Bücher veröffentlicht von Nixes Mate Books

Dot Girl is a memoir written in verse, with technicolor story bursting from the most beautifully wrought bare-knuckle lines. With courageous truth-telling (and fierce humor!) Linda Carney-Goodrich shares her personal roadmap from childhood poverty and family trauma to remembrance, mourning, and reconnection, reminding us that it is more than possible to emerge whole. Traipse alongside her in stealthy solidarity through the darkened dirty streets of pre-gentrification Boston, to the smashed-beer-bottle sands of Dorchester Bay and, ultimately, to the imagined horizons of a girl dying to be free.- Michael Patrick MacDonald, author of All Souls: A Family Story from Southie

We're tight into hurricane season here at Nixes Mate Headquarters. No better time than to sit with our Summer/Fall 2023 issue and read your way through family dilemmas, ekphrastics, and the spirits of color and place. We have 18 writers newly joining the Nixes Mate family. In the future, we hope to read more of their work. We are happy to announce that Hannah Larrabee, who guest edited our climate change issue back in 2021, has joined our editorial staff. In addition to editorial duties, Hannah is our Explorer.

These poems let you eavesdrop on an intense lovers' dialogue at the table next to you, a dialogue completely unpredictable, comic and profound. They will refresh your views of love, and of poetry, and will make you leave the restaurant full of wonder. You should put down your fork and listen.- J.D. Scrimgeour, author of Banana Bread

Welcome to the second print issue of Nixes Mate Review featuring new voices and returning voices. In this issue, we tackle memory and mortality and what it means to publish in a winter that seems like a memory. Is it early Spring in New England when it's 60 degrees Fahrenheit out in February? Is it late winter when, a week earlier, it was -8 degrees Fahrenheit? Is it even winter when Boston has only received 8 inches snow versus its usual 2 feet by the middle of February? Where are the Nor'easters? Are we speaking too soon, jinxing us here at Nixes Mate headquarters surrounded by a rising and warming sea? Will we retain a memory of the winter that wasn't long after it fades?

Devon Balwit's Spirit Spout - a poetic vision directly engaging with Melville's Moby-Dick; or, The Whale - is an eschatological tour de force. The poet practices an intertextual jouissance showcasing singular gifts for sound and image. We encounter "the thrown gauntlet // the poking prod of the devil's own advocate"; there is salt, wind, brine and ocean; Melville as god, as demon; Melville in the throes of creation and also grieving. Ishmael, Ahab, and Queequeg beckon. Both travelogue and existential reckoning with life, there is a painterly attention to the physical, to the body; there is a grappling with sociology and philosophy: "Our thinking // always butting up against the ribs / of the paradigms we travel in." Balwit's powers are on full display - this book's spirit is deep and wide. - Charles Kell, author of Ishmael Mask

Comito’s range is expansive, painting emotions and scenes with a stunning ferocity. Bury Me in the Sky is a marvel of language and insights. The imagery alone is enough to steal your breath.Underlaid in each piece are layers of tripwire that make youreexamine what you’re reading so as not to miss out on the full scope of experience Comito renders seemingly effortlessly. She can beguile you with sardonic humor and then take you out atthe knees with sharp sprigs of pathos, often in the same piece.— Len Kuntz, author of This is Why I Need You

There is a deceptively light touch here. The humor is nevervicious but is always cognizant that we laugh when we have cried enough. Brad Rose’s microfictions and prose poems – each piece the exactly right size and shape – slide easily into the mind fromseveral directions at once, then stick around to scratch at the brain. Read this book and savor it.— Sally Reno, Editor of Blink Ink

With their ravening grace, these blood bright poems call echoes of their kindred – Sappho, Plath, di Prima – not as source but as sisters. Deweese understands the empty spaces between loneliness and desire and the sanctity of flesh as refuge. Her poems seduce. She speaks of “the most pure incarnation of human love,” and I believe her. Here is a masterful poet glowing in her power. Donot miss this book.— Jeff Weddle, winner of the Eudora Welty Prize

Lauren Leja is a terrific writer. Her characters inhabit that elastic, kaleidoscopic space between believing that they are good people while all along they are drenched with the backwash of their own decisions. Ms. Leja doesn't go for the easy knock out in these stories full of keenly observed mayhem populated by a range of quirky and spontaneously combustive types. Instead, she deftly jabs them around the ring, giving them, and the reader, just enough hope that maybe they will punch above their weight class.- Jack Gantos, author of Hole In My Life

