Bøger udgivet af Brick Road Poetry Press

"How do you bury the dead / when the ground won't allow it?" asks Maureen Sherbondy in Eulogy for an Imperfect Man. Here the dead are as unsettled as the living. They inhabit dreams and memories. They cling to the undersides of skirt hems. They flap in bats' wings and take form as red Camaros, fireworks, and valentines. Even the nursing home dead still rock in empty porch chairs. These are poems as restless as the ghosts that pass from page to page, and they'll haunt you long after you leave the last line. Sherbondy's stark images are as true as her unflinching examination of our struggle to put the dead to rest and let our pasts be past. -Barbara Presnell, author of Piece Work In her moving latest collection, Maureen Sherbondy stands before the greatest mystery and marshals a lifetime of craft to take up the noblest and most ambitious of duties for a poet: to remember the dead, whose scattered limbs, like the pieces Orpheus, continue to sing to the living. In the course of undertaking "the needful," her work recovers the consolation that art has always held: that our words are our bond and that they bind us paradoxically by their music to that chaos and old time, which was our first soil, before it became the way to elegy. -David Rigsbee, author of The Red Tower Maureen Sherbondy is the kind of writer who grabs her figurative baseball bat and confronts her demons, head-on. Then-lucky for us-she takes up her pen and tells readers all about it. Eulogy for an Imperfect Man tackles subjects like death, loss, and dysfunctional families in the sort of visceral way that not only lets us know how brave this poet is, but how good she is at her craft. -Terri Kirby Erickson, author of In the Palms of Angels and Telling Tales of Dusk

A Note on Toni Thomas' Chosen These are poems of "that day-" when "the fiction lifted," poems of "ecclesiastical life burning / sweet on the bread sticks," these are narratives and portraits that "buy happiness / with a steel wick / crowbar it to an unyielding clothesline" so that September can come "with its thrifty tongue." And so the lyric opens, and "hemlines' perfect luminaries are bleeding." And we learn that "All the world's a crock of shattered Blue Danube," but "anyone can stand up resolute / in a tail wind with enough grace." I opened this book on the poem "An Arc of Chintz Floats," and I loved it, loved those "sun damaged men" and "rigging of sails" and "holiness" which "invades the courtyard." You whisper in my ear, the author says, and "the hem of my dress keeps lengthening." Many poems to admire here-I recommend "History Lesson," "The Perilous Undertakings of the Everyday World," "I Call Midnight," among others-these poems are Toni Thomas' prayers, her psalms. The reality exists in memory alone, Proust tells us, and this book of Chosen moments, chosen from many other moments of our time, stands up for that notion. -Ilya Kaminsky

Like Jack Kerouac, Rupert Fike is mad to talk. A Rupert Fike poem isn't small talk though. Fike wants to be saved, wants to live. One of my favorites in this volume is "Toast." "In the name of all that's toast it must go," he writes, as he struggles to put the diode-eye out of a machine that, Cyclops-like, watches over our lives. Armed with hammer and nail, Fike is Everyman-Ulysses out for justice. But Fike also knows his limits. In the lovely last poem of this volume, the poet accepts a bittersweet truth he cannot change. The soul must seek another outlet as children outgrow the past. Like Fike-and Kerouac, too-we may love the beauty of "words, words, words stretched out, limitless," though, in the end, poetry of this caliber leads us to understand when and why they must leave off, as well. -Stephen Bluestone

Brick Road Poetry Press is committed to publishing work that appeals to a wide range of tastes. If you enjoy writing that is fast-paced, accessible, and sharply-drawn, The Melancholy MBA will not disappoint. The book is filled with scenes and stories from America's offices and boardrooms, those "glass-enclosed jungles" that shape our lives and culture.

