Wayward

In her seventh collection, Wayward, Katharine Coles uses small poems to take on big questions, including love, aging, death, the permeable boundaries of self, and how we know what we know.

Wayward begins with a poem, “How We Sing,” that makes explicit reference to poetic making and also to time and temporality. These concerns thread through the book’s three sections, unfolding for the most part seasonally, from summer to summer, though also backing up and considering time’s passage more holistically and from a distance, as in the elegies, the poems about aging and mortality, and the infinity erasures that both mark and bridge the section breaks. The poems as a whole, and especially the erasures, acknowledge how our experience of time is flexible, as is time itself (there can be different sizes of infinity, for example, as explored in “New Year Cento on Infinity and Mortality”).  Within the large, abstract questions the poems address play out the intimate details of everyday life and love—that of spouses, parents and children, friends, and animal companions both wild and domestic.  As Wayward begins located in time, it ends with a gesture “away,” outside time, in a poem of that title and a final infinity erasure that brings the collection full circle by joining that last poem with the first.

ADVANCE PRAISE

Pleasure in the mouth, pleasure in the swiftness and accuracy of perception, pleasure in observing a mind divided against itself interrogate its every assumption, pleasure in following the tough-minded investigations of self and the world through the lenses of physics, neurobiology, natural and human history—all these singular pleasures coalesce into poems rich with lyric feeling and a passionately precise syntax. Her use of rhyme shows why virtuosity coupled with psychological insight can get you closer to the heart of things in ten lines than in a pages-long narrative full of intimate details. Coles is a rarity in her generation or any generation: her understanding that poetry is a quintessentially formal art has allowed her to create her own conventions and explode the usual dichotomies between politics and private life, between tradition and the programmatically avant-garde. She is a true original.—Tom Sleigh, author of House of Fact, House of Ruin and The Land Between Two Rivers: Writing in an Age of Refugees

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Katharine Coles

Publication Date: June 25, 2019

Genre/Imprint: Poetry, Red Hen Press

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ISBN: 978-159709-895-3

Wild Honey, Tough Salt

Wild Honey, Tough Salt gathers citizen poems for tough times—with testaments for world community, spells for peace, earth blessings, and family consolations. 

Wild Honey, Tough Salt offers a prismatic view of Earth citizenship, where we must be ambidextrous now. The book takes a stern look inward, calling for sturdy character and supple spirit, and a bold look outward, seeking ways to engage troubling grief. The book begins with poems that witness for a buoyant life in a difficult world: wandering New Orleans in a trance, savoring the life of artist Tove Jansson, reading the fine print on the Mexican peso and the Scottish five-pound note. Clues to untapped energy lie everywhere by the lens of poetry. The book then moves to considerations of the worst in us—torture and war. How to recruit a child soldier? How to be married to the heartless guard? What to say to a child enamored by bullets? In the third section, the book offers a spangle of poems blessing the earth: wren song, bud growth, river’s eager way with obstacles. And the final section offers poems of affection: infant clarities of home, long marriage in dog years, a consoling campfire in the yard when all seems lost. The book will soften your trouble, and give you spirit for the days ahead.

 ADVANCE PRAISE

“Kim Stafford is the most humane poet going, devotedly writing every day, sharing encouragement and generous care everywhere. His eloquent lines, so deeply attentive to each moment, shimmer with breathtaking leaps and humble wisdom. They will help you live. Especially now.”—Naomi Shihab Nye

Wild Honey, Tough Salt demonstrates Kim Stafford’s remarkable talent for coming to the heart. These poems rise beautifully and naturally from their settings, whether a morning in a forest, or inside an ancient myth, or high on a ridge above Big Basin. Wild Honey, Tough Salt contains poems of quest, reconciliation, and joy, offering the reader enlightening variations on the essence of heart and self in communion. “Everything spoke, and I was / nothing but listening.”—Pattiann Rogers, Burroughs Medal winner for Lifetime Achievement in Nature Poetry

A black and white photograph of a forest and blue script towards the top that reads Wild Honey, Tough Salt poems by Kim Stafford.

