Bøger udgivet af Red Hen Press

Calculated to reflect the sixty minutes in an hour of heightened imaginative contemplation, the poems in Ernest Hilbert's first book, Sixty Sonnets, contain memories of violence, historical episodes, humorous reflections, quiet despair, violent discord, public outrage, and private nightmares. A cast of fugitive characters share their desperate lives-failed novelists, forgotten literary critics, cruel husbands, puzzled historians, armed robbers, jobless alcoholics, exasperated girlfriends, high school dropouts, drowned children, and defeated boxers. These characters populate love poems ("My love, we know how species run extinct"), satires ("The way of the human variety, / Not even happy just being happy"), elegies ("The cold edge of the world closed on you, kissed / You shut"), and songs of sorrow ("Seasons start slowly. They end that way too"). The original rhyme scheme devised for this sequence--ABCABCDEFDEFGG--allows the author to dust off of the Italian "little song" and Americanize the Elizabethan love poem for the twenty-first century. Speaking at times in propria persona ("We'll head out, you and me, have a pint"), at times in the voice of both male and female characters ("I'm sorry I left you that day at MoMA"), at times across historical gulfs ("Caesar and Charlemagne, Curie, Capone"), Sixty Sonnets marshals both trivia and tragedy to tell stories of modern America, at last achieving a hard-won sense of careful optimism, observing "the last, noble pull of old ways restored, / Valued and unwanted, admired and ignored."

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.

We live in an age where to speak may not always be wise. Big Brother iswatching you as you call and as you write. So why not write something thatreally stirs up ideas? The enemy for most Americans, the one thing that makesour lives sordid and uneventful, is the mind numbing life we all live. If ourmind is too numb because we cannot turn off electronic stimulus long enoughto think, then where will good writing come from?The Los Angeles Review is the voice of Los Angeles, and the voice of thenation. We will not have one editor who chooses work based on theiridiosyncratic tastes, but instead will bring in a variety of editors for each issue.This year s editors are focusing on Language, Silence and Oppression."

In his first collection of poetry, We Generous, Sebastian Matthews illustrates black culture and music through soulful verse and poignant emotion. With poems reflective of the smooth rhythms of jazz, Matthews captures the essence and beauty of love, desire, and daily life.

The poems in Water & Salt travel across borders between cultures and languages, between the present and the living past.

Diane Thiel's eagerly anticipated collection of poems, Questions from Outer Space, explores fresh and often humorous perspectives that capture the surreal quality of our swiftly changing lives on this planet. The poems travel through questions on many fronts, challenging assumptions and locating unique angles of perception. This thought-provoking book reflects a deep engagement with the natural world, a questioning of our built systems, the expansive wilderness of parenting, and the complexities of navigating outer and inner space.

A collection of moving and meditative poems that richly evoke a Gen X childhood in Los Angeles, exploring how our early recognitions shape our lives.

Former best friends Scott and Errol meet unexpectedly at Oso Lake, a remote Canadian fly-fishing paradise where, five years before, fresh out of college, they had the time of their lives. Their situations, though, have changed, their high hopes quashed by workaday realities and, in Errols case, marriage to Claire, who has come with him trying to stave off divorce. But Oso Lake has changed. The fall before, a womans severed head was left in a campfire pit beside the lake. The shadow cast by her murder is darkened further by a fire-scarred white truck driver who claims to be a long-dead Native shaman and has plans to eradicate not only Scott, Errol, and Claire, but all of Western civilization. The beauty of the wilderness becomes, every day, more threatening and perverse. But the worst danger the vacationers face may be themselves.