Like most publishers, we at Brick Road Poetry Press list submission guidelines on our website. Additionally we go beyond the guidelines to include lists of "characteristics we like" and "characteristics we dislike." In Damnatio Memoriae, the winner of the Brick Road Poetry Prize, Michael Meyerhofer gives the impression of having gone down that list to check off each item one by one with almost every poem in the collection. As to the characteristics we dislike, he avoids them all including no "intentional obscurity or riddling," no "highfalutin vocabulary" or "lack of recognizable theme or topic." Without a doubt, these poems reveal wise insights on the human perspective, but never at the cost of being overly serious, scholarly, or mysterious. The reader of these poems faces no risk of boredom-quite the contrary. Imagination and a beguiling tongue-in-cheek tone are the trademarks of Michael Meyerhofer's poetry. His work hits all our "like" buttons as it speaks in "a coherent human voice," though not always his own or the one you might expect, but one with "a sense of humor" that uses "words and language as [a] springboard for playful exploration." In many of these poems, the speaker possesses an inquisitive mind with an avid interest in history and even pre-history, fueled by the Discovery and History channels, Google searches, and museums. These poems dramatize a mind capable of straddling centuries, combining in the same breath an ancient scene with a contemporary evaluation, as when in the title poem, "Damnatio Memoriae," we encounter a Roman "slave/who fell from a twine-wrapped ladder/that OSHA would never condone." Such use of anachronism strikes us as both clever and funny. In "The Original Swastika," we're guided briskly through history, spotting the association-laden symbol in cultures as varied as the Romans, early Christians, Buddhists, Hindus, Navajos, and finally, "on the hoods /of German sedans." This whirlwind tour succinctly reminds us that the meanings of symbols morph over time and across cultures and that our recent memories and associations tend to obscure the resonances assigned in prior eras. His persona poems conjure speakers from worlds we know and from worlds we wish we knew, and every scene, setting or experience is depicted intensely with concrete imagery and drama. At first blush, "Dear Students," appears to argue for the conceit that writing poetry today rises from the same impulse that produced Stone Age cave paintings. Yet the poem does so much more than simply propose a comparison. It actually delivers a vivid experience from the point of view of a Paleolithic hunter, as if to say poetry is about beauty, guilt, and survival. Although many of these poems pursue history, the contemporary perspective and the everyday moment are not neglected. In "For Tanya, Whose Fate Remains Unknown," the speaker receives a phone call about "bad news" concerning a daughter he doesn't have. The surprise of the erroneous call sets off a poignant daydream of what peril the "daughter" Tanya might be suffering, and then an even deeper imagining of memories that might be slipping away from Tanya as she bleeds. These poems wake you up with their surprising twists, with the intensity of their speakers, and with the inventiveness of their lines and concepts. Sometimes these poems even risk offending the reader by tampering with archetypes, as in "Hansel's Redemption" where the question of what ever happened to Hansel and Gretel is answered with a scandalous narrative. As you may have guessed, Damnatio Memoriae easily asserted itself as the winner of our inaugural Brick Road Poetry Prize. We're proud to be publishing it and further encourage you to seek out Michael Meyerhofer's other books immediately. Keith Badowski & Ron Self Brick Road Poetry Press Columbus, GA

M. Ayodele Heath is a poet so fierce, so tender, so (rightly) angry, so generous of heart and spirit that I am 1) grateful, and 2) reminded again and again why I love poetry, why I have reason to love poetry: because it can be like this! - Thomas Lux, author of God Particles In this electrifying first collection of poems, Ayodele Heath explores "otherness" -- Black otherness, Southern otherness, African otherness, his otherness which becomes our otherness and everyone's otherness -- with such heat and such heart and such precision and magic that the words fairly fly off the page. This is language swooning and falling in love with itself; "consonants sharp as fangs and clean/ as bone." Here are poems "burning the pages in my eyes;" poems that are sharp, hip, sassy and smart as whips, taut as drums; poems full of beauty and horror and passion, unpredictable at every turn. This is the kind of poetry that keeps poetry alive. - Cecilia Woloch, author of Carpathia The words of M. Ayodele Heath are 'a foam which knows no foreign shore.' With his latest collection, Otherness, Heath bathes us in pools flooded with humankind's purest mind. A golden tongued man teaching the tone deaf to dance, his beat filled heart pulsing arrhythmic codes to the misbegotten, one eye witnesses the gore and the other praises glory. Open this book and allow this high priest of prosody to reveal the secrets of okra seeds germinating beneath the djembe's skin. - Robert Earl Price poet/ playwright M. Ayodele Heath's Otherness is many-voiced, peopled with a rich and real throng of speakers clamoring to have their say. Heath seems part stage director, part mimic, part ventriloquist as he channels and divines and ultimately bears witness to this subject of "otherness," the history and repercussions of race in America and abroad. His ear is outrageously good, his music rangy, unswerving, and often dizzyingly ambitious. This is a remarkable first collection. - Paula McLain, author of Less of Her, Stumble, Gorgeous and The Paris Wife

