Bücher veröffentlicht von Unsolicited Press

A 2020 Eric Hoffer Award Honorable Mention in General Fiction, Maggie's Ruse is the story of identical twin sisters Maggie and Marta Dugan. According to an Eric Hoffer Awards judge, Anne Leigh Parrish delivers "astute insight, big characters, a snappy pace...with subtle subtexts and zinger truths."Maggie and Marta Dugan, twenty-seven-year-old identical twins, live the good life in New York City on their stepfather's money. Each has a glamorous calling. Maggie paints; Marta appears onstage. Success, though, eludes them. Marta's roles are few and far between. Maggie's endorsements are infrequent at best. When gallery after gallery passes on her work, she begins to doubt her talent. Home alone one afternoon, fueled by frustration, she is seized by a sudden, wild impulse to masquerade as Marta when a friend of hers drops by. The ruse is quickly discovered when Marta returns from another shopping spree, a rift between the sisters ensues, and they go their separate ways. But living apart proves harder than either thought at first. Each carries the other firmly within her, making any true independence nearly impossible. As the weeks pass, the weight of absence sometimes becomes difficult to bear. Both find a surprising degree of success in their respective efforts, due perhaps to their newfound freedom, yet the bond between them remains firm. Can they come back together, and under what circumstances would a reunion be viable? Has the time come for an open discussion of their issues with each other? Unable to fully answer these questions, each knows only that she needs the other to feel whole.

Suzanne S. Rancourt's second book of poetry uses both fictional and auto-biographical events to create a chorus of survivors. These poems for the unspeakable, the marginalized, the "in-betweeners," create a chorus of survivors in the theatre of life's sorrow, love, tragedy, beauty, and profound human resiliency. Rancourt's life attests to being a survivor, and states, "Prejudice is non-discriminatory." murmurs at the gate, is a poetic narrative that explores the harsh measures of life's wars. "If we are at war with everything, who are the Warriors? Who are the survivors? And, for how long does the war cry reverberate?" Marine and Army veteran, and multi-modal artist, Ms. Rancourt brings to the reader her rich and diverse metaphors inspired by rural mountain living and Native American culture. Ms. Rancourt honors all her ancestors in this astounding book where every murmur could be your own.

Exposed. Vulnerable. Words that describe the poetry in Kris Godspeed Amos's collection, but certainly not the only one: Love. Survival.Perseverance. These too stand out.Are you Ready to Love yourself a Black Man? allows us, readers of literature/purveyors of society a direct view of our relationships with African-American men. The collection, short in pages, is full of depth and deep introspection on concepts such as mental health issues, relationship and family conflict, and intracultural strife, to systematic oppression, racism, prejudice, and sexism. Amos explores his observations, contributions, and position on these topics.Built with lyric in mind, the underbelly of each poem is rhythm. This beat tells the story of the Black Man, and his relationship with the world. Completely relevant and in desperate need of reflection by a society that still hasn't fully experienced the love of a man of color, Are you Ready to Love yourself a Black Man? is meant to be read by all regardless of color, race, religion, sex, or gender.It is a book designed to start conversations and discussions on the topic that matters most: humanity is universal.

Funny, beautiful, and always from a strange angle, "The Weird Ones" reflects modern America in a bent and broken mirror. Most of these stories creep out of the bayou of the author's home town, New Orleans, ready to swap a few tales. With mythical creatures, magical scenes, and heaping helpings of wry humor, this book gives the reader a deep dive into the warped brain of its creator.

Poet L. Ward Abel hears the light beating of wings in an otherwise silent landscape. These wings offer insight into our cacophonous world, "where dreams / ride breezes full of summer thunder / the sound of currents, birds, / a memory of inhaling rain." Here are the remnants of those who have been hard-wired, but who now stand at the treeline and consider a walk out into the open where "the green air remembers." Here is a drone's view of the smallest details "from towers around / wide clearing bounces / sounds bespeaking gardens / way off the thing the grid," reaching the conclusion that "it looks like this / whether I'm here or not." The poems begin, "The Angels Rage Tonight / in flooded amber chutes," and they end when "their frequency goes quiet. Then showers." Trying to reconcile "the wing and the anti-wing," Abel does what we all do, "Skim low the waters / just above a wake." Using a combination of dream-like imagery and colloquial diction, the poet's unique southern voice comes through the clutter of strange times to slow down the ongoing, to catalog the search, and to try to sing "something like / a sparrow that's fallen."

