Bücher veröffentlicht von Red Hen Press

In her second collection, My Infinity, Didi Jackson continues her exploration of the paradoxical meaning of a world where joy and sorrow simultaneously coexist.These poems investigate both sacred and natural spaces. Her poems move grief and emotional suffering to language as a site of recovery and renewal. Much of this collection is ordered around the work of the Swedish visual artist Hilma af Klint. As the first artist to arguably use abstraction, her radical work brims with enigmatic botanical images painted to grasp the seemingly boundless and hermetic realm of the dead. Similarly, Jackson's poems explore plant life and natural species in the Green Mountains of Vermont, where perceived thresholds blur in acts of spiritual reimagining. This is a book that questions all that is endless, all that has been thought as limiting, and all that remains unknown.

Don't look back.Did Eurydice want to return from the underworld? Did anybody ask?In this brilliant portrait of rage and resilience, a Korean woman tries to connect with her younger brother and grapple with family tragedy through bedtime stories that weave together Greek mythology, neuroscience, and tales from their grandmother's slipping memory.Recasting the myths of Eurydice, Orpheus, Persephone, and Hades through the lens of a Korean American family, Eunice Hong's debut novel offers a moving and darkly funny exploration of grief, love, and the inescapability of death.

Ribcage of Time, a poetry collection from a woman's point of view, is both intimate and universal in its scope of events-family life, birth, death, rape, abortion, genocide from a poet on the ledge of some eighty years of life with language fresh and unsettling.The poems in Jacqueline Tchakalian's second poetry collection, Ribcage of Time, refer to Armenian genocide, public murder, rape, home abortions, including one outside the home with tragic repercussions for the writer. These poems have an ever-present wish for improvement, a more sane and equitable society for all. They reference family, the joy of having and being around children, the predicted loss of an ill husband, a plan for a different type of god. They are reflective poems that question the future, make strong assertions, and overall are imbued with hope for the future.

A rich medley of broad and deep practical knowledge of the natural world.

Sex Augury is a collection of radical, trans poems which practice divination with the symbolism of our changed and changeable world.

One of the first books to explore the emotional landscape of living with Ehlers-Danlos syndrome from a patient's perspective; a playful story of falling down, getting back up again, and realizing you should have gone to the hospital sooner.

Featuring work from Victoria Chang, Francisco Aragón, Susannah Nevison, and more.

In Oh, Don't Ask Why, Dennis Must's dark humor and use of jarringly raw language confront a number of anxieties and complexities with which his characters grapple. From overwhelming sorrow to suicidal reflection, this compilation of stories reaches deep into the internal and touches readers to the core.

Featuring work from Alan Lightman, Pope Brock, Aimee Gerstler, and more.

In The Nightlife, Elise Paschen explores the nocturnal world and what happens in that interval between "dorveille" and daybreak. She reveals, through dream lyrics and fractured narratives, the inevitability of unrecognized desire and the drama between the life lived and the life imagined.

Middle School Literary AnthologyThis is the middle school anothology that makes middle school kids want to get in touch with their inner poet or pirate tale teller.What do you do when you're the goddess of love, but you don't have arms? That's the trouble with the Venus de Milo, this crazy armless statue some guy found on an island called Milos about two hundred years back. You've probably seen the statue somewhere before... maybe on the cover of this book!Nobody's quite sure how the Venus de Milo lost her arms. The French sailors who bought her, though, claimed that they battled brigands on a beach to get to her. Apparently, her arms were ripped off during the fight!That's a pretty cool story.It might not be true, but, now that you've heard that version of the tale, you'll probably never forget it. It's unique and exciting, and only the Venus's own rescuers could have told it like that.There are an infinite number of Venus de Milos in the world-objects, people, places, and ideas that are strange, cool, and quite possibly, unique to your life. And, just like those French sailors, you, too, have awesome versions of those Venuses' stories to tell.