Written in the form of memoir or an old time shipping log, Pain Diary: Working Methadone & The Life & Times of the Man Sawed in Half can be viewed as two free-flowing, stream of consciousness, confessional poems. Both are set in sea-faring locations: New Bedford, home of Herman Melville and birthplace of Moby Dick; and Plymouth, where the Pilgrims settled alongside the Indian tribes of Massachusetts. "Working Methadone," evocatively begins with a section entitled "Call Me Ishmael. I Mean...Call Me, Ishmael!" and is set in a methadone clinic directly across from the Moby Dick Marina. A group home for adolescents provides the background for "The Life & Times of the Man Sawed in Half." In both, Joseph Reich, poet and social worker, explores his work experience with the "chemically dependent," the alienated and ostracized, and integrates it with his own cathartic empathy. Influenced by and echoing such wide-ranging and eclectic sources as Whitman, Cummings, Plath, Kerouac, Ginsberg, Bukowski, Nietzsche, Camus, Sartre, Dostoevsky, and Jim Morrison, among many others, Reich's style and point of view rises out of his own years on the road when, as Bob Dylan put it, "the only thing I knew how to do was to keep on keeping on," which included such jobs as cab driver, grave digger, roofer, long-haul trucker, and, "for a bit of a time, hustling the streets in the black market of San Francisco." While "Pain Diary" is a clinical term for the log kept by patients and clients to detail the moments when they feel most desperate and in crisis, the term is also an excellent descriptive for this one-of-a-kind poetry that seems to spring out of raw emotion in language that is, at one and the same time, natural, spontaneous and desperate--the language of survival.

With his uncommon common sense, Albert Garcia makes readers stop and pay attention. Again and again reading this collection I found myself halted by the simple astuteness of an observation, "before I knew love is pain / wrapped in shining paper . . . ." His unlikely choices of words or images often seem somehow exactly correct, once his context is studied, "your hair plumed like ink from a squid." Best of all, an ongoing sense of wonder at life itself pervades these singular expressions of mortality and more. -Gerald Haslam, author of Coming of Age in California and Grace Period With extraordinary attentiveness to the world around us, Albert Garcia explores the important questions: How to find equilibrium in a universe where Isaiah's wolf and lamb do not dwell peacefully beside each other-where "just the idea of standing on a volcano's shoulder...makes you brace for balance"-where awareness means accepting the fragility and underside of each moment. I am grateful for Garcia's wise, humane and wide-awake look into these complexities-of daily life, of marriage, of personal and global history-that enlarges us with its insightful and compassionate clarity. --Susan Kelly-DeWitt, author of The Fortunate Islands Who wouldn't love A Meal Like That, a moment we look back on when the complexities of our family life and our own often-bewildering inner life mingle at a table, and we are happy and sated, if sometimes a bit unsettled? Over the years, Albert Garcia has become a master at isolating such intimate, revealing moments of wonder, and then evoking them in his well-crafted and graceful poems. In this collection, those moments are divided between memories of a boy growing up on a ranch in the Sacramento Valley and those of a young family man living in that same valley. His voice is quiet and his word choices are unpretentious, but make no mistake, this is a poet who offers up the best fare, poems that satisfy and that will endure. Take a place at the table, and may we offer you "Cussing in the 4th Grade," "Dig," "Early Morning, Studying Art," or a little "November Task"? -Gary Thompson, author of One Thing After Another

"A twenty first century William Carlos Williams." -Booklist "Berlin's writing sheds all doctrines and poses. He seems to me to be a person who is living his whole life in an effort to find something, which can never be located or described. In one of those beautiful passages that left me breathless, Berlin writes, 'a doctor becomes/like a man who has spent sixty years/on a lobster boat, watching the world/swim fast and shining, right before his eyes.' These lines, like much of Berlin's poetry, seem to be about the revelation that emerges at the edge between our knowledge of the world, provided to us by science or maturation, and the chaotic understructure that throws up in front of us surprises that are both wanted and unwanted. Berlin has mastered a crisp, narrative style, etching descriptions with brevity and clarity. For example, the poem 'Brought by Police from the Golden Gate Bridge' describes the horrible repetitive suicide cases of nearly dead but still living patients. Alongside the storyteller, we encounter a doctor . . . who descends into darkness in order to find light. In 'Takotsubo Cardiomyopathy' the doctor-speaker encounters 'another broken heart's/beaten down story of futility and resilience.' Berlin seems to live with the courage of undaunted individualism, and unusual honesty . . . as in 'Midnight Rounds, ' he describes patients in a hospital at midnight, 'their shriveled skin/ like moldy frescoes in an untended church/ after the faithful leave for another god.' Practice contains the poems of a sturdy, unadorned man who is not hiding behind anything, and who is not driven towards something. He is standing there observing, feeling, and interpreting the world to a broad audience of intimate listeners. He describes himself so evocatively as anxious while on vacation, 'I can be at peace/ when I am with my patients or at home . . . ' He might have added that his fate, as it emerges in the poems in this book, is in the orientation to life that words expose when they reveal truths that spring up inside of coherent, beautiful language." -Paul R. Fleischman, author of Wonder: When and Why the World Appears Radiant and other books

