-
Destruction Myth
Mathias Svalina
Mathias Svalina was born in Chicago. He is the author of Wastoid (Big Lucks Books, 2014), The Explosions (Subito Press, 2012), I Am A Very Productive Entrepreneur (Mud Luscious Press, 2011) and Destruction Myth (Cleveland State University Poetry Center, 2009). With Zachary Schomburg, he co-edits Octopus Magazine and Octopus Books. He currently teaches writing and literature in Denver, Colorado.
“In the beginning, everyone looked like Larry Bird. In the beginning, there was a rotting pig corpse. Everyone wanted to fight to the death. There was a hole in the basement floor. And a bunny with a broken leg. There were ghosts. Evildoers. A gun. Bacon. Cologne. A pencil. In these inventive, often deeply unnerving poems, Mathias Svalina offers us a string of 45 creation myths and one longer, unsettling destruction myth. The result is a sonically complex, breathtakingly witty book, a collection of poems that surprises first with its wildly orchestrated clamor of narratives then, on reflection, surprises all over again with its intelligence and insight into the many ways we tell stories, the many means by which we imagine ourselves participating in them.” –Kevin Prufer
“In the beginning, we were children and we had beautiful imaginations, but we had no home for them. Then up sprouted Mathias Svalina s Destruction Myth and we did. It too was beautiful, bloody, silly, haunted. At first we thought it was godly, and then we discovered it was human. We feared it; we loved it; we slept with it under our pillows.” –Eleni Sikelianos
“If I feel physically as if the top of my head is taken off and replaced with a soft serve ice cream machine, I am pretty sure it is poetry. Svalina s book does no less, and also so much more. Read but also believe this book of fantastic lies. It’s like how you see a cat sitting there and you think that is just a cat and then you realize that cat is God. Mathias Svalina has reinvented Yahweh as an Animorph. When this book is taught in college classrooms, students will curl up on the air conditioning vents and ask for salt.” –Anne Boyer
More Information:
-
Sum of Every Lost Ship
Allison Titus
Allison Titus is the author of Sum of Every Lost Ship (Cleveland State University Poetry Center, 2010), the novel The Arsonist's Song Has Nothing To Do With Fire (Etruscan, 2014) and the forthcoming book of poems, The True Book of Animal Homes. She teaches in the low-res M.F.A. program at New England College.
“Sum of Every Lost Ship navigates what is haunting, strange, and unknowable grief and disappearances, fragments and histories. Reading, we are deftly balanced on the shores of mystery, a mystery fathomed by a keen instinct for metaphor. Allison Titus is a writer exquisitely attuned to compassion, isolation, and the sometimes overlooked details of this sturdy and tenuous world goats hearts, schooners, cabinets, arctic realities. This is a startling and moving collection.” –Talvikki Ansel
“The pilgrim heart, as one of Allison Titus’ exquisite phrasings has it, requires an unmooring, a letting go, into a world marked by passing journeys, passing architectures, almost-lost motels for intimates to get lost in a hardscrabble world rich with leavings. An internality emerges, sets out, to congress with the obstinate, the creaturely. This poetry’s experiment takes us to the fact that the everyday is also experimental, in that, familiar as it is, it can never, if it is seen intensely enough to be durably writ, be wholly predicted. So fine a lyric sensibility as the reader will find in these poems is all the more compelling for acknowledging the human limits of the lyric, for making hard choices, even refusals, and for never romanticizing omission i.e., obliteration but testing it at every step with earthly perceptions. Allison Titus’ s Sum of Every Lost Ship presents readers with a striking new poetry, and a beautiful and truly original voice.” –William Olsen
“‘We choose / what soothes us,’ writes Allison Titus in this intricate collection, and yet I don t quite believe her; Titus’s choices here are invariably brave and unflinching, thus wonderfully jarring. She pays careful attention, and her sights land on deafening gallops, shipwrecked utterances, waking night terrors. This close-up looking reminds us of our essential predicament ‘What we need / is a surefire way to strap the bed / onto the trembling boat,’ she tells us and yet, in Titus s steady hands, capsize seems not only necessary danger but uncanny adventure.” –Kerri Webster
More Information:
-
Trust
Liz Waldner
Liz Waldner was born in Cleveland, Ohio, and raised in rural Mississippi. She received a B.A. in philosophy and mathematics from St. John’s College. She is the author of Play (Lightful Press, 2009),Trust (Cleveland State University Poetry Center, 2009); Saving the Appearances (Ahsahta Press, 2004); Dark Would (the missing person) (University of Georgia Press) winner of the 2002 Contemporary Poetry Series; Etym(bi)ology (Omnidawn Press, 2002); Self and Simulacra (2001), winner of the Alice James Books Beatrice Hawley Prize; A Point Is That Which Has No Part (2000), which received the 2000 James Laughlin Award and the 1999 Iowa Poetry Prize; and Homing Devices(1998). Her awards include grants from the Massachusetts Cultural Council, the Boomerang Foundation, and the Barbara Deming Memorial Money for Women Fund. She has also received fellowships from the Vermont Studio Center, the Djerassi Foundation, and the MacDowell Colony.