Poet Emily Wall began collecting birth stories after the birth of her third child, Lucy. She realized that women were always quietly sharing their storiesin living rooms with a mug of tea, or whispered at the preschool playground. She saw the intensity with which women listened to each other's stories. They were shared, remembered, retold, but not collected, not treated as the art form they are. Wall began asking for, and collecting birth stories: women sent her emails, handed her their journals, and recorded their own voices. She collected stories from a lesbian couple, a story from an indigenous father who is fighting for his language, and a story from a grandmother. Some of the stories are about difficult and painful births: a woman who had a miscarriage, a woman unable to get pregnant. And some of the stories are beautiful: a birth in water that happened exactly as the mother dreamed it would. Wall has taken these stories and shaped them into poems, and then into this collection, offering the reader a look into the story that women, for centuries, have been quietly sharing with each other.

Saul doesn't get why he's misunderstood. At his high-tech day job, he hides in the bathroom writing a novel about his dead grandfather and wonders why his boss wants to fire him. He tells his almost ex-wife about a blind date and wonders why she slams the door in his face. He aches with worry for his seven-year-old son, who seems happier living with his mom and her new man.When the blind date becomes a complicated relationship, and Sauls blunders at work threaten the survival of the company, Saul has to wake up and confront his fears.I Only Cry with Emoticons is a quirky comedy that reveals the cost of being disconnectedeven when we're using a dozen apps on our devices to communicateand an awkward man's search for real connections, on and offline.

"The poems in Elise Paschen's Bestiary explore domestic preoccupations set against the backdrop of the wild-heartedness, real and imagined, of the animal world," praises the poet Jason Shinder. In this modern-day Bestiary, or "Book of Beasts," the line between animal and human is thinly-drawn - the daughter of a Celtic king, through love, is transformed from beast to human; lovers take flight as moon and owl; manatees transform, before the explorers' eyes, into mermaids. This dynamic runs throughout the collection: taking flight, hovering between air and earth, plunging, and then resurfacing from water. The poems create a constant engagement between what tethers us to our daily lives - marriage, motherhood, raising a family, the loss of parents in old age - and the desire for other worlds. Exploring notions of transformation, these poems cross thresholds between animal and human, between death and life. Award-winning poet, Elise Paschen, creates in her third and most complex poetry collection, work which is elegant and passionate, preternaturally still and reckless all at once. Paschen displays a variety of form and nuance - from ghazals to long-lined free verse poems. Writing out of a distinct Western literary tradition, but tapping into her Native American (Osage) roots, Paschen celebrates the mythic, the unusual, the magical glimpsed in the everyday.

John Weir, author of The Irreversible Decline of Eddie Socket, a defining novel of 1980s New York in its response to the global AIDS crisis, has written a story collection that chronicles the long aftermath of epidemic death, as recorded in the tragicomic voice of a gay man who survived high school in the 1970s, the AIDS death of his best friend in the 1990s, and his complicated relationship with his mother, a movie star without a movie to star in, whose life is winding to a close in a retirement community where she lives alone with her last dog.

Kim Dower's poetry has been described by the Los Angeles Times as ';sensual and evocative . . . seamlessly combining humor and heartache,' and by O Magazine as ';unexpected and sublime.' Acclaimed for combining the accessible and profound, her poems about motherhood are some of her most moving and disarmingly candid. I Wore This Dress Today for You, Mom is an anthology of her poems on being a motherchildbirth to empty nestas well as being a daughter with all the teenaged messiness, drama and conflict, to finally caring for one's mother suffering from dementia. Culled from her four collections as well as a selection of new work, these poems, heartbreaking, funny, surprising, and touching, explore the quirky, unexpected observations, and bittersweet moments mothers and daughters share. These evocative poems do not glorify mothers, but rather look under the hood of motherhood and explore the deep crevices and emotions of these impenetrable relationships: the love, despair, joy, humor and gratitude that fills our lives.

