Bücher veröffentlicht von Serving House Books

Although J.R. Solonche started placing poems in magazine, journals, and anthologies in the early 70s, his first book of poetry, Peach Girl: Poems for a Chinese Daughter, co-written with his wife, did not appear until 2002 and his own first collection, Beautiful Day, not until 2015. Just this March, Years Later, his twenty-second book, was published. That's a lot of books, too many for most readers to buy. But they don't have to. They can buy just one. It's his twenty-third. Selected Poems: 2002 - 2021 is a generous offering of his favorite poems from most of those books, including the two nominated for the Pulitzer Prize, Invisible (2017) and Piano Music (2020) and the 2020 Shelf Unbound Notable Indie Book, The Porch Poems. In her introduction to Selected Poems: 2002-2021, Grace Cavalieri says, "The absolute best remark I can make about this book is that I would give it to non-readers of poems as a conversion to poetry, for its language is as available as rain; hopeful as sunshine; and fresh as the wind. It's a perfect book to let the reading public know that this is America's poetry. This is a serious book disguised as playfulness, and we are its lucky recipients."J.R. Solonche has published poetry in more than 400 magazines, journals, and anthologies since the early 70s.

CONCORD tells the story of a single remarkable year when Henry David Thoreau and his brother John fall in love with the same girl; reclusive writer Nathaniel Hawthorne courts Sophia Peabody of the esteemed Peabody family; and the brilliant Margaret Fuller becomes a houseguest of the equally brilliant but married Ralph Waldo Emerson and finds herself engaged in a passionate affair of the mind as well as the heart. Today, these figures are icons of American literature but once they were young and in love.

The bonds of family; success and failure; philosophy and quantum mechanics; the ways in which we can - and cannot - rewrite our own lives: DUPLICITY weaves all of these together while vivisecting its own genre.

The Hot Sauce Madness Love Burn Suite is a book of poems that revolves around the beloved and sometimes notorious culture of hot sauce and hot peppers. Its 814 rhyming couplets delve deeply into that rich and addicting world, whether they focus on peppers' flavor, pain, linguistics, or history. Come take a bite out of these verses, and see if you can handle the heat.1912: pharmacist Wilbur Lincoln Scoville first measured the "heat" of peppers(the word's in quotes because there's no actual heat in this equation, just spiciness, which hoodwinks our bodies into thinking physical flames are licking our tongues, throat, lips). Chilies aren't caliente, which implies heat from an actual fire, but picante, the word weuse for heat that arisesfrom spice.

The stories in this collection represent about six decades of writing. Over time some of them have grown the "claws and wings" of novels as Vladimir Nabokov put it. But they were stories first.

J.R. Solonche's new poetry collection, A Guide of the Perplexed, is his 20th to date and his third from Serving House Books. If you are perplexed when it comes to poetry, as many of us are, then here is your ideal guide to the richness of poetry as only Solonche can serve it up: wit, word-play, insight, artistry akin to magic, the transformation of philosophical treatises into Zen koans, all of which are, in the words of Kirkus Reviews, "sympathetic but never sentimental."

Have A Heart is mostly set in New York from 1998-2001, ending a few months after 9/11. The three main protagonists include: Anna, a famous Russian ballerina; Ali, a brilliant heart doctor, the head of the heart transplant program at a New York Medical Center; and Nancy, Ali's wife who dies on 9/11.

Mamaji is a story about a daughter longing to connect with her lost mother. It's about a mother's bond to her children and how her love brings them great strength and resilience. It's a story of redemption and forgiveness despite blatant injustice and deceit. It proves a difficult past does not determine future love and happiness.

Gary Fincke's poems lead to discoveries that are both exhilarating and unsettling. In long sequences and precisely observed shorter poems, he explores terrorism, mass hysteria, climate change, political calamity, and the necessity of sustaining belief. He references science and history as well as myth. He grounds his poems in experience.

Piano Music, the new poetry collection from JR Solonche, presents him at his best. The wit, the insights, the playfulness, the craft, the profundity, and yes, at times the silliness, are all here on full display to the delight of the reader, whether that reader be new to the Solonche universe or one returning for more.

River Town Girl: A Memoir is about life in a small Hudson River town right across from Manhattan, about the delights and the power of storytelling, and about one girl's experience growing up--and out of pain--in the 1950s, '60s, and early '70s. Today that version of the town is gone, buried under New Jersey's high-rise Gold Coast.

Solonche can compress a philosophical treatise into three lines... His epigrammatic tidy poems are philosophic gems.

The Kuhreihen Melody examines nostalgia from various angles through an array on lenses.

"In The Disintegration Loops Stephen Cramer attempts to uncover the music within the world's dissolution and fragmentation, from Italian masters painting over the work of previous artists, to the innocence of childhood giving way to scars, to the description of badly stored tapes being looped and played over and over again until they begin to flake. In the last of the three, silence eats the music from the inside so that by the final loop, the listener hears not the soaring themes of the beginning, but an homage to loss and stillness. The book insists that music, and maybe even life itself, is made more dazzling and precious because it "falters/ & staggers/ forward. The broken/ melody limps & surges on.""--