“Liz Waldner’s Trust is a book I’ve been waiting to read for years. Political in the extreme, deliciously crafted, as menacing as it is hysterical, as intellectually sophisticated as it is laugh-out-loud funny, this book ought to be written in silver pen on bathroom stalls, sent as gold records to outer space, or written in gin on a glass-top table in your favorite karaoke bar. Slip a copy into your shoulder-bag and take it wherever you go.” — Kazim Ali
More Information:
-
Self-Portrait with Crayon
Allison Benis White
Allison Benis White is the author of Small Porcelain Head, selected by Claudia Rankine for The Levis Prize in Poetry and named a finalist for the California Book Award and the PEN Center USA Literary Award. Her first book, Self-Portrait with Crayon, received the Cleveland State University Poetry Center Book Prize. Her poems have appeared in The American Poetry Review, The Iowa Review,Ploughshares, and elsewhere. Her honors include the Indiana Review Poetry Prize, an Emerging Writers Fellowship from The Writer’s Center, and a Writers Exchange Award from Poets & Writers. She is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Creative Writing at the University of California, Riverside.
“A fugitive mother haunts these prose poems where absences are presences that ‘briefly in the air crown the shape of what is no longer there.’ Although Degas—another motherless child—provides conceptual armature for Allison Benis White’s portrayals, this book might be A Season in Hell for our times. Its descents, sudden and disorienting, exert enormous pressure; there’s a narcosis of the depths in the voice, a refusal of return to mere surfaces that echoes Rimbaud. Yet White’s poems are also intimate as a box of pins—bright sharps she pricks into the map of orphan-world, to mark each site of betrayal and bewilderment.” –Robert Hill Long
“An oblique conversation with Degas reigns throughout this collection of oddly heartbreaking pieces. Against the backdrop of his paintings and sketches, we find ourselves in an intimate world, coherent but uncanny, where private memory becomes inseparable from the culture we hold in common, and all of it just barely cracked open, riven by interstices through which we glimpse the vivid but unsayable. White has given us a truly exceptional first collection, deeply musical and intricately haunting.” –Cole Swensen
“I found myself thinking of Frost as I read these beautifully disturbing poems—‘The whole great enterprise of life, of the world, the great enterprise of our race, is our penetration into matter, deeper and deeper, carrying the spirit deeper into matter.’ Allison Benis White does just that, pulsing between a childlike wonder at the things of this world, and a seemingly hard-earned self-consciousness at the difficulty in naming them—in these poems a mother is missing, a God is to be feared, the snow is broken, and yet, ‘maybe this is enough: to lose.’ This is an amazing debut.” – Nick Flynn
More Information:
-
A Martyr for Suzy Kosasovich
Patrick Michael Finn
Patrick Michael Finn was born in Joliet, Illinois and was raised there and in rural Southern California. His first book, the novella A Martyr for Suzy Kosasovich, was selected by Tom Barbash as winner of the Ruthanne Wiley Memorial Novella Competition and published by the Cleveland State University Poetry Center. A winner of the AWP Intro Award, selected by Benjamin Alíre Sáenz, and the Third Coast Fiction Prize, judged by Stuart Dybek, Finn’s stories have appeared in Ploughshares, TriQuarterly, Third Coast, Quarterly West, The Texas Review, The Clackamas Literary Review, Punk Planet, and Houghton Mifflin’s The Best American Mystery Stories. His fiction has also received citations in the Pushcart Prize and The Best American Short Stories. He lives in Arizona with his wife, poet Valerie Bandura, and their son James. Patrick’s short story collection, From the Darkness Right Under Our Feet (Black Lawrence Press, 2011), won the 2009 Hudson Prize and was selected as a Best Book of 2011 in GQ Magazine.
“In A Martyr for Suzy Kosasovich, Patrick Michael Finn writes of the disappearing Midwest, of Joliet, Illinois, and its factories and assembly lines and rail yards leading out of town. The tension and violence that mark this fierce portrait of urban decay are tempered by Finn’s insistence that the people in this world endure. Finn’s voice is striking, rich with the poetry of lives measured by time clocks and fistfights, and his novella seethes with dark and fascinating magic.” –Michael Jamie-Becerra
“Patrick Michael Finn has written a fierce and frightening, often gorgeously described, swirling, pulsing, sweating runaway car crash of a novella that reminded me of the darker works of Denis Johnson and Hubert Selby. A Martyr For Suzy Kosasovich is an unsparing look at the other side of the American dream; the collective rage that passes for friendship in some corners. While Finn’s characters are often short sighted and mean spirited, his luminous writing and knack for telling detail, makes their story relevant and unforgettable.” –Tom Barbash
More Information:
-
A Momentary Joke Book
Jayson Iwen
In 2006 Jayson Iwen returned from four years teaching at the American University of Beirut. He then worked in the medical software industry for over a year before joining the English Department at Beloit College. His book-length poem, Six Trips in Two Directions, won the Emergency Press book contest in 2005, and his experimental novella, A Momentary Joke Book, won the Cleveland State University Poetry Center novella contest in 2007.
“I’ve never read anything quite like A Momentary Joke Book. It is wonderfully intelligent, terribly funny, thought provoking, often wise and always compelling. Think Milan Kundera meets South Park. What unifies this wide ranging work is Jayson Iwen’s fresh approach to form and language, and his ability to surprise us and turn us on our heads.” –Tom Barbash
More Information:
-
To See the Earth
Philip Metres
Philip Metres is the author and translator of a number of books and chapbooks, including I Burned at the Feast: Selected Poems of Arseny Tarkovsky (forthcoming), Compleat Catalogue of Comedic Novelties by Lev Rubinstein (Ugly Duckling Presse 2014), A Concordance of Leaves (Diode 2013), abu ghraib arias (Flying Guillotine 2011), To See the Earth (Cleveland State 2008), and Behind the Lines: War Resistance Poetry on the American Home Front since 1941 (University of Iowa 2007). His work has appeared in Best American Poetry and has garnered two NEA fellowships, the Thomas J. Watson Fellowship, five Ohio Arts Council Grants, the Beatrice Hawley Award (for the forthcoming Sand Opera), the Arab American Book Award, the Creative Workforce Fellowship, the Cleveland Arts Prize, the Anne Halley Prize, and a Russian Institute of Translation grant. He is professor of English at John Carroll University in Cleveland.
