Bøger udgivet af Five Oaks Press

"In Drugstore Blue, Susana H. Case's speaker is a femme fatale in serious eyeshadow: 'You need me / like a tongue needs a second / mouth.' That's the sound of her craft, one of her dart-like declarations, hitting its mark. Rarely has makeup, and the color blue, in particular, come alive on the page like this: 'Blue all the way to the brow, an eyelid / tin-glazed, / underglazed, / sancai lead glazed, / oxide blue glazed, / a glaze of blue not born of the blues, but the antidote, / spring blue, felice blue, / green dragon constellation blue, / occult knowledge blue, / the eye of God.' Need I say more? Her poetry reads like a graphic novel, a romp, a road-trip in a borrowed car, speeding with a wild child at the wheel. Vivid, direct, episodic, and utterly believable, Case's tropes make excellent landings. From Morandi to Velvet Elvis, from Marrakech to Cartagena, eros is never far off, and her text glitters on the page in a poetry of great precision." --Elaine Sexton, author of Causeway and Prospect/Refuge

How many sights and sounds our routine-framed lives keep us from experiencing. Not until something unusual strikes, something that disrupts these routines, are we apt to pay attention to all we're suddenly or about to be without. Of course, with time and the help of new routines, we seem to forget even this. Robert Pesich's Model Organism is a reminder to us of what it means to know things not only from their origins, their molecular dispositions, their coveted seeds, sprouts, water and earth but personally as well. He engages the evolution of things and by so doing, translates it for us through a language textured with particulars. It's the way his work's always addressed life's hidden realities, which is why it's no wonder this collection continues along that same path of preserving what's become unseen in the seen for any future willing to pay attention and open its own eyes up wide. Paul B. Roth, editor & publisher, The Bitter Oleander Press "An altar of monitors" describes Robert Pesich's curiousness and embracing perspicacity. His insights are both scientific and heartbreaking; poems that know "the blues" also illuminate the world with a light of many colors. When there is an I, it's a poet-scientist able to identify even physiologically with the prey of a red-tailed hawk or a hummingbird loose in the Biology building. Pesich is our Miroslav Holub; his Nude Mouse is Elizabeth Bishop's armadillo. This collection advances our consciousness and smartens up Twenty-first Century poetry's aesthetic. Sandra McPherson

If personal memory is false, what happens when you try to construct a memory of something that you don't remember but should--that you desperately want to remember? WHAT SOME WOULD CALL LIES is a collection of literary novellas meditating on life, art, and the vicissitudes of memory. The complete manuscript includes two novellas."Shoplifting" is the story of Monica Evans, an aspiring author, a young mother struggling to raise a toddler, a neglected wife juggling a long-distance marriage, and a woman grieving her sister's death. In an attempt to come to terms with this most recent loss--and to jump-start her stalled artistic life--Monica decides to write her late sister's autobiography in the first person. This decision angers and confuses some readers (including her mother), but it pushes Monica toward healing. Reminiscent of the work of Alice Munro and Lorrie Moore, "Shoplifting" is by turns witty and wistful. Employing a touch of metafiction, the story raises real questions about memory, authorship, the ownership of stories, and the many ways we steal from others--and ourselves.In "Infidels," an unorthodox substitute teacher awakens sixth-grader Jackie Rose's floundering sense of focus and ambition. At the same time, an alluring older girl initiates him into the world of desire and longing. Meanwhile, Jackie's parents are moving toward an inevitable separation, and Jackie will face hard choices. Set against the backdrop of an upper Midwestern childhood in the 1970s, steeped in the lingering anxiety of the Cold War and the comforting nostalgia of pop radio, "Infidels" is a classic coming-of-age story with an unforgettable, heart-breaking ending. Told in a reflective, lyrical voice similar to Richard Ford (Rock Springs, Wildlife) and Alistair MacLeod (Island), this is a story with timeless appeal written in polished and enduring prose.

In the expanded 2nd edition of this work, Rosemarie Dombrowki's poetry dwells between the verbal and the nonverbal through her creation of gripping symbols to represent the everyday life she shares with her autistic son. The result is a lyrical, visceral dance that entices the reader into a music-world of language to sway together with Dombrowski and her son as they navigate the hostilities of medical specialists, the ignobilities of the body, and discover a makeshift communication of sounds and images, where we hang precariously, along with her, between the good days and the bad ones.

Postcards are electric. I get excited just turning a rack of postcards around at the drugstore. There was a time before Facebook and Twitter and Instagram when we sent postcards to people. These were generally times of change and travel, new cities, new landscapes, new friends, new languages. The challenge of the postcard was to get all your news on the back where the space for composition was small. You had to condense. You had to take all the excitement of a moment of vision and squeeze it on the back of a card. The poems in this collection are just that: condensations of amazed observation. They have more to do with spirit than place. Subjects vary from baseball to summer rain, the orphans of Aleppo to the taste of honeyed tarragon on the tongue. Their brilliance comes from the region of the mind where there are no borders, a zone of uncharted existence where we are all immigrants. John Olson, Stranger Genius Award Winner, Literature, 2004; Author of Dada Budapest (Commonwealth Books, Black Widow 2017)Maybe there are two kinds of poetic craft: one in which a poet steadily hones and polishes a draft until it shines, and one in which a poet sim-ply opens a channel between the self and what needs to be said. Paul E. Nelson's August Poetry Postcard Project is a powerful example of the second type. This anthology gathers a mailbag of short poems that all possess stunning immediacy, as well as several visual poems for the eye to wander into. A watermelon smile, Frank O'Hara jotting on a street corner, 'lips a-drip with deep fried meat' - the vibrant details have me spinning and spinning this postcard rack, fascinated by the insistent freshness of its offering. Daniel Ari, Poet Laureate of Richmond, California; Author of One Way to Ask (Norfolk Press, 2016)

