A Little Farm Story - Jay Mead
Children's Literature. Sustainability. Art. The sun rises and sets on a little farm. The farmer sleeps, bugs invade, farmers fight back, but the people still feast. Storyteller Jay Mead's simple and provocative intergenerational picture story follows the life of a farm, through the seasons, with gorgeous bright color images throughout and a brief text. In its afterword, A LITTLE FARM STORY emphasizes sustainability on local farms and community sustained agriculture. Mead travels with the story to schools and farmers markets. A member of Wise Fool Puppet Intervention, Jay Mead formerly worked with Bread and Puppet Theater.
A Little Travel Story - David Oliveira
David Oliveira's new book shows his stunning narrative breadth and intelligence. Oliveira, whose mentor was Philip Levine at Cal-State Fresno, is a former poet laureate of Santa Barbara now living and teaching in Cambodia. The final poem in this collection is a long tapestry which begins "under the Mekong sky" and illustrates the gorgeous loops of journey. Christopher Buckley describes A LITTLE TRAVEL STORY this way: "poems with such a keen sense of humor...accurate in irony and political content...[t]his is work of an accomplished and gifted craftsman".
Address to The Smaller Animals - Robert Nichols
ADDRESS TO THE SMALLER ANIMALS is a reprint of the original collection of poems of the same name written by Robert Nichols in the 1960s and published in 1976. Robert Nichols has been a poet, writer, landscape architect, and anti-war activist for many decades. He makes no distinction between the literary and the political, as he and his wife (the late Grace Paley) were often quoted. This edition of ADDRESS TO THE SMALLER ANIMALS marks a long awaited triumph for readers, historians, and activists alike.
Aerolith - William Cirocco
"It has been a long wait for William Cirocco's first full-length book of poems, but well worth it. The slow maturation and building of a body of work here results in a varied yet coherent and finely realised poetry. Cirocco clearly cares nothing for literary fashion, just as he has cared nothing for a premature appearance of achievement, and it shows in the highly singular, intelligent and moving poems we now have before us"--David Miller.
American Drone - Peter Money
Some say "mad" postcards. Some say "an international call and response," a sort of too-full screen of blues. Some say whispers. In fact, AMERICAN DRONE, this American poet's first full collection in a long time, takes rap, hip-hop, folk and pop tradition, film and daily news as his guide toward subjects (and forms). Former laureate Baron Wormser (Paris Review Editions/Houghton Mifflin) says "Peter Money has taken on full-bore, straight-up, flat-out the necessary charge to the poet in these global/electronic times.... He has the chops and range...from page-long, all-verbal-hands-on-deck meditations and urgings to brief, exquisite lyrics [Peter Money has] an enormous appetite for language as a transfiguring force" and "poems...to inhabit." The three distinct sections of AMERICAN DRONE are dense, reflective, and—in the final part—fiercely intimate as they own their own space and honor everyone's right to what's personal.
Be That Empty - Alice B. Fogel
Rare is the author who attracts the love of two U.S. Poet Laureates but Alice B. Fogel, it's no surprise, did it—and deservedly. Alice B. Fogel's poems have been called "as intense and perfectly rendered as that of Rilke"...she has received an NEA fellowship, lives off the grid, makes recycled clothing, and has come bursting at the seams in this first publication since her lauded books from the late good-eye-for poetry, Zoland (her other books of poetry are Elemental and I Love This Dark World). BE THAT EMPTY is that cup of water before being damned, or it is the water at the edge of damnation (its subtitle, APOLOGIA FOR AIR, being the shout and fist of it). If you can handle "All for show, to win a point for their god / they put the bomb on the bus for a ride / each miracle...like leaves and twigs in a real windstorm" then you will be held newborn by "the story / buoyed upon the tones...an essence / I inhale"; "I stay for every note, rippling, concentric".