The seventh collection of poetry by seriocomic master William Trowbridge, ¿One of America's best and wittiest poets.¿

Something is rotten in the state of American poetry. With respect to audience and artistry, poetry has shot itself in many portions of its anatomy, and keeps blasting. The fact that vast numbers of poems are published every year, and a large number of Creative Writing students and graduates combine to read a few of them, does not mean that poetry is on the right track. How has the erstwhile Queen of the Arts been consigned to the tiny corner of the cultural basement where she languishes today-and how can she get out? As an acclaimed poet and veteran teacher of poetry, Charles Harper Webb knows what it takes for a poem to grab a reader's attention and hold on. As a former rock singer/guitarist and a licensed psychotherapist, he understands how to connect with an audience. A Million MFAs Are Not Enough shows-with wit and style and concrete tips that working writers can use-how poetry can return to cultural relevance again.

It is the last day of October 1969, Día de los Muertos. Under the harsh Oaxacan sun the dead are staking terrain-moving in and around and through the apparently alive.

Best-selling poet Kathleen Driskell's newest collection Blue Etiquette is inspired by Emily Post's 1922 edition of Etiquette and explores the interactions between the haves and have nots through poems voiced by Mrs. Worldly and the Between Maid, narratives focusing on blue-collar Americans, and lyrics drifting through the blue etiquette of mourning beloveds.

Psychosis in the Produce Department: New and Selected Poems, 1975-2015 gathers the best work from Laurel Ann Bogen's previous ten books as well as new and unpublished poetry. Ranging in themes as diverse as horrific beauty and exquisite madness, dysfunctional families, love and anti-love, life in Los Angeles and Hollywood, and growing up as a Baby Boomer, these poems offer sly, humorous, surreal-and most crucially, accessible-genre-busting work that can only be called Vintage Bogen. Readers are also given the unique opportunity to experience the full power of Bogen's critically acclaimed poetry performance through ten included QR codes that link to audio files of select poems in the collection.

This book-length poem by the current Poet Laureate of Michigan's Upper Peninsula, Andrea Scarpino, asks the reader to sit with and inside the body's many losses, to grow comfortable and restless in its vagaries, and to acknowledge the myriad ways the body shapes and informs our lives. Incorporating found poetry, including from her own medical records, and the ash and willow tree as mythological figures, Scarpino writes with lyric intensity from a place of resistance and questioning as she tries to describe, understand, and record chronic pain as a growing epidemic.

A poet hailed as "stunning" reveals a fierce and sensual intelligence in a meditation about farming, reproducing, and what it means to try to forge a relationship with the earth.

a slice from the cake made of air processes the physical and mental trauma of abortion coupled with the desires for sexual and emotional love against a backdrop of contemporary culture-with all the sexualization that comes with race, gender, and landscape. From front to back the book is wound through with a single poem whose language is permuted, translated, and retranslated (from English to English) as it cycles around abortion, both asking "what artifact / do I resemble" and stating "small love / small / you failed it / in person." The poems directly confront the sexual self ("This isn't a real orgasm, a real patellar fatigue") and take up the thesis abstract as a malleable form for interrogating the inevitable intersections and overlaps of brains and bodies. Sexy and volatile, a slice from the cake made of air winds over and through itself, with no conclusions or solutions for the mess of living in the world.

A parade of characters and voices, these poems stumble along the playful and pained pathways of our days. This is a book of honest feeling. This book believes in the sacred exchange of a smile. Father, Child, Water wants to make you laugh, wants to surprise you with sorrow, and certainly wants to remind you that you are alive.

Both daring and exacting, Torn from the Sun, journeys through the ensnarements of mortality. The poems' meditations, rendered in supple language and form, invite us to step along with the likes of Miyamoto Musashi, John Coltrane, Walter Benjamin, Jorge Luis Borges, and Vincent Van Gogh, as they fly and fall through labyrinthine paths of life. Torn from the Sun weaves mosaic steps that stir the ashes of rebirth, recognizing that these bewildering, narrow corridors are not a prison for death, but rather a space for interior discovery. Traced in this poetry is a way out and it is the way in.

