FORTHCOMING BOOKS FROM THE POET'S PRESS/ YOGH & THORN:
An Egyptian Reader.
Chamber Music Evenings.
Aeschylus. Orestes and the Furies.
Poems from the Greek Anthology.
The Art of Amazing Dumplings.
Victor Hugo and the Siege of Paris.
MICHAEL FRACHIONI. BUS POEMS.
Poets who practice law are a rarity, yet a few, like Wallace Stevens and Archibald MacLeish, hewed a path to literary fame while disguised Clark Kent-like as sensible attorneys. Michael Frachioni is a member of this secret society, too. In his daily bus commute to Pittsburgh, he finds time and space to read, observe, think and write, about characters on the bus and many other things.
His premiere poetry collection, Bus Poems, falls into four distinct, but related, parts. “First Lights” are poems about starting out and, making one’s way — in writing and in life. Some other poets are evoked for advice or inspiration, including Billy Collins, Robert Frost, Rainer Maria Rilke, Wallace Stevens, Walt Whitman and William Carlos Williams. One powerful poem, “September 12,” compresses the nation’s grief and shock of 9/11 into the actions and gestures of one man attempting to absorb the unthinkable.
“Montana” serves as a detour to a beautiful place of the rugged Rockies and the arid, unforgiving landscape of the high plains.
In “Bus Poems,” the heart of this collection, Frachioni writes expressly about riding the bus, or the people one meets there, among them a painter, an elderly woman trying to quit smoking, and a couple of poor, lost souls at the bus stop.
“Eventide” concludes the book with poems about loss — from a pet to a parent — but always, ultimately, with hope.
In addition to poetry, which has honed all his other writing, and flying airplanes, which also taught him to pay close attention, Michael Frachioni has written and lectured on business and law, local history, cartography, and ancient Greek architecture. He is a member of the Allegheny Valley Poets, participating in poetry readings and workshops around Pittsburgh.
This is the 320th publication of The Poet’s Press. ISBN 9798344905563. 128 pages, 6 x 9 inches, paperback. ISBN 9798344905563. $12.95. To order from Amazon: https://amzn.to/3O4iCNY
CALLIMACHUS IN ALEXANDRIA: A POEM CYCLE.
EXPANDED SECOND EDITION 2024.
Adaptations and expansions from the ancient Greek, by Brett Rutherford. Callimachus was born around 310 BCE in Cyrene, a Greek city in what is now Libya. He found his way to Alexandria, and after some years of poverty as a school-teacher, he was noticed by one of the Ptolemies and called to court. In accounts written centuries later, he is described as either working at, or being in charge of, the Great Library of Alexandria. He is known to have written some 800 works, including an epic on the secret origins of various gods and mythological figures. The only extant complete works of this ancient Greek master are 64 epigrams, and his eight Hymns to gods in the Homeric manner.
This expanded volume presents new translations/adaptations of most of the epigrams, two segments from the Homeric hymns, and fragments from an epic. These poems are personal, imbued with the poet’s own personality; they are usually short, compressed, and brutally to the point. He did not invent the epigram, but he did create examples of breath-taking beauty. Even when the poem is an imaginary tombstone epitaph, the slightly self-mocking world-view of Callimachus shines through. Fate is brutal, life is short, and heroism mixed with passion are allowed to shine, even if they do not triumph.
Stuffy classicists of the past, mired in Puritanism and sexual repression, seemed unwilling to read between the lines and let Callimachus speak. We can now see him as the high-minded, aloof, gay librarian who lives down the hall, with a never-ending array of younger male companions, a man who lives well, eats well, and veers between joy and desolation, all on a librarian’s salary.
The poems in this volume are not literal translations. Although they contain most of the Greek’s words or phrases, much has been added to flesh out the narrative and to create a more modern, speaking voice. Other things are added to make each poem self-explicate so that footnotes are not needed. To varying extent, then, these are paraphrases, adaptations, and expansions. The form is improvised free verse, with a nod to the elegance and restraint of Roman poetry. This second, expanded edition includes eight new translations and adaptations done since the first printing in 2022.
“Love-Spells,” a poem by Callimachus’s friend and successor Theocritus, is also included.
The Poet's Press. This is the 305th publication of The Poet’s Press. Published October 2022, updated 2024. Paperback, 100 pages, 6 x 9 inches. ISBN 9798355028183. $12.00. CLICK HERE to order paperback from Amazon. CLICK HERE to order the Kindle edition for $2.99.
VENUS OF MALTA.
Poems by Suzanne Gili Post. Now in both paperback and Kindle epub editions. Maltese-American poet Suzanne Gili Post grew up in Brooklyn, NY in the 1960s and 1970s. Of this Mediterranean-American adaptation, she writes, “My family found themselves in one of the world’s largest cities but could not have come from a tinier, more unknown or misunderstood place.” As she inhaled pop culture in the punk era, she was also steeped in the mysteries of Malta, the oldest settled place in Europe, whose strange stone figures and silent temples provide a clashing backdrop. From this collision come her poems.
She has been active in the New Jersey “Poets of the Palisades” poetry circle since its beginning in the early 2000s. A cultural activist despite spending over 40 years working nine-to-five, her shifting secret identities have included executive assistant, yoga and meditation trainer, skip tracer, fashion model, lunch lady, play writer, nursery school teacher, recording artist, discussion leader, cook, journalist, trip leader, celebrity handler, costume mistress, photographer, art gallery curator, floral arranger, calligrapher, personal shopper, and shoe salesperson.
Suzanne calls poetry the poor man’s “word art,” whose rich history brings people together in coffee houses, living rooms, pizza parlors and performance stages. It is a form so essential that “even children can recognize it much in the same way we always recognize the voice of those we love.” In Venus of Malta, her long-awaited first book, Suzanne Gili Post steps into the spotlight.
This is the 311th publication of The Poet’s Press. Published March 2023. 172 pages, 6 x 9 inches, paperback, $14.95. ISBN 9798387982002. CLICK HERE to order from Amazon. NEW KINDLE EDITION PUBLISHED OCTOBER 2024. CLICK HERE TO ORDER for $2.99.
DENISE LA NEVE. HALF-LIVES OF THE RADIUM GIRLS.
In this debut book of poetry, New Jersey poet Denise La Neve moves from a quiet center of memory — charmed summers in a remote village in the Vosges Mountains of France — to the hard realities around us, where numbers take on arcane meaning, science reveals the secrets of prehistory, and medicine adds its jargon to the mysteries of aging and vulnerability. LaNeve travels afar, not only in the present-day on foreign jaunts and geological amber hunts, but also in the past. As a poet engaged with history, a time traveler, she chooses to narrate in poems the plights of women in danger: stalked in London by Jack the Ripper, smothered and burned in the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, or slowly poisoned by radium in a factory that made “glow in the dark” wristwatches.
La Neve writes both poetry and fiction. She was a contributor and editor for a trilogy of three “Poets of the Palisades” anthologies: Beyond the Rift (2010), META-LAND (2016), and On the Verge (2020). Her work has also appeared in literary journals, such as Quill and Parchment, Exit 13, The Istanbul Literary Review, Sensations Magazine, The Red Wheelbarrow Anthology, and Platform Review. She co-hosts The Palisades Poetry Series and The High Mountain Meadow Poetry Series, centered in northern New Jersey, with both in-person and zoom events.
Advance praise for Half-Lives of the Radium Girls, by Denise La Neve (The Poet’s Press, 2024).
“Honest, accessible and original, the deeply-felt poems in Denise La Neve’s Half-lives of the Radium Girls address such wide-ranging subjects as the passing of Lisa Marie Presley, the Triangle Shirtwaist Fire, and, in “Ghosts,” the poignant wishes of the deceased: the dead want to sleep/if they want anything. But whatever her subject, La Neve returns always to the essential question of how we face both tragedy and wonder.”
—Catherine Doty, American poet, author of Momentum and Wonderama
“Half-Lives of the Radium Girls captures history and autobiography with equally vivid details and thoughtful revelations, sometimes taking a turn midway through a poem to illuminate its subject from a striking angle. A tribute to the late daughter of Elvis turns into a meditation on the loss of friendships; a contemplation of death arrives at the conclusion that all humans are possessed by ghosts; a poem about gambling odds and mathematical probabilities turns out to have been a love poem all along. I could never quite predict what I would be reading about each time I turned the page, and in the end, I felt as if I had borne witness to an entire lifetime of unique experiences and hard-earned wisdom.
— Anton Yakovlev, American poet and translator, author most recently of One Night We Will No Longer Bear the Ocean.
“Denise La Neve debuts with a wide-ranging collection of poems informed by history, places near and far away, various disciplines of science, the untold or erased lives of women — and by an avid, searching eye for beauty, which she unveils again and again.”
—George Witte, American poet, editor-in-chief of St. Martin’s Press, and the author most recently of An Abundance of Caution
“Denise achieves a rare thing in these poems, finding the humanity in both the grand pages of history and the smallest beating heart. This is the life's work of a poet, grappling with love and loss, the past and future, joy and sadness, handling all with the empathy and understanding of expert hands. These are words that demand to not only be read, but to be lived with.”
—Josh Humphrey: American poet, and Director of the Kearny Library.
“In Half-Lives of the Radium Girls, La Neve’s poems float like satellites above the Earth. Her enchanting encapsulations of beauty and loss drift from the Mullica River to the Aegean Sea. As she dissects death by name or number or describes love without name or date, her imagination is imbued with memories and empathies, whether mining her own life of its still-fresh radium, or the half-lives carefully researched and long gone. As a poem hovers in orbit, we gaze in admiration at La Neve’s craft of luminosity.”
—Alison Ruth, author of Starlight Black and the Misfortune Society and Near-Mint Cinderella
This is the 317th publication of The Poet’s Press. Published September 2024. ISBN 110 pages, paperback, 6 x 9 inches, $12.95. ISBN 979-8336390414. Kindle epub edition $2.99. CLICK HERE TO ORDER FROM AMAZON.
BRETT RUTHERFORD. MIDNIGHT ON BENEFIT STREET.
Neo-Romantic American poet Brett Rutherford spent nearly three decades in the haunted city of Providence, Rhode Island, where the sad shades of Edgar Poe and H. P. Lovecraft are omnipresent. In this 270-page collection of poems, fiction, and journal entries from 2012-2014, the author covers the gamut of his literary and musical passions: mythology, Lovecraftian horror, political satire, classical music, classic European literature from the Middle Ages through the Romantic era. Assembled as a “farewell to Rhode Island,” this volume can be seen as a woven literary memoir. The satire is rich and thick, and Lovecraft and his fans get the worst of it in narratives about a special mental hospital ward for people who think they are H. P. Lovecraft, and a remote Pacific island where “Lovecraft” tourists inhale a mystery-drug to make contact with Elder Gods. Providence’s most famous writer is also honored straight-up in tribute poems such as “The Tree at Lovecraft’s Grave” and “Midnight on Benefit Street.” There are also poems translated from Alexander Pushkin, Anna Akhmatova, Emperor Li Yu, Martial, and Hafiz.
