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The poems in this collection are a meditation on themes such as illness, friendship, family, death, lost innocence, survivor’s guilt, and transcendence by a talented young poet who experienced and endured more in her short life than most people do by old age. Laura Rothenberg was born with cystic fibrosis which is a genetic disease. The poetry is connected with many different special moments, and realizations in her life. Even though she had this disease, and died at the age of twenty-two, she gave as much as she could to life, helping friends, helping others who were ill, and learning different sports. This poetry reveals all of these different sides of her, and much more. Paperback Page count: 54 Trim size: 5.5 x 9 in. ISBN: 978-1-949933-22-2
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The poems in Heaven Underfoot qualify as ecopoetry as they exemplify the four features of environmentally conscious texts, which set them apart from nature writing (as outlined by American scholar Lawrence Buell in The Environmental Imagination): they make the non-human environment central rather than marginal; they feature human interest as only one valid focus; they hold humans accountable to the environment; and they portray nature as a process rather than a fixed framework.
Diana Woodcock holds a Ph.D in Creative Writing from Lancaster University, where she researched poetry’s role in the search for an environmental ethic. In 1974, she earned a B.S. degree in Psychology, and in 2004 an M.F.A. degree in Creative Writing. She has worked as a counselor with delinquent youth, an editor of a young women’s magazine, and a teacher of English as a second language. For nearly eight years, she lived in Tibet, Macau, and on the Thai-Cambodian border teaching and working with refugees. Since 2004, she has been teaching creative writing, environmental literature, and composition at VCUarts Qatar. She is the author of seven chapbooks and five poetry collections, most recently Holy Sparks (a finalist for the 2020 Paraclete Press Poetry Award) and Facing Aridity (a finalist for the 2020 Prism Prize for Climate Literature). She is the recipient of the 2022 Codhill Press Pauline Uchmanowicz Poetry Award, the 2011 Vernice Quebodeaux Pathways Poetry Prize for Women (for her debut collection, Swaying on the Elephant’s Shoulders), a three-time Pushcart Prize nominee, and a Best of the Net nominee. Her poems have appeared in Best New Poets 2008, Women’s Review of Books, Nimrod, Crab Orchard Review, Southern Humanities Review, Spiritus, Comstock Review, and other journals and anthologies. Her grand prize-winning poem, “Music as Scripture,” was performed onstage in Lincoln Park, San Francisco by Natica Angilly’s Poetic Dance Theater Company at Artists Embassy International’s 21st Dancing Poetry Festival. Paperback Page count: 86 Trim size: 5.5 x 9 in. ISBN: 978-1-949933-25-3 -
Betty writes with wisdom and humor about aging, as well as many of life’s stages. In a career encompassing sculpture, painting, freelance writing, and performing, the author turned to writing from her heart in her late seventies. At eighty-nine, she offers her first published book. Betty’s work has appeared in the anthologies Get Out of My Crotch, 80 Things to Do When You Turn 80, Open House, Better with Age, and Lightwood, an online magazine. She has performed her work for WritersRead, TMI Project, and Woodstock Bookfest. Betty hosts Words Carry Us, a monthly livestream of readings and interviews from Green Kill, in Kingston, NY. Paperback ISBN: 978-1-949933-21-5
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In Win or Die: Leadership Secrets from Game of Thrones, Bruce Craven brilliantly analyzes the intense journeys of the best and worst leaders in the epic fantasy empires of Essos and Westeros, offering the reader guidance and motivation to apply the skills necessary to fight his or her own game of thrones. Bruce Craven is an Academic Director and member of the Columbia Business School Executive Education faculty. He teaches across the portfolio and serves as Faculty Director for executive education programs, including the Advanced Management Program (AMP), and programs for the French luxury goods company Kering, and for the German business school W.H.U. He teaches workshops in resilience, emotional intelligence, leadership communication and flexible thinking and also teaches his graduate school management elective Leadership Through Fiction. His novel about NYC in the Nineties – Sweet Ride – was published by Codhill Press in 2021. Win or Die: Leadership Secrets from Game of Thrones has been translated into Turkish, Serbian and Russian. His collection of poetry Buena Suerte in Red Glitter, was published in 2019 with Red Dirt Press in Oklahoma. He published the novel Fast Sofa in 1993. The novel was translated into Japanese and German. He cowrote the script for the film Fast Sofa (Lionsgate Entertainment, 2001), starring Jennifer Tilly, Crispin Glover and Jake Busey. He has served on two boards for non-profit organizations focused on helping low-income families and the homeless. He received his MFA in Poetry from Columbia University’s School of the Arts. Helives with his wife and two sons in the Coachella Valley in California. Paperback Page count: 300 Trim size: 6.125 x 9.25 in. ISBN: 978-1-949933-20-8