“Do our voyages Auden once asked, ‘still promise the Juster Life?’ Too many of us would answer this question in negative—not so Philip Metres. His poems seek above all to traverse borders, not merely those between nations and cultures but also—and most importantly—between the personal and the political. With a sure command of craft, which he displays in abundance, Metres plays for high stakes. To See the Earth is a debut of unusual distinction.” –David Wojahn
“Set in landscapes ranging from Russia to Kentucky, from Ephesus to the Murder Capital of the World (that’s Gary, Indiana!), from Cleveland to Hiroshima, Philip Metres’ superb poems explore the confusion and complexities that ordinary people face in talking to one another—in the slippery language of everyday speech, or across the secured borders of grammar and history. Words are not abstractions to Metres—they’re as physical as fifty women making PEACE with their bodies, as mysterious as a bat soaring to unheard music, as illuminating as an ash tree ‘burning into its name.’ These poems echo in the mind long after the book is closed.” –Maura Stanton
More Information:
-
The Fat Sheep Everyone Wants
Bern Mulvey
Bern Mulvey has written poems, articles and essays in English and in Japanese, with recent work inPoetry, AGNI, Hokuriku Shijin Shishuu, the London Times, Poetry East, RUNES, Fine Madness, River City, and the American Language Review. He is the former poetry editor of The Missouri Review and served as faculty advisor/editor of Black Rock & Sage (Idaho State University’s literary journal) for several years. Currently, he is Dean of Faculty at Miyazaki International College in Japan, the youngest dean in Japan and one of just three non-Japanese to hold this rank at a Japanese university.
“Bern Mulvey, an American living in Japan for many years, has absorbed much of that great culture, particularly its literature. The Fat Sheep Everyone Wants is a beautiful and powerful book that is at the same time restrained and yawping over the rooftops of the world, that is both as compressed as diamonds and expansive and full of life as a vast ocean. Godspeed this wonderful book!” –Thomas Lux
“Bern Mulvey’s The Fat Sheep Everyone Wants is a study in intimacy—an intimacy conspiring across cultures, languages, families, and landscapes despite histories of wars, racism, and difference. In our time of global connections, Mulvey has created a poetry of negotiation, of tender but insistent communication. This is a poetry of witness without the distance of the spectator. Complicated because implicated, the voice in these poems speaks with profound precision because where it stands just happens to be where we are standing.” –Claudia Rankine
More Information:
-
Kiss, Kiss
Linda Lee Harper
Linda Lee Harper divides her time between Batesburg-Leesville, South Carolina, and Augusta, Georgia. Born in Cincinnati and educated at the University of Pittsburgh, where she received her M.F.A. in Poetry, she is the author of five poetry chapbooks and one previous full-length collection,Toward Desire (Word Works, 1996), winner of the 1995 Washington Prize for Poetry. Her poems have previously appeared in such journals as The Georgia Review, Rattle, Seneca Review, and Southern Humanities Review, and have been recognized with fellowship residences at Yaddo and the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts.
“Reading Kiss, Kiss is like waking up in a strange bed with a new tattoo. These poems ride close to the skin, and generate their own heat. Linda Lee Harper takes us from the haunting familiarity of ‘Summer, humid as an old aunt’s apartment when she boils the fat out of ham,’ to the electric pleasure of ‘the beautiful boys on the avenue, / parading, winking hips at my hips.’ It’s as if Harper has reclaimed all of the memories we’ve hidden beneath our mattresses, and repopulated them in a world that is at once alien and intimate. These are poems that demand a visceral response. Thankfully for the reader, they will not wash off.” –Mary Biddinger
“To read Linda Lee Harper’s Kiss, Kiss is to escape into another striking and memorable world, while never feeling as if you’ve completely left the familiar behind. Her poems are filled with the imagery of ordinary life, and yet these images are often slightly off-kilter and unexpected, so what emerges in these poems is honest, and sometimes uncomfortable. Harper’s poems remind us of our common desire to build connections among ourselves, to honor the singularity of the places we come from and the quirks of the people we love.” –Margot Schilpp
More Information:
-
Piece Work
Barbara Presnell
Barbara Presnell grew up in Asheboro, North Carolina, where her father was production superintendent of a locally owned textile manufacturing company. She has published three poetry chapbooks, and her work has appeared in such journals as Southern Review, Laurel Review, andMalahat Review. She holds an M.F.A. from the University of North Carolina, Greensboro. She lives in Lexington, NC, and teaches at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte.