To read these poems is to know without doubt that it's no clichE vulnerability is indeed strength - and strength, when given language, becomes a call to action. Fearless and unflinching, The Things a Body Might Become is both an ardent call to action and an action in and of itself. This collection leads the reader to do what is perhaps the most important work a person can do: to think - and think, and think again - about their actions and ideas, their betrayals and beliefs. In harrowingly gorgeous language, DiGiorgio examines the best and worst of what we make, do, and experience in our human bodies - love and lust, bullets and babies, harm and healing - with the valiant persistence and merciful patience necessary to lead us to understand and to see ourselves and our neighbors as human. --Emma Bolden, author of medi(t)ations (Noctuary Press, 2016) and Maleficae (GenPop Books, 2013). "Your manager / warns you: Please wear your uniform tomorrow. This is the last time I'm going to ask." These lines from the title poem of Emari DiGiorgio's bold debut collection The Things the Body Might Become are emblematic of the work as a whole. DiGiorgio tries on selves, the way one tries on clothes, and there is nothing more human than her discomfort with how they fit. As it turns out, the things a body might become include "An anvil, a bottle of bleach, a basketball," or a container full of matchbooks. But what it becomes will not be contained or controlled -- it is egregiously out of uniform -- and I cheer on this poet, this voice, this body, as I make my way through this stellar book of poems. --Karen Craigo, author of No More Milk (Sundress, 2016) and Passing Through Humansville (Sundress, 2018) Emari DiGiorgio asks "when does a girl learn to make a fist?"--a question that is echoed throughout the entirety of The Things a Body Might Become. This is a question that is still being answered in new ways across the globe. The Things a Body Might Become is a voyage around the world, which is another way to say it is a trip through the turmoil of inhabiting the feminine. These poems actively reject the notions of silence and shame that surround gendered violence, while at the same time becoming a tug-of-war that consistently reminds readers how living as anything other than the cis-male default offers little to no protection in the world "[because] a smile is provocation." DiGiorgio masterfully centers what it is to live in a world hinged on gendered violence while providing lyrical, narrative arcs that carry readers across space and time. --CaseyrenEe Lopez, author of i was born dead (Black Magic Press, 2018)

In Findura's post-diluvian lyrical apocalypse, the covenant of the rainbow is reneged, replaced by an anxiety of everyday pathologies we all feel and recognize, whether living near a coastal border or further inland. These pages absorbed me like one of Prospero's drowned books till my eyes turned to pearls, fixed on Medusa's raft. - Timothy Liu John Findura's Submerged is a series of short, clear meditations on the beauty, the power, and the terror of water. It's a striking collection, reader-friendly, but unflinching in its treatment of personal fear and wonder. - Billy Collins "I have made sure that I am not anxious," John Findura claims early in Submerged, but of course it's never that easy. Anxiety sweeps and crashes over this collection like the waters of its unnamed nemesis, Hurricane Sandy. Through these plainspoken yet harrowing poems, Findura learns--and teaches his readers--something that is as true of devastation as it is of survival: "This happens all the time / and we barely realize it." - Mark Bibbins

In Melissa Atkinson Mercer's Saint of the Partial Apology, I've rediscovered the terrifying pleasures of awe, of limbs that part like orchids in black rain, of maps made from wolves' feet, of "the white church of the rabbit's jaw." I've discovered the most tender rage in these pages, but here, here Mercer also offers a dark and certain light to bury myself in. These poems want to confound you, and you should let them. Enjoy their witch-dark and loose miracles. This book is a lostness worthy of every pilgrim. Traci Brimhall, author of Our Lady of the Ruins and Saudade A wash of gorgeous sound and imagery ("winged horses shuddering in my soon-severed throat"), the poems in Melissa Atkinson Mercer's Saint of the Partial Apology deliver part confessional, transformation, myth and story. Enter a dark pastoral inhabited by wild women, hags, gorgons, fishwives, Medusa, prophetesses, witches, saints, sea monsters and (so close to our hearts) mothers who might stay or leave their children to the wolves. "I've named my monsters," the poems' narrator says; she's a "miracle girl on her knees in the mud" and "the woman/who could be a thousand women//the woman who took /every miracle she could." These fierce poems are pieces of a heart balancing between finding its own way, traversing memory and architecting a different future: "So many words mean wait, my mother says." Truly, Saint of the Partial Apology showcases a poet whose work is ritual, and is necessary and vital: "what woman does not want the earth she has forged?" This collection of poems must be simply savored and re-read. Nicole Rollender, author of Louder Than Everything You Love and Ghost Tongue Filled with imagistic meditation on generation and inheritance both physical and emotional, Mercer 's poems haunt as they declare: "Believe me, I understand that we are the sieve through which the years move." Melissa Atkinson Mercer's Saint of the Partial Apology thrums with the rhythms of earth and bone, bread and blood, witch and mother, wolf and whale, the voice of the natural world and the melody of the wild-throated heart. Donna Vorreyer, author of Every Love Story is an Apocalypse Story and A House of Many Windows Melissa Atkinson Mercer's debut full-length collection suspends the readers in a lyrical masterpiece soaked in the music of acute revelations and elegant storytelling. These poems are a sudden riptide, roots pulling light like prayers, creating an astonishing backdrop for Mercer's piercing insight that wonders even as it rebuilds the miracle of a frail yet hopeful humankind. With a language that, like memory, both fractures and restores, Saint of the Partial Apology unravels its power with a unique finesse and beauty. It is a body of work that is sprawling and generous with its wisdom and staggering imagination. A must read. Shinjini Bhattacharjee, author of In My Landscape, I Am Not Real