Bøger udgivet af Gunpowder Press

"The poems in this book reframe the daily and habitual to reveal the strange, rich interiors of ordinary moments: sitting in a traffic jam, tilted back in a dentist's chair, thinking of an old joke while looking at a famous painting. Christopher Blackman is alert to the ironies that link the comedy and tragedy of existence, yet his poems are never arch or brittle. They start, as so many unforgettable poems do, by welcoming us with lucidity and candor into the particulars of someone else's life; they end by handing us back our own lives, transformed." -Nan Cohen"The poems of Christopher Blackman's poignant Three-Day Weekend search for authenticity beneath the fluorescent glow of late capitalism. Who might we be free of our jobs and shorn of limiting social norms? What might we turn our attention to before it's too late? Blackman's candid-and often funny-poems reach out from a "stretch of time that precedes the pageant's end" to grab the reader by the shoulders and shake them awake."-Keith Leonard"I really like these Chaplinesque lyrics, the prat-fall wisdom of their lines, the stumbling beauty of their turns, the charm of the speaker's ill-timed realizations.... The book is more than a snack-pak of pop pleasure; it is secretly a solemn buffet. These passages begin in the intoxications of bars and radios and movie theaters, but lead into the enduring, sober territories of interior history, the fantods and grace of love and death, and they end questioningly, wisely befuddled, standing beside the reader, saying "I'm the last one left in the poem, and I'm a little afraid/ to be here without anything else to distract me.."-Ed Skoog

"Is this smalltown America? A place where the air doesn't move, love is thin, beer fails nightly to do its trick, and hope rides a cloud to the edge of town, then disappears? These poems are located further east than Sherwood Anderson's Winesburg, Ohio, but they offer the same story of lives where the dramas are small, their significance large, the outcome of disappointments seemingly permanent. Here is art, here is truth, poems as portraits."-Gary Soto, Final Judge, Barry Spacks Poetry Prize"A work of great candor and lucidity, In the Cathedral of My Undoing is a gutting and deeply observed collection. Everything Ayres' eye falls on takes on a stark clarity. Her straightforward lines disguise an enormous intelligence and tonal sensitivity: a fierce capacity for finding the emotional heart of things. I admire the deep attentiveness in these poems - the frontal gazes at the pain and strangeness of our most intimate connections and losses. Here are snapshots illuminating the truths of human encounter and the naked wrongs of our world; here, too, poems of eerie simplicity and praise, pulsing with a kind of desperate sadness. These are poems of our hidden lives, reminding us of the interior paths we all travel between our betrayals and our acts of courage. A wise, vulnerable, and immensely rewarding book."-Jenny George, author of The Dream of Reason"The human need for connection-what it masks and reveals-is at the heart of Kellam Ayres' stunning debut collection. Grounded in the weighted, rooted past of rural New England and the rhythms of working life, and given expansive resonance in the intimate spaces of the speaker's retrospective present, these poems explore cycles of desire and despair, the need for and inability to change, brokenness and the effort to break free. "I can't possibly protect my heart from this world," our speakerrecognizes in the final section, but the reader is witness throughout to her evolving resilience and self-sufficiency. In the Cathedral of My Undoing is a lyric journey through what would undo us into what sustains."-Debra Allbery, author of Fimbul-Winter

Inspired by Santa Barbara Botanic Garden and the trees and plants that define California's Central Coast, Out of the Ground features more than fourty local poets.Carmen Alexander Lori AnayaSarah Blakely Gudrun BortmanSally Anderson Boström M. L. Brown Christopher Buckley Carolyn Chilton Casas Clayton Clark Fran Davis Marsha de la O Kurt Duran Ana Ellickson Kimbrough Ernest Mary Freericks Cie GumucioHannah Huff Kristin Kane Peggy Kelly Isabelle Kim-ShermanGabriella KleinPerie LongoJasmine Marshall Armstrong Juliane McAdam Anita McLaughlin Anne NeubauerEnid Osborn Melinda Palacio Scot Pipkin Susan Shields George HS SingerDavid Starkey Daniel ThomasEmma Trelles Jace Ryan Turner Isabelle Walker Joseph Warren Norma Wightman Paul Willis George Yatchisin Chryss Yost

Posthumous Noon was selected by Jane Hirshfield as the winner of the 2017 Barry Spacks Poetry Prize from Gunpowder Press. Of the collection, Hirshfield said: "Posthumous Noon is a book of grief and its bearing. It is also a book of language's largess and leaping--as all true poem-volumes must be--and a book of the treasure house of the living: of largemouth bass; of the eros of moths and of humans; of cities and fields, stories and waters. It is a book holding as well many kinds of migration: the migration of the body in illness, of love's witness, of souls, of creatures, of aftermath. In word, music, and image, Aaron Baker confirms his book title's promise: even amid loss's darkness, the full dimensions of light cannot be kept from this world."

