
Poetry & Short Prose, 160 pages
ISBN 978-1-931236-70-6(paperback), $18.00
ISBN 978-1-931236-71-3(hardcover), $28.00 |
Face
Sherman Alexie
Sherman Alexie’s poems, fiction,
essays and films have won him an international following
since his first book The Business of
Fancydancing was published by
Hanging Loose in 1992. Smoke Signals,
the film he adapted from one of his short stories and co-produced,
enlarged his audience still further. Alexie’s awards
include the National Book Award for Young People’s
Literature, the Boston Globe-Horn Book Award, the Western
Literature Association Distinguished Achievement Award, the
Regents’ Distinguished Alumnus
Award from Washington State University, the PEN/Malamud Award
from PEN/Faulkner Foundation, as well as honors and awards
from the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Lila Wallace
Reader’s Digest Foundation. An enrolled Spokane/Coeur
d’Alene Indian, Alexie lives in Seattle with his wife
and sons. |
"Mr.
Alexie's is one of the major lyric voices of our time."—The
New York Times Book Review
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ISBN:
978-1-931236-97-3 (paperback), $18
ISBN: 978-1-931236-98-0 (hardcover), $28 |
Getting Lost in a City Like
This
Jack Anderson
This is Jack Anderson‘s
tenth collection of poems. His previous books include The
Invention of New Jersey, Field
Trips on the Rapid Transit,
and Traffic: New and Selected Prose
Poems.
A native of Milwaukee and a longtime resident
of Manhattan, Anderson is also a well-known dance writer
and critic, for The New York Times, Dancing
Times (London)
and New York Theatre-Wire, among
others. He has written or edited seven books on dance, including The
One and Only: The Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo and Art
Without Boundaries: The World of Modern Dance. He
and George Dorris co-founded
Dance Chronicle and co-edited it
for 21 years.
“As a long-time admirer of Jack Anderson’s poetry,
I am again impressed by his enduring mastery of the art.
His latest collection reveals all his wit, his wayward charm,
and the innocence that allows him his shocking honesty—qualities
that have always marked his poems but are here even more
sharply evident. With urban sophistication and the wide-eyed
alertness of a child, he reports from the borders of sanity
and beyond, in often-lurid tales that strangely make perfectly
good sense. These poems are such fun to read, an antidote
to the humorless profundities of our Great Thinkers and Poets,
those pompous asses. Long live this mischievous imp of a
poet, who replaces the baby Jesus in the church crèche with
a lecher of a garden gnome! I recommend this delightful poet
to the world!”—Edward
Field |
What
critics have said about earlier poetry collections by Jack
Anderson:
“Whether inspired by dreams or fairy tales or the
uncanny paradoxes of everyday life, Jack Anderson’s
prose poems evoke a sense of wonder.” – The
New York Times Book Review
“The spirit of dance emerges in his poetry’s
now hypnotic, now fiery energy, movement, and pacing... playful
magic.” – The Village
Voice
“These poems...are as evanescent as the urban kaleidoscope
he depicts.... This is a sophisticated mind cultivating childlike,
Blakean wisdom....” – Library
Journal
“Anderson is admirably inventive and at home whether
composing a love poem, elegy, narrative, allegory, lyric
sequence, or prose poem.” – American
Book Review
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ISBN: 978-1-931236-90-4 (paperback) $18.00
ISBN: 978-1-931236-99-7 (hardcover) $28.00 |
On The
Imperial Highway
New and Selected Poems
Jayne Cortez
Jayne Cortez is the author of eleven books of poetry and performer
of her poems with music on nine recordings. Her voice is celebrated
for its political, surrealistic, dynamic innovations in lyricism,
and visceral sound. Cortez has presented her work and ideas
at universities, museums, and festivals around the world. Her
poems have been translated into many languages and widely published
in anthologies, journals, and magazines. She is a recipient
of several awards including: Arts International, the NEA Creative
Writing Fellowship, the International African Festival Award,
the Langston Hughes Medal, The American Book Award, and the
Thelma McAndless Distinguished Professorship Award. Her most
recent books are The Beautiful
Book (Bola Press) and
Jazz Fan Looks Back (Hanging Loose
Press). Her latest CDs with the Firespitter Band are Find
Your Own Voice, Borders of Disorderly
Time (Bola Press), and Taking the
Blues Back Home, produced by
Harmolodic and by Verve Records. Cortez is organizer of the
international symposium “Slave Routes: Resistance, Abolition & Creative
Progress” (NYU) and director of the film Yari
Yari Pamberi: Black Women Writers Dissecting Globalization. She
is co-founder and president of the Organization of Women Writers
of Africa, Inc., and can be seen on screen in the films Women
In Jazz and Poetry In Motion.
