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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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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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.

“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

 

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.”

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.

“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

 

ISBN: 978-1-934909-07-2 (paperback.) $18.00
ISBN: 978-1-934909-08-9 (hardcover) $28.00

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.

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

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.

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