Bücher veröffentlicht von April Gloaming Publishing

Cruelty and abuse from his Southern past follow Jack "Half-Pint" Crowe into the Vietnam War. Two tours of combat inflict physical wounds and moral damage, but they also deliver the ministrations of a Navy corpsman named Frank-a holy being who reads mysterious books and befriends Jack, coaxing him inward toward his own wholeness. When Frank is killed in battle, an anguished Half-Pint removes three blood-stained books from Frank's shredded pack. Those books and his vow of nonviolence carry the Marine home to the swampy borderland of Louisiana and Arkansas. In that summer of return, Half-Pint plunges back into the atmosphere of hell he had longed to escape for good. Hunted by the fanatical Calvin Whitehead after offering help to his wife and son, his vow of nonviolence is challenged in the murky swamplands of the Southern grotesque. He takes refuge in his new oil rig coworkers, a misfit cast of no-gooders on the verge of insanity brought on by the harsh conditions of their job and the undying meaninglessness of a life spent cheating death amid the pulse of true American blue collar work life. It is through these folds we see the illumination of Half-Pint's evermoving quest for truth and meaning. Guided by Frank's bloodstained books, Half-Pint must shred all he knows to find the thing missing in all of us.

Brent House's debut poetry collection, The Wingtip Prophecy, augers through the soil of the American South, offering both prophetic and pastoral visions of the rural landscapes remaining on the margins of contemporary life. In a language both strangely familiar yet utterly new, House invites readers into his "neck of the woods," then cries loudly, "Behold." There's much for the eye to behold -and plenty for the ear to hear-in this collection, as we encounter "a jar filled with moonshine" and "the mantic threnody of the mockingbird." In a "field with the smoothness of vellum," we might hear sounds "wafting through the narrow rows of produce." In the midst of this pastoral setting, however, we're also being warned of "a jubilee of tolerant scars" and the "aleatory bloom [that will] deepen each fall to germination." Images and sounds overwhelm the author occasionally in these poems, but rather than succumb to silence, he sometimes chooses to speak in lists: lists of foods, lists of names, lists of places, and lists of words that once permeated his native culture. House's poems unearth the artifacts of rural America and bring them into new light. Like generations of poets from the American South-with James Dickey's influence especially evident-he offers a postage stamp portrait of a particular society, in a voice that claims its own particular sound.

The act of reading difficult texts during difficult times is the thematic element that holds these 4 authors'' poetic works together. Having met at Harvard Divinity School, Charli Pence Bond, Ethan Nosanow Levin, Abigail Grace Louisin, and Jason Adam Sheets take their deepest, most intimate connections to the truth to decipher meaning during a time of high anxiety, stress, and debilitating circumstances--the pandemic. What transpired was a creative energy where each author sought meaning through difficulty in the form of poetry--hence, this collection. What sits now before you is a reach for something brighter, truth that screams and saws, verse that transcends normality, and a collection of poetry that offers a great light to be shared with the masses. Take a deep breath. Hold these poems in. Breathe. Answers to all come in time.

Inside these pages, verses sing of light in the dark, of unearthing dark pasts and reckoning them with a resilient fervor. Kristi Carter dredges up the old, the scarred, the traumatic, and weaves a stolid face into the rising sun of tomorrow. However, scars never leave—they fade, yet they remain. We are who we are because of our families, our old friends, our former lovers who made us weak in the knees yet somehow our knees do not grow weak anymore. When our mother births us, she is supposed to hold us—she is supposed to drip candle wax over her hands as she guides us through the unknown. In this collection, we can see all that has been lost, has never been known, and because of them, their effects on the individual. Aria Viscera is a reminder that sometimes it is necessary to grab the candle from your failed mother, your failed relatives, and your darkened past and find your own way around the tricks and traps of the coming present.

THE HOUR WASP by Jay Sheets does the unspeakable.  It takes you on a journey, in three sections, through morose, sometimes tragic imagery (the ouroboros rinsed in venom / [flickering] the shape of things unshaped // no silken moments / only that which is always breaking / [something is always / breaking here]), and finds itself, in those melancholy moments of the second section some hint of a truth, of a reason, of hope, or a hope (the hour wasp awakens // & we are the things that take shape / & we let the things without shape take shape), and then, finally, we come to the final section, the send-off, the great, all-encompassing display of universal truths, using similar images, visions Mr. Sheets has experienced himself through dreams and meditations, and gives the reader the sense of understanding, almost accomplishment as she has waded through the dark along with the author and illustrator and come to find a sense of solace, one that may stand the test of time (i see the thousandth star / she looks to the thousandth star / the thousandth star is us // & i wonder if i / or anyone i  know    should be so lucky / & i light a new fire at the end of myself).