Bøger udgivet af Spartan Press

Americana songwriter and Kansas-City-based storyteller K.W. Peery is the author of five poetry collections: Tales of a Receding Hairline; Purgatory; Wicked Rhythm; Ozark Howler; Gallatin Gallows. Tales of a Receding Hair- line was a semi finalist in the Goodreads Choice Awards - Best in Poetry 2016. Peery is a regular contributor in Veterans Voices Magazine. His work is included in the Vincent Van Gogh Anthology Resurrection of a Sun Flower and the Walsall Poetry Society Anthology, Diverse Verse II & III.

Gary Lechliter's work has recently appeared in many poetry journals and anthologies. He has published three full-length books of poetry. His newest book Off the Beaten Path is published by Woodley Press. Gary is the managing editor of I-70 Review.

"Steve Gerson's latest collection moves from light to dark. It begins with the kind of love poems that could only be written by someone who has loved for a long time. They are rife with powerful images that show us true love doesn't have to fade: "your hands in mine as small as birdsong" or "stay with me as long as ink and paper remember." In part two, Gerson shatters us with images of loss like "seawater salt, like acid rains, eroded her resolve into fissures" or "like planting corn in concrete." The final section of the book, "Lost," takes the reader through the experience of various speakers who suffer trauma. Throughout the book, Gerson experiments with form, most notably with the erasure poems in the "Lost" section. This book begins with bird song, but it ends with an AK 47 and the Apocalypse. This great collection of poems is a knockout."-Dr. Beth Gulley, author of I Am Your Fish Drowning In Air: Love Poems"Albeit an optimist, this poet writes truthfully about the trying times we have all been living through. Recently, we have been forced to make frequent pivots - pivots to plans, to rules, to procedures, to hopes, to change. Love and losing and loss are the felt arc of this chapbook. This poetic arc suggests continued inspiration for the next phase - finding peace and love and hopefully solutions beyond the madness. Gerson writes, "but overflowing onto pages into our future written" in Chapter 1. These words hint at a positive conclusion beyond Chapter 3."-Dr. Stefani G. Buchwitz, Director, Self Graduate Fellowship, University of Kansas"Steve Gerson's evocative poems immerse the reader in what it means to love in our unsettling times. The first of three sections, "Love," transitions from the enclosed and timeless world of the lover and his beloved to our present-day, digital world where a love letter, no longer handwritten, can be deleted in an instant. "Losing," the middle chapter, begins with classic impediments to love: unfaithfulness, lack of communication, illness. The intrusions in "Lost" switch from the personal to the world at large: homelessness, racism, climate change, 9/11, Covid, and hanging over it all, the digital world which we have embraced. Throughout, striking images highlight the progression from love to loss as the poems move from the beloved, "your hands ...as small as birdsong" to a bride wearing "toxic mascara" to a teacher, "a little lady wearing a reindeer sweater" and wielding a gun. Timely and thought-provoking, energetic and perceptive, Gerson's poems are a testament to the challenges love faces in our viral world." -Edie Cottrell Kreisler, Professor Emeritus of English, Merritt College, Oakland, CA."This second volume of rhythmic incantations cements Steve Gerson's standing as a foremost American poet. Exuding sensuousness, pathos, and prescience, Viral: Love and Losses in the Time of Insanity brilliantly captures the urban landscape amid the pandemic as expertly as its counterpart, Once Planed Straight, evokes enduring images of the heartland. Gracefully and poignantly etched, Viral contains fifty-two exquisitely drawn poems nested in the pristine arcs of "Love," "Losing," and "Lost." The braided themes range from enduring love to vaccine refuseniks to the national shame of school shootings involving 'another child another child,' as Gerson eloquently weeps."-Dr. Robert Cottrell, author of Izzy: A Biography of I.F. Stone

I am a poet with two books of poetry titled Stewed Soul that was published in 2008 and On the Edge of Urban that was published in 2013. I have been writing professionally for 18 years, and my poems have been published in various Literary journals/magazines/newspapers such as: The Kansas City Star, Potpourri Literary Journal, Grist Literary Magazine, Forum: A Women's Studies Journal (Avila University), Poets-At-Large (The Writers Place), Scop Literary Magazine (Avila University), and The Women's Studies Group (Avila University). I was a featured reader at The Cornelia Street Café in New York City, The Writers Place, The Kemper Museum of Art, The Kansas City Public Library, the Johnson County Public Library, and gave a featured performance for The Kansas City Fringe Festival which is a major Arts Organization in Kansas City, Missouri. I gave a featured performance for The Kansas City Literary Festival which was a national event. I have been a featured reader at Propero's Bookstore, Missouri Center For the Book ( Stephens College-Columbia Missouri), and I was a Guest Lecturer at the University of Missouri-Kansas City for a Graduate English Class at UMKC. I was a Special Guest Author along with the Award-Winning Poet and Professor Stanley E. Banks on a Public Education Television Program which was sponsored by the University of Missouri-Kansas City, and the program was titled "Writers on Writing." I have been a Featured Guest Poet on several radio programs on KCUR, 89.3 FM and KKFI, 90.1 FM. I have my own Production Company called BanksWorks, and one of the programs is titled Some Funk From Him And Some Funk From Her.