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“Cortez
has been and continues to be an explorer, probing the valleys
and chasms of human existence. No ravine is too perilous,
no abyss too threatening for Jayne Cortez.”—Maya
Angelou
“The poetry of poets who make
metaphors of destruction, as does Jayne Cortez in her poem “Stockpiling,” a
magnificent effort to make poetry out of total inhumanity,
the metaphors having the effect of making the forces of nuclear
destruction accessible to the imagination.”—Stephen
Spender
“If you haven't read Jayne Cortez,
you’re
missing some of the best that life has to offer. A compellingly
original voice of fire and freedom.”—Franklin
Rosemont
“Jayne Cortez’s poems are filled with images
that most of us are afraid to see.”—Walter
Mosley
“Jayne Cortez has been described as a pioneer and a
giant of the spoken word renaissance. Often cited as a major
influence, her jazz/poetry synthesis is seen as the natural
link between the black consciousness of the past and today’s
rappers.”—Graham
McKenzie
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ISBN: 978-1-934909-03-4(paperback), $18.00 |
Complete
Lineups
Charles North
Charles North’s ingenious poems in the form of baseball
lineups have been exhilarating readers since they first appeared
in 1972 and sportswriter Larry Merchant devoted two New
York Post columns to them. The Village Voice and The
Philadelphia Inquirer have both called the lineups “brilliant,” and
among poets themselves they are legendary. Ranging from hilarious
to sober and moving, always witty, these poems metaphorically
organize all sorts of human experience—seasons, cities,
vegetables, diseases, Wordsworth poems—by batting order
and field position. Complete Lineups reprints the original
series with drawings by Paula North, as well as “Lineups
II” and recent experiments with the form. Also included
are three new, unpublished lineups, new drawings, reproductions
of artwork based on the poems, author’s commentary,
and an introduction by poet and critic William Corbett.
Charles North has published nine books of poems and a collection
of essays on poets, artists and critics. He has received
two NEA Creative Writing Fellowships, four Fund for Poetry
Awards, and a Foundation for Contemporary Arts Individual
Artist’s Grant. The Pulitzer Prize-winning poet James
Schuyler called him “the most stimulating poet of his
generation.” Of his last book, Cadenza, the poet and
novelist Harry Mathews wrote, “He belongs at the summit
of our American Parnassus.”
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ISBN: 978-1-934909-09-6 (paperback), $16.00 |
CIRCA
Hannah Zeavin
Hannah Zeavin is from Brooklyn, New York, and lives in New
Haven, Connecticut, where she studies at Yale University.
A volunteer at the Saint Mark’s Poetry Project, she
has also studied at Naropa University and worked as the assistant
to the Creative Director of the Summer Writing Program. She
is the recipient of the Princeton Poetry Prize and the Alan
G. Ross Memorial Mentorship Prize. This is her first collection
of poetry.
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“Daggers, ghosts of
pirates, 60 lengths of loose lace, Ferris wheels, jesters,
family dramas and the exigencies and suffering of the WWII
death camps. Where are we? This extraordinary first collection
by the prodigious Hannah Zeavin is circa another century
when the old weird America and the world at large strummed
its imagination with a searing song. There’s a powerful
balladic sepia-toned poetics at work in the psyche of these
poems. Archetypal characters emerge and play out their
gestures as if in a dream. I think of Bob Dylan, of old
bluesmen, and the quirky confidence of a young woman wanting
to reclaim the mysteries of bygone time and place. Yet
we are right here, now.”—Anne
Waldman
"A mysterious physicality of language abounds amid
an awkward eloquence of stuttering measure in Hannah Zeavin’s
Circa. In her fractured inciting
imagery, the pure power of imagination’s verb is Absolute. Is Untamable.”—Maureen
Owen
“Troubadourian
and carnivalesque, Hannah Zeavin bursts onto the stage
through a paper window, juggling deep-rooted poems for
the 21st Century mind. Post-New York syntactic surprises
balance atop wild Romantic referentiality. Is this fearless
time traveler a New Symbolista?”—Matvei
Yankelevich
"Listen: Here’s how to begin to write poetry.
The author bribed me with a raspberry pie!”—Bernadette
Mayer
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ISBN: 978-1-934909-07-2 (paperback.) $18.00
ISBN: 978-1-934909-08-9 (hardcover) $28.00
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The One and Only Human Galaxy
Elizabeth Swados
Perhaps best known for her Broadway and international smash
hit Runaways, Elizabeth Swados
has composed, written, and directed for over 30 years. Some
of her works include the Obie Award-winning Trilogy at
La Mama, Alice
at the Palace,
with Meryl Streep, at the New York Shakespeare Theater Festival
and Groundhog, which was optioned
by Milos Forman for a film. Her work has been performed on
Broadway, off Broadway, at La MaMa, the Brooklyn Academy
of Music, Carnegie Hall, and locations all over the world.
She has also composed highly acclaimed dance scores for well-known
choreographers in the U.S., Europe and South America.