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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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"David Appelbaum's Window with 4 Panes aims high: the poet in his "Overture" claims a prophetic mantle, aiming to speak a truth 'beyond each simulation by language,' over obstacles of 'dislocation, displacement, dissonance.' Appelbaum, whom we must thank for his work at New Paltz's Codhill Press as well as for his poetry, acquits himself well, writing of big topics with a light hand using a spare, short line. The first section takes on mortality ('sorrow/to the bone/all for petty things'), while the second traces a kind of coping, promising 'survival is rare glory.' `The garden must be praised,' he declares, for pushing on in this 'dangerous oxygen.' The final poems are precise and authoritative, rather like oracular utterance." - William Seaton, Chronogram Originally published: 2009
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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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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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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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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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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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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.
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THE ENNEAGRAM OF G.I. GURDJIEFF, Mathematics, Metaphysics, Music, and Meaning, explores various aspects of the enneagram, the symbol that G.I. Gurdjieff introduced to the modern world, and which he stated represented a complete description of the laws governing the universe. Because of the importance he attached to it, it has long intrigued followers of his teaching, and others, yet the understanding of its meanings remains very incomplete. In particular, how it relates to modern mathematical and scientific descriptions of the laws governing the universe has largely been unexplored. This book explores connections between these two approaches to the truth, while also recognizing and exploring the differences between knowledge based on symbols and that based on scientific theories and mathematical formulae.
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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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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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With this collection of writings, author Frank R. Sinclair strikes a contemplative note, necessary for our times. Through a series of recollections and reflections—in part inspired by the spiritual discipline lived by his late wife, Beatrice Sinclair—he introduces the reader to the equivalent of the practice of the presence of God. Also by Frank R. Sinclair: Without Benefit of Clergy: Some Personal Footnotes to the Gurdjieff Teaching Of the Life Aligned: Reflections on the Teaching of G.I. Gurdjieff and the Perennial Order
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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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Translators: Bruce and Ju-Chan Fulton Inspired by the case of a torture specialist in 1980s South Korea who from 1988 to 2000 was a fugitive in his own house, The Catcher in the Loft (published in South Korea in 2011 as Saenggang) is in equal parts a portrait of a man coming to terms with his notorious past and a coming-of-age story centered in his dependent relationship with his college-age daughter, who has always thought of him as a patriotic policeman. The novel begins at breakneck speed, with a victim perishing under the torture artist (renamed An)’s watch, and a hurried decision that An must take cover. The remainder of the novel is a dual narrative related in turn by the torture artist and his daughter, Sŏn, who must harbor her father in a loft above her room. There follows a counterpoint of concealment (An) and revelation (Sŏn), with the daughter discovering the “festival” of her own body during an infatuation with a university classmate, followed by the sobering knowledge, manifested firsthand in her encounter with one of her father’s shattered victims, that the father she had idolized is a sado-masochist reduced to abject dependence on her for all of his daily needs during his concealment in the loft. When the novel ends, years later, the focus is equally on An’s ultimate capitulation (he turns himself in to the authorities) and Sŏn’s awakening to her autonomy.
