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"A few years ago, I wrote a poem that I titled "Paradelle for Susan." It was the only paradelle ever to have been written because I invented the form in order to write the poem. What I set out to do was write an intentionally bad formal poem. Auden said there was nothing funnier than bad poetry, and I thought a horribly mangled attempt at a formal poem might have humorous results. I considered using an already existing form, but I figured enough bad sonnets and bad sestinas are already being written these days without me adding to the pile. . . . The paradelle invites you in with its offer of nursery-rhyme repetition, then suddenly confronts you with an extreme verbal challenge. It lurches from the comfort of repetition to the crossword-puzzle anxiety of fitting a specific vocabulary into a tightly bounded space. While the level of difficulty in most verse forms remains fairly consistent throughout, the paradelle accelerates from kindergarten to college and back to kindergarten several times and ends in a think-tank called the Institute for Advanced Word Play. Thus the jumpy double nature of the paradelle, so unsteady, so schizo, so right for our times. . . ." Billy Collins, from the Introduction

"With these poems¿sparsely worded, richly lived¿Geri Digiorno reminds us again just how entangled the delicate roots and tendrils of family and ¿individual¿ identity can become. Her lovingly subjective subjects include family, neighborhood, coming of age, friendship, betrayal, initiation, baptism, masquerade, transformation, sexual discovery and conquest. Sketching poetically, Digiornöat heart a realist unafraid to risk sentimentality¿relives a working-class life begun in San Franciscös Noe Valley. In clipped, lower-case memoir-vernacular, she tells all, serving up clues to the meaning of life worldwide." ¿Al Young "The poems in Geri Digiornös White Lipstick explode with passion and power. Unforgettable and moving, these poems, rooted in pop culture, are ones you will return to again and again. In fearless poems about survival, Digiorno tells the story of an extraordinary woman¿s life and tells it with humor and grace." ¿Maria Mazziotti Gillan "These direct and open-hearted poems speak with humor and insight of one woman¿s life in the American West. Geri Digiornös clear voice draws us directly into the center of her world." ¿Diane Di Prima

These are brave and intimate poems etched with breathtaking constraint in a calibrated free-fall through the separate terrains of explicit meaning, metaphor and photography with impeccable timing. description by Trisha Brown

The poems in The Last Mojito were written between 2000 and 2004. The six distinct sections of the book?the ingredients of the infamous mojito (mint, sugar, lime, rum, ice, and club soda)?were chosen, initially, to impart a rather playful frame to the collection?s content. Quite a few of the poems, of course, reveal the presence of alcohol. In almost all cases, more often than not, the mere mention of spirits or booze is employed as a continual theme, helping to open up friendships or any relationships in a way that bring the narrators closer towards a supposed set of insights gained from a glass that?s no longer filled with what might pass for liquid truth. Individual poems such as ?"Enough,"? "?Pub Crawl,"? "?Forbidden City,"? "?Story of His Life,"? and "?I Killed the Poet,"? explore both probable and improbable situations the speakers face on the road to self-discovery.

In Hilberry’s poems, the body is a canvas on which a whole range of experiences are painted: grief at the loss of a sister, the adolescent search for God, sexual passion, and ordinary pleasures such as swaying in a hammock, touching the astonishing warmth of a lover’s body, or watching a surfer rise “on the joy of a wave.” Crazy Jane, an alter-ego figure, makes appearances throughout the book, seducing a bear, sleeping in a priest’s bed, and generally transgressing social norms. Ultimately, the book celebrates the poet’s own unconventional choices—to love both men and women, not to have children, to abandon the attempt to find God in church. She ends up loving the impermanent world and the mortal body, wanting only to touch “what’s returning to earth.”

