Poesía

CAPP ROAD

Capp Road is a brutal, unflinching portrait of small town America. Here, Matt Borczon trains his laser-focus upon the claustrophobic, suffocating, sinking feeling of not being able to escape the nowhere fate that threatens, at every turn, to capture us like bugs under glass. What makes this book work, really work at a fundamental level, is Borczon’s minimalistic storytelling approach. The broken characters that wander Capp Road are neither good nor bad – they simply are. They are doing the best they can with the fucked-up situation they were born into. Their hopes, dreams, fears, stories, and journeys through madness and redemption, through Borczon’s trademark smashed-up sentence narrative, becomes ours. Capp Road is not a book to be read – it is meant to be ingested, injected, scraped from under our fingernails and shaken off like dust. This book is a triumph. — Wolfgang Carstens, Epic Rites Press

THE GEOMETRY OF FREEDOM

The Geometry of Freedom is a collection of poetry about liberating the human spirit through undaunted exploration of our innermost workings and of our inextricable connections with our world. Henry Cunningham takes us on a colorful journey of elation, examination, and celebration, reassuring us always of our potential, our responsibility, and our power. The collection is divided into three sections inspired by the awakening of our will, the importance of duty and playfulness in our world, and the boldness of our quest.

POETIC BALLETS OF MY MIND

First collection of poems by Chinese-Canadian author Phyllis Kwan. This Toronto-based author has put together a collection of her poems from early stages of writing poetry to more recent writing. She writes love poems, reflections on life, musings on?marriage, family, her Chinese?heritage, Canadian culture, tribute to father, and her favourite holiday resort?in Aruba.

CLASS

One of the Midwest’s finest slam poets, Osayande brings his work to the written page and delivers a lyric exploration of everyday life in Detroit in his debut full-length collection Class. In his voice you can hear and feel the lineage of some of Detroit’s finest poetic voices, stretching back to David Blair, Murray Jackson, and Naomi Long Madgett. He captures the rhythms, images, and deepest meditations of life both hardscrabble and painfully beautiful in a fashion that calls us to know that survival is much more about living than cowering in fear. As a teacher Osayande brings us before his classrooms, let’s us linger on the experiences and moments of growing up in a city that feels lost amidst the promises of America, and takes us through the high cost of being black in a place where the colour of one’s skin can deliver a trauma that only the strongest can survive. His poems show us the Detroit that has always been here. Both heartbreaking and empowering the poems in this collection ask the reader to consider the America that is kept hidden from Prime Time television, that carries on because it must, and understands that the act of speaking is the best therapy and resistance that one can offer to a world given at best to indifference and at worst insidious violence.

MY SEABORGIUM

My Seaborgium sings songs of loss and growth, motherhood and viscera, elements and experience, with love and relatable grace.   “I'll tell you the story,” the opening poem coos, “of how / I rolled around in a mail truck full of other / people's letters, I was that happy / to be your mother.” This speaker guides us into her expectant waiting, calling on insight from what she knows of her parents, what she thought she knew about her body, fables and gods. She asks all of these potential sources of wisdom to attend to her as forty weeks go by and she tries to detach because “it makes birth manageable,” even as she tests her nipples “to see if they lift / away from the breast” while “standing on a mountain / and trying to spot a suitcase on the ground below.” My Seaborgium travels toward motherhood from before, during, and after the experiences of pregnancy and birth, as the speaker imagines the thickening of her infant’s fur and readies “for the bloody show.” The only wisdom she gleans from her passage is the live and atomic feeling that arrives for a child whom she tells to “be your element’s namesake / and alive, know it. My Seaborgium.” This is a book fat with heavy and wild love.   Named a 2015 Best New Poet, Alicia Rebecca Myers is multiply published in prominent journals and magazines and has been the recipient of a Kimmel Harding Nelson Center for the Arts residency.   “The poems of My Seaborgium utilize metaphor in an attempt to account for the beauty that emerges from our moments of greatest grief. . . . Even through the pain, Myers’s speaker struggles to pay attention, to unfold that pain in ways that feel particular and personal.” --Kiki Petrosino, author of Hymn for the Black Terrific

VOCATIONS

C?est une ?vocation personnelle de l?existence que Catherine Messy aborde en m?lant une nouvelle fois textes et peintures dans son troisi?me recueil de po?mes illustr?s, o? les th?mes qui lui sont chers sont rassembl?s. ?vocations vient compl?ter le cycle de modestes r?flexions entam?es dans ses pr?c?dents ouvrages, quant aux ?v?nements qui modifient notre rapport aux choses ou aux ?tres malades qui nous sont chers et nous obligent ? nous interroger sur notre place dans l?univers. Les visages dont Transfiguration s?inspirait c?toient la nature d?peinte dans Bucoliques. Ils y sont en ?troite relation, pour laisser s?exprimer les ?motions ressenties au souvenir d?une caresse ??celle du vent ou d?une main??, devant la vision d?un ?tre cher dans la souffrance ou celle d?un paysage apr?s la temp?te. Pleurs, rires, neige, pluie, baisers se retrouvent et se m?lent. ?vocations est une invitation ? leur donner libre cours, en permettant ? nos sens de s?exalter, s?attendrir, s??mouvoir.

TANKA & ME

“As with the best writing, I found myself simultaneously devastated and soothed, satiated and hungry for more.” --Susanna Childress, author of Entering the House of Awe   TANKA & ME is a visceral, pleading, and fierce collection of poems, underpinned with thudding vessels and satisfying wreckage. Kaethe Schwehn externalizes the overlooked power of women into a multidimensional character who hunts both the speaker and the reader. Our wild Tanka engages down deep with role-play, sex, prayer, and refusal until we can’t look away or stay quiet. These are love poems, but they love with claws and whiskey, bolt cutters and saws. You can love someone for a long time without knowing how, our speaker realizes, and Tanka prowls and preens and breaks us down until we know how to love ourselves, how to know ourselves, how to free ourselves. TANKA & ME is feminist poetry with muscle, bones, and heart.   “Meet Tanka, the girlish/ghoulish spirit at the heart of Kaethe Schwehn’s marvelous TANKA & ME. She’s ‘all ears and a liver,’' knows extraordinary things, has a boyfriend named Briar and poignant adventures in grief, but her penchant for detail, at once hilarious and harrowing, is all Kaethe Schwehn.” --Leslie Adrienne Miller, author of Y