Kim Stafford ( Author Website )

Publication Date: April 23, 2019

Genre/Imprint: Poetry, Red Hen Press

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ISBN: 978-159709-896-0

Transatlantic Connections

In the 1950s, a group of brash young British writers coalesced into a controversial poetic and critical movement known simply as the Movement. In the 1980s, a group of brash young American writers coalesced into an equally controversial poetic and critical movement known as New Formalism. Especially since the British coalition known as The Movement was short-lived, surviving less than a decade, few people could have predicted that it would have an impact that was both far-reaching and long-lasting. This groundbreaking new study shows that the Movement lives on, in a very real way, in New Formalist poetics and poetry.

ADVANCE PRAISE

“In her new book, Theresa Malphrus Welford offers a cogent study of poets separated by an ocean yet connected by sensibility. Through meticulous research, as well as interviews conducted especially for her project, she convincingly demonstrates the Movement’s profound influence on the first wave of New Formalists. Welford navigates the currents of literary history with admirable grace: we learn of Donald Davie’s mentorship of Dana Gioia, Timothy Steele’s early embrace of Thom Gunn, Mark Jarman’s subtle homages to Philip Larkin, and much more. In reconstructing the influence of both movements on poets writing today, Welford has produced an essential critical work that illuminates the productive kinship of two distinct generations and traditions.”—Ned Balbo, author of Galileo’s Banquet

“In Transatlantic Connections, Theresa Malphrus Welford explores the complex, sometimes fraught influence of the Movement on America’s New Formalism—on not just its aesthetics but also its sense of the poet’s ideal role in society. Once marginalized—even reviled—New Formalism has, four decades on, seeped into and transformed American poetry, sparking a renewed interest in meter, rhyme, narrative and received forms, even among primarily free verse poets. Welford persuasively and meticulously demonstrates how a loose affiliation of critically unfashionable British poets left an imprint on contemporary American poetry.”—April Lindner, author of Skin, recipient of the Walt McDonald First Book Prize

“Most laudable in this study of the ties between Britain’s the Movement and America’s New Formalism is Theresa Welford’s sensitivity to the complexity of poetic influence. She convincingly questions the legitimacy of airtight “schools” of poetry then shows how the boundaries between them are more porous than what was commonly thought. This critical study will send readers back to some of their favorite modern and contemporary poets with new eyes.”—Billy Collins, former Poet Laureate of the United States (2001–2003) and author of eleven books of poetry, including The Rain in PortugalAimless Love: New and Selected PoemsThe Trouble with Poetry, and Picnic, Lightning

“This remarkable book offers a series of insights into a significant—and, until now, largely neglected—transatlantic poetic connection. Theresa Welford offers a convincing demonstration of just how much the New Formalist poets owe to their predecessors in the Movement—and just how intricate and influential were the personal and textual exchanges between them. Her argument is finely nuanced, acknowledging both the similarities and the differences between the American and British groups. Her analyses of individual poems are subtle, sensitive and rigorous; and her argument places the texts and poets she discusses in exactly the right historical and cultural contexts. This is a groundbreaking book about an international poetic dialogue; it will be a vital and indispensable resource for anyone interested in the recent past, present and future of poetry.”—Richard J. Gray, University of Essex Emeritus Professor and author of critical books including A History of American LiteratureAmerican Poetry of the Twentieth CenturyA Web of Words: The Great Dialogue of Southern Literature,  and After the Fall: American Literature Since 9/11.

A graphic design of a large boat carrying passengers with yellow script that reads Transatlantic Connections by Theresa Malphrus Welford.

Theresa Welford

Publication Date: June 20, 2019

Genre/Imprint: Non-Fiction, Story Line Press

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ISBN: 978-1-58654-054-8

Toward Antarctica

A lyric travelogue of photographs and writing by poet-naturalist Elizabeth Bradfield, who guides on ecotour ships in Antarctica. This book sounds, challenges, documents, and queries one of the world’s most iconic wild places.

