Bøger udgivet af Unsolicited Press

From a place of solace and chaos comes OF DAISIES AND DEAD VIOLINS, a poetry collection by the renowned S.B. Borgersen, author of WHILE THE KETTLE BOILS and FISHERMEN'S FINGERS. The poems in this marvelous collection sow seeds that burst into unforgettable moments that crack the world open time and time again.From the collection:A Sliver of a Nova Scotia SummerIt dawns on you one morning late in Juneas mayflowers start their fade:soon the lady's slipper orchidswill arrive to tell their messagein gentle pink-tinted voicesas if in secret 'summer's on its way' you know you've yet to see the yarrowthe partridge berry and rhodorabut on the shaded forest floorpainted trillium and Angelicaunfurling ferns and wild irislet you know for sure 'summer has arrived' Monarch butterflies arrive in cloudswith ruby-throated hummingbirdsall this way north from Mexico.Dragonflies and damselfliesflirt hints of purple greensaround still pools 'yes, summer's really here' wild strawberries and blueberriesfor summer picnics on the shoreyou feel the soft white sand beneath your feet and diptoes in the welcomeclear warm ocean. and now you taste,smell, feel, gaze,hear those gentle lapping waves of summer

"Playground" picks up momentum from Benevento's previous two books of poetry, his volume of "selected" poems, (Expecting Songbirds 1983-2015), and his chapbook of poems in his own invented form, After, by including poems with an even wider range of publication dates than in Expecting Songbirds, and the presence of eight new "After" poems among its twenty-six lyrics. Themes such as the after effects of unrequited love, growing up in working class Queens, the redeeming potential in family, all make their appearance. This collection offers far more than recapitulation, though, with poems set in places as varied as a bagel shop in Columbus, a tapas bar in downtown Miami and a barrio in East Oakland, and subjects ranging from rehabbing a shoulder impingement, to participating in a track program for underprivileged youth to inventing a new kind of cake. Throughout these poems, Benevento affirms, as he has in published work for over thirty-five years now, his obsession with the paradox of poetry's ability to offer hope to a world that seems often hopeless without it.

Boasting a cast of dreamful characters, from Young Escher to George Bailey to a wide array of inanimate objects absconded from the dark tonics of our childhood - be they headless dolls, cuckoo clocks, inverted carpets or ravenous prisms, SKULL KINGDOMS: AN IMAGINARY OMNIBUS dives headlong into the radii of the imagination, measuring our inner landscapes against the sharp, enchanted edges of the playgrounds we create to keep us safe from the outer world. In these formally audacious escapologies, speakers duck the responsibilities of adulthood, choosing to crash into Ottomans or sway along with imaginary galleons over the violence of growing up and its hungry regimes that would blot out all color to leave us listless. Concluding with a roleplaying game of loneliness, Skull Kingdoms proposes a fanciful, novel cartography for reimagining an otherwise jagged, savagery of terrain.

"The Gospel According to B." is a queer autobiography of Jesus of Nazareth's life. A series of persona poems both in Jesus's voice and in the voices of those he impacted, "The Gospel According to B." delivers a queer account of Jesus's early life and times, from his childhood to young adulthood, periods curiously omitted in canonical Gospels. Combining midrashic, gnostic, and queer thought, the poems ditch heteronormative assumptions about Jesus's experience, sensibilities, and era and imaginatively insert new, and especially queer, angles to biblical stories. Though the collection draws from a Judeo-Christian tradition, its appeal is broad regardless of one's spiritual, religious, or atheistic orientation. The poems unlock a queer dimension to both spiritual experience and biblical history and throw open surprising revelations about the nature of the sacred.

Life is short. We blink, and it is gone. In a world filled with joy and pain, beauty and magic, how does one even attempt to experience it all? How can a person possibly find that moment of nirvana and hold on to it forever? For most of us, we call the day a success if we simply get out of the door on time. Wells Lowell Monasmith, however, has a secret, one that has been passed down for generations allowing certain individuals the chance to have their cake and eat it too. A chance to hold on to those special moments a little longer.As the Monasmith family gathers at the funeral of their only brother and son, they learn about an unbelievable familial trait that has been hidden from them for their entire lives. With a little post-humanous help from their son, Margaret and Charles Monasmith must guide their adult children through the implications of the power that courses through their veins. In Wells' Time is the story of a family with a little magic in their blood. For Wells, it is both a gift and a curse. For his family, it is a reality they must come to terms with as they learn from the triumphs and failures of the brother who died too young and lived an entire life between the pages of time. With any luck, the Monasmith family might just get a little closer to answering the question: How should we spend our time?