Cell Mate - Ana Merino
Translated from the Spanish by Elizabeth Polli. "Ana Merino is one of the best contemporary Spanish poets, and CELL MATE is a wonderful place to start reading her. In these poems all of Ana's registers are present: the whimsical one some times, others the haunted one. Ana writes dark lullabies, fairy tales for grown ups, and she does it without losing the sense of childish wonder. How is that possible? Open the book."—Edmundo Paz-Soldan
Child's Play - Ana Merino
Translated from the Spanish by Elizabeth Polli. "Ana Merino's CHILD'S PLAY is a descent into the sea of memory where the experiences and magical characters of childhood are vibrant. The images from the past are caught in a poetic net of language rich in emotions and craftsmanship. CHILD'S PLAY is a touching book that will make the reader relive their childhood. This is truly rewarding poetry and I wholeheartedly recommend it."—Oscar Hahn
Eve & Her Apple - Sharon White
"Sharon White has the remarkable talent of weaving the various times that poetry can summon—moments, histories of eras, seasons, human recollections, botanical cycles, even geology—into effortless wholes. The poems reverberate with the feeling that comes from deep observation and deep caring. That makes them precious in the fullest sense—not rare and self-conscious but shining with their own light"—Baron Wormser.
Framing Memories - Mario Susko
"Susko leaves his readers with no easy answers. We must weigh dozens of opposing concepts in our own minds, and decide for ourselves what to keep and what to let go, to construct a self-defined sense of security in a disquieting world.... It is a small comfort, but at least it is a real one. Mario Susko's poems make no false promises, but instead offer authentic experiences and, yes, pleasures"—Amy Schrader.
If You Like Difficulty: Poems - Jan Causen
IF YOU LIKE DIFFICULTY presents Jan Clausen's controversial playful language and unapologetic assertions as a tour de force as "Shakespearean as it is June Jordean." IF YOU LIKE DIFFICULTY treads its heavy feet across the plains of what some have left blithely contented. In a variety of speech (bridged bite of lyric or agile bounding narrative phrases--all composed of wit and bright shards of anger and loving, Clausen's poems will not surrender to the inept. Jan Clausen is also the author of the memoir Apples and Oranges (Houghton Mifflin).
In The Shop of Nothing - David Miller
In these poems, celestial transparency is abandoned for the quieter glow of unruly paradox; as Miller writes, "Anterior dark/makes its claim upon light." Yet this poetry is anything but bleak. For the SHOP OF NOTHING culls the radiance of poetry as witness, as alchemical window ("This ghostliness may, in fact, be the very/stuff of form"). Miller's poetry locates the site precisely between gaze and image, effecting a mode of recognition that somehow conjoins love with love, presence with absence, ghost with flesh.
Inaudible Trumpeters - Elizabeth Robinson
This unique collection by Elizabeth Robinson shows her at perhaps her playful best, mingling poet with poet: two Robinsons—Elizabeth and Edwin Arlington—redefine the notion of encounter, "entering the cochlea of [each other's] ear" (to paraphrase Devin Johnston's blurb). Of course these collaborations suit poetry but they particularly suit Robinson, the newer, as blurbs from Hoa Nguyen and Keith Waldrop further underscore. In Waldrop's words, "you've come upon a good book of poems."
Mapping the Fourth Dimension - Laura Davies Foley
"In this collection of poetry, MAPPING THE FOURTH DIMENSION, Laura Davies Foley meditates upon the death of a significant love with poems that are dreamy and ecstatic. Fused with the terrible knowledge that comes only with direct experience she writes: 'I knew then what Dido must have known at her fiery end.' Using direct plain language she invites the reader into her world of loss, which is simultaneously, a world suffused with hope."—Jackson Wheeler, Founder of The Ventura Poetry Festival, former co-editor of Solo, author of Swimming Past Iceland, and contributor to A Near Country: Poems of Loss.
