Claire Bateman's Coronology is a compendium of the crowns we bear, from the asbestos crown that insulates our thoughts to the zeitgeist crown, "a collective rather than an individual illumination," and provides pertinent information concerning crown birth, crown anatomy, the medical treatment of crowns, and more. The jailbreak crown, the quintet crown--you'll meet them all here, alphabetized for your convenience. The book is available on Amazon.com.
Steve Heller's What We Choose to Remember asks crucial questions about human memory. What is the relationship between memory and imagination? How unbridled is the power of story? How intimidating? The narrative essays in What We Choose to Remember tread the tenuous, shifting grounds of memory, revealing how our imperfect recollections shape not only how we live our lives, but the act of storytelling itself. The book is available on Amazon.com.
Rita Signorelli-Pappas' Satyr's Wife fuses classical, aesthetic, and personal history. She summons a world in which mythic time mercurially flickers into the present, and transformations erupt and intersect with Ovidian force. As the poems move from understated to extreme psychological states, they explore the thematic terrains of love, exile, travel, art-making, and death, all conveyed through a hypnotic dark-play of images and a haunting urgency of tone. The book is available on Amazon.com.
Lars Rasmussen's Come Raw offers a world of strange, haunting tales, sometimes lyrical, sometimes dark as deep Danish winter night, and sometimes both, and sometimes all of these things. There is even a story here written in Latin! Although it is followed immediately by the English version. Whether brief as a flaming match or burning more slowly, like a taper in the dark, these tales have a tendency to brand themselves into the reader's mind. The book is available on Amazon.com.
Susan Tekulve's Savage Pilgrims includes five poems and five stories, most of which were first published in journals such as Beloit Fiction Journal, Denver Quarterly, North Dakota Quarterly, Emrys, Connecticut Review, and Clackamas Literary Review. These short stories and lyric interludes roam from suburban America to the trellised landscapes of Europe, exploring the revelations of love and fear in characters thrust into fierce journeys. Fired from his sales job, a middle-aged Ohio man becomes a full-time Civil War re-enactor. A faithless Peace Corps volunteer stationed in Poland leads a group of elderly Catholic women on a pilgrimage to the shrine of a Black Madonna. After learning of her husband's ocular disease, a wife takes him on an urgent quest to Scotland to see the sights she believes he will miss after he is blind. Regardless of their circumstances, these characters all wrestle with the complex disappointments and hopes that keep them searching for savage truths about themselves and others as they take off-kilter paths toward healing, love, grace and solace. The book is available on Amazon.com.
Pending Books
Supriya Bhatnagar's And Then There Were Three is a collection of personal essays about a family rebuilding its life after early tragedy. Set in a ten-year time period of the author's life, the book begins with the death of the only man in her life, her father, when she was ten, and ends with the entry of the next man in her life, her husband. The accounts of life are both particular and universal—the joys and the sorrows of being raised in a family headed by a single mother bringing up two girls in the male-dominated 1970s India.
In Out-Patients, Elisabeth Murawski transforms the vulnerabilities of our bodies into poetry, her precise lines evoking hospitals and cemeteries, malignancies and bomb blasts, The birth of a child prefigures its end: "this life / slated to be brief / as a poem." These poems confront our inevitabilities.
In Gladys Swan's The World of Carnival, you will find the first chapters of Carnival for the Gods, and the three novels that form a sequence from hercomic fantasy, first published in the Vintage Contemporaries Series. The World of Carnival, continues with its original inhabitants and their struggles against the odds: Alta and Dusty, who dream big; the midget Curran, who undertakes a journey at the behest of the acrobat Elise, whose son has gone mad (Small Wonder); the Kid, who, after a long search, sets out to find the Seventh City, picking up along the way a melancholy Jew, who grew up there (The Dreamseekers). And, finally, a return to Alta, who finds herself drawn back to the circus to follow another set of dreams (Down to Earth). The series of novels explores the relations between life and art, reality and illusion, the openness to possibility and the capacity for the renewal of energies within a culture. It is the writer's major work, and it is her dream that the sequence may one day be published.
William Zander's Gone Haywire contains a harrowing long poem of that title which weaves the turmoil of a psychotic breakdown with the cataclysm of September 11, 2001. Other poems in the collection for Zander's Old Sayings series were first published in various literary magazines, including The Chattahoochee Review Connecticut Review,Defined Providence, Light: A Quarterly of Light Verse, The Louisville Review, Naugahyde Literary Journal, New Letters, Nimrod International Journal of Prose and Poetry, Slant: A Journal of Poetry, and South Dakota Review.
