Bücher veröffentlicht von Red Hen Press

Unending Nora is a love story, though not in the ordinary sense. Having retreated to the streets of the east San Fernando Valley amidst an intense heat wave, Nora Yano, who has lived the first 29 years of her life as a devout Christian and an outcast, strikes up a relationship with a stranger and experiences sexual intimacy for the first time. When Nora mysteriously disappears, her best and only friends Caroline and Melissa, each with their own lives to consider, must decide what they\u2019re willing to risk to find her. The complications that ensue, along with an unexpected arrival home, set this novel in motion. Beneath the stories of four compelling women, Shigekuni creates in Unending Nora web of ideas concerning the after effects of wartime internment. Fresh out of the camps, a displaced and emotionally scarred generation clustered together to form a community; they even took on a religion in order to adapt to the society that oppressed them. Now their offspring, four young women coming of age in their thirties, must carve their own path. Unending Nora is a story about finding love through adversity. In an ambitious examination of faith, shame, and desire, Julie Shigekuni takes up where John Okada left off over fifty years ago with his masterpiece No-No Boy—to tell the story of a community ready to mark its place in the larger world.

love belongs to those who do the feeling-an exciting collection of new and selected poetry by Judy Grahn. The book contains selections from Judy's entire body of poetic work from The Work of a Common Woman, The Queen of Wands and The Queen of Swords, to new poems written between 1997 and 2008. Judy's poetry is rangy and provocative. It has been written at the heart of so many of the important social movements of the last forty years that the proper word is foundational-Judy Grahn's poetry is foundational to the spirit of movement. People consistently report that Judy's poetry is also uplifting-an unexpected side effect of work that is aimed at the mind as well as the heart. Judy continues to insist that love goes beyond romance, to community, and that community goes beyond the everyday world, to the connective worlds of earth and spirit.

Calculated to reflect the sixty minutes in an hour of heightened imaginative contemplation, the poems in Ernest Hilbert's first book, Sixty Sonnets, contain memories of violence, historical episodes, humorous reflections, quiet despair, violent discord, public outrage, and private nightmares. A cast of fugitive characters share their desperate lives-failed novelists, forgotten literary critics, cruel husbands, puzzled historians, armed robbers, jobless alcoholics, exasperated girlfriends, high school dropouts, drowned children, and defeated boxers. These characters populate love poems ("My love, we know how species run extinct"), satires ("The way of the human variety, / Not even happy just being happy"), elegies ("The cold edge of the world closed on you, kissed / You shut"), and songs of sorrow ("Seasons start slowly. They end that way too"). The original rhyme scheme devised for this sequence--ABCABCDEFDEFGG--allows the author to dust off of the Italian "little song" and Americanize the Elizabethan love poem for the twenty-first century. Speaking at times in propria persona ("We'll head out, you and me, have a pint"), at times in the voice of both male and female characters ("I'm sorry I left you that day at MoMA"), at times across historical gulfs ("Caesar and Charlemagne, Curie, Capone"), Sixty Sonnets marshals both trivia and tragedy to tell stories of modern America, at last achieving a hard-won sense of careful optimism, observing "the last, noble pull of old ways restored, / Valued and unwanted, admired and ignored."

In his first collection of poetry, We Generous, Sebastian Matthews illustrates black culture and music through soulful verse and poignant emotion. With poems reflective of the smooth rhythms of jazz, Matthews captures the essence and beauty of love, desire, and daily life.

The poems in Water & Salt travel across borders between cultures and languages, between the present and the living past.

"The poems in Elise Paschen's Bestiary explore domestic preoccupations set against the backdrop of the wild-heartedness, real and imagined, of the animal world," praises the poet Jason Shinder. In this modern-day Bestiary, or "Book of Beasts," the line between animal and human is thinly-drawn - the daughter of a Celtic king, through love, is transformed from beast to human; lovers take flight as moon and owl; manatees transform, before the explorers' eyes, into mermaids. This dynamic runs throughout the collection: taking flight, hovering between air and earth, plunging, and then resurfacing from water. The poems create a constant engagement between what tethers us to our daily lives - marriage, motherhood, raising a family, the loss of parents in old age - and the desire for other worlds. Exploring notions of transformation, these poems cross thresholds between animal and human, between death and life. Award-winning poet, Elise Paschen, creates in her third and most complex poetry collection, work which is elegant and passionate, preternaturally still and reckless all at once. Paschen displays a variety of form and nuance - from ghazals to long-lined free verse poems. Writing out of a distinct Western literary tradition, but tapping into her Native American (Osage) roots, Paschen celebrates the mythic, the unusual, the magical glimpsed in the everyday.