In 1984, three Royal Hong Kong Police Force inspectors investigate a murder on the set of a major action film. When one inspector goes missing, the commissioner forbids them to pursue the case any further, but eventually they uncover a connection between the triads, the film industry, and elements of the colonial government. In 2014, a disaffected Londoner returns to Hong Kong to discover the truth about his long-missing father, who was one of the inspectors on the Lucky Stone case. Following the instructions of a cryptic monk with some connection to both the triads and the police force, he infiltrates a suspiciously well-connected investment fund in exchange for information about his father's fate. Set in Hong Kong in 1984 and 2014, When a White Horse Is Not a Horse is cross-cultural mystery-a blend of detective fiction, history, and homage to Hong Kong Cinema. The novel jumps back and forth between two parallel timelines, allowing the reader to piece together the mystery from twin vantage points.

The magical-realist fables and bizarre folk-tales that are the poems in Festival of Dangerous Ideas conjure a nightmare world of what could be in the not too distant future especially considering where we are in our state of politics. It's a surrealist statement on politics, religion, family, love and art. This is poetry of the imagination lit by old knowledge. Imagine entering a festival where booth after booth display scary and strangely familiar scenes of depravity, or absurd theater.

Before the first third of the twentieth century, almost everybody read poetry. Books of poetry were found in most homes in America. It was published in daily newspapers, taught in school, memorized and recited with enjoyment. In short, poetry once was both accessible and meaningful.Then, modern poetry became "difficult." It began to scare readers or turn them off with obtuseness, dense symbols or it simple became difficult to understand. It became marginalized in American literature-a place where it remains.It should not be this way. Many poets today believe that poetry should resonate again for everyday readers. It should share with readers the feeling that the poet empathizes with everyday people and situations. If possible, it should be hopeful, even humorous when appropriate. In short, it should be relevant.The poems contained in A Grammar for Snow are about everyday people in small towns, cities and farms in those fly-over-states and off-the-map places who work and love and quietly live out their lives. It is about place-mostly in the U.S. Midwest--both real and imagined. Many of the poems contain elements of humor that help people deal with the sometimes-hard issues of day-to-day life.The poems contain vivid imagery and concreteness designed to help the reader believe that these places and people really exist. More than that, the poems are designed to make the reader care about these folks and their lives, to pull for them and hope against hope that things work out.

The Horror of the Ordinary deals with life through the eyes of diverse characters and stories. As you dive into the short story collection, you'll meet a property owner dealing with an infestation of Japanese beetles in his backyard, a too-tall Afghan named Hamid, a trophy huntiing orthodonist not prepared to deal with his actions, and many others.As you dive deeper into the collection, things get weirder, more out of the ordinary. From the unexpected tragedy of a Japanese pitcher's performance in American baseball to disturbing thoughts about an alligator watchband, every story provokes. Every story incites.

The morning after helitack pilot Ed Kline's friendship with a female wildland firefighter turns hot, he receives a text from a phone number he's never seen:Bad thg 1 wkI leve I dieCops evry1 diesHelp L 47033012Could the L mean his adult son Lewis? You're a hero, Lewis wrote to him before disappearing a year ago, but the country you fought for doesn't exist. Then a "bad thg" happens. A group calling itself the PUMAs-Patriots United Militia of America-assassinates two Washington State senators the same day it perpetrates a deadly armored truck robbery. Unnerved, Ed jeopardizes his new relationship, his career, and his sanity while trying to rescue a son who might be one of the killers, trying to escape them, or both.

The protagonist, Ana, is a young woman in her early thirties. She was born and raised mostly in New Jersey, but has since moved out West to Portland. In a lot of ways, she left her deep roots to escape her hardscrabble childhood. When she finds out her mother has cancer, she commits to spending a lot of time back east, helping not only with the care and treatments that come with a terminal illness, but in the managing and wrangling of the family dynamics. She is insightful and unafraid to speak the truth, something that her family members oftentimes have a hard time with. So much about her past, her relationship with her mother, who her mother really is, who her family really is, comes to light for her in this challenging landscape. But when Ana finds out she is pregnant during this already intense time, the darkness that has always loomed over her, the grief of having to face neglect and borderline poverty as a child and adolescent, is now glowing with the hope of a new beginning even though she knows it is also the end of her mother's life.

