Bøger udgivet af Red Hen Press

A short story collection that explores the weirdness of the human experience: physical transformations and experiments, adolescence and old age, extreme forms of love, from Japan to Poland through Pasadena.

How to Feed a Horse is a manuscript in three parts: One, ';Ranch Poems,' activities, contemplations, awareness of the creek environment. Two, ';Numerology,' disparate poems that invite us to consider the absurd in our language, politics, history, and human relationships. Three, ';Her(e),' conversations with a network of women, some imagined, some historic, some intimate. The author's preoccupations with climate change and our deteriorating planetary environment surface as she gives herself over to be witness to the landscape, its decline and perseverance, its glory and rich legacy. The poems are also love poems; they show the ecstasy and shock of the now.

Using epistolary letters and fragments, Abracadabra, Sunshine collects multiple personal, cultural, and historical narratives that embrace the tragedy, magic, and beauty that is the human experience.

Touching Creatures, Touching Spirit illustrates with true stories that we live in an interactive, aware world in which the creatures around us in our neighborhoods know us and sometimes reach across to us, empathically and helpfully. Implications are that all beings live in a possible ';common mind' from which our mass culture has disconnected, but which is only a heartbeat and some concentrated attention away. This mind encompasses microbial life and insects as well as creatures and extends to nonmaterial intelligence as wellthat is to say, spirit.Creatures as varied as a collaborating dragonfly, ants rescuing each other, a sympathetic lizard, an empathic coyote, gift-giving squirrels, crazed birds, and lots of very mysteriously smart cats inhabit the stories.Precognition, dreams, paranormal experiences with birds, psychic communications with cats, visitations from ghosts with messages, rolling earth spiritsnot supernatural, they seem natural enough but not visible to everyone.The intention of this book is to help people catch interactions they themselves experience with nonhuman and even disembodied beings, and who could use some support for recalling since these interactions make clear we live in a sentient world.

In the forty poems of her first full-length book, House Without a Dreamer, winner of the 1993 Nicholas Roerich Poetry Prize, Andrea Hollander explores the complicated emotions that accompany both common and uncommon occurrences within ordinary lives, especially as the years pass. How does one decide what dress a mother should be buried in? When and how do feelings change? What do you do when your therapist falls asleep while you're revealing your deepest hurts?

Each person lives but a single life—yet this is not wholly true. While our lives progress as a result of the choices we make—this career, that husband, this town, that house—we are left imagining a life we might have lived. If we are defined by our choices, in what ways are we limited by them? What of the spiritual lives we lead, the inner lives that others cannot truly know? Which life is truest?A woman recalls her special bond with her father and compares it with her ties to other men; a man copes with his unloved life and finds a way to secretly inherit it; after making love for the first time, a young woman wishes to go back in time, erase what she’s done.In readable, finely wrought, resonant, and memorable poems about the nature of longing and disappointment, desire and betrayal, pleasure and sorrow, The Other Life explores the dualities in life that every person experiences.

Breath in Every Room intertwines parents and children with encounters in the natural world. Ranging from birds in the forest to a boy’s captured frogs, from rattlesnakes in the prairie to a bat fallen from the sky. The book weaves in and out of myth and dream.

"Lola Haskins's range is broad; her perceptions are always surprising. Natural objects surpass themselves and episodes of women's history are rewritten in this lively, adventuresome collection."-Maxine Kumin" . . . Hunger is a cabinet of crystals each one with a cutting edge. It's a wonder."-Beloit Poetry Journal"She knows we are rooted to the earth but long for the stars. . . . And she's wise enough to know that love searches us out. Dazzling."-Northwest Arkansas Times"[The poems] richly present the experience of women, as the complexity of their material, emotional, and imaginative lives presses against the constraints of their assigned roles. . . wonderfully evocative."-The Hudson Review". . . Convincing and exquisitely visual. It plays off a painterly use of visualization and technique even as it enacts the limits of such artistry in the face of real feeling. . . . It is the clarity of Haskins's poems and (her speakers') observations, combined with the sometimes elegant, sometimes searing restraint with which the observations are made, that gives these poems their impact."-Colorado Review

This book is about Latina identity, a timely subject in today's America. The author’s journey begins as she, full of love for Mexico and its culture despite her closest blood connection being her bisabuela, boards a bus. She starts out determined: "Yes foreign is a word for fear. Yes I am coming home." But then, because "it is afraid, staying in a language where you were not born," she retreats, hiding first behind we, then behind masks. But when it becomes clear that the masks are her true self, she loses her fear, and barrels ahead as I, fully committed, all the way to the end.

