Bøger udgivet af Blue Horse Press

American poetry of the Washington State steppe and scrublands.Red Shuttleworth's Straight Ahead shows readers a crisply-drawn textual landscape of the scablands of Eastern Washington. This is a wounded land pocked with volcanic rock, coyotes, and "plow-ripped / floury soil" that, like the mythic Old West, "declines and crumbles / to blue rock suburban driveway gravel" and "double-wide farmhouses." In these stark and masterfully-wrought scenes-most crafted in chiseled tanka-like five-line poems-we get a glimpse into this microcosm of America through Shuttleworth's astute, terse, and always human observations. In Straight Ahead we hear the twenty-first century lament of the exile in the Western wilderness.- Barbara Brinson Curiel, author, Mexican Jenny and Other Poems, winner of the 2012 Philip Levine Prize

Burning Number Five is Co-Winner of the first Blue Horse Press Chapbook Contest. It was selected by guest judge Larry D. Thomas, 2008 Texas Poet Laureate.Of the countless poetry collections I have been privileged to enjoy over the years, few indeed have been as startlingly original as Burning Number Five: Power Plant Poems. The poet's intimate and detailed knowledge of the boilers and other equipment of a power plant is matched by her knowledge of the intricacies of language, employed in this instance with masterful precision and economy. The title poem is a skillfully executed sonnet whose exquisite lines provide an elegant counterpoint to the violence and potential danger of the subject. These poems, although remarkable in their detailed exploration of the powerful machinery of a plant and the numerous potential dangers it poses to those who tend the terrible machines, also illuminate, with subtlety and consummate artistic skill, the broader concepts of human labor and the paradoxical relationship between humans and technology. Burning Number Five is a memorable, seamless merging of art and science.- Larry D. Thomas, Contest Judge, 2008 Texas Poet Laureate and Member of the Texas Institute of Letters

Daniel Corrie's poetry vectors into imagistic and sonic surprises, not to mention imaginal reach. While avoiding green didacticism, these poems are incantations about time, consciousness, and the non-human world, all the while embracing the miracle of human perception. Even as his poems unfold with a deliberate patience, the richness of his motifs create a kind of ganglia in which one finds him or herself joyously tangled: the poems refresh, elucidate, and--yes--sometimes inform. They never befuddle, rely on rhetorical pivoting for the sake of cleverness and cleverness only; instead, Corrie's work reaches outward concentrically to enfold ambitious layers of perception into few words--but words that count. --- William Wright, Editor, Southern Poetry Anthology, and assistant editor of Shenandoah Review

Laurie Byro's 51 poems compose a poetic and imaginative look into the life of Gertrude Stein and her milieu.

This is what Ekphrastic Poetry is supposed to do: go beyond the visual image of the photo and make the scene come alive in language. Once again, I find in Bleak Music this balance of sound, rhythm, lineation, and stanzaic construction that defines good poetry.- Nelson Sager, Ph.D.Piper Professor Award WinnerProfessor Emeritus of English, Sul Ross State University

Ever since Larry D. Thomas crafted the poems which ended up in his first book, The Lighthouse Keeper, a Small Press Review "Pick-of-the Issue" chapbook published in a handset letterpress edition by Timberline Press in 2000/2001, he has turned to the chapbook as his favored means of poetic expression on twenty-five occasions (ten of his published books are book-length print editions).). His chapbooks have received a number of other significant honors including a Western Heritage Wrangler Award for The Goatherd (the first poetry chapbook to be awarded this most prestigious honor); a Pecan Grove Press National Chapbook Competition finalist citation and Violet Crown Award finalist citation (both for The Woodlanders); and a Spur Award Finalist citation (for The Red, Candlelit Darkness) from Western Writers of America. Additionally, his poem titled "Irene" from Los Días de los Muertos was nominated by Right Hand Pointing for the Pushcart Prize.Fifteen of Thomas's twenty-five chapbooks were first published online (as electronic chapbooks), thirteen by Right Hand Pointing in its invitation-only poetry chapbook series. The Circus, published by Right Hand Pointing in 2008, was re-published in an expanded print edition by Blue Horse Press in 2016. The Red, Candlelit Darkness, first published in print by El Grito del Lobo Press, was re-published online by Right Hand Pointing in 2013. Thomas's other e-chapbooks were published by Lily Press, Slow Trains Literary Journal, and the Virtual Artists Collective (nodding onion imprint), all three of which are/were juried publications (Lily Press has ceased publication). Thomas has enjoyed the artistic challenges the chapbook provides in concision of language and seamless thematic unity.

An international journal of poetry and art.