Taking the reader across our country through the varied landscapes of Colorado, Tennessee, North Carolina, and Arizona, Refugee discusses the nature of seeking shelter. We are all refugees looking for a haven from whatever oppresses our lives. What constitutes a refugee is at the heart of the collection. Poems confront and explore xenophobia, sexism, gun violence, domestic violence, corporate greed, and their ties to environmental destruction and political and economic tyranny. An ovarian cancer survivor, the author also writes about her own courageous confrontation with death. These inspiring poems ultimately call for the reader to recognize the refugee condition as a human condition. They call for a change in consciousness in the forms of action and compassion. They call for the reader to thrive. Ranging from short lyric poems to narrative poems, this collection steeped in rich, sensual imagery draws inspiration and healing from the natural world. Truth lies in recognition of the interdependence of all life. Refugee is an odyssey to find grace and unity in a besieged and divided contemporary American society.

"With these poems¿sparsely worded, richly lived¿Geri Digiorno reminds us again just how entangled the delicate roots and tendrils of family and 'individual' identity can become. Her lovingly subjective subjects include family, neighborhood, coming of age, friendship, betrayal, initiation, baptism, masquerade, transformation, sexual discovery and conquest. Sketching poetically, Digiornöat heart a realist unafraid to risk sentimentality¿relives a working-class life begun in San Francisco's Noe Valley. In clipped, lower-case memoir-vernacular, she tells all, serving up clues to the meaning of life worldwide."¿Al Young"The poems in Geri Digiorno's White Lipstick explode with passion and power. Unforgettable and moving, these poems, rooted in pop culture, are ones you will return to again and again. In fearless poems about survival, Digiorno tells the story of an extraordinary woman's life and tells it with humor and grace."¿Maria Mazziotti Gillan"These direct and open-hearted poems speak with humor and insight of one woman's life in the American West. Geri Digiorno's clear voice draws us directly into the center of her world."¿Diane Di Prima

This collection of poetry, prose, and translations explores Latinx and queer identity through homage to the great Nicaraguan poet Ruben Dario.After Ruben unfolds a decades-long journey braiding together the personal, the political and the historical. Throughout the text, acclaimed poet Francisco Aragon intersperses English-language translations and riffs of the Spanish-language master Ruben Dario. Whether it's biting portraits of public figures, or nuanced sketches of his father, Francisco Aragon has assembled his most expansive collection to date, evoking his native San Francisco, but also imagining ancestral spaces in Nicaragua.Readers will encounter pieces that splice lines from literary forebearers, a moving elegy to a sibling, a surprising epistle from the grave. In short, After Ruben presents a complex and fascinating conversation surrounding poetry in the Americas-above all as it relates to Latinx and queer poetics.

';Utterly unique... examines themes of love, intrusion, loss, community and trust against a backdrop of a Makah reservation in the Pacific Northwest.' Ms. MagazineSelected as a Staff Pick by The Paris ReviewSilver Medal winner in the Independent Publisher Book Awards in Multicultural Fiction Fleeing the shattered remains of her marriage and treachery by her sister, a Latina anthropologist named Claudia takes refuge in Neah Bay, a Native whaling village on the jagged Pacific coast. Claudia yearns to lose herself to the songs of the tribe and the secrets of a spirited hoarder named Maggie. Instead, she stumbles into Maggie's prodigal son Peter, who, spurred by his mother's failing memory, has returned seeking answers to his father's murder. Claudia helps Peter's family convey a legacy delayed for decades by that death, but her presence, echoing centuries of fraught contact with indigenous peoples, brings lasting change and real damage. Through the ardent collision of Peter and Claudia, Subduction portrays not only their strange allegiance after grievous losses but also their shared hope of finding solace and community on the Makah Indian Reservation. An intimate tale of stunning betrayals, Subduction bears witness to the power of stories to disruptand to heal.';Young beautifully and vividly renders the Pacific Northwest, particularly the unique world of Neah Bay. Subduction is at once a thought-provoking meditation on the geography and geology of the natural world and a generous exploration of the natural shifts and movements that shape her characters.' Jonathan Evison, New York Times-bestselling author of Legends of the North Cascades

Don't Go Crazy Without Me tells the tragicomic coming of age story of a girl who grew up under the magnetic spell of her outrageously eccentric father.