“One does not know which to admire more in this collection—its fierce documentary honesty, or the perfect pitch of its imagined speakers. The two come together memorably in poem after poem, giving us a deep and abiding insight into industrial and post-industrial America. This, too, is part of poetry’s task: to tell what happened, and why it still matters.” –Jared Carter
“Charlie, the first-shift foreman at the textile mill, is proud to say, ‘What I do means something in this world.’ Other workers—Tonisha, Sherry, Jimmy, Bill—could say so too but probably won’t. InPiece Work, one of the strongest, most truthful books of poetry I have ever read, Barbara Presnell says it for them, to them, with them, in lines of pure and heartfelt respect. Here are some words—courage,exhaustion, hope, despair, persistence, defiance,—never spoken but always profoundly lived. In this fine poet’s hands, they are more than words.” –Fred Chappell
Other Publications/Links:
-
Duo: Novellas Vol. 1
Ruthanne Wiley and Eric Anderson
Pushcart nominee Ruthanne Wiley was the 1999 winner of the Ohio Writer Fiction Award for her short story “Rain Silver on Me.” Ms. Wiley earned her M.A. in English with a concentration in Creative Writing from Cleveland State University and was fiction editor of Whiskey Island Magazine. Her short story, “Things That Cannot Be,” was published in The Berkeley Fiction Review (University of California Press), in February, 2001. A former concert violinist with a bachelor’s degree from the Eastman School of Music, Ms. Wiley lived in Chagrin Falls, Ohio, with her husband Eli Epstein, and son, Adam.
Eric Anderson lives with his family in Elyria, Ohio. His poems and fiction have appeared in The Sun,Prairie Schooner, and Whiskey Island Magazine. A chapbook of his poetry, Confederate Season was published in 2002 by Lorain County Community College.
-
Sunflower Brother
Sam Witt
Sam Witt was born in Wimbledon, England and lived there until the age of seven, at which time his family moved to America, where they lived in North Carolina and then Virginia. After graduation from the University of Virginia and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, Witt lived and worked as a freelance journalist in San Francisco for several years, publishing in such magazines asComputerworld, the San Francisco Chronicle, Salon and Wired. His first book of poetry, Everlasting Quail, won the Katherine Nason Bakeless First Book Prize in 2000, sponsored by Bread Loaf.Everlasting Quail was published by UPNE the following year, and he received a Fulbright Fellowship to live and write in Saint Petersburg, Russia for a year. Witt has taught at the University of Iowa, Harvard University, the University of Missouri Kansas-City, Whitman College, and other institutions. He currently teaches creative writing and expository writing at Framingham State University.
“Sunflower Brother pairs a pastoral setting with images of fire, explosion, irradiation, and burning; both sets of images are equal parts creation and destruction. Witt’s voice always feels fresh from and flushed with loss and his elegies—poems written for the dead—not only acknowledge death and limitation but try to reinvest the mourning self with life. The result can be both beautiful and direct, whether the poet addresses a deceased relative, or speaks more generally to what he perceives as our decaying world. Often it sounds more like Witt’s been reading Keats than anything from his own century.” –Katie Peterson
“Sam Witt confesses, ‘The truth is, // I love the world. / Sometimes part of me even loves / what we’ve done to it.’ Witt loves our world hard, and what he does for it is to fashion a language, sad and bitter but tough and full of sunflowers, that shows us a way to love it, too. This is poetry for strong readers.” –Robert E. McDonough
“Sam Witt’s poems are rhapsody and ‘crisp singing’ both. The best are purest poetry—mixing beauty, the reaches of language, and an imagination equally made up of body and grace. He speaks in all our tones. His equivalences are fresh and reveal an involved, likable world.” –Carol Frost
More Information:
-
The Small Mystery of Lapses
Christopher Burawa
Christopher Burawa is a poet and translator. He was born in Reykjavik, Iceland. He holds an M.A. in English Language & Literature and an M.F.A. in Creative Writing from Arizona State University. He was awarded a MacDowell Colony fellowship in 2003. His translations of the contemporary Icelandic poet, Jóhann Hjálmarsson, Of the Same Mind, won the Toad Press International Chapbook Competition and was published in summer 2005. Currently, he is the Director of Literature and Public Information Officer for the Arizona Commission on the Arts. His book of poems, The Small Mystery of Lapses, was published by Cleveland State University Poetry Center in 2006. He was awarded the Joy Harjo Poetry Prize in 2010. He is the Director of the Center of Excellence for the Creative Arts at Austin Peay State University in Clarksville, Tennessee.
“In the richly detailed poems of Christopher Burawa’s first collection, The Small Mystery of Lapses,the narrative inclination of a fabulist is the accelerant that fuels a remarkable and incandescent imagination. Burawa leads us deftly and confidently in his poems from the familiar to the strange without provoking estrangement. For in a Burawa poem we have no doubt that when ‘[m]oths wake up,’ they ‘mistake the blue milk in the buckets / for starlight.’ The Small Mystery of Lapses marks the fresh and energetic appearance of a promising poet.” –Michael Collier
“In these spectacular first poems by Christopher Burawa, I begin to hallucinate the characters in a kind of pantomime that has in the past distinguished writers such as Joseph Conrad; there is Geppetto’s paste pot and the shiny foil of a local apocalypse, ghosts of Stalinists with spears of dried cod flaming up behind them on a pier in Iceland, and then the harlequins of a first-person narrative that crosses the river or doesn’t. Melodious and irritable, aspiring and brooding, I mean to say, these are poems from one of the most brilliant first books of a new millennium.” –Norman Dubie
“Christopher Burawa gives shape to the mysterious with images that are surprising and transformative: ‘As luck has it, / I’ m sitting in the clover, staring at her / with all the eyes grown out of my loneliness.’ Burawa’ s voice so effortlessly interweaves experience and imagination that we do not feel like readers so much as lucky inhabitants of the world he creates. Here is the smell of earth, an acute sense of the landscapes we carry in us, the fragility of history, an alchemy of wonder and loss, ‘the bordering trees [waving] // like confirmed bachelors without curtains.’ By turns lyrical, meditative, slyly surreal, Burrawa is a poet of astonishing presence and originality.” –Beckian Fritz Goldberg
-
Hunger Wide as Heaven
Max Garland
Max Garland was born and grew up in western Kentucky, and is the author of a previous book of poems, The Postal Confessions, from the University of Massachusetts Press. His poems, stories, and essays have appeared in Poetry, Gettysburg Review, Georgia Review, Best American Short Stories, and other journals and anthologies. He has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Bush Foundation, the James Michener Foundation, and the Wisconsin Arts Board. He now lives and teaches in Eau Claire, Wisconsin.
