Bøger udgivet af Spuyten Duyvil

If "the realm of the personal and sexual has always been literary for men [...] and confessional for women," as Lori Saint-Martin puts it, Marisa Crawford's Diary explodes the literary/confessional binary, pushing the limits of what it means to write a poem, a diary entry, a marketing copy block. A woman works, walks, and writes, traversing Midtown Manhattan on a lunch break from a corporate day job: like her predecessors Frank O'Hara and Clarissa Dalloway, she sweeps through streets and stores, navigating the entangled pleasures and horrors of city life in late capitalism. Family, literary, and personal histories of New York appear around every corner, braiding themselves into poems that glow with longing for this life and for all the others-in memory and fantasy-that shimmer behind it.¿¿

The poet hurts, his "scab is a lake where bull shark flits toward chum." In punchy, clipped poetic prose, he parses out our commonweal psychic pain, each poem a blind alley in which he must retrace his steps to get to the next imagistic manifesto. As always, Seidman is a master of lacerating catalogues, each noun the flick-lash of a whip, regicide the endgame.

Jim, Carole and David engage in teenage clandestine romantic and erotic adventures, plotting and executing revenge against dangerous adults who have done them harm and physically threaten their lives. The novel grips us in a dark delight as they become the people they will become, and, in turn, perhaps have us trace back to the fruition of our own forgotten history. Fireball tells a tale of the immensity of children's lives, those they live out in secret, far from the reach of adult supervision and awareness.

Edward lives in Brooklyn not far from the narrowest part of the Hudson, across from Staten Island. Things happen to him all the time that he can't understand. In the school auditorium singing Silver Bells, Christmas, he faints and travels across the river to another place, not Staten Island, where everything seems drawn and flat-the fluttery, papery world of the unsuccessfully dead. When Edward's mother dies suddenly of a stroke, his seizures become more intense. Mrs. Parenti shows up at their house to explain to Edward's father that he may well have a gift which she could help develop through her séances held in a mysterious townhouse Edward fears but is keenly interested in. Edward's father, bereaving, isn't.

With Rahim for this journey, we ultimately are able to see how she and her loved ones come to acknowledge profound truths about the past and present, as well as the incalculable value, she tells us of this work, her "writing and reading and remembering and reconstructing, where I reside."

"Michael Gregory Stephens teaches us how to look at things we have never seen before-and to make them part of what we know about ourselves." -Paul Auster, author of The New York Trilogy

What London predicted in his 1912 novel has come to pass. Levato has skillfully and sensitively carved current fact and feeling out of another writer's prescient imagination. Scarlet gives me feelings of connection, recognition, and relief in a disturbing and anxious millennium. In a world where nothing makes sense, the book feels like an attempt at sense making. It pieces together what is fragmented, indecipherable, unknown, and frightening. In using the techniques of glitch and erasure, Levato is also playing.

Pritchett's poems manage a level of lyric statement that recalls both Rilke's Duino Elegies and the late poems of Robert Creeley, as the author asks, "May I ruin the poem's / promise with the promise / of another poem / the yet-to-come / forever shining / nickel sweet beyond / horizon's oblivion." Written under the sign of COVID and the attendant global violences related to a pandemic, Sunderland meditates in ardent, necessary, and ethical ways on the "real wonder of the world in its ruin." Both a work of daily apprehension and one sundered from topical realities, Pritchett's work here is invested in poetry's requisite and long-historied demand, asking us "to undergo lyric / as though it were a curse."

Sumitaku Kenshin, a free verse haiku poet, died tragically just before his 26th birthday. He left behind a small yet memorable body of work that consists of 281 haiku. This collection presents the entirety of his haiku in a new translation by noted poet Eric Hoffman.

Richard Martin's recent books from Spuyten Duyvil are Chapter & Verse, Ceremony of the Unknown, Goosebumps of Antimatter, and Techniques in the Neighborhood of Sleep. He is the author of a series of four chapbooks from Igneus Press: Hard Labor, Cosmic Sandbox, Sighting Icarus and Hobo Return. Individual poems from his books have been translated into Vietnamese, Chinese and Russian. Martin is a past recipient of a NEA Fellowship for Poetry, founder of the Big Horror Poetry Series in Binghamton, New York (1983-1996), and a retired Boston Public Schools principal. He lives in Boston with his family.

A "reincarnation adventure" of the highest order, Goold shows the reader "how to distinguish where worlds meet," with a deft musicality and earthly, sensory exactitude recalling Niedecker, Bishop, and Plath. Whether planting bulbs, caregiving, questioning consciousness and systems, or painting rain, this is a new pastoral with able footing both in late modern and postmodern idioms ("you don't need/ metaphor to see the animal that you are"), one that delivers what it promises: to endure, love, and abide.

Gellar-a reluctant scream queen whose oeuvre skews toward horror-and the traumas of her characters echo in the abuse, violence, and shame of the speaker's childhood and adolescence. Queer readers will innately understand this alchemy of fandom and pain, the way in which we come to understand "what is this world but bruises."

The lucid, tender poems in Ça Existe, Lauri Robertson's fifth collection from Spuyten Duyvil, continue to unfold as a series of musings that proceed, literally, from a tower in the Loire valley, the "Garden of France." From her new home, the poet as expatriate psychotherapist-in-retirement addresses the predicament of aging "Boomers" bearing witness to a brutally humanized but undying planet.

