Catalog

  • On Being an Image-maker A Passion for Seeing gathers a rare feast of stories, impressions, and observations from a writer and artist known for his keen honesty, great heart, and passionate pursuit of the question: what does it mean to be human? Carefully chosen excerpts from many of his books and over a dozen new drawings are among the treasures included. In A Passion for Seeing, Frederick Franck establishes himself as a prime witness to the twentieth century. Read in this anthology the best of Franck's observations. From the onset of World War Two and his work with Dr. Albert Schweitzer to private audiences with Pope John XXIII and the Dalai Lama, from the streets of New York City to the ancient temples of Japan, follow his art and thought as they illuminate our world. "Franck...looks deep into the human heart and what he finds there is the priceless treasure of the sacred reality: a discovery and message so crucial to contemporary humanity."

    —Georg Feuerstein, author of The Yoga Tradition

    "Dialogues with the spiritual masters of the East show us the possibility of a universal ecumenism that is rarely experienced."

    —Matthew Fox, author of Original Blessing

    "For the pilgrim in each of us who would journey into Eastern or Western spiritual traditions to chart a path in this troubled time...."

    —Joanna Macy, author of World as Lover, World as Self

    "He simply sees things most people do not...."

    —Harvey Cox, author of The Secular City

    2003 | 112 pages
  • Translations and Transformations Fenkl's Cathay is a complex interweaving of fiction, translation, scholarship, and transformative writing. It includes new translations of the three luminaries of Tang Dynasty poetry: Li Po, Tu Fu, and Wang Wei—but that is only to whet the appetite. The volume also features the opening of the seventeenth-century Korean Buddhist classic, Nine Cloud Dream, by Kim Man-jung; an emulation of a horrific yet transcendent Tang Dynasty chuanji (“strange tale”); a magical, and yet postcolonial, revisioning of Hans Christian Andersen’s nineteenth-century fairytale, “The Nightingale”; and the enchanting story of the Shakyamuni Buddha’s conception and birth. The scope and depth of Fenkl’s achievement are astonishing. A simultaneous tribute to and criticism of Ezra Pound’s history-making 1915 chapbook of the same title, Fenkl’s Cathay is destined to be an instant literary classic.
    2007 | 110 pages
  • …At the crossroads of assault and proceed, with the sweat dirty gun grease of law machines, amid thrill and lull, faithless young gods inured to guts swill black smoke, uniformed, flag-fetishistic do-good recruits who brace for sanity's sake (checkpoint!) sake (checkpoint!) the creed of pluck for country and pluck for self and die in the smithy of old gods' desires... They planned it. This, the goods your works produce."

    —Design at Mahmoudiya

    2007 | 60 pages
  • "You have in your hands a selection of poems I wrote just before & just after I turned fifty. Each in its way expresses the search for the unknown that has been the center of gravity of my entire adult life. This search has brought me into intimate relationship with others, some of whom I have never met and some of whom are good friends.... I hope that you can hear these voices and perhaps the sounds of forest birds & late night winds in the pages that follow."

    —from the Preface

    Bold and forthright in observation, Damon takes in the look and feel of things, and in concert with his perceptions, finds language both simple and adequate to his task. Where his poems sing, it is in the quiet lyric of presence. Where they exult, it is with the exclamation of the moment of pure vision.
    2005 | 118 pages
  • Praise for Steve Clorfeine's work: "I found myself carried by his words...often an unremarkable or extravagantly beautiful list of things and events was made brilliant by the attention paid to their existence."

    —Parabola: Myth, Tradition and the Search for Meaning

    "Clorfeine's day to day experiences read like a series of prose haikus...there is a clarity in his writing...a habit of seeing the ordinary and the extraordinary, the marvelous in the mundane..."