Ron Carlson is a master of the contemporary short story. In The Blue Box, he extends that mastery to the short short story, offering us a captivating glimpse of a writer at play. With that voice of his-sharp, sensitive, and wry, brimming with good humor-Carlson inhabits one standby after another of the American pop landscape, past and present: monster flicks, action heroes, unsupervised teenagers, blogging. Coming in for special scrutiny is the world of education, in hilarious send-ups of recommendation letters, teacher evaluations, style guides, and a MOOC. Whimsical, wistful, and gently surreal, The Blue Box delights in life's unending absurdities, and reminds us not to take anything-especially ourselves-too seriously.

2014 OMAHA READS SELECTION2016 ONE BOOK, ONE NEBRASKA WINNERStuart, Nebraska is a long way from the battlefields of Western Europe, but it is not immune to the horrors of the first Great War for Peace. Like all communities, it has lost sons and daughters to the fighting, with many more giving themselves over to the hatred only war can engender.Set in 1918 in the farm country at the heart of America, The Meaning of Names is the story of an ordinary woman trying to raise a family during extraordinary times. Estranged from her parents because she married against their will, confronted with violence and prejudice against her people, and caught up in the midst of the worst plague the world has ever seen, Gerda Vogel, an American of German descent, must find the strength to keep her family safe from the effects of a war that threatens to consume the whole world.

Existing at the intersection of darkness and play, the noisy, irreverent, and self-conscious poems in Interrobang take clinical "phobias" and clinical "philias" as their conceit. Each poem makes its own music, the crescendos and decrescendos born of obsessions over anxiety and lust. Encompassing a range of forms (but mostly sonnets), each piece toes the line between traditional meter and contemporary sonic play, while a tell-tale heart beats beneath the floor of the collection, constantly reminding us of our shames, fears, and the clock's unrelenting ticking. Through individual stories about love, degradation of the self, the redemptive power of genuine humility, and the refuge offered by art and language, Interrobang, winner of the 2012 A Room of Her Own Foundation To the Lighthouse Poetry Publication Prize, illustrates how even the worst-case scenario of these pathologies are, fundamentally, just extensions of the dark truths to which every one of us can relate.

Ron Koertge wants to do nothing but delight. Armed with his trademark wit, he introduces readers to Little Red Riding Hood all grown up with a fondness for salsa and chips, explores the thorny relationship of Jackie Robinson and Pee Wee Reese, spies a Trojan pony and the children it bamboozles, and offers an alternate reading to the Icarus story. He meets Walt Whitman on the set of an X-rated movie, attends his gardener's funeral, and goes to his beloved race track. Seminal figures from pop mythology speak up in unexpected ways: The Beast, transformed by Beauty, hints that his new life isn't exactly what he expected. Gretel enrolls in night school, the ogre's wife from the beanstalk yarn writes a heart-rending story on her cutting board, and a group of fourth-graders on a field trip encounters Death. Occasionally setting aside free verse, there are couplets about a Bette Davis movie, a sestina about routine blood tests, a villanelle set in a topless bar, and a set of haibun that chronicles an entire day. Reverend Ike and John Lennon said, "Whatever gets you through the night." This book will do just that and carry you right on in to the next day, guaranteed.

Winner of the inaugural Letras Latinas/Red Hen Poetry Prize, Dan Vera's Speaking Wiri Wiri is a work of historical insight and wry wit, unexpectedly delightful and full of surprises as it meditates on the challenges of multiple identities, ethnicity, geographies of migration, familial displacement, popular history, and more. Everything is fair game for Vera, who finds poetry in the mundane and the monumental, the hidden lives of iconic television stars and the alternate and accidental histories of Latinos in the United States. Carmen Miranda makes an appearance, as do Captain Kirk, Vladamir Nabokov, and José Martí in a literary landscape careening lyrically between lost and found.

