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Subverting received traditions, embellishing mythic figures, the lyrics of The Devil’s Fools speak to and for those wanting heaven: modern pilgrims, medieval masons; seafarer, axe murderer, alcoholic; daughter, spouse, sibling, mother; a woman on pause, a monarch of the underworld, Eve stepping out past Eden. One country bombs another, there’s mass animal slaughter during epidemic, never-ending yard work, love letters from the dead. Humans sorrow and glory, mourn and thrive, treasure the will to live—with burdock and mushroom, apple and willow, cicada, cuckoo, brontosaurus, toad. The poems represent wild and delicious creaturely delusion, deception, vigor and joy. Mary Gilliland is the author of two award-winning poetry collections: The Ruined Walled Castle Garden (2020) and The Devil’s Fools (2022). Her poems are widely published in print and online literary journals and most recently anthologized in Rumors Secrets & Lies: Poems about Pregnancy, Abortion, & Choice; Wild Gods: The Ecstatic in Contemporary Poetry and Prose; and Nuclear Impact: Broken Atoms In Our Hands. She is a past recipient of the Stanley Kunitz Fellowship from the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown and a Council on the Arts Faculty Grant from Cornell University, where she created and taught seminars such as ‘Ecosystems & Ego Systems’ and ‘America Dreaming.’ Paperback Page count: 82 Trim size: 5.5 x 9 in. ISBN: 978-1-949933-16-1
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Will ship early in the New Year. The poetic writing and images of Alicia Wirt-Fox’s The Obscure Substance of Sky are divided into three parts. Each attempts to evoke three distinct realms. The Obscure pertains to the hidden, unseen, or arduous aspects of living in ourselves in the world as humans. Substance describes our material existence. Discoveries in nature, in the body, or experiences on and of Earth. Of Sky alludes to immaterial realms, abstractions and the world above. All the sections weave ideas and experiences and the character of birds dance between each distinct space. Alicia Fox is an artist, designer, poet, and teacher. Alicia Wirt-Fox was born in Chicago, Illinois. She received a BFA from Parsons School of Design in 1987 and an MFA from Yale University School of Art in 1997. Her first collection of poetry and paintings entitled Missives was published by Codhill Press in 2009. She wrote a series of poems for the book Blind Date a collaboration with the photographer Alan Barnett, published in 2012. She is a recipient of the 19th Annual Richard Kelly Grant for her experimental work utilizing reflective light and color within the context of painting. She teaches at the School of Visual Arts in New York City and currently lives and works in Greenpoint, Brooklyn. Paperback Page count: 76 Trim size: 5 x 7 in. ISBN: 978-1-949933-17-8
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A collection of poems written by father and daughter during the Pandemic Year 2020
“My father and I started talking about making a split collection of poetry together shortly before the pandemic began. And then he was hospitalized with Covid-19, and we all watched the world change. Together. Separately. It was then that I began to understand how important it was to share our voices in the same collection, to be read together. To not only write with him in the room, but to explicitly invite him in. To make something beautiful out of our conversation. To suffer together. To learn together. To dream of a better world.”