Like a quirky photographer, David Oates has captured moments from life-funny, ironic wistful, poignant, odd, warm, happy and beautiful-and distilled them into short, evocative poems. David is the author of a previous book of similar poems, "Shifting with my Sandwich Hand," and one of stories and poems, "Night of the Potato." He has worked as a reporter, columnist, photographer, comic-strip writer, teacher, poetry-slam organizer and emcee, and editor and publisher of "Monkey," a magazine of satire and slam poetry. He hosted the public-radio shows "Front Porch Stories" and "Great Apes," and is currently the host and producer of Wordland on WUGA, Athens, GA.

In The Word In Edgewise, Sean M. Conrey writes ballads of intimate human moments, backed by a landscape that is so palpable, we'll reach into our memories for it like home. Conrey's poems honor "the good fear" that "brings us into our skin" and as a result, they bring us that much closer to whomever and whatever it is that we love. The present moment may be all we have, but when Conrey wonders, "if we could see the river without us," he widens time and offers a kind of company that's "all solitude without loneliness." Jesse Nissim, author of Day Cracks Between the Bones of the Foot, and Alphabet for M

In Carol Tyx's Rising to the Rim, we are in the presence of a thoughtful and loving sensibility that speaks in a language both energetic and simply put, language that opens a door and invites us in to marvel at what these poems notice-from a red tomato hidden behind its leaves to a revelation in old hiking boots, from the loneliness of an empty house to the red surprise of a raspberry patch ready to give today "what you missed yesterday." Time and again these poems suggest a mature poet, who has raised children and seen her parents through the end of their lives, a poet who rages deliberately at injustice and muses quietly at falling leaves or the love of a father for his young son. In this moving collection, Carol Tyx observes with great skill and invites us to watch as well, as if such attention and such singing are the practice needed "to learn/how to love everything." James McKean There is a wise observer in these poems, someone very awake to significant, visionary elements and possibilities in experience-"trying not to close / trying to taste this late afternoon" or "tell me how one moment / stands out, luminous and wet." Carol Tyx always convinces me in her painterly attention to things that happen, that are, in the world, and her manner and voice are characteristically refreshing, as in "The easiest way to make sure / you love someone well is to / love everything, but we know / how hard that is, don't we?" The tenderness is unforced. This is a clear and fearless poet who can talk quite naturally to her loneliness, to her bladder, to her bed. Alert to dramas in lives other than her own, she is also unsparing in recording darker moments, diminishments, inevitable declines. Her sometimes stark sadness, her gift for the celebratory, make this a distinctive collection of poems. Michael Dennis Browne

The alp at the end of Gary Leising's street is many things but to me it embodies the immensity of life's surprising spiritual eruptions, doubts, and challenges amid the mundane. The Alp at the End of My Street is full of happily disconcerting shifts between humor and high seriousness, and it is rich with daring but agreeable leaps of imagination that surprise and delight. The author's intelligence, good humor, and common sense light up every poem in this outstanding collection. Andrew Hudgins

"Ace Boggess's The Prisoners gives voice to those forgotten Americans behind the ever increasing miles of razor wire. Complicated with the mixed emotions of regret and defiance, of loss and perseverance, of hope and frustration, these aren't just persona poems, nor are they just poems of witness; rather these poems are metaphors, too, for the way each of us may feel jailed by circumstance only to find a kind of freedom in the possibilities of poetry." -Gerry LaFemina, author of Vanishing Horizon and Notes for the Novice Ventriloquist

Possible Crocodiles, Book of the Year for 2010 (Alabama Poetry Society) is Barry Mark's debut full-length poetry book. The poems are witty, self-deprecating, and vulnerable. The collection demands your attention from the first word to the last, always hooking you along on a journey comprised of unexpected twists and meaningful rewards. Barry Marks is a Birmingham attorney whose poetry, fiction, articles and essays have been published in nearly 100 journals, magazines and periodicals over the last 30 years. Mr. Marks was 1998 Alabama State Poetry Society Poet of the Year and his chapbook, There is Nothing Oppressive as a Good Man, won the Society's 2003 Morris Chapbook Competition. A member of the Big Table Poets, his work is featured in that group's anthologies, Poems from the Big Table and Einstein at the Odeon Cafe. He is a past president of the Alabama State Poetry Society and a former Board member of the Alabama Writer's Conclave.