Ms. Swados has been creating issue-oriented theater with
young people for her entire career. This work has culminated
in a theatrical extravaganza for New York University, The
Reality Show, about the trials, tribulations and joys of
college in New York City. The piece uses rock and roll, dance
and edgy humor and was performed by NYU students at Madison
Square Garden.
Recent productions include Atonement, a theatrical oratorio
presented by the Cathedral of St. John the Divine, an adaptation
of S. Ansky’s The Dybbuk at
NYU/Tisch, Spider
Operas at PS122 (with Mabou Mines),
and Political
Subversities,
a political revue that has been presented in two Culture
Project festivals as well as at Joe’s Pub. In conjunction
with Forward Face, Ms. Swados recently released a children’s
CD, Everyone Is Different, that
has been distributed to three thousand schools around the
country. Her latest musical, Kaspar
Hauser: a foundling’s
opera was performed at The Flea Theater in Manhattan. Ms.
Swados has published novels, non-fiction books, and children’s
books to great acclaim and received the Ken Award as well
as a New York Public Library Award for her book My
Depression.
Other awards include five Tony nominations, three Obie Awards,
a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Ford Grant, the Helen Hayes Award,
the Lila Wallace Reader’s Digest Foundation Writer’s
Award, a PEN Citation and others.
This is her first collection of poetry.
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Praise
for The One and Only Human Galaxy
“Like her great forebear Bertolt Brecht, Elizabeth
Swados is a consummate theatre artist who is a poet at the
core. With her composer’s ear, director’s intuition,
and startling linguistic economy, she reinvents the theatre
poem for our time, conjuring a lost world and, at its center,
a quicksilver Houdini—escape artist, Jew, son, lover,
celebrity, metaphysician, visionary. Let us welcome Swados
the poet! The One and Only Human Galaxy is a triumphant debut.”—Honor
Moore
“Pick a card, any card,” says this poet in the
voice of Houdini: existence is ‘a planned trick/ the
right card/ is a gift from Houdini’s god.’ In
this strange and beautiful book, we watch the poet perform
on the bright page, in a bright light, Houdini’s death-defying
story of escape. A must read.” —Harvey
Shapiro
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ISBN: 978-1-934909-01-0(paperback), $18
ISBN: 978-1-934909-02-7(Hardcover), $28
|
If the Delta Was the Sea
Dick Lourie
Dick Lourie is both a poet and a blues saxophone player.
In 1997, the chance to perform at a festival with internationally
renowned blues musician Big Jack Johnson led him to Johnson’s
home town of Clarksdale, Mississippi, historically a vital
center of Delta blues. Since then, he has returned to Clarksdale
every year, drawn as much by the history and culture of
the Yazoo-Mississippi Delta area as by its music. Finding
inspiration in Clarksdale and the Delta, If
the Delta Was the Sea fuses Lourie’s work as a poet and a musician.
Over the past forty years his poems have appeared widely
in such literary journals as ACM,
Agni, The Arkansas Review, Exquisite Corpse, Lungfull!, The
Massachusetts Review, Sun, Transfer, and Verse. Seven collections of his work
have been published, from the Crossing Press and Unicorn
Press, as well as Hanging Loose. Writing about Dick Lourie’s
poetry, Denise Levertov observed that his “voice
speaks with a unique and convincing eloquence.”
In
addition to playing with Big Jack Johnson, Lourie has appeared
regularly with the late Weepin’ Willie Robinson,
Boston’s “Elder Statesman of the Blues”;
the original G-Clefs, a rhythm and blues “doo wop” harmony
group performing together since 1955; the Blue Suede Boppers,
a ’50s rock and roll band; and Johnny Carlevale’s
Jump Blues All-Stars. He has also recorded (at a Clarksdale
studio) with rockabilly legend Sonny Burgess.
Dick Lourie’s most recent book is Ghost
Radio, from
Hanging Loose Press, along with a companion CD of poetry
and blues, Ghost Radio Blues. He lives in Somerville, Massachusetts,
and spends several weeks a year in Clarksdale.
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About
If the Delta Was the Sea
“Dick Lourie has written a rich, spacious book.
Observing the principles that ‘we are all embedded
in history’ and that the individual ‘contains
multitudes,’ these poems present a portrait of a
place, Clarksdale, Mississippi, and its people, through
a unique cultural and social perspective. Lourie has an
impeccable ear for colloquial nuances and an acute eye
for meaningful trivia. If the Delta Was the Sea is
a genuine delight.”—Ha
Jin
“Dick Lourie has something to say and he says it
well. Here, in direct, clear, no-nonsense language, he
tells the story of Clarksdale, in the heart of the Mississippi
Delta. The voices of the town ring true, from blues legend
Robert Johnson to civil rights leader Aaron Henry to Lin ‘Pap’ Pang,
an elder in the Chinese community, all presented with irony,
humor and honest insight. This is a poet who fully understands
the burdens and the blessings of history, and knows that
there is much to celebrate in the spirit of the survivors.”—Martín
Espada
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