Bücher veröffentlicht von Spuyten Duyvil

With gentle humor and passionate meditation, Lion, Gnat, Lee Slonimsky's latest poetry collection, soars above the clamor of modern life and "steel against indifference". These poems argue vigorously that not only is nature man's origin, but also his destiny. Like the winter oak, nature sheds light on life's enduring lessons and shows the path forward. Luminous, deeply felt, Lion, Gnat once again establishes Slonimsky's singular voice in contemporary poetry. Pui Ying Wong, author of An Emigrant's WinterLee Slonimsky has long been master of the sonnet, as both nature poem and persona poem, often in the voice of the ancient Greek philosopher Pythagoras, in love with the pure order of the cosmos. In "Geometry in Paradise," Slonimsky finds "math's everywhere," and in the title poem, "Lion, Gnat," he observes "the lust of molecules to rearrange / themselves quite differently: as lion, gnat." In this collection, he extends his range, exploring other forms such as triolet, haiku, and free verse, while turning his piercing intelligence inward on the conundrum of romantic love. What is love, marital and extra-marital, current and passed? He brings us face to face with this enigma with startling clarity. Finally, this is a book about love, pervading the micro- to the macro-cosm: in "Electrons Love to Dance," Slonimsky sees how electrons "romance / their protons while they whirl." Barbara Ungar, author of Charlotte Brontë, You Ruined My Life and Immortal MedusaI'm convinced that though he respects the lion, it's the gnat-like things of the world that most often fuel Lee Slonimsky's admiration. And in Lion, Gnat, he shows us the riches to be found in ants ("each one a President/ of his or her own life"), the talons of birds, tree bark, dust and the varied life of electrons, even how they love to dance. The human animal too gets its say: couples who learn to achieve something like bliss (his take on Ghent will fire the romantic in you), a stockbroker who turns a bit into a Thoreau as he watches the flight of birds, a poet's meditation on poetry and the joy of teaching-while the mysterious Weldon Kees rises from the windswept ocean. The last section of the book celebrates Pythagoras, the mathematician Slonimsky has turned into one of the great characters of poetry, enlightening us all again with the Greek who's at once young and old, timeless. In the title poem of the collection, Slonimsky offers "Complexity determines everything"-yes, but it's his poetry that reminds us of the simplicity we often overlook in our often busy lives that makes the complex a concern to us. Lion, Gnat and Lee Slonimsky-listen hard (as he might put it), the Universe is being written. Tim Suermondt, author of Election Night And The Five Satins

Katie Jean Shinkle is our new master writer of the nightmare. In Ruination she has created a classic world of infestation and prophets and terrorist sisters. It's a world where girls are sent to eradication centers for sprouting flowers and mushrooms and forsythia bushes from their skin. The prose is tender and bold and sharp. If you were to carve the initials of this book on your knee, you would have to spell one word: amazing. Scott McClanahan, author of The Sarah Book and The Incantations of Daniel Johnston

Meklina's writing skill in English is astonishing. Ursula K. Le Guin Meklina's writing is metamorphic, tangling comedy, irony, tragedy and beauty together. Alicia Ostriker In these startling and engaging stories, Meklina presents the familiar and the unfamiliar through bright beams of language, and wonderful flourishes of narrative craft. Her literary eye is one that wisely observes and wisely embroiders simultaneously, and I came away ready to think about everyone I know in wiser ways. Rod Val Moore, author of Igloo Among Palms (Iowa Fiction Award) Meklina's short prose portrays with jarring realism the gritty street life of big cities, and the inner Angst of people on the edge, through the naive perspective of immigrant narrators and helpful fools. The characters are frequently the quintessential American oddities or expatriates, people who nonetheless carry the taste of every-day reality in large 21st Century cities anywhere. These narratives weave together the stream-of-experience images that, in a few hundred words, say more about city life and daily struggle than some books of as many pages. D.A. Rich, author of The Tsar's Colonels: Professionalism, Strategy, and Subversion in Late Imperial Russia

Focused deeply on a language to navigate the outward space of the body, the heart of these poems beats between want and its relief, no matter how briefly it's obtained. Gagnon's poems forage, find their bearings, then sing out of the body's reorientation in a territory it is continuously desiring to understand, they gallop "as a flame / does, against / the turbulence / of convictions." Pam RehmThese poems are fluent in the language of pool, sky, bath, afternoon, body, earth-the way things pass into and out of the mind, the way a bird's song can become: "the slow ancient call of the bird/ in the distant flicker." Gagnon has much to say about how and where we find one another, how and what we see in the field of the world's luminous circumstance. For the sheer dexterity of phrase, the pleasure of perceiving, and the music of quiet crescendo, this is a book to be savored and read and savored again. Mark McMorrisIn ravishing language that blends ecstasis with visionary wonder, Matt Gagnon's poems plumb the phenomenological terrain of our creaturely experience. "This terra parches wonderment / and leaves us still and ghosted," Gagnon writes, and the work gathered here speaks to the serious introit of desire and ghostliness that limn our anthropomorphic selves. Forwarding Louis Zukofsky's "upper limit music" and the prescient romanticism of Robert Duncan's lyric address, Gagnon masterfully weaves together the scales and signs of our worldly attention, providing necessary evidence of the body's "molecular advance twilit, sheened, abraded." Querulous, ruminative, distilling narratives from the molecular tide of diurnal experience, Gagnon's haunting Song of the Systole asks "Is it possible to love more than one world, to see clear across to the other side?" This beautiful book, "hounded by rituals of loss," inscribes its pain-worn and joyous journey in an effort to make that crossing visible and audible to each of us. Andrew Mossin

Heather Woods is a lightning rod; her poems abundant with the evanescent, sensual pleasures of God and spirit in this remarkable, transformative first collection. 'May all beings be full of light and the roots of light,' she writes, a modern mystic who acts as both a receiver and transmitter of radiance. This is a holy book of the highest order.D. A. PowellSomebody shook, then popped the lid on, the Great Hymnal: out flew these devotional lyrics wholly recast - ravenously tender, carnally transcendent, and fearlessly pitched towards ecstasy. Heather Woods reawakens a tradition that Dickinson, George Herbert, H. D. inhabited, whereby the poet constructs a void of self as an act of seduction, a surrender to language that is also a command of sonority and syntax. Light bearing calls down the powers holily and hotly; it filled "me up such// that my seams would burst."Aaron ShurinHeather Woods' extraordinary debut poetry collection, Light Bearing, is a spell binding, light-charged tour de force. Shot through with ardor, compassion, love and wit, Woods invites us to "commit luminous chaos together and render havoc holy." These poems swoon, dive, dip, swirl, twirl, and ascend to help us transcend our pedestrian daily cares. Word play offers us new angles into the spiritual and the corporeal. Lines like, "This little light of mine,/ I'm gonna fret and pine," turn time worn lyrics on their heads and wake us from any dolor to light our way. You'll have no need for extra candles or a flashlight if the power goes out on a windy night. This shining, glowing book of poems will light the darkest room and your world will be suddenly, brilliantly lit.Toni MirosevichLight Bearing is a work that is at once precise, conflicted, unflinching in its gaze. In these pages, I am reminded that the real work of poetry is hidden in the underbelly of its lines, and the complexity of emotions. That is to say these poems are beautiful, dangerous, and devastating to read.Truong Tran