Shearsman Books | North American Authors A to D

North American Poetry Titles: Authors A to D

Search: A - D E - L | M - P | R - Z

Rosa Alcalá  Undocumentaries

Published 2010. Paperback, 88pp, 8.5 x 5.5ins, £10.95 / $18
ISBN 9781848610729 [Download a sample from this book here.]

'Rosa Alcalá, originally from Paterson, N.J. is a true daughter of W.C. Williams with a distinct, gutsy, and penetrating identity twining a public poeisis with her own luminous particulars. I know of no one else writing such poems that cut into and reenact the "plebeian" with such personal force, eloquence, and skill. "The syntax of worry rewrites cellular codes" she writes and then proceeds to investigate and expose the Industrial Age and its "genetic drifts". A worker is "fighting like a girl for gloves", a kind of child's cognitive dissonance documents improperly stored chemicals, "the deep sleep of field hands" stirs memory as does the more current and common "paycheck clean of union dues." Undocumentaries is Archive made Poetry. "Factory is both fact and act and/mere letters away from face/and story…" Alcalá's imagination and language disarmingly penetrate and extend these powerful devices and activating signals. The face we see is hers and our culture's own. I celebrate this book.' —Anne Waldman. 
BUY THIS TITLE
Rosa Alcalá Undocumentaries

Rosa Alcalá  The Lust of Unsentimental Waters

Published 2012. Paperback, 90pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £10.95 / $18
ISBN 9781848612334 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]

"Rosa Alcalá's poems dwell in the liminal space between the personal and the political — poems built on the idea that "the world exists," and that work to define the metaphysical and ephemeral architectures of origin, migration, nationalism, and loss. Rosa Alcalá is uncompromising, wry, and brutal: all of the qualities that significant poetic works of cultural criticism require." —Carmen Giménez Smith
BUY THIS TITLE
Rosa Alcalá The Lust of Unsentimental Waters

Merle Lyn Bachman  Diorama with Fleeing Figures

Published 2009. Paperback, 88pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £10.95 / $18
ISBN 9781848610125 [Download a sample from this book here.]

The poems in Diorama with Fleeing Figures delicately point to devastating historical events. Instead of mounting judgments, the poems accrue power gently, even stealthily. Evoking a language at once lost, familiar, original, and dying, they balance fragments of culture, with a locus of Jewish Eastern Europe, against intimate imagery of the body — "the most confused part of the forest."
BUY THIS TITLE
Merle Lyn Bachman: Diorama with Fleeing Figures

Merle Lyn Bachman  Blood Party

Published 2015. Paperback, 104pp, 9 x 6ins, £10.95 / $18 
ISBN 9781848614147 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]

“Memory has its own architecture, its own geography. Yet, as Merle Bachman demonstrates in Blood Party, these are mutable—stretching and contracting within the space of experience: strafing events to get at their illogic and yet/memory, remaking. Bachman’s beautifully crafted, acutely sensitive poems adroitly combine history, autobiography, and lyric meditation. If space is ‘the externalization of what you really are,’ then Bachman risks sculpting space in a boldly disclosive and passionate way. This is a poetry that sends messages into the hidden sites of memory and returns with color, form, and commitment.” — Elizabeth Robinson
BUY THIS TITLE
Merle Lyn Bachman  Blood Party

Rachel Tzvia Back  On Ruins & Return

Published 2007. Paperback, 104pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £10.95 / $18.

ISBN 9781905700370 [Download a sample from this book here .]




On Ruins & Return: Poems 1999-2005 is Rachel Tzvia Back's second full-length collection and tracks the cycle of violence marking the lives of Palestinians and Israelis in the last intifadah (uprising).


