Bücher veröffentlicht von Brick Road Poetry Press, Inc.

In Lisa Titus' debut collection First Time, Every Time, the everyday becomes something mythic. "Feral and alive like the hot breath of birth," these poems straddle "the empty space between panic and bliss." There is playfulness and humor as well as devotion to craft. I felt like an intruder spying on the most intimate moments in the lives of the people who populate these poems. Sometimes I wasn't prepared for what I encountered, but this unexpectedness is part of the journey.-Jason Irwin, Author of The History of Our VagranciesFirst Time, Every Time is a ride-along with an earth goddess disguised as a bartender, poet, mother, lover and teacher. Tactile, nervy, sticky, glimmering and foreboding, Titus is incapable of spinning without belief, incanting, manifesting and celebrating the flawed and feckless life of the loving and well-loved, polishing and releasing the threads of the everyday heartbreaks and torpor. This book is a walk in the woods, a drink with a friend, a hand on your back. -Louisa Lam, Collaborator, Asian American Modernism with Abang-guard

Written during the early months of the Covid-19 pandemic, Joan Baranow's Reading Szymborska in a Time of Plague contemplates the dread uncertainty of our life. Describing hospitalized sufferers, she writes: "A patient, no longer struggling, is wheeled away. / Another sits up, accepts the bent straw between his lips." Likewise, her tough-minded yet always loving vision of domestic life invites us to inhabit a level of self-scrutiny that leaves us heartened even if also often troubled. And yet, despite the losses mourned throughout this book, the poet's humor and hopefulness prevail. In "Advice from a Moth" she exhorts us to "enjoy the erratic path." Deeply satisfying, Baranow's unaffected language is as clear and natural as a tumbler of spring water. She possesses a scrupulously honed poetic gift that is precious and rare. Arnold Rampersad, Stanford UniversityAuthor, The Life of Langston Hughes (2 vols.) Joan Baranow's Reading Szymborska in a Time of Plague opens with poems about months of isolation with her spouse and college-age son during the 2020-21 pandemic. Instead of anger or boredom, her poems express tenderness with images of care and repair. They explore the natural world, paying special attention to shunned creatures: an iguana that lost its tail, insects, even a baby rat whose life she spares. In Baranow's sequence "Summer Ghazals" she asks herself about mysteries of illness, life, and death. A series of heart-thumping elegies follows soon after the ghazals. Read this wonderful book. Read all of it from "Traveling in Tiger Rain" to its final poem "Prayer," where she implores: "Let quiet hours pass without a stir / while the earth repairs." Susan TerrisAuthor of Familiar Tense"I'm there as much as here," Joan Baranow tells us, staring into a Japanese print. In richly musical and compassionate poems, Baranow reconciles our daily lives with our desirous imaginings: "most of life comes at you / while scrambling eggs in the pan." Whether writing elegies or confronting her own mortality, Baranow leans toward community for consolation and renewal, taking note of "trees sending mycorrhizal / messages underground // like teenagers vibrating / under their clothes." Literary, political, and erotic, Reading Szymborska in a Time of Plague considers "What blunderous creatures we are, / holding cell phones to our heads," the poet's voice brimming with anxiety and affection. Michael WatersAuthor of CAW

MIRACLE STRIP, a poetry collection by Matt Layne, is a hybrid of the written and spoken word. Each piece of the collection has an embellished QR code which, when scanned, transforms you from reader into listener. In the campfire tradition of storytelling, the first line of the book invites you to "tell me your story, and I will tell you mine," and like a couple of backwoods adventurers, you and the poet travel together through intricate memories of the deep south and the ghosts who haunt its environs as you journey through MIRACLE STRIP.

Gary Stein is a poet in the spirit of Blake, Frost, and William Carlos Williams. In Stein's poetry, the ideas are always in little things that touch larger things, and the world is revealed in a squirrel dying, a car being washed, a clock falling from a wall. To read poems such as "The Cremationist's Day Off," "Travels in Time," and "On My 50th Birthday" is to know you are in the presence of a poet who is a master of language. TOURING THE SHADOW FACTORY is a magnificent book.-Miles David Moore, author of THE BEARS OF PARIS AND ROLLERCOASTERWhat tours, what shadows in what factory are here, in these haunting poems of memory, love, and legend? Stein's poems focus on the father, now a shade, a gifted, patient carver and craftsman who "knew the soul of wood" and long ago brought his young son into his workshop. The poet-son, now grown, pursues the craft of words, of story-making, of would not wood, with kindred, altered skills. And wonders and blesses, in his turn, what shadows and what skills, what callings, his own now-grown sons will now pursue.-Judith McCombs, author of THE HABIT OF FIRE: POEMS SELECTED & NEWGary Stein's TOURING THE SHADOW FACTORY is a meditation on time, memory, and loss-from the ghosts of the past to "the soft blur of [the] future." In poems both precise and masterfully understated, Stein explores the human condition of being in many times at once, carrying our childhoods with us as we age, expectant about what might be coming: "Each night the next miracle." -Maggie Smith, author of THE WELL SPEAKS OF ITS OWN POISON & GOOD BONES