Thirty-six-year-old Kita Fletcher is fleeing a dead marriage riddled with affairs. After a chance meeting with a small group of people headed to the Rainbow Gathering, she can go her own way or choose to embrace her adventurous spirit that was snuffed out years ago.After receiving a devastating diagnosis, Maddy Alexander leaves her medical residency and her fiancé behind. Taking only a few belongings-including her beloved guitar-Maddy travels the US trying to live as fully as she can before it's too late. When she hears about the Rainbow Gathering, she's intrigued and wants to go, but that dream is crushed when her car breaks down just outside Boulder, Colorado.Twenty-eight-year-old Elaine Kennedy is living her dream life in New York City, far away from her childhood home where she and her mother lived off the grid. When Elaine's mother dies, those worlds collide when she's forced to go back home to settle her mom's affairs. Once there, she's caught in a battle between everything she loved about her childhood and all the reasons she escaped it.Just shy of his eighteenth birthday, Talon Callahan's conservative, religious parents are sending him to a conversion program after finding out he's gay. Tempted to end his life, Talon instead runs away to the Rainbow Gathering. But with Talon's wealthy father sparing no resources to look for him, Talon is in constant danger, even after he meets Kita, Maddy, and Elaine, three people who would do anything to help him.ALL POINTS OF LIGHT CONVERGE is an interwoven story that explores the internal battles of four strangers drawn to something that may save them from themselves.

After her mother is killed in a rare Northern Michigan tornado, Sadie Wixom is left with only her father and grandfather to guide her through the pitfalls of young adulthood.Hundreds of miles away in western Saskatchewan, Stefan Montegrand and his Indigenous family are forced off their land by multinational energy companies and flawed treaties. They are taken in temporarily by Sadie's aunt, a human rights activist who heads a cultural exchange program.Stefan, whose own father died in prison while on a hunger strike, promptly runs afoul of local authority, but Sadie, intrigued by him and captivated by his story, has grown sympathetic to his cause and complicit in his pushback against prejudiced accusations.Their mutual attraction and struggle for equilibrium is stymied when Stefan's older brother, Joachim, who stayed behind, becomes embroiled in the resistance, and Stefan is compelled to return to Canada. Sadie, concerned for his safety, impulsively follows on a trajectory doomed by cultural misunderstanding and oncoming winter.Let Evening Come is the love story between the son of an Indigenous family displaced from their ancestral home on the Tar Sands of Canada and a motherless farm girl from Michigan. Together they combat suspicion and bigotry on both sides of the border and the cultural differences that separate them.

Iconoclastic, deftly crafted, original, memorable and thought-provoking, each one of the short stories comprising "This Kind of Man" is raised by author Sean Murphy to an impressive level of literary excellence.-Midwest Book Review"This Kind of Man, a suite of dramatic monologues and meditations, seems to pick up where Raymond Carver left off: anatomizing all the ways that American masculinity finds itself adrift, with a special thought for the women in the same lifeboat. Murphy sees how we live so plainly and clearly that, in the best possible way, it hurts."-Louis Bayard, author of The Pale Blue Eye THIS KIND OF MAN offers an unvarnished look at life in 21st Century America, excavating the complicated, tender, wild truth of what it is to be a man across generations and relationships. These stories interrogate the pressures and tensions of contemporary life, and the ways men grapple with them, often without success. Issues such as marriage, fatherhood, aggression, alcoholism, gender expectations, generational backlash, and the inexorable dread of death, abound. Many of these stories live within a slow implosion of coping, and often failing, as well as those who refuse to succumb, addressing concerns oft-discussed, or not discussed enough, in mainstream print: gun violence, the recent history of coal country Appalachia, sports-related concussions, illegal immigration (and the jobs many of these ostensibly unwelcome folks are obliged to do), homelessness, and the inability of men to honestly connect or communicate. Far from excusing or exonerating toxic males, this collection locates their violence (toward others, against oneself) in the context of a deadening culture and the false narratives that prevail in an exploitative, zero-sum game capitalist model, where those without are encouraged to quarrel with similarly overworked and underpaid, mostly blue-collar workers. We see that our received notions of manhood and masculinity are inculcated-from the beginning and by design-to ensure willing participation in a system where the overwhelming majority are excluded from the start. We witness the way these dysfunctions are handed down like inheritance, and how every cliché, from fighting to drinking to intolerance of dissent and distrust of others, is a carefully constructed trap, preventing solidarity, empathy, and love (for others, for one's self).