"e;Brilliant . . . Rooted in the shifting California landscape, this elegiac yet hopeful book is . . . dedicated to grieving the world as we know it."e; -Ada Limon, author of The CarryingThis collection of poems traces literal and metaphoric fault lines-rifts between past and present, childhood and adulthood, what is and what was. Circling Tess Taylor's hometown-an ordinary California suburb lying along the Hayward fault-these poems unearth strata that include a Spanish land grant, a bloody land grab, gun violence, valley girls, strip malls, redwood trees, and the painful history of Japanese internment.Taylor's ambitious and masterful poems read her home state's historic violence against our world's current unsteadinesses-mass eviction, housing crises, deportation, inequality. They also ponder what it means to try to bring up children along these rifts. What emerges is a powerful core sample of America at the brink-equally tuned to maternal and to geologic time. At once sorrowful and furious, tender and fierce, Rift Zone is startlingly observant, relentlessly curious-a fearsome tremor of a book."e;Taylor vividly and memorably renders the complexities of an America of violence and rifts."e; -Publishers Weekly"e;Unearthing and sifting the seismic layers of her own East Bay locale, she's created a haunting American elegy."e; -Jonathan Lethem, author of The Feral Detective

Against the backdrop of the rising commercial fishing industry in an Alaska Native village, Under Nushagak Bluff is a powerful mid-century tale of women, love, loss, resilience, and the unexpected strength found in storytelling.

The stories in The Girl with Two Left Breasts focus on a new generation of African-Americans, who, having had access to the education their parents could only dream of, now face the challenges of living in an insane postmodern world. Readers will encounter stories shaped and styled for the new millennium as image and metaphor are taffy-stretched and virtually collapsed in order to depict how, at this unique juncture barely beyond our century¿s turn, cultures, genders, and points of view collide as characters struggle with issues of race, identity, sex and addiction in an unforgiving urban milieu. Publisher Fiction Collective 2 calls Glenn¿s work ¿An important new voice speaking to us throughout the stories in an array of vivid, unusual tongues, all of them full of intellect, passion and poetry. Moreover, the collection strikes one as having been written by someone whose literary sensibility is already fully formed.¿ This is fiction that is sometimes darkly humorous or humorously dark, deftly sidestepping facile categorization and often, like a koan, unfolding with a lyrical sort of dissonance.

Douglas uses poetry to explore the personal and professional struggles of soul legend Donny Hathaway.

Orlando White explores language from a Dine (Navajo) perspective. One idea that interests him, inspires him to think and write, is the idea of the English language as a forgotten language. Imagine if we as a people, all people in the United States, are speaking an Indigenous language rather than English; that the English language e

Suicide Hotline Hold Music is a collection of poems (mostly short ones) and poetry comics (poorly-drawn mostly-text sometimes-funny things). A human pretends to be a machine in order to provide comfort anonymously. We are made to consider the epic meaning of middle school pantsing. Hearts are broken and mended. Children play with My Little Robot Pony. A troll keeps a food diary. Everyone's hair has a sound effect.

Based on the true story of Sarah Ellen Gibson, the sixth woman to arrive in Fairbanks, Alaska, in the gold rush of 1903, this novel in poems incorporates a wide variety of style-persona, narrative, and lyric poems, as well as historical photographs and documents-to tell Gibson's story. Through these poems, the reader is offered the chance to try on the dusty, mining-town overcoat of Gibson's life.

In My Body Is a Book of Rules, Elissa Washuta corrals the synaptic gymnastics of her teeming bipolar brain, interweaving pop culture with neurobiology and memories of sexual trauma to tell the story of her fight to calm her aching mind and slip beyond the tormenting cycles of memory.

In 1964, Chuck Rosenthal was a thirteen year old boy whose dream was to make his grade school basketball team. Never Let Me Go tells the true story of how a college professor who coached grade school basketball as a hobby became the man who held that dream in his hands; became Rosenthal's coach and his mentor; how he made Rosenthal his student, his confidant, and eventually his sexual partner, and how that teenager, trapped in the cycle of loyalty, betrayal, denial, secrecy and abuse, found the inner resources to escape and take the first steps toward adulthood.