“I’m a mad fan of the delicious, radiant poems of Max Garland. He even makes me feel closer to that old-time religion than I’ve felt in quite a while. There’s a welcoming world here you’ll recognize, as well as a wistfulness that feels perfectly pitched, leaning out to mystery. You can string his poems together in your mind, drape them from the door inside your head like a welcoming wreath, and you’ll feel better walking through it.” –Naomi Shihab Nye
“Max Garland finds, in ‘the knottiness / of things’—wind, tree, bird, sky, water, light, a father’s milk truck, a mother’s perfume—a music of resilience, and grace. Simultaneously elegy and celebration, these poems explore themes of time and mortality, God and faith, memory and redemption, with a meditative serenity and urgency, in an affectionate accessible voice. For Garland, poetry is ‘a way to speak a loss away,’ to embrace, in emptiness, strength; in diminishment, desire; in loss, recovery; in hunger wide as heaven, the possibility, at least, of fulfillment. This is a beautiful, beautiful book.” –Ronald Wallace
“Kentucky bred, fed from ‘the faint blue source’ of dawning TV ‘the waning days of Methodism’—for grassroots American melancholy. Max Garland is the pure tobacco: free of poetic fashions, the wind in the linden his muse, surprised by the light that has traveled so far to find his transparent self on the dark glass of a hotel window, ‘a man still / in the midst of transmission’, through which our transient world can be seen.” –Eleanor Wilner
More Information:
-
Ordering the Storm: How to Put Together a Book of Poems
Susan Grimm
Susan Grimm is the author of Lake Erie Blue (BkMk, 2004) and the chapbook Almost Home(Cleveland State University Poetry Center, 1997). Her writing has appeared in such publications as the Plain Dealer, Rattapallax, and Spoon River Poetry Review. From 2004-2007 she served as Series Editor for the Cleveland State University Poetry Center. Born and raised in Cleveland, Susan Grimm received an M.A. in English from Cleveland State University in 1992. In 1996 she was awarded an Individual Artist Fellowship from the Ohio Arts Council.
“Susan Grimm’s Almost Home is a tightly weaved collection in celebration of the doggedness of life. Again and again, these poems offer a hand, insisting on seasons, on fevers, on dentist appointments, on the giddiness after lovemaking, ultimately on ‘the old names and their desires.’ With unabashed intimacy, her stunningly lyrical voice directs us away from the darkness, home.” –Claudia Rankine
“Ordering the Storm empowers readers to see the poetry collection as an artistic medium in itself, and offers diverse perspectives on the subject. Experienced writers and beginners alike will find inspiration and encouragement in the words of exceptional poets such as Maggie Anderson, Wanda Coleman, and Beckian Fritz Goldberg. This book should be required reading for all graduate student poets, even those who are still in the process of writing their first collection, because it includes essential information on poetic sequencing and useful strategies for examining a manuscript’s possibilities. One of the most exciting aspects of the book is the sense of community that readers feel upon exploring each essay. Ordering the Storm transforms the task of arranging poems from a solitary undertaking to a collaborative adventure.” –Mary Biddinger
More Information:
-
A Small Asymmetry
John Donoghue
John Donoghue is the author of the poetry collection Precipice (Four Way Books, 2000), and his poems have appeared in Agni, Alaska Quarterly Review, The Lancet, Prairie Schooner, The Virginia Quarterly Review, and other journals. He received his M.F.A. from the Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College. A native of New York City, he holds a B.S. and M.S. in electrical engineering from Northeastern University, and a Ph.D. in engineering from Case Institute of Technology (now Case Western Reserve University). After working for several years in industry as a Senior Control Engineer for the Industrial Nucleonics Corporation (now ABB), he joined the faculty of the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department at Cleveland State University where he presently teaches in the areas of control systems and digital signal processing.
“Imagine Marianne Moore’s scientific eye, Robert Lowell’s turbulent heart, and Billy Collins’ sleight-of-hand and you begin to glimpse the altogether agreeable chimera that is John Donoghue. The poems in A Small Asymmetry take the familiar surfaces of the world and probe them, rumple them, shake them out, reminding you, as the best poems do, of just how much you fail to see. In poems like ‘Neighbor’ and ‘Shelia’s Auras,’ and the splendid ‘Solstice,’ Donoghue’s restless intelligence and imagination are drawn equally to the silly and the sad, to the broken and the whole, to the beauty and absurdity of trying to make sense of things—ourselves in particular.” –George Bilgere
“The mind in these poems is sharp, brash, book-smart, and filled with rage for an order the world simply refuses to provide. The heart in these poems is street-smart and smart-alecky, yet tender with hard-earned wonder at the world’ s mysteries. ‘I love all of it’, Donoghue writes, and so do we after reading these masterful poems.” –Lewis Buzbee
“Idiomatic, wildly smart and emotionally open, alive alike to nature, myth, mathematics, family, physics, religion, malls, ATMs, and doctor’ s offices, John Donoghue’s poems read like tracks left by a consciousness imaginatively alert to humor and suffering, the chaos of history and the engineer’s passion for design. Follow them.” –Dan Tobin
More Information:
-
Metropolis Burning
Karen Kovacik
Karen Kovacik is Associate Professor of English and Director of Creative Writing at Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis. She is the recipient of a number of awards, including a guest fellowship at the University of Wisconsin’s Institute for Creative Writing, an Arts Council of Indianapolis Creative Renewal Fellowship, and a Fulbright Research Grant to Poland. Her poems and stories have appeared in many journals, and her translations of contemporary Polish poetry can be found in The Lyric, American Poetry Review, West Branch, and Poetry East. She is also the author ofBeyond the Velvet Curtain, winner of the Stan and Tom Wick Poetry Prize (Kent State University Press, 1999).