Few poets have such a range as Rutherford, as an extinct Trilobite speaks of doomed romance, cemetery managers conspire to keep Lovecraft fans away from his grave, the Titan Prometheus argues with Zeus about whether humans deserve to survive, the Empress of Mexico tells her life-story from a Belgian madhouse, a Chinese emperor sighs over loss and forbidden love, a sinister colonial schoolhouse reveals its dark secrets, and a young Greek girl learns how to “play dead” when her mother goes on a murderous rampage.
A group of poems in honor of artist Riva Leviten (1928-2014) demonstrate the art of “ekphrasis,” basing elaborate narrative poems on single works of visual art. The author and artist, near neighbors in Providence, shared a keen sense of coincidence and dream-based creation. Two short-stories set in Providence’s historic East Side, “The Readings at Blighted Corners” and “The Specter of St. John’s Churchyard” are sure to alarm readers who have to contend with New England’s attics, basements, and shadowy churchyards.
The extensive journal postings include a harrowing section titled “The Hookah Wars, or Why I Left Providence,” an account of living in a decaying neighborhood surrounded by hookah bars, drug dealers, toxic air, noise, and violence, all this one block from an Ivy-League university. Writers and artists once flocked to Providence, but this journal reviews, cogently, and with some humor, why many have moved on.
This is the 318th publication of The Poet’s Press. Published September 2024. ISBN 9798339397298. 276 pages, paperback, 6 x 9 inches. $14.95. To order from Amazon: https://amzn.to/47rWvto. Kindle and PDF versions in preparation.
THE HAND YOU'RE DEALT.
J. Rutherford Moss, aka Jacqueline Tedrow Moss, lives by the sea with her husband in East Quogue, New York, where she regularly greets the sunrise with her camera and pen. Her poetry is informed by the whispers of tides, symbols of dreams, and revelations that rise from contemplative practices. Family ancestry, heightened states of consciousness and transcendence are common themes in her work. Jacqueline’s award-winning poems have been published in several literary journals. A mother, grandmother, and retired teacher, she now spends her time performing with the Long Island Sound Chorus and serving as a hospice volunteer.
Born in Mount Pleasant, PA in 1952, to a family with Scottish, British, and Czech forebears, she heard about distant relatives who resisted in The Whiskey Rebellion, others who labored in the region’s coal mines and coke-ovens, and others (the Rutherfords) who owned some of the mines, mills, and enterprises of Western Pennsylvania’s brief golden age of industry.
She studied at California (PA) State College, Brooklyn College, and also at Parsons School of Design and Suffolk Community College, finally getting a teaching degree from Long Island University. She received an MA in Social Policy from SUNY Empire. For a number of years she owned and ran the progressive Hampton Bays Children’s Center, and later worked at The Ross School, where she was both teacher and curriculum designer.
This is the 310th publication of The Poet’s Press. Published April 2023. 156 pages, 6 x 9 inches, paperback, $14.95. ISBN 9798391018094. CLICK HERE to order from Amazon. CLICK HERE to order the Kindle edition for $1.99.
TWO RUSSIAN EXILES: SELECTED
FICTION OF MIKHAIL ARTSYBASHEV AND LEONID ANDREYEV.
Mikhail Artsybashev (1878-1927) and Leonid Andreyev (1871 -1919) both spent their last years in exile from Soviet Russia, and saw their works banned in their native land. Each had gained notoriety for shocking the reading public and alarming the authorities. Artsybashev was a realist and an anarchist. Describing one Artsybashev story, an American critic wrote, “Twenty-three pages are sufficient for the author to produce a finished work that begins in laughter, and ends in horror so awful that no one should read it whose nerves are not under control.” Andreyev took the world as he found it, and wove an obsessive web of war, sexuality, and death, so much so that he has been called the Russian Edgar Allan Poe.
These ten stories, edited/adapted and introduced by Brett Rutherford, are as fresh as today’s headlines. With a journalist’s sharp focus, they deal with sexual predators, murderers, political fanatics, mass shooters, corrupt officials, the traumas visited upon soldiers in battle, and the dehumanization of a people as they are pulled into a civil war against their fellow citizens. These two authors lived in times that tested and distorted the very idea of what it is to be human, and their stories are an unflinching warning. As an outsider and anarchist, Artsybashev seems not to have an answer to the dilemmas he portrays, but he is there to show us that all these things are human; they are what people do. Andreyev has more soul and humanity, and his retreat into the Finnish countryside, to look at Russia from outside rather than be killed within in, shows him as a principled man who still had hope for his people, even if it seemed that humanistic values were no longer an assured progression.
A Yogh & Thorn Book. This is the 258th publication of The Poet's Press. Published December 2019, revised and corrected July 2024. 6x9 inches, 266 pp. ISBN 9781676891512. $16.95 CLICK HERE to order paperback from Amazon.
Hardcover edition published December 2021: ISBN 9798782481674 $19.95. CLICK HERE to order hardcover from Amazon. PDF ebook version and an EPUB version now also available for $2.99. (see link below).
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BRETT RUTHERFORD’S
FROM HECLA TO JACOB’S CREEK
American neo-Romantic poet Brett Rutherford spent his first thirteen years in the coal and coke districts of southwestern Pennsylvania. The Rutherfords had emigrated from Northumberland in England to Scottdale around 1880, and took part in its mill-town boom as business owners, financiers, and shop owners. After the Depression destroyed the town’s fortunes, the family remained, a pinch-penny aristocracy.
The other side of his family dwells “out home,” where Alsatian maternal grandparents lived in squalor in a tar-paper-covered shack. These country people, their pride and their secrets, left an indelible impression that emerges in this book.
In addition to coke ovens, coal mines, and decrepit houses, the poet’s early childhood is also blasted by the specter of “Dr. Jones,” who, his mother assures him, can be summoned with a phone call, to employ his amputation saws on the limbs of any disobedient child. Connected to this is the threat of “Torrance,” the state mental hospital where several aunts and uncles had been sent, where ordinary mental patients were confined with the criminally insane. The two poems recovering memories of this psychological horror are a jarring specimen of childhood trauma.
This is a book of secrets. A grandmother reveals her Native American origins. An imaginary playmate turns out to be real. A pact is made to help a visiting Rabbi make a Golem. Small boys wrestle with the discovery of a sex manual. A neighbor woman freezes to death in a cold wave. A hesitant girl on the library steps never manages to cross its threshold. After a divorce scandal, the town pulls a blanket of silence and shunning, and a family name is erased from history.
This memoir in poems portrays a true “outsider,” already reading adult literature from the age of six, finding his own way out of a brutal and forbidding landscape.
This is the 316th publication of The Poet’s Press. Published July 2024. Epub and Kindle $1.99. Order from Amazon at https://amzn.to/3WoHuVA.
BRETT RUTHERFORD'S
SEPTEMBER SARABANDE
(NEW POEMS AND WRITINGS 2022).
A tour-de-force of literary creation, September Sarabande presents all the poems and fiction created by neo-Romantic American poet Brett Rutherford in the twelve months of 2022. Along with the usual bizarre and Gothic creations of this Pittsburgh-based poet, the 209 poems also trace in biting satire the year of COVID, the Giant Insane Baby Ex-President, and looming mass extinctions. Placed here in the order written, the poems span settings as diverse as rural Pennsylvania, Revolutionary Russia, Tang Dynasty China, and New York City. The speaking voice can be The Emperor of China, a centipede living beneath a carpet, a solitary oak leaf in Crimea, or a librarian in ancient Alexandria. Three poem-cycles adapt and expand the writings of poets whose works are seldom seen in English: the witty Eros-obsessed Greeks Callimachus and Meleager, and Li Yu, the exiled and doomed last Emperor of Southern Tang, whose poems are counted as the saddest things ever written in the Chinese language. Rutherford enfolds the originals into narrative cycles that portray each classic poet in his times, yet makes each work speak with new meaning for our times.
This volume also includes four supernatural sketches about a First World War succubus, Edgar Poe's encounter with a graveyard specter, a childhood meeting with the legendary Jewish Golem, and the confessions of Dr. Frankenstein’s hunchback assistant. These compressed narratives are akin to European supernatural sketches like those of Ludwig Tieck from the Romantic era.
Finally, more than 180 Facebook diary entries trace the poet’s everyday life and writing, with ideas and rants shared online with his friends. As a journal of living through a time of epidemic and dreadful politics, this casts light on some of the poems and what prompted them. Rutherford’s engagement with film, classic literature, classical music, poetry publishing, and his Pittsburgh environs, all shine through.
This is the 315th publication of The Poet’s Press. Published April 2024. Paperback, 490 pages, 6 by 9 inches. ISBN 9798321267684. $21.95. CLICK HERE TO ORDER FROM AMAZON.
NEW EXPANDED EDITION WITH 267 POEMS!
THE WRITINGS OF EMILIE GLEN 3: POEMS FROM MAGAZINES
For more than four decades, New York City poet Emilie Glen produced a torrent of poetry, widely published in little magazines all over the world, and in a series of books and chapbooks that went through numerous reprints. Yet when the poet died in 1995, all that remained of her papers were several shopping bags full of manuscripts, chapbooks, and tear sheets of already-published works. From this legacy, Brett Rutherford has assembled all the presently-available poems of this prolific New York poet. This third volume, in its first printing, presented the 193 recovered poems that appeared in magazines and newspapers, but were not included in Glen’s many chapbooks. None of these poems existed in manuscript. Now, because more long-unavailable little magazines can be found online and in academic databases, 74 more poems have been located, adding to the treasure trove of this important collection. Two portraits of the poet have come to light, and they are included as well.
Open anywhere, and the Emilie Glen we know from the first volume is still here in spades: poet, actress, pianist, bird-watcher, cat-lover, nature rhapsodist, the woman of Manhattan with a piercing eye for character and image. She is the city, the street, the windows, the bridges and tunnels, the parks and fountains, the desperate dreamers on the doorsteps. This volume also includes the full text of an out-of-print chapbook from 1963 titled Laughing Lute and Other Poems.
This is the 314th publication of The Poet’s Press. Published April 2024. 316 pages, 6 x 9 inches, paperback, $16.95. ISBN 9798320159003. CLICK HERE to order from Amazon. Also available for $2.99 as a PDF ebook from: https://payhip.com/b/XdEV
BY NIGHT AND LAMP: THE WORLD OF MELEAGER.
A Poem Cycle by Brett Rutherford. The poet Meleagros, known to us by his Latinized name Meleager, lived in the first century BCE. Born in Gadara in what is modern-day Jordan and spending most of his years in the Greek-speaking city of Tyre in modern-day Lebanon, he spent his last decades on the Aegean island of Kos. In his poetry he is as Greek as any Athenian, and as the compiler and editor of the first great anthology of Greek lyrics, epigrams, and fragments, he knew the mythology and literature of the Hellenic world through and through.
Like his forerunner Callimachus, Meleager devoted most of his poems to a self-effacing confession of his failed and thwarted love affairs, with both women and men. He met his match in the brilliant woman Heliodora, but her scandalous infidelities drove him away in jealous rage. The singer Zenophila also charmed him, but the outcome was the same. Blame two meddlers for Meleager’s troubles: the goddess Aphrodite, and her son Eros (Cupid), who kept everyone in an endless circus of new amours and trysts. No one was to blame with Love’s arrows flying in every direction, and if same-sex love happened, too, that was fine with the frat-boy idlers of Tyrene and Kos who attracted Meleager’s attention.