Compiled in celebration of the Santa Barbara Museum of Art's 75th anniversary, this collection features work by 40 poets living in Santa Barbara and adjacent counties inspired by art in the museum's permanent collection. The book is the fouth in the Shoreline Voices Series, published by Gunpowder Press. Poets include Ron Alexander, Alison Bailey, Rick Benjamin, Gudrun Bortman, Laure-Anne Bosselaar, Steve Braff, Mary Brown, Susan Chiavelli, John Chilcott, Natalie D-Napoleon, Fran Davis, Pamela Davis, Carol DeCanio, John Elliot, Kimbrough Ernest, Tessa Flanagan, Mary Freericks, Luci Janssen, Gabriella Klein, Perie Longo, Glenna Luschei, Kathee Miller, Delia Moon, Enid Osborn, Christina Pages, Melinda Palacio, Christine Penko, Peg Quinn, John Ridland, Sojourner Rolle, RBS, Linda Saccoccio, Susan Shields, David Starkey, Roslyn Strohl, Patti Sullivan, Kevin Patrick Sullivan, Daniel Thomas, Emma Trelles, Paul J. Willis, George Yatchisin, and Chryss Yost.

There is a brilliant subtlety to this witnessing, a knowing tenderness that explores our relationships with the natural world and those we love. These poems exalt the moment and explore the geography of memory, with a spare clarity that evokes our finest lyric poets' imaginations. --Lee Herrick, author of Gardening Secrets of the DeadBecause she's honed the art of looking inward and outward at the same time in Raft of Days, Catherine Abbey Hodges writes poems that manage to be small and also large, quiet while eventful, realistic yet reverent, both evocative and clear. Her poetry produces more than pleasure. It is an antidote to despair.--Susan Cohen, author of A Different Wakeful AnimalIn Catherine Abbey Hodges' second collection of poems, . . . the complexities of faith huddle close to the ordinary work of cooking, making lists, and keeping a steady breath. This is an authentic and beautiful book. --Emma Trelles, author of Tropicalia

David Allen Case was born in Birmingham, Alabama. He earned a Bachelor's from the University of Alabama and a Ph. D. in English from UCLA. He died unexpectedly at age 49. His first collection poems, The Tarnation of Faust, launched Gunpowder Press. The publication of Before Traveling to Alabama further highlights Case's remarkable talent and marks the tenth anniversary of the Press.

Santa Barbara poets respond to the exhibit "SWARM: A Collaboration with Bees" at Ganna Walska Lotusland in Montecito, California. Poems reflect themes of the exhibit and place. Poems on bees, art, mythology, and gardens. Part of The Shoreline Voices Series. Contributors include Ron Alexander, Diane August, Barbara Bates, Gudrun Bortman, Laure-Anne Bosselaar, Kurt Brown, Mary Brown, Susan Chiavelli, Neal Crosbie, Frances Davis, Pamela Davis, Marsha de la O, John Elliot, Paul Fericano, Tessa Flanagan, Suzanne Frost, Luci Janssen, Richard Jarrette, Gabriella Klein, Wendy Wilder Larsen, Zachary Liebhaber, Perie Longo, Glenna Luschei, Enid Osborn, David Peacock, Christine Penko, Peg Quinn, RBS, John Ridland,Linda Saccoccio, Barry Spacks, Michael Wilds, Paul J. Willis, George Yatchisin, and Chryss Yost.

I love the title of this book…and I love the innovative mischief of its poems. Let it be known: a true poetic intelligence and imagination lives between its covers. Thomas Lux, author of To the Left of Time Burning Down Disneyland is a remarkable work-poems that move in propulsive leaps, that crackle like fire. Olsson's lines unfurl with an almost molecular agitation, zinging at the speed of synapses as sparks fly from flints. These poems are wrought in the great invisible furnace of the psyche. Marsha de la O, author of Antidote for Night For Burning Down Disneyland, Kurt Olsson has risked the hazards of childhood and adulthood-both "lethal as an alley in a kung-fu movie"-gleaning from memory's usual store of shame and humiliation quality tinder to stoke the purifying, transformative flames of his often apocalyptic imagination. The resulting poems, freed of the dross of self-pity and sentiment, are playful, absurd, vulnerable, provocative, disquieting, and at times necessarily repugnant…but they are never ordinary, and, like their author, they never flinch. Mark Drew, editor of The Gettysburg Review Kurt Olsson is the author of one previous collection of poetry, What Kills What Kills Us (Silverfish Review Press). He lives and works just outside of Washington, D.C.