Bøger af Diane Kistner

In his fourth full-length collection of poetry, Paul Hostovsky offers up the kind of fare that his readers keep coming back for--the humor mixed with poignancy, the heartbreak lined with a kind of palliative existential mischief--in poems that explore the nature of violence, illness, beauty, childhood, Deaf people and sign language, the art of love and the art of poetry.

In this slim volume of poems, Caroline Hagood offers a surreal journey through the fever dream of creativity, exploring what it means to grow up as a woman and poet sensitive to the point of being skinless, walking the line between inspiration and madness daily. Starting from early childhood and moving forward, these poems address gender and trauma, sex and bathroom humor, the misbehaving mind, relationships, and more. A poet's attempt to transcend suffering through writing, Lunatic Speaks is by turns funny, sad, and, joyous.

In Naming the Dead, Robert Collins takes the reader into "the blind world here below," a world inhabited by sinners, saints, and strangers, who often are one and the same. From childhood playgrounds through the suffering of adulthood, the heart of the collection is made of eight elegies literally naming the dead and paying homage to some who have served as mentors and companions on the journey. We learn, then, that the only way to return home is to keep moving forward. Thus, the poet offers hope, however tentative, that those who enter the abyss might like Dante "ascend into the shining world again."

The Gravedigger's Roots is told by the gravedigger himself, a man who is at the lowest point of the social totem pole. He is, however, also a man with spiritual (but not religious) leanings. He tries to understand the work he does and why things happen (or don't happen). He is undeniably a cynic, yet he suspects that life goes on beyond the grave, that after death he may be reborn to a life he'd rather not live, finally to succeed or to fail once again. The gravedigger could be described as a pessimist who is not bereft of hope.

The Hunted River is a book of poems dealing with phases of life and mind. The poems examine the struggle between status quo and growth, comfort and change, control and freedom. The voice in these poems ranges from mystic tenor to bass blue collar, all the while asking if nature is what we see, what we cannot see, or what we want to see.

Scott Owens describes his new volume of poetry: I grew up in two worlds: my father's parents' world of brick homes, city streets, shopping, and playgrounds; and my mother's parents' world of dirt roads, livestock, growing our own food, and endless woods. That second world was undeniably harder than the first. The work was dirtier, and there was more of it. The homes had fewer luxuries: no cable, no AC, never more than one bathroom. Even death was different. In town, death was a polished event that took place elsewhere: hospitals, nursing homes, slaughter houses, funeral parlors. On the farm, animals were killed every week and most people died at home, and their bodies stayed there until they were buried.Somehow, however, that second world still seemed much more alive, much more real and vital. Despite that vitality, I was aware that most people knew almost nothing about that second world. It was then, and is increasingly now, an undiscovered country where life and death exist side by side with a natural intensity missing from the artificial world of the city.This book, Owens tells us, dedicated to my grandfather (one who knew how to own land), is a record of my undiscovered country and the people who lived there.Critical Acclaim"Landscape and memory are seamlessly merged in this excellent volume. Like all the best writers of place, Scott Owens finds the heart's universal concerns in his vivid rendering of piedmont Carolina." -Ron Rash, Parris Distinguished Professor in Appalachian Cultural Studies at Western Carolina University"There's not a speck of sentimentality in the rural poetic Americana framed by Scott Owens in For One Who Knows How to Own Land. There are dead crows, red dirt earth, barking dogs, burning coal, fox traps, and flooding rivers. These stories matter. The poems all rattle and sing. This is a jolt of strong coffee for a watery time." -John Lane, author of The Woods Stretched for Miles: Contemporary Nature Writing from the South"In For One Who Knows How to Own Land, poet Scott Owens creates, with a mature voice, childhood reminiscences of pastoral summers in the red-dirt rural Piedmont of upstate South Carolina. This, his most affecting collection to date, is a remarkable sensory journey that registers narrative moments along the entire emotional scale from harsh to tender, from the threatening to the anodyne. Through the magical nature of memory, these poems of mystery and loss prove again and again that 'The boy who left this country/ never stopped hearing its names/ echo in his ear.'" -Tim Peeler, author of Checking Out"'Why should this be home?' Scott Owens asks us in 'Homeplace, ' his question as much about leaving as going back. We walk his train tracks and ridges as if they were our own, as though home were 'something you held tight before you, / your back bending against its going away.' In this both visceral and meditative rendering of place, decay and rebirth are part of the same landscape. I applaud the skill that directs us down a path of experience and familiarity to 'stone steps/ that dead-end in mid-air.' His poetry is wise in knowing the weight of its own footsteps." -Linda Annas Ferguson, author of Dirt Sandwich