Acclaimed novelist David Armand's first collection of poetry, The Deep Woods, contains fifteen poems that are at once deceptively simple, clear and colloquial, yet dense with meaning and universal significance. Drawing upon everyday incidents, Armand fashions poems of great lyrical beauty and potent symbolism that remind his readers of the importance of memory and of a shared language. - from the back cover

In The Gathering Light at San Cataldo, Jeff Alfier obeys the command in his first poem, "Make known to us the sea." Lush poems detail Alfier's travel through the physical world of towns like Savelletri, Torre Canne, Sardinia, and Ancona Marittima. Always vigilant, intellectually detailed, there is affirmation not only of the self but also of the community. The body of a man who fishes and of the woman who releases "him to the sea, as dark as it is" are not urns holding memory, but are filled with spirit from the past that sustains them even as he "drops in weariness." Alfier invites us into his poems by immersing us in an abundance of sensual particulars like flour wintered knuckles, lightening cleaving summer, braying children, and the glance of a woman "culled from shadow." Weaving light into rhythm and image, Alfier's poems mesmerize with musical language evoking loss but also the love, slippery and shining as a fish that darts in and out, contained in the hands of an old married couple as he reaches to her across the table, "aware her touch will complete the circuit." The poems in this beautifully crafted collection are significant, are necessary because they teach us the importance of being quiet, of listening. These are not poems that can be sailed out into the Adriatic Sea. They boomerang and anchor in the heart. - Vivian Shipley

Of David Thomas, the late detective novelist James Crumley wrote, "All of the old Missoula hands feel the same way about Dave: as if he is the national treasure of our small, but extended nation, a nation founded on those sixties ideals of love of language, a respect for hard work, friendships closer than blood . . . Dave Thomas has spent those years actually working at jobs most of us gave up in our youth, working on the railroad as a tie gang laborer, worked construction as a laborer, clean-up, and wheeled endless barrows of concrete . . . and obviously, he spent long hours writing in bars, on the roadside, and locked in small rooms all over the West working at his craft and art . . . the lonely ecstasy of putting down the words, doing the work all alone."- James Crumley, from the Forward to Thomas's Buck's Last Wreck (1996)

In this wonderful collection of poems, Night Holds Its Own, CiaraShuttleworth lives up to the early promise of her best known work, theastonishing "Sestina." Her territory is the human heart and mapped hereinis the confusing nexus of love, loss, and above all, desire. Its inhabitantsare a restless tribe, seeking in motion what they have lost in their all tootemporary couplings. "I'm concentrating on the rear-view/like I'm goingsomewhere." In these poems, natural forces promise both oblivion andredemption; lightening is shroud and wedding dress, and the scent of the ocean can track you down even in the middle of the desert. This collection will leave you, like the "What Sings Is the Drunk Boy's Hands," ..".always singing, One more, just one more."- Robert Schenkkan, Pulitzer prize and Tony Award winning author

Inasmuch as the first three of Larry D. Thomas's eleven full-length poetry collections were largely set in West Texas where he was born and reared, his poetry became associated by many of his readers with the landscapes and people of West Texas and the Trans-Pecos region of the state. Although eleven of his print books, however, contain poems inspired by the Mississippi River Delta, In a Field of Cotton is his first poetry collection dedicated entirely to the Delta region and culture to which Thomas is vitally connected in spirit, emotion and by bloodline. The following is excerpted from his preface to In a Field of Cotton: "I am inextricably connected to the Mississippi River Delta in spirit, emotion, and by bloodline. Three of my grandparents, born in western Tennessee around 1880 (my paternal grandfather was born in Texas; his father was born in Mississippi), migrated to west Texas in the late 1890s. They traveled by covered wagon. All four of them worked their entire lives as tenant cotton farmers, although my paternal grandfather was also a mule trader. They plowed the cotton fields with mules, and hand-picked the cotton as soon as it was ready for harvesting. My mother and father, who were thirty-nine and forty years of age, respectively, at the time of my birth, also hand-picked cotton into their late twenties until my father started working at a Mobil service station. From the early years of my childhood, I heard stories about my family's experiences on the tenant farms, and was fascinated by how they hand-picked cotton much like the black slaves on plantations throughout the American South. These stories made me feel a strong connection to blacks and black culture which I still feel to this day."

WINNER OF A 2016 WRANGLER AWARD 2016 from the National Cowboy & Western Heritage Museum.

Biannual literary journal of poetry and art.

