages, like a small lyrical garden rooted in a sensibility that surrounds everything rural: landscape, trees, birds, animals, flowers, weather, all filtered through an intuitive sensibility, all contributing to the book's passion for both language and insight. Loosely arranged around a season on a tiny acreage, these poems shape a kind of almanac for living in the natural world. Surprises, pleasures, disappointments, the rich emotions the inhabit the heart. They are carefully crafted poems inhabited by muses, palpable as the sun or the moon, offering readers the experience of understanding a familiar poetic landscape.

Rust Belt, USA, where steel is dead, hope is scarce, and hardship is a way of life. Miles Junction is but one of many Northeastern Ohio towns long forgotten and left behind, its residents living on the cusp of financial, emotional, even spiritual destitution. An old trapper becomes the scapegoat for a boy's brutal murder. An out-of-work diesel mechanic resorts to crime in order to provide for his wife and son. A teenage girl braves a brutal winter storm to protect a tragic secret. A recovering drug addict wrestles with temptation and bears the weight of an uncertain future. These and the other working-class characters that populate this collection know struggle intimately and understand that desperate times often call for desperate measures. Their lives are linked by a ruined yet starkly beautiful post-industrial landscape-a desolate vestige of our fractured American dream. Taking place during the last few decades of the twentieth century and those following the new millennium, In Just the Right Light is a glimpse at one region's bleak inheritance and the precarious lives of those who remain to rummage through the fallout of its past.

"A Beginner's Guide to Heaven" is not so much concerned with moving earth towards heaven, as it is with yanking heaven to earth. Even amidst our haste, failures, distractions, and worries, it's all within reach. The poems invite us to see the mystery in the every day, and revel in the wonders of such things as moths, dandelions, dogs, and beer. These poems serve as a gateway to the inner journey. They remind us we are one holy family cut from the same cloth, spiritual explorers of this beautiful, broken world. This collection urges us to pay attention and get to work, "while we still have time to build."

The poems in Volcano work together to tell a story. For his whole life, F's unnamed lover has had a volcano growing inside him, fueled by experiences such as interactions with an abusive father and repressed queerness. As his relationship with F sours, the volcano continues to grow and eventually manifests as a physical reality. Fearing the consequences of the now-real volcano, he sacrifices F to it, believing he has solved both problems at once. However, F returns in ghost form and takes control of the volcano. Assisted by an army of shape-shifting spirits, she pursues the man around their island home until, eventually, he must face her. Though she is not given a voice in the text, Volcano is F's story, conveyed and mediated through the eyes of the male character (and a chorus of divorced birds who comment upon the action). Set simultaneously in ancient Greece, contemporary Hawai'i, and the British isles at all points in time, Volcano is a reply to dominant narratives of relationships and gender in the "traditional" literary canon.

HECKLER by Jason Graff is a story about forgiveness, about intersecting struggles, about ghosts. Three men seek forgiveness and find themselves in a hotel haunted by ghosts. From the book: Sunlight flashed in The Shelby Hotel's windows as a wave of clouds rolled across the sky. At only four stories, it still managed to tower over every other building for miles from atop its perch on Mt. Kneebow. Since drying out, Angus Sperint had come to accept that much of reality, like the fact that his inheritance wouldn't last forever, was indeed sobering, so it would be dusty hotels like The Shelby, in towns like Pittson from there on out. Not that he was really much for luxury, except when it helped him to recover from other kinds of excess. Across the street, Psycho was playing in an old, rather disused looking movie house. The letters on the marquee were of various shades of sun-bleached red -- the 'y' bright, candy-colored, the 's' a dull pink. Angus pushed through the revolving door into The Shelby's lobby, trying not to think of Norman Bates.A hint of lemon-scented cleaner tucked into the murky air reminded him of the common room back in rehab. He wiped his forehead and sniffed his hand, still unused to smelling of something other than booze. Behind the desk, a young man with the posture of a boy who'd just started to grow into his adult clothes stood before a catacomb of cubbyholes.