Without Asking marks Jane Ransom's debut as a book author, initially placing her within the poetic tradition of narrative Confessionalism. But one can already sense here the ambivalence that would lead both to a break from narrative-in her second poetry book, Scene of theCrime-and her subsequent return to narrative in Bye-Bye, her first novel. This is a writer whose epistemological inquiry continuously turns both inward and outward, from linear to non-linear and back again, in an unrelenting quest for Truth.

The precise gaze and chiseled language of the poems in Oldest Mortal Myth authoritatively convey a broad and deep knowledge. Whether a reimagining a Greek myth in order to infuse it with a contemporary pain, extending empathy and humorous Mitmenschkeit to both denizens and voyeurs of the world's freakshows, or describing with wit and experience the spiritual affects of medical conditions, the book is infused with restrained but piercing emotion, a subtle metrical ear, and enough daring and wit to write in rhymed couplets to take the obvious, easy way. For instance, with the last line of "De Wallen, Amsterdam": "The moon above the spires, a sexless disk,/eyes us coolly as an odalisque." I so admire the refusal to make that last line scan as a perfect iambic pentameter line. It would be so easy; all you'd have to do is add the grammatical, but colloquial, "as." Which would have ruined the line, and the poem. Oh, and the rhymes in the canzone! There's much to admire here, much to enjoy.-Marilyn Nelson

Scene of the Crime exposes the poet’s inner criminality, where matricide and mother tongue engage in diabolic discourse. Confessing her outlaw sexuality, Ransom grapples with feminist theory and disembowels postmodern philosophy. Delighting in the multiplicity of self, language and desire, Ransom fires puns dead-aimed to riddle any interpretive reduction.

Adele Slaughter’s first book of poems, What the Body Remembers, was published by Story Line Press in 1994. It is an autobiographical collection of glimpses into a childhood fraught with familial violence, alcoholism, and trauma, and the life that has been led in its wake; the failure of a marriage and the experiences that forever mold us as human beings. Through all the abuse and suffering these poems portray, however, the driving theme behind What the Body Remembers never falters: the reader is left with an inspiring picture of courage, perseverance, femininity, and the survival of the truest self. The subject of the work remains always the poet, the speaker, even as great attention is drawn to the circumstance surrounding her, providing an impactful example of how our greatest pains may leave us changed, but not defined, and never defeated. Pat Monaghan called the book "a stunning debut volume."

Structured like the movements of a New Orleans jazz funeral, this all-sonnet collection deals with death, loss, war, disaster, the binding power of community, and the celebratory spirit that reemerges after all. In the words of poet and critic David Mason: "Part elegy for a city and a way of life, part meditation on mortality and grace, this book is wonderfully, defiantly alive."

In a city teeming with stories, how do lost souls find one another? It's a question Meg Rhys doesn't think she's asking. Meg is a self-identified spinster librarian, satisfied with living with her cat, stacks of books, and her dead sister's ghost in her New York City apartment. Then she becomes obsessed with an intriguing library patron and the haunted house he's trying to research. The house has its own story to tell too, of love and war, of racism's fallout and the ghost story that is gentrification, and of Brooklyn before it was Brooklyn. What follows is an exploration of what home is, how we live with loss, who belongs in the city and to whom the city belongs, and the possibilities and power of love.

A woman who is suffering from a tragic loss is placed on a jury with her estranged ex-husband.