In her first full-length volume of poetry, Amy Riddell has given us a true crime story, that of her Bluebeard-like father who went to prison for trying to murder his wife. From her attempts to understand her father's odd brutalities (and love) to her own hard-won transcendence later in life, these poems offer tacit touchstones to healing what is wounded in all of us.

LEAVE IT BEHIND expresses the paradoxical wish of every poet, seeking to leave behind-in both senses of that phrase-the language trace of her mind and heart. And what a fine first book Emily Raabe has left behind: vivid and strange, haunted by dreamed animals, alive with the landscapes and losses of her Vermont childhood. Raabe's poetry seeks "something like love/ in that it is the absence/ of distance"-and yet it faces both absence and distance with unflinching imagination, intelligence and grace. -Dan Chiasson, author of WHERE'S THE MOON, THERE'S THE MOONThe poems in Emily Raabe's first collection, LEAVE IT BEHIND, are distinct and imaginative. Often with a surreal edge, they have the intensity and grip of dream imagery and dream narrative: "My best dream/ goes like this: two fields/ cut by a thin line of trees./ In the dream I'm at the line/ when the storm comes in." And so the reader is immediately drawn into the poem with a sense of suspense in which the familiar has a strange and ominous aura. Raabe is able to find her identity in correlations between herself and the outer world as in "Self-Portrait of a House": "If I were a house, I'd be a little/ green house, with peeling paint/ and an Ali Baba stairway/ to my swinging green screen door," and so she invites her reader into a world of innuendo. Her poems possess an engaging freshness, and her debut as a new poet is to be welcomed. -Robert Pack, author of LAUGHTER BEFORE SLEEP

This collection by Don Boes features quick shifts in tone, subject, and language as a way to discover and track the moving targets of life. Each poem offers an experience based in serious wordplay and deadpan seriousness. Poem titles like "History of Appliances" and "Retain this Portion for Your Records" hint at the jangly conglomerations that we will read and enjoy and then read again.

Minding the Spectrum's Business is a work set on a path that is personal, as well as universal, in appeal. In this collection, the poet, recording the perks and pitfalls of her life, embarks upon an existential journey during which a pattern of movement comes to light: propulsion and drag. The poet formally establishes the balance between the two. The leitmotifs in the poems are the elements of nature, tidal relationships, and certain "pulls" akin to Beckettian diversions, all of which play out within the context of solitude. Each dwelling place of the mind, each new station is explored from the vantage point of some unique landscape, be it an arc in the spectrum, or a spare room.

The art of Kintsugi, using gold to fill cracks or mend shards in Japanese ceramics, suggests that when a thing has been damaged by time, it becomes more beautiful. So, too, for human experience, offers Jane Ellen Glasser. In her sixth poetry collection, the tone is one of gratitude; Glasser treats even serious subjects, such as late love and life's end, with wit and a light hand. In her 70th year, Glasser does not bemoan aging, but, rather chooses to acknowledge, even celebrate the inevitable accidents of experience that grow a life. In the closing poem, she offers guidance to her future eulogist. Just as the Japanese cracked pot is imperfectly perfect, she tells us how she wants to be remembered: "Say I was perfectly flawed. / Say I was human."

This kaleidoscopic collection of fourteen-line poems is an attempt at mitigating "the modern self-erasure of poetry." In spite of the form, which is one of the most ancient in existence, the originality or consistent weirdness finds expression in sheer style and content. Many of the poems connect to archaeology and the ancient past, possibly as they have never been seen before. Look for the surprise, the double take, the mild smirk, even the kiss. Look for the unusual use of conventional form.