This book-length poem chronicles a family's experience from the 1950s through the 1990s. The 1950s section was selected by Donald Hall for inclusion in the Best American Poetry series.The poet's first full-length collection, Quiet Money's New Edition consists almost exclusively of longer narrative poems, including the title poem about a bootlegger/pilot who flew the Atlantic solo before Charles Lindbergh. This piece is often cited as one of the most important poems of the 1980s and the movement to revive storytelling in verse.

This culmination of a life of poetry, art, and social justice "e;has the freshness of an opening argument and the majesty of a man's last words"e; (Molly Peacock, author of The Analyst).Like paperweights, his lyrics are both small and hefty. His subjects range from race relations to trees, from secrets to parenthood, from ideas of god to kissing, from sons and mothers to fate, and of course, to poetry itself. Never afraid of the big questions of why human beings are alive, and what hope and justice are for, Louis-Dreyfus could take decades to finish a poem. A perfectionist, a thinker, and always inspired by visual art, he fought with himself over how to say what he wanted to say best. Like the French-Uruguayan businessman poet Jules Supervielle, whom Louis-Dreyfus translated, he felt the tug of the financial world against the pull of the lyricism of poetry, and the division marked his life and sparked ideas for his finest poems. As the heart condition that seized him made it absolutely imperative, finishing Letters Written and Not Sent literally became a life-or-death matter. This is the book that he wished to send into the world."e;There's rock-bottom integrity, a dignified modesty, and a quizzical, persistent quest for meaning in this collection. It's a final bequest to the living from an intensely generous man."e; -Rosanna Warren, author of So Forth: Poems"e;The poems of William Louis-Dreyfus testify to an inner life of great richness, but one that freely slipped across the border of the self into the world beyond . . . a fine collection of his work, and it is good to have it at last."e; -Charles Martin, author of Future Perfect

A novel of male friendship and forbidden love in post-WWII Appalachia: "e;A pitch-perfect exploration of the terrors and pleasures of American adolescence."e; -David Pratt, author of Bob the BookIn The Falls of the Wyona, four friends growing up on the banks of a wild Appalachian river just after World War II discover, almost at the same time, the dangerous, alluring Falls and the perils of their own maturing hearts.Seen through the eyes of his best friend Arden, football hero Vince falls in love with the new kid, Glen. But they have no context for their feelings-and the next few years of high school become a tense, though sometimes funny, artifice of concealment.The winner of Red Hen's Quill Prize and an INDIES Silver Award for LGBTQ+ Fiction from Foreword Reviews, The Falls of the Wyona is a moving, powerful novel imbued with the magical atmosphere of Appalachian culture.

Peripheral Vision, Susan Kinsolving's fourth book of poems, explores the world from many points of view. She takes her readers to England, Hollywood, Wyoming, France, and Chile. She goes behind the scenes in a military hospital, an elementary school, and a disturbed family. Her poems were described in the New Yorker as ';grand and almost terrifying.' In this new collection, she proves herself again. As a guest poet and lecturer, Kinsolving has performed at numerous venues, including Harvard, Columbia, and Yale University, as well as Bad Robot in Santa Monica and Bread Loaf in Vermont.

Wild Honey, Tough Salt offers a prismatic view of Earth citizenship, where we must now be ambidextrous. The book takes a stern look inward calling for sturdy character and supple spirit, and a bold look outward seeking ways to engage grief trouble. The book begins with poems that witness a buoyant life in a difficult world: wandering New Orleans in a trance, savoring the life of artist Tove Jansson, reading the fine print on the Mexican peso and the Scottish five-pound note. Clues to untapped energy lie everywhere by the lens of poetry. The book then moves to considerations of the worst in ustorture and war: how to recruit a child soldier? How to be married to the heartless guard? What to say to your child who is enamored by bullets? In the third section, the book offers a spangle of poems blessing earth: wren song, bud growth, river's eager way with obstacles. And the final section offers poems of affection: infant clarities of home, long marriage in dog years, a consoling campfire in the yard when all seems lost. The book will soften your trouble, and give you spirit for the days ahead.