“In these lush and wry poems, Karen Kovacik returns to a city that burns in her imagination and ancestry, as she explores the once-gracious metropolis of Warsaw: its churches filled with ‘evangelists of shrapnel and of wax’; its architects designing modernist ‘radiant flat world[s]’ on their computer screens while living in dilapidated, centrally planned apartments ‘reeking of garbage’; its poets turning prematurely gray as they ‘kiss. . . in every dialect/of tobacco.’ Warsaw is ‘a coal on [her] tongue,’ as she feels charged with the prophet’s urgency to speak its name, and the names of other cities, in the voices of alternate selves, including the woman she might have been had her grandfather not emigrated from Silesia. With affection and irony, Kovacik makes her return, not only to a literal Poland in the last days of Soviet domination, but to the psychic landscape immersed and implicated in layers of history and conjugated in the ancestral mother tongue. Here, she blends the language of Eros with that of Realpolitik, in a collection of poetic love notes in which ‘all armaments have crossed the frontiers.’” –Carolyne Wright
“The beloved and ruined cities of Karen Kovacik’s Metropolis Burning are the substance of an individual and human history of the last century. In Warsaw, Krakow, and its near-neighbor Auschwitz; in Dresden, Prague, New Orleans, Belgrade, and Cleveland, she finds ‘Poetic justice: when image fits idea like a workboot.’ Out of her generous heart, her strict understanding of the crimp of labor on the free imagination, and her rare sense of humor, Karen Kovacik has made a gorgeous, multi-layered music I want to listen to again and again and again.” –Maggie Anderson
More Information:
-
The Job of Being Everybody
Doug Goetsch
Douglas Goetsch’s books of poetry include Nobody’s Hell (Hanging Loose Press, 1999), The Job of Being Everybody (Cleveland State University Poetry Center, 2004, winner of the CSU Poetry Center Open Competition), Nameless Boy (forthcoming), and four chapbooks. He is a recipient of fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the New York Foundation for the Arts, a Pushcart Prize, the Donald Murray Prize, the Paumanok Prize, and numerous other honors. His work has appeared in Poetry, The New Yorker, The Iowa Review, The Gettysburg Review, Best American Poetry, online at Garrison Keillor’s The Writer’s Almanac, and on the air at NPR.
“Douglas Goetsch is, without a doubt, an unbridled creative talent. His pinpoint lyricism and apparent reverence for craft stamp his work with a gorgeous signature, and he just gets better with every outing. These are poems of desire and disappointment, the magnificent and the mundane—and in Goetsch’s capable clutches, each one leaves an electric charge in the air. This is no misty-eyed look at where poetry has been or where it’ s going. The Job of Being Everybody is where poetry should be, where it should have been all along.” –Patricia Smith
“The gritty naturalism of these poems would qualify them as ‘anti-lyrical’ were it not for the mix of sweet nostalgia and bitter truth that gives them their pungent, winning flavor. It’s hard to imagine a reader who could resist Goetsch’s seductive opening lines.” –Billy Collins
“Douglas Goetsch’s autobiographical poetry is so consistently bleak, I’m not quite sure why I so often find it moving. I guess partly because the poetry seems so free from baloney, and because there is a sweetness down inside Goetsch’s insistence on the factual.” –Mark Halliday
More Information:
-
Someone Wants to Steal My Name
Henri Michaux and Nin Andrews
Henri Michaux was a highly idiosyncratic Belgian poet, writer, and painter who wrote in the French language. Michaux is best known for his esoteric books written in a highly accessible style, and his body of work includes poetry, travelogues, and art criticism. Michaux travelled widely, tried his hand at several careers, and experimented with drugs, the latter resulting in two of his most intriguing works, Miserable Miracle and The Major Ordeals of the Mind and the Countless Minor Ones.
Nin Andrews’ poems and stories have appeared in many literary journals and anthologies, includingPloughshares, Best American Poetry (1997, 2001, 2003), and Great American Prose Poems. She is the author of several books, including Why God Is a Woman (BOA, 2015); Southern Comfort(CavanKerry Press, 2009), Dear Professor, Do You Live in a Vacuum? (Subito Press, 2008), Sleeping with Houdini (BOA Editions Ltd., 2008), Midlife Crisis with Dick and Jane (Web Del Sol, 2005), andThe Book of Orgasms (Cleveland State University Poetry Center, 2000).