    —Woodstock Times

    2006 | 90 pages
  • An Anthology of Hudson Valley Writers Riverine is a contemporary anthology of memoir, short fiction, and poetry by over seventy Hudson Valley writers. The memoirs reflect Hudson Valley life along with life outside the U.S. Intriguing short stories, both dark and light, explore a wide range of fictional characters. Microfiction (or flash fiction) brings the reader the razor-sharp genre of the short-short story and thought-provoking prose poems. Two poetry sections offer a wide array of styles from a diverse group of poets. "Hudson Valley Views" focuses upon the landscape of the valley that these poets call home. "Other Realms" journeys to the inner mindscape and takes the reader to places both real and imaginary. Riverine is the creation of writer and editor Laurence Carr along with Codhill publisher, David Appelbaum, former editor of Parabola magazine. Riverine celebrates the words of those authors who breathe the air of the Hudson Valley, drink its water, eat the harvest from its rich soil and convert these gifts into the gift of words that reflects our individual and collective lives. As long as a healthy Hudson River continues to flow through this valley (and part of our lives must be committed to its good health), the words of its writers will also continue to flow from lips and pens and pencils and keyboards.
    2007 | 314 pages
  • 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
  • The Passionate Pursuit of Wisdom in the West Two powerful motives weave beneath the surface of our spiritual history: the desire to know and the desire to love. The secret history of the West is the story of saints, mystics, alchemists, poets, and philosophers trying to unite these two streams and celebrate—in the world and in their own persons—the sacred marriage of Logos and Sophia, Word and Wisdom. This book, an impressionistic history of the Western spiritual tradition, follows the traces—from ancient Greece into modern times—of those who sought to know the world and themselves, while realizing that they must overcome themselves to love the world and each other. There are chapters on Pythagoras, Sophia, Celtic Christianity, the Troubadours, the Grail, the Rose Cross, Renaissance spirituality, Romanticism, nineteenth-century occultism, and twentieth-century esotericism. Inspirational interludes place the whole within an atmosphere of Christian mysticism. Tracking this endless trace of our evolving relationship with each other, God, and nature, we begin to understand how human consciousness has changed and evolved and what humanity's task is now. With an introduction by Philip Zaleski, editor of The Best Spiritual Writing Series.
    2003 | 303 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
  • A Short Piece It must be that the azaleas Bloom at dawn And fall at dusk. Over the low pine grove Behind the rocks in Samchung Dong They droop Whenever the clouds pass. All through April Unnoticed by any This year's azaleas also Must be blooming in the shade And falling in the shade. —Kim Gwang-gyoon
    2007 | 152 pages
  • I pick up thumb-tacks in the street and put them in my pocket. Some I use to stick up times on the corkboard, some I put back in the desk. Once a tack stuck straight through the ball of my foot as I ran straight on it, the ball of the foot came down, the heel lifted off pushing the ball of the foot down full on the tack. Running off I stepped off pulling off blind—leg, hip, spine, neck and tongue like a crack of lightning. If you want to keep time straight, you pick up tacks and put them in your pocket. —from "Thumbtacks, Glass, Pennies"
    2009 | 64 pages
  • Full Moon Tide I want to stop listening.

    I’m tired

    of making sense, of having to listen, of taking the ocean in day after day, of holding on to its labor; you have to let go—and it blanks out lost to the magnification of mind; when I fall asleep the muscle won’t let loose, my back slides, my hip hurries for doorways, my fingers talk as though they were held by a talking hand for an instant that turns off night, and it’s still noon, and the talking ocean just said it, just spoke the words that mean this loss is really here and you can’t turn it away and the doorways are slamming shut, the breakers are slamming down, the magnification of mind slamming down. I’m listening for doorways. —from Shorewards Tidewards
    2007 | 36 pages
  • The poet's eye never misses the incongruity of things that cuts to the bone, "an obsidian scalpel of love" that keeps racing with her in the space between life and death, adoration and hatred. It may be that "balance is axiomatic," but always it is imperiled, a saving grace necessary, and the eye nervously glancing between heaven and earth. "Pamela Uschuk is a political poet, defiant in the face of injustice, as well as a poet of Eros. She's nobody's fool. She resurrects in her poems the brutalized, the murdered, the lost of the world—those who have no voice of their own. She pulls them close. And when she turns to the world's gliding wonders, she does so with a precise eye and everything she sees is absorbed by her uniquely compassionate voice."

    —Dennis Sampson, author of Constant Longing and Needlegrass

    2005 | 44 pages
  • Uchmanowicz's poetry lives in its form and its formalism enlivens the line and space between images "in perpetual flight." Breathless accents, a parade of local color, deep sympathy with existence, the work is a continual reaffirmation of the poet's need for life. "Uchmanowicz portrays a 'year-rounder's' Cape Cod of fickle weather, untimely deaths, and gritty sensuality. Her taut, precise poems are vivid enough to grab a reader at first sight and rich enough to reward a second reading."

    —Chronogram

    2004 | 32 pages
  • Poetry cannot perform search and rescues. Words are not water or food or shelter. Grief cannot put a roof over storm-refugees. Compassion's not a substitute for action. Come in from the wind, let words restore power. Come in under the blue tarp of this Muse.... —from "Hurricane Hymn
    2009 | 148 pages
  • "Winner of the Codhill Poetry Chapbook Award for 2008, Barry Sternlieb’s Winter Crows recalls the directness of Asian master poets, its offerings as deft as calligraphic brushwork, as acoustically sound as birdsong, as defined as avian tracks through newly fallen snow, leading to the house of wisdom."

    —Pauline Uchmanowicz, final judge

    2009 | 42 pages
  • "Winner of the Codhill Poetry Chapbook Award for 2009," Elizabeth Rees's Tilting Gravity shimmers like moonlight on tidewater, illuminating the ebb and flow of brokenness and recovery with rippling imagination and lyrical elegance."

    —Pauline Uchmanowicz, final judge

    2010 | 36 pages
  • 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.
    2008 | 38 pages
  • "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 Judge
    2007 | 32 pages
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