Meleager is more than a love-poet. His sober poems about fate, philosophy, and the Underworld show us the sombre uncertainties of the pagan world. In one monologue from an imaginary tragedy, a messenger describes to Queen Niobe the cruel death of her children, killed by spiteful gods.
This volume combines, translates, adapts, and expands 70 of Meleager’s poems, arranged to present a portrait of a complex and passionate man, and of daily life and love affairs in the first century BCE. The form is improvised free verse, with a nod to the elegance and restraint of Roman poetry.
This is the 312th publication of The Poet’s Press. Published April 2023. 120 pages, 6 x 9 inches, paperback, $24.95. ISBN 9798391383987. CLICK HERE to order from Amazon.
IT HAS FOUND YOU.
New Poems and Writings 2021. Neo-Romantic American poet Brett Rutherford, writing from pandemic isolation in Pittsburgh, finished 35 new poems and ten prose tales and sketches from mid-2020 to the end of 2021. New works here depict a terrifying incubus in the trenches of World War I; the intercepted thoughts of dying COVID victims; the tug of war between planets during the Jupiter-Saturn Great Conjunction; a MAGA plot to outlaw Halloween; visions at The Pantheon and at the walls of Troy; and a wild dream of a malevolent Aztec deity titled “The God Who Uses Cats As Slippers.”
Rutherford’s ongoing project of translation and adaptation spans millennia, from Anglo-Saxon, Greek, Latin, French, German, and Russian. Each is rendered in a new voice with something to say to today’s reader. Anna Akhmatova, living in terror in the Stalin era, receives a Muse’s summons to greatness. Adapted from Ovid comes the gruesome account of Queen Niobe, whose children are killed by angry gods. The desperation of a young woman attempting love-spells comes to life in a monologue from Greek poet Theocritus. Another work, narrated by a duck, is from a Mingo-Iroquois folk tale.
Ten short-stories and prose works in this volume include the Lovecraftian “Readings At Blighted Corners” and “Up in Smoke.” Another tale recounts a Japanese general’s invasion of Korea and his Macbeth-like descent into madness, while “Never to Part,” from a sketch by Ludwig Tieck, explores a world of elusive fairies and sex-crazed goblins.
Here, too, is a COVID-and-Trump Era diary, as the poet shares 240 titled Facebook postings and hundreds of briefer notes, many with links to text and video sources, recreating the daily “coffee house” that the poet maintains with his many friends. Filled with news briefs of the pandemic, rants against Giant Insane Baby President, and dark speculations about politics, these journal entries also celebrate classical music, film, and the wide range of literature the poet has been engaged in editing and adapting.
This is the 308th publication of The Poet’s Press. Published April 2023. 336 pages, 6 x 9 inches, paperback, $16.95. ISBN 9798390821084. CLICK HERE to order from Amazon.
AUTUMN SYMPHONY.
Three Poem Cycles by Brett Rutherford.
This new, expanded ebook is Brett Rutherford’s 67-poem epic cycle of autumn poems. The spirits of Whitman, Shelley, Poe, Pushkin, Hugo, and Bradbury walk alongside the author in this celebration of “autumn’s being,” a linked word symphony in three parts, mythic, metaphysical, political, satirical and, of course, supernatural. This volume expands upon and replaces the previous print volumes, published under the title
Anniversarius in four different editions.
Autumn becomes the landscape for Jan Palach’s suicide in Soviet-invaded Czechoslovakia in 1969; for translations of Pushkin, Lermontov, and Hugo; and for rhapsodic and moody invocations of fall in Western Pennsylvania (the poet’s birthplace) and haunted New England. Greek myth comes in by way of a hymn to Rhea, the Oak Tree Goddess, an encounter with three oak nymphs, and a dinner party in Hades. In Ming Dynasty China, an old poet-scholar confronts Bai Hu, the White Tiger of Autumn, while in other poems the doomed Tang Emperor Li Yu sings out the saddest poems ever to come from China.
Rutherford walks in the footsteps of Poe in New York City, and sets two other powerful poems in Manhattan: one a panorama of historic Madison Square Park, the other a troubled visit in the aftermath of 9/11.
The most important work of this neo-Romantic poet, Autumn Symphony presents a cosmos tinged with autumnal sadness, yet the work is brave with the delight in a life fully relished down to the last falling leaf. Although solitude and loss stalk through these pages, there are also poems expressing a defiant, transcendent spirit. The locales of the latest poems include New York, Providence, rural Pennsylvania, the planets Mars and Pluto, ancient Greece, and ancient China. Relish this book slowly. Read it aloud and savor its music as well as its meaning.
This is the 313th publication of The Poet’s Press. Published April 2023. PDF ebook, 244 pages, 6 x 9 inches. Read online or download from The Internet Archive using the link below.
Autumn Symphony : Brett Rutherford : Free Download, Borrow, and Streaming : Internet Archive
WASTEBASKET ELEGIES & PLYWOOD DELIGHTS.
New Poems by Jacqueline de Weever. Writers have responded in many ways to seeing the cities in which they dwell become places of crisis and mass mourning. In this somber and elegant collection, Jacqueline de Weever roams Brooklyn and Manhattan to glean darkness and light as a city confronts the COVID pandemic. De Weever, as an elder poet and thus among the most vulnerable New Yorkers, studied the city as architecture and infrastructure in crisis, as public art blossoming out of stress and darkness, and as a mask over the never-ending struggle for justice against violence. Amid a masked and boarded-up New York, the poet found unexpected bursts of hope in the streets, and has revealed them here in terse and understated poems, like watercolors of a near-Apocalypse, or a butterfly at the edge of a volcanic crater.
In a prefatory page, the poet writes: “Anguish floated on the breezes blowing through New York City as we tried desperately to keep ourselves alive. Some of us awoke to the sight of refrigerated trucks waiting outside hospitals to receive the dead. In upper Manhattan, some awoke to ‘Flower Flash,’ installations donated by Lewis Miller Designs. Black trash baskets, old telephone booths, subway entrances appeared stuffed or garlanded with flowers. The florist’s night work became altars of mourning and remembrance.”
This is the 307th publication of The Poet’s Press. Published February 2023. 78 pages, 6 x 9 inches, paperback, $9.95. ISBN 9798374129694. CLICK HERE to order from Amazon.
PITY THE DRAGON: POEMS ON CHINESE THEMES.
By Brett Rutherford. Chinese emperors, empresses and concubines play a role in the 71 poems in this new collection, but so do delicate porcelains, three-legged frogs, the play of the seasons across China's landscape, and the story of how an American poet became deeply immersed in Chinese culture through an important friendship in his Greenwich Village days. Brett Rutherford’s poem cycle, “Emperor Li Yu, A Life in Poems” takes the reader inside the court of Southern Tang with its military and sexual intrigues, where “the bed just wide enough for one, is also wide enough for two.” The 39 surviving poems of Li Yu are adapted and expanded here to form a poetic biography of a complex but doomed ruler, forced to drink poison by the rival Song Emperor. Some of Li Yu’s exile poems are regarded as the saddest poems in all Chinese literature, and his saga has been re-enacted in no fewer than three Chinese TV dramatic series.
A fantasy poem, “Bai Hu, The White Tiger,” is a Shelleyan autumnal narrative, defying age and fear. “The Loft on Fourteenth Street,” an elegy but also tribute for the poet's first Chinese friend, uses long-breathed lines to sustain an atmosphere of longing and loss.
“Emperor Kangxi Drinks Tea from Eggshell Porcelain Teacups” is a cycle of twelve miniature poems, inspired by the delicate hand-painted teacups created for the Kangxi Emperor, each cup showing the flowers and trees associated with a lunar month. It is a brief tour of Chinese flower lore, and the Emperor himself, drifting into his gardens on sleepless nights, becomes a character in the poems.
“The Thirteen Scorpions,” a monologue, presents a narcissist emperor, the powerful and long-lived Xian Long, who considers himself “the most interesting man who has ever lived,” as he delivers a Daoist-magic comeuppance to a Jesuit missionary.
Pity the Dragon is an entryway into the fascinating world of Chinese history and culture, but it is also a tour de force of neo-Romantic poetry: clear, accessible, unsparing of emotion and sorrow but ready to leap with joy at nature’s beauty.
This is the 309th publication of The Poet’s Press. Published February 2023. 204 pages, 6 x 9 inches, paperback, $12.95. ISBN 979-8378320738. CLICK HERE to order from AMAZON.
OPUS 300 — THE POET'S PRESS ANTHOLOGY 1971-2021.
The 50th Anniversary Anthology. The Poet's Press celebrated its 50th anniversary in 2021. This 406-page oversize anthology contains the best and representative selections spanning the whole history of the press -- from long-out-of-print chapbooks up to the present day. Brett Rutherford has chosen work from 146 poets and writers, including 363 poems, two play excerpts, and five prose works. Works are selected not only from single-author chapbooks and books, but also from the numerous anthologies published by the press.
This volume is full of surprises. Some of the best poems of Poet's Press principal authors like Barbara A. Holland and Emilie Glen are collected here along with works from poets as diverse as Hugo, Longfellow, Goethe, Scott, and Shelley. The Greenwich Village poets of the last Bohemia of the 1960s and 1970s are joined by their successors across the Hudson from the "Poets of the Palisades" poetry community. What all the poems share is that they are a delight to read.
This book also includes a year-by-year chronology of the publications of the press, an annotated bibliography of authors and titles, and a list of all poets published in books from The Poet's Press and its imprints.
The Poet's Press. This is the 300th publication of The Poet’s Press. Published November 2022. Paperback, 406 pages, 8-1/2 x 11 inches. ISBN 9798364480330. $19.95. CLICK HEREE to order from Amazon. PDF ebook to be issued at a later date.
ROBERT L. CAROTHERS. FREEDOM AND OTHER TIMES.
First published by The Poet’s Press in 1972. This new 50th Anniversary Edition is completely reset in Plantin type and published as a free download PDF ebook.
Robert L. Carothers was born in 1942 in Freedom, Pennsylvania, a small town on the Ohio River. The poems in this volume, published in 1972, are arranged in a kind of geography, and tracing his footsteps from a blue-collar community, to grad school at Kent State University, where he was studying at the time the state militia opened fire on a student protest, to Edinboro State College in Northwestern PA, where he taught English in the department where he had been an undergraduate just a few years earlier. The poems here include Carothers’ signature poem, “Muskrat,” and portraits of local characters from Freedom, including a grandfather who had joined the Wobblies. In one poignant poem, he talks about the impossibility of returning to a small town: “You do not know me; your strange/ Eyes stare hard at my beard,/ Your lean faces call me the stranger.” The Kent State poems are overshadowed with war, with an elegy to Allison Krause, a student killed at Kent State. A few poems come from a sojourn in Maine, before the return to Edinboro, where he writes about the burning of the school’s administration building, and reflects on the suicide of a felow poet: “so the poet flirts with madness,/ brings himself to the brink of it/ and knows himself there.”