Winner of the 2015 FutureCycle Poetry Book Prize. Who are the bad guys, anyway? Which one is the good fight, anyway? In Paul Hostovsky's eighth book of poetry, The Bad Guys, there are poems about suicide bombers and high school bullies, capricious exes and ecstatic bums, fastidious drug-dealers and contemplative alcoholics, evil stenches and spiritual moms; poems about the Republicans, the mega-hospitals, the brusque and bearded anesthesiologists, and the lady who gave out pencils on Halloween. Plus a host of other unlikely, often likable, always loveable, candidates. These poems are by turns funny and poignant, formal and free verse-a villanelle here, a pantoum there, and lots of loosey-goosey sonnets peppered throughout. Of Hostovsky's poetry Thomas Lux has said: "Hostovsky's poems strike me as kinds of non-religious prayers-of joy, of grief, of praise, of pain...but mostly prayers as a form of gratitude, a kind of thank you, thank you, Life!"

The old saw tells us that we shouldn't argue politics or religion. In the poetry collection REDEMPTION, Lee Passarella avoids these two minefields as best he can, highlighting instead the redemptive moments that make modern life both a journey AND a destination. The going is often rough, as the poetry suggests through the experiences of a number of personas both fictional and real (Beethoven, Dante, Pilate). But REDEMPTION also celebrates those instances of revelation that help us make sense of the seemingly senseless and peace with the world, no matter how briefly.

From an elderly Spaniard building his own cathedral to a straight-laced woman mortified to have been born at Woodstock, from ill-fated love beneath a kerosene moon on the shores of Lake Michigan to loneliness relieved by utter silence in Alps, Lawrence Kessenich's poems draw vivid portraits of his own powerful experiences and those of colorful individuals, real and imagined, who engage life passionately.

In this clever, heartfelt collection of poems, Barbara Conrad celebrates the unreal of what is real: a dead father entering a coffee shop, an old lover on bended knees, cedar waxwings in the guise of wild fruit. Whether the focus is time, colors, words, nature, social issues or personal relationships, the whole world seems to spin and startle in these lyrical, yet accessible creations.

This second full collection of prose poems from Mary Carroll-Hackett traces through a life spent in liminal places, particularly that often shadowy and always sacred realm between life and death, touching on both the isolation and the grace, even the bliss, such an existence can bring. Poems made of love and heartbreaking loss, the collection works toward healing, a reconciliation of soul and self, of body and spirit, of the peace to be found even while walking with a foot in both worlds.

THE ABANDONED EYE celebrates J. P. Dancing Bear's poetic strengths as a master of image, oftentimes surreal, though never losing track of emotion and meaning while dazzling the senses. Dancing Bear is a ventriloquist and impressionist rolled into a clever actor aware of the audience without pandering to it. He involves the reader in the evolving landscapes, all the while asking questions and examining both the inner and exterior scenes.

AFTERWORDS, Leon Weinmann's debut poetry collection, investigates the power-and powerlessness-of the lyric to respond to time and loss. In a fallen, hyperconscious world in which "the echo follows what it should precede," in which words arrive too late, as mere addenda to experience, how can language, and poetry specifically, create our necessary "small round world, held out to hold/ a place for everything that's lost"? Weinmann's poems, ranging from traditional sonnets and blank verse to more radically experimental forms, push language beyond consolation and praise and toward a possibility of atonement with the world of things.

Monkey Screams thrusts the horrors, the idiosyncrasies, the fallacies of the War in Vietnam into the vividly personal reactions of participants whose fears, accomplishments and shame burst forth in descriptions that surpass journalism or propaganda. They are both confessions and recriminations, yearnings for home and struggles to make sense out of the senseless. In similar fashion the second section of these poetical narratives reflects the anxieties, conflicts, resolutions of the succeeding generation: life as it is contrasted with what life could or should be. Telephone linemen, football coaches, foreign-born account clerks wrestle limitations imposed by laws and society, proud of their achievements yet poignantly aware of what is missing in their lives.The third and final section pushes into the present through the eyes, thoughts and imaginings of a journalist nearing the end of his career. Poems of acceptance, of remembrance, little details of life that never important before become planks between acceptance and eternity. Facts give way to dreams and dreams to definition of what his life has been and why. The factual world-lentil soup, the cat asleep-offsets perceptions of monstrous fish, a boyhood unicorn that only he could see as he experiences existence beyond that apparent to routines of daily life.In Vietnam, the silence that followed battle was eerie, frightening, until the sounds of the jungle resumed-the monkey screams as one G.I. describes it. But the normal to which it returned was itself surreal, something to be apprehended intuitively, not understood by superficial observation. Throughout this book the intuitive pierces the commonplace, transforming the ordinary into something feared, loved, shared.