—Elizabeth Bayou-Grace (from the Introduction)
Paperback Page count: 80 Trim size: 5.5 x 9 in. ISBN: 978-1-949933-15-4 -
Sole Impression is a collection of Poetry that covers a broad range of subjects from the personal to the universal. Barry Sternlieb is the author of Winter Crows (2008 winner of the Codhill Press Chapbook Award), and three other chapbooks. His work appears in Poetry, The Yale Review, Southern Review, Virginia Quarterly Review, Sewanee Review, Gettysburg Review, New England Review, Prairie Schooner, Beloit Poetry Journal, Commonweal, and others. He is the recipient of a 2004 Massachusetts Cultural Council Fellowship in Poetry, and also edits Mad River Press, specializing in the very slow creation of handcrafted, limited edition letterpress poetry broadsides and chapbooks since 1986. The Mad River archive is housed in The Chapin Library at Williams College. Paperback Page count: 88 Trim size: 5.5 x 9 in. ISBN: 978-1-949933-12-3
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In Watch Me Trick Ghosts, Robert Krut reveals a city weaving between a surreal consciousness and concrete imagination, where speakers are fully aware that “the scars of the world are turning neon” (“Accidental Light”). Among them, spirits hide and appear in tree lines, behind bookcases, even “etching a name into a street sign pole with a knife” (“You Are the Street, You Are the Sleep”). These poems skillfully veer between lyrical moments of intimacy and urgent messages seemingly sent from the negative space surrounding a dream. It may be the case that “fear is a blade held in a lung” (“The Anxious Lever of Lowering Sky”), but in the quietest hours of night, strangers can connect through striking images that cast a spell. Robert Krut’s poetry collection Watch Me Trick Ghosts offers an immersion into the sublime, enveloping the reader in a shroud of welcome terror. Fusing narratives of ordinary life with flashes of otherworldly awe, Krut’s speaker serves as guide and protector while we venture down darkened streets, through empty buildings, and even into a forest grown out of grief. The lines of these poems haunt with remarkable clarity. “A Coffin is a Battery” states that, “Fine hairs of stray electricity twitch in wind,” and “When you come looking, I am the wires.” Whether through surreal imagery, or storylines lifted from our strangest dreams, Watch Me Trick Ghosts has a chill to rival the most ravishing Gothic novel, and the simmer of film noir. --Mary Biddinger, author of Department of Elegy Paperback Page count: 66 Trim size: 5.5 x 9 in. ISBN: 978-1-949933-13-0
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Translated by Younshil Cho The poems in this book, by the way they speak to all parts of our minds, invite us to come alive and experience each movement, each emotion and action, and some statements therein, intuitively and aesthetically. This is about a Korean man’s everyday life in the milieu of contemporary America; his struggle to find meaning in his immigrant life, in his vocation as a medical doctor, and to grow as a poet, a high calling for him. Weaving through personal narratives with the backdrop of historic events both domestic and foreign, he reaches a moralist’s viewpoint, as he searches for a right way to live. Equally excellent in lyric and narrative form, these poems give an indication he has found what he’s been after—good human relationships and artistic achievements, two founts giving ample significance to life. Chonggi Mah, a beloved poet of Korea and a retired medical doctor, has written over ten collections of poems and prose. Eyes of Dew was translated into English and published by White Pine Press in 2006. He has garnered numerous literary awards, and is acknowledged as one of major modern Korean poets. Youngshil Cho has won several grants for her translation of modern Korean poetry books and children’s books. Her publications include One Day, Then Another by Kim Kwang-Kyu (White Pine Press, 2013), A Warm Family by Codhill Press (2014), A Lion at Three in the Morning by Nam Jin-Woo (Homa & Sekey Books, 2017), Whisper of Splendor by Chong Hoyn-Jong (Homa & Sekey Books, 2018), Paper by Shin Dal-Ja (Codhill Press, 2018). Paperback Page count: 106 Trim size: 4.75 x 7 in.
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A volume of lyric poetry including ekphrastic works, animal poems, life studies, and found objects. Excerpt from “Sardine:” A rough-sketched line, a tin’s sharp edge delineates the domain of a lonely sardine who misses her erstwhile mates. As oil soothes the rounded corners, she awaits the cracker or cat’s crunch. Sarah Wyman teaches comparative literature at SUNY New Paltz. Her poems have appeared in many publications including A Slant of Light: Contemporary Women Writers of the Hudson Valley, Eds. Laurence Carr and Jan Zlotnik Schmidt (Codhill, 2013). Finishing Line Press published her book Sighted Stones in 2018. Paperback Page count: 94 Trim size: 6.25 x 9.25 in.