Poet-naturalist Elizabeth Bradfield’s fourth collection documents and queries her work as a guide on ships in Antarctica, offering an incisive insider’s vision that challenges traditional tropes of The Last Continent. Inspired by haibun, a form the 17th-century poet Bashō invented to chronicle his journeys in remote Japan, Bradfield uses photographs, compressed prose, and short poems to examine our relationships to remoteness, discovery, expertise, awe, labor, temporary societies, tourism’s service economy, and “pure” landscapes. Antarctica was the focus of Bradfield’s Approaching Ice, written before she had set foot on the continent; now Toward Antarctica furthers her investigation with boots on the ground. A complicated love letter, Toward Antarctica offers a unique view of one of the world’s most iconic wild places.

ADVANCE PRAISE

“Modern expedition ships sail south to Antarctica every year, carrying continent-baggers and bucket-listers who drink a toast to Shackleton, pat themselves on the back and heroically claim, ‘We made it!’ It takes a poet, and a darn good one, “to at once be there and to not even come close.” This is Elizabeth Bradfield writing to the truth in what she calls, “crepuscular moments of poetry . . . Here on this unbridled ocean. Here on this world unto itself.” Having been to Antarctica many times, and studied its literature, I found this book an artful standout from the crowd, one garnished with reflection and rust, humor and humility, sincerity, and respect.”—Kim Heacox, author of Antarctica: The Last ContinentJimmy Bluefeather, and The Only Kayak

A photograph of the ice glaciers in Antartica and a red flag post towards the bottom and white script that reads Toward Antartica an exploration by Elizabeth Bradfield.

Elizabeth Bradfield ( Author Website )

Publication Date: May 9, 2019

Genre/Imprint: Boreal Books, Hybrid

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ISBN: 978-1-59709-886-1

The World Began With Yes

Erica Jong has never stopped writing poetry. It was her first love and it has provided inspiration for all her other books. In a dark time, she celebrates life. Her title comes from the Brazilian genius Clarice Lispector who was deeply in love with life despite many tragedies. Life challenges us to celebrate even when our very existence is threatened. Never have we needed poetry more. Jong believes that the poet sees the world in a grain of sand and eternity in a wild flower—as Blake wrote. Her work has always stressed the importance of the lives of women, women’s creativity, and self-confidence. She sees her role as a writer as inspiring future poets to come.

 ADVANCE PRAISE

“Erica Jong’s new book of poetry is inspiring, uplifting, exciting, stimulating, engrossing—piercing. These new poems of Erica’s light up the page with tears and shouts, with wounds and exclamations, with yes, yes! That is it, that is what I feel, what I imagined, what I dreamed. Ms. Jong says she culled these poems from those she has written over the last decades, poems whose writing keeps her alive. That is what poetry is for, to keep us alive, to wake us up!! Erica has done that for me again today, kept me alive, breathing, weeping, shouting at the page, “Yes!!” This is what it takes to make a poem, to make a life. Right on the money, right on the edge, right on the heart, right on the breath, The World Began With Yes is the real deal. Get it and read it. You need it. We all need it. In this time of agitation and fear, you will fly with Erica Jong—she brings us back to what matters—the heart, the mind, the head, the imagination—the “Yes” of life.”—Judy Collins

A white background and pink and black typography that reads The World Began With Yes poems by Erica Jong.

Erica Jong ( Author Website )

Publication Date: April 16, 2019

Genre/Imprint: Poetry, Red Hen Press

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ISBN: 978-1-59709-846-5

The Falls of the Wyona

The Falls of the Wyona by David Brendan Hopes confronts friends growing up in Appalachia just after WWII not only with the material threat of the wilderness, but with the uncharted darkness of their own maturing hearts.