SUICIDAL GODS is a short story collection. The short stories range from hilarious to dramatic with a variety of characters and themes wrapped into the collection.From the collection:CORALINE WAS DESTINED to be the last. Her mama, Emma Walker, took to bed immediately after the difficult birth, where she grew weaker and frailer as the days passed. She was laid to rest in the Walker family cemetery shortly after her daughter's first birthday. Coraline remembered nothing about her.Everything she knew about Mama had come from Granny Mag. After their mother died, it was Granny Mag who took care of Coraline and her two older brothers, William and Nathan, moving into their cabin on the warm side of Spenser Mountain, several miles south of where the Dogleg Bend Trading Post sat along the river. Papa walked the line most every morning, even Sunday, checking his traps from the day before. He didn't have many, so he was choosy about his spots, and his favorites were spread out over a half day's walk. Every day, Papa traipsed into the misty hills with his hunting rifle, Coraline watching from the loft window as the West Virginia morning swallowed him up. He always gave her a kiss and whispered, "My little dog-flower," before he surrendered himself to the mist. Granny Mag, having been named after the magnolia blossom herself, said it was because she was as pretty as the pink flowers on the dogwood.

A 2020 Eric Hoffer Award Honorable Mention in General Fiction, Maggie's Ruse is the story of identical twin sisters Maggie and Marta Dugan. According to an Eric Hoffer Awards judge, Anne Leigh Parrish delivers "astute insight, big characters, a snappy pace...with subtle subtexts and zinger truths."Maggie and Marta Dugan, twenty-seven-year-old identical twins, live the good life in New York City on their stepfather's money. Each has a glamorous calling. Maggie paints; Marta appears onstage. Success, though, eludes them. Marta's roles are few and far between. Maggie's endorsements are infrequent at best. When gallery after gallery passes on her work, she begins to doubt her talent. Home alone one afternoon, fueled by frustration, she is seized by a sudden, wild impulse to masquerade as Marta when a friend of hers drops by. The ruse is quickly discovered when Marta returns from another shopping spree, a rift between the sisters ensues, and they go their separate ways. But living apart proves harder than either thought at first. Each carries the other firmly within her, making any true independence nearly impossible. As the weeks pass, the weight of absence sometimes becomes difficult to bear. Both find a surprising degree of success in their respective efforts, due perhaps to their newfound freedom, yet the bond between them remains firm. Can they come back together, and under what circumstances would a reunion be viable? Has the time come for an open discussion of their issues with each other? Unable to fully answer these questions, each knows only that she needs the other to feel whole.

Suzanne S. Rancourt's second book of poetry uses both fictional and auto-biographical events to create a chorus of survivors. These poems for the unspeakable, the marginalized, the "in-betweeners," create a chorus of survivors in the theatre of life's sorrow, love, tragedy, beauty, and profound human resiliency. Rancourt's life attests to being a survivor, and states, "Prejudice is non-discriminatory." murmurs at the gate, is a poetic narrative that explores the harsh measures of life's wars. "If we are at war with everything, who are the Warriors? Who are the survivors? And, for how long does the war cry reverberate?" Marine and Army veteran, and multi-modal artist, Ms. Rancourt brings to the reader her rich and diverse metaphors inspired by rural mountain living and Native American culture. Ms. Rancourt honors all her ancestors in this astounding book where every murmur could be your own.

Exposed. Vulnerable. Words that describe the poetry in Kris Godspeed Amos's collection, but certainly not the only one: Love. Survival.Perseverance. These too stand out.Are you Ready to Love yourself a Black Man? allows us, readers of literature/purveyors of society a direct view of our relationships with African-American men. The collection, short in pages, is full of depth and deep introspection on concepts such as mental health issues, relationship and family conflict, and intracultural strife, to systematic oppression, racism, prejudice, and sexism. Amos explores his observations, contributions, and position on these topics.Built with lyric in mind, the underbelly of each poem is rhythm. This beat tells the story of the Black Man, and his relationship with the world. Completely relevant and in desperate need of reflection by a society that still hasn't fully experienced the love of a man of color, Are you Ready to Love yourself a Black Man? is meant to be read by all regardless of color, race, religion, sex, or gender.It is a book designed to start conversations and discussions on the topic that matters most: humanity is universal.

Funny, beautiful, and always from a strange angle, "The Weird Ones" reflects modern America in a bent and broken mirror. Most of these stories creep out of the bayou of the author's home town, New Orleans, ready to swap a few tales. With mythical creatures, magical scenes, and heaping helpings of wry humor, this book gives the reader a deep dive into the warped brain of its creator.

