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Jehanne Dubrow The Hardship Post
Release Date: Jan. 15, 2009
88 Pages, $13.95, ISBN:978-0-9770892-6-0
"I admire Jehanne Dubrow's poems not only for the poise and beauty of her lines, but also for the way she grapples with big subjects: inheritance and home, the cultural and the personal. A bearer of tradition, she also knows what it's like to lose herself in modernity. 'I don't belong where bodies separate / from minds like sand trying to leave behind / the sea.' Poems become strands of continuity stretched almost to breaking by mobility. Dubrow seems to have lived everywhere-and that is precisely where The Hardship Post should be read."
— David Mason
"At the place where the cruelties of history and those of story intersect, Jehanne Dubrow has staked a claim. These are poems of emotional intensity under formal control. An impressive first collection."
— Linda Pastan
"There's a tensile strength of line here-predominantly pentameter-that underscores the ease of the poetic idiom: just as the heartfelt yet disciplined feeling-life of the content underwrites this collection's larger themes of Judaism and it ancient traditions. The Hardship Post has a good deal on its mind as well as the load in its heart. Polish history and heritage may be one personal focus, but displacement and identity are the greater subjects. First books don't usually take on the world at this level of seriousness and skill."
— Stanley Plumly
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Matthew Shindell In Another Castle
Release Date: Nov. 11, 2008
104 Pages, $13.95, ISBN: 978-0-9770892-5-3
"Let's call this poet Blind Lemon Shock Therapy, he who knows how our visions prey on us and redeem us. Let's give him a wreath of drunken hummingbirds, a life supply of Goo Gone, he who sings as an inebriate of air and wipes the film from our helmet's visors. Let us admire the poise of this poet in the burning building of his poems where the party is. Let us praise Matt Shindell for offering us another castle where the ferocity of the imagination bedazzles and many-persons us until we be kaleidoscoped."
— Dean Young
"I believe in this first book by Matthew Shindell, a man who has devoted much of his life to the history of science; in it we find the changing simultaneous particle or standing wave alive in a confounding space that is like the special silence between lovers. There is sadness here and the brittle music of Kafka's decisions in language. And, yes, what an original and brilliant book it is."
— Norman Dubie
"In what may be one of the saddest, weirdest books I've ever read, reminding me at once of a critique of Blake and Stevens, Matthew Shindell explores the hollowness of the imagination and declares it all but bankrupt. For the last two hundred years we've been told there is some kind of glorious refuge in the imagination. We've been told the imagination is this transcendent kingdom, a stalwart distant castle, anchoring the real, where it's all okay, a place where there is safety and order in the supreme fiction: that poetry is an oasis and a poem is a kind of Wallace Stevens Memorial vacation get-away. But Matthew Shindell's book explodes this lie and shows us that the imaginative capacity is not a palace of wisdom, but a castle of delusion. And that we have to find another castle. An admirable, amazing — and really depressing — book."
— Gabriel Gudding
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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
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Press Release
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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
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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
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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
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- Deborah Keenan
- Tony Trigilio
- Lee Ann Roripaugh
- Shanna Compton
- Jake Adam York
- Michael Meyerhofer
- Matthew Shindell
- Jacqueline Marcus
- William E. Stobb
- Frank Matagrano
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Autographed
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Also Available from Ghost Road Press or the poet's website, the debut collection of poetry from Steve Mueske.
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