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Poetry. THEORIES OF FALLING is the winner of the 2007 New Issues Poetry Prize. Judge Marie Howe said of THEORIES OF FALLING, "I kept coming back to these poems--the tough lyric voice that got under my skin. Clear, intent, this poet doesn't want to fool herself or anybody else. Desire pushes defeat against the wall, and the spirit climbs up from underground." "Sandra Beasley slices her way down the page with precision and punch. Her haunting 'Allergy Girl' series will set off such an itch, I doubt you'll ever fully recover...This poet leaves us to smolder and ache in small kingdoms where 'even the tame dogs dream of biting clear to the bone.'"--Aimee Nezhukumatathil.
Poetry. "Ralph Angel possesses what every poet dreams of a warm heart and a cold eye and all of his poems have a foothold between Everything and Nothing, the place each of us lives in day in and day out, though we seldom recognize or admit it the way these poems do. Many of them unfold like a ravishing film to which a voice-over adds such haunting commentary we are surprised to reach the end and realize we have been reading. His vernacular arrests me. A thread of wild and somber beauty runs through this book by one of America's most original poets." Mary Ruefle"
Poetry. "Robert Frost believed a poem should begin in delight and end in wisdom, but in TREE LINE, Judy Halebsky proves a poet never has to choose between the two her poems begin in both and end in both. Smart, sexy, thoughtful, and beautiful, Halebsky's lyrics are a masterful marriage of tradition and innovation. This remarkable book loves many things language and landscape to be sure but most of all, it loves this world and how we make our way in it." Dean Rader"
Poetry. African American Studies. "Abdul Ali's TROUBLE SLEEPING awakens the mind. Like the guts of a marvelous timepiece, the incremental details tick with merciless accuracy and timeless certainty. Urban, gutsy, each poem exposes the conflicts of an inner-city speaker. Yet even in the midst of conflict one believes the voice saying, 'I love the city.' Here, popular culture converges with iconic moments of American history; personal and worldly affairs, and a knowing, practiced music holds TROUBLE SLEEPING together as a needful song." Yusef Komunyakaa"
Fiction. Winner of the 2007 AWP Award for the Novel. Robert Eversz, Judge. "WE AGREED TO MEET JUST HERE is a lyrical mystery about disappearance, told in precise and luminous prose. A young lifeguard in an Austin suburb vanishes one night while returning from a screening of The Third Man. A doctor, ill with cancer, goes missing from his home, and is later seen, bearded and ragged, wandering the aisles of a grocery store. A car is stolen, the unseen consequences tragic. One child is given up to adoption, another is lost up a tree. The absences are so keenly felt, in the drifting lucidity of the author's sentences, that every reappearance reads like a small miracle"--Robert Eversz.
Poems.
To Zenzi is the extraordinary story of Tobias Koertig's odyssey through the apocalypse of Berlin in 1945. An orphaned thirteen-year-old who loves to draw, Tobias is coerced into joining the German youth army in the last desperate weeks of the war. Mistaken for a hero on the Eastern Front, he receives an Iron Cross from Hitler himself, who discovers the boy's cartoons and appoints Tobias to sketch pictures of the ruined city. Shuttling between the insanity of the Führer's bunker and the chaotic streets, Tobias must contend with a scheming Martin Bormann, a deceitful deserter, the Russian onslaught, and his own compounding despair--all while falling for Zenzi, a girl of Jewish descent (a mischling) who relays secret news of death camps and convinces Tobias to make a treacherous escape to the Americans. With thrilling risks in plotting and prose, with moments of pathos and absurdity, Shuster richly conjures a mad, tragic world.
This book represents a mental construct of salvation. It portrays the individual way in which a person saves the psyche. Fifth Season is an amalgamation of losses transformed into a state of serenity for the individual. The fifth season is that imaginary place where time becomes less relevant, where the poet attempts to make sense of the tangible world around him. The fifth season represents a unique path, one which may not be traveled twice. It is the imaginary construct of a season of hope.
''In She'd Waited Millennia, there is a persistent, sometimes anguished recognition of the dominance of what we call the interior world, that world where we exist most fully in thought or perception. The phenomenal world of people and things exists alright, along with the names we use to contain them, and yet the recognition of that is too a source of loneliness, 'just another story of the self and itself.'(''Low City'') The beauty, the courage, in the poems collected here is evident in the attempted transit from Self to Other, in the struggle between what George Oppen called 'the shipwreck of the singular, ' and in the difficult, persistent hope to 'say something to the others.'(''The Green Ray'') In her unflinching description of an individual psyche, Lizzie Hutton presents a portrait of the human condition which will be recognized by all.''--Claudia Keelan.
"Published in the USA by New Issues Poetry and Prose"--Title page verso.