Bøger udgivet af Mongrel Empire Press

These beautifully conceived and sculpted essays reveal a deep humanity and extensive knowledge. Weaving together local, national, world, and even ancient histories with personal stories, Joyce dips deeply into politics, religion, love for his adopted home of Oklahoma, and throughout, a thread of tribute to the great Howard Zinn. -Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz author of Red Dirt: Growing Up Okie

"Miscegenation Round Dance is a fierce collection that pierces your heart with ancestralknowledge. It asks questions such as 'how many ways removed from violence am Ithrough the language of poetry?' These poems take us through the lived experiences ofholding different nations: Black, Indigenous, and settler backgrounds, within one'sbody, one's vessel. Rain dances us through 'the topography of pain' and history as thepoems help us re-learn and re-write colonial narratives, begging the colonizer to: 'unoccupy me.' This is a powerful and unapologetic collection sure to move you at yourcore.-Tanaya Winder, author of Words Like Love: Poems and Why Storms are Named AfterPeople and Bullets Remain Nameless

Poetry of Oklahoma farmlands and their people. The author, Yvonne Carpenter lives on the Custer County land her great grandmother homesteaded in 1892. Farming informs her poetry and she aims to deepen the understanding of both agriculture and words.

In Marianne Broyles' Liquid Mercury Girl we learn to love in loneliness, turn the pages of the bible and find our fathers instead, see the faces of our ancestors in our mother's troubled face, "trying to rise like a hyacinth in [our] throat[s]." -Erika T. Wurth, author of You Who Enter Here

In his third collection, Jose Angel Araguz's poems grope the walls of a dark room, looking for answers from a father who has been absent. The writing amplifies the ache of empty spaces, and delves into themes of culture, home, growth, reflections, and change.

"All of the new thinking is about loss," Robert Hass once wrote. "In that, it resembles all of the old thinking." Gay poet Justin Bond's gorgeous debut collection pays beautiful, painful homage to this human tradition. These pages steep the reader in passion and grief, stark and gleaming. They nourish us with lust, lyricism and the will to go on, which is, as Bond says, "part of what elevates us above a clumsy gallop of meat and bone." --Ruth L. Schwartz, winner of the National Poetry Series prize, Autumn House Press Poetry Prize, Anhinga Prize for Poetry, AWP Award Series prize."The story of us," writes Justin Bond, "is the story of America." The smart, insightful, and revelatory poems of Ordinary Monsters are themselves stories of us (both reader and writer) but also of this vast and bizarre country. And like our country, Bond's poems are diverse, ambitious, and explosive. Walt Whitman would love their big, expansive, democratic heart. You will too.--Dean Rader, winner of the 2010 T. S. Eliot Poetry Prize, 2010 Writer's League of Texas Poetry Prize, and the George H. Bogin Award from the Poetry Society of America

Poetry collection by Carolyn M. Dunn, PhD., a Louisiana Creole whose indigenous ancestry includes Cherokee, Muskogee Creek, and Seminole descent on her father's side, and Tunica-Choctaw-Biloxi on her mother's.

In Earth Vowels, Duane Niatum (Jamestown S'Klallam) shares his powerful autobiographic journey. Duane's writing is deeply connected with the Northwest coast landscape, its mountains, forests, water and creatures. The legends and traditions of his ancestors, who have long called this place home, help shape and animate his poetry.

A Thousand Horses Out to Sea is a dark, feminine collection of poetry. There is song here, stomp dance and corrido and deep, sad lyricism. Set mainly in desert Southwest, inside the glittering Indian city of Albuquerque, the lives in these poems are full of cruelty, beauty, and pain.

These are poems of place and of prophecy, street scenes and visions, protests and elegies. These poems move across the American continent with a detailed eye for the natural world and a perceptive ear for the drama of human living.

Arachnid Verve focuses on the acrobatic nature of the genred and gendered multilingual lifestyles found in the Southwest. These are poems of movement and balance-searching for equilibrium between the mundane, utilitarian elements of working class life and the flourishes of color and spice inherent to artist expression. Individual poem inspirations run the gamut--from Aztec gods, dredging machines, Judd Nelson, punk rock bands, and Zora Neale Hurston. The collection also code switches between three different languages: Spanish, English, and Numu tekwapu (Comanche) because Southwestern life is not lived in a single language.

This is the final collection of Larry D. Griffin's Jane poems which includes the text of The Jane Poems (Nine Muses Books, 2002) and More Jane (Umpteen Press, 2003) as well as new poems and poems previously published in journals, magazines and in the chapbooks Airspace (Slough Press, 1989) Greatest Hits 1968-2000 (Pudding House Publications, 2000).

In Joseph Bruchac's Four Directions, the Manitou tells the whale, "I can change you / into an island of stone . . . you will not die / as the animals die / but wear slowly away / into waters / that love you." No transforming deity but one of our time's finest writers, Bruchac deeply and meaningfully renders the experience of bereavement and the experience of living our earthly destinies. The concluding poem, "Season's End," beautifully evokes our human effort to come to terms with mortality: "Within the sweat lodge we will drum, / remembering we are promised nothing. / It is reason enough to join our voices, / my sons and I, for dead and living, / our breath reborn into song." -Ralph Salisbury, Pulitzer Nominee, 2012 Riverteeth LiteraryNonfiction Book Prize & Rockefeller Bellagio Award

In her first collection of poems, Jenny Yang Cropp writes about growing up mixed-race, overcoming abandonment and addiction, and surviving the enormity of grief. Moving from supernovas to microscopic black holes, these poems reimagine love, family, and physics as the speaker tries to navigate a world of damaged, often severed, human connections and come to terms with her own fragmented sense of identity. At its heart, String Theory is a meditation on multiplicity and the soul's capacity to hold countless versions of itself.

