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From the author of Gigs and The Reservist, John Davis's new poetry collection Guard the Dead explores the consequences of war and the struggles of the human spirit to endure. As a former Coast Guard veteran, Davis brings an authentic voice to his verses on military life, violence, trauma, and the perseverance of love amidst unimaginable hardship.Populated with vivid imagery and unflinching honesty, Davis's poems transform the personal into the universal. We are immersed in his haunting recollections of combat, fragmented psyches, and the bittersweet mundanities of life after serving in the military. Yet his uncompromising gaze also finds moments of surprising tenderness-the hand of a lover, the first steps of a child, the simple joys of the natural world that surrounds us.Whether chronicling the anguish of a bullet's journey through the brain or a crab's mating dance on the ocean floor, Guard the Dead demonstrates Davis's remarkable ability to render both the beauty and brutality of our existence in language alternately brutal and exquisite. This is a collection that will leave no reader unmoved as it roots into the deepest ranges of human experience and emerges, shaken yet resolute, as testament to our flawed, profound and ever-persisting world.Unforgettable and essential, Guard the Dead is a profound addition to the literature of war and survival from the pained voice of an American poet.

Set in Gray's fictional small town of Argus, Illinois, Police Chief Art Millage faces one last manhuntAs Art prepares to step down after 15 years as Chief and pursue a new life running the local marina, a mysterious figure from his past returns to Argus-Nathan Bedford, the son of Brant Russell, a desperate criminal Art was forced to kill in the line of duty years before.The troubled young Bedford, never having known his father, begins stalking Art. Tensions rise and suspicions grow. When Bedford assaults one of Art's deputies and flees into the same fateful woods where his father died, Art realizes he must confront this threat to the town he has sworn to protect.Armed and on edge, the weary Chief pursues Bedford deep into the dark forest, unsure of the young man's intentions-or his own resolve to take another life if he must.Masterfully blending a tense crime story with poignant character drama, The Last Stop is a riveting exploration of duty, morality, and one man's search for meaning and redemption after a life in the long shadows of tragedy and dedication to the law.

My Father's Gloves touches on the complex, often fraught bond between fathers and sons with raw honesty and deep emotional resonance. In this haunting poetry collection, David Spiering explores the heavy burden of a father's expectations and the struggles a son faces as he grows into manhood.With an accessible yet subtly complex voice, Spiering's poems are wrought with piercing emotions and vivid descriptions. His measured, deliberate pacing allows each hard-hitting revelation about family, identity, and the legacies we inherit to fully resonate.From reminiscences on his German grandmother's influence to meditations on his father's thriftiness and apparent emotional distance, Spiering invites readers into the most intimate spaces of the heart. Compassionate yet unflinching, these poems confront the difficulties of forging one's own path while still carrying the weight of paternal expectations and generational traditions.

In terms of commercial success, The Henry Rifle Project was a complete and utter failure. From a profit and loss standpoint, the historical scales will forever tilt heavily toward loss. Still, more than anything else, Henry Rifle was a lifeboat launched by a man who was sinking rapidly. An emergency buoy fired up from the depths.Even if that lifeboat never reached new worlds and did little more than drift about in vast and empty seas, the fact of it is, it kept its lone occupant afloat-alive.From that viewpoint and that viewpoint alone, The Henry Rifle Project was an unqualified success.

The American poet Henry Rifle is dead. You could remember him as the guy who fell in a hail of bullets launched his way by a Mexican firing squad. Or you could remember him for his poems and the charitable work he liked to tell people he did. Undoubtedly, he would prefer the latter. He might especially appreciate it if you remembered him for his last collection of poems-Ballistics Report. Were he here, he would tell you that was probably the closest he ever got to capturing the truth as he knew it. It contains everything: the humor, the heartbreak, the passion, the pathos; the unique perspective that almost made him famous. Henry Rifle liked to say It's always what you thought, but never what you think. What he meant was that the clues are generally there for the mystery to be solved, but we usually don't see that until after the police have arrived, and it's too late to do more than wring our hands and bemoan the fact we didn't connect the dots quicker. Henry Rifle connected those dots. And even though it's too late for him, you might benefit from the twisted picture he put together.