In his latest collection, accelerant, Bill Yarrow bears witness to nature's and mankind's fierce wiles. But Yarrow never forgets to be poetic, nor does he skimp on his trademark zaniness. While most poets opt for serenity, Yarrow opines that "the only chance for happiness / is to excommunicate all calm." By eschewing tameness for his unique brand of mayhem, Yarrow does exactly what poets should do: speaks his mind and throws caution to the wind.- Cindy Hochman, author of Habeas Corpus

Body Bag should be required reading for every President and member of Congress considering sending their citizens to war. These poems, none more than four lines, are dollops of horror, heartbreak, endurance, humanity, vulnerability and a whole lot of love. Although I wish Borczon didn't have to write Body Bag, I am grateful for this book and I am grateful knowing Matt is out there using his immense artistic skills to give us an idea of how it was and what it's like.- Bob Pajich, author of The Trolleyman

The poems in Heather Sullivan's Method Acting for the Afterlife bring me to a world of Donny and Marie songs, of hollowed out oak trees, to a world of "unseen demons and/long dead ghosts pushing addiction and/melancholy." As only a master poet can, Sullivan blurs that line between the seen and the unseen, the living and the dead. As the "toll keeper of existence," the poet connects us with "everything that I've lost forever." Loss is ever-present, but tempered with humor, with such real imagery - the popular girl's table, Deadheads, and Limoncello - that my heart is allowed to "break again and again." I trust Sullivan's "deliberate, direct" voice - the voice of a "Sabbath child made wise." Method Acting for the Afterlife is an important book, full of urgency and truth.- Jennifer Martelli, author of My Tarantella

In her impressive first collection, Liljegren retells the Lucy stories from the iconic tv show, revealing depths and a darker side behind the slapstick. With great skill and exquisite language, Liljegren takes us through a series of episodes and imagined therapy sessions, complete with dream analysis, a Rorshach test, role reversal, and free association - associations that lead always to Ethel, and the endurance of women's friendship. Liljegren reveals the courage behind the humor, the power dynamics of marriage, the conflict between the good wife and the professional woman, of how we become the roles we play. We love Lucy, these poems say, because we know she is us. Cheryl Savageau, author of Dirtroad Home and Mother/Land

Poetry and Fiction from: Hussam Jefee-Bahloul · Gene Barry · Robert Beveridge · Matt Borczon · Pris Campbell · Alan Catlin · Linda M. Crate · Lori Desrosiers · Mari Deweese · Susan Mann Dolce · James Duncan · Karen Friedland · Roberta Gould · Mitchell Grabois · Doug Holder · Richard D. Houff · Tim Kahl · Mignon Ariel King · Kay Kinghammer · Susanna Lang · Jennifer Martelli · Gary Metras · David P. Miller · Suchoon Mo · Phil Montenegro · Polly Richardson Munnelly · Edward Mycue · Philip Nikolayev · Carl Nelson · Renuka Raghavan · Melissa Rendlen · Tree Riesener · C. C. Russell · Margarita Serafimova · Scott Silsbe · Meg Tuite · Bill Yarrow · Donald Zirilli · ryki zuckerman

Anne Elezabeth Pluto's Lubbock Electric is a gushing exploration of life in which she gives you, the reader her world to make your own. You can dive into poem after poem and swim with familiarity, frequently learning new strokes. Einstein maintained that the definition of genius is taking the complex and making it simple, and this is precisely what Pluto has achieved in this stimulating collection.The skeleton of this book is cast swiftly with the introduction of the resplendent Peregrine. A poem constructed using admirable craft that pulls you into the poet's emotional, mental and physical world. Pluto's verve and acute awareness delivering the reader to a wealth of love and compassion. Annie Pluto has an inbuilt ability to poetically emote a specific feeling, situation or scene with admirable craft.Between the lines of the poem, Love Letter to Lubbock, the poet has placed a seat for every reader. This heartfelt and warm, cleverly woven tapestry delivers wishes, regrets, celebrations, acknowledgments and love with extraordinary economy.The subtlety Pluto masters in delivering a history lesson in The Home Borough, rides in tandem with the poet's utilitarian ability to ground the reader. The poems in Lubbock Elecctric ride on a conveyor of poetic pleasures that underlie the current of seriousness that will ground each reader. Gene Barry - Poet and Psychotherapist; author of Stones in their Shoes, Unfinished Business and Working Days; Founder of the Blackwater Poetry Festival; publisher and editor at Rebel Poetry.