Robert Carothers studied under Donald Washburn at Edinboro and Jacob Leed at Kent State. He lives today with his wife Jayne in Wakefield, RI, after a long tenure as president of the University of Rhode Island. His other books include Poems for the End of Something (1969), John Calvin’s Favorite Son (1980) and Winter Poems (2008). Individual poems have appeared in many small magazines. Carothers acknowledges the influence of Dylan Thomas on his work, as well as the storytelling of miners, railroaders, fishermen, and decades of his students.
This is the 299th publication of The Poet’s Press. Published October 2022. 60 pages, 6 x 9 inches, PDF ebook. CLICK HERE to download.
EMPEROR LI YU, A LIFE IN POEMS.
A Poem Cycle by Brett Rutherford. Adaptations and Expansions from the Poetry of Li Yu (937-978 CE), last ruler of the Southern Tang Dynasty.
After almost two hundred years of glory and accomplishments, the great Tang Dynasty of China collapsed in 907 CE. The culture of Tang lingered on in the Southern Tang kingdom, however, ruled by three generations of the Li family. In Southern Tang, the grand traditions of art, music, poetry, and painting thrived, and Buddhism flourished.
Li Yu, the last ruler of Southern Tang, did not inherit his father’s military inclinations, and when he assumed the throne at a young age, the realm was shrinking as provinces were ripped away by rival states, the most rapacious of which was the new Song dynasty. Tributes, gifts, and hostages made the tension between Southern Tang and Song more and more fraught with peril.
A poet, dreamer, and pacifist, Li Yu was totally unsuited to rule in a time when China was being split into “Five Dynasties and Ten Kingdoms.” Isolated in his palace compound, he devoted himself to writing poetry, and enjoyed not only the favors of his Empress and concubines, but also entered into a scandalous love affair with his wife’s younger sister.
Li Yu invited poets and artists from all the war-torn states to Southern Tang, where he housed them as honored guests in their own palace of the arts. More and more Buddhist temples and monasteries dotted the landscape.
Captured by the Song army after the siege of Nanjing, Li Yu became a state prisoner, shown off and ridiculed as a former king and would-be emperor. When his new poems offended the Song Emperor, he was ordered to drink poison.
This cycle relates the tragic fate of Li Yu, his Empress, and the “other woman,” the kind of royal soap opera that fascinates because the outcome is the end of an entire nation. Only 39 poems of Li Yu survive, and every word of them has been woven into this narrative cycle. They are regarded as among the saddest and most emotional poems written in China, and they are sad because this poet, who had everything a mortal could wish for, lost it all. Li Yu’s Chinese originals are also included on facing pages. Illustrated with 24 paintings from the Tang and Song Dynasties
The Poet's Press. This is the 306th publication of The Poet’s Press. Published October 2022. Hardcover, 174 pages with 24 full color illustrations, 6 x 9 inches. ISBN 9798354819225. $32.95. CLICK HERE to order from Amazon. Paperback edition ISBN 9798339589457 for $23.95. To order from Amazon: https://amzn.to/4dcQe68.
e="katz">MICHAEL KATZ. THE CROSSING.
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The Crossing is a young poet’s first book, fascinated with the lure and decadence of the Jersey Shore, with love attained and lost, and with the first hints of transcendent light behind the realm of the everyday. The book was first published by The Poet’s Press in 1980 as a limited-edition chapbook, featuring black-and-white photos by the author. Some of those photos appear again in this new edition, this time in full color. The surrealistic lights and reflections of Asbury Park complement the impressionistic prose poem about the remembered time and place. We are delighted to have this book return to our active catalog.
Dr. Michael Katz plays many roles: transpersonal Psychologist, meditation instructor, author, artist and long-time student of contemporary masters of Tibetan Buddhism. He has been amongst the pioneers in utilizing hypnotic induction for lucidity during “guided naps,” often with spectacular visionary results.
His novel, The White Dolphin, raises awareness about the destruction of the world’s natural
resources, featuring the dream-based relationship between a white dolphin and an environmental activist.
Dr. Katz’s book, Dream Yoga and the Practice of Natural Light, emphasizes the importance of using the time spent asleep and dreaming for spiritual or transpersonal purposes. The book also offers specific exercises to develop awareness within the dream and sleep states associated with the Tibetan tradition of Buddhism.
Second edition. The Poet's Press. This is the 297th publication of The Poet’s Press. Published May 2022. Paperback, 72 pages, 6 x 9 inches. ISBN 9798824016956. $14.95. CLICK HERE to order from Amazon.
BORIA SAX. STEALING FIRE — MEMOIR OF A BOYHOOD IN THE SHADOW OF ATOMIC ESPIONAGE.
When Saville Sax and Theodore Hall first met as undergraduates at Harvard, little did either realize that a day would come when they would be passing atomic secrets to the Soviets. Their acts of espionage could have led, as in the case of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, to death in the electric chair. But unlike others (Klaus Fuchs, David Greenglass, Morton Sobell) they were never even tried for what they did, let alone convicted.
Professor Boria Sax, an eminent scholar in the field of human/animal studies, and the elder son of Saville Sax, here relates his stressful experiences growing up in a troubled home, one in which his father lived in constant fear of the FBI.
It was only as an adult that Boria Sax came to fully comprehend the magnitude of his father’s deed, one he does not condone. As a result, he can now relate how Saville Sax’s puzzling behavior affected every member of his family, and the price each one had to pay.
This very personal memoir is also an account of a Russian Jewish community that settled in the United States, torn between the desire for continued intimacy and the need to assimilate. The examination of social and political events over several generations invites readers to reflect back on their own experience and its implications.
Second, revised edition. Yogh & Thorn Books (The Poet's Press). This is the 296th publication of The Poet’s Press. Published November 2021. Paperback, 158 pages, 6 x 9 inches. ISBN 9798750643844. $16.95. CLICK HERE to order from Amazon.
TALES OF TERROR - THE SUPERNATURAL POEM SINCE 1800 -- SUPPLEMENT 1.
Evil never dies, and neither do the poets who dwell in the shadowland of Gothic gloom and supernatural horror. This treasury of supernatural-themed poems is a supplement to Brett Rutherford’s anthology series, Tales of Terror. Inspired by Old Norse and Anglo-Saxon chronicles, the medieval tale of a bad bishop eaten by rats, the lore of the shape-shifter incubus known as Puck, the German ghost-ballad of “Lenore,” and the vision of a frenzied witches’ sabbath, Gothic poets have mined mythology and history to clothe ancient terrors in new language. The 96 poems selected for this anthology come from the United States, Canada, Britain, Ireland, Australia, Germany, France, Spain, Peru, and Colombia. Treasures to be found in this volume include the tale of Siegfried and the dragon, a succubus in a World War I battlefield, The Grim Reaper’s Dance of Death, alluring and fatal cemetery specters, and an avenging revenant — plus ghosts, witches, vampires, were-ravens and dreads that cannot be named. Among the 41 writers featured are Goethe, Rossetti, Hugo, Gautier, Cawein, Holland, Longfellow, Kipling, Southey, Marquis, Browning, Rutherford, Todhunter, Vanderbeck, and Wagner.
Highlights include the translation of Bürger’s “Lenore” made by Dante Gabriel Rossetti at age 16; new translations of classic French poems of terror by Gautier and Hugo; poems based on the “Dance of Death” engravings of Hans Holbein; a selection of supernatural poems by Madison Cawein, “the American Keats;” newly rediscovered poems by American Gothic great Barbara A. Holland; selections another nearly-forgotten poet, Fannie Stearns Davis; and new translations of landmark dark poems from 19th-century Spain and Latin America.
For the scholar of the Gothic, this volume supplements the huge collection already assembled in the four preceding volumes of Tales of Wonder and Tales of Terror. The book also includes a cumulative index and bibliography for the entire series.
Yogh & Thorn Books (The Poet's Press). This is the 295th publication of The Poet’s Press. Published August 2021. Paperback, 300 pages, 6 x 9 inches. ISBN 9798458966542. $19.95. CLICK HERE to order from Amazon.
WAKE NOT THE DEAD! CONTINENTAL TALES OF TERROR.
“She now began to fix her blood-thirsty lips on Walter’s breast, when he was cast into a profound sleep by the odor of her violet breath, reclining beside her quite unconscious of his impending fate. All too soon did his vital powers begin to decay; and many a grey hair peeped
through his raven locks.”
A terrifying female vampire who can destroy cities … a medieval sorcerer and his captive un-dead bride … a sinister hag who uses hypnosis to lure men into committing suicide … a love-charm that requires the ritual sacrifice of an innocent … faceless creatures in the treetops broadcasting fear in order to conceal a village of elves … a parallel world of immortal fairies, luring mortal children to be their playmates … the secret orgies of nocturnal goblins … bandits and brigands, cut-throats, dwarfs and hunchbacks. This is the world of 19th-century German and French weird tales.
In Wake Not the Dead!, Brett Rutherford has adapted, revised, and expanded eight tales and one novella by the Germans Ernst Raupach and Ludwig Tieck, and the French writing duo Erckmann-Chatrian. In this literary experiment, the earliest English translations of these stories are modernized and sometimes expanded and embellished. Although the additions are new, the period style of the writings is maintained. As a literary entertainment, think of these as re-told classics as they might have been adapted for 1970s Hammer Horror films.
Contents include Ernst Raupach’s “Wake Not the Dead!”, which anticipates Stoker’s Dracula; Ludwig Tieck’s “Pietro of Abano” (basis of an opera by Louis Spohr and a long poem by Robert Browning), “And Never to Part,” “Tannenhaüser,” (the basis for Wagner’s opera Tannhaüser), “The Elves,” “The Goblet,” and “The Price of Love,”; and Erckmann-Chatrian’s “The Eye Invisible,” and “The Child-Stealer.”
A Grim Reaper Edition. This is the 294th publication of The Poet’s Press. Published May 2021. Paperback, 300 pages, 6 x 9 inches. ISBN 979-8734684313. $18.95. CCLICK HERE to order the paperback from Amazon. Hardcover ISBN 9798780348597. $25.00. CLICK HERE to order the hardcover from Amazon.
DISGRACE WITH A CAPITOL D, by Jonathan Aryeh Wayne.
A passionate essay written January 9th, with the facts-as-we-knew-them about the right-wing lunatic attack on the U.S. Capitol. Pittsburgh writer Jonathan Aryeh Wayne sums up how we got to the catastrophe of January 6th, and profiles a number of the bizarre invaders who wreaked havoc in the Capitol. This is an urgent and angry essay. This free PDF pamphlet was produced the same day the author finished his article. This publication takes The Poet's Press back to its origins in underground newspaper publishing. Please download, read, and share this intense article -- while you still can.
This is the 293rd publication of The Poet's Press. 7 pages. CLICK HERE TO DOWNLOAD AND READ.
THE ISLAND OF THE DEAD — TWO POEMS ON HART ISLAND, by Brett Rutherford.