Adroitly told, Geoffrey Clark's collection of stories Necessary Deaths will appeal to anyone who has faced difficult choices regarding the care of animals. Mr. Clark's characters struggle to learn how to let go and confront loss. His stories examine the themes of violation of innocence, and the acceptance of required acts of violence. His characters live with animals and care for them. Through the transcendent experience of that care, they must face assumptions they've been living with regarding what is natural and right with and around them. As either victims or perpetrators of violence, the characters in these stories are forced to ask themselves if violence is inherent in their condition. Mr. Clark avoids glib, over-worked metaphors, and as a writer with five decades of stories behind him, he renders internal and external landscapes of his stories through a knack for the bon mot that enlightens, startles and illuminates. Peppered with trenchant details, cadenced in a laconic, sometimes very funny Mid-western narrative voice, each story resonates long after it's been read. The stories are polished without being pompous, and charged with a vivid, consistent accuracy. The best, culled from earlier collections, poignantly evoke a time gone by in northern Michigan during the post World War II years, and Mr. Clark addresses without nostalgia the hardscrabble innocence and complexities of rural life in that region and era. There is authenticity, skill and subtlety in the telling. Mr. Clark does not disappoint; he deserves a wide readership."-John Flynn is author of Something Grand, a collection of stories, and several volumes of poetry and translations.

In Unfree Associations, Gottfried Bloch, a psychoanalyst and Holocaust survivor, describes his experiences in Auschwitz through a lens at once clinical and personal. For Bloch, unfree associations are haunting and powerful memories that are always painfully on the margin of everyday life. Since the end of World War II, Bloch has been compiling and reliving his experiences, which he now revisits with a sense of clarity and objectivity. In Unfree Associations, Bloch does not seek to be praised for his survival, which he attributes to chance or luck. Instead, he seeks to be understood in human terms.

The stories of Stories of the Sky-God: Spider's Web of Fiction occur in the past, present, and future of the human world. The themes are blues themes and the tellers of the tales are trickster-transformers, transforming an unacceptable reality of death and separation into tragedy, comedy and romance. The stories start in the future with "Thaddeus." "The Rock Garden" goes further into the future. "Liberation" takes us back in time in order to go forward. ¿The Contract¿ starts our trip forward, and "Wheels and Miracles" continues our journey from past to present to future. The settings vary from Kansas in the future to Ankara, Turkey in the present and empathizing with the characters we struggle to live in the finite worlds that all of us share.

Rumor of Cortez, Levine's second book of poetry, unfolds the compelling dilemmas of a modern man at odds with the endless possibilities of the rapid-fire world. Here are poems that spin and dip into the myths and contradictions presented by history and the driving forces of want-desire amok in the "stopless" world the poet holds dear and celebrates even through intense sensual and spiritual conflict. These poems touch emotional chords most poets leave unsounded and vibrate with the jazz riffs and rhythms of Levine's language.

"Any other poet with Gail Wronsky's gift for sheer gorgeousness-for the sensuous image, for shapeliness, for the ever-unfolding ever-mobile vocal line-would call it a day. But Wronsky's intellect is of a larger order: restless, irreverent, wittily attuned to the force-fields of cultural fashion and to the depths those fashions bespeak. How heartening to see trenchant critique and passionate endorsement so fully intertwined! Poems for Infidels is a celebrant's book, "guilty . . . of beauty" and, resoundingly, of faith."-Linda Gregerson

Natural history, work, queerness, and family collide in Interpretive Work. When they do, a deep stubborn will emerges, a belief in the unexpected beauty of the world "flaws and all. The poems of this collection foreground the role of the viewer" the interpreter "smudging self across what's seen."From neighborhood kids cussing in the cul-de-sac to marbled murrelets calling in Southeast Alaska, the poems of this book reach toward a moment where one finds "this unsettlement, / this beauty applauded at last."Bradfield delivers her bruised truths through a quiet honesty that stands in ardent defense of mainstream normative expectations. A male singer has a woman's high, sweet voice, redefining beauty. A female deer grows antlers. A woman chooses to be child-free without regret. As a whole, these poems furtively suggest that the tourist on the sunset cruise ship misinterprets the cravings of humpback whales in the same way Bradfield's family, neighbors and bureaucratic officials misunderstand love, sexuality and gender.

