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Poetry. An extended love letter, Todd Colby's sixth collection SPLASH STATE is filled with humor and charm. These poems are as concerned with aging, time, being, and death as they are with eliminating "the need for anxious circumstances" with facts, instructions, and advice. From extolling the uses of "Shark's Paw" and "Fink Leaf" to "how to look like everything is okay in photographs," Colby's poems opt for the personal and generous, even when his tongue is firmly planted in cheek. If melancholy is just around the corner, these poems will walk with you in the opposite direction. "Todd Colby's poetry radiates the joy of receiving a long-awaited letter. He ends an early poem, 'Sweetie,' with the line 'Let me let me know let me know soon let me know soon Sweetie.' It now seems that Sweetie has replied. In his new collection, SPLASH STATE, he tells us 'You will no longer need a hushed, barely audible tone / to confess your inadequacies because you will no longer have any / to confess'--the ideal state that Auden hoped would 'make us well / without confession of the ill.' With this pleasure comes responsibility, but it's the responsibility to remain in joy.' There won't be a need / for codes or inane principles, because you'll always / be too radiant and purposeful for that.' In SPLASH STATE, a perfect title for the state of calm eagerness he writes out of, Colby discovers that 'There are mornings, and then there are / golden glimpses of something totally / amazing like awe or coffee,' and then that 'Morning will never be called off / due to budgetary constraints, or even heartbreak. / By afternoon, there will be plush green pillows, / strewn on the lawn waiting for my body. / I can hardly wait.' The rest of us no longer have to wait. This dazzling collection confirms Colby's status as one of the finest and funniest poets of his generation."R

Poetry. In his Eclogues, Virgil offers the reader poems about responding--listening, picking out, and answering back the pleasures of song. Nate Klug's RUDE WOODS is an inspired, modern response--a new translation that blends talkative elegance with lyric intensity. "In a manner that is as successful as it is surprising," notes W.R. Johnson in his introduction, "Klug has devised a conversational idiom that relies on spare diction and spare syntax, on a pure clarity of sight and sound to give us superb poems that give Virgil's pure lyricism a genuine 'answering form.'""Translation tends to be either a conspicuous aid to comprehension or that other thing: a strangely impure art form that both mimes and contends with an other. At its best it makes you think and not think about the original; it carries you along in a state of belief even as you remind yourself that there is an older text behind the new song. If the translator-poet strays too far from the colloquial the text hardens, seeming too much like another language; if he or she is too modish it seems as though the earlier poet exists solely to promote the work of the later one. Virgil himself was a modeller of the work of others, as we all are to some degree. It's a delicate balancing act performed well by only the best translators. Nate Klug is of this noble band. 'He cares about poetry' and his Virgil has a lightness of touch that only the best can manage."--Laurie Duggan"Nate Klug's RUDE WOODS renders Virgil in an idiom as honest and appealing as 'ripe apples, cooked chestnuts, and cheese.' Ezra Pound's Propertius comes immediately to mind. These selections evince the same careful attention to the natural rhythms and movement of speech--perfect for a poetic escape into simple pleasures. Yet Klug doesn't skirt an important lesson of the Eclogue

Poetry. Jane Gregory's MY ENEMIES records a poet's search for meaning in a landscape of combined and dissolving definitions. Affirming disaster and its beyond, these poems sing toward belief--a self-made belief that will not rely on any static symbol or logic or idol. Gregory's dynamic, unpredictable enactments of the modern world avow vulnerability to a belief compatible with self-consciousness. Sometimes triumphant, sometimes overcome or self-ruinous, MY ENEMIES never halts in its search for definition, even when it claims to not have been written--as in the serial "Book I Will Not Write" poems. Each poem here establishes a new, necessary material and mode for our uncertain world that can offer its readers something to believe in; despite forces internal and external that try to undo us, Gregory's poems redo that undoing until "my enemies" becomes instead "my eyes many," a new sonic way of seeing."When Jane Gregory speaks of 'enemies' she speaks of those elements that (following Valery) ravage books and people alike: fire, humidity, wild animals, time, and their own inner content. Gregory knows how to let those elementals run free in her own words, and to make a friend of their disequilibrating energy. Her work renews romanticism in the twilight of time, knowing that even the spelling of words is the spilling of everything they cannot say. Here, the poet has overwritten the multiples of her 'Book I Will Not Write' with 'the fire in the ocean'--with words that, reduced to their very atoms, 'in the dark: s,i,n,g.'"--Andrew Joron"Jane Gregory's MY ENEMIES is a collection of high-stepping verses of live wires where every phrase is a detonation od swings, breaks and pops! Thrillers 'suitable for blasting' (viz. 'guncotton')--pages of startling figures, near rhymes and off rhymes, psychological, philosophical, ec