BUY THIS TITLE
Rachel Tzvia Back: On Ruins & Return

Rachel Tzvia Back  What Use Is Poetry, The Poet Is Asking

Published 2019. Paperback, 96pp, 9 x 6ins, £10.95 / $18
ISBN 9781848616400 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]

"Rachel Tzvia Back transmutes the hard and sharp facts of the world into green and gold in these poems that bristle with desperate hope. She’s always biblical to me, not just because the Galilean landscape she lives in is so like that of those old psalms, but also because she too was a mother who sent her son to war, though she sees in that son another’s son—a boy killed on a beach in far Gaza, while playing. The poet here becomes mother to both, she rises up in need to save both, to spin these new and much needed psalms. Shone upon by a tradition of humanism and compassion, Back dares to ask the famous questions first articulated by Fanny Howe: 'Where did the days go? Where to now?' And the last one, the one that always haunts her, throughout all the poems in this painful and wise book: 'Are my children safe?' 'We will need a new language,' Back warns. Good then that she’s giving it to us". — Kazim Ali
BUY THIS TITLE
Rachel Tzvia Back  - What Use Is Poetry, The Poet Is Asking

Andre Bagoo  Trick Vessels

Published 2012. Paperback, 80pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £10.95 / $18
ISBN 9781848612037 [Download a sample PDF from this book here .]



"Aptly titled are these poems: they are like vials without bottoms… held up, looked through, a universe can be discerned. They pour and continue to pour a mixture of guile and subterfuge, language that contradicts, and bargains for its own sanity, contents in volume denying the size of these trick vessels." — Mervyn Taylor



BUY THIS TITLE
Andre Bagoo Trick Vessels

Andre Bagoo  Burn

Longlisted for the Bocas Literature Prize, 2016. 
Published 2015. Paperback, 70pp, 8.5 x 5.5ins, £10.95 / $18
ISBN 9781848614154 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
 
“Shapely intimations of disaster, poems of incendiary grace.” 
—Mervyn Morris, Poet Laureate of Jamaica

Burn is a kaleidoscopic, surreal and stunning collection. Bagoo forges carnivalesque, enigmatic, experimental, vivid, wild and wonder-inspiring poems full of verve and utterly fresh language that are, by turns, eerie, elegiac, fleshy, pensive, mournful, rhapsodic and absolutely scorching…
      Poems traverse geographical locations, from his island home of Trinidad, to other Caribbean islands and as far distant as Iceland. There, personal and societal angst, passions and pleasures are held up to a ‘sea of mirrors,’ into which we gaze. Bagoo explores daily life, love, art, history, literature, myth, popular culture, ritual and the molten ground of memory, bringing together and animating douens, lionfish, Auden, Mozart, Caravaggio and Tchaikovsky, among other figures. Bring the fire, burn.”  —Loretta Collins-Klobah
BUY THIS TITLE
Andre Bagoo  Burn

Dennis Barone  Parallel Lines

Published 2011. Paperback, 84pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £10.95 / $18
ISBN 9781848611627 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]

I have organized Parallel Lines somewhat chronologically. There are stylistic (not thematic) groupings which break the chronology and there are repetitions, such as a number of "breath" poems, which go counter to the breaks and provide connections. The longest poem, 'Scarf', wanders and a scarf, as you know, can be wrapped around anything, any subject. Or a scarf can be comforting, keep you warm, or make you fashionable. Or it might be used by the magician for conjuring acts. For me in writing 'Che Tempo', one of the shortest poems in Parallel Lines, I heard in my head Marcello Mastroianni and a sort of post-war angst in the midst of la dolce vita. (Dennis Barone) 
BUY THIS TITLE
Dennis Barone Parallel Lines

Ellen Baxt  Analfabeto / An Alphabet

Published 2007. Paperback, 80pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £10.95 / $18

ISBN 9781905700363 [Download a sample from this book here .]



Analfabeto / An Alphabet was written in Recife, Brazil, and Brooklyn, New York. Part dictionary, part travel diary, part historical record, it crosses genre boundaries narrating a story of fragmented shifts in identity — cultural, gendered and sexual. It addresses the complications of translation, not only linguistic translation, but also the multiple ways we translate ourselves when we are away from whatever we might call "home."



BUY THIS TITLE
Ellen Baxt: Analfabeto / An Alphabet

Guy Birchard  Aggregate: retrospective

Published 2018. Paperback, 76pp, 9 x 6ins, £10.95 / $18
ISBN 9781848615755 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]

Further than the Blood contains only the briefest excerpts from Cold Mine, Shownman, Travelling Mercies". Perhaps Birchard will be persuaded to put those series back together… His vivid, offbeat, casually learned and masterly language is refreshingly modest, individual—unfashionable. I’m not sure there’s a poet with a better ear, and I’m also unsure if another has a feeling for how intelligence moves within and between lines that is any way superior.” —David Miller.

