Bücher veröffentlicht von DOS Madres Press

Knock-knock! Who's there?Ultimately for all, it will be age. At first, it seems like a bad joke--needing a cane, memory loss, more care, forgetting even one's own name. In KNOCK-KNOCK, Lewis creates the persona of an older physician who should've known what's in store. Sometimes the reality is grim, but there's humor, love, and even romance in his inventive and poetic story-telling. "Lost-and-found / is not a planned / destination." Yet we all eventually find ourselves there."Old age is no joke. The body breaks down; the mind wanders away. For many, if not most, aging is existentially challenging and physically demeaning. And yet Owen Lewis' KNOCK-KNOCK finds a variety of entry points into this penultimate human experience. The eighteen poems (in the numerology of the Kabbalah, life) gathered here range from mild ruminations on the disconcerting experience of losing and forgetting inconsequential things, to more intense poems, exploring critical conditions: impaired ambulation, deterioration of vision, cardiac failures. Like all good healthcare providers, Lewis - a medical doctor, himself - is always writing toward the fear of mortality that lies at the heart of aging, and that frightens most of us, nearly to death. Through poetic storytelling, deep empathy, psychological courage, and a gimlet eye, he finds both solace and meaning (and yes: sometimes humor) in this phase of life."--Kate Daniels"KNOCK-KNOCK is a sophisticated chapbook about aging and the brain by a prize-winning poet and professor of psychiatry. The poems come to the reader in a variety of shapes, moods and sounds. The book opens with the speaker's tender first encounters with such age-related issues as the use of a cane for mobility and the occasional challenges of memory. Music is an important element (and subject) in the subsequent poems about more serious symptoms and the fears they inspire. Only a clinical expert in diseases of the mind could have constructed the drama of the scenes that follow."--Michael SalcmanPoetry.

In this striking collection of poems, Joel Bettridge crafts a poignant mix of lyrics, half-stories, epigrams, speculations, histories, and songs to study how evolution, especially that of people, is guided more or less by magic. OF SPECIES documents the relentless transmutations of our human selves and the environments we inhabit; reveals the facts coded in myths, prayers, and rituals; unearths the forgotten gods who live in gene pools, artifacts, and biomes. These poems map our created and changing world, offering a vision for how to belong now to what we are on the brink of losing."'Awake, awake: look awry, look new, ' insists Bettridge's new breathtaking collection, OF SPECIES. Gods, gullies and crevasses, Homo georgicus and horses, bark beetles, and more, all burrow out from the 'artifacts of light' that are these poems. Too fierce to be pastoral, too urgent to be elegiac, this collection widens the imagination of what nature poetry might be, what it must do. Some books are meant to be read--this one wants to be lived."--Richard Deming, author of This Exquisite Loneliness"Bettridge's collection invites the reader into an entangled existence where we have permission to be curious and intimate about everything: What even is a species or an animal body without other species or other animal bodies? What is the unlearning required for a human to see beyond the categories of human and nonhuman, to look beyond categories at all? 'What is the ambition of grasses? / What dreams as they throng / With the winter in abeyance?' The conversations that emerge from these questions are perhaps the conversations we should all be having more often. Beautiful and expansive, OF SPECIES is a significant work."--Janice Lee, author of Separation Anxiety"OF SPECIES begins with a knock-out introduction, 'HORSES, ' in which the poet confesses that horses in two beguiling illustrations by artist Rick Bartow have begun speaking to him, initiating him into a world of metamorphosis, one that he duly records in a series of stunning theriophanies--of beast, of person, of divine power. This book is a marvel of formal and tonal shifts that Joel Bettridge manages with enviable ease, from the stateliness and earnestness of the 'Transmutations' that initiate each new section to the magical open-form free verse interspersed by the short, pungent epigrammatic poems the poet has been dazzling us with for years. In this daring collection, Bettridge has devised a creation mythology for evolution and it really sings. A masterful book!"--Peter O'Leary, author of The Hidden Eyes of ThingsPoetry. Nature.