In The Falls of the Wyona by David Brendan Hopes, four friends growing up on the banks of a wild Appalachian river just after WWII discover, almost at the same time, the dangerous, alluring Falls and the perils of their own maturing hearts. Seen through the eyes of his childhood friend Arden, football hero Vince falls in love with the new kid, Glen. They have no context for their feelings, and the next few years of high school become a tense, though sometimes funny, artifice of concealment. The winner of Red Hen’s Quill Prize, The Falls of the Wyona is the first of three achieved (and several more projected) novels by this author imbued with the magical atmosphere of Appalachian culture.

AWARDS

SHORTLIST – 2020 Rubery International Book Award, Fiction
SHORTLIST – 2020 Eric Hoffer Grand Prize
FINALIST – 2020 Montaigne Medal
SILVER – 2019 Foreword Book Awards, LGBTQ+

ADVANCE PRAISE

“Dave Hopes grants us entry into the wondrous, highly charged world of young male friendship once upon a time. The setting is lovely and nostalgic. I wanted to know all about it, and I even wished I could live there. But there is trouble underneath, and there are things that just cannot happen. Until they do. A pitch-perfect exploration of the terrors and pleasures of American adolescence.”—David Pratt, author of Wallaçonia and Bob the Book

A green background with a graphic design of a lake in the middle of woods and two boys holding hands with light green scrip that reads The Falls of the Wyona a novel by David Brendan Hopes.

David Brendan Hopes

Publication Date: May 23, 2019

Genre/Imprint: Fiction, Quill

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ISBN: 978-1-59709-893-9

The Diviners

A book-length poem that brilliantly reinvents narrative poetry, The Diviners is a single poem divided into five chapters, each a different decade. McDowell relates the most crucial developments in each decade spanning from the 1950s through 1990s, of the shared lives of Al, Eleanor, and their son, Tom. The Diviners records in blank verse the family’s beginnings, their growth, their problems, their separation, and their ultimate reunion. The events that follow the intertwined lives of the characters illustrate the endless capacity for human empathy.

Story Line Press legacy tittle, Robert McDowell The Diviners Poem, white script text against emerald green background.

Robert McDowell ( Author Website )

Publication Date: July 23, 2019

Genre/Imprint: Poetry, Story Line Press

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ISBN: 978-1-58654-057-9

Sunbathing on Tyrone Power’s Grave

In Kim Dower’s fourth collection, Sunbathing on Tyrone Power’s Grave, death has never felt so alive! Alluring titles to haunting last lines, the poems in Dower’s fourth collection soothe, terrify and always surprise, revealing the extraordinary within the ordinary. Acclaimed for combining the accessible and profound, humor and heartache, Dower’s poetry continues to be quirky, dark, sexy, disarmingly candid and moving, and here she explores the landscape of death and its intersections with love, longing, obsession, sadness, joy and beauty. Wise and soaring, these poems bravely imagine another life beyond the one we all know where even the angels surrounding the graves are wearing bikinis, smoking Kool Light

AWARDS

GOLD – 2020 Independent Publisher Book Awards, Poetry

ADVANCE PRAISE

“By turns exuberant, sexy and sobering, Kim Dower’s remarkable poems are known for their extraordinary range. This fourth collection finds her at the top of her game. Attuned to the oddness of the quotidian and grounding the metaphysical in the sharp sensations of daily life, the poems in Tyrone Power’s Grave invite us to live as fully and generously as the poet herself.” —Chris Kraus, bestselling author of I Love Dick and After Kathy Acker

“Kim Dower’s poems speak not of the highs and lows, but about the grey space between tragedy and tenderness, memory and loss, fragility and perseverance—that space where the soul and the truest self live.” —Richard Blanco, Presidential Inaugural Poet

“Kim Dower’s poetry has a way of transforming everyday life into something luminous and unexpected. Simultaneously accessible and complex, whimsical and heartbreaking, Dower’s poetry shines with subtle irony and playful imagination, empathetic and relatable, as well as full of wisdom.”—Culture Trip

An orange background with a graphic design of a woman in a pink bathing suit sitting in a green lawn chair and black script that reads Sunbathing on Tyrone Power’s Grave poems by Kim Dower.