In this collection Todd Fuller draws us back to the endangered sounds memories made in the moments of their creation, stored in the thread of words spun into the narrative arch of these poems, Fuller¹s poetry restores us well into our disappearance.

Brood, the new poetry collection from C. R. Resetarits, is at once migratory and home bound, ranging from lyric to narrative, from nests to meditations, from obsessive spin to obfuscating flight, from Celtic tribes to Native American clans, and from having to losing. Brood begins with a ruminating family wandering under the blooming trees of downtown Los Angeles and ends with an equally inclined herd of dairy cows dividing a farm into zones of acquiescence and adventure. In between, her poems record the struggle and grace of a brooding need to acknowledge a life of minor migratory diversions in a much larger quest for looking west to home.

Hardy Jones is Cajun through his mother, and the Felice family is a blend of Native American, French, Spanish, Dutch, and Irish from the southwest Louisiana prairie. People of the Good God explores the search Hardy began in his twenties to understand Cajun identity and how the culture evolved into the new millennium. These essays employ auto-ethnography, food writing, travel writing, and music writing to create a memoir that probes history, place, and self.

James Murray's The Long Rifle Season is a collection of stories both historical and contemporary. Some of the stories could be described as revisionist westerns, others as character studies or as literary sociological explorations of the past and present of Indian Territory in its many incarnations. There is no doubt that The Long Rifle Season stands among the best of the grit lit / rough South genre: fatalistic in humor, devoid of romanticism, anti-nostalgic, unwaveringly truthful, deeply authentic.

Streets As Elsewhere is where everything and everyone is absorbed by the place, where "This empty house listens to its landscape"; "Dust as it is seen is swept inwards/ as a dream at noon." The inhabitants are as discarnate as those in Pedro Paramo, "...a woman walking up the dusty road. / Straight uphill." "...wild bees in a memory of women stretching fabric." The sound tunes to its surrounds-crows in the afternoon, April thunder, crickets-and to smells of overcoats in rain, cognac and persimmons. A subtle disquietude attaches to a sense of belonging; a strange magnetism alleviates an equally potent sense of estrangement. So much braided hair, so much so much dust, so much rain. J.L. Jacobs has conjured a language for her distinctive world. The poems linger and beckon. The silvered reader enters from behind the mirror. The book tenders a strange exaltation. -C.D. Wright

"Quraysh Ali Lansana is from Enid, OK. Christopher Stewart was raised in Dallas, small Texas towns, and Chicago neighborhoods. A white man and a black man born in post-Kennedy, post-King southern and midwestern USA--though both disagree with those geographical tags. Through these poems, the poets assert that their births, their ways of seeing, and their pains are rooted in what Ali Lansana's OU film professor termed 'the Walmart republic, ' a land where shopping center is community center"--Publisher marketing.

Carter Revard's newest collection, From the Extinct Volcano, A Bird of Paradise, sings through poetry and prose "to celebrate our creatural selves." Revard draws from a lifetime of experience that started on the Osage reservation during the Depression era and has continued through his role as a distinguished student, teacher, scholar, and poet. In this book, he illustrates how culture, which is not restricted to the human species, has survived through the practice of singing. In showing us this, Revard skillfully blends narratives of nonhuman animal behavior, scientific studies on the nature of language, and literary allusions. From the Extinct Volcano, A Bird of Paradise demonstrates how survival ultimately depends on song.

This writer warns us she is a woman like a "Mexican electric fence." And yet between the sheets or between the murmur of the rolling pin, we are trusted to overhear confidences between intimates. It is on the white sheets of this book that a woman's most private confessions are transformed from dirty laundry to poetry luminescent as linen on the line. I truly feel gratitude for being allowed to read such private dialogues. It is a book that is a remove from other Texas writers in its capacity to encompass the globe, as Chicana poetry should in the new millennium. I feel very privileged to be allowed to give this book its blessing. -Sandra Cisneros

Inspired by the primary colors of Mark Rothko's vibrant No. 15 painting, these poems give life to the canvas of the rural Ozarks. Chiefly love poems, the book explores not only the rugged Ozark and Rothko landscape, but also romantic yearnings, relationship, despair, and togetherness.

In a form that is a hybrid of flash autobiography and prose poetry, former Indiana Poet Laureate Norbert Krapf revisits the past and reflects on its relationship with the present. American Dreams: Reveries and Revisitations contains seven cycles, all but one of which has ten sections, each introduced with a photograph. The author meditates on family history, scenes from his ancestral past, and childhood memories. Featuring quirky perspectives and spoken in various voices, some ironic, Krapf's reveries lift the thin veil between dream and nightmare set in Europe and America. In the last section, the voice of Minnesota minstrel Bob Dylan sometimes merges with that of the poet, and the fellow Midwesterners, who found their voices in New York, cross boundaries to explore and celebrate the common origin of poetry and song.