How to Do the Greased Wombat Slide will dance poetry lovers away to places you never knew poems could go. This fifth collection from Chicago poet Pamela Miller (author of Recipe for Disaster and Miss Unthinkable) is a constantly surprising jamboree of surreal situations ("She has teeth inside her teeth inside her teeth"), wildly inventive wordplay ("We're the muck-it-up bungle-thumbs failure brigade"), and zany humor ("When the going gets tough, the tough yell "FOGHORN!").Yet as poet Ralph Hamilton (Teaching a Man to Unstick His Tail) says, "Beneath their surface pleasures, these poems resonate with Miller's generous and exuberant delight in our weird and wounded humanity."

When Lara was four years old, her father moved from Rochester, New York, to Anchorage, Alaska, a distance of over 4,000 miles. She spent her childhood chasing after him, flying a quarter of the way around the world to tug at the hem of his jacket. Now that he is in his eighties, she contemplates her obligation to an absentee father. The Truth About Unringing Phones: Essays on Yearning is an exploration of responsibility and culpability told in experimental and fragmented essays.

Inspired by various disasters, from climate change to the pandemic, the poems of True Stories whirl together extreme weather, isolation, and interpersonal dysfunction into a gathering storm of a book. The first poem, "100-Year Storm" foregrounds cyclical themes, asking readers to consider-again and again, over and over-the effects of interconnected catastrophes. When one storm ends, the next one begins. When waters recede in one place, they flood elsewhere. When we think we're ending, we're only just beginning.Split into five parts named for the four stages of hurricane formation and the eye of the storm, the book builds in intensity only to suddenly provide precious moments of calm relief. Poems about unbridgeable distances are side-by-side with poems about deep friendships and romantic relationships. Shattered free verse poems that move across the page are interspersed with orderly sonnets and other forms. Guiding the reader through a maelstrom before leaving them becalmed, the book artfully reproduces the feeling of living in chaotic times. Intimate and all-encompassing, each line is a torrent of emotion and truth.

Unashamed Observations is a collection of 110 prose poems. The poems address living for nine years in Japan, traveling in the Far East, driving a taxi for five years in New York City, growing up in the Bronx, and living for seven years in an orphanage in Pennsylvania. They include poems about relationships with animals, books, and body parts, and record the depth of experiences with the men and women I have met.

"Girls" is a short story collection that reflects on a central character's run-ins with women ranging from young girls, grandmothers and every woman in between. This isn't Bukowski. This is everyday made remarkable.

In the long-awaited sequel to Anne Leigh Parrish's An Open Door, Edith Sloan navigates life after leaving her dull, demanding husband, Walter, for Henry, a well-off British peer. The bookstore she owns on Harvard Square, The Turned Page, thrives under her management, and prospects for a publishing venture take shape. As 1949 comes to an end, and with her sights trained on a new decade, Edith struggles with stifling social conventions, unreliable men, and an unforeseen circumstance that might ruin everything.

Passport to Perdita is a story of how a man handles unexpected truth. When Gordon's elderly father dies, he leaves his sixty-year-old son alone with no family. He also leaves a suitcase full of clues to a secret life. Another life. This is a work of fiction set in Nova Scotia, Canada, and Chile.

She Asked Me Where explores the various ways in which the demons, darkness, and pain, both of ourselves and of others, manifest in our lives. It captures the pull of several spectrums innate to the human experience: pain and triumph, fear and power, longing and overcoming, the perfect and the flawed. This collection approaches the liminal spaces of these binaries through recurring themes that are connected in their struggle for control and understanding over what cannot be controlled or understood. Grounded in recurring themes such as unearthing and rediscovery, the collection begins by creating a sense of instability before seeking to find some semblance of coping throughout the narrative.

