-
ODE TO DOGS I am tired of hearing about dogs used as metaphors for the uncivilized. Imagine a world in which humans possessed at least twenty times as many olfactory receptors, able to distinguish the tang of cancer rising musk-like from the bedsheets next to a smoldering ash tray, able to detect that one drop of blood in every five quarts of water, to know what you did last night no matter how many times you soap-scrubbed the evidence. It does not take savagery but more love than we can muster to lick the hand you've sniffed, to love despite the perfume of sins we wear each day like a halo.
-
"Final Finalist for the Codhill Poetry Chapbook award for 2008, Sibyl James’s Pistols and Hearts captures the beauty and ruggedness of daily life in Mexico through inventive lyricism. Oscillating between English and Spanish, between declarations of love and regret, between the oracular and the ordinary, a transcontinental vision emerges, both deeply personal and fiercely public."
—Pauline Uchmanowicz, final judge
2009 | 36 pages
-
Poems Searching for Things to Worship Sorting through fluttering debris of thick boyhood days, tangle of jungle browned with our absence, I remember how you cupped water at Cedar Creek, your hands a chalice. And flowers you planted near the bank to make it your church, somewhere to sit in the greening comfort of a private prayer. A place one might see God and not be surprised.
"Winner of the Codhill Poetry Chapbook Prize for 2006, Patrick Carrington's Thirst reads like a novena, a plea for understanding and mercy." —Pauline Uchmanowicz, Final Judge2007 | 32 pages
-
Out of stockMicrofiction set in, around and under the mythical town of Wytheport Sometimes angst-ridden, sometimes whimsical, sometimes meditative, these short "biographs" depict the life and times of a unique place and its haunting residents. The Wytheport Tales draws inspiration from a range of authors: Dante, Carroll, Joyce, Eliot and Masters, as well as fantasists such as Cabell, Eddison and MacDonald.
" 'Time is warping in the palace,' Laurence Carr observes in The Wytheport Tales. And our nights and days are warping in these sly, canny (or are they uncanny?) poems. Most interested in the world when that world is changing, and by turns in-flected, de-flected, and re-flected, here fanciful, there matter of fact, Carr's tales summon twilight presences from the edges of experience, dark, restless, playful, and urgent."
—Robert Polito, Director, New School Writing Program
"Though it seems to begin in the land of Dylan Thomas's Nightwood, it extends beyond that into wonderfully evocative, mythic worlds that strike me as utterly original in its language and pace."
—Robert H. Waugh, The Monster in the Mirror: Looking for H. P. Lovecraft
"With The Wytheport Tales, Laurence Carr gives us a work that shimmers and twists, that undulates across the mind's eye like a tapestry. At times homely, at others baroque, at still others nightmarish, the collection fits multitudes between its covers. I'm eternally grateful to have been introduced to a sampling of Wytheport's denizens, and look forward to many return visits."
—John Langan, Mr. Gaunt
2006 | 54 pages
-
The ambiguity of snow Dog wishes, buried in squinty sun may never sprout deeper dreads down under may deface even terror’s stun gun before bright dawn pours on white cloth buffered over white strain and shows no blood on the collar— but the dead ground, bone’s crypt, dazzles, unwinds a drape to hide a corpse stuffed in.
Read a review of Window with 4 Panes, from the May 2009 issue of Chronogram magazine.2009 | 78 pages
-
"Winner of the 2012 Codhill Poetry Chapbook Award, Heather Cousins's Freeze, as sparse and elegant as winter branches, illuminates how time is both fixed and divisible, the human paradox both archetypal and mutable."
—Pauline Uchmanowicz, Final Judge
2013 | 30 pages
-
"Winner of the Codhill Poetry Chapbook Award for 2011, Midwestern Heart sings in the voice of a prairie prophet whose well-crafted verses bless landscapes, both visible and unseen, with amazed reverence."