He has been thus persuaded, as has Shearsman.
BUY THIS TITLE
Guy Birchard Aggregate retrospective

Debby Jo Blank  The Explosion of Binary Stars

Published 2012. Paperback, 86pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £10.95 / $18

ISBN 9781848611979 [Download a sample PDF from this book here .]



The Explosion of Binary Stars explores themes of loss in the author's own life and in the lives of her patients. The themes are universal: divorce, breast cancer, war, addiction, PTSD, ageing, depression and, most importantly in this book, the death of a sibling. The book is not maudlin, rather the intimate poems invite the reader to enjoy an honesty that ultimately celebrates life, while funny poems about love and travel are scattered throughout as a balm.



BUY THIS TITLE
Debby Jo Blank The Explosion of Binary Stars

Joseph Bradshaw  In the Common Dream of George Oppen

Published 2011. Paperback, 90pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £10.95 / $18
ISBN 9781848611498 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]

Comprised of both poetry and essays, Joseph Bradshaw's In the Common Dream of George Oppen makes its premise to imagine what bodies of work might exist in Oppen's fabled 25 year silence. By turns, the book forcefully projects a singularly fabricated biography onto the figure of Oppen, then self-reflexively retracts, divagating through a poet's desire for mentorship and community. Bringing in everything from ruminations on blurry memories of Idaho's landscape, to dialogues held across centuries & continents with the likes of figures such as the Elephant Man, In the Common Dream of George Oppen brushes up against the fragile boundary between the finished and the unfinished poem, or a finished or unfinished life.
BUY THIS TITLE
Joseph Bradshaw In the Common Dream of George Oppen

Melissa Buckheit  Noctilucent

Published 2012. Paperback, 80pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £10.95 / $18
ISBN 9781848612150 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]

The poems in Noctilucent begin where light exists or is created in darkness, a paradox. But this is not "dark / light" of metaphor, but of the real and of relationship, where algae illumines the deep sea, the light of dead stars reach us from deep space, and night is a doorway, an entrance into the interior — of self, other, cosmos. Melissa Buckheit bridges human experience — personal, historical, social — into this space where the very thing which is invisible or hidden, must be spoken. There is no Truth — but truths, identity, eros, suffering, loss gleam along the interstices of the lyric as meaning embedded in a strange and musical syntax. We are surprised, as if by a pale-white, fragrant Datura blooming unforgivingly in the dark of night, by her intimacy and electric force. In Noctilucent, the beloved is every human body, a decaying salmon, or the lilts of a lover's voice — our human memory in the impermanence of the world.
BUY THIS TITLE
Melissa Buckheit Noctilucent

Carmen Bugan The House of Straw

Published 2014. Paperback, 80pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £10.95 / $18
ISBN 9781848613249 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
 
The House of Straw is Carmen Bugan's second collection, and follows her well-received memoir of life under the Ceaucescu regime in Romania, Burying the Typewriter.
 
'Bugan's poetry is subtle, tends towards reticence, yet has an indelible staying power. Crossing the Carpathians is a moving exploration of the costs of survival and the survival of love.' —Jacquelyn Pope on Crossing the Carpathians in Harvard Review.
BUY THIS TITLE
Carmen Bugan The House of Straw

Carmen Bugan  Releasing the Porcelain Birds

Published 2016. Paperback, 82pp, 9 x 6ins, £10.95 / $18
ISBN 9781848614697 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]

In 1989 the five members of the Bugan family were allowed to leave Ceauşescu’s Romania with one suitcase each and death-threats in their wake. In 2010 the poet Carmen Bugan took possession of 1,500 pages of Securitate files on her father and in 2013 a further 3,000 pages of secret files on her mother, sister, brother and herself. Releasing the Porcelain Birds is about the transformation of that extraordinary history of Cold War Europe into poetry; it is about writing the self free and how poetry drawn in a new and tender narrative can do this. In this manner Releasing the Porcelain Birds is one continuous poem which faces down dispossession and reaches towards exuberance. 
BUY THIS TITLE
Carmen Bugan  Releasing the Porcelain Birds

Carmen Bugan  Lilies from America: New & Selected Poems

Poetry Book Society Special Commendation

Published 2019. Paperback, 116pp, 9 x 6ins, £12.95 / $20

ISBN 9781848616738 [Download a sample PDF from this book here .]