Agnes Vojta grew up in Germany, spent a few years in California, Oregon, and England, and now lives in Rolla, Missouri where she teaches physics at Missouri S&T. Her work has been published in The Gasconade Review, Poetry Quarterly, Southwinds, and elsewhere.

Jim Hanson's Endless Journey is at once a travelogue and guidebook of trips down "Cinderella paths" and rivers both roaring and calm, along train tracks and online. In his poems, Hanson brings us with him forward and backward in time to meet up with Buddha and Burroughs, Lao Tzu and T.S. Eliot, Plato and Nietzsche, and then, after peering like Hubble into the far, dark reaches, he leads us home to the people whose "last names/and faces in high school yearbooks" we know well. Endless Journey is a wild ride, and Jim Hanson is a delightful guide-poet.- Josh Russell, author of Yellow Jack and King of Animals: Stories, Director of the Creative Writing Center, Georgia State University Jim Hanson's poetry takes us on a journey from mythology to Jack Kerouac. Oedipus Rex was driven by fate. He made choices but ultimately ended up where the gods preferred him to be. Jim shows how we may be driven by fate, but where we end up depends more on our own makeup---something innate or is it? "Perhaps something beyond" draws us forward as we feel our way through life and "Venture not back to your home/ where they know not who you are or what you mean."- jacob erin-cilberto, author of Pour Me Another Poem and five other poetry books Jim Hanson's first collection is a feast of ideas, undergirded by his broad knowledge of literature, history, science, arts, and religion. Images from varied disciplines travel comfortably together within Hanson's cohesive metaphor of journey. The seven sets of poems tackle the "hoary question of living and time," offering insights both ageless and new. Lost Journey is creative, challenging, and inventively formatted-an intelligent, provocative collection of poems that the reader will want to revisit, dog-ear, and embellish with marginalia.- Kathy Lohrum Cotton, author of Common Ground, and President of Southern Illinois Chapter of ISPS Out of the cacophonous multicultural clamor that we call America, Jim Hanson composes his provocative lyrics in a hero's effort to reach that which is ungraspable. He incorporates notes, chords, and themes, both harmonious and dissonant, from sources as varied as Plato and Lao Tzu, Einstein and Meister Eckhart, Saint John and Zoroaster, Heisenberg and Lucretius. Sometimes taking the role of Virgil, the guide, and other times, Dante, the seeker, Hanson accompanies us down the many strange byways of the human mind as it searches for the ineffable.- William L. Holcomb, physician and founder of Heartland Zen Meditation Community of St. Louis Jim Hanson's poems are about faith and the journey as a spiritual metaphor. While describing that in real life the way is often lost, he opens the way to salvation by the walking poems at the end. Great stuff.- Hugh Muldoon, late poet and activist, Carbondale, Illinois

All Through Your Multiple Selves by Blake Hamilton is made of haunting poems that are in dialogue with themselves on the virtues of chaos and order, and the disorienting, erotic, lonely, and yearning patterns they make when they come together in the same body, through multiple selves. The narrator, or narrators, experience hauntings, vanishings, silence, ecstasy, music, need, grief, and a sense that he is reliving his own prismatic life forwards and backwards, that time is both stretched to infinity and also collapsing into this moment. In elegant lyrics, Hamilton never evades the hunger or dread of intimacy and vulnerability, and his language nimbly casts us about through fluid and shifting stages of knowledge, "charging forward, / a body-ocean // burning off / old ambitions." The quest to know and be known, "My mouth is full of your sleep. / In the roots of my teeth are my indecisions," animates this collection, though so many encounters leave his narrator(s) rocking between moments of generosity and states of alienation. This is a poet attuned to the possibilities of reincarnation, that all we have is this moment, and to keep opening to it, despite the wounds and scars, is an invitation we were born to, because "everything is exposed / everything has a name."¿ ¿ ¿Sun Yung Shin is a poet, writer, and healer. She is the author or editor of six books, most recently the award-winning poetry/essay collection Unbearable Splendor. "Blake Hamilton has created divine footnotes on the big spaces and the little spaces that we traverse in a lifetime. In these short poems, Hamilton saturates his human experience into fast-moving frames of honesty that hit hard and leave the best kind of bruises. This is an excellent first collection from a new and refreshing voice." --- Brice Maiurro, Poetry Editor for Suspect Press and Author of Hero Victim Villain Blake Edward Hamilton holds an MFA in Creative Writing from Naropa University, and currently teaches college English. His work has appeared in World Literature Today Magazine: Windmill, NPR, The Guerrilla Literary Magazine, The Bombay Gin Literary Journal, Punch Drunk Press, and SoboGhoso Press, among others. He frequently travels, spending his time between the deserts of New Mexico and Paris, France as often as possible.