John Proctor, about to turn seventy, spies a disconsolate young man eyeing him from outside his remote studio window. Invited inside from the bitter cold and fed dinner, the visitor, who calls himself Eli, implies that he is no stranger to the man, having been told by his grandmother that "e;you might take me in."e; Astonished to learn that the woman was his wife who decades earlier had aborted their marriage, which lasted "e;but the length of a wedding candle,"e; the narrator ruefully explains he has since relished living alone by making no lasting connections to anybody or anything. Whereupon Eli confides, "e;She also said you had profaned my mother,"e; the daughter John Proctor never knew he had. Thus commences MacLeish Sq., a tale of awakened remorse and familial longing recounted by an aging recluse when his life is abruptly upturned by the young visitor-captive to a mythical past of his own creation-who intimates that he and the narrator are unlikely strangers. Their unresolved relationship ultimately challenges the reader to question if he and his coincidental guest are one and the same . . . that Eli may be who the narrator has carefully hidden from himself throughout his adult life.

Human Heartbeat Detected is a collection of essays that explores how we are wonderfully and terrifyingly human. Hitting on themes such as trauma, emotional abuse, marriage, mental illness, and grief, these essays delve into how humans are simultaneously beautiful and terrible to one another. Though regardless of how we might make each other shatter, our hearts continue beatingeven when we might not want them toand we wade through the wreckage of our lives to find ways to survive. With exquisite language and captivating storytelling, the essays in Human Heartbeat Detected face what it means to be human.

David Mason was born in Washington State, forty-odd degrees north latitude, and now lives on the Australian island of Tasmania, forty-odd degrees south latitude. That Pacific crossing is the work of a lifetime of devotion and change. The rich new poems of Pacific Light explore the implications of the light as well as peace and its opposing forces. What does it mean to be an immigrant and face the ultimate borders of our lives? How can we say the word home and mean it? These questions have obsessed Mason in his major narrative works, The Country I Remember and Ludlow, as well as his lyric and dramatic writing. Pacific Light is a culmination and a deepening of that work, a book of transformations, history and love, endurance and unfathomable beauty, by a poet at the height of his powers.

Full of warmth, terror, and underhanded humor, If I Were the Ocean, Id Carry You Home, Pete Hsus debut story collection, captures the essence of surviving in a life set adrift. Children and young people navigate a world where the presence of violence and death rear themselves in everyday places: Vegas casinos, birthday parties, church services, and sunny days at the beach. Each story is a meditation on living in a world not made for usthe pervasive fear, the adaptations, the unexpected longings. A gripping and energetic debut, Hsus writing beats with the naked rhythms of an unsettled human heart.

When an elderly woman goes missing, the women of her neighborhood dig into the secrets and lies of her husband’s past to save her.

Brynn Saito’s debut collection of poetry begins in a cityscape and ends \u201cdeep in the cloud-filled valley,\u201d traversing myriad terrains—both emotional and physical—as it weaves towards completion. From the bays of Denmark to the deserts of California, Saito’s searching lyricism gathers stories of sudden departures, forced removals, and the journeys chosen in between. Narrative selections inspired by childhood, sisterhood, lost loves and newfound freedoms are cased by interludes of otherworldly visions and persona poems spoken from many perspectives—animal and otherwise. This is a book about the ever-present capacity for wonder, transformation, and change: \u201cThe fighter is in me,\u201d claims the speaker in the poem \u201cWinter in Denmark,\u201d \u201cand the future is in me.\u201d Inside every moment of rage or loss—beneath tough city sidewalks and under the quiet of a moonlit valley—is another moment, ripe with possibility and foretelling the future sky.

GONE TO EARTH brings to light, late in the long, distinguished career of poet Eleanor Wilner, her early uncollected poemsan unveiling of the first stages of a vital, imaginative process, in whose evocative, imagistic landscapes is enacted a drama of emergence from entrapment. In the often-painful drama of new birth, from the deadly strictures and oppressions of the older social forms, come the living forces undermining themnew life seeded out of a decaying order: ';a wet nose / breaks the earth, and sniffs the river air.' Written during the poet's immersion in the civil rights movement and the protests against the Vietnam War, an inner liberating struggle is tuned to a collective channel where communal memory and vision are undergoing transformation.