"The grace of these poems...should be a...lesson: to those who have settled for less...those who...presumed more." ¿Jim Krusoe "[Saltman]'s a fine poet, a genuine one--which is saying a great deal...Lovely...apparent plainness...depth beyond it." ¿W.S. Merwin

¿Angela Ball is a poet wise enough to describe love as `a double appetite for seeing.¿ Her poems are suffused by a wary disappointment in romantic excitement, but with the piqued attention that accompanies desire she makes the world, so far as this can be done, the object of her desire.¿¿Williams Matthews

Poetry arises from the search for sacred language that describes the awe and mystery of the real world. Deena Metzger is a contemporary poet who has aligned herself with this ancient tradition. This collection, that includes selections from her earlier books of poetry Dark Milk, The Axis Mundi Poems, Looking For the Faces of God, A Sabbath Among the Ruins and Skin: Shadows/Silence draws on her life s work, more than forty years of devotion to the word, and aligns itself with such a quest for meaning that has increasing urgency because of the spiritual and political ruins of our time. It is no longer sufficient, she believes, for the poet to be an unacknowledged legislator of the world, for the committed poet is called to engage with full heart in the continuous activity of restoration on behalf of beauty, wisdom and the natural world. Here we meet the articulate voices of the otherwise silenced, the voices of the animals, the land and the elementals, rain, wind fire and earth, and our responsibility to them. This book combines a searing look at the horrors that we permit, the anguish of human cruelty, brutality, and indulgence, but carrying the fierce determination to live, act, and write on behalf of the soul in all its manifestations. In this collection, despair is acknowledged but not indulged, as Metzger engages in the meticulous task of reconstructing a world, informed by the past and history as language demands, but, extracting ourselves from its violence and caprices, looking toward a viable future and all its unexpected possibilities.Poetry arises from the search for sacred language thatdescribes the awe and mystery of the realworld.Deena Metzger is a contemporarypoet who has aligned herself with this ancient tradition. This collection, thatincludes selections from her earlier books of poetry, and draws on her life swork, more than forty years of devotion to the word, and aligns itself withsuch a quest for meaning that has increasing urgency because of the spiritualand political ruins of our time.It isno longer sufficient, she believes, for the poet to be an unacknowledgedlegislator of the world, for the committed poet is called to engage with fullheart in the continuous activity of restoration on behalf of beauty, wisdom andthe natural world.Here we meet thearticulate voices of the otherwise silenced, the voices of the animals, theland and the elementals, rain, wind fire and earth, and our responsibility to them.This book combines a searing look at thehorrors that we permit, the anguish of human cruelty, brutality, andindulgence, but carrying the fierce determination to live, act, and write onbehalf of the soul in all its manifestations. In this collection, despair isacknowledged but not indulged, as Metzger engages in the meticulous task ofreconstructing a world, informed by the past and history as language demands, but, extracting ourselves from its violence and caprices, looking toward aviable future and all its unexpected possibilities."

The poems in Cartographies travel new territory, exploring the heart s changeable cartography and the soul s uneven terrain. They map the familiar, and always complex world of the San Gabriel Mountains, as well as nearby Los Angeles, with its cultural richness and social/political tensions. Divided into four sections The Soul, The Self, Mountains, The City Cartographies investigates our profound relationships with time, nature, love, and death.Simon finds meaning in unexpected locales, from the "Rorschach" on a butterfly s wings to a barrio bakery, and in the briefest of moments, evoked by the plaintive voice of a spider, or provoked by a breathless escape from an avalanche. These poems record the paradoxes present in our daily lives, those interstices of yearning and mourning or fear and celebration that reveal the deep wells and turbulence of human consciousness. Simon apprehends the elegiac within the purest moments of joy, and intimates catharsis within despair. She opens the mind s windows to small miracles provoked by the barest glimmers of wonder and hope."

