In The Exquisite Triumph of Wormboy, multi-award winning illustrator and graphic novelist James Kochalka brings us a thematic collection of drawings that chronicle the exploits of a worm who embarks on an adventure of rescue, fueled by inescapable surges of bravery. This odyssey is aptly and expertly versified into an ekphrastic epic by former Vermont Poet Laureate Sydney Lea. Readers of all ages will be entertained by the sights, tension, suspense, and humor of this unique collection. Yet here’s a leaf! And here’s a boat! And here’s the cure for the chill of doubt! Why should not hope, however odd, Be just as strong, no, stronger than gods? ABOUT THE AUTHORS: James Kochalka is the author and illustrator of more than forty graphic novels. He has won two Eisner Awards, one Harvey Award, and four Ignatz Awards. In 2011 he was named the first Cartoonist Laureate of Vermont. He also has a separate career as a rock star, performing with his band James Kochalka Superstar. In 2007, Rolling Stone named his song “Britney’s Silver Can” one of the 100 Best Songs of the year. Sydney Lea, founding editor of New England Review, is author of thirteen volumes of poetry, most recently Here (Four Way Books, 2019). A former Vermont Poet Laureate and a Pulitzer finalist, he has also published a novel, a collection of literary criticism, and four volumes of personal essays.
With its thirty-three essays, This Impermanent Earth charts the course of the American literary response to the twentieth century’s accumulation of environmental deprivations. Arranged chronologically from 1974 to the present, the works have been culled from The Georgia Review, long considered an important venue for nonfiction among literary magazines published in the United States. The essays range in subject matter from twentieth-century examples of what was then called nature writing, through writing after 2000 that gradually redefines the environment in increasingly human terms, to a more inclusive expansion that considers all human surroundings as material for environmental inquiry. Likewise, the approaches range from formal essays to prose works that reflect the movement toward innovation and experimentation. The collection builds as it progresses; later essays grow from earlier ones. This Impermanent Earth is more than a historical survey of a literary form, however. The Georgia Review’s talented writers and its longtime commitment to the art of editorial practice have produced a collection that is, as one reviewer put it, “incredibly moving, varied, and inspiring.” It is a book that will be as at home in the reading room as in the classroom.
In Daniel Galef’s Imaginary Sonnets, a cast of people and objects from mythology, history, the news, and the quotidian parades through a variety of imaginative scenarios. In dialogues, dramatic monologues, satires, lamentations, eulogies, and execrations, the sonnets adopt perspectives ranging from the familiar to the novel to the twisty and surprising. Characters include not only widely known figures such as Cassandra, Pandora, St. Augustine, Byron, and Doris Day, but also obscure ones such as Henrique of Melacca, Emmett Till’s father, John Taurek, and—more startling—a salmon, a snowflake, and a pair of parallel lines. Imaginary Sonnets entertains and entrances with every turn of the page. PRAISE FOR IMAGINARY SONNETS: I love sonnet sequences, and Daniel Galef has written a rollicking collection that is alive with wit, intelligence, and wild imagination, as in the poem of unrequited love between two parallel lines. If you want to know what Cézanne has to say, not to mention Cassandra, Alcibiades, and “Parmenides to Doris Day,” then dig into this cornucopia of crazy, formal fun. — Barbara Hamby, author of Holoholo Daniel Galef’s sonnet cycle is a rare feat of empathy, wit, style, and (as the title hints) imagination. I’m thankful to have this book, in which the messy overlaps of life are somehow illuminated in work of astonishing, clear-eyed discipline. — Jack Pendarvis, author of Movie Stars Daniel Galef’s debut collection, Imaginary Sonnets, demonstrates his mastery of the form as well as his ability to reinvigorate it with wit and experimentation. These fourteen-line biographies and tales open up a world, largely drawn from literature, that your history books ignored and that you will enjoy. — A. M. Juster, author of Wonder and Wrath The sonnet is one nifty little container, isn’t it! Each of these poems contains its own tiny library—of books, sure, but life experiences, history . . . okay, everything, from Pandora (she of the box full of imps) to Casey (he of the Mudville Nine) and beyond. There’s even a taco talking to a chalupa, and I’m not making that up. Nobody could make that up except Daniel Galef. — David Kirby, author of Help Me, Information ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Daniel Galef was born and raised in Oxford, Mississippi, where he spent his afternoons on the veranda of Square Books. After studying philosophy and classics at McGill University in Montreal, he received his MFA from the fiction program at Florida State University in Tallahassee. His poetry covers a diverse range of styles and genres, including light verse (Light Quarterly, the Saturday Evening Post, the Washington Post Style Invitational), children’s literature (Spider, the Caterpillar, School Magazine), and serious formal poetry (Able Muse, Atlanta Review, the Lyric). Besides poems, he also writes fiction (Indiana Review, Juked, the Best Small Fictions anthology), nonfiction (Word Ways, Working Classicists, the Journal of Compressed Creative Arts), humor and satire (American Bystander, NationalLampoon.com, the Journal of Irreproducible Results), and plays (Players’ Theatre Montréal, Théâtre MainLine Theatre). In 2022 he placed second in the New Yorker cartoon caption contest. This is his first book.