The broom tree may be identified as a place of hope, provision, providence, sustenance, growth, faith, and calling. The broom tree may also be identified as a place of fear, doubt, despair, depression, anxiety, hiding, running, failure, uncertainty, loneliness, suffering, loss, struggle, and even confrontation. The broom tree may be some or most or all or one or a few or none of these things. For Elijah the prophet, it was the collision of them all. The broom tree was the end, and also the beginning. It was both burial plot and birthplace, both failure and freedom. It was a place of getting beyond the self-image, beyond the projection. It was a place of nakedness, a place of surrender, a place of examining actions, weighing frailty; a place where Elijah weighed himself on the scales of God and found himself wanting. The broom tree is a place I am, a place I thought I was, a place I hate, a place I love, a place I wish I never had to come to and a place I don't wish to leave. The Broom Tree dares to challenge, "Where will you find shade in the desert?"

A meditation in a rush, kiss & release is driven by the intense voice of an observant, insistent & emotional "I." He's an urban gay man who admits he's here with a date, but you never know how the night will end. He has several loves, at least a few fuckboys, and many questions:most spells are made with words & broken by a kiss, why not the other way around?what is more intimate than a whisper?how long will yr wife be gone?Have you ever noticed it? asks "Love Is Finished Again," a poem cycle revealed in seven movements. The sequence muses on how we end up in the same place over & over in sex & love & everything. The only real change is through decay that makes ruins, noseless busts, caves of Pompeii, brothel rooms. Even language & communication decay, as a number of mashup and collaborative poems explore.Are you ready for the beats? This book is a party and a romance. It's a lucid dream.This poetry accuses, brags, confesses, obsesses, panics & promises. It discos, raves & swings. It falls in love during a hookup but gets bored at a four-way. It woos the Zodiac; tries to get its virginity back; invents sex as a religion, mythologizes masculinity & succumbs to its devils; kills a snake to resurrect a lover; gives a blowjob at a dirty book store; goes to see bad performance art; looks for love & finds it everywhere/wherever.

At the age of forty-nine, driven by an urgent restlessness, Laurie Woodford rents out her house, packs her belongings into two suitcases, and relocates to Asia. What begins as an opportunity to teach college English overseas, evolves into a nomadic adventure as Laurie works and volunteers in South Korea, Ethiopia, Peru, Spain, and Mexico. After four years of traveling, Laurie's return "home" to the U.S. becomes an unexpected adventure of its own when she ends up in Arkansas and meets Bruce, a bird-loving, bearded Quaker, who challenges her to reconcile her life of fierce independence with her longing to feel settled and loved.

In Singer's latest book, the engine is story-telling, but beneath the plots lurk layers of madness and magic, as well as startling, genre-busting juxtapositions. For example, two related stories, "Buying a Car" and "Selling a Car," are N.Y. City picaresques combined with technical automotive detail and the history of a marriage. Written almost three decades apart, these two stories mirror their times, from the 1970's recession to the wave of immigration that was a by-product of the war in Afghanistan.The play, "Voir, Dear," is also about an immigrant (Russian-Jewish); its themes are race, justice, language, and family relationships. Race and justice are also the themes of "Simple," and family relationships are at the heart of "Norman's Cousin." The final piece in the collection, "Flagman," is about a Cuban immigrant, but the narrator is a racist and nativist. A constant note in this edgy, passionate collection is mockery of public officials. A leitmotif is the inexorable rise in the cost-of-living, as well as other important changes to life in the city.Norman's Cousin & Other Writings is full of allusions to literature and the other arts. "Simple" takes its title from Langston Hughes, and alludes to the history of rhythm-and-blues. "Carla, the Copy-Shop Girl," a satirical libretto, is an analogue to Melville's "Bartleby, The Scrivener," with echoes of Horatio Alger. "The Rented Pet" combines several genres, including local color, animal saga, and Grade-B Hollywood melodrama. As the heroine, Mildred Schapp, says when she rents the grizzled canine hero, Rex, "I like ... an older dog."