“[…] a word-smithy that is now owned by an incorruptible woman of letters. Her words are in open view and in plain hearing for the eyes and ears of people who value every single tongue but not the forked one.” —Christopher Ricks, Dead Ground 2018-1918


“I can certainly attest […] now, after being in Bugan’s world of ‘frail syllables’, that such an equilibrium between history and art is not only possible, but is often the only way to assuage pain, to release the caged birds, to free oneself from the shackles of grief.” —Simon Gatev, Dundee University Review of the Arts


“Carmen Bugan has the ability to transform deeply personal experiences into poetic language without losing the radiant particulars from which they sprang.” —Frank Beck, The Manhattan Review

BUY THIS TITLE
Carmen Bugan  - Lilies from America, New & Selected Poems

Carmen Bugan  Time Being

Published 2022. Paperback, 98pp, 9 x 6ins, £10.95 / $18
ISBN 9781848618039 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]


"In these poems, many addressing the 'long Sunday' of the pandemic years, Carmen Bugan reflects on the impact of the virus through the prism of personal family moments and local experience. She writes with disciplined precision, always attendant to the necessary nuance poetry demands. Her lyric voice and moral imagination in these poems gathers its energy from the urgency of daily concerns and anxieties, as well as the need to witness. Set against a time of crisis, she maintains a sense of wonder at the resilience of nature, her children, her own spirit. At the heart of this compelling collection is assurance and the poet’s good instruction to herself 'to feel the real, to protect myself against the imagined': advice each of us should heed." —Gerard Smyth, Poetry Editor, The Irish Times.  
BUY THIS TITLE
Carmen Bugan - Time Being

Vahni Capildeo  Simple Complex Shapes

Published 2015. Chapbook, 36pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £7.50 / $10.95

ISBN 9781848614512 [Download a sample PDF from this book here .]


Vahni Capildeo is a British Trinidadian writer of poetry and prose. Her recent work also appears in New Poetries VI (Carcanet, 2015).


BUY THIS TITLE
Vahni Capildeo  Simple Complex Shapes

Alfred Celestine  Weightless Word — Selected Poems

Edited by David Miller & Richard Leigh
Published 2017. Paperback, 118pp, 9 x 6ins, £12.95 / $20
ISBN 9781848615281 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]

Alfred Celestine was born in Los Angeles in 1949 and came to London in 1977, remaining there until his death in 2009. He published two books of poetry: Confessions of Nat Turner (The Many Press, 1978) and Passing Eliot in the Street (Nettle Press, 2003). Weightless Word is easily the most comprehensive selection of his poetry to date, revealing his range and power as a poet.

BUY THIS TITLE
Alfred Celestine  Weightless Word — Selected Poems

Maxine Chernoff  Without

Published 2012. Paperback, 86pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £10.95 / $18
ISBN 9781848611962 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]

The series of poems in Maxine Chernoff's Without are elegiac brushstrokes, each somewhat feathery and brushing in more than one direction, which creates tension and unexpected arrivals as well as departures: someone or something is missing. Parts of the world are wavering and parts have disappeared. What remains is treated in the subtle management of the lines without a hint of punctuation, which allows for "waves" of attention, as meaning rises and subsides. The emotional impact is powerful, as are the recognitions, such as "when darkness loses / its waiting mirror / and tuning forks / stand in for solace" and "readers asleep /mouthing their dreams / fears of whispering / become a creed / until life blurs / like any lens /that fails at attention." There's a sense of meaning passing with the solidity and darkness of time.
BUY THIS TITLE
Maxine Chernoff Without

Tom Clark  Something in the Air

Published 2010. Paperback, 128pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £12.95 / $20
ISBN 9781848611085 [Download a sample from this book here.]

A poet of original vision and gentle, careful word-shaping, Clark allows his images to merge and converge toward a resolution in which flow is not arrested but pauses to take thought; the images take over the controls and "do the talking," almost as if they had a mind of their own. What a relief when that happens, the poet confesses; he just follows along and tries to stay out of the way of whatever it is they seem to want to be saying.

And when the elements of image and sound and sense do then mysteriously come together in the moment, as Clark here proposes, "A point is fixed…"
BUY THIS TITLE
Tom Clark Something in the Air

Jennifer Clement  New and Selected Poems

Published 2008. Paperback, 110pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £12.95 / $18

ISBN 9781905700462 [Download a sample PDF from this book here .]


