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Poetry. IF WE HAD A LEMON WE'D THROW IT AND CALL THAT THE SUN by Christopher Citro was chosen by Ariana-Sophia Kartsonis as the winner of the 2019 Elixir Press Antivenom Poetry Award. Lee Upton had this to say about it: "In Christopher Citro's IF WE HAD A LEMON WE'D THROW IT AND CALL THAT THE SUN, the kinetic, continually surprising lines of poems contend with the largest questions. The poem title 'An Emergency Every Day of the Week' suggests the sense of threat that veers through these poems in the midst of their bracing comic energy. For Citro, so much depends on the angle at which we view our experiences. Musing on our daily disarrangements and the ways we attempt to lower the temperature on our worry barometers, he makes wildly inventive, exciting, vital poems, working sideways to reveal what we really ought to see at last."
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Winner of the 2020 Steel Toe Books Poetry Award, Focal Point is a scientist's unofficial dissertation, a daughter's faithful correspondence, and a coming-of-age story. Written largely while Jenny Qi was a young Ph.D. student conducting cancer research after her beloved mother's death from cancer, the collection turns to "all the rituals of all the faiths," invoking Western and Eastern mythology and history, metaphors from cell biology, and even Jimi Hendrix, as Qi searches for a container to hold grief. The opening poem of this debut collection primes us to consider all definitions of the titular "focal point," as the speaker evaluates this moment of early loss beneath a literal and metaphor...
Eddie Little, author of the hit Another Day in Paradise and who The New York Times describes as "Reminiscent of Hunter Thompson and William Burroughs," is back with a new gripping crime novel. Little writes about the world he used to inhabit, a place filled with drugs, crime and danger at every turn. His electrifying prose brings to life the rough, raw, and seedy life of Boston's underworld where corruption lies at the heart of every deception. Bobbie is a young criminal prodigy. Living in Boston he's approached by a mysterious Greek on behalf of an anonymous shipping tycoon, who wants to commission a theft. The Fogg museum is the target; a collection of ancient Greek coins the score. Everything goes fine with the burglary, but with easy street just around the corner Bobbie's life takes an unexpected twist and his big score evaporates. With his life on the line, Bobbie must learn who he can trust when trusting anyone can make you lose everything. Steel Toes is as close to reality as fiction can get. Little draws you in with his knife sharp writing, his authentic and unflinching characters and plot as tight and strong as the hold of addiction.
If I were Colen's agent, I'd pitch these poems to a movie producer as "David Lynch meets Gertrude Stein." Money for Sunsets, like Tender Buttons, is syntactically rich and varied, using fragments, repetition, and word associations.If I were Colen's agent, I might not mention her complicated and smartobservations on women, violence, and money - since I'm assuming that most movie producers are capitalists. In "Des Oeufs," Colen writes, "A naked woman as a motif is too easy." Too easy, indeed. Innovative and evocative, these poems have arrived at just the right cultural moment. And I, for one, am grateful they're here. - Denise Duhamel, Judge, 2009 Steel Toe Books Prize in Poetry
The centerpiece of Allison Joseph's sixth full-length poetry collection is a sequence of thirty-four sonnets about losing her father. "Superbly executed, part family history and part homage, Allison Joseph strings the frail human voices across the forceful lines of her verse to summon her absent father back from the dead." -- Maura Stanton
"In this splendidly entertaining debut, Jeannine Hall Gailey offers us a world both familiar and magical-filled with fairytale and mythology characters that are our own bedfellows-we wake up with Philomel and argue with Ophelia while half-listening to a Snow Queen, amidst Spy Girls, Amazons and Mongolian Cows. The wild and seductive energy in this collection never lets one put the book down. (In fact, any one who opens the collection in the bookstore and reads such poems as The Conversation and Job Requirements: A Supervillain's Advice will want to buy the book ) For her delivery is heart-breaking and refreshing, so the poems seduce us with the sadness, glory and entertainment of our very own days. Propelled by Jeannine Hall Gailey's alert, sensuous, and musical gifts, the mythology becomes all our own." -Ilya Kaminsky, author of the award-winning Dancing in Odessa
"Gabriel Welsch's remarkable third collection boisterously offers up a wonderfully imaginative romp through the wilds of pop-culture and various amusing suburban conflicts. These poems are at once hilarious and tender in their resolve to praise the very pulse of a busy life-even if we face the knowledge that 'loss fires the blood/ loss starts the day, blood fired is the day.' In poem after poem, Welsch displays a rare understanding of what it means to reward the reader by uncovering wild, brave, and beautiful truths about the human condition." -Aimee Nezhukumatathil, author of Lucky Fish
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"Ron Salutsky takes his readers from the deepest memories of childhood to the edge of our loneliest moments when the stars bloom in the night sky, and the trees and wind tell us their secrets. This is a world in motion, a world filled with goodbyes. Cars travel deserted highways, and we witness acts that he translates into poems of arching bravura. This is a deeply felt and moving debut collection." - Barbara Hamby, author of All-Night Lingo Tanto