Memory and Rain is first an evocation of place and mood, of how the exterior landscape affects and shapes the interior landscape. Then the collection goes deeper with an exploration of how the facets of memory¿some crystalline and some surreal, some painful in retrospective clarity and some wryly humorous¿coalesce into a life that gradually fades with memory¿s loss. The collection is bookended by two extended sequences bridged by such pivotal poems as ¿Photographic Memory,¿ ¿The Missing Scene: He Speaks Again to the Ghost of his Father,¿ and the Pushcart-nominated ¿Three Fates.¿ The opening sequence, ¿Rain in L.A.,¿ features a speaker literally and figuratively forced inside by a seemingly unending series of storms. His life becomes a series of vignettes of self-examination interwoven with montages of noir films, a soundtrack of jazz and blues, and a running commentary on the quirks and natural splendors of Los Angeles observed with a poet¿s eye. ¿In Memory of Her Memory,¿ the final crown of poems, deals with the author¿s experience of watching his mother descend into the abyss of Alzheimer¿s, dead to him even as she is alive. Reflective and ultimately redemptive, Memory and Rain challenges readers to ask themselves what in their lives is of substance and what is ¿just music in winter air¿not even there. It¿s not even there.¿

In the era just before computers, at the dawn of "safe sex," for a sub-generation of people who came of age without a war in Vietnam to unite them, the stories in Trickle-Down Timeline are glimpses into individual lives subtly influenced by the political and social milieu of the 1980's. For some people, the surplus and glut of the 80's were part of some other world, not theirs; and it couldn't be a "me-generation" if they didn't know who they were or where they were going. They were often just finding out what they were going to want; or they were, in starting out, already where they were going to end up.

Books would seem to be one thing, and rough business another¿except that the life of Tullio Pironti has brought both together. This mover and shaker in Italian arts and publishing began as a scuffling street kid in Naples, then enjoyed a boxing career that included two trips to the nationals, and only after that entered the book business. Yet in the decades that followed, he ended up working with the likes of the Nobel Prize-winner Naguib Mahfuz and the Maestro of Italian film, Federico Fellini. Not surprisingly, then, Pironti\u2019s memoir won wide attention in his home country, with more than 100 notices. Red Hen Press is excited to bring it out now in an American edition. Before anything else, the young Pironti had to survive a war. His memoir begins with a refugee experience, as he and his family are driven out of their homes in downtown Naples by the American bombing of 1942-43. Then after the liberation, Pironti must make his way with his wits and his fists, amid a colorful array of Neapolitan street figures. His recollections of youth provide rare insight into coming of age in a culture so ancient, so full of secrets.Then once Pironti quits his boxing career, the real fight begins. His rise as editor and publisher presents the Italian version of up by the bootstraps¿during a period of near-Biblical changes for the country. In the arena of the arts, Pironti experiences those changes first-hand. As he improvises his way onto the best-seller lists and into the film industry, his work makes a larger and larger place for women, and for books by Arabs and Africans. Then too, many of his publications boldly expose the destructive collusion between the Mafia and the politicians in Rome. At the memoir\u2019s climax, Pironti himself suffers for his expos\u00e9s. He faces trumped-up charges from some of the most powerful forces in Italy, and finds out just how gratifyingly broad his support is, across native city. Anyone who wants to know the real Italy, and what it\u2019s been through over the last half-century, will find Books & Rough Business a source of endless fascination. On top of that, this autobiography offers the timeless pleasures of watching a wily player work his way from next to nothing to great success, overcoming just about every kind of adversity along the way.

Each portion forming a reduced-size copy of the whole, a fractal is forever fragmented, both chaotic and ordered, endlessly complex. Timothy Green s American Fractal sees this pattern emerge from the fabric of modern culture, as it navigates the personal, the political, and the metaphysical, in a lyric dreamscape in which an eerie chaos lurks just behind the facade of order where what looks like / a river...could be a log, as if accident were / the fundamental attribute of life. In separate poems, one man sells ad space on his forehead, while another examines the multitudes of his own voice on an audio cassette recorder. Each life is but another section of the fractal, the past and the future two mirrors that face each other to perpetuate the illusion of infinites. At turns evocative and sweetly ironic, Green straddles the line between accessibility and complexity, exploring how the wind whispers our secrets, how that little tremor of understanding touches your sleeve, lets go. "

