Three Candles Press: Poetry Books

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Erin Elizabeth Smith The Fear of Being Found

Release Date: Feb. 15, 2008

85 Pages, $13.95, ISBN: 978-0-9770892-4-6

"Erin Elizabeth Smith's debut book of poems, The Fear of Being Found, is adamantly itself. Smith's nervy, plangent lyrics question and reject assumptions, outfit themselves for uncertainty in a world where wind is "young and bitter" and "cicadas sound like a factory of lathes." Personal and metaphysical, mythic and immediate, these poems are elegant as a pair of white gloves and fierce as a set of fangs."

— Angela Ball

"Coming from the desert which is the world of pretentious contemporary American poetry, the dense and luscious verbal foliage of Erin Elizabeth Smith's first collection arises miraculously, a testament to original talent and the ancient impulse to call out. This is the voice of one who cryeth in the wilderness, but it's not John the Baptist — it's Salome, both feminine and fully empowered, sharpening her knife, singing a haunting ballad of love gone wrong, bespeaking those terrors which have passed, foretelling those to come."

— Jonah Winter

In "Becfola," Erin Elizabeth Smith asks, "Who would not fight for an island, for this / small shelter in a vast and singing sea?" And in her impressive debut collection, she offers a vibrant new version of Yeats' dream of Innisfree, as at home among the muscadines and honeysuckle of the south as it is on the banks of the Susquehanna in upstate New York. These are poems of tenderness informed by a deep understanding of personal loss and familial trauma, and the way they both shape who we are. The Fear of Being Found announces a poet of considerable deftness fishing among "soft-shelled histories" and "our own country's bones" for these vital and vitalizing poems.

— Chad Davidson

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Andrew Demcak: Catching Tigers in Red Weather

Release Date: Oct. 30, 2007

88 Pages, $13.95, ISBN: 9780977089239

"What a deliciously queer & charming book Andrew Demcak has created! These poems are a homage to influences, obsessions, admirations, desires, dreams, wishes, witness, tradition, lived experience and poetic imagination. They come together as conversation, as pillowbook, as memoriam, as a considered response to the noise and cogs of daily living. Demcak shows us the richness and the possibilities that come about when we engage our lives with language & poetry."

— Justin Chin

"From the Singing Nun to a brother's son, from glad hotels to a white palm tree or a half-smoked Marlboro, these surreal couplets continually return us to 'the damp contact of skin, unfathomed.'"

— Dorianne Laux

Andrew Demcak is a poet unafraid of the harrowing, sometimes revelatory nature of modern life. Above all, these poems evoke the moments when people come together, both in violent and romantic ways, and they also train a keen eye on the aftermaths of our partings. Catching Tigers in Red Weather will remind everyone who reads it that beauty and fear come into the world hand-in-hand. Like any significant poetry, it will alter its readers' perspectives forever.

— Kaya Oakes

Andrew Demcak's poems make acrobatic leaps and turns that dizzy and delight me, flashing their urban wit, their old-young wisdom, and their exhilarating range of language and feeling. Demcak's ingenious invention is a compact, elegant form, repeated throughout the book as world after surprising world, under intense pressure, flares within it. This is a book of gems.

— Joan Larkin, Contest Judge

Press Release

Tony Trigilio: The Lama's English Lessons

Release Date: Nov. 30, 2006

96 Pages, $12.95, ISBN: 0-9770892-1-5

"In The Lama's English Lessons, Trigilio navigates a postmodern American urbanscape searching for grace. He calmly chronicles the way the natural and the mechanical now interpenetrate, taking on each other's characteristics, missions: 'The cabs stupefied / at the airport like cattle.' In his quest he encounters the homeless, baseball, TV, special prosecutors, jazz, Lee Harvey Oswald, the proclamations of newscasters and ex-presidents, and the legacies of WW II and Vietnam. He discovers odd moments of humor and transcendence in the mass transit, multi tasking madness we're trapped, in a confluence of personal and public histories, and manages to float above it all, maintaining perfect spiritual equilibrium, like strains of Buddhist music."

— Amy Gerstler

"A quietude pervades this boffo first collection, the poems aglint with disaster. In a time of war, Trigilio tracks our sadness calmly, ever aware of the expense of spirit spent on anger. But don't be misled: these poems do plenty, graciously, elegantly, and with the ardent skepticism of a man living awake in the twenty-first century. Alfred Nobel would be proud: this book's full of peace and dynamite."

— Alan Michael Parker

RJ McCaffery: Ice Sculpture of Mermaid With Cigar

Release Date: April 7, 2006

128 Pages, $12.95, ISBN: 0-9770892-0-7

"'Here we go a-sentencing' Robert Frost said about writing poetry. This is what you'll find in Ice Sculpture of Mermaid with Cigar: exceptional sentences, a wild, wily, Protean imagination, a sometimes generous, sometimes scaldingly wry intelligence, and a whole, properly crazy heart. RJ McCaffrey makes poems that are almost miracles."

— Thomas Lux

"RJ McCaffery writes of 'the gloss and flare of moment' in these lushly precise, precisely lush poems. Dense and musical, indelibly articulate, Ice Sculpture of Mermaid with Cigar speaks of "necessary language" and that's what these poems are: necessary to anyone looking for poems that speak to the heart, the mind, the soul."

— Paul Guest

R.J. McCaffery has heeded Coleridge's call and put the best words in the best order. These are poems which can and should be read as prayers — poems which substantiate desire, which reify a need so grave it can only be spoken of in the careful architecture of our most private spaces. The tenderness with which McCaffery attends to the sound and sense of these poems thus belies their most fundamental attribute: a grace which cannot be taught. This is the language of a life lived in and through poetry.

— Seth Abramson

Digerati: 20 Contemporary Poets in the Virtual World

Release Date: February 21, 2006

336 pages, price $15.95, ISBN: 0-9770892-2-3

Peter Pereira Eduardo C. Corral Aaron Anstett Paul Guest Alison Pelegrin Teresa Ballard RJ McCaffery Seth Abramson Nancy Eimers Anthony Robinson	Deborah Keenan Tony Trigilio Lee Ann Roripaugh Shanna Compton Jake Adam York Michael Meyerhofer Matthew Shindell Jacqueline Marcus William E. Stobb Frank Matagrano
Sale Price: $12.00, no shipping, while supplies last.

Autographed

Also Available from Ghost Road Press or the poet's website, the debut collection of poetry from Steve Mueske.