In Seeing the There There, David Alpaugh intermixes his poetry with his visual artwork, realized in collaboration with artists and photographers worldwide. The result immerses the reader in surprises of sense and meaning. Alpaugh's poetic musings and preoccupations range from the irreverent to the meditative, and include people, society, culture, nature, and the universe—visible, theoretical, imagined. This is a unique book that engages the reader with written and visual treats at each turn of the page. PRAISE FOR SEEING THE THERE THERE: Seeing the There There is compelling and wonderful, but how best to describe a book that combines a colorful picture with a poem on each page? There are gut-wrenching truths, accompanied by unexpected rhymes, puns, wit, and humor. Every time you turn a page, another visual and verbal surprise awaits you, with titles and opening lines like these: “Mayfly”: “Here Today / Gone Today / No Tomorrow”; “Old Fogies”: “Never tire of telling us / how thankful they are / to be born when they were / on the planet that was”; “Selfie”: Narcissus was the entreprenewer who tried to take one first”; “Trying to live in ‘the moment?’”: “No one’s ever that fast!” Yes, this is a one-of-a-kind book. You will want to own it, read it, savor it. It is simply amazing! — Susan Terris, author of Familiar Tense David Alpaugh’s brilliance delights us once again in this remarkable collection. His visual poems take imagery and verse to a whole new level. As you time-travel through his poetic multiverse, you’ll discover whirling dervishes, a three-legged cat, a postcard from a volcano, a poppy apocalypse, a grief-stricken jack-o’-lantern, a revolutionary sonnet, a whiff of vermouth, and the heaviest crow. There are intricate ironies and shades of truth that will entice your imagination both verbally and visually. With every turn of the page, there is a unique turn of phrase. Seeing the There There deserves a place on everyone’s nightstand—for it is truly, in the poet’s words, “a messenger” that “arrives and begs your attention.” — Connie Post, author of Prime Meridian Seeing the There There is a bright, wonderful book. David Alpaugh knows how to capture a rare poetic moment and create total delight. Each poem finds us in a sui generis universe: surprising rhymes surfing on fresh insight. Never have animated thoughts and choice images spent such quality time together! — Marvin R. Hiemstra, author of Poet Wrangler: Droll Poems ABOUT THE AUTHOR: David Alpaugh is the author of Spooky Action at a Distance (Word Galaxy Press, 2020), a book of “double-title” poems, a form he invented; Seeing the There There, a book of visual poems; and Counterpoint, winner of the Nicholas Roerich Poetry Prize from Story Line Press and reissued in 2021 by Red Hen Press. He has published more than four hundred poems in literary journals from Able Muse to Poetry to Zyzzyva. He is one of the contemporary poets included in the Heyday Press anthology California Poetry from the Gold Rush to the Present and has been a finalist for Poet Laureate of California. He teaches literature for the Osher Lifelong Learning Institute at its Cal State East Bay Campus and poetry writing at the University of California, Berkeley Extension.