Divided into three parts, Michael Trocchia's debut collection of verse is a lyric study on the forms of fate, a haunting discourse on the linguistic fractures between one's self and substance, and a set of shimmering images and meditations on the constant "guesswork" of understanding the world within us and beyond. The immediacy and sonic play of these poems are met by what is their gravity of thought and, in some, their philosophic irony. Attending to both the magic and logic of our language, Trocchia's poetry draws the two together, renewing the wonder of existence with greater clarity.

Joseph Hutchison's BED OF COALS is a poetic sequence that tells a story of emotional crisis and recovery at the unsparing hand of Eros. Rooted in transgression, the poems honor the powerful psychic energies at work in the book's tragicomical hero, whose name is Vander Meer. They trace his journey toward balance and wholeness in ways that reflect his struggle: shifting points of view, mercurial mood-swings, now layered and allusive, now plain as a single plucked guitar string. It is a highly crafted but deeply human book, a book for readers who appreciate the strange richness of our inner lives.

In LOVE SONGS FOR LAS VEGAS Suzanne Burns chronicles everything from Elvis impersonators to casino buffets to showgirls with a mix of both whimsy and reverence. Regional side trips in this collection include visiting Tonopah to meet an orchestra conductor, Ely to marvel at a diner filled with homemade pies, and Reno to contemplate the sadness of pawn shops. Follow her down the Strip and meet a cast of characters almost too unbelievable to be anything but real.

In this chapbook, Barbara Bennett tiptoes into the afterlife to see what relatives, lovers, and friends have been up to and reports her findings. With a few sentences, each prose poem brings into focus a character and a dilemma he or she faces. The touch is light, the language lyrical, and the observations moving.

In Camille Vérité, the audience is transported into the wry, irreverent, sensual world of Jennifer Lagier's existential anti-hero, Camille. Her adventures range from sultry to sadder-but-wiser, from Big Sur to the Barbary Coast, from youth to slightly north of Cougarville. These poems challenge readers to come along for a sometimes rueful, often humorous, frequently erotic ride.

In FUGITIVE PIGMENTS, Ruth Bavetta brings together the worlds of poetry and art. These are ekphrastic poems, instructive poems, poems riffing off the principles of art-the art of living, of shading, perspective, colors; how to create an exquisite corpse, and what one should know about shadows. Bavetta speaks in the voice of Joseph Cornell, addresses Alice Neel, wakes up under a sky painted by Andrea Mantegna. She writes of making art, looking at art, teaching art-teaching us to see.

The Wingback Chair, Colby's fourteenth volume of poetry, contains new poems that illustrate significant moments in her life as well as the inexorable progression of her poetry. The subjects range from the personal elements of the title poem to the historical, social, and cultural interweavings of the textile poems.

Eric Greinke (in Presa) has written that "Chorlton more than meets my criteria for inclusion in the canon of the best poets of the Boom Generation." With more than 90 diverse selections spanning the work of 30 years and 29 books and chapbooks, DAVID CHORLTON: SELECTED POEMS is a great introduction to Chorlton's poetry as its themes have ranged from his European background to the desert Southwest. For those already familiar with his work, these selections include many poems you may not have seen or heard. A definite must-have book.

FLEEING BACK chronicles travels through the mental and geographical landscapes of the world and of the spirit. The poems reveal the sensual, sometimes dark, sometimes lush and exotic topography of the worlds the poet moves through as she embraces the choice to live life dangerously, passionately and fully, rather than according to the expectations of family, culture and time. Among dusty sand-filled plains, dirty rivers, and desiccated towns strewn with the detritus of war; from Greece, Egypt, France, Italy, Bosnia, Thailand, Hong Kong, New Jersey and Pennsylvania; in living rooms, hospitals, coffee shops, deserts, army camps and trains: the familiar is revealed as foreign through the flux of time and experience. The result is a celebration of life in all its tragic, regrettable, beautiful, transformative and astonishing moments.

This collection of poems by Mary Ricketson digs deep into the earth, unafraid to bite into hardship, willing to confess regret and shame, and ready to celebrate details of ordinary life. By words of pleasure and pain, the reader is transported to times of fear, joy, and courage, and ultimately an authentic breath of life.