In a post pandemic world, how do we rebuild what is broken? Pool Parties dives into dinosaurs, pop culture, hospital beds, barnacles, geology, and the soil of the midwest to dig through and sift our aching to heal psyche. Found poems about crystals, Sabrina the teenage witch, and building trails are just some of the topics of these playful yet sometimes dark poems. Once shielding ourselves from the world in tiny boxes, we now long to break the glass, feel the sun, and one another, but it is scary. Try to connect we must, if we fail, we must fail better. What rooms are our safe spaces? What woods? From Ranch for Sale, As is: "In the god trees you disappeared into Port wine and too many off ramp brown eye role playing games. My heart in a 1960s ranch style basement. Thought you'd come in, shake out the red and white checkered tablecloth, pull aside the daisy patterned curtains." MacBain-Stephens invites us to dive into the deep end of the pool where it is always too cold at first. We don't trust our own pleas for help and need a third operator to repeat our words back to us: "the operator whispers / plays the soundtrack to the The Third Man / listens in, but this isn't Orson Welles in black and white beauty..." (from The Telephone Operator Knows When to Plug in.) Pool Parties is a delicious awkward visit to that place you left too quickly, just when it was getting interesting.

On a foggy morning in New York City, a man and a woman are about to run into each other, literally. Upon impact, they fall to the ground in an instinctively protective hug. The fog dissipates, and they stare into each other's eyes in disbelief, at the sheer magnitude of their bodily collision and their subsequent, spontaneous coupling. They laugh. The man, a writer, invites the woman, an artist, for coffee and they talk until lunch. They date. They fall in love, hard. They marry just two months later. And four years later, their marriage is on the precipice of disaster.On a foggy morning in New York City, the same man and woman pass through the fog, oblivious of each other's existence. Until five years later, when the writer finds an oval-shaped locket no bigger than his thumbnail, a tiny white dress painted within the boundary of its golden border.Lines is about possibilities, about the choices we make - or fail to make. It's a star-crossed love story; it's a bitter tragedy. It's about Josh and Abby and their intertwined lives, together and apart, through births and deaths and the beautiful mess in between.

Wake up in a storm. Row down a flooded alley of people looking for their way home. "Nothing but the Weather" wades through the water, both clean and dirty, digging up life without cleaning it off first. The collection introduces you to a grandmother who reads magazines at the grief counselor's office because her son wants her to adjust to life again. You will rub shoulders with a bipolar Lynn who has half-started just about every career. Mingle with an array of family units that hold secrets, lies, but love one another.

Set in the early days of the Trump presidency, A Symmetry of Husbands probes the inner workings of marriage and long friendship. As she grieves the death of her friend, Megan, Abigail struggles with complicated feelings of lingering desire for Megan's husband, and guilt over their affair. Abigail also entertains a growing suspicion of the circumstances of Megan's death, and her own possible complicity.

As climate change ravages the small beach town of Sunport, Alabama, Devin feels increasingly unfit to prepare her children for what can only be a bleak future. Her mental health devolves overtime into lethargy and despair until Devin meets an unhoused woman, Trinity. With Trinity's guidance, Devin explores a newfound freedom and will to live.

Riding atop grief's didactic waves, Rancourt skillfully writes in a variety of poetic forms that support the intimate melding of shared experience as healer, elder, and human being. Prose, lyric, ballad, couplets, and haiku inspired - Rancourt continues to push the boundaries of trauma. Songs of Archilochus is an odyssey of soul recovery over great distances, time, and place: a migration from moral injury to a momentary place of peace. It takes courage to age with grace. It takes courage to sing the songs that we have been given - but sing we must for that is how the healing is carried - that is how the stories take shape - how they become a part of history whether personal, societal, global, or Universal. Songs of Archilochus reminds us that the vibration of human life knows no border, boundary, box or cage. Warrior. Poet. Lovers. Sing.

Boys, Girls represents the poetic of five Northern California poets who examine tragedies and relationships in a way that forces an emotional response too great to be read within the pages of a novel. Poets Kevin Gunn, Odette Metamorph, Nicole Pomeroy, Cesar Reyes, and Michelle Tran can be reached through Unsolicited Press's website: http: //unsolicitedpress.wix.com/unsolicitedpress

A poetry chapbook that examines the world from up above.

Jo Mason is the commanding officer of a large mounted band base. Thanks to a horse almost killing her, she is terrified by the noble creatures she once loved. That is until she meets the rogue's stallion's son, who has his own trust issues. Together, they embark on a quest to make her lifelong dream of winning a prestigious international competition come true. Can Jo move beyond her fear and those that may be standing in the way?

Poetry exercises are a smart way to develop one's "toolbox" -- but why would you want to pay $15,000-45,000 per year to get to those exercises? Our book offers poets at all levels a variety of poetry exercises designed to push you out of the comfort of your style. Not to mention, a brief selection of poetry terms are outlined.