Jennifer Clement has published three collections of her work in bilingual editions in Mexico, where she was born and still lives. Although better-known outside Mexico as a novelist / prose-writer ( A True Story Based on Lies, Widow Basquiat, Prayers for the Stolen ), she has been writing poetry for many years and runs the annual San Miguel Poetry Week in San Miguel de Allende with her sister, Barbara Sibley. This volume draws on her Mexican collections and also includes more recent work.

BUY THIS TITLE
Jennifer Clement: New and Selected Poems

Jennifer Clement  Widow Basquiat

Published 2010. Paperback, 144pp, 8.5x5.5ins. Out of print.
ISBN 9781848610989.
Now reissued by Canongate in the UK and Random House in the USA.

Widow Basquiat explores the love story between Jean-Michel Basquiat and Suzanne, his muse and lover. It is also a profound portrait of New York City during the early 1980s' art scene and the striking cast of characters from that time: Andy Warhol, Madonna, Keith Haring, Debbie Harry, Julian Schnabel and William Burroughs, among others.

Jennifer Clement Widow Basquiat

Peter Cole  What is Doubled: Poems 1981-1998

Published 2005. 212pp, paperback. £14.95 / $23
ISBN 9780907562795 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]

This volume gathers between a single set of covers the two highly praised books of poems published by Peter Cole in the United States — Rift and Hymns & Qualms. The doubling of its title, however, runs deeper, and reflects Cole's long engagement with the cultures of Jerusalem and linkage at every level. Whether a poem takes up the patterns of bird flight, the Eros of speech, or the slaughter of Muslim worshippers by a Jewish settler in Hebron, the poet's concern throughout has been with forms of offering and strategies of sustenance.
BUY THIS TITLE
Peter Cole: What is Doubled: Poems 1981-1998

Brooklyn Copeland  Siphon, Harbor

Published 2012. Paperback, 80pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £10.95 / $18
ISBN 9781848612020 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]

The poems in Siphon, Harbor are what happen when the element of freshwater is allowed to wash freely over the poet's intense and unabashed observations of new romance and the capricious nature of the American Midwestern summer. Copeland, anchored by the mutuality of her themes, wastes no time in layering her own intimacies upon the intimacy she creates with her reader. From the very first page we have access to both her process and the inevitable resultant verse. This verse, which may appear self-contained and compact, is in fact pliant and reciprocal. Among love poems that are unclouded by disingenuousness or cliché, we find a love that is both succinct and expansive, like a clear, gray lake that is deeper than it is wide.
BUY THIS TITLE
Brooklyn Copeland Siphon, Harbor

Martin Corless-Smith  The Fool & The Bee

Published 2019. Paperback, 104pp, 9 x 6ins, £12.95 / $18

ISBN 9781848616448 [Download a sample PDF from this book here .]


"A masque: it's all a mask, celebrating the "organic" . . . British nature (transplants to US), in layers of spring and subsequent decay, within a long cultural history and a (to middle age) lifespan, personal pain, modernization, human war, gods and goddesses speaking anywhere. The poem has an enormous and muscular musicality (including prose musicality); the Poet constantly wondering how to Bee, how a Fool can Bee (symbol of all good qualities, sunniness, industry, royalty and divinity, various Saints) . . . A stunning, pleasurable book." — Alice Notley


"Martin Corless-Smith is a gifted and brilliant poet. His work is filled with poesy and all that can mean for the depth of the art. The mind is vertical as it moves through the master box of diction and form. Here is a generous voice with wild lyric runs and gorgeous music throughout—we are only made richer by this tender work. The Fool & the Bee is a fabulous book of the poetic imagination." —Peter Gizzi


BUY THIS TITLE
Martin Corless-Smith  The Fool and The Bee

Martin Corless-Smith  The Melancholy of Anatomy

Published 2021. Paperback, 94pp, 9 x 6ins, £10.95 / $18
ISBN 9781848617582 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]


In The Melancholy of Anatomy, his ninth collection of poetry, Martin Corless-Smith turns his attention towards ageing and mortality, and in particular to the death of his father. Shifting between formal verse and prose, from the metaphysical to the whimsical, from surreal to anecdotal, the book moves between poetic articulations as a mind might through memories, sifting to find anything to hold on to as everything flows and falls away. At times melancholic, at times nihilistic, at times luminous and dark, this collection asks questions about poetry, memory and what it is to have loved and lived.