Kim Dower ( Author Website )

Publication Date: April 1, 2019

Genre/Imprint: Poetry, Red Hen Press

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ISBN: 978-1-59709-621-8

Steller’s Orchid

In 1924, Yale student John Lars Nelson takes ship on the SS Victoria, bound for Nome. He has been hired to do a plant survey, but his real mission is to find an orchid described by Georg Wilhelm Steller, the naturalist on Vitus Bering’s 1741 expedition. On the ship, John Lars encounters a young Aleut woman, Natasha Christiansen. Once in Nome he hires a pair of down-at-the-heels bootleggers to take him to the Shumagin Islands on their schooner, the Emilia Galotti. He quickly discovers that the two are not what they first seemed. In Bristol Bay he again encounters Natasha and she joins them but she and John are marooned shortly thereafter. They cross the Alaskan Peninsula on foot and then in a borrowed skiff reach Nagai Island, where Bering made his landfall two centuries before. They find the Emilia there, along with another ship, and the hunt for the orchid brings to a violent resolution an intrigue started many years before.

AWARDS

SILVER – 2020 Independent Publisher Book Award, West-Pacific Best Regional Fiction

ADVANCE PRAISE

“In Nelson, Tom McGuire has created a smart, capable, and endearing narrator for this old-fashioned adventure, mystery, and coming of age novel. Steller’s Orchid is authentically Alaskan and refreshingly original. It belongs on the shelf with Eowyn Ivey’s To the Bright Edge of the World and Lynn Schooler’s Walking Home. I just finished Steller’s Orchid, and I enjoyed it so much that I’d like to read it again.” —Heather Lende, bestselling author of Finding 

“I learned more about life in the Aleutians 100 years ago from Tom McGuire’s page turner Steller’s Orchid than I did from a decade living in Alaska. In the course of drawing us in to the quest of John Lars, a young orchid seeker, McGuire subtly reveals how we arrived at the Alaska of today. This adventurous, unforgettably original and so human saga has more than a few moments of erudite ad poetic narrative. Steller’s Orchid teaches us how and why commoditized plants have been transported around the world to comprise the modern agricultural landscape. McGuire’s narrative culminates in an exciting climax set in one of the most remote spots on the planet, a fitting end to a book that is as much about the nature of life and love as orchid hunting and ambition.”—Doug Fine, author Farewell, My Subaru and Too High to Fail

A drawing of a fuchsia orchid with dark green script that reads Steller’s Orchid a novel by Thomas McGuire.

Thomas McGuire

Publication Date: June 11, 2019

Genre/Imprint: Boreal Books, Fiction

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ISBN: 978-1-59709-860-1

Sex & Taipei City

Sex in Taipei City is not what one expects: it is repressed, traded for cash, vengeful, sometimes awkward, and almost always secretive.

In Sex & Taipei City, a diverse cast of characters finds relationships more trouble than they bargained for. Some are young and innocent: a teenager loses her virginity to a Ching Dynasty torture device in her family’s Strange Objects Museum. Some are far from innocent: a schoolgirl sells her body as an odd form of revenge and a grandfather alienates his family by watching Japanese porn at too loud a volume. For others, sexuality is a battle: a wife leaves her husband over a sexist joke, a foreign nanny steals an American baby, a mail order bride runs away, and a “spinster” beats up a pervert in the MRT station.

