Bücher veröffentlicht von 1st World Publishing

BENITA: prey for him is the true story of bright, vivacious Benita Kane and the Catholic priest who lured her from childhood into a disastrous, twenty-year entanglement that changed the course of her life. What happened to this fatherless girl in the hierarchical, patriarchal world of Dubuque, Iowa during the 40's, 50's and 60's is not simply one more tale of clerical sexual abuse, but rather an astounding, maddening, compelling account of what it was like to grow up in a family, community and culture so dominated by the Catholic church that no one could recognize the ominous events developing around them. As Benita's friend and classmate from second-grade through college, Virginia Tranel writes from the unique stance of both participant and observer.

"The Benson brothers have put together not only a fine book of poems well worth keeping close but also a strong testament of faith in those subtleties of blood that can elevate the ordinary into song." -Gary Gildner, winner of the Iowa Poetry Prize, Pushcart Prize, etc.; author of two novels, a collection of short stories, two memoirs, and nine books of poetry, including Cleaning a Rainbow, his most recent. "This is what poetry was meant to be, neither overly-sentimental nor veiled in obscure imagery. The poems read like music you have discovered as you search across the radio dial. Once found you stay tuned, turning the pages for more. This is adult poetry with risky passion, psychological pain, sensual thirst and the ache of longing. There are no forced inventions or over-clever literary devices. In fact, you are rarely aware of the writer, only the emotional landscape that unfolds with each line. The writing has a quality found in Marcel Proust's Remembrance of Things Past - an old picket fence, the ruts in a lane. The sun doesn't merely shine on a meadow, but rather is "This July-fireball afternoon in a pasture . . ." When an alcoholic, frail father irritatedly boots an empty paint can towards his sons it becomes the tumbling, end-over-end kick-off of an imagined football game, the boys waiting underneath it to return the shiny offering. I find the value of any poem is increased or diminished in the sharing. The sharing of these poems, I can attest, stokes the delight and interest of another. "SCHOOLED LIVES: Poems by Two Brothers is a gift Barry and Steve Benson have placed in our hands." -John Gaps III, finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, author of God Left Us Alone Here: A Book of War (poems and combat photographs). "Who says a book of poems need be the domain of a singular poet and aesthetic? With Schooled Lives by accomplished poets and brothers Steve and Barry Benson, you get double the perspectives, imagery and deft language about life in the unruly, rural Midwest and other climes. Here too, are lively pairings of poems that dialogue with each other. For instance, Steve's "Candy for the Fat Lady" begins, "She bulged in the bed of a parked pickup truck / where it cost two quarters to gawk at her thousand pounds..." counters Barry's "Wild Man of Borneo" - ". . .not far from fields / where we boys baled hay in country dust and sun and sweat, / patrons stare at the geek in rags and a promise..." Though both poets are natural storytellers, Steve -- a visual artist - leans toward a leaner, impressionistic verse compared to Barry's love of narrative. This weaving together of writers is a welcomed addition to the genre. As Steve claims, "The Best Writers are spiders; they connect everything / with fine homespun lines /. . . (and) live in the trembling / nets of their own designs." -Barbara Lau, author of The Long Surprise (winner of the X. J. Kennedy Poetry Prize) & the award-winning drama, Raising Medusa.No relation to me, but brothers in the guts of deep, dark, old, weird America, the viscera of heartland their shared family legends, firsthand feedback stirring one another's grief and energy along, resilient as cubs, memories crystals hard and sharp, these two linked different men are wrenchingly attentive to a restless, emphatic, and receptive, sensuous life in contact with and imagining the world they've known. Their poems' honest power braces against labor's compromises and intuition's leaps, tradition and discovery, to bring us into real places some of us have never been and others may not have left. -Maine language poet (eight books published) and practicing psychologist (not related to Barry or Steve Benson).

The wildness of the natural world, and of the spirit, just barely contained; the elemental and the ephemeral; a primal darkness full of stars; fistfuls of tart black fruit-this is the stuff out of which Paul Fisher makes his poems, poems that are mysterious and musical and often terrifyingly beautiful, carved out of the strange light of this world "into luck, luminosities, pearls." -Cecilia Woloch, author of CarpathiaWhen there is no wind, rain / tells vertical stories about the ground," writes Paul Fisher, and in taut poem after taut poem he translates those stories, moving vertically downward through "ghost-riddled strata" and upward beyond "Christ-old sequoia," then horizontally to understand "the calligraphy of mice and voles" and how, "peck by peck, our ragged / world is drawn." His "tempestuous marriage to poetry" offers more than the usual consolations-it provides celebratory reminders of habitation, intimacy, and "the raga, the renga, the unceasing prayer" that deepen our lives toward meaning. -Michael Waters, author of Darling VulgarityPaul Fisher's poems in Rumors of Shore are set with both deference and a gentle yearning in the center of the wonder, mystery and occasionally terrifying randomness and brutality of the natural world. He generously beckons to us, the readers, to join him in his experience of nature, his questions, his sweet hungers: "Like a dew-studded seedling / I wanted to wear the rings of wisdom / rippling the heart of a redwood tree." His is a soft, evocative, welcoming voice, resonant with a deep humility toward this world: "Sometimes I watch winter geese / veering back through dreams, / wild wings spread / like shadow-puppet hands, /. . .What use is it?. . . / no answer to my question / put to sun and moon and rain."Paul's thrifty, precise use of language, and in particular, metaphor, can astonish us with its unexpected, evocative images of the living world that expand its meaning, its importance, its essentialness: wishful skin, warm wine blooming, the moon rowing on, the pirated gimcracks of autumn, weeds riddling our walls with roots, as far as the wind can snake. This is a first book to be taken very seriously, and I am eager to read more. -Becky Sakarelliou, author of The Importance of Bone

