Bücher veröffentlicht von Unsolicited Press

Working Title investigates a spectrum of emotions: disillusionment, fatigue, anger, frustration, and indifference, and others through a series of poems that honor the Everyman. The speakers of the poems share the same face but not always the same uniform. They are workers from the proletariat and the bourgeoisie. What emerges is a painting illustrating the consequences of spending more time in an office than out in the world. The numbing nine-to-fives. The blinding blue light of computer screens. Working Title is a portrait of the mundane everyday of modern civilization in the western world.

A Contemporary Portrait of the Southwest is a love letter to the Southwest. The collection follows the journey of a man named John Whenn who, after accepting his position as an adjunct faculty member at Central Arizona Community College, investigates the Southwest and produces a politically charged collection of op-eds which describe in vivid and lurid detail the landscape, people, and history of the region.

The Animal Within is filled with poems that want to swim together, focusing on animal and human nature. A few are ekphrastic, based on photography by Jaimie Huycke and Dennis Liddell. Dive in and readers find a world where horses speak their minds, crawdaddies sing, and mermaids find love. Wolves howl "ahwoo at the full strawberry harvest moon in June," and birds do more than flap their wings, but rather create a voice for the oppressed. Humans step in, personas based off the author, and consider loss, depression, and love- inner-self mixed with creature habits- scratching down a lover's back or crying in a zoo. One persona connects with water, skinny-dipping her way into a galaxy reflection, "as quiet as you would expect it to be [she] sends a ripple through the moon." Hawaiian Goddesses tell their story about how the Yoni Crater came to be with a crash. Nature takes note and gets noticed, exploring transcendental and organic aspects. "The stream has no objection" as the poet takes liberty in playing with ideas of what it might be saying. A divine devotion to creatures large and small- flora and fauna finding a voice among calm and chaos, depending on the scene created. Each poem cups a piece of life- ideas not too far fetched- mundane and supernatural. With sounds all around, the author uses anaphora, alliteration, assonance, and other devices to give these animals and personas personality of their own. This chapbook implores readers to take a hiatus, step outside of themselves, and experience the animal within.

34-year-old Angie Dugan struggles with many things-anxiety, her career as a social worker in a retirement home, and her difficult family. Her biggest struggle, though, is finding love. When she meets Matt, she's swept away by his attention. As issues from his past come up she wonders if she can trust him. Should she break it off, or give him another chance? In the end, all she can do is listen to her heart, and evaluate what she wants most.

Andrew Brenza's Spool is a reckoning of our diminished natural world through the register of a disjointed, smeared, and unraveling poetics. Consisting of a series of breathless lyrical and concrete poems, Spool strives to represent both nature's beauty as well as the tragedy of its destruction, a destruction which is, ultimately, the destruction of ourselves. But the book does not descend entirely into despair, for the author's novel approaches to poetic expression suggest an alternative way that humanity might imagine its place in the world, a way that fundamentally incorporates and enacts humanity's vital connection to nature. It is through this alternative poetics that Brenza offers hope, albeit a difficult one, since it asks us not just to change the way we think about nature, but the way we think about and within language itself.

Built on stunning character development, plot, and unflinching emotion, Joseph Allen Costa delivers stunning prose perfect for the times. The settings, both personal and universal are not only tangible in the imagination, but the invite the reader in to experience stories from the heart. 

At once delicate and visceral, the poems in To Drown a Man chronicle the long gauntlet from a life of secrets to a life of intimacy. "The only difference between imprisonment and hiding," Russell writes, "is who shuts the door." Exploring the meaning of redemption and shame as related to the personal, the marital, and the spiritual, these are the poems of a soul at war with itself. They read like chunks of ore being burned of their dross.

 When Story Stops, the Leak Begins is the story of accidental pilgrims on a journey through eerie, uncharted territory, having only each other as foils and resources, while they search for the key to their ultimate destination.  Along the way, they meet a grifter, an archetypal character and a spooky digital presence, who might possibly be an ally. In Hollywood parlance, this tale could be described as a spiritual adventure story in which Six Characters in Search of an Author jump headlong with no net into a Canterbury Tales style quest across a dreamscape merging scenography from Waiting for Godot with digital shards of Bladerunner in a rowdy and irreverent Voyage to Arcturus.   The key to meaning, style and emotional resonances in When Story Stops, the Leak Begins, is the poem-script, a hybrid form that combines poetic dialogue, a performance script format and a narrator – imbedded in what would normally be called stage directions – who speculates, comments and reports on feelings and thought processes in each character’s head. This storytelling format grew from the author’s experiences making non-traditional theatre where speech conveys its usual content but also works as a form of gestural action.  A series of routines weave through the poems-scripts and serve as armatures for developing character relationships. These routines also animate the pulse and cadences of the text. The dialogue derives from skaz, a Russian literary technique using singular dialect and speech rhythms to reveal motivations, intentions, even reliability as a narrator.  

Stages of Blue is a nonfiction collection that deals with the harrowing effects of mental illness. Jeswald digs deep. Through poetry, short stories, and flash fiction, Jeswald opens a window so readers can witness the struggle of living with anxiety, bipolar disorder and severe depression. The collection is emotional and riveting.

Annette, soon to turn thirty, has been transplanted from New York City to a small college town where her husband has been hired to teach rich girls "the basic tenets of History and Culture." The girls have arrived from all over the country with their horses, and Annette wonders how the seemingly spoiled girls manage their busy daily schedules, but they do, they seem to thrive in the fresh air of intellectual and physical pursuits, while Annette, not much older than the girls, feels she has become something she never imagined was possible. One morning, reaching for the notebook where she writes down emergency numbers and To Do lists, Annette, as if compelled, begins to write two diaries, one she titles Squabble Diary, and the other, Love Diary, or, more precisely, Sex Diary, in which she will dutifully record the times her husband (whom she names "Monsieur") deigns to acknowledge her and her needs. At some point, the two diaries become one, and what began as an exercise in futility, and as an uncertainty-will she keep at it-becomes a habit, and "this notebook is filled with words, feelings, stories, historical events, and me." Back in New York and on her own, Annette, adjusting to her new situation, summons the Arabic proverb: yom asal, yom basal-one day honey, one day onion-telling herself she must be strong and keep in mind E. Graham Howe's wise advice: "It is better, if we can, to stand alone and to feel quite normal about our abnormality."