literature

  • Codhill Poetry Award Winner 2018

    In The Now Dark Sky, Setting Us All on Fire, Robert Krut unveils surrealistic imagery and apocalyptic moments that encroach on his cityscapes. Entering his urban vision of off-kilter fingerprint police, helix fireworks, and lockboxes replete with “unsewn / buttons from the shirts of dead men” (“The Vault”), we are invited to witness how “daylight peels silence / off the sides of buildings” to reveal vampire teeth and arrows (“Phantasmagoria at Six AM”), how “every single body on the street / turns to paper” (“At This Very Moment”). Krut dismantles the world around us and in turn remakes it into something dark yet alive, a place seething with desire, where “A thousand leaves are worth one wish” (“This All Starts With You, and This All Ends With You”)
    From the very first poem in this quiet and intimate collection, Robert Krut inventively crafts image after shape-shifting image, each suggesting an alternate universe designed to help us better understand our real one. From a preacher in a lentil rainstorm to a doorman wearing a hat full of beetles, we meet people (and see places) filled not only with what is real but with what is possible. Between these magical details runs a clear and steady narrative: a speaker who dons the “too-small sweater of summer.” Who knows that “danger isn’t a bomb, danger is a drip.” And who survives “this pension of suffering.” The graceful poems in The Now Dark Sky, Setting Us All on Fire beautifully balance being both agent and acted upon. Krut is a poet of vivid imagery and distinctive voice.

    —Patricia Colleen Murphy, Hemming Flame 

    Robert Krut’s newest collection, The Now Dark Sky, Setting Us All on Fire, paints a landscape of imagination where the Lord of Time might be bargained with as we are left “waiting to be swallowed whole.” The seductive tactility of Krut’s language reminds us of our bodies, our bones and teeth, our veins and fingerprints even as we move among dragons and giant arachnids. A provocative pendulum swinging from fantasy to physicality and back again, these poems acknowledge our longing for escape but leave us with the inescapable conclusion that we are tethered now and forever to ourselves and to this blood-drenched world.

    —KMA Sullivan, Inclined to Riot

     A poem inside a poem is a guest, and Robert Krut’s new compilation The Now Dark Sky, Setting Us All on Fire is worth putting the kettle on to serve. I am in awe at his ability with composing words, where the music from deep imagination comes easily to him. I’ve dined with these poems, went for long walks with “Now, Breathe Fire” and “Dear Demon” inside my coat pocket. I wrote his poem “Welcome” on a lotus leaf and posted it on my front door because it reminded that it is good to welcome the essentiality of darkness from time to time. Let these poems be lanterns to the door you are about to open. This collection is a treasure and good reason why we must keep on breathing.

    —Sam Roxas-Chua, Saying Your Name Three Times Underwater

    2019 | 80 pages
  • Nobody captures the infuriating challenges or transporting joys of fatherhood like Steve Lewis. Written with honesty, humor and compassion, as well as an abiding love of the remote beauty of Hatteras Island, A Hard Rain is the masterful and compelling story of one man’s attempt to reclaim a sense of self and rebuild his family after his wife inexplicably disappears.

    —Karen Dukess,The Last Book Party 

    “What begins—and remains—a poignant love story also immediately becomes a mystery that pulls the reader through to the very end. The family at the heart of A Hard Rain learns to reckon with a change so profound that every member is affected, as well as every reader. Lewis tells a story that moves us all, well beyond even the last word of his brilliant novel.”

    —David Masello, author, playwright, cultural critic, Executive Editor of Milieu magazine

    Forget what you know about motherhood as you dive in to Steve Lewis’ A Hard Rain. He places you skin to skin with a family wading through grief and mesmerizes you with prose that makes you feel each carefully placed comment, each grain of North Carolina sand beneath your feet. I have seldom read such beautiful writing or felt so taken by a group of characters.

    —Annabel Monaghan, columnist and author of the Digit books and Does This Volvo Make My Butt Look Big?

    Steven Lewis has the uncanny ability to write about your life without actually knowing you. In his latest novel, an unrelenting hard rain falls on the Hudson family. A rain shrouded in mystery that leaves each member scanning the horizon for a glimmer of sunlight. A reprieve from the squall of their lives. A beautifully observed story of a family’s search for understanding on an island with few answers, rich in heartbreaking poetic detail, by an incredibly gifted writer of whom I couldn’t be more jealous.

    —Peter Steinfeld, Screenwriter, Drowning Mona, Be Cool, 21

  •  Instructions for the Heart Acclaimed storyteller Laura Simms gives us a rich tapestry of tales that unveil the secrets of love in all of its forms. Passionate, riveting, often humorous, these stories of emotional, physical, and spiritual love come from a variety of traditions, including Celtic, Inuit, Persian, Hindu, Jewish, and African. Laura finds the pearls of wisdom and insight carefully hidden within each story. Her evocative, telling commentaries and quotes interspersed with these tales of love and the mysteries of the heart lead us to the many faces and profound requirements of love.
    "One can never know what love will look like or what form it will take. Each of these fourteen stories is a passage to love with its own perils and triumphs, disappointments and miracles. It is in the power of story to remind us what we have forgotten, what we need to remember to restore our hearts."

