Bøger udgivet af Wapshott Press

Poetrylandia, Issue 5, "Three Soul-Makers: Poems That Bring Us Together" Darkly beautiful, erotic, lyrical and haunting poems inspired by experiences of love and loss, this collection carries readers across time, geography, and interior space to embrace both the pain and beauty of living fully in an ever-changing world. Mary Kennedy Eastham's work has been called darkly beautiful, erotic, lyrical and haunting. One reviewer said sitting down with her poems blew his hair back flat, reminding him of when he was in high school, laying in the grass at the end of the runway as the jets took off. In the poem The Shadow of A Dog I Can't Forget, a woman, married for only 60 days, deals with feelings of melancholy by inventing a mysterious dog only she can see. Mary Eastham carefully crafts a world of runaways, mystical goddesses, happy strippers, and Marilyn Monroe returned to us to comment on her life being auctioned away. The poet's words nag at us the way only a great seduction can...like liquid pearls falling from the sky above/as soft and easy as a fortune teller's dreams/We are beautiful alone with ourselves/they seem to say/evening snowflakes floating beneath a faint moon/like fingertips about to touch/a new piano/each sound, each song/a miracle.Mary Kennedy Eastham's book The Shadow of A Dog I Can't Forget - Poems & Prose was a Best Books Award Finalist, a Celebrity Achiever Winner, a Runner-Up for Best Poetry Book and was a Wild Card Runner Up in the Paris and Amsterdam Book Festivals. Points of Love, a poem from that book was a recent Writer's Digest Poetry Winner, a San Francisco Dancing Poetry Winner and a $5,000 winner in the Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Foundation. She has gotten two generous writer's award grants from the Arts Council Silicon Valley. She is working on her third book of flash fiction titled Little Earthquakes. She teaches College Essay Seminars in the San Francisco Bay Area and is the Flash Fiction Judge for the San Francisco Soul-Making Keats Literary Competition. Eileen Malone grew up in England, Ireland and Australia and now lives in the coastal fog at the edge of the San Francisco Bay Area. Her poems and stories have been published in over 500 literary journals and anthologies, a significant amount of which have earned awards, i.e., four Pushcart nominations. She has published four poetry collections and a book on writing groups and taught with the California Poets in the Schools and Community Colleges. A mental health activist, Eileen wrote these poems inspired by her experiences with her adult son diagnosed with schizophrenia at nineteen. She speaks for those who cannot or dare not: the families and loved ones of those with serious mental illnesses. You are not alone, they call out, we feel your pain, your love and loss, we listen, care, make loving human connections. We know tragedy and still we endure. Together, we sing our pain. www.eileenmalone.us and www.soulmakingcontest.us Kathleen McClung's books include Temporary Kin, The Typists Play Monopoly, Almost the Rowboat, and A Juror Must Fold in on Herself, winner of the 2020 Rattle Chapbook Prize. Her award-winning poems appear widely in journals and anthologies. McClung teaches at Skyline College where she directed the annual Women on Writing conference for ten years. Assistant director of the Soul-Making Keats literary competition, she was a 2018-19 writer-in-residence at Friends of the San Francisco Public Library. www.kathleenmcclung.com This collection carries readers across time, geography, and interior space. Poems move from the Cuban missile crisis to the Covid-19 crisis, from hospitals and cemeteries to spring sidewalks of Barcelona and San Francisco, from the zestful curiosity of childhood to the wry wisdom of age. McClung harnesses a variety of poetic forms-sonnets, centos, villanelles, sestinas, and others-to embrace both the pain and beauty of living fully in an ever-changing world.More information at www.WapshottPress.org

Storylandia 15 features five tales of dark fantasy and horror by British writer Julie Travis. "From the Bones," two ancient corpses are discovered on the wild moors of Devon and Cornwall. For one amateur archaeologist they reveal more about the past-and the landscape-than she'd ever imagined. "Grave Goods," Edward Dobbs' excuse for drinking and gambling his family's money away was, to quote an old saying, 'you can't take it with you when you go.' His son Eddy is offered a diabolical opportunity to disprove the adage. In "Scar Tissue," everyone's life leaves marks on them, physically or emotionally, but Marie was different. No scars, just flawless flesh, a life untainted by injury. "Theophany" shows us a hellish underworld that re-emerges to stalk present-day London, aided by a man with his own, deviant agenda. "Widdershins" brings us a girl who defies folklore and walks counter-clockwise around a church, an act that has repercussions for the rest of her life.

Orlan Lightesblood is the son of the world's most powerful wizard and is training to become a wizard himself. But beyond his father's castle, he is still an innocent youth, defenseless against the evil and temptations that threaten the future laid out for him. On an alternate earth filled with wonder and danger, the wizard's son must overcome the demons of his own past and his father's enemies to survive to manhood.

"'Darkness at Sunset and Vine' draws on conventions and stock characters from several genres such as comic books, anime, and action-adventure movies. For me, the most important influence on the structure of the novel is the tradition of Film Noir. As in a classic Humphrey Bogart movie, "Darkness" gives us the first person narrative of a jaded private investigator in Southern California, navigating his/her way through a jungle of violence and moral bankruptcy. As in the classic Noir film or Raymond Chandler novel, the heart of the story is not about solving the case. It's about the journey the protagonist takes to get there. "Darkness," like a good Noir film, is sort of a Pilgrim's Progress in a landscape with every scrap of moral certainty removed." From the Introduction by Kelly S. Taylor, Ph.D.

It's 1984 and Hackenbush's broken heart is on the mend as she assists the very roguish, but devastatingly charming theater director, Monte Vista, in his last and greatest production. Mabel Hackenbush, better known as the singer, dancer, ukulele player extraordinaire, and front woman for Dr. Hackenbush and her Orchestra, has taken a chance on love and lost. After an epic binge, she can't sing, won't dance, and can only get through the day by focusing on her temp secretary job. Add in all this, the band has a big show coming up that Hackenbush might not be able to do in her current state of mind. Could this be the end of Dr. Hackenbush and her Orchestra? Into this dire situation saunters Monte Vista, theater maven supreme, who says he wants Hackenbush to help him write his memoirs. But for what he really wants... well, Hackenbush will have to call in reinforcements for that. And even then the outcome isn't a sure thing.

When Laurel Windswift enters an apprenticeship under her uncle, the great wizard Lord Redmantyl, she sees only the delights that her magic can bring. But her desire for more knowledge brings her too soon into the dark secrets that all magicians of power share, and forces her to take up a wizard's duties of night vigils against monstrous and inhuman forces before she is ready. When Laurel returns to her home city to investigate a small magical anomaly for her uncle, this maiden of light meets a child of darkness, and must undertake a task too terrible to perform. On an alternate earth filled with wonder and danger, the wizard's niece must make a decision that will affect the rest of her life. As she struggles with the unbearable obligations of a magician, she also faces the ostracism of the merchant families who cast her out as a child, her aunt's matchmaking efforts, and finding an unexpected love.

Set in late 2008, "Electricland" satirically describes a large scale terrorist operation that goes wrong and the damage control put into effect in Los Angeles. The terrorist cell of seven brilliant middle aged women, known as the Seven Sirens, use hackers and gamers in the massively multiplayer online role-playing game online game called "Electricland" to wreak havoc in and terrorize secure networks. The hackers and gamers think they're playing a game while they're really being played by the Seven Sirens. Until one of the hackers gets cocky and all hell breaks loose.

Set in 1988, Mabel Hackenbush is between gigs, her baritone ukulele smashed, and her car in the shop, she is bravely temp secretarying her way to a kinder, gentler, not to mention, solvent life until she can get back to work as a jazz standards singer.