ADVANCE PRAISE

“Contemporary Taiwan’s contradictions come to life in Yu-Han Chao’s wonderful and gossipy collection Taipei City. The urban denizens that populate Chao’s words are modern only in appearance and they helplessly careen toward their strange destinies, conveyed by age-old superstition and the failures of intimacy. These are the stories shared between rounds of karaoke that are so juicy and awful, you don’t realize it when your song comes on.”—Ed Lin, author of Ghost Month

“From the fascinating quirks of food obsessions to the odd-but-seemingly-ordinary erotic moments of Taiwanese citizens, Yu-Han Chao’s Taipei City’s stories unfold a world of both the exotic and the familiar, captured in squirmy, disarming details. Teen pregnancies and forced marriages are accepted almost as a matter of course, as is the groping of a food stand/sex-worker, but Chao evokes the dignity and power of quiet tragedies, the lingering stigma of shame and what happens once a desire is given into, how it creates a desire-shadow. Funny, bold, and in moments, heartbreaking, these nineteen stories make up a stunning debut.”—William J. Cobb, author of The Bird Saviors

A colorful graphic design of a city landscape with skyscrapers and black script that reads Sex and Tapei City by Yu-Han Chao.

Yu-Han Chao ( Author Website )

Publication Date: April 4, 2019

Genre/Imprint: Red Hen Press, Short Stories

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ISBN: 978-1-59709-043-8

Rattlesnake Allegory

From poems about the speaker’s relationship with loneliness after the suicide of his lover to poems about discovering that dark part of oneself that he never knew existed, this collection is about the transformations of a queer brown body and the echoes of those shifts found in South Texas’s feathers, shadows, and trees.

These poems are about “the moment inside the body / when joy is not born as much as it is made out of anything / the rest of the world doesn’t want.”  Using land and South Texas’s flora and fauna as references, these poems explore aloneness and manhood as articulations of want, asking the reader to “take a moan by the hand, see what good it does.” Thematically, these poems address loss after transformative experiences, admitting to a reader, “All night I might fathom taking back / something precious / that somehow, / long ago, or not so long ago, I don’t know, / ripped off, / yanked from bone, / sloughed off like a husk.”  These poems are about getting to know one’s body after being distanced from it, of recognizing a queer brown body inextricably belonging to lineages of loss, and then realizing that some new body has emerged from where the old parts were lost, or taken, as in the final sequence of four poems, “Lechuza Sketches,” where the speaker manifests the Tex-Mexican folkloric figure of a lechuza, the human-owl hybrid said to inhabit parts of South Texas and the Northern Mexican border. In the end, this is a collection of poems about more deeply engaging with one’s queerness, one’s brownness, and understanding that there are parts inside us we never knew existed, or as the Lechuza Sketches speaker offers, “In the world, some part of us is often / unseen / & not glorious. / But what if we are? / Glorious. Seen.”

AWARD

WINNER – 2020 Milt Kessler Poetry Book Award

ADVANCE PRAISE

“First, I thought desire the core of these gorgeous lyrics—belly hunger, eros, a near ecclesial pang to be good. Joe Jiménez makes palpable a world of things to want, sometimes despite how they might cut—mesquite and teeth, thick arms and bedfuls of nopales, tattoos and gleaming gar fish. But then I wondered—what are all these owls doing here? Harbingers of death, these raptors rap against the cage of the poet’s ribs, the poet rapt in loves some insist he die for and some he would choose to die for. This fearless and beautiful book follows a man who knows the difference and loves them all anyway.“—Douglas Kearney

“There is so much desire, loneliness, and ultimately a longing for love in these sensuous, honest, and searing poems. So many questions, so much beautiful emptiness in return.  Joe Jiménez exhibits poetic skill throughoutfrom the marvelous use of repetition, which leads to a kind of intensity and earnestness, to the often-surprising and sparkling imagery.  He writes: “…but I also want to make beautiful things—. Sometimes, I want others to/see me/as beautiful, too.
  Not rough, not voracious…” Jiménez has made a beautiful voracious thing—Rattlesnake Allegory, a brilliant book of poems by a poet I will keep my eye on for years to come.“—Victoria Chang author of Barbie Chang

A purple snake skin as background with a woman’s hip and arm toward the right side exposing a flower tattoo on her arm and another tattoo on her hip, with white script that reads Rattle Snake Allegory by Joe Jimenez.

