These dazzling poems are set in the earliest years of American aviation when daredevil pilots—woman and men—thrilled spectators who had never seen an airplane.

Lincoln Beachey, Betty Scott, Harriet Quimby, Ruth Law, Ormer Locklear, Bessie Coleman, and Clyde Pangborn fly at carnival altitudes. In a lyrical sequence of persona poems, the pilots in Exuberance wonder how the experience of moving through the air will transform life on the ground. They learn to name the clouds, size up the winds, mix an Aviation Cocktail, perform a strange field landing, and make an emergency jump.

AWARDS
Finalist – 2020 Connecticut Book Awards, Poetry

Finalist – 2019 Foreword Indies Book Awards, Poetry (Adult Nonfiction)

 ADVANCE PRAISE

“Intoxicated with the history of aviation, Dolores Hayden has written a work of historical imagination that is vocally energetic, psychologically acute, and musically sophisticated. In their love of physical risk and in their daredevil elan, the speakers in these poems keep faith with the mundane facts of flight as well as its spiritual intimations. The movement between lyrical speech and historical reflection gives us not only a portrait of the early years of the twentieth century, but a book in which technological advance is given a profoundly human voice.” —Tom Sleigh, poet, dramatist, essayist, author of House of Fact, House of Ruin

“Exuberance is the word for this expansive and exciting collection, and also the word for the vanished earliest days of aviation it evokes, when flying was entertainment and adventure, not everyday transportation. Hayden brings to life a rollicking cast of birdmen and birdwomen, showmen and stunt pilots, producers and profiteers—and their entranced audiences and riders too. “I have the air intoxication,” says Harriet Quimby, a journalist who was the first American woman to get a pilot’s license and the first woman pilot to fly the English Channel. “Only a flier knows what that means.” Hayden’s lush and energetic poems give us earthbound readers, used to shuttling from airport to airport, a sense of what that intoxication must have felt like.”—Katha Pollitt, poet and columnist, author of The Mind-Body Problem

Trees are queer magic; just look at those queens.

Through the creaking of bedazzled branches and the soft rustle of jeweled leaves, deciduous qween explores the queer world all around us—how we, like our environment, wear and shed different identities in our performance as human, as drag queen, as ancient tree. This collection reveals in the natural world those ephemeral moments which reflect our own truths and confront our fear of death, of loneliness, and of failure. With an air of Southern Gothic mysticism, the poet reflects on a childhood spent in Houston’s bayous, an adolescence rife with curiosity and shame, and a young adulthood marred by the loss of his mother. How do our bodies and minds find equilibrium as we learn to let go, yet long to remember? The title poem, “deciduous qween, I–V,” binds the collection in a five-part sequence, pondering those things that are lost in the seasons of our lives: teeth, antlers, body, shape, and leaf. And it’s those sharp edges of loss and the scars they leave behind that linger here, like bark stripped from a swaying willow, or a family bereft of its matriarch.

AWARD

WINNER – 2017 Benjamin Saltman Award

ADVANCE PRAISE

The Texas of Matty Layne Glasgow’s deciduous qween is big, teased out, and sequined, but it is also parched, prickly with violence and grief, and fire-gutted, its aspens “all char-soaked & done up with ash.” In poems as deft as they are refreshingly unguarded, Glasgow queers nature itself, revealing the possibilities in the landscape to be as complex and limitless as those of the self: “There’s a buzz in the air. / It’s the world unzipping.”—Maggie Smith, author of Good Bones

“Rooted in ache and wonderment, deciduous qween by Matty Layne Glasgow is a dazzling queer catalog of loss and gain. The death of a singular mother kindles the empathic imagination of the speaker. Trees, like drag queens, preen and sparkle. Those marginalized by society are seen and heard. Pop culture clarifies desire. Glasgow’s command of craft is impressive. The images are precise and sensual, the lines are musical, and he pours language into eye-catching forms. The dexterity with language is matched by emotional acuity. Vulnerability, brashness, grief, and astonishment leap off the page. deciduous qween is a marvelous and inventive debut.”—Eduardo C. Corral, author of Slow Lightning

Unapologetically sensual and forthright, Bright Stain explores desire, loss, faith, doubt, tenderness, and violence; and sex as experience, metaphor, and magnifying lens for relationships.

Bright Stain may or may not become the Sex and the City of poetry, but this knock-your-socks-off debut will likely inspire debate—perhaps controversy—as it inhabits some startling points of view, including pedophile priests’, serial killers’ and prison inmates’. Those who miss reading these breathtaking, visceral poems won’t know what their friends are raving about.

ADVANCE PRAISE

“Francesca Bell’s poems are fierce and tender, passionate, compassionate, disturbing and delightful. Wide-ranging, finely-honed, smart and surprising, Bright Stain is a compelling debut collection!”—Ellen Bass

“How deeply gratifying to see Francesca Bell’s electric, erotic, and completely ravishing debut collection, Bright Stain, at last in the world. For the past ten years she has been writing some of the most charged, subtle, and yet devastating poems in American poetry. Many of these dramatic vignettes are laced with a rare sexual candor and a whip-smart emotional intelligence. Bright Stain is one of the most darkly elegant and luminous books of recent years; it is, in all ways, truly a wonder.”—David St. John

WINNER OF THE 2020 IPPY AWARD IN MOST ORIGINAL CONCEPT

Percival Everett’s The Book of Training by Colonel Hap Thompson of Roanoke, VA, 1843, Annotated From the Library of John C. Calhoun, is poetry within the harsh confines of a mock historical document, a guidebook for the American slave owner. The collection features lists of instructions for buying, training, and punishing, equations for calculating present and future profits, and handwritten annotations affirming the brutal contents. The Book of Training lays bare the mechanics of the peculiar institution of slavery and challenges readers to place themselves in the uncomfortable vantage point of those who have bought and enslaved human beings.

“. . . Artful and literate, Everett explores the philosophical, the metaphysical, the physical and the psychological boundaries of human life . . .”
—Terry D Auray

“. . . Everett achieves a primal sense of dislocation, forcing us to question how we determine the limits of the human . . .”
—Sven Birkets, The New York Times

“. . . The audacious, uncategorizable Everett. He mixes genre and tone with absolute abandon, never does the same song twice. Brilliant . . .”
—The Boston Globe

“. . . An author who dances with language as effortlessly as Fred Astaire.”
—Daniel Quinn, author of Ishmael