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The poems in this collection explore social and ecological struggles, personal and public nostalgia, family and solitude and seek to balance it all with hope. Grant Clauser is the author of four previous collections and has won the Cider Press Book Award and the Dogfish Head Poetry Prize. He lives in Pennsylvania where he works as an editor and writer and also teaches poetry at Rosemont College. These finely crafted, deeply evocative poems written with a tenderest heart, questioning mind, and an acutely observant eye, invite us to join the speaker on a trek across history, across intimate landscapes of relationships, human and animal courage, love and grief, global brokenness, and unexpected grace. - Doris Ferleger, author of Leavened and As the Moon has Breath Whatever the topic of his luminous poems--family, nature, childhood or fly fishing--to name a few, Grant Clauser knows that are all related. It is this understanding and wonder that undergirds these poems. Whether the characters in this book "smash atoms/ into each other/ trying to find god" or tie flies because "water is music/ I want to stand in," these poems reach for the place where the known world meets the realm we sense but cannot know. Grant Clauser is a poet who knows the importance of vision, both in the sense of observing what is around us and in being attuned to the worlds to come. "Trust me, this is the world we deserve," Clauser says. We will be more deserving of this world if we heed these wise and luminous poems. - Al Maginnes, author of The Next Place and Music From Small Towns
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Codhill Poetry Award Winner 2014
Sonia Greenfield explores menace and loss so often, it’s as if her poems are scarecrows to hold against the night. She likes the lyric and persona, likes telling us over and over again, we survive. A master of the unsettling image and moment, she’s got a big imagination and an appetite for the complexity of our lives. “We always bend / our fear into something more useful.” I don’t know if we do, but Greenfield does. The poems in Boy with a Halo at the Farmer’s Market are more than useful—they are beautiful, and demonstrate once more that art is our deepest response to the fragility of life.—Bob Hicok
Sonia Greenfield’s vision is x-ray and technicolor at once. These are poems of tragedy and ecstasy, rendered in high music and beautiful and shocking imagery. It’s rare to find a poem “riveting,” but hers are poems that, once started, refuse to be left unread.—Laura Kasischke
In Sonia Greenfield’s poems, we experience a mind busy with the work of description, and it is through that description—of people known and unknown, of lives on the edge of being unmade, or being sewn back up again—that Greenfield brings us to revelation. By looking at the surface of existence, and by narrating circumstances of particular people in particular places, Greenfield shows us how noticing matters, and how looking at the surface can illuminate the depths.—Mark Wunderlich
2015 | 76 pages
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Contemporary Women Writers of the Hudson Valley This volume celebrates contemporary prose and poetry of more than a hundred women from New York's Hudson Valley. Writers from the Eastern border to the Catskills and along the length of the Hudson River evocatively address issues that touch not only women, but every reader who desires insight into the human experience. A Slant of Light is divided into five sections, each addressing a theme of women's lives. The book begins with Mythos, representations and revisions of myths on women. The second section, Body & Gender, explores visions of the body, gender socialization and the roles of women. The third section, Identity, examines both how women see themselves and how others see women. The fourth section presents women as parents, children, partners and lovers. The last, Woman in the World, shares works that meditate on our collective fate in a global world.
2013 | 220 pages
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From A Warm Family… “ The sun is going down, and in the pureness of silence I drop the day’s anchor. As I shed the sweat-soaked clothes stars in the night sky draw near to me to be my friends, and my family.…”
—Kim Hu-Ran Translation by Cho Young-Shil
2014 | 120 pages
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In the poetry of Celestine Frost, the I is not confessional, rarely even personal, but, like he or she, a voice, subliminal and quirky. In this, her fourth collection, the liquid, unamalgamated thought of the subconscious seeps into the conscious mind as ore into stone. The resulting idiom is the real subject of her work. "This is feisty, apt writing with an appetite one very much respects. No world is ever there unless it's come into. Here's a way in!"
—Robert Creeley
"Celestine Frost's poems have the delicate touch that the surest poets command. Here is music that can devise with fire and grace."—Ed Foster, Editor, Talisman
"A brilliant song, a celebration of life connecting us to the universe. Frost experiments with language and form, creating a unique rhythm and vision--playful, profound."—Marcia Arrieta, Editor, Indefinite Space
2003 | 120 pages
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The authors of this collection are seven older women from diverse backgrounds who are members of a longstanding Hudson Valley writing group composed of academics, a social worker, a psychiatric nurse, a teacher and a lawyer. Some are retired, some are still working, some are musicians. All are volunteers, activists and artists. The sections of the book— Remembrance, Joy, Visibility, Resistance, Resilience, Transformation, Aging, and Bearing Witness—grew from the authors’ individual passions and from their collective perspective of being women-of-a-certain-age in a culture that tends to render older women invisible, irrelevant. This collection is filled with honest, insistent poetry and prose that demands to be heard by readers of all ages, genders and perspectives.
