Bøger udgivet af Mongrel Empire Press

What a mouthful! Rain Gomez's book makes you swallow hard, goes down big easy. I can hear a river of blues in lines like "head high, legs sturdy back stalwart against the rough rub of white faced stares as we roll up to Albertsons." There's lyric, prose, confessional, even a classic seafood gumbo recipe, all laced with memories of the red people of the Southeast. Rain Gomez has proven herself the culinary master of poetry. Her book really cooks! -LeAnne Howe, author of Shell Shaker (American Book Award) & Evidence of Red Rain C Gomez's poetry is as multi-dimensioned and multi-nationed as her heritage and her book's title. It doesn't get more American than this. --Geary Hobson, author of Plain of Jars and Other Stories & Last of the Ofos

This book is simply a treasure. Carol Tarlen's poems bring the human and political together in rich, heart-felt ways. I can't help wishing Carol was still with us, but we should all be extremely grateful to have this fine collection of her work out in the world as a legacy and tribute to her compassion for others, and her passion for writing and for life. She had an uncompromising commitment to the truth without sentimentality or condescension. Carol Tarlen was a Straight Shooter. In "Nellie Perkiss Speaks Her Mind," she writes "The news don't never tell the way it really is." Well, Carol Tarlen always told things the way they really are. These poems deserve a wide and diverse readership-read this book, and pass it on. -Jim Daniels, Poet & Professor, Carnegie Mellon University Born of pink-collar solidarity, Carol Tarlen's activist poems speak up, sass back, and never, ever cross a picket line. Keep this book next to your heart when standing up for workers. With Tillie Olsen and Meridel LeSueur, Every Day Is an Act of Resistance belongs on every bookshelf in America. -Karen Kovacik, Poet Laureate of Indiana Tough girl, quiet Quaker, brilliant poet, worker for the working-class, Carol Tarlen punctured the masks of bourgeois insularity-but with grace, good humor, and more kindness than many deserve. Her luminous poetic voice is large, direct, high-steppin, and justice-driven. Go ahead join the Angels Liberation Front and read her poetry, teach it to your children. -Janet Zandy, Professor of Language & Literature, Rochester Institute of Technology

"Ya hadda good job and ya left. Yer right," recruits bray in cadence as they march, with little enough thought to that ages-old lesson learned by returning soldiers, scapegoats dismissed with a wave from our social circle to avenge us, to project our power out among the damned of the earth. They do our dark bidding amid filth, horror, fire, and death... then come back to: ..".another damnation full of divorce decrees, drugs, and broken bank accounts." Jason Poudrier reports for yet another lost generation of returnees to be greeted by " a moment's awkward embrace of a family knowingly never understanding." The classic tale of separation, initiation, return recounted with vitality, authenticity, dark humor by one of the living shades among us with whom we can likely have no communion save by reading the spare, passionate verses of Red Fields.

In seventeen well-wrought tales, you see people across Texas and around the world. There's an East Texas artist confronting a wild tiger in a Southeast Asian jungle, a child in Port Arthur trying to understand death, a young unlikely pirate saving a woman from slavery in Madagascar, an American soldier in Vietnam struggling with his wife's infidelity, a young couple's courtship as they canoe the Brazos River, a woman in Amarillo breaking away from an abusive husband, a comical gold prospector in Venezuela dealing with bandits, and other vivid characters you will remember long after you close the book.

Anca Vlasopolos' poems are a battle cry-bracing, powerful and luminous. With spare eloquence, she evokes a world that's turned cruel and unforgiving. Her poetry is as distinct as her fingerprints. --Patricia Abbott, author of Monkey Justice and Other Stories Walking Toward Solstice captures a restless naturalist's and poet's eye that scans the landscape of Southeast Michigan, whether urban, suburban, or its patches of isolated wilderness, for the signs of life and struggle that often are bracing reminders of our own mortality. Vlasopolos has a relentless, fierce vision, without sentimentality: this book of intricately-wrought lyrics sharpens the soul and offers fortification for all readers as we each tread toward one solstice or another. -Caroline Maun, author of The Sleeping and Mosaic of Fire: The Work of Lola Ridge, Evelyn Scott, Charlotte Wilder and Kay Boyle

"Kathleen Johnson's Subterranean Red is a rich work by a richly talented poet. The collection is a sharp evocation of the Oklahoma landscape and of the people who are shaped by it. For those who know that landscape, these poems will ring true. For those who do not, they will be a fitting introduction to a world that is starkly beautiful, simply powerful, and profoundly unique. Sensitive and perceptive, here is a book to be read many times over, always with growing appreciation." -N. Scott Momaday