The potter's field cemetery for New York City is a desolate island closed to the public: Hart Island, where prisoners labor to bury the poor, the nameless, and thousands of victims of HIV/AIDs whose bodies no family would claim. This free PDF ebook presents two poems by Brett Rutherford that center on the loneliest place in New York City. From his Anniversarius cycle comes “Hart Island,” a narrative of the prisoners going about their sorry business of placing the coffins in trenches and then covering them. In 2020, the poet set out to translate and adapt a classic Spanish poem, “They Closed Her Eyes,” by Gustavo Adolfo Bécquer (1836-1870), a poet influenced by E.T.A. Hoffmann and Heinrich Heine. Unexpectedly, Rutherford found himself gender-changing the poem to "They Closed His Eyes" and making the mourned dead one of those sent to an anonymous pit of coffins on Hart Island. At the end of his poem, Rutherford laments: “City of a billion lights, city of symphonies and towers aspiring to Promethean heights: how did a hundred thousand souls perish in our averted gaze?” This ebook is offered free on The Internet Archive.
This is the 292nd publication of The Poet's Press. 28 pages. READ AND DOWNLOAD HERE.
THE STORY OF NIOBE. Adaptations from Ovid's Metamorphoses by Brett Rutherford, Phillis Wheatley, and Samuel Croxall.
This episode from Roman poet Ovid presents a boastful and narcissistic ruler, fourteen murders, a royal suicide, and a petrifcation, a tale that might be ripped from newspaper headlines except that the players are a Titan, a Queen of Thebes, Apollo and Artemis armed with fatal arrows, and a field littered with corpses as a grieving mother turns to stone.
Brett Rutherford’s new adaptation of Ovid’s gruesome mythological tale is followed by two famous earlier versions: one by the 20-year-old Boston slave poet Phillis Wheatley in 1773, and another by British poet Samuel Croxall from the famous multi-translator English edition of Metamorphoses from 1717.
Two important essays by Brett Rutherford round out this volume: “Niobe’s Tears: The Classical Poetry of Phillis Wheatley” studies how Wheatley constructed her mini-epic from Ovid, using both the Latin poet’s work, but also taking cues from the famous 1760 painting by Richard Wilson, The Destruction of the Children of Niobe. It is a rounding defense of Wheatley’s place as a poet in the classical tradition. Wheatley’s book found a British patron and was published in London in 1773, making it the first poetry book by an African-American woman.
A second essay, “The Myth of Niobe and the Boston Massacre” presents startling evidence that Paul Revere’s famous 1770 engraving of The Boston Massacre incorporates references to the Niobe myth and even copies visual elements from the Wilson painting. The illustrated text presents the three different known Niobe paintings by Wilson, and engravings made from them (the principal means of copying paintings in the era before photography.)
This is the 291st publication of The Poet's Press. 80 pages, 6x 9 inches with 26 illustrations, most in full color. $16.95. ISBN 9798674478591. CLICK HERE to order from Amazon.
THE BARBARA HOLLAND READER.
Created as a one-volume introduction to the poetry of Barbara A. Holland (1925-1988), the mysterious Greenwich Village poet who was a centerpiece of the 1970s neo-romantic and Gothic poetry movement, this volume presents all the reviews and essays about Holland that appeared in her lifetime, along with the poems quoted or cited in those articles. This makes it a perfect book to study and teach the remarkable work of this 20th-century American poet.
Twenty-eight of Holland’s most memorable writings are here, including the terrifying “Medusa,” “Black Sabbath,” and “Apples of Sodom and Gomorrah.” Her work is garlanded with a group of poems about her by her contemporaries and by younger poets she influenced, including Shirley Powell, D. H. Melhem, Marjorie DeFazio, Dan Wilcox, and Vincent Spina. A memoir of Holland in her coffeehouse haunts by Matthew Paris establishes her image and milieu as a fixture of the last Bohemia of Manhattan.
Interviews, reviews and essays about Holland are presented here for their first time since their appearance almost four decades ago. Those who shed light on Holland’s unique place in American poetry include Olga Cabral, Stephen-Paul Martin, Maurice Kenny, A. D. Sullivan, Robert Kramer, Ivan Argüelles, Kirby Congdon, Claudia Dikinis, and Michael Redmond.
Since Holland’s more than 800 extant poems are scattered across numerous chapbooks and books, this volume includes a complete bibliography of the currently-known poems. This is the ninth and final volume of a series based on the Barbara A. Holland Papers, and the archives of The Poet’s Press.
This is the 290th publication of The Poet's Press. 198 pages, 6x 9 inches. $14.95. ISBN 9798668830121. CLICK HERE to order from Amazon.
ON THE VERGE — POETS OF THE PALISADES III.
Edited by Paul Nash, Denise La Neve, Susanna Rich, John J. Trause, and David Messineo. The Poets of the Palisades shine in their third anthology of new and memorable works — 142 poems from 80 poets. All have had featured readings in the series sponsored by the North Jersey Literary Community in Teaneck, NJ (founded 1997) and the High Mountain Meadow Poetry Series in Wayne, NJ (founded 2017). For these tumultuous times of environmental crisis, bad politics, pandemic, and unrest, the editors selected submitted poems and arranged the best into eleven themed sections.
These works, of our time, are on the verge, or, as editor Paul Nash indicates, “In transition . . . about to change ... at the point where something may occur … in anticipation … to extend outward toward the unknown . . . nearing the likely or inevitable attainment of some state of being . . . to approach a barrier, boundary or portal … at an event horizon … crossing a permeable membrane . . . to reach the outer margins of something different or unexpected.”
POETS AND ARTISTS IN THIS ANTHOLOGY: Joel Allegretti, Renée Ashley, Donna Baier Stein, Amy Barone, John Barrale, Caterina Belvedere, Norma Ketzis Bernstock, Michael McKeown Bondhus, Laura Boss, Theresa Burns, Laurie Byro, Kevin Carey, Cathy Cavallone, John Chorazy, David Crews, Jessica de Koninck, Erica Desmond, Catherine Doty, Juditha Dowd, Sandra Duguid, Jane Ebihara, James C. Ellerbe, R.G. Evans, Tom Fitzpatrick, Ellen Foos, Laura Freedgood, Davidson Garrett, Deborah Gerrish, Henry Gerstman, Suzanne Gili Post, George Guida, Barbara Hall, Therése Halscheid, Patrick Hammer Jr., Karen Hubbard, Pamela Hughes, Josh Humphrey, Paul Kuszcyk, Vasiliki Katsarou, Tina Kelley, Adele Kenny, Janet Kolstein, Elaine Koplow, Denise La Neve, Susanna Lee, Joel Lewis, Timothy Liu, Roy Lucianna, Mary Makofske, Charlotte Mandel, Maria Mazziotti Gillan, David Messineo, Marilyn Mohr, Gene Myers, Paul Nash, James B. Nicola, Priscilla Orr, Wayne Pierson, Tom Plante, Jennifer Poteet, Morton D. Rich, Susanna Rich, Denise Rue, Alison Ruth, Brett Rutherford, Yuyutsu Sharma, Danny Shot, Carole Stone, Heather Strazza, John J. Trause, Doris Umbers, David F. Vincenti, Emily Vogel, BJ Ward, Galen Warden, Joe Weil, Barbara R. Williams-Hubbard, George Witte, Dave Worrell, Anton Yakovlev, David Yazzi, Michael T. Young, Donald Zirilli, Sander Zulauf.
ISBN 9798650452249. 284 pages, paperback, 6 x 9 inches. $19.95. CLICK HERE to order from Amazon. Ebook for $4.99 from Payhip. (see link below).
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BARBARA A. HOLLAND. AFTER HOURS IN BOHEMIA — LOST POEMS FROM NOTEBOOKS, MANUSCRIPTS AND MAGAZINES.
Barbara A. Holland (1925-1988) was called “the Sybil of Greenwich Village.” Her poems of Manhattan’s Bohemia in its last decades are sharp and surreal takes from an outsider who fled a Wall Street job and chose to live among the writers and artists, a “full-time poet” when such a choice of profession was a guarantee of neglect and poverty. She is the flaneur of streets and harbors, of coffeehouses and lofts, always “alone in my voice” but eager to share her sharp and biting images and visions. After Hours in Bohemia is the eighth and final volume of the series of the poet’s complete surviving works, from published magazines and typewritten manuscripts. Holland’s long-time publisher Brett Rutherford has also added almost 100 pages of other poems, recovered or reconstructed from the poet’s hand-written notebooks.
The final section of this book reprints all the known critical reviews and articles about Barbara Holland published in her lifetime, plus interviews about her craft, and her struggles for recognition in the Manhattan poetry scene, which did not initially welcome her. As she told one reporter, “I am my own prison.” The contributors to the “critical reception” section include Ivan Arguelles, Kirby Congdon, Robert Kramer, Claudia Dobkins-Dikinis, Olga Cabral, Maurice Kenny, and Michael Redmond.
This is the 289th publication of The Poet's Press. 352 pages, 6x 9 inches. CLICK HERE TO DOWNLOAD AND READ THIS BOOK FREE IN PDF FORMAT. Paperback print copies available by mail for $19.95.
JACQUELINE de WEEVER. SEED MISTRESS.
The first Europeans to visit the Caribbean and the Amazonian realms of South America were overwhelmed by the profusion of animals and plants, many of them brightly-colored, unfamiliar in shape, and unknown to the gardener’s or the chef’s palette. Could you eat it? Would it eat you? Medicine, or poison? Overlaid with the magic of Inca, Maya, and Aztec, the natural world of our hemisphere is as rich as all of Europe’s myths, if only one looks and listens. Born in British Guiana (now Guyana), Jacqueline de Weever, a medievalist as well as a poet, has overlaid poignant lyric poems using tropical flora and fauna with the region’s troubled history from Columbus onward, in her two prior books, Trailing the Sun’s Sweat (2015), and Rice-Wine Ghosts (2017). In her newest book, Seed Mistress, where “dreams excavate my past,” de Weever plunges us into a world of crocodile caimans, howler monkeys, spice trees, boa constrictors, and armadillos, but just as readily engages with close observations from her own Brooklyn gardens. This is a voluptuous collection of poems with a voice gently but affirmatively outside-looking in: “I joined migrants and refugees long ago. Now I belong nowhere, birthplace an accident/ ancestors from rain forests in Asia, Africa, to meet saturated Amazonia.”
This is the 275th publication of The Poet’s Press. Published April 2020. 100 pages, 6 x 9 inches, paperback. $12.95. ISBN: 9798639275159. CLICK HERE to order from Amazon.
BRETT RUTHERFORD. THE INHUMAN WAVE - NEW POEMS AND REVISIONS 2019-2020.
Spanning just one year of Brett Rutherford's poetic output, this 264-page collection shows the American neo-Romantic, Gothic poet at the peak of his powers. The new poems include biting satires and laments about the current decline of the United States, as might be expected from a self-professed "outsider." But there are many facets to this dazzling kaleidoscope of a book: childhood memories of the coal and coke towns of his Pennsylvania childhood; riveting narratives such as that of a freezing woman going from door to door begging for coal, or a grandmother telling her grandson about "the things that happen to women" living alone in the country; and memories of college years overshadowed by the Vietnam War. The supernatural, as always plays a large role, as an invisible monster lurks in a Pennsylvania swamp, angry Native American spirits pop the windows off skyscrapers and snap the wings off airplanes, Medieval thieves are magically prevented from robbing an Abbey; and the tale of a Danish girl, a raven, and her lover's eyeball. One of the darkest poems here is an imagined monologue of the crazed military Roman Emperor Domitian, as he leads a group of senators and oligarchs into his subterranean "Black Room."