This sequence of fifty 14-line poems uses the Zapruder Film of President Kennedy's murder as a prism through which to view America and the world. Refracted rays touch on crime and punishment; guilt and responsibility; charisma and love; the dying victim's experience during the stretched-out seconds of his violation and death; and the dark world of war profiteering, narco-traffic, and deceit where the facts of power determine history. Epic tradition (e.g., Homer, Dante, Milton) shares these pages with science, religion, and popular culture, now funny and now horrifying. Limousine, Midnight Blue is a haunted book about a haunted film of an event whose hungry ghosts still walk the American unconscious, rattling their chains louder every year."

Type O Negative is a collection of poetry that draws on Joel Tan's life in the Philippines and America. He uses powerful imagery and drama to illuminate the experiences and the passions of human nature. He focuses on loss, sexuality, love, and all the emotions that come with growing up and going through life. Tan's unique style of poetry brings readers right into the heart of his narrative.

"Ching-In Chen's first book, The Heart's Traffic, constructs a re-naming, a caterwaul call to arms to attend to an archipelago of hybrid identity: political, sexual and always love-persuaded. Here the father is temporary, the mother is dead-alive and girls are writing tiger-legends through sestina, haibun, and the lost letters that must be reinvented if we can understand this new American body. The author necessarily offers up her riddles without answers, her ultimatum of banishment and homecoming with good food and sweet intention. She assures us, "I am kissing a new body into flesh."¿Sarah Gambito

The Los Angeles Review is a literary journal of divergent literature with a West Coast emphasis. Established in 2003, LAR publishes both the stories of Los Angeles, endlessly varied, and those that grow outside our world of smog and glitter. LAR seeks voices with something wild in them, voices that know what it means to be alive, to be fallible, to be human.

Like the mythic Persephone, these poems move between worlds of wild light and onyx darkness. Abducted by Hades, Persephone was kept captive in the underworld until her mother, Demeter, consumed with rage and sorrow, refused to let anything live or bloom. Grudgingly, Hades released her but only after she tasted the pomegranate he offered, a fruit that kept her bound to him for three months of the year forever. These poems move between such ecstatic glimpses of love, sex, family and that underworld of pain, loss and dark coldness between parents and children, siblings, lovers and strangers. The blues and despair in her poems, immediate and powerful as the worlds of any woman who moves from darkness and cold into the green world of rebirth, light and flowers, highlights the combination of eros, ebullience and triste, or sadness, a Lifshin trademark."

Praise for Percival Everett: ". . . Artful and literate, Everett explores the philosophical, the metaphysical, the physical and the psychological boundaries of human life . . ." -Terry D'Auray ". . . Everett achieves a primal sense of dislocation, forcing us to question how we determine the limits of the human . . . " -Sven Birkets, The New York Times ". . . The audacious, uncategorizable Everett. He mixes genre and tone with absolute abandon, never does the same song twice. Brilliant . . ." -The Boston Globe ". . . An author who dances with language as effortlessly as Fred Astaire." -Daniel Quinn, author of Ishmael

Motel Girl amounts to an exploration of the contemporary laws of romance, longing and sex, of how the computerized, branded universe is now fully integrated into the fabric of our thought and behavior. Join in the journey, a frenetic and disarming joy ride. Taken as a whole, these stories create a new paradigm for the American short story, an expansion in narrative reach, creative power, and experimentation.

In Kathleen Driskell s new poetry collection, Seed Across Snow, understanding attempts to thaw untended griefs, long dormant. The book opens with Overture, a collage poem that serves as a cinematic trailer for the collection, introducing images which surface more fully in subsequent pages. In colorful lyric and narrative, Driskell s poems center on recent tragedies surrounding her family s home in an old church rumored to be haunted a neighbor nearly killed while fetching her mail, a girl abducted and left for dead on the highway behind her house, the drownings of two boys in a local creek. Poems are bound, too, with old sorrows from her past. Each memory that surfaces while living in the old church with its small graveyard next door, reminds that the most sacred, the family, is also the most fragile."