Mud Blooms - Ruth Dickey
Ruth E. Dickey has spent 25 years working at the intersection of community building, writing, and art. The recipient of a Mayor’s Arts Award from Washington DC, and an individual artist grant from the DC Commission and Arts and Humanities, Ruth’s poems and essays have been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and won three Larry Neal Writing Awards. She is the author of the chapbook, Paper Houses, Sky Ceilings (Pudding House Press 2006), and her work has appeared widely, including in Alimentum, The Baltimore Review, Cincinnati Review, Ocean State Review, The Potomac Review, and Sonora Review. She lives in Seattle, where she serves as Executive Director of Seattle Arts & Lectures, which brings the best writers and thinkers to Seattle stages and classrooms. A builder and believer in big dreams, Ruth has had the pleasure of leading organizations in Washington, DC; Cincinnati, OH; and Seattle, WA to dramatically expand their community impact. Ruth holds an MFA in poetry from UNC - Greensboro, and a BS in Foreign Service and an MA in Latin American Studies from Georgetown University, and was a 2017 fellow with the National Arts Strategies Chief Executive Program. She is a voracious reader, an ardent fan of dogs and coffee, was a co-founder of mothertongue in DC, and has taught poetry workshops in soup kitchens, drop in centers and the DC Public Schools. Mud Blooms by Ruth Dickey is the MURA Award winner.
One Class: Selected Poems - Norman Macafee
ONE CLASS collects Norman MacAfee's major poems written between 1965 and 2008. MacAfee is a translator of Pier Paolo Pasolini's poems, and Victor Hugo's Les Miserables. These are ecstatic, serious and often funny poems about war and peace, sexual liberation, utopias and murderous class divisions--national collapse, Orwellian maladies, surreal comic tics that are screenplay, opera and celebration. This volume features several epic rants that approach libretto, including the touching "I Am Astro Place" which chronicles New York culture and concerns, 1984-2001. Bob Holman calls ONE CLASS "real, unwavering, it's art in the classical sense that gets dirty as life is."
Out of Time, Running - Edward Nudelman
Includes the poem"Melody of Complaint," nominated for a Pushcart Prize. These wise and pithy poems address human ontology with surprising originality and wit. Struggle is made funny and acceptable and yet the poet doesn't downplay ordinary struggle. April Ossmann notes, Nudelman's poems are courageous and soulful, merging science and poetry—such that each is made more personal. Readers who appreciate Gaston Bachelard, William Bronk, David Ignatow, will likely find a new next voice—unexpected as it is in a life-long medical researcher and bookseller. But just when you think Nudelman's honesty is boy-next-door, we're given a dose of allusion to the surreal. OUT OF TIME, RUNNING refines indulgences and goth as if Keats and David Sedaris were sometimes Med School buddies. What remains is more sweet than bitter, and poetry we couldn't refuse.
Rhapsody of the Naked Immigrant - Elena Georgiou
Elena Georgiou's second collection, RHAPSODY OF THE NAKED IMMIGRANTS, prompts us beyond the question "Where are you from?" to more complicated questions regarding multiple migrations, invasions, post-colonial freedom, and the ability to board international flights. "Elena Georgiou has the unbordered tongue of an immigrant. Her poems travel through the public and private geographies of citizenship, building homes made of bodies and language. Her work is an alphabet, a Greek chorus, a praise poem for the English language and its many tongues. It is your visa to the poetry of immigration"--Lisa Birman. "She reminds us, through the eyes of 'immigrant' experiences, that we too must be our own 'Expatriate Cartographer' if we are to navigate and survive the losses and gains of living through change and eruption.... Remarkably brave"--Jenny Boully. "Immigrant questions become questions of how to love, how to adhere to an 'earth ... cut in half.' Elena Georgiou's beautiful book of poems is ... a 'map ... of silk countries,' folded and unfolding"--Bhanu Kapil. A choreography of names, places, and the forbidden worn by figures over a shared landscape--urban, rural, in between.