Poetry. In ESSAY STANZAS, Thomas Meyer begins modestly by warning the reader: "This won't amount to much." Each of the four poems in this book follow the imagination of the poet through his attempts to map out the human drama as it's reflected in natural elements. Using myths and fairy tales, the Bible and Shakespeare, silver-screen starlets and ancient love songs, Meyer assembles his influences with true compassion, to aid him in pointing out the mysteries of the physical and emotional world around him. The poet's wisdom shines through at every turn: "My shadow, I used to think / backed me up from behind. / Now I realize / I am my shadow's human shield." "Thomas Meyer is a living master. In ESSAY STANZAS, he innovates a form in three of the four poems that make up this magnificent book, compressing Orphic oracle, Faustian apocalypse, oneiric pageant, invented fable, wisdom literature, cryptic joke, disturbing aphorism, epigrammic wit and nervous ruin into sequences of thematically linked stanzas--on the weather, relationships, or enlightenment, for instance. The fourth poem, 'Airs Waters Places,' reveals Meyer's powers completely: a nuptial hymn in a high style as antique as it is absolutely present. No living master is so hidden as Meyer but there's none whose poems we should read more urgently. 'My heart / can't help overhearing / what they say, and try as I might, I / can't stop listening.'"--Peter O'Leary

ABOUT THE BOOKHow do you catch a killer in a small town where seemingly everyone has a motive to kill or to protect the killer(s)? . . .As a youngster, Demetrius Clarke spent joyous summers in the small, quiet village of Tolland, Connecticut. Now a somewhat disillusioned Los Angeles mystery writer, Clarke returns to Tolland to evaluate his life and his future. His arrival in the place he loves and cherishes coincides with the discovery that the community's most reviled resident, Ike Karas-a brash, arrogant, wealthy New Yorker whose values are entirely at odds with those of the village-has been murdered.Tolland's only law enforcement officer, Billy Williamson, is a rookie Connecticut State Trooper. Bright, eager, and admittedly inexperienced, Williamson is determined to solve the crime even as he is intimidated by the gravity of the assignment. When the small town's grapevine alerts Williamson to the presence of a writer who specializes in mysteries, the young officer implores Clarke to assist him. Reluctantly, Clarke agrees, and the two men embark on an investigation in the face of a significant challenge: most of the village's residents are content to be rid of the victim and more than a few believe that Karas got exactly what he deserved. Will they catch the killer(s) and return Tolland to bliss? Read and find out."A murder in a perfect Connecticut small town. An upright citizenry that doesn't seem to care. The appearance of a stranger. These are the seeds of David Hamlin's most captivating mystery novel yet. Cozy up and let it work its way into you. Have a muffin." -Pulitzer Prize and Emmy winner Ron Powers, author of Flags of Our Fathers, Mark Twain, and Nobody Cares About Crazy People"In his splendidly-written mystery, David Hamlin not only kills off 'the village SOB' but casts half the village's residents under suspicion." -Jack Shakely, award-winning author of The Confederate War BonnetABOUT THE AUTHORDAVID M. HAMLIN is the author of three Emily Winter mysteries (Winter in Chicago, Winter Gets Hot, and Killer Cocktail), two nonfiction books (The Nazi/Skokie Conflict and Los Angeles's Original Farmers Market), a wide range of freelance news and feature articles for daily and weekly newspapers, short stories and flash fiction published in several literary journals, and a political satire column. After a career in activism in the 1960s-which included serving in VISTA, the domestic peace corps-David was an Executive Director of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) for nearly a decade and then a partner in a Los Angeles public relations agency. David now resides in Palm Springs, CA.