BUY THIS TITLE
Martin Corless-Smith - The Melancholy of Anatomy

Cid Corman  Marginalia

Published 1996. 44pp, A5 Paperback, £5 / $9.95

ISBN 9780907562214. OUT OF PRINT.


A rare UK publication for this major US poet, long resident in Japan, this is a collection of the short lyrics for which Corman (1924–2004) was renowned.



Cid Corman: Marginalia

Catherine Daly  Vauxhall

Published 2008. Paperback, 100pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £10.95 / $18
ISBN 9781905700714 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]

Vauxhall is pitched where voice and experience coincide. The poems sing and dance through heavenly mansions and real bungalows, tourist traps and museums, pharmacies and vending machines. Vauxhall is a calendar. It's an "all occasion" greeting and gift.

The Hollywood pitch for Vauxhall might have been "Marianne Moore meets Joan Jett" or "Alexander Pope goes to night school."
BUY THIS TITLE
Catherine Daly: Vauxhall

Richard Deming  Let's Not Call It Consequence

Published 2008. Paperback, 80pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £10.95 / $18
ISBN 9781905700660 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]

In Let's Not Call It Consequence, Richard Deming's first full-length collection of poems, the poet brings together abstraction and precise images to explore the intensities and reversals of lyric thinking, that "infinitely stuttering thing." These poems searchingly engage the content and form of anger, violence, intimacy, and the poetics of proximity, exploring the intricacies of language use to find the ways that "to ache, so to speak, is human."
BUY THIS TITLE
Richard Deming: Let's Not Call It Consequence

Richard Deming  Day for Night

Published 2016. Paperback, 80pp, 8.5 x 5.5ins, £10.95 / $18
ISBN 9781848614857 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]

Day for Night, Richard Deming’s searching new collection of poems, takes its title from the cinematic term for shooting night scenes during the day. With a complex lyricism, these poems often explore the ways that art, in whatever form, creates the possibilities of an address by which we hope to encounter other people even as it reveals the impossibilities of ever truly knowing others or ourselves. Haunting the poems in echoes and allusions is Shakespeare’s Hamlet and that play’s profound meditation on skepticism and the role of art in knowing the self. The poems bring together high and pop culture, hope and loss, loneliness and belonging, melancholy and transcendence. Poems from this collection have appeared in such places as The Nation, The Iowa Review, The Colorado Review, American Letters & Commentary, and elsewhere.
BUY THIS TITLE
Richard Deming  Day for Night

Shira Dentz  black seeds on a white dish

Published 2010. Paperback, 90pp, 9x6ins, £10.95 / $18
ISBN 9781848611283 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]

The poems in black seeds on a white dish spring from the search for what is generated and discovered when loss and desire occupy the same space. But lamentation is not the primary focus—by destabilizing everything in its reach, loss disables rigidity. These poems shift widely in form and tone, and seeds invoke the creative germ that spurs the metamorphoses occupying them: "Nothing to do but let the form of things take over." Shapes themselves, including punctuation, become a language throughout.
BUY THIS TITLE
Shira Dentz black seeds on a white dish

Shira Dentz  Leaf Weather

2nd edition. Published 2012. Chapbook, 36pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £7.50 / $10.95

ISBN 9781848612273 [Download a sample PDF from this book here .]


"Veering — often within a single poem, often within a single line — from self-lacerating anger to desperation, from mordant satire of the confessional mode to stunned (and stunning) autobiography, from irreverence to a state of fearful silence, Leaf Weather is a 'chapbook' in no diminutive sense of the term. In 'peeling/away the sun,' Shira Dentz unlooses equal parts verbal anxiety, formal adventure, and emotional reckoning. It's one thing to write poems; it's quite another to live, as Dentz does, in the marrow of one's words." —Mark Levine

BUY THIS TITLE
Shira Dentz Leaf Weather

Laressa Dickey  Bottomland

Published 2014. Paperback, 84pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £10.95 / $18

ISBN 9781848613263 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
 
Shortlisted for the 2015 Michael Murphy Memorial Prize for Best First Collection.
 