Rumored Islands - Robert Farnsworth
Robert Farnsworth's first two books were published by Wesleyan University Press. Twenty years later, Harbor Mountain Press brings out Farnsworth's next: fine narrative poems made of patina and salt, family memory and youthful outlook, reality and regret. "Farnsworth returns with poems of wonder and shame, loneliness and 'the strange, sun-spun fabric of the world.' In carefully sculpted lines, alternately lyrical and narrative, cultured and stripped down, he offers poems that arrive unannounced and track the unexpected turns life takes, the way an unanticipated moment can become part of a story we were meant to hear"—Publishers Weekly, starred review.
Surfacing: Contemporary Croation Poetry - Branko Čegec and Mario Suško
Edited by award winning Croatian authors Branko Čegec and Mario Suško. Translated from the Croatian by Mario Suško. This astounding collection of contemporary Croatian poetry is a first of its kind, by a U.S. publisher, marking these contemporary Croatian poets as among the world's exceptionally talented and daring writers who are pushing us as readers and writers to expect more from life... and from poetry.
The Auxiliary Time of Being - Mario Susko
Poetry. Croation Literature. In his third solo book with Harbor Mountain Press, Mario Susko's wit and precision are on display with ferocity: "It's hard to be / a transient / in one's literature— / I walk the streets, / carrying a travel bag with things one / throws in when not expecting to return," and "I have overdosed on words, those that were / supposed to keep the past in remission." His facility for language is like no other. In Susko's lines, poetry is redeemed.
The Baghdad Blues - Sinan Antoon
THE BAGHDAD BLUES presents documentary filmmaker/co-creator of About Baghdad, Sinan Antoon's first poems in English. Antoon studied in Baghdad and moved to the States after the Gulf War. Since then, Sinan Antoon completed his dissertation at Harvard, has taught Arabic and literature at Dartmouth and NYU, and has a novella just published by City Lights. Antoon's poems--many of them published in Banipal (London) and Across Borders, as well as anthologized--are not quite the thin trails they would appear to be. Antoon's line, although lyrical, is packed with the absence and fury which ought to make us shake a fist at the skies. If it were only the sky's fault.
The Glass Tree - Laura Davies Foley
"What is the spirit of elegy? It begins in sorrow and lament, of course, but in these poems we see how elegy opens out to ever-widening circles of consciousness. We witness a pinpoint and unflinching attention to the endpoints of life: the fact of illness, hospital beds, and graveside bewilderment. We also watch these poems enact with dignity and beauty our capacity to absorb such pain. They show us how we sometimes barely survive our losses, but in so doing find ourselves more and more aware of the resilient presence of the soul. Or, to put the spirit of elegy in Laura Davies Foley's own words near the end of THE GLASS TREE: 'I sense clarity, / a mind learning to see itself.'"—Fred Marchant
Wanting It - Diana Whitney
Women's Studies. This is Diana Whitney's debut book of poems—praised as a "saucily entitled and brilliant book...What a debut!" by Vermont Poet Laureate Sydney Lea, a debut with "a tremulous spirit full of...imaginative agitation" adds Major Jackson, and "one of the finest collections I've read in a very long time" says Laura Kasischke. We highly recommend this title for classes and individuals. Narrative, provocative, revealing: perhaps Plath, Sexton, Olds, Frost have combined.
The Sovereignty of the Accidental - Michael Brosnan
Poetry. "I was riding in a plane from Dublin when I read Michael Brosnan's poem in The Moth. You know when you feel you've found a poet for keeps? At that moment I wondered if he had many books. Turns out, Brosnan had no poetry book. Now he does. Please greet his debut as I did. He's one for the company of others. Welcome this name perhaps you've never heard of but who has been writing poems diligently and publishing in journals for years."—Peter Money
Naomi Shihab Nye calls THE SOVEREIGNTY OF THE ACCIDENTAL a "stunning book...It's as if he found the pulse of poetry," while Eamon Grennan says Michael Brosnan's debut is "an impressive, deeply satisfying debut."
From Luminous Shade - Giusseppe Ungaretti
**LIMITED EDITION** - Please contact Harbor Mountain Press if you wish to purchase this book.