Joe Jiménez ( Author Website )

Publication Date: April 4, 2019

Genre/Imprint: Letras Latinas, Poetry

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ISBN: 978-159709-899-1

Quiet Money

Robert McDowell is a genuine poetic innovator, and Quiet Money is his first collection. Rezoning an honored old form—narrative verse—McDowell’s poems read almost like short stories, yet there is nothing prose like about his manner of expression. Here you will find careful craft and the presence of what Pound called “luminous detail.” In the long title poem, “Quiet Money,” a man flies solo across the Atlantic before Lindbergh, but can’t crow about it because he was merely a flying bootlegger picking up gin in Norway. Full of humor and desperation, these are poems from the middle-class world. “The Liberated Bowler” tells of a woman who can’t find a man able to cope with her talent. There is even a wicket parody of Robert Service, the man who gave narrative poetry such a bad name. As the poet Mark Jarman has written, “With Quiet Money Robert McDowell joins the big three of American narrative poetry—Robinson, Frost, and Jeffers. His is an important contribution, not only to poetry but to fiction as well.”

Story Line Press legacy tittle, Robert McDowell The Diviners Poem, white script text against emerald green background.

Robert McDowell ( Author Website )

Publication Date: July 16, 2019

Genre/Imprint: Poetry, Story Line Press

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ISBN: 978-1-58654-056-2

Praising the Paradox

Poems about life/loss/childhood/concepts of self and the larger meanings of existence.

This full collection of fifty-six poems reflecting on the concept of self, loss, fragility, and the constructs we must create in order to face the transient nature of life was named a finalist in the National Poetry Series, The New Issues Poetry Prize, The Four Way Books Intro Prize, and others. It was also listed as a “remarkable work” in the Tupelo Press 2012 open submission period.

ADVANCE PRAISE

“What I admire most in Praising the Paradox is the resilience throughout and an awareness of the common world that both comforts and devastates. These poems navigate a landscape of loss where what goes on is the sway of stoplights, the waitress with her coffee-pot suspended in mid-air, the everyday moments that gather momentum and make a life. These poems celebrate the small gestures, carrying pain alongside joy, reminding us we are alive.” —Dorianne Laux, author of The Book of Men, winner of the Paterson Prize, and Facts About the Moon, winner of the Oregon Book Award

“Tina Schumann’s Praising the Paradox is a rich guidebook for a life—a grand companion. These deeply satisfying poems, with their lush images and fluid sound movements, unfold in elegance, settling the spirit. In every stanza, Schumann’s honest voice feels compelling and humble—‘what radiant resignation / to be so much / less than I / could have ever hoped for’—offering largeness of vision, grace, and enormous reading pleasure. ‘I simply left / blank spaces along the way; an ellipse here, a dash there.’ Nothing forced, nothing labored. What a treat.”—Naomi Shihab Nye, chancellor of the Academy of American Poets (2010–2015) and author of 19 Varieties of Gazelle: Poems of the Middle East and Voices in the Air

A background design of a full moon and a night sky with mountains covered in snow at the bottom and a woman’s face on top with a bird cage that makes up the top half of her face and script that reads Praising the Paradox poems by Tina Schumann.

Tina Schumann ( Author Website )

Publication Date: July 9, 2019

Genre/Imprint: Poetry, Red Hen Press

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ISBN: 978-1-59709-617-1

Peripheral Vision

Peripheral Vision by poet Susan Kinsolving travels to many unexpected places: the ocean floor, a lunatic asylum, and to an ocularist for a glass eye.

Peripheral Vision goes behind the scenes in a military hospital, an elementary school, and a disturbed family. Susan Kinsolving’s poems were described in the New Yorker as “grand and almost terrifying.” In this new collection, she proves herself again. Exploring the world from many points of view, Kinsolving takes her readers to England, Hollywood, Wyoming, France, and Chile. In idiosyncratic homages, she invokes Neruda, Bishop, Clare, Frost, and Dickinson, along with Helen Keller and Odilon Redon. While referencing fact or history, she attacks with “a startling backhand of wit and irony,” as noted once in the New York Times Book Review. She writes poignantly to a daughter in Hollywood and acerbically to an ex-husband. Her family’s most disastrous Thanksgiving is described in a funny piece, “Fill the Cavity with Crumbs.” In “The Case of the Carrot,” she reports on an absurd legal action in family court. All Kinsolving’s poems demonstrate a keen love of language, its dimensions of meaning and musicality of sound. Each poem is a pleasure.