John Beaton’s Leaving Camustianavaig celebrates nature and coexistence and harmony with it, be it in his childhood Scotland, or his adopted homeland of Vancouver Island, with musings distilling the very essence of headwaters, wilderness, forest, mountains, the sea. Beaton’s masterfully crafted metrical poetry is deployed with linguistic prowess in a showcase of given and nonce forms—sonnet, sestina, triolet, villanelle, and others. The accounts of home and community, of the outdoors, or of eking a living from land and river are heartwarming and memorable. Along with its lyrical elegies of belonging, uprootedness, and reminiscences, this is a rapturous debut collection not to be missed. PRAISE FOR LEAVING CAMUSTIANAVAIG: John Beaton has a gift for writing formal poetry so well composed that the meter and rhyme are subsumed in the poems. This collection spans a life, starting with a childhood set in the Scottish Highlands where he was raised, and imbues the setting with irresistible vitality. Beginning with family, mortality, legacy, and loss, the poems then journey throughout a land passionately loved and gloriously brought to life. Poems about his adopted homeland in Vancouver Island maintain this unity and involvement in the natural world. The viewpoint may be human, but the land is a sentient thing. Its creatures act out their deepest impulses and are woven into the human experience until it becomes impossible to separate our existence from the cycles of nature. If you share a passion for, or even just a fascination with, the outdoors, the call of the wild, and the natural world as an extension of living and loving, you will treasure this book. — Vera Ignatowitsch, editor-in-chief of Better Than Starbucks From the Isle of Raasay with its “spray-sodden Hebrideans” to Vancouver Island half a world west, where salmon silver the rivers and wolves “tear savage furrows down the nightscape,” Beaton brings readers into an unforgettable world where past and present weave together like tapestry. — James R. Babb, former editor of Gray’s Sporting Journal I want to hold this book high and broadcast its power. It is to be reread and savoured. John Beaton’s words loup out of the mythic river, combining and recombining in the rainbowed spray of it; questioning, celebrating, lamenting and informing in myriad ways as they twist and birl, howl and skirl, laugh and greet, shedding light and love on the human condition through the prism of Scotland's ancient past and its present—to which I resonate as a Scottish fiddler who is fortunate enough to stumble into certain universal truths through the lens of the Scottish condition. Maybe I could undertake to compose an equivalent piece of music—a symphony, a suite, a thousand fiddle tunes—but any such attempt would come short because a master poet is at work here, on a large canvas. Herein lies an efficacious, loving, joyous use of language that transcends depth. This collection of poetry is the soaring song cycle of a bard in top form and it will accompany me on my journey from this point on. — Alasdair Fraser, Scottish fiddler and composer ABOUT THE AUTHOR: John Beaton’s poetry is metrical and has been widely published in media as diverse as Able Muse and Gray’s Sporting Journal. He wrote a monthly poetry page for several years for the magazine Eyes on BC and served for four years as moderator of one of the internet’s most reputable poetry workshops, Eratosphere. He recites his poems from memory as a spoken word performer and a poet member of the band Celtic Chaos. His poetry has won several awards, including the 2015 String Poet Prize and the 2012 Able Muse Write Prize for Poetry. He is a retired actuary who was raised in the Scottish Highlands and lives in Qualicum Beach on Vancouver Island, Canada.
This book is a compendium of newspaper columns Sydney Lea composed in his tenure as Vermont Poet Laureate. He says he hopes these columns will continue to be of interest to poetry lovers and students, but above all to the common reader. Seeking at every turn to avoid jargon, he explores how the making of a poet's art resembles the making of any reader's life. For Lea, poetry and everyday life are deeply entangled.
Fiction. NECROPHILIA VARIATIONS is a literary monograph on the erotic attraction to corpses and death. It consists of a series of texts that, like musical phrases, take up the theme and advance it by means of repetition, contrast, and variation.Written in a style that ranges from the lugubrious to the ludicrous--from purple prose to black humor--NECROPHILIA VARIATIONS uses literary means to probe the psychopathology of sexual perversion. Eros, the book asks, is naturally drawn to beauty, and yet nothing would seem to be less inherently beautiful than a cadaver. How is it that a necrophile ends up confusing the two, discovering beauty in what most people would find repugnant? How does he come to desire that which would seem to be intrinsically undesirable? If you have ever contemplated the curious points of contact between eros and thanatos, then Necrophilia Variations will be sure to delight you with its depictions of death, desire, and deviance.