Translations from Spanish, French, Old English, German, Danish, and Old Norse show the poet working in the tradition of American poets such as Longfellow, tapping the poems and lore of other times and cultures, yet making of them new works that delight (and caution) today's reader. Rutherford does not employ rhyme, so these adaptations flow like highly-condensed sketches or stories. At the heart of this book is a poem cycle started four decades ago and only now finished, an adaptation and expansion from German Rainer Maria Rilke's Duino Elegies, titled Fatal Birds of the Soul. It transcends any label, not translation, not mere adaptation, swallowing the lines of Rilke into a web of interrogations.
The book also includes another cycle, as far from serious German verse as can be imagined. Titled Buster, or The Unclaimed Urn, it is an imaginary cat book about the adventures of a winged housecat. Based on notes left behind by poet Barbara A. Holland, this long narrative poem shows what happens when two Gothic poets attempt to write a "children's book." Of course no child would ever be allowed to read a book about drowned kittens, eating mice, and the horrors of being "snipped" at the veterinarian's office.
Published June 2020. This is the 285th publication of The Poet's Press. 262 pages, 6 x 9 inches, paperback. $14.95. ISBN 979-8650988762. CLICK HERE to order paperback from Amazon.
Hardcover edition $19.95 ISBN 979-8796045572. CLICK HERE to order hardcover from Amazon.
BRETT RUTHERFORD. FATAL BIRDS OF THE SOUL.
A Poem Cycle based on Rilke's Duino Elegies 1 and 2. FROM THE POET'S NOTES ABOUT THIS BOOK: “The work on these poems started in 1976, an attempt to translate, adapt, and expand upon the first two of Rainer Maria Rilke’s Duino Elegies. The project was abandoned, the sketches only rediscovered in late 2019. In April 2020, I decided to complete the project, revising and expanding the original sketches and making them into a connected cycle of 21 poems.
“This cycle is in no way an explication of Rilke, and the German poet would doubtless be horrified at the thought of a young atheist, neo-Romantic American poet of the 1970s making a palimpsest over his work, with the shades of Shelley, Walt Whitman, Poe, and even H. P. Lovecraft looking over his shoulder. That Rilke himself stepped away from the Elegies after writing the first two, only returning to the project some years later, gives some indication of the daunting power of Elegies 1 and 2. I, too, unsure of what I had done, and what was to be done with it, put the project aside.
“Some of my recent work with translations and adaptations gave me the self-confidence to return to this perilous project, this time trusting my own voice and letting even more expansion emerge from the original material. If I have succeeded, Rilke’s own words fit seamlessly into the flow of my own. I was in his thrall for a number of years, and his Letters to a Young Poet gave me comfort and inspiration when it was not coming from those around me. I already had a sense that in poems such as this, one is being “lived through” by language, creating a freestanding work that has its own existence, its own right to be.
“To illustrate this book I turned to some of the Greek sculpture that makes clear some of Rilke’s language about the vocabulary of touching in classic sculpture, and I was able to find a photo of the Latin tomb inscription Rilke found in Venice and copied down. I introduced the god Hermes, who, as a messenger of the gods, served the same role as messenger angels to the Greeks. These visual embellishments may help the reader recreate the visual elements of Rilke’s musings on angels, on sculpture, and on Beauty in general."
This is the 287th publication of The Poet’s Press. Published June 2020. 62 pages, 6 x 9 inches. ISBN 9798650985211 Price $14.95. CLICK HERE to order from Amazon.
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BRETT RUTHERFORD. THE PUMPKINED HEART — POEMS OF PENNSYLVANIA.
Brett Rutherford published The Pumpkined Heart in 1973 as a 48-page illustrated chapbook. Now, almost a half-century later, he has assembled all of his poems that have Pennsylvania as their locale, into one huge book, a personal memoir in poems. This 320-page edition is available in hardcover, paperback and PDF formats.
Three towns figure in this saga that spans early childhood to college years: Scottdale, in the coal and coke district when the skies were black with smoke and fumes from the coke-ovens; West Newton, a grim steelworkers’ town hugging the steep banks of the Youghiogheny River; and Edinboro, a college town in the northwest corner of the state, its placid lake setting contrasting with the tumult of Vietnam-era protest.
From early childhood in Scottdale, the poet casts himself as an outsider, breaking rules, recruiting neighbor children to act in “monster shows,” absorbing Native American lore from a story-telling grandmother, and learning about the Golem legend from Jewish neighbors. The other side of his family life is “out home,” where his maternal grandparents live in squalor in a tar-paper-covered shack. These country people, their pride and their secrets, left an indelible impression that emerges in “memory poems,” written many decades later. In “Peeling the Onion,” a grandmother relates to him the dark side of living alone in the mountains, and “the kinds of things that happen to women.”
Four high-school years in West Newton with a degenerating family and an evil stepfather are lightened by self-discovery: “I was a poet. A cape would trail behind me always.” Here he studies Latin, writes his first poems, and deepens his abiding love of the Gothic in literature and film. The fantasy poem “Son of Dracula” celebrates artistic birth, and “Mr. Penney’s Books” gratefully recalls the town’s one mentor for the unruly young, a bibliophile with 10,000 books.
Readers turning to the Edinboro section of this book will be startled by the transformation of theme and mood. Rutherford attaches himself to the town’s glacial lake, its flora and fauna, its sharp seasonal divides, and weaves them into a Whitmanesque vision. These poems, while modern in style, are in the spirit of Shelley, Whitman, Rilke, and Jeffers. Returning to the locale again and again over many decades for renewal and recollection, the poems celebrate what the poet calls, “my first-found home.” Other poems lift the veil on the student life of the time, and the choices one had to make about war or resistance.
The last section of the book, “Looking Backward,” includes retrospective poems, written from far away, that look back on the childhood places and events, rather than the straight-forward story-poems earlier in the book.
The longer poems here are stories in verse, several of them with multiple voices, most notably the four-voice tale, “The Doll Without A Face.” But all the poems are clear, easily read aloud, and aimed at the reader who may be wary of poetry.
This is the 286th publication of The Poet’s Press. Published April 2020. 320 pages, 6 x 9 inches, paperback. $19.95. ISBN 9798639218460. CLICK HERE to order from Amazon.
NOW AVAILABLE IN HARDCOVER. Hardcover edition published November 2021. ISBN 9798760659507. $21.00. CLICK HERE to order from Amazon.
PDF ebook edition, December 2020, the 295th publication of The Poet’s Press. 320 pages, 6 x 9 inches. $2.99.
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GROUP 74: THE NEW YORK POETS' COOPERATIVE.
The Poet’s Press is delighted to present this new edition of a wonderful 1974 anthology of New York poets from “The Last Bohemia.” Group 74: The New York Poets’ Cooperative. Edited by Edward Butscher, Roberta Gould, and Donald Lev.
In his Foreword, Robert Kramer outlines the organization and its goals:
“In April, 1969 the New York Poets’ Cooperative was founded by
Sabina Roseman and a number of other writers from the metropolitan
area who believed that by working together and sharing their writing
problems they could improve their own creativity and also foster an
appreciation of poetry around New York. Thus the activity of the
organization today is concentrated on two levels: the writing, editing,
criticizing, public reading, and publishing of the members' own works;
and the sponsoring of public poetry readings for non-member poets in
order to enable the public, at little or no cost, to hear gifted but
lesser-known poets read their own works. The Cooperative sponsors fifty
regular public poetry readings a year and also, upon request, provides
poets for readings at libraries, churches, Y's, and radio-stations. The
organization is completely democratic and not committed to any
particular school or style of poetry. New members are admitted solely
on the basis of the quality of their work, and all members share equally
in performing necessary tasks.”
Group 74 features the work of 32 poets who were active members of the Cooperative, and provides a lively cross-section of the literary scene in Greenwich Village in the 1970s: Jacob Bush — Edward Butscher — Olga Cabral Kurtz — Vinnie-Marie d’Ambrosio — Richard Davidson — Joseph Drucker — Elaine Edelman — RobertOh Faber — Mark Fishbein — Dolores Giles — Andrew Glaze — Roberta Gould — John Guenther — Hannelore Hahn — Rembert Herbert — Ronald Hobbs — Barbara A. Holland – Robert Kramer — Ann Kregal — Donald Lev — William J. Matthews — D. H. Melhem — John Burnett Payne — Sabina Roseman — Janet Sage — Susan Sands — Layle Silbert — Denis Sivack — Lee Strothers — P. K. Vollmuth — Dick Whipple — Eunice Wolfgran.
The text of the book has been completely re-set and corrected.
This is the 272nd publication of The Poet’s Press. Published March 2020. This is a free PDF Ebook. Read and download from The Internet Archive. Read Group 74 Online.
BARBARA A. HOLLAND: SELECTED POEMS, VOLUME 1
This publication is the first of two volumes bringing together the selected works of America’s great imaginative poet, Barbara A. Holland (1925-1988). It is based upon a 112-page edition published in 1980 and ambitiously titled Collected Poems, Volume 1. Only a few hundred copies of Collected Poems were circulated. After the poet’s death in 1988, the project fell into limbo. The first volume should instead be regarded as the commencement of her “Selected Poems,” a still-living poet’s choice of the works she wanted to preserve. A number of poems had previously appeared only in magazines, many of them already extinct by 1980. Additionally, we included the complete text of her earlier chapbooks: A Game of Scraps; Penny Arcana; Melusine Discovered; On This High Hill; Lens, Light & Sound; and You Could Die Laughing. The poems from an unpublished chapbook, East from Here, were likewise included.
For this expanded edition, completely re-typeset and corrected, we have added additional poems that Holland selected for a 1983 collection, Running Backwards, published by Warthog Press.
This is the 271st publication of The Poet’s Press. Published March 2020. 230 pages, 6 x 9 inches. PDF Ebook free to read online and to download from The Internet Archive. READ OR DOWNLOAD SELECTED POEMS, VOLUME 1.
BARBARA A. HOLLAND: SELECTED POEMS, VOLUME 2
The present volume is dedicated entirely to Holland’s cycle of poems centered around the paintings of René Magritte, originally titled Crises of Rejuvenation and first published in two volumes in 1974 and 1975, and then expanded in 1986.
The two volumes of Selected Poems should be regarded as the poet’s personal choice, rescued from chapbooks and magazines, of the poems she regarded as her best, in their final form. Some punctuation changes (commas and hyphens) have been added, in keeping with my overall editing of the Barbara A. Holland papers that became available in 2019.
