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Shipping in September. Through a combination of personal narrative and historical research, Rupture weaves together the history of enslaved women in the Americas and themes of life, love, and loss. A nursery rhyme motif in the book juxtaposes the innocence of childhood and the insidious transgenerational trauma of slavery. The poems trace the author’s own journey through pregnancy and into motherhood as it poses its own questions to the history of African-American motherhood, inevitably imprinted by the legacy of slavery in the Americas. Ultimately, the book heralds the creativity and resilience that characterizes black life. Monique is an associate professor and chair of the English, Writing, and Communication department at Emmanuel College where she teaches courses in literature and poetry writing. Her first collection—Anonymous (Jacar Press, 2018)--won the New Voices Award and her second collection, Rupture, was a finalist the Perugia Press Prize and Four Way Books Levis Prize in Poetry. Her book Between the Lines: Literary Transnationalism and African American Poetics (Oxford UP, 2011) is the first to juxtapose Cuba, Brazil and the United States in a study of nineteenth-century women’s poetry, and the first to include the Lusophone literary tradition in a comparative study of African descendants in Latin America, the U.S., and the Caribbean. Paperback Page count: 64 Trim size: 5.5 x 9 in. ISBN: 978-1-949933-18-5
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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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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 -
For the last five years of his life, Barbara Probst served as the personal secretary to Lord John Pentland, the man designated by G.I. Gurdjieff to lead his teaching in America. In this unique collection of anecdotes and vignettes, Barbara offers a vivid portrait of a man who embodied Gurdjieff’s call to awaken to oneself, “always and everywhere,” and sought to awaken that call—in deft, subtle, and unexpected ways—in those who were near him. As noted in the Introduction, not only was Lord Pentland head of the Gurdjieff Foundation and instrumental in spreading Gurdjieff’s ideas throughout North America, he was also a businessman, keenly involved in a range of endeavors. With a penetrating vision that could encompass ideas on a vast scale along with the smallest details of the individual in front of him, he left indelible impressions on those who knew him. Thanks to this memoir, those who did not know him are offered a glimpse of a truly remarkable teacher for whom the inner and outer worlds were always related. Paperback ISBN: 978-1-949933-14-7
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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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Enter the fairy-tale of pre-dawn Fifth Avenue, as ‘90s nightlife ingenue, Lilly Lejeune, strolls past Tiffany’s. Her plan is to live her own best version of the iconic Manhattan film Breakfast at Tiffany’s. The actress Audrey Hepburn is Lilly’s north-star. Up to the packed bar to order a shot of tequila in the smoke-laced neon shadows. Lilly glides from velvet-roped clubs to packed, sweaty dives, comforted by her fashion choices, her dirty martinis, the story of her glamorous rebellion and the arrangements she has with men to support her independence. But despite Lilly’s nostalgia, this is the ‘90s and the grungy, heroin-chic, pre-gentrified NYC isn’t filmed in 1961’s Eastman color film stock. In this world, the extras are cloaked in hoodies as pagers beep and votive candles flicker. This is a decade when famous models search out private spots to shoot pool, cigarettes clenched in their teeth as the jukebox clicks to Alice in Chains’ Man in the Box. Time for one more round? Hell, yeah! Because no one leaves the East Village until night fades into the searing flames of day. Much like Holly Golightly in Breakfast at Tiffany’s, Lilly, her new writer friend upstairs, George Nichols, and her dive-bar locals have a choice: hide in the neon or wake up and face the day. Join them on the streets of Manhattan and see how they face the journey of this Sweet Ride. Paperback Page count: 196 Trim size: 6 x 9 in. ISBN: 978-1-949933-07-9
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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.