Poet L. Ward Abel hears the light beating of wings in an otherwise silent landscape. These wings offer insight into our cacophonous world, "where dreams / ride breezes full of summer thunder / the sound of currents, birds, / a memory of inhaling rain." Here are the remnants of those who have been hard-wired, but who now stand at the treeline and consider a walk out into the open where "the green air remembers." Here is a drone's view of the smallest details "from towers around / wide clearing bounces / sounds bespeaking gardens / way off the thing the grid," reaching the conclusion that "it looks like this / whether I'm here or not." The poems begin, "The Angels Rage Tonight / in flooded amber chutes," and they end when "their frequency goes quiet. Then showers." Trying to reconcile "the wing and the anti-wing," Abel does what we all do, "Skim low the waters / just above a wake." Using a combination of dream-like imagery and colloquial diction, the poet's unique southern voice comes through the clutter of strange times to slow down the ongoing, to catalog the search, and to try to sing "something like / a sparrow that's fallen."

In 1984, three Royal Hong Kong Police Force inspectors investigate a murder on the set of a major action film. When one inspector goes missing, the commissioner forbids them to pursue the case any further, but eventually they uncover a connection between the triads, the film industry, and elements of the colonial government. In 2014, a disaffected Londoner returns to Hong Kong to discover the truth about his long-missing father, who was one of the inspectors on the Lucky Stone case. Following the instructions of a cryptic monk with some connection to both the triads and the police force, he infiltrates a suspiciously well-connected investment fund in exchange for information about his father's fate. Set in Hong Kong in 1984 and 2014, When a White Horse Is Not a Horse is cross-cultural mystery-a blend of detective fiction, history, and homage to Hong Kong Cinema. The novel jumps back and forth between two parallel timelines, allowing the reader to piece together the mystery from twin vantage points.

The magical-realist fables and bizarre folk-tales that are the poems in Festival of Dangerous Ideas conjure a nightmare world of what could be in the not too distant future especially considering where we are in our state of politics. It's a surrealist statement on politics, religion, family, love and art. This is poetry of the imagination lit by old knowledge. Imagine entering a festival where booth after booth display scary and strangely familiar scenes of depravity, or absurd theater.

Before the first third of the twentieth century, almost everybody read poetry. Books of poetry were found in most homes in America. It was published in daily newspapers, taught in school, memorized and recited with enjoyment. In short, poetry once was both accessible and meaningful.Then, modern poetry became "difficult." It began to scare readers or turn them off with obtuseness, dense symbols or it simple became difficult to understand. It became marginalized in American literature-a place where it remains.It should not be this way. Many poets today believe that poetry should resonate again for everyday readers. It should share with readers the feeling that the poet empathizes with everyday people and situations. If possible, it should be hopeful, even humorous when appropriate. In short, it should be relevant.The poems contained in A Grammar for Snow are about everyday people in small towns, cities and farms in those fly-over-states and off-the-map places who work and love and quietly live out their lives. It is about place-mostly in the U.S. Midwest--both real and imagined. Many of the poems contain elements of humor that help people deal with the sometimes-hard issues of day-to-day life.The poems contain vivid imagery and concreteness designed to help the reader believe that these places and people really exist. More than that, the poems are designed to make the reader care about these folks and their lives, to pull for them and hope against hope that things work out.

The Horror of the Ordinary deals with life through the eyes of diverse characters and stories. As you dive into the short story collection, you'll meet a property owner dealing with an infestation of Japanese beetles in his backyard, a too-tall Afghan named Hamid, a trophy huntiing orthodonist not prepared to deal with his actions, and many others.As you dive deeper into the collection, things get weirder, more out of the ordinary. From the unexpected tragedy of a Japanese pitcher's performance in American baseball to disturbing thoughts about an alligator watchband, every story provokes. Every story incites.

The morning after helitack pilot Ed Kline's friendship with a female wildland firefighter turns hot, he receives a text from a phone number he's never seen:Bad thg 1 wkI leve I dieCops evry1 diesHelp L 47033012Could the L mean his adult son Lewis? You're a hero, Lewis wrote to him before disappearing a year ago, but the country you fought for doesn't exist. Then a "bad thg" happens. A group calling itself the PUMAs-Patriots United Militia of America-assassinates two Washington State senators the same day it perpetrates a deadly armored truck robbery. Unnerved, Ed jeopardizes his new relationship, his career, and his sanity while trying to rescue a son who might be one of the killers, trying to escape them, or both.