Although most of these poems are inspired by a Surrealist painter's work, Barbara Holland is not a literary Surrealist. There is no randomness, no impulse toward Dadaist fist-shaking. The ambiguities of meaning, the shattering of form and syntax that run rampant in some experimental and visual poems, have no place in her writing. Like Magritte with his photographic style, Holland writes in plain English, often in a narrative that could easily be read as prose to the unwitting listener with poem-phobia. Her voice speaks in complete sentences, tightly packed clauses, and unambiguous meaning. If they seem at times like run-ons, they clarify themselves on repeat readings, like a puzzle solved.
The world of Barbara Holland, then, is the real one, that of a solitary literary woman living in Greenwich Village in its last Bohemian years. The twist is simply that impossible things happen there. Roses drink bottled blood, tree stumps sprout human ears, unaccompanied crutches stride the avenues, and a knife appears in the poet’s back as a permanent ornament. She writes with clarity and wit about each brand of impossibility. There is also the passivity of the spectator/voyeur in most of her poems: the poet seldom acts, but is acted upon. She is an esthetic pin-cushion. Reality annoys her more often than it delights her, and she is quick to tell you that. These poems inhabit the world-view, sense of life, and physical laws of an alternate universe. Her poetry is more aligned with weird fiction than with the sodden confessional personal poem of the 1960s.
The book includes notes about the poems based on 1985 interviews with the poet, and selected Magritte images alongside a number of the poems.
This is the 273rd publication of The Poet’s Press. Published March 2020. 140 pages, 6 x 9 inches. PDF Ebook free to read online and to download from The Internet Archive. READ OR DOWNLOAD SELECTED POEMS VOLUME 2.
BARBARA A. HOLLAND: THE SHIPPING ON THE STYX.
Barbara A. Holland (1925-1988) was called “the Sybil of Greenwich Village,” for her sometimes eerie presence and her incantatory readings. By 1970, she had published her work in over 700 magazines, and had read her work everywhere a poet could read. After seeing several small chapbooks published, Holland decided it was time to tackle the big New York publishers. The Shipping on the Styx, recently rediscovered in the poet’s papers, was rejected by all the publishing houses by the end of 1972. What would have been her “breakthrough” book is finally presented here. Its three parts include a solitary observer’s impressions of bustling New York harbor; a medley of her Manhattan-based poems that she read in coffeehouses; and her blistering and unforgettable Gothic poem, “Black Sabbath.”
Rounding out this volume is Songs of Light and Darkness, a manuscript that probably dates to 1951, the end-point of Holland’s graduate studies at the University of Pennsylvania. These poems show the poet embarking on her career as a devotee of the work of T. S. Eliot and, perhaps, of Thomas Hardy. Pre-dating her “New York style,” this never-before-seen glimpse at the early Holland is a revelation.
This is the 259th publication of The Poet’s Press. Published December 2019. 110 pages, 6 x 9 inches. ISBN 9781679125287. $12.95 from Amazon. CLICK HEREE to order from Amazon. PDF Ebook to be published at a later date.
BARBARA A. HOLLAND'S
OUT OF AVERNUS: THE EXILED SORCERESS AND THE FALLEN PRIESTESS.
Barbara A. Holland (1925-1988) was called “the Sybil of Greenwich Village,” not only for her sometimes eerie presence and her incantatory readings, but also because she wrote a number of powerful poems on mythological women. In 1976, the poet went off to the Macdowell Colony in New Hampshire with a working manuscript collecting her unique “impressions and impersonations” of famed or unknown women who, “in conflict with the gods or the mores and customs of their cultures, are alienated.”
The manuscript she brought back to her Greenwich Village home yielded some powerful poems that she read for the rest of her life, inhabiting the spirits of the classical Cassandra, Sybil, and Eurydice; the Biblical Lilith, Hagar, and the Witch of Endor; the medieval snake-woman Melusine and Wagner’s Grail-temptress Kundrie; two 12th-century Hindu saints, and even a Revolutionary War-era witch who spied for General George Washington at Valley Forge.
Seen in the context of the feminist poetry being written in New York in the 1970s, Holland’s work can be seen as a recasting and re-voicing of women’s magical attributes, both for good and evil.
This is the 257th publication of The Poet's Press. Published October 2019. 6x9 inches, 80 pp. ISBN 978-1704115689. $12.95. CLICK HERE to order from Amazon.
EMILIE GLEN'S
MOON LAUNDRY.
Emilie Glen (1906-1995) was a staggeringly prolific New York City-based poet, whose published work spans five decades with thousands of little magazine and newspaper credits worldwide. This new chapbook supplements the four-volume set available from The Poet’s Press, containing newly-discovered poems and prose from published magazines and from manuscripts. Since the cache of published poems included the first publication of one of Glen’s best-known poems, “Late to the Kitchen,” that poem is also included here, along with a link to an audio of Emilie Glen reading the poem.
First recognized by H.L. Mencken and published in his American Mercury, she started as a fiction writer and then gravitated to narrative poetry, writing and publishing thousands of poems in magazines around the world. Glen’s poems are an ongoing narrative saga of New York high and low, as well as a poignant saga of family sorrows. The best of them are intimate character portraits, short stories compressed into a dramatic, reader-friendly style, poetry the untrained reader need not fear. A strong musical thread runs through this collection as well: Glen was a child prodigy pianist and came to New York City to study at The Juilliard School before the poetry Muse asserted her primacy, so Glen's Manhattan is always a musical island. Her years of acting in children’s theater also come to the fore in this collection.
This is the 254th publication of The Poet's Press. Published October 2019. 6x9 inches, 48 pp. ISBN: 9781794704978. Also available as a PDF ebook. $2.99.
Print edition available for $12.00 at Lulu.com (see button below).
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JODY AZZOUNI. HEREAFTER LANDSCAPES.
As cheerful as Timon of Athens or Anacreon, philosopher-poet Jody Azzouni unleashes this cycle of aphoristic, terse and dark visions of the world after global warming, nuclear winter, pollution, mutation and plague have come and gone. There's no "rapture" to rescue us, just the hard light of a ruined world. Back in the Cold War, Bertrand Russell noted that the smartest thinkers were the most gloomy about the prospects for humankind, and this cycle inhabits that world of intellectual worry. And yet there is beauty in desolation, and every dystopian artwork, by depicting what might and must not come to pass, may serve as a warning. Hereafter Landscapes might be the butterfly that changes history by changing the hearts of a few — or it might be locked into a time capsule as a prime specimen of post-millennial gloom. However one takes this sombre and linguistically rich little book, it comes from a serious thinker, versed in myth, science and art. In keeping with the book's theme, we chose to decorate it with the paintings and engravings of the artist most associated with the terror of the Sublime: John Martin. Martin's vast murals terrified crowds in London, and his engravings of Paradise Lost and Biblical cataclysms gave nightmares to generations of Victorian schoolchildren.
Selected as one of the six best chapbooks of 2010 by Presa magazine: "The most ambitious production in this round-up, complete with beautifully printed cover art and illustrations from the paintings and engravings of John Martin . . . The poetry has a prophetic quality that reminds us of the apocalyptic writings of William Blake. Azzouni also deals with the big themes, unafraid of directly engaging the spectre of potential environmental & nuclear disaster. His work is didactic, but not in a bad way, since the issues raised are the very issues of human meaning and survival. "
New second edition October, 2019. This is the 256th publication of The Poet's Press. ISBN: 978-1701656116
56 pp., 8-1/2 x 7 inches, full color, $12.95 paperback. CLICK HERE to order from Amazon.
BRETT RUTHERFORD. WHIPPOORWILL ROAD: THE SUPERNATURAL POEMS (Expanded and Revised 6th Edition, 2019). Hardcover edition published 2022.
This
is the expanded sixth edition of Brett Rutherford's landmark poetry
collection, Whippoorwill Road: The Supernatural Poetry. This
extraordinary 418-page paperback contains all the poet's supernatural
poems, including major new poems added since the last edition. Praised by
Robert Bloch and Ray Bradbury, these may be the best supernatural poems
of our time. The writing ranks from the seriously Gothic
through the downright hilarious, including Gorgons, Egyptian
mummies, Golems, Lovecraftian horrors, vampires, werewolves, possessed sex toys
and stuffed animals, and the personal recollections of Fritz, the
hunchback assistant of Dr. Frankenstein. All of Rutherford's Lovecraft-related poems are collected in this volume -- more than 100 pages of Lovecratian items including all the poems written for the annual ceremonies at HPL's gravesite in Providence. Other major new items in this collection include the long narrative poem “Mrs. Friedman’s Golem,” and accounts of Pittsburgh’s radioactive grave-walking specter, the most alarming bed-and-breakfast stay of all time, a secret mental ward full of Lovecraft fans, and a young girl’s lessons in witchcraft in ancient Corinth.
This is the 255th publication of The Poet’s Press, under its Grim Reaper Books imprint.
Sixth edition, revised and expanded 2019. Paperback, 414 pp., 6x9. ISBN 9781701296275. $19.95. CLICK HERE to order paperback from Amazon.
Hardcover $25.00 ISBN 979-8793376518. CLICK HERE to order hardcover from Amazon.
PDF Ebook edition, published December 2020. This is the 294th publication of The Poet’s Press, under its Grim Reaper Books imprint.
Sixth edition, revised and expanded 2019. 414 pp., 6x9. $2.99
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BARBARA HOLLAND'S
THE BECKONING EYE.
Barbara A. Holland (1925-1988) was called “the Sybil of Greenwich Village.” Her poems of Greenwich Village’s Bohemia in its last decades are sharp and surreal takes from an outsider who fled a Wall Street job and chose to live among the writers and artists, a “full-time poet” when such a choice of profession was a guarantee of neglect and poverty. She is the flaneur of streets and harbors, of coffeehouses and lofts, always “alone in my voice” but eager to share her sharp and biting images and visions.
From the papers and notebooks of Barbara A. Holland comes The Beckoning Eye, this collection of 150 poems that appeared in little magazines, few of which have ever appeared in book form. Holland’s long-time publisher Brett Rutherford has also added 29 other poems, recovered or reconstructed from the poet’s notebooks and typed manuscripts. This is the third volume of publications from the Barbara A. Holland papers, following Medusa: The Lost First Chapbook and The Secret Agent.
Whether writing about doomed love affairs or her flirtation with the mysteries of Hindu religion; recreating the persona of a jealous witch, or an outraged Virgin Mary in grief at Calvary; playfully bouncing stars, moons, and mirror images in Magritte-inspired pre-dawn fantasies; or puzzling over her fellow residents of Gotham’s Bohemia, Holland is at turns brilliant, unnerving, and witty. Many of her poems are miniature opera arias, tightly-knotted in syntax, poetic hand-grenades disguised as walnuts. They are meant for reading and performing aloud, and unfurl their meanings on repetition.
This is the 253rd publication of The Poet's Press. Published September 2019. 6x9 inches, 212 pp. paperback. $14.95. ISBN 9781695033023. CLICK HERE to order from Amazon. A PDF ebook will also be published.
BARBARA HOLLAND'S
SECRET AGENT AND OTHER POEMS FROM NOTEBOOKS AND CHAPBOOKS.