Susan de Sola’s Frozen Charlotte spans the breadth of human experience-from celebration to lamentation, from gravity to lightheartedness, from domestic and quotidian scenarios to historic upheavals and their aftermaths, both European and American. She skillfully deploys an impressive range of formal styles and free verse in her debut collection. De Sola's Frozen Charlotte manifests all the hallmarks of a seasoned poet in surefootedness, wit, and depth of empathy.
PRAISE FOR FROZEN CHARLOTTE
The breadth of Susan de Sola’s poetry, by turns gossamer light and solemnly elegiac, offers a pleasurable aesthetic surprise from poem to poem-from “sun-starved Dutchmen” to immigrant Jews in Manhattan, from tulips to the life of a friend whose actual name she never knew, from the imagined language of rocks to a war widow’s cedar closet, from the death of an infant to conjugal love. Susan de Sola evinces wit and knowingness, a dexterity with verse, a way with form. The pleasure of de Sola’s poetry is to be in the presence of virtuosity and insight, of a poet who knows what it means to be human, and when to be serious and when to be light. -Mark Jarman, author of The Heronry
When I read Susan de Sola’s uncanny title poem “Frozen Charlotte” for the first time, I couldn’t stop thinking about it. I feel the same about the book as a whole, a virtuoso grouping of form and topic, a book that is haunting, yet which also sparkles with a sense of humor that I much enjoyed. Susan de Sola, it seems, can write in any form. While this book is her first full-length collection, it is the work of a master craftsperson. -Kim Bridgford, author of Undone
Whether their subject is a painting by Sargent, a gathering at the site of a Holocaust deportation center, or the bestial appearance of ATM machines, Susan de Sola’s poems seem animate with her vision: the poems breathe on the page. Part of de Sola’s power lies in her formal acumen. Every word here seems carefully sieved from the welter of English, and each poem’s form is perfectly matched to its ambition and music. De Sola’s tonal range is equally rich-she is by turns funny and dark, pensive and sly, her voice resounding in the reader’s head long after a poem’s final line. Like its memorable title poem, Frozen Charlotte intrigues, goes deep, surprises. It is a book rich with the pleasures the best poetry provides. -Clare Rossini, author of Lingo
This book has many moods and many messages for any reader who pays the poems collected here the attention they deserve. At times it seems a fairground, at times a graveyard, and neither cancels the other out. It is a mark of Susan de Sola’s always persuasive rhetoric that we see that both characterizations are somehow, simultaneously, true, and that despite their exhilarating variety these poems are of a piece and come from one complex, sophisticated, supremely alert sensibility. -Dick Davis (from the foreword), author of Love in Another Language
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Susan de Sola’s poems have appeared in many venues, such as the Hudson Review and PN Review, and in anthologies, including The Best American Poetry 2018. She is a winner of the David Reid Poetry Translation Prize and the Frost Farm Prize. She holds a PhD in English from the Johns Hopkins University and has published essays and reviews as Susan de Sola Rodstein. Her photography is featured in the chapbook Little Blue Man. A native New Yorker, she lives near Amsterdam with her family.
In his thirteenth book of poetry, Sydney Lea gives voice to the deep connection between human life and the natural world as well as their fragility and transience. Here, nature is as much a muse as a trigger for sense memory--as a schoolboy on a playground "breathing in autumn mud, / that cherished aroma" or as witness to a redtail hawk's attack and the aftermath during which "That poor doomed duckling's wisps of down / Floated in air like snowflakes, /Diaphanous." Death is a constant presence in these poems, too, arising from the bittersweet awareness of what eventually will be lost. While there is reckoning, there are few regrets in a life well-lived and closely observed. Here is a title, but it's also a statement, an incantation and affirmation: "Let's chant it throughout the year," Lea writes, "like so much birdsong: we're here we're here we're here."