More Information:
-
Guide to Native Beasts
Mary Quade
Mary Quade’s poetry collection Guide to Native Beasts won the 2003 Cleveland State University Poetry Center First Book Prize. In 2001, her work was recognized with an Oregon Literary Fellowship. In 2006 and 2010, she received Ohio Arts Council Individual Excellence Awards for poetry, and in 2014, she received an OAC Individual Excellence Award for prose. Her poems have appeared in several anthologies, including On the Wing: American Poems of Air and Space Flight, ed. Karen Y. Olsen (University of Iowa); New Voices: Contemporary Poetry from the United States, ed. H.L. Hix (Irish Pages), which was published as part of the NEA’s International Literary Exchange Program; and the forthcoming Ley Lines, ed. H.L. Hix (Wilfrid Laurier University Press) and New Poems from the Midwest 2014, eds. Okla Elliot and Hannah Stephenson (New American Press). Her essays will appear in the anthologies From Curlers to Chainsaws: Women and Their Machines, eds. Joyce Dyer, Jennifer Cognard-Black, Elizabeth MacLeod Walls (Michigan State University Press) andWriting Essays: Twenty Essays and Interviews with Writers, eds. Jen Hirt and Erin Murphy (SUNY Press). She is an Associate Professor of English at Hiram College in Ohio, where she teaches creative writing.
“Mary Quade’s point of view is uniquely hers—linguistically inventive, edgily understated, poised and uncompromising. Nothing deflects her from rendering the relentless way we lurch forward, arms crossed, spreading damage like Edward Teller, wanting ‘a crater, some fallout to measure.’ Welcome to this new voice skillfully and mercifully calling us to account.” –Marilyn Krysl
“Though Mary Quade’s world in these quirkily meditative poems is populated with sundry native beasts—from bats and horses to a neon chicken that ‘squawks electric’—it becomes clear that the creature that most galvanizes her imagination is the human beast itself. Accordingly, she plumbs and explores (implicating herself in the doing) the various poignancies of our longings, as well as our ‘gloved’ fists and hidden ‘cold deeds’ our ‘blight of good intentions.’ The result is my favorite kind of book—attentive to the things of this world while remaining inherently philosophical.” –Stephen Dunn
More Information:
-
Buffalo Head Solos
Tim Seibles
Tim Seibles is the author of Buffalo Head Solos (Cleveland State University Press, 2004), Hammerlock(Cleveland State University Press, 1999), Ten Miles an Hour (Mille Grazie Press, 1998), Kerosene(Ampersand Press, 1995), Hurdy-Gurdy (Cleveland State University Poetry Center, 1992), and Body Moves (Corona Press, 1988). He is a former NEA fellow and has led workshops for Cave Canem and the Zora Neale Hurston-Richard Wright Foundation. He lives in Norfolk, Virginia, where he teaches courses for Old Dominion University’s English Department and M.F.A. in Writing Program.
“This is not a poetry of the highfalutin violin nor the somber cello, but a melody you heard somewhere that followed you home. Elegant and silly, irreverent, fun and funny, Tim Seibles’ poetry celebrates the spirit’s little moments of holy joy.” –Sandra Cisneros
“Tim Seibles will get you in his hammerlock and won’t let you go till he has taken you into the center of American politics and pop culture, the minds of birds, the Tao te Ching, your body, your so-called color, your so-called race. He lights up everything he touches like the candle at the heart of the lantern. A houseful of voices speaks through him in language so tenable, you’ll at times feel bruised, at times made love to. I read a lot of poetry. I’ve never read poetry like this.” –Reginald McKnight
“Tim Seibles’ version of our changing and growing American speech range widely, from anguish to comedy, from transcendence to earthly bewilderment. The joy of reading these poems is like overhearing a very smart, crazy neighbor’s thoughts as they move between philosophical inquiry and praise for the everyday.” –Li-Young Lee
More Information:
-
One of Everything
Diane Gilliam Fisher
Diane Gilliam Fisher, whose family was a part of the Appalachian outmigration from West Virginia and Kentucky, was born in Columbus, Ohio. She has a Ph.D. from the Ohio State University and an M.F.A from the Warren Wilson Program for Writers. She received an Individual Artist Fellowship from the Ohio Arts Council in 2003, and Kettle Bottom received the 2004 Intro Award from Perugia Press, a poetry publisher based in Florence, MA.
