Books in Print
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Royal Blue Car
In Royal Blue Car, apparitions that cannot be named appear at the periphery of the words, layers of lived trauma, dead baby will not leave the “mother dead these twenty years,” a smooth cascade of events from one generation to the next, the present not left in peace, a present held in place by repetition of the imbued, unseen life handed down, the past in pursuit with its white stucco buildings, neighborhood fireplaces belying mere, current utility provoking an urgent need for fire escapes. A single word is often an unsettling atmospheric net of metaphor, words left in opaque connections evoke feeling, cast shadows of meaning, a meaning of loss, “a crazy highway dazzled by blindness.” The apparitions can only be avoided at the expense of life. The witness lives the truth, holds a place for the voice of those who need to speak. Royal Blue Car is a text giving voice to that which cannot be relayed in any sort of objective clarity, words repeating, circling around letting us feel what cannot be said. Truth here is an evocation, felt at that place where life borders death, calling us to our humanity. Posamentier has created a form to hold the inexpressible in a resonance of rhythm that touches the body, puts light on the edge of meaning.
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Wayward Lines
Life is no lightweight thing, “we are reborn in our heavy steps, our secrets zippered shut on our backs.” Our humanity, our bodies, is where we find ourselves in these poems, in the drama, in the finality of acceptance and self-determination, at the edge in which we burn white hot. The inward entanglement of two bodies strong in love, in leaving, in struggle, emotions and feelings, thick, palpable, and wonderment too…whatever it is we experience, the body is the doorway, the body pushing against gravity, pulled by its own vision, needs and desires, “our secrets”…leave us with “mud up to our ankles.” Love, in Wayward Lines, is fathoms into the quick, leaving the shallows of fantasy, romance. The body is our connection, here is breath, teeth, throat, mouth, tongue, arms, skin…eyes throb, our backs carry the world and our dreams, “hands full of dark.” The body, life, is its own hunger and the beauty, even when we feel broken. These are poems of relationship, of home…and traversing the impossible as we feel every inch of it.
ISBN 978-0-9819534-6-5
76 pp, $15
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Itch
A sort of somatic Texts for Nothing, almost nothing 'happens' in Itch, but the reader is surrendered to the vertiginous intimacy of an obsessive proprioception in which every sentence undermines the premise of its compositional posture, the reductio ad absurdum of the diegetic stance. Written in a lyrical aphorism, in turns playful and disconsolate, the narrative ventures a sinuous, beguiling intensity that seems both excessive and lean at once, alternately adopting and dissecting the tropes of philosophical, fictive, and poetic discourse––philosophy with an unreliable narrator, if you will.
ISBN 978-0-9819534-5-8,
211 pp, $15.95
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Until the Eye Opens
writings from blind faith
One woman’s journey to confront solitude in Elk Creek, California, but to find her own humanity tested and stretched in unexpected ways. The journey is her relationship to awareness and to writing itself.
ISBN: 978-0-9819534-1-0
197 pp, $15.00
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Salt and Paper: 65 Candles
by
A daily reflection that is immediate and an accumulation of life experience in poetry and prose fragments placing a heartfelt, yet realistic light on difficult subjects as author speaks of aging: a friend’s slow demise with Alzheimer’s; the life-long effect of a brother’s mental illness; the present, lived aging process; the interlacing of four generations—and, the creative, writing life that responds with compassion, humor, art.
192 pp. $15.00
ISBN 978-0-9819534-2-7
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Other Clues
Prose poems…or short shorts? Grafton’s writing is a hybrid style distinguished by sensate labyrinthine takes on life that are powered by reversals that drop the bottom out and fragment combinations that contain complete scenarios. These prose poem short shorts are language driven, glints of narrative delivering irony both witty and dark.
88 pp, $15.00
ISBN 978-0-9819534-3-4
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Rising at 5:00 A.M.
This book is a life intersecting with many lives. Poems that read like narratives traverse years of suffering, learning and delight. They open doors of Provincetown, summer camp, prep school, the mental ward, Russian novels. With unerring rhythm and in countless ways Marc Hofstadter sings his passion to the reader’s heart.” Neal Oxenhandler.
104 pp, $14.00
ISBN 978-0-9819534-0-3
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WiLD WEST
The poems in WiLD WEST excavate the human condition in postmodern America. The poet takes on our idiosyncratic lives at the edge of contemporary American democracy. These poems will not let the reader be comfortable.
64 pp, $12.00
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but then you danced
Jeanne Lupton writes, “I enjoy writing tanka as emotional diary, as a way to peace, as a song of nature, as a reminder of love, as play and work, as connection, as celebration, as gift, as a practice in concision, as a practice in honesty, as a way of life.” These are free form tanka that give uplift and depth to our everyday experience. Most of these tanka have appeared in tanka journals.
64 pp, $10.00
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Where I Live
I am a gardener. I chose that profession so that I could be a poet. I prefer perennial plants to annuals, trees to shrubs. I love pruning so that the tree looks like it was never touched, that it just grew that way. I feel the same way about my poetry. Wherever I work with plants I am also working on my poems and, in the poems, I am working on living. The day I found something useful to do with my hands, my real life began and all of the days I had before, fertilize it.”
64 pp, $8.00
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Out of Nothing
Out of Nothing (OON) is “a” story of awareness by way of the intersection of language and experience. The key element in OON is to break logic apart by using logic and demonstrating that experience is the final arbiter: Transmuted matter-energy comes from acts of self-reflection which are then stored in memory… the animal brain having direct control over matter-energy within the brain.
120 pp. $12.00
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