We Grow Tomatoes in Tiny Towns is an homage to rural living. This poetry collection meanders through the spiritual fabric that holds communities together, acutely aware of the practical approach to life that's commonplace among small town residents. Fiercely loyal to the enduring nature of Garrettsville's distinctly American spirit yet honest in its assessment of the village's social fabric, Jeremy explores the pros and cons of knowing everyone on a first-nameBasis. Drawing his inspirations from a diverse crowd of poets like John Berryman, Philip Levine, Lynn Emanuel, and John Ashbery, Jeremy's writing is a mixture of the straightforward confessional and layered surreal. Utilizing a cast of recurring characters, forest phantoms, and offbeat imagery, this poetry collection comes together as a grand formula for elevating the mundane to grand significance.

Permanent for Now is a novel that inspects the binary of good and evil during one of history's most difficult times: World War II. Told through three vantage points, circumstance rises to the forefront as the engine that generates goodness and wickedness in our world.

From the universal to the personal, the formal to the experimental, Carolyn Martin's fourth poetry collection, A Penchant for Masquerades, takes an unflinching look at the fluidity of truth, time, identity, history, death, and relationships. Martin time-travels with Neanderthals, Lucy, and Big Foot to 9/11 to the future collapse of a holographic universe. She mines scientific discoveries, nursery rhymes, biblical characters, and the works of Issa, Horace, Yeats, Frost, Williams, Szymborska, and Collins in poems that are both playful and thought-provoking. Since she believes reincarnation is a distinct possibility, she suggests that death need not be taken too seriously ("Re-Entry Interview," "A Case for Sudden Death"). She riffs on an Issa haiku ("Thoughts on a Translation"), sits down to dinner with Horace ("Notes from a Water Drinker"), and promises literary revenge on a reviewer who negatively critiques this collection ("To the Reviewer Who Missed Too Much"). Martin's forms run the gamut from sonnets, haiku, and pantoums to free verse, found poetry, and paratactic poems whose stanzas can be read in any order. A lover of language, she builds poems based on one word ("Phonaethetics," "Disambiguation," "Stirring"), and delights in re-stitching the words of others in surprising ways ("Variations on Final Words," "10 Variations on the 50 Most Quoted Lines of Poetry," "90+ Titles Appropriated from Poetry 180 Hosted by Billy Collins"). A lover of all things poetic, Martin has created an eclectic collection for readers who have a penchant for words and who are open to believing in everything and nothing.

None of the Above spans twenty seven years (1980-2007) of the life of Increase Alt, a fearful, introverted sort who does a poor job of paying attention to things that don't directly affect his life. Throughout grade school, high school, and college, his energies become more and more directed toward his own pursuits-the study of literature, the attempt to secure a girlfriend, the forging and maintaining of relationships with his male peers. Events happening in the world, in the country, and in his hometown of Cleveland-a Reagan-Carter presidential debate, the Iran Contra scandal, the AIDS epidemic, the first Gulf War-become important only when they threaten to pull him out of his comfort zone. As a highly-educated adult, he returns to the town of his birth to discover he still has much to learn, as both personal trials and traumas in the country (and world) put his maturity to the test.

Growing up on a small dairy farm in upstate New York, Gary lived a few hundred steps from his paternal grandparents. His grandfather (hereafter "Grandpa") was a perpetually happy man and Gary wondered, in light of the nature of farm work, in light of some of the hardships Grandpa endured, in light of the pace of the town, in light of the way he was chronically frugal, how this could be so. After college, Gary moved to the city and reveled in the cadence and sophistication of the city. And began to see how places came to shape the people who lived in those places. How the way we defy and indulge in a place; how the way we yearn for the notion of somewhere else; how the cadence and influence of a place affects a person. In The Emperor of Ice-Cream, Gary recounts all the little moments - moments he never thought could or would be important - he had with Grandpa to try to understand who Grandpa was. He - with an astonishing blend of his signature humor and a reverence that only comes from a boy who loves his grandfather - then examines how his understanding of those moments has evolved after moving to the big cities for which he had always yearned. Does changing from denim overalls to a Brooks Brothers suit change a person? Should it? Is cow piss really that different from the piss with which the sidewalks of New York City are often soaked?

A LOAF OF BREAD is a requiem for the loss of the author's homeland. During the years of the civil war in Syria, the author lost her father-in-law; he was buried in a hurry in some unrecognizable ground in Aleppo. Her aunt died alone in a sieged nursing home; her belongings were stolen. Her father was flown ill around the USA on a stretcher; he never got to go back home to his village in Syria; his bones rattle in some cemetery in South Carolina. During the war, her house in Damascus was bombed. She followed the struggle of her friends and a thousand others as they boarded rubber boats and floated to the unknown; some drowned in the sea and some in their despair. A Loaf Of Bread digs into the depth of anguish to excavate the collective human experience of grieving and enduring across the maps of losses.