When William Fox, a TV writer on location in Florida, is dragged by his shows toxic producers to a gentleman's club thats just appeared outside town, he meets Nicole, a mysterious dancer who claims to be an anthropologist searching for signs of rational life on Earth.Enchanted by her both playful and serious ideas exploring love, limerence, power, monkey behavior, paintball combat, creativity, and the dilemma of a rational mind compelled to serve an animals body by feeding it fantasies, Will falls in loveand his ever more troubled love-struck behavior and the acidly destructive battles among his producers and network executives during the production of his show soon begin to illustrate Nicoles theories.Nicole is charmingly romantic on a cruise up the Space Coast, but nothing about her seems authentic. After she warns shell soon leave and his producers are humbled by an uncanny encounter with the police, Will begins to wonder, is Nicole staging real world events with him and the producers as her experimental subjects? And if so, can he discover her true identity, learn the lessons shes trying to teach, and earn her love before he loses her forever?

Taking the reader across our country through the varied landscapes of Colorado, Tennessee, North Carolina, and Arizona, Refugee discusses the nature of seeking shelter. We are all refugees looking for a haven from whatever oppresses our lives. What constitutes a refugee is at the heart of the collection. Poems confront and explore xenophobia, sexism, gun violence, domestic violence, corporate greed, and their ties to environmental destruction and political and economic tyranny. An ovarian cancer survivor, the author also writes about her own courageous confrontation with death. These inspiring poems ultimately call for the reader to recognize the refugee condition as a human condition. They call for a change in consciousness in the forms of action and compassion. They call for the reader to thrive. Ranging from short lyric poems to narrative poems, this collection steeped in rich, sensual imagery draws inspiration and healing from the natural world. Truth lies in recognition of the interdependence of all life. Refugee is an odyssey to find grace and unity in a besieged and divided contemporary American society.

"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 Francisco's 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 Digiorno's 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 Digiorno's clear voice draws us directly into the center of her world."¿Diane Di Prima

In Epilogue: Selected and Last Poems, Frederick Morgan reworks and amplifies, in his extraordinary poetic range, the fundamental human themes that preoccupied himlove, death, pain, the nature and transcendence of the Self. In interweaving his many themes, he recaptures the past, the confrontation with the external world of nature and the internal world of dream, the oppositions and ambiguities of body and spirit, and the reduplications of meaning in legend and fable. Assembled from eight previous collections, and including his final poems, this profoundly moving book transcends individual expression to provide a powerful insight into universal human experience.

This harvest of poems is inspired by the plant medicine latent in Gossypium Herbeceum, or Cotton Root Bark, which was used by enslaved Black women to induce labor, cure reproductive ailments and end unwanted pregnancies. Through an arrangement of stories, secrets and memories experienced, read, heard, reimagined and remixed, gossypiin reckons with a peculiar yet commonplace inheritance of violation, survival and self-possession. In this way, Ra Malika Imhotep invites us to lean in and listen good as the text interrupts the narrative silence around sexual harm, sickness, and the marks they make on black femme subjectivity. Within these pages, the poet is joined by a ';sticky trickster-self' named Lil Cotton Flower who tells of their own origins and endings in the Black vernacular traditions of the griot and the gossip. Interspersed throughout the collection, Black feminist wisdoms and warnings meld with the poets own yearnings and Lil Cotton Flower's tall tales.Gossypiin is an offering towards the holding and healing of Black beings that exceed the confines of their own bodies.

Worship the Pig, Gaylord Brewer's eleventh collection, is by the poet's own definition his ';Americas book.' The migration begins from his Tennessee home to the Inside Passage of Alaska, then detours sharply south in a return to his beloved Costa Rica, then onward finally to the qualified paradise of Brazil's Ilhabela. Brewer's persistent obsessionstranslating the call and challenge of the feral world, negotiating some truce with private ghostshave never been more poignantly and sharply drawn. From chiseled lyrics to more expansive narrativesby turns reserved and raucous, always heartfelt and rivetingthese new poems exhilarate. ';No schematic for conquest, / no reckless conclusions, // no tenuous argument for connection / beyond the simple truth / of what accrues together.' At mid-career, the author called ';the most natural poet in the country' by the Asheville Poetry Review continues to astonish.