Poems born out of the author's experiences from living forty years in Greece.Celebrating four decades of living in Greece, A DIFFERENT HEAVEN: NEW AND SELECTED POEMS joins the more prominent poems from Donald Schofield's five previous collections (three full length books and two chapbooks) with more recent work and a sampling of translations from modern Greek that have influenced his writing and continue to resonate off it. Taken together, the poems in this collection chart one American's experience of living in a part of the world where the ancient and modern, the urban and rural, and the mythical and mundane intermingle in wondrous and sometimes disconcerting ways. As the poems go deeper into the land, language and culture the author has come to embrace, they engage in an ongoing dialogue with such ancients as Homer, Herodotus, Plato and Aristotle. Other poems speak in the voice of marginalized biblical figures, such as Hagar, Joseph and Lazarus. Earlier free verse looks out at the world from within Egyptian sarcophagi and beneath the gilded surface of Byzantine icons. More recent blank verse and sonnets interact with shepherds and poets; painters and refugees; archaeologists, cemetery workers and assorted others who people the landscape that he now calls home."For the past three decades Don Schofield has been writing and publishing the deeply affecting and finely crafted poems gathered here in a single volume, poems 'determined by nothing / but rhythm, ' the rhythm of our lives as we lean into 'the glittering present.' Ranging from his adopted Greece with its cries of lambs--I aam, I aam--and its refugee camps to Nepal where he watches 'a tiger eating what remained of a baby water buffalo' to Hart Island in NY with its 'unclaimed dead in their plywood coffins' to the dusty Fresno of his violent boyhood where he imagines a place 'where love isn't fear, ' these poems cast a precise eye on the natural landscape and our place in it: 'You can tell we're humans / by our short-billed caps.' A Different Heaven is a book best read slowly to savor the 'gentle lure' of these necessary and enduring poems."--Michael Waters"Wherever the poem comes from--from the poet's earthly place, I mean: say, Nevada, Montana, Italy, Greece, Egypt. anywhere--in the case of Don Scofield's work, the poem comes from somewhere the reader will recognize as implicitly true, minutely accurate, and abundantly beautiful. This is work by a man as in love with language as he is with the world and with this earth. You will be moved; you'll be astonished. You'll be very glad you read this book."--Robert WrigleyPoetry.

Twenty-five years in the making, with some poems dating as far back as forty years, To Sleep in the Horse"s Belly: My Greek Poets and the Aegean Inside Me, is George Kalamaras's chronicle of his Greek ancestry--literary, artistic, and familial. This book retells the lives of some of Kalamaras's favorite Greek poets and artists, most often with his characteristic Surrealist outpouring and accretion of imagery, interlacing his inquiry with myth and the metaphor of the infamous Trojan Horse. He embraces pillars of Greek Letters, such as Odysseus Elytis, Yannis Ritsos, and George Seferis--three poets who helped form the backbone of Kalamaras's poetics forty years ago. Yet he moves beyond these well-known Nobel Laureates and Lenin Prize recipients. He delves into a plethora of modern and contemporary Greek poets who he has studied during decades of poetic apprenticeship, most of whom are little-known in the United States. Many of these figures are at the forefront of the Greek avant-garde, questioning (implicitly or explicitly) Greece's two military dictatorships in the last century. This abundant collection of poems takes us on a 300-page journey not only of Kalamaras's literary and artistic forebears but also of his familial roots from Zakynthos, Pharaklatha, and Solaki--places in Greece from which three of his four grandparents emigrated during the early part of the last century. Imbuing this collection is Kalamaras's ongoing poetic project of "seeing one in the other." He affirms the value of "an archeology of Being," a project in which he continues to chronicle the world around him, attempting to unearth the value of poets who have come before him, affirming the living presence of the "dead." Poet George Vafopoulos says in one of the book's opening epigraphs, here now I stand before all the Greek poets. George Kalamaras similarly takes this "stand," and in the process embraces his literary, cultural, and familial history, taking us on an odyssey to unexpected places both inward and outward."In his tenderly written new book, former Indiana Poet Laureate George Kalamaras is taking us on a poetic voyage of perpetual metamorphosis, deflating time and space, (re)uniting both sides of the Atlantic, invoking the Pelasgian magic of the Aegean within, and elegantly compounding both his immigrant and poetic ancestral lineages. Poetry is a haunted practice, Peter Gizzi writes, particularly well-equipped to speak with the dead. Kalamaras has artfully proven this existential fact. Like in Jack Spicer's After Lorca, Kalamaras resurrects, blows life into, and converses not with one, but with many dead, who all seem to constantly flow in and out of him and in and out of each other."--Giorgia Pavlidou, author of inside the black hornet's mind-tunnelPoetry.