    —from the introduction by Terry Tempest Williams, author of Red, Refuge, and Leap

    "Irresistible. A major force in the revival of storytelling in America."

    —The New York Times

    "Intriguing, wonderful, and ripe with the mysteries of love."

    —Geoffrey Navias, Artistic Director of the Open Hand Theater

    2002 | 94 pages
  • Song Yong is not one of the more celebrated writers in Korea but more of an outsider looking in on the mainstream writing establishment in Korea. His work has never seen commercial success, nor it is well-known in Korea, although he is respected among prominent literary critics. The lack of interest in Korean literature in North America makes it difficult to find a publishing venue for "out-of-the ordinary" fiction such as Song Yong's.... Song Yong's fictional world is different from the mainstream Korean fiction in the 70s and 80s that tended to reflect the political struggle for democracy and the consequences of rapid industrialization. It focuses on the alienation of individuals who are marginalized from society for various reasons. They are vulnerable within a homogenous society where dominant public discourse enforces rigid hierarchy, obedience, and conformity. There is little precedent in Korean fiction for Song Yong's calm, subdued and often detached narrative voice. He is one of the few Korean writers influenced by Existentialism in the 70s, and the themes of existential angst and despair appear throughout his work.... Song Yong's stories have a surreal tone which is rare in Korean fiction.... His stories never follow a standard formula or contrived plots but employ a unique narrative voice and technique that can be identified as distinctly his. They may deal with taboo topics in Korean society such as the unequal American-Korean relationship, materialism, and disturbing physical and mental abuses prevalent in the Korean military penal system.... Song Yong's stories display a Kafkaesque world of ordinary people trapped in authoritarian society. They present a different Asian fiction to readers accustomed to the two most common genres: Chinese books on Mao's cultural revolution and Murakami's brand of weird-for-weird's-sake Japanese fiction.

    —from the introduction by translator Jason Park

    2008 | 190 pages
  • Reflections on Myth, Symbol, and Story "The Sphinx, the Pyramids, the stone temples are, all of them, ultimately, as flimsy as London Bridge; our cities but tents set up in the cosmos. We pass. But what the bee knows, the wisdom that sustains our passing lifehowever much we deny or ignore itthat for ever remains."

    —P. L. Travers

    2010 | 303 pages
  • A Collection of Creative Nonfiction In Search Of offers a wide-angle lens into the craft of creative nonfiction in a unique collection by fourteen professional, academic, and student writers, whose stories traverse oceans and continents in the common search for identity and place. Haifa Mahabir is a graduate of the Creative Writing Program at the State University of New York, College at New Paltz. She has also studied in Paris at the Creative Writing Workshop of the Paris American Academy, and has twice received recognition as the Year's Best Young Writer in both 2008 and 2009 from Travelers' Tales/Solas House. Original cover and interior artwork by Brandon Boyd of Incubus.
    Proceeds benefit the SUNY New Paltz Creative Writing Program.
    2011 | 116 pages
  • A Promise Kept is the story of Jared's mythic quest to fulfill an ancient promise and save his people from endless war and spiritual poverty. A thrilling adventure and a tale of our time.
    2011 | 280 pages
  • Set in 1970s America, an era that challenged sexual and cultural norms, Anthony Robinson’s riveting new novel, The Floodplain, tells the story of Professor Rick Forester, his wife Chloe and their two children, whose lives are forever changed when Chloe, a fledgling psychotherapist, becomes romantically entangled with her mentor, the charismatic psychiatrist Dr. Evan Kendrix. Kendrix, a leading interpreter of techniques in humanistic psychology, lures Chloe with promises of success and an exciting new life. Rick watches helplessly as his wife becomes increasingly involved with Kendrix. When Chloe discovers Kendrix’s true nature—he is a flagrant manipulator of women—she falls into a steep emotional decline. Rick takes action at last. In the last part of the narrative, events culminate in a murder and a trial. The themes of action and inaction, guilt and innocence, are played out, and in the end Rick Forrester comes to terms with himself.
    2011 | 280 pages
  • Bo Lassner is an ex-coach and an ex-player who currently scouts collegiate and high school hoopsters for the New Jersey Nets. As such, he has no stake in who wins or who loses, and approaches each game and each player with a purity of vision. For him, life is a metaphor for basketball. However, although he knows the secrets at the heart of the game, he is caught up in the behind-the-doors politics that's rampant in the NBA. Here are his iconoclastic views of basketball, love, and American culture.
    2013 | 180 pages
  • This collection of stories presents characters drawn with such depth and detail that you will swear you met them somewhere before. The self–described "old maid" who marries at 73. The high school principal who sees his orderly existence upended by a new colleague. The middle–aged, divorced woman who has a series of dreams that alter the course of her life. Whether facing the circumstances of their lives with clear vision or stumbling along with unwitting blindness, these and other characters are never less than recognizable human beings with contradictions and secrets hidden even from themselves. Told with humor and poignancy, these eight intimate stories speak to the spiritual question of what matters in life and remind us that things, and people, are not always what they seem.
    2014 | 124 pages
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