Bücher veröffentlicht von NYQ Books

Dancing Room Only is a wild romp into the forgotten center of our people. With his signature rollicking style, a keen sense of humor, and an acute ear for dialect and voice, Reese archives the sinners and saints that haunt the Midwest and beyond. Author Kent Meyers writes of Reese's work: "In these poems, ordinary life with its children and neighbors crackles like a mirage, and shifts and opens, and we find we've been all along in San Quentin prison. What is it we just saw?-a five-year-old child swinging on the monkey bars, or a tattooed convict, crying? Reese's eye is the eye of a father, and he finds his world both alien and comforting. These are poems of praise and poems of warning, infused with love and latent violence. Reese makes us feel the threat throbbing inside the song." In Dancing Room Only:New and Selected Poems Reese is a well-traveled troubadour with Midwestern sensibility, and as the author of three widely-praised books of poetry, he knows how to blow our hearts sideways.

Heeding St. John Cassian's call, The Third Renunciation rejects classic depictions of divinity and religious dogma to see God more fully. Each poem begins with a proposition (e.g. "Say God is the music we strain to hear"), or an explanation for a Biblical story (e.g. "maybe Jesus was having an off day"). Henry's poetry offers answers to the myriad whys at the center of faith and doubt, gives voice to the notion that both singing and screaming are authentic responses to suffering, and argues that "grace is a Twinkie or a cockroach-/something that never goes bad, can survive/anything the cold world throws.../ despite all our best efforts to quell it."

Sentenced: It's not that we didn't know what the sentence would be, it's that we didn't know what would happen on the other side of the sentence. We didn't understand that it would be a long story, paragraphs filled with contrasting sentences: mine, my husband's, my mother's, her mother's, her father's, their sons, her sister's, her brother's, friends and family. What we didn't know is that, for us, this day would not bring closure; instead, this day propelled us into new directions.

This magnificent volume of poetry-as-witness lifts up and dignifies the life we hold in common, illuminating that which is largely hidden within both the personal impulses and impersonal systems that drive and constrain us. The propulsive, elevating, and varied poems build upon each other toward an epic revelation of how our pride and dependence on technological growth blinds us with its short term gains. The resulting vision is one of dark and churning machinery within which everything is connected, the world becoming a vast fabric woven of passions and failures, of lights and shadows, exploration and exploitation leading to war and pandemic. There is individual freedom and survival to be found, but it is in finding the light within each individual's hard-won experience and compassion and understanding the spheres of which we are a part.

In Man at the Railing, the 2022 winner of the Laura Boss Narrative Poetry Award, Edwin Romond explores how "joy and loss join hands across our lifetime." Drawing upon his family experiences, his four decades in public education, and his love of music and baseball, Romond's poetry suggests the past can be a teacher as well as a source of both inspiration and anguish. Man at the Railing is the work of a seasoned poet viewing the world and his place in it with clear eyes and a beating heart.

At the intersection of religion, politics, and Americana, Colin Pope's latest collection inquires what it means to believe while living through unbelievable times. These poems careen and rollick, imagining a world in which conspiracy theory and urban myth figure as acts of God. Here, the notion of "blind faith" is subjected to kaleidoscopic interrogation in a madcap, whirling, unabashedly entertaining pursuit of the limits of dogma. In Pope's vision of belief, wayward children are plucked up by eagles, the moon landing is faked via the liberal use of shaving cream, and a men's room wall is elected president. But beneath their roiling surface, these poems surge on their dauntless quest for some understanding of how we ended up here, now, fighting for our humanity.

For Alexis Rhone Fancher fans, the wait is over. Admit it! You've been lusting after something naughty to liven up your life. Once again, Alexis delivers. BRAZEN showcases her best work since EROTIC, and includes all the "Famous Poet Behaving Badly" poems, together in one volume for the first time.Do it! Give in to your BRAZEN nature...