Steinbeck could have learned a lot from this book. Its stories bring us American history in living color (real people, in white, black, and red), from Oklahoma land runs of 1889-92 down through the Dust Bowl, World War Two, Viet Nam, and the invasion of Iraq. We meet homesteaders, bootleggers, revival preachers, rich oil men and failing farmers, children of slaves working for freedom, a WW2 veteran who trades his phantom arm for a farm, a dying WWII vet whose son peddles smart bombs that are killing Iraqi children. In the first story, we are there for the much-mourned death of a grandmother who homesteaded; in the last story, which brings us full circle, a man and woman make a new beginning, leaving behind her redneck husband to (as Huck Finn put it), set out for "The Territory." -Carter Revard, author ofHow the Songs Came Down, Winning the Dust Bowl, & Cowboys and Indians Christmas Shopping

This collection of poetry by Joe Dale Nevaquaya has come in its own time, exactly when we need it. These poems range from star messages tapped out on silver cords ascending from the death dreams of a dying country, to tribute poems in the form of shields, giving protection to those whom they are addressed, to reports from the edge of brokenness. It is time to celebrate the arrival of these poems, acknowledge the visions and give them their place in the circle.-Joy Harjo Mvskoke poet, musician, performer and playwright

In this book of poetry, photographs, and scripture, poet Nathan Brown expands the tradition of spiritual literary struggles by engaging with the Book of Job both as poetry and as catalyst for personal, contemporary questions of innocence and experience, faith and doubt. Often irreverent but always honest, Not Exactly Job is an emotionally powerful and intellectually challenging work.

These quirky, funny, and sometimes disturbing stories arise fully formed from a "crucified land" where the unexpected is a sure deal, strangers and acquaintances are often more reliable than family, and nothing, nothing, is ever quite what it seems.

Alan Berecka's Remembering the Body is one of the few poetry books I couldn't put down. These poems are high-energy, driving narratives that range from hilarious vignettes to poignant episodes of loss and injustice-and now and then one of these small, complete stories manages to be both. Berecka's special gift is a twisty irony that hauls your eyelids up. Try reading the first poem, "The Evolving Case for De-evolution," with a straight face. Peopled with characters you would love to meet or avoid, the poems are mocking and meta- physical, quizzical, sometimes angry, sometimes shoulder-shruggingly acceptant, sometimes romantic and sometimes cynical-but always intriguing. --Janet McCann, Professor of English Texas A&M Alan Berecka's poems reveal truth in microcosm...and a pure heart weaving allegories that range from his native northern land to Texas. These poems will never die because truths are the same at all times in every heart...Because Alan's poetry is easily under- stood, some may misunderstand how superb a poet he is. It is hard to find words better organized to generate emotions than one sees and feels in Remembering the Body. --Cleatus Rattan, 2004 Texas Poet Laureate A son trying to outgrow a father, a sinner reckoning with saints, Alan Berecka evokes ancient Greece, summons Corpus Christi, quickens Wordsworth and wrestles with God. You will laugh and cry as you read these poems, but most of all, you will think what a good and haunting thing it is to be human. --Ken Hada, author of Spare Parts and The Way of the Wind

In My Sideways Heart, with consummate poetic skill, Brown explores the nuances of human relationships, and he does so with a courage and emotional honesty rare in contemporary American poetry. Are the poems in this collection love poems? Absolutely, but love poems skillfully absent the banal excesses of sentimentality. Brown writes with the confidence and directness of an experienced poet, and his seemingly simple diction belies the hard-earned wisdom stirring deep beneath the surface of his art. --Larry D. Thomas, 2008 Texas Poet Laureate

In Joey Brown's Oklahomaography, crows, coyotes and thunder reflect the hard-won lives of the men and women who inhabit the land, and those who yearn to escape. These are splendid poems, filled with hard-edged narrative, the kinds of poems I like best. - Jo-Ann Mapson, author of Hank & Chloe, Bad Girl Creek, and The Owl & Moon Cafe These poems are snapshots and narratives of people, even whole towns, whose identities are drawn from their geography. Though most of them are set in Oklahoma, they are for anyone who understands the abiding connection to place. - Speer Morgan, Editor of The Missouri Review author of American Book Award winner The Freshour Cylinders"