—Pauline Uchmanowicz, Final Judge
2012 | 32 pages
-
A Hudson River Anthology This anthology of contemporary poetry and memoir celebrates the Hudson River and its environs in all of its breadth and depth. It brings together sixty Hudson Valley writers who explore what it means to be part of one of America’s great river systems: to live near it and sometimes on it, to travel it by sail, steam, oar and motor, to swim it, to gather food from it, and to have it as a constant in one’s ever changing life. The book was created as part of the Hudson 400 Celebration, but we hope that it will stand for many years as a testament to those native people, explorers, immigrants turned locals, and visitors who made the river part of their lives, and ultimately, a place to call home.
2010 | 131 pages
-
"These poems require us to approach with an uncorrupted humanity. The poems insist on dignifying us. They have an almost theological ambition in that they love us, not in spite of our imperfections, but because of them and in so doing they shock us into our better selves and guarantee us salvation. This is a book to be grateful for. Its generosity elevates us."
—Vince Cioffi Winner of the 1999 Stegner Fellowship in Poetry
Ben Mitchell's "Only the Sound Itself" reminds us to think about the experiences that made us who we are. This poetry acts as a wake up call to make us realize how hectic and crazy our lives have become. The theme of nature throughout the collection allows one to see the peace and serenity that used to exist and how the simplicity of life is lost as we take on responsibilities, fall in love, and eventually grow into adulthood.2010 | 45 pages
-
"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
-
22 Poems This collection of poems was written between 2004 and 2009. Working with various partners Steve Clorfeine developed a form, “moving and writing,” in which one person moves with eyes closed and the other witnesses the movement, after which both write, “free writing” style. Witnessed moving with eyes closed is based on a form called Authentic Movement, pioneered by Mary Starks Whitehouse and later by Janet Adler. They brought to a generation of dancers, educators, and therapists an improvised mindfulness-awareness practice, which Whitehouse called “movement in depth...moving and being moved.” What is revealed when the activity of imagining is primary, when the less visible or invisible becomes visible, when the substance of shapes, sounds, images, stories surfaces, mingles, and compounds and we are drawn deeper into the unknown and directed to mysteries?
2010 | 68 pages
-
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
-
"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
-
With each poem in this series, Bauman explores the life of an animal native to the Catskill region, delving into their secret suffering, fear, and determination. Through their daily struggles, he reveals the interconnected nature of our world and our shared fears. In his final poem, he extends these same fears and struggles to man through the mythic figure of Gilgamesh. Richly detailed and poignant, Feral Idylls asks us to consider existence and our place in the world.
2010 | 56 pages
-
Out of stockThe fragmentary poems are of flight, written in the full fury of movement from a known habitat to one full of strangeness. The uncanny is their constant envoy. They enter into things at an obtuse angle and forget their origin, beyond good sense, beyond good taste and use of time.... Perhaps a nomadic ear is able to make very subtle discrimination in text. Such an ear is at work here.
—from the Afterword
2010 | 32 pages
-
Out of stockInternationally acclaimed poet H.R. Stoneback gives an inspired rendition of the eternal feminine, writing in high tonality of the struggles and passions of life, real and imaginary.
2011 | 328 pages
-
a Hudson Valley Story Pancake Hollow Primer is the story of Gulf War vet and drifter Frank Closky who finds himself on a physical and spiritual journey after he inherits an 1820's farmhouse in New York's Hudson Valley. At first indifferent to his ownership of "seven acres with a house, outbuildings, and all the contents within," Frank discovers a land where nature speaks it's ancient history, where ghosts and seers hold the past, and where he comes to find his place in a rock-laden piece of property and a house with no square corners. Inspired by writers like Sarah Orne Jewett, naturalist John Burroughs, and poets Gary Snyder and Mary Oliver, author Laurence Carr weaves together fiction, essay, and prose poem to create an insightful and often humorous tale of rural life and how an old house and its land can bring a broken person back to wellness.
2011 | 180 pages
-
In his latest collection, Bauman continues the sensitive and detailed inventory of his environment and the soul's interaction with nature and the realm of spirit.
2011 | 70 pages
-
Conceived first as a correspondence between two woman, Letters and Found Poems expresses the mystery of their intimacy in their quotidian existence in rural New York. The complexity of Chloe’s affairs creates a damaging separation that brings a tragic turn of events. A collection of poems each had written to the other serves as a supplement to the story.
2012 | 85 pages
-
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