The only book of poetry to date devoted to the Rwanda genocide and published in this country, this is a work of nonfictional poetry, a cousin in genre to the nonfictional novel. It is based not only on the poet's observations and encounters during months spent in post-genocide Rwanda, but on his numerous extensive interviews with survivors, all of whom lost most if not all of their families, and with convicted genocide perpetrators, conducted in prisons. The result is a startling book of poems that by turns is unthinkably horrifying, heartbreaking, and enraging, yet which at times breaks unexpectedly into stunning revelatory moments of grace. As a poetry of witness this book reveals what it is like to carry on with daily life in a society where nearly every adult male is either a genocide survivor or perpetrator, almost every woman either a survivor or the wife of a perpetrator, and where nearly every child at the time of the genocide witnessed multiple killings, often of immediate family members. Ranging from free verse to stanzaic forms, this book by an NEA-award-winning poet uses tools and methods of poetry to distil each of its many varied voices to its essence, allowing those who are heard in these poems to speak for themselves, often in juxtapositions that lend the book the structure and tension of a drama. Considered more broadly, The Rwanda Poems is a book about the extremities of evil that the human psyche is capable of enduring and inflicting, and the resulting psychic costs to survivors and perpetrators.

Matthew Johnson's second poetry volume constructs a space where the rural communities of Upstate, the suburban living of the Lower Hudson Valley, and the metropolitan landscapes of the City are woven together in a mosaic snapshot. A collection of poems where the historical and cultural traditions of New York State meet, the reader is acquainted not only with seminal figures across the cultural channels of literature, music, and sports, such as Washington Irving, Paul Robeson, and the '86 Mets, but to the author himself. Tender, playful, and meditative, Johnson presents stories that he has lived, and shares others that have been passed down through familial storytelling around the kitchen table and cookout barbecue pit.

In Between Twilight Post delves deep into the difficult journeys of everyday life and intersects those with the difficult maps of the past. There are "atrocities in the body" and many ways a person can falter, fall or rise from "the hue of an unseen self." Post explores the necessary truths, the ones we can no longer hide, the ones we've held on to, for too long. In these poems, the reader will more fully understand Faulkner's "the past is never the past in never past, it's not even dead." The poet infuses elements of evolution, illness, astronomy, humanity, internal travels inside our bodies, and travels back in time "before shadows understood their first for light." Post's poems will seep into our subconscious and help us see how a room can be "dark and iridescent all at once."

The poems in Clint Margrave's VISITOR travel to distant lands and familiar ones, through museum doors and down the aisles of grocery stores, into the pages of books and along the shared walls of an apartment complex, far out in space and up close in the inner space of love and loss, life and death. VISITOR is collection that calls on you to let it in.

Al Ortolani's most recent collection of poems, The Taco Boat, focuses not just on the people of the American Midwest, but on the connection to the humor and pragmatism of working men and women. His poems are vignettes from the fields of Kansas, the hills of the Ozarks, and the streets of Kansas City. They are about good dogs and crazy cats. His people are family and strangers alike. Both are seen with an empathetic eye. They share an attachment to the joys and exasperations of being human, struggling to understand, to thrive. The poems in The Taco Boat step back from the day to day with an acceptance of the life its characters have been tossed into. The images are frequently taken from the natural world, but just as often are from the mechanics garage, the fast-food restaurant, the baseball diamond, the assisted living cafeteria. The poems in The Taco Boat are about the relationships people build, dismantle, and build again

Poems in the manner of a religious waffler. Poems suggesting it's stupid to hate gay people. Poems in the manner of a poet transforming experience into first and third person accounts, which is to say, poems in the manner of poetry. Not to mention "Poem in the Manner of a Beatnik Hipster Psycho-babbler Writing an Introductory Essay to a Newly Published Book of My Poems." Unacknowledged Legislations has something for everyone and/or someone every someone knows. Buy it for your secretly counter-cultural but practically mundane, middle class a) relatives b) mentors c) friends. They'll like it if they're in favor of a) not being an asshole b) being an asshole c) laughter. Proceed with reckless caution.

Christopher Locke's new collection of poetry Music for Ghosts is a visceral testament to youth and hubris, erasure and forgiveness. The heart of these poems straddle the space between the personal and the universally lived, where the past can shatter our best intentions at love, while the future holds us wanting at the precipice of joy. From his Pentecostal childhood to the blazing religion of punk rock, Locke caromed straight into the void of addiction, even as marriage and fatherhood hinted at something better. But in spite of loss, or maybe because of it, Locke remains steadfast in his quest to seek fearlessly and intentionally, reclaiming every light offered in hope's name.

