FORTHCOMING BOOKS...
NEW BOOKS IN PRODUCTION AT THE POET'S PRESS, GRIM REAPER BOOKS AND YOGH & THORN BOOKS
July 2024. Here's a short list of books now in production:
Victor Hugo and the Terrible Year. When Victor Hugo returned to Paris in 1870 after almost 20 years in exile, he found Paris surrounded by the Prussian army, bombarded and starving. Months later, after France's humilating defeat, the horrors of the Paris Commune uprising broke out, followed by harsh reprisals and mass executions. Hugo's poetical journey of the period, The Terrible Year, has never appeared in full in English. This new translation and adaptation by Brett Rutherford present all of the Hugo poems, along with Hugo's diaries, memoirs, and letters from the period. Some memoir entries by other French writers also complement Hugo's own account. Now in preparation for Fall 2024.
An Egyptian Reader. Western fascination with Egypt came in waves, from the Roman invasion to the Napoleonic adventure. From the Rosetta Stone to the unearhing of King Tut's tomb, knowledge about ancient Egypt and its culture filtered into Europe and America as popular editions of The Egyptian Book of the Dead appeared, as well as countless travelogues. This illustrated edition, to be published as a "wide-screen" ebook, presents excerpts of writing from antiquity to the present day.
Half-Lives of the Radium Girls.. First poetry collection by Franco-American poet Denise LaNeve.
The Greek Anthology. A new selection of the best short poems from the famed Greek Anthology.
Orestes and the Furies. Aeschylus, translation by Mattew James Chapman. A lost Romantc-era translation.
The Collected Writings of Emilie Glen 2: Fiction and Prose Poetry. The second volume of Emilie Glen's work gathers together her fiction published in magazines and a long prose poem that appeared in New Directions. This expanded second edittion includes rediscovered stories that have come to light as more and more small journals' back issues are available in online archives and databases.
SECOND REVISED EDITION WITH 74 NEWLY-DISCOVERED 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.
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.
Published April 2024. 316 pages, 6 by 9 inches, paperback. ISBN 9798320159003. $16.95. CLICK HERE TO ORDER FROM AMAZON.
BRETT RUTHERFORD's SEPTEMBER SARABANDE.
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 encounter 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. AMAZON link will appear here as soon as the book is available.
RECENT BOOKS...
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 happens, 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.
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 Mt. 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.
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.
VENUS OF MALTA.
Poems by Suzanne Gili Post. 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.
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.
NEWS ABOUT POET'S PRESS AUTHORS
Last updated July 04, 2024.