In Under a Prairie Moon, Susie Niedermeyer doesn't so much observe the natural world as experience it flowing through herself. In a poetic voice that is at once down-to-earth and visionary, she explores inner and outer landscapes as they intersect and shape one another. Many of these poems are rooted in close, delicate observation of plant and animal life in the rural Midwest and are animated by the poet's acute sensitivity to the life within her and abroad. These poems carry the weight and the wisdom of lived experience: how memories accumulate in individual lives and cast their shadows on the present; how illumination and understanding can come suddenly, in a moment. These are poems of promise and regret, of fulfillment and loss, of love and longing, written by a poet who knows that "From all our moments something / must remain" ("Advent of Autumn") and yet also that the earth continues "huge against the smallness / of our passing" ("Amigo"). There are special moments here when individual being expands and there is no separation between observer and observed, whether under the vastness of a night sky or at the edge of waters, or in moments when the poet falls "deep into the quiet of trees" ("Home") or knows that couched within all things is an effulgent light. There are reminders here of Mary Oliver and Denise Levertov; these poems speak gently, with a fine intelligence, of a life reflected on by a woman who can feel, on a winter evening, "the body of the earth / Becoming my body, filled / with quiet stars and snow" ("Night Vision"). - Bryan Aubrey, Ph.D.Author of Watchmen of Eternity: Blake's Debt to Jacob BoehmeHere are the fierce truths of love, and sorrow saved by beauty. Read these poems if you're willing to be shaken awake, to have the hair stand up on your arms, to feel your eyes brim again and again. The poems do not leave me when I put down the book. -Diane Cooledge Porter, nature writer, ornithologist

In the poems of Petroglyphs, Ostrander piles up image after image, in long and short lines, creating a cadence. Whether the poem is an epithalamium for a beloved daughter, the stark image of a suicide artist, or a climb in the Himalayas, the poet's unique voice comes through, and we see the work of a beautiful and probing mind, a generous spirit. Ostrander is a master craftsman, with patience and discipline to capture "The Word"-"which is always there, this reassembling of the self. . . a word that, ignored, appears for a moment and returns, lucid, to the circle of our reaching, the radius of our love." His poems, richly textured and resonant, are both shape and shadowshape. In the desert's shifting sands, he hears still the inland sea it has replaced, in a beach at Santa Cruz, California, the eternal forsakenness of Matthew Arnold's "Dover Beach." ~~~~~Ruth. G. Iodice, Founding Editor, Blue Unicorn: A Triquarterly of Poetry ~~~~~~~~ The Welsh poet Vernon Watkins said about writing poems, "Cold craftsmanship is the best container of fire." Fred Ostrander is a poet who understands such a dedicated and diligent approach to the use of language. His poetic vision, subtle and engaging, is very individual and is powered by the natural rhythms of a confiding voice, a voice that conveys a man of deep integrity and humanity. The poems in Petroglyphs are a real breath of fresh air, intimate and universal, lyrical and intelligent. They are first-class poems that call the reader back, again and again, to wander around their word and sound landscapes. This is a collection that truly deserves a wide readership. ~~~~~ ~~~~~~~Peter Thabit Jones, Editor, Seventh Quarry (Swansea, Wales)In Petroglyphs, Fred Ostrander distills a life filled with travel and observation into a series of poems that probe the depths of meaning in language that makes the failure of words all the more poignant and meaningful. Whether describing nature or art, the attention to detail is absolute; the deference to image steeped in reverence. In poem after poem, experience and memory, image and the effects of image are examined through the lens of language to erupt into the beautiful. Here is the essential quest revealed. This is a collection of poetry one simply must read again and again. ~~~~~~James Michael Robbins, Sulphur River Literary Review ~~~~~~~ In a period when trivial poetry is not only the norm, but apparently the ideal, Ostrander's work is complex, subtle, massive, and disturbingly romantic. ~~~~~~~Jeanne McGahey, winner, Quarterly Review of Literature Poetry Competition ~~~~~ ~~~~ To begin reading Fred Ostrander is to enter an alternate, intenser world where the great images rule and the tides of the universe palpably lift (and drop) us all. Ostrander is one of those poets of whom accomplished poets say, "I wish I could write like that." -~~~~~~~John Hart, two-time winner, Commonwealth Club Medal in Californiana ~~~~~~~