Bottomland is a collection of six longer sequences of poems: American Rough-leg; Bottomland; Catalogue of Utilities; A Pictorial History of Wilderness; Route to Cloudless: Day; and Mimesis, Synaptic. In this collection, Laressa Dickey sustains something of the spirit and space of the poem over a longer period of time, and explores the poem as an improvisational space. The poems were born in the deep chill of the Minnesota winter, and they begin out of her experience and memories of growing up on her family's tobacco farm in Tennessee, but move on to much more.

BUY THIS TITLE
Laressa Dickey Bottomland

Laressa Dickey  Roam

Published 2016. Paperback, 96pp, 9 x 6ins, £10.95 / $18
ISBN 9781848614864 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]

Roam marks a migration: back, forward and round again. Who stays? Who is allowed to roam? Mistakes, reverses—what do we take of our presence and past as we discover the world through our own perceiving? Motion comes first, then form. What is fixed? And who is with us? How does the past come toward us? How do we make sense of loss, silence? Disoriented, relating to a past that is unclear, we cannot be sure both where we are and which direction we’re moving. The question becomes where is the future? Roam proceeds toward it by echolation and witness—making something integral come alive.
BUY THIS TITLE
Laressa Dickey  Roam

Laressa Dickey  Syncopations

Published 2019. Paperback, 86pp, 9 x 6ins, £10.95 / $18
ISBN 9781848616592 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]

"Laressa Dickey’s Syncopations continues the thematic explorations of her earlier work—family, memory, the American South—but displays a depth and richness all its own. In 'Two Holed Mouth,' Dickey challenges readers to 'hold space for your own I; otherwise someone fills it.' This collection makes plenty of such space, demonstrating that Dickey isn’t just an accomplished lyric poet and aphorist; she is 'a graduate of persistence and traditional courtesies,' qualities she combines in ways unique to her work. These poems show readers what can be gained once these courtesies are no longer necessary and persistence has paid off. Readers are treated to a poet in full command of her art who is willing to share the benefi ts of her hard-won knowledge, making this a truly essential collection." —Matt Duffus
BUY THIS TITLE
Laressa Dickey  - Syncopations

Joe Doerr   Tocayo — New and Selected Poems & Songs

Published 2016. Paperback, 150pp, 9 x 6ins, £12.95 / $20

ISBN 9781848614710 [Download a sample PDF from this book here .]




“By turns erudite and lyrical, esoteric and oracular, profane and ethereal – Joe Doerr’s Tocayo contains multitudes. This vast miscellany, a bravura poetic performance by every measure, signals the aborning of a new, necessary literary idiom for this mashed-up American age: the ineluctable punk sublime.” —John Santos

 

“Disturbs all the codes.” —John Kinsella


BUY THIS TITLE
Joe Doerr  Tocayo — New and Selected Poems & Songs

Edward Dorn  Two Interviews

Edited by Gavin Selerie and Justin Katko
Published 2013. Paperback, 102pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £10.95 / $18
ISBN 9781848612785 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]

Edward Dorn's Two Interviews brings together two largely unseen interviews from 1971 and 1981, conducted in Vancouver and London, with Tom McGauley, Brian Fawcett, John Scoggan, Stan Persky, J.H. Prynne, Ralph Maud, and Gavin Selerie. Published alongside the interviews are uncollected extracts from Dorn's Day & Night Report (1971), extracts from his unpublished prose work Juneau in June (1981), and three uncollected poems from 1981. Along with Justin Katko's preface to the book, which focuses on Dorn and Prynne's 1971 trip to Vancouver, and an extended introduction to the 1981 interview by Gavin Selerie, which deals with Dorn's geographical and linguistic alignments, particularly those relating to his first period in England, this book includes unpublished photographs, and a bibliography of Dorn interviews.
BUY THIS TITLE
Edward Dorn Two Interviews

Susanne Dyckman  equilibrium's form

Published 2007. Paperback, 80pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £10.95 / $18
ISBN 9781905700202 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]

In Susanne Dyckman's first full-length collection, following from her Etherdome Press chapbook published in 2005, poetic tonalities and phrasings are used to disrupt the chronology of past and present. Language plays — and replays — across the page, radiating from interiority to historical concreteness and back again. The reader is impelled through a temporal spiral, "the body as it moves in sequences of rain".
BUY THIS TITLE
Susanne Dyckman: equilibrium's form

Share by: