BOOKS
NEW
Dark Devouring: Songs from Magpie & Sun Mountain
Thomas McGuire’s Dark Devouring is a work of art unlike any collection I’ve ever read, quite singular in its focus—and yet, in the same breath, it’s layered in history, it’s a piercing exploration of species extinction and genocide, the wholesale slaughter of life, with the historical receipts that the magpie has gathered. The language itself is exquisite and restless, inquisitive and musical, woven into verses chiseled with gem-like precision.
—Brian Turner, author of The Wild Delight of Wild Things
Maxine Susman has learned over the decades how to share the world with the bear who “each year…comes closer,” and in Northern Swim, she teaches the reader how that can be done. These poems fearlessly explore the intimate world of growing older, of illness and death, and the broader world of history and the political, while reveling in love and in memory. Susman is a poet at ease in the natural world—the trout pond, the beach, birds, animals—with an environmental slant and an eye attentive to detail.
—Jessica de Koninck, author of Cutting Room
"Ilene Millman’s poems stretch our minds. Words like whines, and whynotness sum up her open-minded thinking and startling fearlessness. Her poems take their subject matter from everyday activities, like walking in the woods and watching dough rise, back through memories of childhood and young womanhood. Everything in this collection of poems is deeply felt and skillfully expressed—the words echo the world of a mother, a grandmother, a wife, a teacher of language. "
—Elizabeth Danson, author of Look Again
We No More Sang for the Bird: A Poem of World War I
by Daniel Weeks
"Homer has risen from the Underworld to write this epic paean to the poets of World War I. But wait! It’s Daniel Weeks who has revived Rupert Brooke, T. E. Hulme, Wilfred Owen, Edward Thomas, and Isaac Rosenberg. The immediacy, imagery, and music of We No More Sang for the Bird is so searing, we become these soldiers, intimately sharing their passions, fears, and desires. Invocation, communion, revival, redemption—this is a 4-D travelogue through time and space."
—Susanna Rich, author of SHOUT! Poetry for Suffrage
by Luray Gross
"While reading this generous new collection, I thought often of Keats and the vale of soul-making and his “three grand materials” that act upon each other in this process: the intelligence, the human heart, and the World. While dropping none of these key threads, Gross crucially adds the body, a body full of yearning and flexibility, one that takes walks literally and dreamily, that breathes and has a pulse while taking the pulse of our age."
—Jeanne Marie Beaumont, author of Letters from Limbo
by Steve Nolan
"A Palace of Ruins, Steve Nolan’s new book from Ragged Sky Press is a power-packed autopsy of man’s inhumanity to man. With intelligence and courage, he shares experiences of pain, loss and death firsthand, yet we are left with the residue of hope. Altogether, this collection accomplishes what all great books do, it makes the greater poem. This book is a must read.
—Bill Wunder, author of Welcome to Paradise: New and Selected Poems
by Rachel Hadas
"In Ghost Guest, Rachel Hadas embraces important and eternal themes—family, mortality, the relentlessness of time passing, the unreliability of memory, the fresh renewal of returning spring—and treats them with the utterly flexible skill of her seasoned and artful decades-long practice, being now conversational in tone, now notational in style, suddenly deftly formal, or classically lyrical. This latest collection offers constant pleasure, enlightenment, and surprise."
—Lydia Davis, author of Our Strangers
“These poems present one man’s reckonings with the missteps and right steps, the haunting passions that make up a life. What strikes me especially is how Michael Simms is able to show how permeable a life is, how the traffic between a flesh-and-blood person and the spirit of memory goes both ways and allows for—beyond regret—thanks and forgiveness. The tough tickets we may draw in this world define us but do not necessarily limit us."
—Baron Wormser, author of The History Hotel
"Mike Schneider wields impressive craft and achieves many moments of beauty in Spring Mills. His poems poignantly explore the relationship of a son to his real and archetypal 'old man,' chronicle experience in a small nation undergoing revolutionary change (Nicaragua), and illuminate the arc of intimacy in romantic life. Schneider writes with exceptional grace about music, leading readers to share his joy in appreciation of, among others, stark fiddle tunes, the 'raggedy piano' of an old-time hymn-singing session, and a Brahms sextet".
—TJ Beitelman, author of This Is the Story of His Life
“Arlene Weiner's new book, More, is a treasure of brilliant, gem-like poems which reveal
her resonant voice, deft wit, and wide-ranging vision. In writing about friendship and family,
nature and history, grief and aging, Weiner draws from Judaica and her deep wells of
empathy and knowledge. These luminous, beautifully crafted poems chronicle a rich and fully realized life. They deserve to be read again and again.”
—Joan E. Bauer, author of The Camera Artist
“Umit Singh Dhuga’s capacious imagination spans continents and history even as his fastidious language halts cliche at the border. In the resulting blend of distant gaze and intimate scrutiny, Wince is distinguished by the poise and precision of Dhuga’s poetic voice, a voice whose cosmopolitan irony accommodates both elegiac tenderness and moments of piercing beauty.”
—Rachel Hadas, author of Pandemic Almanac
by Bruce Lowry
The poet draws from glimpses, places and remembrances along life’s journey, stopping, on occasion, to observe the torments and joys of Southern boyhood, the grit and byways of New Jersey, and even one sensuous Italian sunset. Lowry salvages both the tragic and humane from any moment, allowing memories to “burrow themselves into tops / of plum trees …/ and rust of clothesline,” and yet be open to the darker, lyrical pages of life. As Michael Waters observes, these poems are “taut and imagistic, brimming with desire as a stay against mortality.”
by Jessica Grim and Melanie Neilson
Alsop's Tables contains collaborative poems by Jessica Grim and Melanie Neilson, and art by Jean Foos. Jena Osman has described Neilson and Grim as “two poetic engineers of generous and raucous intellect.”
Set in a quasi-Russian dreamscape, the blackly comic, darkly beautiful poems and fables contained in this vast volume chronicle, in an elaborate symphonic arrangement of recurring themes and motifs, the miscellaneous travails of several interacting characters—ballerina, chess master, opera tenor, cabaret chanteuse (if not, too, the odd street urchin, idiot, or organ grinder)—all under the vigilant glare of the anarchically violent, subversively vulgar Petrushka puppet thwacking away savagely at his various adversaries with his beloved slapstick.
by Rachel Hadas
In our precarious moment of global contagion and shifting technologies, Rachel Hadas has found a lyric measure to mark the monumentality of our age and its accompanying stillness that occasions a gorgeous chronicling of the seasons, small natural wonders, humane acts of gift-giving, but also generative reminiscences that find the poet “pawing through time like an eager lover.”
—Major Jackson, author of The Absurd Man
Steinberg’s wealth of worldly experience, accompanied by substantial credentials in the arts and the academy, impel the book’s diversity of themes and prosody: reflections on Hemingway and Matisse in free verse and of Dickinson in rhymed quatrain; a passionate sonnet of abandoned love (“Love’s Losings”) in counterpoint with licentious limericks; sightings into war, Americana, the outdoors, China, Poland; imaginings about myth-laden Greece. Humor, outrage, sighs are embedded in this volume. “Art,” says Steinberg, “is taking risks.”
“The lines of Michael Simms’ Nightjar are deceptively relaxed, as if you are being invited into his house: ‘It was one of those April snows/we used to get in Pittsburgh/before America went to hell;’ words a sane person with a heart might say but pitched intimately as poetry. Like William Stafford he can write an apparently plain line that reveals its longing as an after effect: ‘the darkness inside me/would merge with//the darkness of the world.’ A great book to hang out with all weekend and then start over again.”
—Doug Anderson, author of Horse Medicine
RECENT
With Aeneas in a Time of Plague
What does The Aeneid have to do with us? Bursk, like Vergil, descends. He teaches us how the ordinary world becomes mythic in our memories, shaping our fears, our loves, and our fates. Then he brings us back the way that poets always have—through song. He writes, “We know music and poetry / will not save anyone, but we sing anyway.” In this time of disease and uncertainty, when many of us have lost so much, Bursk reminds us that The Aeneid is our story, too.
—Brandi George, author of Faun: A Play in Verse
The Diamond Cutter’s Daughter: A Poet’s Memoir
In Terranova’s memoir, vignettes sparkle like her father’s precious stones. Born in 1939 in Philadelphia as the youngest child and only daughter in an Orthodox Jewish family, she quietly flouts cultural norms. Through agile, sensual prose, the reader sees a black-haired brother and his red-haired wife as ‘a game of checkers, a regal battle.’
—Natasha Sajé, author of Terroir: Love Out of Place
In a Beat-like voice that's spontaneous, raw, and irrepressible, Michael Simms writes with the courage of a witness and the wisdom of a survivor. These poems leap, lament, pierce, transcend, delve, witness, praise, and testify to the curative power of poetry.
—Chard deNiord, author of In My Unknowing
American Carnage: An Officer’s Duty to Warn
by Steve Nolan
Steve Nolan, Major, USAF, Ret., served six Commanders in Chief (Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush, Bill Clinton, George W. Bush and Barack Obama). Initially a line officer in the Air Force assigned to Electronic Security Command, Elmendorf AFB, Anchorage, Alaska, he left the Air Force to earn his Master's degree in clinical social work from Barry University in Miami, Florida.
by David Keller and Eloise Bruce
With clarity, honesty, and marvelously telling detail, these two gifted poets evoke the depths and complexities of their continuing life together after David is diagnosed with an incurable brain disease. While confronting darkness and loss, these side-by-side poems are also full of love, warmth and laughter. Readers who have known or cared for someone facing dementia will find support and comfort in this accessible and profoundly moving collection.
—Susan Allen Toth, No Saints around Here: A Caregivers Days
Outside/In: On Loving Nature & Living with Parkinson's
by Ed Bieber
A collection of poems by naturalist Ed Bieber about living with Parkinson's disease and coping through nature.
From the Foreword: "I also came to make more of the fact that my love of the great outdoors had been whetted by those youthful hours amid the natural splendors right outside the door of my family home. Harriman was an embarrassment of riches, by comparison, but I was convinced that people didn't actually need to range so far to appreciate what nature has in store."
by Lynn Levin
The subjects of these unpretentious but tantalizing poems range from the domestic and the everyday to the mythic and the religious. Lynn Levin is a poet of the disused, the broken, the modest, and the unrecovered. She is also a poet of restitution and repair. From the grocery store to the classroom, from adolescence to deathbed, from past to present, and from home to abroad, the arc of her poems is that of the life we all lead. She offers us gentle examples of how to lead it. Her many virtues, variously presented and contained here, are more than minor. Maturity, wisdom, and wit are among them.
--Willard Spiegelman, author of Seven Pleasures
by Paul Sohar
Personal, philosophical, social, nature-oriented—all of these adjectives characterize this book composed by a mature cosmopolitan poet. The book's opening poem (“The Fences I've Climbed Over”) kicks everything off by describing the poet's struggles in life in terms of this metaphor, based on his actual escape from Hungary, his homeland, after its unsuccessful uprising against the brutal Soviet rule. Overcoming that particular obstacle, both literally and figuratively, set Paul Sohar on a journey into his new life that has taken numerous twists and turns along the way.
--Alan Britt, author of Violin Smoke,
Towson University
by Steve Nolan
The poems in Base Camp take us from the steep slopes of Mt. Everest to the darkness where thirty-three Chilean miners are trapped. With an insistent empathy born of passion, trauma, and illness, Nolan's poems reach out to women making their daily trek for water and to an ice-trapped whale, from a medic tending the wounded in the range of fire to an abused three-year-old hiding in shadows. Written with a directness that does not indulge in distracting pyrotechnics of obscurity, these poems invite us "home/to the repository of music: the human heart."
--Luray Gross, author of Lift"
The Bookshop on Lafayette Street: A Collection of Stories and Poems
Edited by Eric Maywar
A collection of stories and poems about bookstores and the love of books. Everything that you love about bookstores is in the collection: books, a sense of wonder and discovery, the cozy clutter, idiosyncratic book lovers, and the feeling that you are in a magic haven buttressed against the cruelties of the world.
Contributors: Ilene Dube, Jeff Edelstein, Barry Gross, John Gummere, Yusef Komunyakaa, Doc Long, Eric Maywar, Leon Rainbow, Jackie Reinstedler, Nancy Scott, Thomas Webster, and David Lee White.
by Luray Gross
Luray Gross's Lift represents the work of an accomplished poet at the height of her powers. Assured and lyrical, with no word wasted, Gross's poems are precisely observed while containing multitudes. On subjects that range from childhood, adulthood, and family life to religious faith, war, and social justice, the stories Gross tells are united in their power to move us toward a new recognition of our shared humanity.
by Zoltán Böszörményi
Translated from the Hungarian by Paul Sohar
Zoltán Böszörményi's voice rises pure and truth-filled to join the poets not alone of middle-Europe, but of the world. This is a poetry whose DNA is sourced in the struggles and rebellions of a Hungarian past, but which carries forward to join in a philosophical chorale enriched by place, ideas and love itself. The tone is uncompromising, sometimes ironic, and never overstated.
Artist book documenting an artist project on the subject of a happy home and also thoughts on home as part of a community. It includes artwork (watercolor/graphite painting) created after meeting and talking with community members, as well as text and photographs of interviewed participants.
Poetry by Steve Nolan
Pastels by NJ DeVico
Newly diagnosed with multiple myeloma, Steve Nolan called every person in the country rumored to have the same form of cancer. He was misinformed about NJ DeVico's leukemia; she had myelodysplastic syndrome. The initial phone call revealed his love of poetry and her love of art. A collaboration—and friendship—was born.
Silver Pirouettes: Selected Poems
by György Faludy
Translated from the Hungarian by Paul Sohar
"György Faludy arrives bearing a truth that burns deep in our bones--that mankind is not benign, that suffering is meaningless, and that love, like death, is inevitable. He might be speaking of his own poetry when he writes, 'this land can be frighteningly cruel / but its plain face cannot tell a lie.' "
--Yves Sorotobi, editor and publisher, TheWriteDeal Press
by Ellen Foos
"In her new collection of poems, The Remaining Ingredients, Ellen Foos takes on the challenges, frustrations and, ultimately, joys of 'marrying and adopting / in one giant late-middle-age swoop.' And that's just the beginning of a wide-ranging perspective that she offers, with reflections on humanity's incongruities, death's inevitability, family roots and enduring ties, old friendships, and so much more. The poems are rendered masterfully with plain-spoken candor--some graced with a gentle but insistent social consciousness and others with a touch of soft-spoken humor. Having attained a lifetime of varied experience, Foos knows, 'It's okay to stir instead of shake / the remaining ingredients.'"
--James Keane, author of What Comes Next
"Reading Arlene Weiner's poems is like walking down a long hall opening doors. Behind each door is a tableau: two girls sit on a bed eating chocolates; a bird moves like a flamenco dancer; a mother and daughter cut radishes; two women in an Automat are overheard talking about sex; an old woman makes an entrance, belting out a song like a showgirl. But as we move from room to room, strange questions occur to us: Does the bird move like a flamenco dancer, or does the flamenco dancer move like a bird? And why is God lounging on the sofa while nations are at war and Terror tap-dances down the stairs? Weiner's poems seem like bits of stories from her past, but they won't stay in their pretty containers."
—Michael Simms, founder of Autumn House Press and Vox Populi
Can a dream be documented? Is a document really a dream? These questions surface in the poems of Charlotte Nekola's collection, Della Who. In works both lyrical and wry, the poems inhabit landscapes too real to be real, shaded both by wonder and darkness. The poems travel from Brooklyn to Missouri prairies, from Atlantic islands, to Prague, and the sea. They probe complex relationships—mothers, fathers, children, lovers. At the same time, they hold a mirror of the self to the imagined self.
Mennonite on the Edge
An Unlikely Romance
A new love story and a woman's search for identity.
Though a country-girl at heart, MaryJo hopes to leave behind her identity as a Mennonite in marrying Adam and living a life of adventure in Manhattan. But news from home kicks up memories she'd tried to forget. While she begins to question her choices, Adam lands a high-profile job, making a move seem impossible. MaryJo must make peace with her past and her present so that she can live the life of her dreams with Adam. Can she reconcile her craving for a life of poetry and country serenity in the City that Never Sleeps?
Buy from Amazon.
Dark as a Hazel Eye:
Coffee and Chocolate Poems
Edited by Ellen Foos, Vasiliki Katsarou, and Lynne Shapiro
Chocolate as craving, as reward, as medicine; coffee as companion, cultural export, rite and ritual.
The process of brewing and tempering Ragged Sky Press' anthology of coffee and chocolate poems has begun. It should be ready for a taste in Winter 2015. Our Princeton launch party will be February 8, 2016.
A espaldas de Dios / Behind God's Back
by Sándor Kányádi
A bilingual poetry collection translated into English from the original Hungarian by Paul Sohar Translated into Spanish by Rodrigo Escobar Holguín, Ricardo Pérez-Salamero García, and Carlos Hernández Peña
"Sándor Kányádi, resident alien urging fellow citizens to pay closer attention to the status of their fleeting lives, or a sad, clear voice among the din? Kányádi in an intelligent, nearly naked language tackles head-on the important issues of our time..."
--Alan Britt, Towson University, Maryland
Cannonball Lagoon
As one of today's most dynamic abstract artists, Jean Foos has been involved in the New York art scene for many years. This new volume covers Foos' current exhibition at the Governors Island Art Fair. Her work is instantly recognizable, with mesmerizing patterns painted over gallery invitations and other promotional cards.
Edited by Richard Jochum and Ruth Zamoyta
The Blanket Stories Project invited poets, artists, and musicians to respond to a tale of sibling rivalry, then culminated in an exhibit/reading/performance in June 2014 at Teachers College, Columbia University in the City of New York. Select poems and illustrations appear in this color anthology. Conceived of by artist Richard Jochum, Blanket Stories aims to encourage appreciation for art and poetry as well as collaboration across fields. It demonstrates how a parable can be read and reinterpreted in an infinite number of ways.
by Lynn Levin
Miss Plastique, the fourth full-length poetry collection by Lynn Levin, invites the reader into a world of female bravado in which Miss Plastique and her many selves rant, fret, joke, fall in love, dress up, and do their hair. A poet known for her eclecticism, humor, and range of poetic styles, Levin is also a writer and literary translator. She teaches at Drexel University and the University of Pennsylvania.
by Ishmael von Heidrick-Barnes
Intimate Geography is a poetic record of discovery. Ishmael Von Heidrick-Barnes invites his readers to join him on an international trek through many of this century's major events. It is a journey where the boundaries between person and place, language and life counter-intuitively vanish under the lens of poetry.
When Ishmael points the telescopic eye of verse at the world, he finds the world looking back. When he turns the same navigational instrument inward towards his psyche, the unedited universe streams into focus.
Memento Tsunami, Vasiliki Katsarou's first collection of poetry, is available from Ragged Sky Press. Memento Tsunami is a collection marked by startling abstract and lyrical poems that draw from a wide variety of cultural influences. These include her Greek heritage, background in European filmmaking, as well as a childhood among the ghosts of New England Transcendentalism. Katsarou's work reflects a nostalgia for origins as well as a 21st-century visionary impulse to reconcile disparate worlds.
I Should Have Given Them Water
I Should Have Given Them Water is a sensual and heartbreaking new collection of poetry by San Francisco-based poet Eileen Malone. With a maximalist style, Malone's hard-edged poems make the most of grammatical ambiguities and compel the reader to fully engage with her unique sense of the incongruous. Offering feminine as well as feminist testimony to the experience of being a woman in the 21st century, Malone is a widely published poet, mental health activist and the host of a television series on the arts in California.
TIMELESS
Eating Her Wedding Dress:
A Collection of Clothing Poems
edited by Ellen Foos, Vasiliki Katsarou, and Ruth O'Toole
100 contemporary poets—local stars and literary luminaries such as Kim Addonizio, Margaret Atwood,Billy Collins, Elaine Equi, Jorie Graham, Maxine Kumin, Paul Muldoon, and Charles Simic—join together to celebrate clothing in its many forms and functions: as desire, as ghost, as body, as poetry, as talisman, as transformer of the soul.
AND MORE BOOKS BY RAGGED SKY PRESS
The Ragged Sky Poetry Series
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