Barbara A. Holland (1925-1988) was best-known for her alarming and terrifying supernatural and myth-infused poems, and for her large cycle of poems that transferred the surrealist visions of Belgian painter René Magritte to the gritty streets of Greenwich Village. The never-published manuscript titled The Secret Agent is something very different: a spiritual and psychological battleground. These are not freestanding poems such as one finds in little magazines, but a series of interlocked self-debates in which Hindu gods, un-named lovers, and a mysterious Secret Agent who may have stepped from a Magritte canvas, vie for attention, and for the poet’s soul. Like Rilke’s Duino Elegies, these strange poems, full of arresting, pin-prick images and startling lines, may defy easy interpretation.
This volume also includes the full text of another long-unavailable chapbook, Lens, Light and Sound, and a completion of Holland’s longest and most unusual unfinished work, a text for a macabre cat story in the manner of Edward Gorey, now titled Buster, or The Unclaimed Urn, the life, adventures, and sad fate of a flying housecat.
To round out the collection, Holland’s longtime publisher Brett Rutherford has added sketches and unknown poems from the poet’s notebooks and manuscripts, now available for the first time. Finally, the book concludes with a set of Holland’s supernatural “warhorses,” the most powerful incantatory poems she performed for enthralled audiences all over the Northeastern United States.
This is the 252nd publication of The Poet's Press. Published August 2019. 6x9 inches, 158 pp. paperback. $14.95. ISBN 9791689221405. CLICK HERE to order from Amazon.
PDF Ebook Now Available for $2.99. November 2022. This is the 307th Publication of The Poet's Press.
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BARBARA HOLLAND's
MEDUSA: THE LOST FIRST CHAPBOOK.
Barbara A. Holland (1925-1988) made her entrance into the New York poetry scene around 1961 with a self-published chap-book, Medusa. The reaction to its up-front mix of witchcraft, Satanism, and Chthonic mythology among friends, family, and fellow poets must have been discouraging, for the book vanished and Holland never referred to it again. The haunting title-poem, “Medusa” was published and read aloud frequently, and, by the early 1970s, the poet was regaling her audiences with other alarming and terrifying supernatual and myth-infused poems. The Gothic vein in her writing was not to be suppressed.
The discovery of the sole remaining copy of the chapbook led to the creation of this book. To round out the collection, Holland’s long-time publisher Brett Rutherford has added sketches and unknown poems from the poet’s notebooks and manuscripts, now available for the first time. The range of work presented here shows Holland’s engagement with Greenwich Village and its eccentric people, with the inner demons of thwarted desire, and with the overarching power of nature: moon, wind, woods, and ocean.
Fasten your windows, New York: Barbara A. Holland is back!
This is the 251st publication of The Poet's Press. ISBN 9781686840289, 80 pp., 6 x 9 inches. $12.95 from Amazon. CLICK HERE to order from Amazon.
The PDF ebook is $3.99 from the link below.
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BURT RASHBAUM'S
OF THE CAROUSEL.
Burt Rashbaum has had the rare privilege of being one of five operators at The Carousel of Happiness, a re-imagining of a 1910 carousel with animals hand-carved by Scott Harrison, a Vietnam veteran who used his decades of carving to heal himself from the horrors of war. With ridership approaching one million, Rashbaum has had the opportunity to see a wide spectrum of life, and how riders react to the beauty of the carousel. In describing his experiences, he would often say, “I see magic there,” but when asked what this magic was, his explanation never seemed to match the actual experience.
Rashbaum knew he could only relate his observations in the one genre that can explain the unexplainable, through poetry. With a fiction-writer’s eye and a poet’s sensibility, he crafted these 21 poems as one sequence to reflect the beauty and wonder of The Carousel, the healing that occurs there, the life lessons, the love and indescribable joy that, as one poem states, is “barely contained within the human form.”
Scott Harrison, the carver of the carousel animals, wrote: “For me who, during the carving process, never knew the future extent of its magic and meaning, [the poems are] a particularly extraordinary description of what goes on under the roof in ways only an observant operator who stands in the middle of the spinning creatures could know.”
Some of the poems are in the shape of the carousel, others evoke its movement, the kinetic energy of the place and the enveloping bombast of the 1913 Wurlitzer band organ that plays while the carousel spins. While the words whirl like a rider on the carousel, when they are read aloud they tell stories. Open this book and enter The Carousel of Happiness, become a rider and experience what countless thousands from the world over have shared.
This is the 250th publication of The Poet's Press. 72 pp., 6 x 9 inches, printed in full color. $14.95. ISBN: 978-0922558971. CLICK HERE to order from Amazon.
DAVID MESSINEO'S
TWENTY MINUTES OF CALM: POEMS OF NATURE, SCENE & SEASON.
New Jersey-born poet David Messineo’s ninth collection, Twenty Minutes of Calm, is his first to focus exclusively on Nature. His selection of works on “Nature, Scene and Season” range from idealized nature as painted in China in the 17th century, to the raw discomfort of a rural American winter; from a cave in Australia to the placid shores of a lake in the Pine Barrens; from the Amazon in Brazil to the rivers and hills of northern New Jersey.
Messineo is widely known as the publisher and poetry editor of the award-winning Sensations Magazine. He is one of the nation’s longest-serving independent literary magazine publishers, and he runs one of the longest-lasting poetry reading series still active in America, the Sensations Magazine Creative Events Series. Much of his published poetry centers on American history, and as an editor he has persuaded many other poets to create narrative and lyric poems inspired by historical events and persons. In this role he has helped shape what is now informally called The Palisades Poetry Movement. His previous books are First Impressions, Suburban Gothic, A Taste of Italy, A Taste of Brazil, Restoration, Formal, The Search for the Sapphire Robe, and Historiopticon.
This is the 249th publication of The Poet's Press. 56 pp., 6 x 9 inches, designed and typeset in the manner of a Roycroft Book, printed in full color. ISBN 978-0-922558-01-8. $13.95. CLICK HERE to order from Amazon.
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BARBARA A. HOLLAND'S
AUTUMN NUMBERS. NEW EBOOK EDITION.
Autumn Numbers was published as a chapbook by our Grim Reaper Books imprint in 1980. We described it then as “a wry set of poems. … [with] many surreal and whimsical autumnals.” It included “End of an Era,” addressed to the goddess of Victory, fallen from the arch in Brooklyn’s Grand Army Plaza. For this new 2019 ebook edition, we have added some other Holland autumn-themed poems, including the terrifying witch-poem, “Apples of Sodom and Gomorrah,” and Holland’s most powerful single poem, “Not Now, Wanderer!”
Philadelphia-raised poet Barbara Adams Holland was the daughter of an archaeologist who specialized in Greek ruins; her mother was a Professor of Latin. She earned B.A. and M.A. degrees at University of Pennsylvania and completed work on a doctorate. She labored on the staff of the Merriam-Webster dictionary, conducted genealogical research, and worked as a stockbroker. A descendant of the Revolutionary-era Adams line, she was a rugged individualist, choosing to live off the tiny earnings of a small bundle of stocks and bonds so that she could be a full-time poet living in Manhattan. From the 1960s until her death in 1988, she did just that, publishing hundreds of poems and haunting all the poetry venues of New York. Her Gothic and surrealist poems, and her gaunt appearance, earned her the nickname of “The Sybil of Greenwich Village.” So powerful were her readings that audiences frequently wept, and many poets who heard her were inspired to emulate her or even to write poems in response to hers. She is still a legend on the New York poetry scene.
This is the 248th publication of The Poet's Press. To order the PDF ebook for $2.00, click below.
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SHIRLEY POWELL'S
ALTERNATE LIVES. NEW EBOOK EDITION.
Poet, novelist, and storyteller Shirley Powell was best known for ghostly tales, turning the American Midwest of her childhood, and the New York of her later years, into spine-tingling, tantalizing stories in prose or verse. Alternate Lives weaves the supernatural and transcendental with a very different strain, retelling the lives of seemingly-ordinary people — people who do not read poems — in sparkling images and words. We meet and grow to understand a shepherd, a wise farmer, a lonely African-American farm wife hidden away by a jealous white husband, a cemetery caretaker, and several urban homeless. There’s always the dark, Chthonic undercurrent, though, as she veins into the very cells of someone frozen in the snow, and another who lived and died in a tree, “leaving my satisfied skeleton wherever scavengers let fall the bits of me.” In another poem she has entered the soil, saying, “I am really gone this time.” The Woodstock Times reviewer cited the book’s “original visions of country living, strange tales unadorned with sentimentality.” The book features montage art illustrations by Mildred Barker.
This is the 247th publication of The Poet's Press. To order the PDF ebook for $2.99, click below.
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JODY AZZOUNI'S
THE LUST FOR BLUEPRINTS. 20th ANNIVERSARY EDITION.
Poets are expected to have, or imply, a philosophy in
their writing. But when a philosopher threatens to write poetry, most
readers head for the hills. This makes the debut book of
philosopher-poet Jody Azzouni all the more astonishing. It dazzles
and delights. Wry, sardonic, myth-infused, and precise as a
scalpel blade, this 1999 collection revels in dark imagery and playful
erudition. All the poems here were published in literary magazines, but
some also appeared as postcard-sized "guerilla-publishing" pieces that
found their way into New York City bookstores, sometimes even planted
like wasp larvae inside books of other authors' work. To our delight, a
cache of these books has turned up intact, surviving our many moves, as
well as several floods and mildew plagues. This volume contains
two digital art illustrations by Catherine Weaver, and concludes
with Azzouni's challenging 20-page essay, "Numbered
Paragraphs: An Essay on Esthetics."
Print edition on press now. To order the PDF ebook for $2.99, click below.
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IN THE SILENCE OF SCORPIONS.
POEMS BY RICHARD LYMAN.
A LOST 1971 POET'S PRESS CHAPBOOK.
The first edition of this book was a hand-stapled chapbook, published in 1971 as one of the earliest productions of The Poet’s Press. The text was completely re-set and minor corrections of spelling and punctuation were made. Many of the poems are intentionally ambiguous, so punctuation has only been added in a few places for clarity.
Richard Lyman (1925-2003) was the pseudonym of Richard Bush-Brown. He was active in the Greenwich Village poetry scene in the 1960s and early 1970s.
The poet was the son of Harold Bush-Brown (1888-1983), a Harvard-trained architect and author of the 1976 book, Beaux Arts to Bauhaus and Beyond: An Architect’s Perspective. His mother, Marjorie Conant Bush-Brown (1885-1978), was an artist and portrait painter, and both his paternal grandparents were artists. He was estranged from his parents, who disapproved of his youthful avowal of Communism. Only the fact of his birth is stated on web pages about his parents.
Bush-Brown attended Black Mountain College. His poetry is overshadowed by his reverence for Dylan Thomas. His poem, “The leopard came into the world” was his most memorable work, and his readings of it impressed listeners at New York poetry readings. On the strength of that poem, The Poet’s Press persuaded Bush-Brown to assemble the manuscript for this chapbook.
No other details are known about the poet, who vanished from the Manhattan poetry scene, and so far as we know, he published no other books.
He continued to live in Manhattan, was seen riding the subway to and from some Wall Street job, and died on October 18, 2003.
40 pp, 6 x 9 inches. PDF format. $2.99. Published May 2019. This is the 243rd publication of The Poet’s Press.
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Version 25.1 Updated November, 2024.