These linked essays form a memoir exploring the American outback from eastern Oregon horse trails to the arctic and subarctic river towns of Alaska.In Mostly Water, Alaska-based journalist and nature writer Mary Odden shares a series of personal essays celebrating the beauty and independent spirit of America's remote and rural Northern spaces. In these landscapes, human dwellers are entwined in histories and anecdotes as loopy as northern rivers.Odden invites the reader to a vivid patchwork of characters and seldom-seen places, with a soundtrack from fiddle dances and a menu that is "e;half potlatch and half potluck."e; Each essay features a recipe for a traditional regional dish, such as mincemeat, creamed salmon, and lingonberry sauce. As the stories unfold, events of the churning twenty-first century rise like the sea-as does a love of human togetherness and the precious otherness of nature.

Danielle Vogel's newest collection creates a latticework for repairthe repairing of past trauma, the calling-into-presence of a dissociated selfbut does so while keeping the material of this net of thinking in a fragmented, diaphanous state, glowing in the space between the poem and essay. Across three sections of ';displacements,' ';miniatures,' and ';volume,' Vogel initiates readers into the seance of the book; she asks the reader to hold vigil for the most crucial phase of its composition, which can only happen when the reader and she meet at the site of the page, within a ';new, interrupted unity.' In The Way a Line Hallucinates its Own Linearity, accordwriting with, reading withis always a verb, always kinetic, alchemical, and alive. ';It only takes one letter on the page,' Vogel writes, ';and we are already inside one another's lungs.' To consent to walk through these spaces is to give up that part of you that wishes to remain anonymous and un-entrained. You will be grateful that you did.

A woman searches for the daughter who was taken from her long ago in "e;a powder keg of a novel, where secrets and lies explode into truth and consequences"e; (Marlon James, National Book Award finalist and author of Black Leopard, Red Wolf).To find the daughter taken from her, Plum Valentine must first locate the child's father, who walked out of a hospital with the day-old baby girl without explanation. Seventeen years later, weary of her unfruitful search, Plum sees an article in a community newspaper with a photo of the man for whom she has spent half her life searching. He has become an Episcopal priest. Her plan: confront him and walk away with the daughter he took from her. From Brooklyn to the island of Jamaica, Tea by the Sea traces Plum's circuitous route to find her daughter-and explores how Plum's and the priest's love came apart."e;The forbidden love story of Plum and Lenworth comes alive in this heart-rending novel . . . heady twists and turns delivered in an urgent and beautiful prose."e; -Lauren Francis-Sharma, author of Book of the Little Axe"e;A moving portrait of identity, belonging, family, immigration, and the power of maternal love."e; -Washington Independent Review of Books

Boy Oh Boy is a collection of queer fabulist stories and flash fictions told via second person, asking readers to share Doss's explorations of joy and longing. Your boyfriend is many boyfriends, possibly all the boyfriends you've ever had or will have. But you must ask yourself whether you have them or they have you. Your boyfriend plays jokes on youplays jokes on the world. He is forever unattainable, and still you love your boyfriend, even when it hurts you. Doss explores how relationships can be all-consuming, how we transform ourselves to fit within their contour. Eventually, you might change so much that you don't even fit inside your own body. This book is so much about spacethe physical, emotional, and mental spheres that everyone inhabits. Doss uses humor to deal with the isolation that each of us experiencesnot because we're alone, but because we've become detached from ourselves, our needs, and our desires. Boy Oh Boy is our chance to understand Zachary Doss, as well as our strangest selves.

Body of Render explores the internal and external impacts on our humanity when political, national, and societal decisions strip away our basic human rights. What does it mean to be an underrepresented individual in a country where the most powerful seat in the land unashamedly perpetuates racist, misogynistic, homophobic, and classist behaviors? The voices document a journey before and after the last presidential election. These poems cry out for reconsideration of our broken systems to find common and safe ground rooted in equitable treatment of each other as human beings. How do we exude love when being a person of color or underrepresented person in this country means the dominate white-male-able-bodied-heterosexual narrative continues to threaten our voices? This collection carves at the physical, the political, the intimate, and the structural with poems that simultaneously create and encourage voice to seek a path toward collective mending.