The 2022 Windham-Campbell Prize winner Wong May's landmark anthology of Tang Dynasty poetryChinese poetry is unique in world literature in that it was written for the better part of 3,000 years by exiles and refugees. Known as "the Golden Age of Poetry," the Tang Dynasty was a time when poems were bartered in the marketplace for wine and tea and posted in temples and taverns, the words of poets unmissable as street art and signage. Monks, courtiers, courtesans, woodsmen and farmhands were fluent in poetry. More than reading matter, it was a common currency--whether as a necessity or luxury in times of rampant warfare, droughts, famine, plague and man-made and natural disasters. "Chinese history can be read in the words of the poets. It was left for poetry to teach the least and the most," says the translator Wong May, "a literacy of the heart in a barbarous world." True to the spirit of classics, these poems from 1,200 years ago read like they were still being written somewhere in the world--to be read today, and tomorrow: "In dark times we read by the light of letters." In this anthology of the era's poetry, we meet Du Fu, Li Bai, Wang Wei and others less familiar to readers in English.Wong May was born in China's wartime capital, Chongqing, in 1944. She was brought up in Singapore by her mother, a classical Chinese poet and studied English Literature at the University of Singapore with the poet D.J. Enright. From 1966 to 1968 she was at the Iowa Writers Workshop. Her fourth book of poems, Picasso's Tears: Poems, 1978-2013, was published by Octopus Poetry. Wong May currently lives in Dublin. She paints under the name Ittrium Coey, and has exhibited her work in Dublin and Grenoble.

"With language crispy, sharp, focused and forgiving, Rucker pulls us into the creation and destruction of what can be revealed when we hold our truths to sunlight and midnight's dark. This debut is resplendent ... Dereliction brought me to tears." --Joseliah Rebekah HughesDereliction, Gabrielle Octavia Rucker's debut collection of poetry, moves through childhood and into the afterlife with poems that evoke an artful and urgent sense of the author's "insatiable wandering." With cinematic imagery and formal variation, these poems effortlessly find dream-life and myth transforming the daily actions of talking on the phone or finding your reflection in the window. The bracing intimacy of Rucker's voice invites us into a precise and carefully constructed world in which we are asked to question what it means to "do the human things," and where the poet eventually asks the reader, and possibly poetry itself, "What bloody lens holds firm between this mystery & us?"Gabrielle Octavia Rucker is a self-taught writer and poetic practitioner from the Great Lakes currently living in the Gulf Coast. She is a 2020 Poetry Project Fellow and 2016 Kimbilio Fiction Fellow. Her work has appeared in various media and publications, including the Sundance Film Festival, the Studio Museum in Harlem, the Academy of American Poets' Poem-A-Day series, Annulet, Montez Press Radio and more.

"Through two long poems, Jesâus Castillo's TWO MURALS explores the personal and political sides of love, selfhood, and transformation in a wasteful age. "Variations on Adonis," the first sequence, is filled with music and memorable images, evoking the decline of civilization alongside a desire to live. The second sequence, "A Mural After Darwish," is a love letter to a woman, to nature, and to memory. Castillo's visions span the landscapes of different countries and ages, always questioning and curious. Abundance and destruction are placed side by side in his consideration of language, life, and death. TWO MURALS offers the reader urgent views of love and perseverance despite the traps of the past and the uncertainty of our future." --

Visit MarketingSavesTheWorld.com to receive complimentary videos.Every now and then, someone comes along and makes the subject of management both fun and insightful. That's what Bill Matassoni has done in his memoir-a combination of compelling stories and contrarian substance-that covers his forty-year career selling what he calls "ephemeral things." In addition to the memoir, Bill plays host to a series of videos that are entertaining, irreverent, and filled with his conviction that marketing is the primary driver of progress in both commercial and social markets. Bill, a former McKinsey and BCG partner, distills his life, loves and lessons in his captivating memoir on the evolution of the modern marketer. He presents an entirely new way to think about unlocking value in market spaces, not places. Using his experiences as a canvas on which to share his ideas, Bill recounts his adventures-and they are adventures-working for The United Way of America, McKinsey, BCG, Ashoka and other organizations where ideas were the product and emotion was as important as function. We learn about how Victoria's Secret "democratized" luxury, why beer might become a nutritional product, BCG's efforts to compete with McKinsey and vice-versa, Bill's wonderful wife Pamela and the important role of social entrepreneurs. As Bill pays tribute to his talented colleagues, The Bill Matassoni Show and Marketing Saves the World teach us how to find new dimensions of value that make the world better by enabling multiple stakeholders to win. It is about capitalism with a capital "C." Says Bill, "Forget about sharing the pie. Make it bigger."