Poetry set in New York City. Originally from Jonesboro, Arkansas, Justin Booth is an Austin, Texas writer of outlaw poetry, questionable stories, and outright lies. His six books of poetry are Stripper's Daughter (2018), Outlaw Blue (2016), The Singer, The Lesbian, & The One with the Feet: 69 Bipolar Love Poems (2015), A Quarter, a Dime, and Two Copper Pennies (2015), Lucky Strikes, Grave Dirt, and 1/3 of the Stars (2016), and Trailer Park Troubadour - Strung Out on Heartache (2013). He is a frequent contributor to San Pedro River Review

Working class poems set in Missouri. As fellow poet Shawn Pavey says in the Foreword, Dorsey "loves our beat up and rusted out cars, the dive bars and chicken joints which are the only places we can really afford even though settling the tab always brings on that discernible stab of anxiety." His "subjects would be off center, off balance, and blurred just a little in grainy black and white." Yet amid life's failures are the small triumphs that make it all worth living.

Lapses & Absences is a collection of poems selected from five previous chapbooks and one full-length collection, sometimes in a slightly different form.

Poetry of the American West by award-winning poet Red Shuttleworth.

Rarely have I encountered a poet whose poems travel so widely in time and space and take such surprising twists between the autobiographical and the imagined, the contemporary and the mythic, the everyday and the surreal, and often the visionary. Steven Huff's The Fire in the Hill burns with a yearning for "a rebirth of wonder," for "more and fresher alphabets to sing," and it "keeps you awake like a piranha hunting."- Jeffrey Harrison * * * * Work I love is A Fire in the Hill, work that makes me think where I come from and where I go. Clarity makes poetry reach for the depths of being, and this is precisely what Steven Huff's poems do. Memory is his tapestry, passion the rope that holds together our common humanity. Few poets these days can do this as abundantly and generously as Huff in this his fine and most recent book.-Pablo Medina, author of The Island Kingdom

The close observations and sculpted language of William Wright's poems make the world a holy place. These poems brim with the restless energy of waking that leads us into 'rooms of smoky light that house the myth.' The myth is the beautiful and fragile existence of the creatures in these poems, from the boy who ponders a long-drowned woman to a caterpillar heavy with 'something vital and black.' Wright draws a world that is elemental and spirit drenched, and it is a world I want to live in. --- Al Maginnes

Let's go with Larry D. Thomas to visit Art Museums. Here's the docent, shining "the cadenced light / of his learning"; the visitors, who ." . . navigate / the treacherous seas // of permanence," "the pristine yard / between viewer eye / and canvas"; the security guard who can "identify // each canvas by its scent." Thomas takes us to spaces as varied as the MFA in Houston, the Art Museum of South Texas in Corpus Christi, the Walters Art Museum in Baltimore, the steps of the Philadelphia Museum of Art, all the while calling our attention to the details: "the sibilance / of shuffled / shoes," "the light, deferent / with silence." This is vintage Thomas: spare and lean, no extra words or images, each stanza a tight little block creating a construct that works, on the page, like a small masterpiece hung on the wall of a fine art museum. -Barbara Crooker, author of Radiance, Line Dance, More, and Gold

Poems of human interiors, resonating with the world at large, and with the wider human heart.

The Tenderest Petal Hears is Co-Winner of the first Blue Horse Press Chapbook Contest. It was selected by guest judge Larry D. Thomas, 2008 Texas Poet Laureate.This Tenderest Petal Hears is a skillfully executed poetic testament not only to a life fully lived, but a life lived with razor-sharp reflection, sensitivity, love, yearning, the power of memory, and the transcendent capabilities of language carefully studied, appreciated, and utilized to its full potential. Simultaneously classical and contemporary, these poems are richly textured with allusions to mythology, history, philosophy, music, fairy tales, and psychology: composed by a poet well versed in both the great literature of the past and the present. The poet's diction, although accessible to the college-educated reader, is scintillant with daring word clusters and intriguing turns of phrase: ..".Quixote midget tilting at little windmills," ..".trumpeted yowls / dancing on chordal clouds," ..".misty-mint aura / washing pastel across the day," "Orioles flap hunger to jam-dolloped platters," "rising like purple pagodas, spirit-scenting / promised whispers of healing," and "when a lover traced the curve of my hip / as if it were the lip of God." With an incantatory voice one would expect from a shaman, the poet of these poems leads the reader through a contemporary inferno of existential angst, betrayal, abuse, homophobia, the undying love and horrors of familial relationships, and promise unfulfilled, only to redeem that reader with the splendors and unfathomable mysteries of the natural world teeming at their fingertips. -Larry D. Thomas, Contest Judge, 2008 Texas Poet Laureate and Member of the Texas Institute of Letters

'Night Surgery' marks the first full-length collection by Julianna McCarthy. In it we discover the strange combinations of wonder and precision needed to repair the heart, to separate humor from pain, and stitch the night together. "By noon light / or moonlight the way home is always long..." Whether the subject is love or music or the history of loss, McCarthy's work allows us to savor the world in real time. "Night falls as the wind rises. Front doors open all along the block, people / rushing, crowding, embracing their way to one another..." The only cure for beauty is more of it. The healing starts with 'Night Surgery.'