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My mother said I had it, my father’s Black Irish. She loved him powerfully, as she did me. Still, I knew that couldn’t be good, the way she said it, a disease. But what exactly did it mean? – BLACK IRISH Dennis Doherty is author of three other volumes of poetry: The Bad Man (Ye Olde Fontshoppe Press, 2004), Fugitive (Codhill Press, 2007), Crush Test (Codhill Press, 2010), and a meditation on Mark Twain's classic, Why Read The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn? (New Street Communications, llc, 2013). Mr. Doherty’s works appear throughout the literary press. He teaches creative writing and literature at SUNY New Paltz, and lives with his wife, Shari, in Rosendale, New York, hometown to their beautiful three daughters.
2016 | 68 pages
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Zen Echoes
"It is astonishing how thousand-year-old riddles are brought here to evocative poetic life. David Rothenberg converts them into contemporary verbal music, an arcanum, a profound secret, a mystery without intellectual solution." —Frederick Franck, author of The Zen of Seeing, The Buddha Eye, and other books Much as Coleman Barks breathed new life into the work of the great Sufi poet Rumi and reached the hearts and minds of contemporary readers, David Rothenberg now brings us vividly poetic new versions of the enigmatic koans and riddles from the classic Zen Buddhist text, the Blue Cliff Record. Blue Cliff Record: Zen Echoes is an accessible contemporary distillation of this twelfth-century treasure of Zen Buddhism, a lively feast of words and images designed to stretch and open the mind. With a foreword by poet, author, and translator Sam Hamill. "David Rothenberg's adaptation of Blue Cliff Record is that rare thing, a work of art that is also useful. It is as bracing as a dive into a cold spring--a wake up call from reality--the splendor of what is." —Mark Rudman, winner of the National Book Critics' Circle Award for Poetry and author of Rider "What is unique and wondrous about these poetic responses to the Blue Cliff Record is that here philosophy, spiritual practice and creativity are fused and whole. Each poem remarkably celebrates the Zen past and at the same time builds the foundation for a new interpretation that helps imagine how we, here and now, can live the Dharma on these shores." —Charles Johnson, winner of the National Book Award in fiction for Middle Passage2001 | 128 pages with 12 illustrations
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Selected Poems: 1977–2005 A retrospective view of the best of Celestine Frost's work, culled from the five volumes she has published, along with a handful of uncollected work. The work reflects her view that the poet is a lightning rod and poetry a dangerous occupation.
2013 | 218 pages
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Abraham Burickson's chapbook Charlie is an exploration of what it means to find oneself living without an instruction manual in a world filled with strangers. The poems follow Charlie and Sal, two very particular Everymen, as they navigate the emotional and intellectual straits of their lives, seeking meaning, pleasure, and some sense of self. The road is treacherous; pronouns jumble, rhythms overwhelm, and the intensity of sensual experience causes these poems to shimmer with longing and uncertainty. Charlie guides the reader on a journey that is as enticing as it is unsettling.
2010 | 45 pages
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"I could make a picture book with cut-outs pop-outs and load-ins of Burrill Street long as a cobra snaking from above the train station all the way down past the monument to Kings Beach."
2010 | 85 pages
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"Comfort, fathers of nostalgic rue? I'm charged to deliver the new, but change has shifted the shape of me; pain has twisted the make of me from all I thought I knew. Nomadic mappers of the land, I'm lost. Am I the message, messenger, or the one who heeds what calls?"
2010 | 64 pages
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The poems in this volume are experimental in nature. They came out of a study of the enneagram—a symbol best described in P. D. Ouspensky's In Search of the Miraculous. While looking for a way to experience the laws expressed in the enneagram, Frederick Bauman devised a poetic form of nine verses of three lines each. The poems are presented in the order written and then the stanzas are rearranged in the order 9, 3, 6, 1, 4, 2, 8, 5, 7. Readers interested in the enneagram are referred to Mr. Ouspensky's book and the “Holy Planet Purgatory” chapter of G. I. Gurdjieff's Beelzebub's Tales to His Grandson, which does not mention the enneagram but discusses the laws it symbolizes.
2007 | 110 pages