Ryan Quinn Flanagan's Minotaur Snow is an urban menagerie of very human poems. Difficult situations, individual foibles, that unescapable rush of the modern city; the sights and sounds and smells and touch, all told with great humor and at times, compassion. Flanagan peoples the landscape in such a way that his experiences become your experiences, his revelations and perspectives a busy populous of comings and goings all captured in a language that is both highly accessible and littered with odd notions or turns of phrase. Minotaur Snow above all else is a book that captures what is timeless to our shared experience, but with a fierce individuality that washes over everything like a heavy falling snow.

In Taking the F Train, a New York City poet rides the F Train through the final years of the 20th century into the 21st; both gentrification and technology are rapidly transforming life as she has known it. Her old haunts...cafés, bookstores, diners, are being replaced by luxury co-ops. There are also losses due to illness and aging...those of others as well her own. And it's not OK, she cries out! At the same time, for every push forward into the future, she's witnessing an opposite push back into the past by the so-called leader of the free world. Nothing makes sense to her anymore. There's only what can be salvaged by art...the act of creation.

The road a poet travels is often littered with unrealized fragments, half-realized drafts, and unfinished poems that found their ways into a magazine but never earned their way into a book. If a poet is lucky, a few of such left-behinds might be "rescued," released into their true form thanks to abilities that have ripened over many years of practice. In Under Sleep's New Moon, Joseph Hutchison (Colorado Poet Laureate, 2014-2019) offers a range of such poems, all rescued from twenty years of writing between 1970-1990. The poems in this new/old collection are by turns personal and public, surreal and naturalistic, musical and plain-spoken. But all explore the liminal regions we live in every day, too often unconscious of what we're finding there. What this poet found there he has lifted into new configurations, where at last the poems can speak for themselves.

Family Promises is a collection of poems that are like prisms that reflect Laura's unique blend of humor, irony and clarity. Her signature style of irreverence and honesty are in full display as she faces life's challenges without flinching. She bravely attempts to triumph over insurmountable losses with her sardonic tone and grace. It is astonishing how Laura manages to merge heartbreak with laughter in every poem. The legacy of her enduring voice resonates throughout this exquisite posthumous volume.

The Backwards Year collects poems written between June 2018 back to June 2017, more or less, in reverse order and juxtaposes the poet's childhood with love poems for his own neural atypical children, Clare and Gabriel. The book returns to childhood in some of its rhyming poems, but also by exploring the dark spaces where childhood is a kind of fevered dream that keeps informing and shaping the present. This is the most reflective and meditative book Weil has written yet.

In The Calculus of Imaginaries, Gerard Grealish explores in poetry not only the elusive and transitory aspects of the physical world, but also our misperceptions of what “reality” is and the ramifications of discovering that it is otherwise, and largely unknowable. Within the uncertainties of such inner and outer worlds there emerges alternately from time to time a litany of anger, frustration, sorrow, guilt, pain, tragedy, and death, but also love and beauty. Addressing El Niño, the climate phenomenon, as if it were indeed a child, Grealish asks in the poem “El Niño 1997,” “Whose child are you anyway?” and receives in Spanish the answer “I don’t know! I don’t know!” finding the child’s words and inflections paradoxically beautiful. Such paradoxes abound as Grealish takes the reader in five sections through the “Imaginary Roots” of things and people, their existence as “Infinitesimals,” “The Transfer Principle” that often reshapes them, the “Impossible Conditions” they are confronted with, and the “Transcendent Curves” that take them to another place. Grealish’s poetry in this volume metaphorically reenacts Webster’s definition of the book’s abstractly mathematical title, to wit: “a method of investigating the nature of imaginary quantities required to fulfill apparently impossible conditions, using √-1 [the square root of negative one] as a unit.”

Tony Gloeggler writes narrative poetry with the lyrical nonchalance of everyday NYC language infused with splashes of Monk's jazzy stop and start, quirky intonations that interweave the past and present. What Kind of Man is filled with stories to tell on late night Brooklyn stoops, secrets and confessions whispered to your closest friends or maybe only yourself that seek a heightened form of unguarded communication. The poems in What Kind of Man emanate from the narrator dealing with kidney disease to engage everything from family, sexuality, race, work, aging, love, loss, and loneliness to finding blessings in the most unexpected places. The book explores how his world changes, the way he views it, and the people who fill it, especially himself. Tony Gloeggler's What Kind of Man finds and defines the kind of (hu)man the narrator was, is, and hopes to become.