These are texts that take us into lived experience and allow us to know an enemy that can never be fully defeated. War, violence, abuse and most recently pandemic have made so many of us tragically familiar with PTSD. Yet Bohm's poems are also strangely hopeful. Their ability to involve the reader and then release him or her lies in the poet's attention to detail, to inner meaning and overall significance.

At once evanescent as life itself and beautifully precise, these are remarkably fluid pieces that have both the advantages of fiction and of prose poetry. They lull you, and then surprise you, moving subtly in unexpected directions.

To call Deborah Wood's Underneath The Occipital Bone poetry is to gravely do it an injustice of its literary brilliance. This is a book that defies the oppressive reality of genre. The writer reminds us why we choose to read in the first place, to love words, relish its sonic resonances and lose ourselves in the wonder of language.

These are the poems we need in this human moment, at the sticky end of the pandemic. Goldman's transcendent vulnerability underscores how little we have, and how precious and resilient it is, after all.

Kate, who has been put away for years in a hospital for the criminally insane, is out now and living by the railroad tracks in a furnished room. Phoebe, ostensibly Nancy's mother, is running scared and putting out contracts with an Albany hit man. The Mayor of this same small upstate New York town is found dead in his office with knitting needles stabbed into his eyes. Lester Mather, community stalwart, is stabbed in the heart. A minor gangster named Nickie is found shot in the head by the river. Nancy's father kills himself. The local psychiatrist is found in his garage with his neck cut through by a pair of shears. At times tender and abysmal, always engaging in energetic jumps from scene to scene, its many characters, their secrets, obsessions, and rich moments of eloquent madness makes Pale Horse a fierce event, perhaps where Dostoyevsky and True Detective meet and wrestle each other in the dark of night.

Tom Cahill thinks the two voices on the harassing phone calls he's been receiving are actually one person. But they are indeed different predators: Eddie Branagan, telling him what he's going to do to his daughter Laura; Phil LaPorta, painting a picture of how great a man Tom, a newspaper columnist, really is. Because the novel cuts back and forth between otherwise total strangers suspense is rendered all the more palpable; and the place, Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, shows its many sides in and out of our collective American past. Beetlebomb is a pan through mundane time and place, written in opposition to the otherwise unspoken sources of human shame and brutality.

"In Consummation, Hamilton has nurtured a compelling collection of modern and often queer horror stories. Strands of satire, thriller, and science fiction twist together to form a fear that we would rather tuck away and not talk about. Consummation is a thoughtful gathering of tales that shine a spotlight on the devil in the room, whether that room be our hearts or the society we live within"--

"It may or may not be true that we live each event twice, once as tragedy and once again as farce, but it's certainly true in literature, and in Ann Tracy's stunningly and aptly titled Winter Hunger the Windigo motif, such a force of horror and of spiritual dismay in it's previously studied versions, is used by the author for subversive and often hilarious purposes." Margaret Atwood on Winter Hunger

What happens to the story when the world of the story is under attack? As trees are felled and pollinators disappear, Paige Menton painstakingly erases narrative, opening up spaces of possibility to find that "the beauty remains." We can no longer speak the world that was; instead, in lines that inhabit the full emptiness of the page, Menton uncovers what stories may still be possible. A beautiful and haunting book that reveals the subtle ways we might speak our own ecology.

Armenteros evokes the dreamscapes and desires of Marquez, Joyce, and Ballard while asserting his own distinctive voice.

JohSchertzer cleverly writes, "the natural associations are often unnatural" which here is Second Nature.

Becker's poems struggle for the acceptance of aloneness, and the shunning of anything that hinders transcendence. She finds assurance in the story of the water spider-how something so small could bring the sacred light to the world after others had failed. Her work achieves autonomy through illness. "When one inherits trauma, / it is in the blood. In the bones.

In these radiant destabilizations of language, Dan Kaplan's 2.4.18 sizzles within the lineage of extraction books like Annie Dillard's Mornings Like This, Mary Ruefle's A Little White Shadow, and Srikanth Reddy's Voyager.

With a deft command of comic distance and abiding compassion for her characters, Lynn Levin in House Parties, her debut collection of short fiction, presents us with a broad range of characters who ardently, foolishly, and often with weird invention, relentlessly spar with their fates. Three friends hike through Yosemite in search of an awe-inspiring waterfall that may or may not exist...a girl on a high-school science trip finds herself abandoned on an island inhabited by aggressive monkeys...a lonely young rabbinical student creates and animates a female form only to see her beloved creature acquire free will...overwhelmed by surveys, an office worker rebels à la Bartleby...a couple believes that a move to a friendly and sophisticated exurban neighborhood will set the stage for happy marriage. Many of the characters in House Parties see themselves with a certain bemused humor and strive to stay self-possessed even as they struggle against the strange and undeserved things that happen to them. At other times, the characters-sometimes successfully, sometimes not-keep trying to escape the gravity of a plight they created or a problem they refuse to resolve. In observant and generous prose, Levin writes in tones that range from the wry, witty, and hilarious to the lyrical and deeply serious.

Weighing in at 389 pounds, Simeon Saint-Simone was doing just fine. He enjoyed laying on his cardiac tilt table next to a window facing the sea, gazing at scantily clad young people frolicking on the beach...