Bücher veröffentlicht von Unsolicited Press

The poems in PAPER BIRDS do not require any background other than a certain maturity of experience, some acquaintance with poetry and its oddities, and a lively curiosity: "a splash that drew us quickly refolds itself/as the lake's plain surface over a depthless void..."As with a painting, a poem isn't a flash-frozen scene but a lively one in a reader's moment even if we can't see it so. What's there isn't waiting for us. It happens in our arrival, as our arrival: "like a team of synchronized swimmers whose legs and feet/then arms and hands form flower patterns/ briefly before a closing splash/it is flow we see and yet do not;" An unavoidable strangeness remains and must remain. The world isn't here for our pleasure nor our suffering, and poetry doesn't tell us why we have so much of the one and so little of the other, only that it is so. If it seems a particular poet is much too negative, consider the product of a thorough, open-handed negativity: "a shallow fluid 'I' walking its body from room to room/while its other face,/ strings of pulsing miracles commingled as a universe/streaming in an abyss/of virtual gaps between there-then and here-now,/watches, lives large, remembers..."

While the Kettle Boils is a collection of 150 micro-fiction.

Mayo begins his new collection with a brief tale and utterance made by an elephant trainer at a zoo: "It's said," Beasley says, "an elephant won't pass by a dead elephant without casting a branch or some dust on the body. A kind of homage, I suppose." In a variety of ways, the twelve stories that follow are tributes to characters who find themselves on the fringes, at the sides of roads. In "When the Moon Was Ours for the Taking," a man recalls a brief few days he found himself fishing with his NASA-physicist father who is otherwise preoccupied with the Space Race craze of the 1960s. In "A Mindfulness Becoming Less," an aging, out-of work Homer Lynch convinces himself he doesn't need the job and health care he needs. In "Vigil for Ammospiza nigréscens," a veteran of the Vietnam War searches for an extinct bird in the salt marshes of Florida, haunted by the North Vietnamese soldier he killed. In "Burn Barrel," Cole, a jobless college graduate, despairing that he can never pay his student loans, begins to burn all his university papers, in a strange effort to erase the debt. In these and other stories, Mayo's characters are people we think we know, in situations we think we understand-and then realize in flashes of truth we can see them-and ourselves-in new ways.

Laura Kiesel plumbs the depths of familial dysfunction, and the wretched inheritance of addiction, thoroughly and with impressive nuance in Swallowing the Stem of Adam's Apple, combining integrity and personal grit that's interwoven throughout her lyrical style. She writes beautifully about her fractured relationship with her mother, and the ripple effect it has had throughout the rest of her life. Her work is an unflinching examination of the erotic implications of romantic relationships and filled with visually exhilarating metaphors and analogies.Raised a Roman Catholic, Kiesel describes religious rituals and makes use of Christian symbols, while referencing Biblical figures and stories, in ways that are simultaneously subversive and familiar. Illness and death are common themes in her work, whom Kiesel often personifies and treats as old friends--more accurately, rivals or frenemies--competing for her time and attention and that of her loved ones. Instead of keeping them at arm's length, Kiesel embraces them and the macabre reminders her daily life offers her of her own and others' shared mortality and finiteness. Swallowing the Stem of Adam's Apple does not demur in its assessment of the self and society but instead navigates the trials and tribulations of the human condition with visceral astuteness.