AWARDS
Finalist – 2020 Connecticut Book Awards, Poetry

ADVANCE PRAISE

Susan Kinsolving’s poems gratify the senses, and if that were all they did, it would be much more than enough for even the most difficult-to-appease reader of poetry. They do something more, though: as the title of this beautiful volume suggests, they bring us in tantalizing proximity to the radiant mysteries that prowl just beyond the sphere of the senses. They are triumphs of perception and miracles of insight. —Vijay Seshadri

Susan Kinsolving practices an enchanted speech that awakens us to the bright glare of surviving time, of passionate seeing, especially the natural world, and as mother, wife, and daughter, of an art that honors our fragile yet sturdy relationships. These poems, more than an enhanced book of hours or remembrance of things past, are invocations soaked in the fluencies of sound and enriched by a palpable intellect that gifts readers so much charm, sublimity, and humor. —Major Jackson

A blue background with a small drawing of an eye at the center and black script that reads Peripheral Vision poems by Susan Kinsolving.

Susan Kinsolving ( Author Website )

Publication Date: May 28, 2019

Genre/Imprint: Poetry, Red Hen Press

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ISBN: 978-1-59709-615-7

Letters Written and Not Sent

Letters Written and Not Sent is the lifetime work of poet William Louis-Dreyfus, written over decades, culminating a passion for poetry, art and social justice.  He passed away just days after the book was completed.  Like paperweights, his lyrics are both small and hefty.  His subjects range from race relations to trees, from secrets to parenthood, from ideas of god to kissing, from sons and mothers to fate, and of course, to poetry itself.  Never afraid of the big questions of why human beings are alive, and what hope and justice are for, Louis-Dreyfus could take decades to finish a poem.  A perfectionist, a thinker, and always inspired by visual art, he fought with himself over how to say what he wanted to say best. Like the French-Uruguayan businessman poet Jules Supervielle, whom Louis-Dreyfus translated, he felt the tug of the financial world against the pull of the lyricism of poetry, and the division marked his life and sparked ideas for his finest poems.  As the heart condition that seized him made it absolutely imperative, finishing Letters Written and Not Sent literally became a life-or-death matter.  This is the book that he wished to send into the world.

AWARDS

2019 Best Book Award, Poetry: General

 ADVANCE PRAISE

“In the tradition of Jules Superville and Wallace Stevens (two poets he adored), he wrote while working as a full-time businessman, spending his life perfecting the poems in Letters Written and Not Sent, his last effort and only book. His writing process was slow, his poems largely written in his head, but not written down until the last moment of their full formation, almost like letters not sent but at the last minute—like finishing this book on his deathbed—posted to the world. How glad I am that he did finish it! This is a marvelous book, to be kept at a bedside table for when one wants to have another voice speaking out of the night about what comes to us at night: death, remembering, reconsidering, and sudden, quite miraculous revelations.” —Molly Peacock, author of The Analyst

“The poems of William Louis-Dreyfus testify to an inner life of great richness, but one that freely slipped across the border of the self into the world beyond. He wrote well in poems about the natural world, his relationships with past and present, his desire for justice and his empathy for those to whom it was denied. This is a fine collection of his work, and it is good to have it at last..” —Charles Martin, Translator of Ovid’s Metamorphosis and The Baghavad Gita

A design of parchment paper and a man carrying a cane with red pants on towards the bottom left and red script that reads Letters Written and Not Sent Poems by William Louis Dreyfus.

William Louis-Dreyfus

Publication Date: July 2, 2019

Genre/Imprint: Poetry, Red Hen Press

$16.95 Tradepaper

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ISBN: 978-159709-869-4