This is the personal story of the life of Blase Bonpane, a vanguard practitioner of liberation theology and a former Maryknoll priest.In the wake of the Second Vatican Council 1962-1965 many religious people, especially those serving in Latin America, began to understand a spirituality that transcended sectarianism. Having come from an upwardly mobile Italian American family marked by Southern Italian anti-clericalism, Blase was accustomed to hearing his parents express real differences with their institutional church. He went into the seminary despite the avid protests of his parents. BlaseÆs odyssey takes us from his high school and college years, through his service in Guatemala during a violent revolution, to his expulsion from that country for subversion. After receiving gag order from the Church, which he could not in good conscience accept, Blase met with the editorial board of the Washington Post and released all of the material he had regarding the U.S. military presence in Guatemala. This action led to his separation from the Maryknoll Fathers.Blase accepted a teaching post at UCLA. While serving in academia, he met the former Maryknoll Sister Theresa Killeen, who had served in Southern Chile. They married in 1970. Their adventures include working directly with Cesar Chavez at his headquarters in La Paz, California, building solidarity with the Central American Revolution, forming the Office of the Americas, working in the forefront of the international movement for justice and peace, and raising two children.Blase worked on the ground for international peace in Mexico, Guatemala, El Salvador, Nicaragua, Costa Rica, Honduras, Panama, Colombia, Ecuador, Cuba, Japan and Iraq. He led the U.S. contingent of the International March for Peace in Central America from Panama to Mexico in 1985-1986.

At the nexus of a top-secret government conspiracy to develop a doomsday-style bio-weapon, cutting edge science and ancient primal bloodlust collide when a team of ill-fated explorers unlocks the eons-old secrets of humankind's savage evolutionary past lurking miles beneath the killing cold of Antarctica.When disgraced evolutionary biologist Dr. Claire Matthews is asked to accompany a group of leading scientists on a fact-finding expedition to Antarctica to investigate a tragic accident, she is naturally suspicious. Her checkered past and ongoing professional exile are more than enough to convince her that any offer made by the charismatic and scheming Dr. Ethan Hatcher merits serious skepticism.Despite her doubts, Claire cannot turn her back on close friend and colleague, Alan Whitehurst. Killed under mysterious circumstances weeks earlier with the members of the first expedition, Alan deserves better than an anonymous death in Earth's harshest and most unforgiving environment. While the expedition promises Claire an unwelcome reunion with an array of personal demons, it also presents her with a golden opportunity to resurrect a once-promising career. Proving the existence of S. iroquoisii, an ancient microscopic organism critical in the evolution of primitive man, would mean the culmination of her life's work, and a triumphant return for one of the scientific communityÆs brightest prodigies. To earn her keep, Claire must determine the role S. iroquoisii played in the catastrophic accident that decimated the previous expedition, before her crew falls prey to a similar fate. Employing the latest in forensic investigation, Claire and a joint team of military and civilian personnel undertake the gruesome task of piecing together the events that led to the massive explosion that destroyed the previous research station. As a nightmare of unimaginable proportions begins to coalesce, Claire is drawn ever deeper into a maze of deception and savage violence. Pitted against a primordial foe they can scarcely fathom, Claire and her colleagues must battle the cold, each other, and the growing madness within themselves to survive the infinite polar night.

Leia Penina Wilson’s i built a boat with all the towels in your closet (and will let you drown) is at once a love ballad and a warning. These poems are—at their simplest—about relationships, sex, love, creatures, different kinds (and degrees) of violence, and—at their most complex—about the limits of the imagination, of language, and about the power the imagination has over the body. These poems confront the shifty line between human and animal, and urge the question: at what cost the body. Wilson’s animal-human doesn’t intend to answer that question; instead, she lunges towards it and tears it up and begins again, and again, and again.