This collection of poetry, prose, and translations explores Latinx and queer identity through homage to the great Nicaraguan poet Ruben Dario.After Ruben unfolds a decades-long journey braiding together the personal, the political and the historical. Throughout the text, acclaimed poet Francisco Aragon intersperses English-language translations and riffs of the Spanish-language master Ruben Dario. Whether it's biting portraits of public figures, or nuanced sketches of his father, Francisco Aragon has assembled his most expansive collection to date, evoking his native San Francisco, but also imagining ancestral spaces in Nicaragua.Readers will encounter pieces that splice lines from literary forebearers, a moving elegy to a sibling, a surprising epistle from the grave. In short, After Ruben presents a complex and fascinating conversation surrounding poetry in the Americas-above all as it relates to Latinx and queer poetics.

In five poetic sequences, Jason Schneiderman's Hold Me Tight considers life in a new age of anxiety as technology and violence inform new forms of selfhood and apocalypse seems always around the corner. Starting with a long poem about his own struggle to find peace, the collection is searingly grounded in the personal, anchored to Schneiderman's own life. The collection moves to a sequence of parables about wolves, which obliquely consider intractable political conflicts and the emotional fallout of relationships that are structured around predators and prey. The next sequences focus on technology and art, looking at how technologies extend the possibilities of the human body, which alters what it means to be human. A long set of poems about Chris Burden explore the artist's movement from the personal, self-inflicted violence of his early work to the larger questions of political violence that inform his later work. In the final sequence, Schneiderman imagines a series of ';last things'in which finality gives meaning to the people and things in question. In the end, Schneiderman's project invokes a kind of old fashioned humanism, embracing the ruptures in our contemporary ways of living and thinking.

';Utterly unique... examines themes of love, intrusion, loss, community and trust against a backdrop of a Makah reservation in the Pacific Northwest.' Ms. MagazineSelected as a Staff Pick by The Paris ReviewSilver Medal winner in the Independent Publisher Book Awards in Multicultural Fiction Fleeing the shattered remains of her marriage and treachery by her sister, a Latina anthropologist named Claudia takes refuge in Neah Bay, a Native whaling village on the jagged Pacific coast. Claudia yearns to lose herself to the songs of the tribe and the secrets of a spirited hoarder named Maggie. Instead, she stumbles into Maggie's prodigal son Peter, who, spurred by his mother's failing memory, has returned seeking answers to his father's murder. Claudia helps Peter's family convey a legacy delayed for decades by that death, but her presence, echoing centuries of fraught contact with indigenous peoples, brings lasting change and real damage. Through the ardent collision of Peter and Claudia, Subduction portrays not only their strange allegiance after grievous losses but also their shared hope of finding solace and community on the Makah Indian Reservation. An intimate tale of stunning betrayals, Subduction bears witness to the power of stories to disruptand to heal.';Young beautifully and vividly renders the Pacific Northwest, particularly the unique world of Neah Bay. Subduction is at once a thought-provoking meditation on the geography and geology of the natural world and a generous exploration of the natural shifts and movements that shape her characters.' Jonathan Evison, New York Times-bestselling author of Legends of the North Cascades

The Skin of Meaning is award-winning poet Keith Flynn's sixth and most wide-ranging collection, seeking to find the tangible analogs and visceral meanings hidden behind the daily bombardment of digital information and hoping to restore the mystery in our involvement with language. From the etymologies of pop culture, history, astronomy, and rock and roll, these poems fan out into a bold multiplicity of voices and techniques. Flynn's work illustrates the meaning that is also created through tense collisions and is populated with figures in resistance to the status quo, a gathering as varied as Caravaggio, Nina Simone, Gaud, Villon, Wonder Woman, and Manolete. The final section examines America's fascination with violence and death, revealing that ';a human being in love with mystery is never finished.' This collection constantly challenges our assumptions about the world we think we see and is teeming with evidence of another invisible world bristling like an underground river beneath our feet.