“In a down-home vernacular recalling her elementary school do’s and don’ts, Fisher writers: ‘It’s not allowed telling what you dreamed / for sharing, you have to bring something / people can see.’ This could double as her own arts poetica—the way her language carriers a particularizing, living presence, stripped of everything false. These deeply-felt, wide-awake, powerful poems are a touch-stone for the genuine.” –Eleanor Wilner
“Diane Gilliam Fisher’s first book of poems goes straight to the heart of a family, and a woman’s place at the heart of it. ‘The heart gets a hankering, some days,’ she says, ‘for a new sentence to sing // but an old rhythm thrums / and drums through her rooms, // a bass line, a syntax whose momentum / the heart is hard-pressed to overcome.’ In this lovingly gathered collection of poems, Fisher’s voice sings both the heart’s hankering after new songs, and that old thrumming syntax of mother and daughter that underpins and holds up a woman’s life. Motherhood uses up all of your emotions, a friend once remarked. Fisher takes on all of them, and renders them believably and memorably—the fear as she sits with her baby daughter, hearing the diagnosis of cystic fibrosis, or anger and despair as she listens to her daughter’s friend relate tales of family abuse…and here is her response to her own heart’s wondering how to overcome, how to sing, language pieced together like a Jacob’s Ladder, dark pieces stair stepping up across the quilt: ‘I know this quilt won’t save anyone, but I don’ t know / what else to do,’ she concludes in ‘Every Rung is Higher, Higher.’ Like every poet, she is looking for a new sentence to sing, regardless of the syntax, and like every real poet, she wrestles with her angles, staying up nights, rehearsing that ancient story until she is blessed.” –Kathryn Stripling Byer
“Music as wild as a dance tune on a country fiddle and as slow and sad as a shape note hymn informs Diane Gilliam Fisher’ s complex poems. In One of Everything, she gives us a world in which it seems that one of everything goes wrong: illness, violence, tragic, and premature death. This narrative of three generations of women with roots in the coal camps and prayer meetings of the southern Appalachian mountains is ‘. . . one / long history / of the verb / to bear.’ It is as if this poet has made a pact with her art not to flinch from any terror as long as the poems agree to keep on coming. And in return for her allegiance, they do. With metrical precision, these often-formal poems work out their rhythms through a Keatsian understanding of human mortality and the endurance of art. Fisher is loyal to the objects of this world — ‘. . . porch and stove, the smell // of coffee and old paper / cold morning air and coal oil. . .’ And she writes of ‘fist and floor . . .shotgun and belt. . .’ without a trace of the romantic or the falsely redemptive. This is a dangerous poetry that ‘in the way of our people,’ speaks hard truth, bears up and, ‘. . . singing praise, palms and face upturned. . .,’ crosses over. I am grateful to welcome this necessary book to the table.” — Maggie Anderson
More Information:
-
Double Exposure
Sarah Kennedy
Sarah Kennedy’s first book, From the Midland Plain, was published in 1999 by Tryon, a small press in North Carolina. Her second, Flow Blue, won the 2001 Elixir Press contest. She is a co-editor ofCommonwealth: Contemporary Poets of Virginia, from University of Virginia Press. She has a doctorate in Renaissance poetry from Purdue and an M.F.A. from Vermont College. She teaches at Mary Baldwin College in Staunton and lives in Rockbridge County, Virginia with her husband, Rod Smith.
“Kennedy’s narrative poems, many in unrhymed couplets that befit the stop-start retelling of child and sexual abuse, are horrific and spellbinding. A poem titled ‘Stone’ opens: ‘Will it always be there, swelling my side?’ The answer’s yes. Cathartic yet controlled, this is a mordant and powerful collection.” –Maxine Kumin
“Sarah Kennedy packs punch after punch of truth-telling in Double Exposure, her third book. She employs again the form of memoir-in-poems, a form that allows her to tell stories compressed with double entendre and graced by music. It’s a marvel how much she squeezes into every line, and how deftly she exposes an individual life caught in a sometimes brutal warp of family, gender, class, and religion. Her intelligence transcends them all.” –Natasha Saje
“What distinguishes these poems from other autobiographical lyrics is a tough linguistic precision coupled with a kind of sustained ferocity: Sarah Kennedy takes no prisoners. Hers are vivid and haunting poems.” –David Wojahn
More Information:
-
The Saint of Letting Small Fish Go
Eliot Khalil Wilson
Eliot Khalil Wilson is a native of Virginia. He received his Ph.D. in Critical Theory and American Drama from the University of Alabama in 2000. His work has won awards from the Academy of American Poets and a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. The Saint of Letting Small Fish Go is his first book.
“Eliot Wilson’s informed heart casts an ever-widening net of sympathies that trammels up Viet Nam and zoo animals of Paris, Damascus and the Salvation Army Store in Tuscaloosa, Alabama. Like the rain he touches everything. He misses little. He sounds the nation, our history, our work, our desires and weeps for those who have yet to be wept for. An impressive and memorable debut.” –Bruce Smith
“Poetry should enliven us, should make us more suspicious of our work-a-day lives that so often oblige us to admit only small burps of feeling. I’ve grown sick of poems nudged along by a tepid heart whose only recommendation is that they are ‘well crafted’ or ‘carefully considered.’ A book of poems should be far more than smart, should in fact, fuel hours of trans-rational frenzy about how to be human, how to observe and engage the traveling circus of society. The Saint of Letting Small Fish Gobalances trouble, insight, humor and compassion the way a well-lived life does. Page by page, I was moved to pay progressively more attention to Eliot Wilson’s words, to the energetic chase they embody. We’re long overdue for such poetry.” –Tim Seibles
More Information:
-
Before the Blue Hour
Deirdre O'Connor
Deirdre O’Connor’s first collection of poetry, Before the Blue Hour is the Cleveland State University Poetry Center Prize winner for 2001. She has been the recipient of an individual artist’s grant from the Pennsylvania Arts Council, and has won an Academy of American Poets Prize. She works at the Writing Center at Bucknell University in Lewisburg, Pennsylvania, where she also teaches in the Bucknell Seminar for Younger Poets.
“The poems in Before the Blue Hour beautifully document encounters between visible and invisible worlds, between presence and absence, between the self and its fictions. In language that shatters just as it consoles, Deidre O’Connor offers ‘Hope for words as stars / disappearing, daybreak waking each world.’ Every poem in this book is a star, illuminating our secrets and our griefs, charting its way into the unspoken future.” –Nicole Cooley
“Reading the first poem I heard a voice and the voice was a chord of human music: so many notes at once: thought, feeling, wit, and the alleviating joy of speech itself: a syntax that created the melody it needed. And the voice spoke from deep necessity—to the inner life and the outer world at the same time as a way of living through life. These poems aren’t records; they are experiences. I read the book from beginning to end and then started at the beginning again.” –Marie Howe
More Information:
Printing is not supported at the primary Gallery Thumbnail page. Please first navigate to a specific Image before printing.