Brenda Linkeman began writing poetry when she was a sophomore in high school and only recently began publishing. She has had poems published in The Gasconade Review and the Trailer Park Quarterly. She has made a career working as a clinical social worker and play therapist with children, as well as teaching private art lessons. Brenda grew up moving frequently since her father was a topographic engineer for the USGS. She has lived in seventeen states. Living all over the U.S. allowed her to learn about the variety of landscapes in this country, and the often subtle, but unique cultural differences there are between the states. The dynamics between people inspires Brenda's poetry, as does the universe.

When my three sons left for college, I entered the MFA program at Wichita State University. I entered the buzz saw of critique workshops full of hope. However, after a few weeks I planned to drop out of the program, Robert Dana, a visiting professor from Iowa, said I should stay in the program. I eventually learned how to write poetry. Professor Bruce Cutler became my thesis advisor. He entered of my poems to the American Academy of Poet competition. I was awarded rst place, with a check to go along with it. After I graduated with the MFA, I taught English Composition at Butler Community College, where I taught for forty plus years. I'm still writing poetry and getting published. I'm also a co-editor for three editions of 365, the anthology of poets who post to the Facebook, "365 Poems in 365 Days." I've published two books of poetry. Leap of Faith, is a self- published book with the help of my son and his MAC computer. My second book, The Sad Joy of Leaving, was published by Blue Cedar Press. As president of District 5 of the Kansas Authors Club, I've gotten to know poets from around the state. I also belong to four poetry groups, Poets in Hiding, Women Who Write, Thursday Group, and Basement Bards. I owe thanks to everyone in those groups for their close and careful reading of my work. I especially appreciate Roy Beckemeyer, Robert Dean, and Ronda Miller for their support. In May, my poem, "In Answer to W.B Yeats," I received the first place award in the Kansas Voices for the traditional poetry category, as well as winning the best poet award. My husband, our little dog Annie, and I live in Wichita's Old Town in a house that's almost a hundred years old.

Nettie Zan Powers is a poet, painter, fiction writer, event organizer, editor and founder of Stubborn Mule Press, an indie poetry press focused on working class street poets with an emphasis on radical country queers. Powers has several poetry collections published and their work can be found in numerous anthologies and journals both print and online. They also are a founding member and organizer of FountainVerse: KC Small Press Poetry Fest, a three-day festival in October of each year. Powers believes in an open hand, eye contact and dissolving into laughter, also rivers and exchanging disposable cameras.Nettie Zan Powers is a performance artist, writer and community builder in KCMO and beyond. She currently heads the generative performance venue, Uptown Arts Bar; collaborates on the annual Lit Fest Fountainverse; and is a fellow resident with Osage Arts Community near Belle, MO. She is a non-binary queer, working class artist. She has published ten books, not counting secret ones: including Earthworms & Stars, The Cosmic Lost and Found, Perfectly Good Muses, and most recently Gasconade by NightBallet Press. Her first novella, Victimless Crime, is forthcoming by Outlandish Press. She has also edited a number of successful anthologies: Finding Zen in Cowtown: Poems about KC; Desolate Country: Poets react to the inauguration; and Prompts: a spontaneous anthology.

Mark Matzeder is a Nomad, fading in and out of landscapes like a glitchy hologram or psilocybin dream. An officer's son, Mark spent his early life looking at the interiors of sundry post housing across the American South. From leprechaun height they all look much the same. At the dawn of Aquarius his family settled in the Old Dominion, whose soil, marsh, and forests scream with the blood of pioneers, revolutionaries, and rebels.Mark studied celluloid majik at Trinity U, then took to wandering again: dabbling in stage, screen, poetry, and prose. He earned his bread with a series of dead-end jobs he prefers to think of as Research for the Great American Novel or Indy film. The whirlwind touched down in Kansas City in 2002.Mark is a Linguistic Mystic seeking Truth in the space between words. He is a fledgling Bard-a lowly mage casting spells of Summoning & Binding with these glyphs.

Phillip Emanuel Frost Bounds is a poet, pilot, and a pundit for perplexity (with an emphasis on the pun). He is also an attorney, axe throwing coach, swing dancer, and intellectual adventurer with a penchant for precise word usage and anffnity for antinomies. He is a transplant from Colorado but is glad to call Kansas City home. He has a bachelor's degree in philosophy from the University of Colorado in Colorado Springs, and a Juris Doctorate from the University of Denver. You can find more of his writing online at i revity.com or on Instagram at @i revity_poetry.

I was born and raised in New York City, attending the public schools there-a pretty typical kid, gabby and obnoxious, who loved to play with his friends. But when I was eight years old, my four-year-old sister Carole Anne was diagnosed with liver cancer. We watched her wither away to a living skeleton, then die in agony. The soul of our family was shattered. The poetry I began writing as an adolescent seeped from that grieving wound, expressed that stark alienation. And that's where my essential self remained until, as a 32-year old atheist, my soul was suddenly cracked open. I experienced an overwhelming mystical awakening which forever changed my life.Well before this great turning point, I'd graduated from Queens College, N. Y., earning a B.A. In Creative Writing while winning a couple of literary awards: The Dwight V. Durling Poetry Prize, and The Peter Pauper Press Award. I was also very active in college theater, playing several leading roles. Prior to graduating however, I dropped out for a while, studied acting at HB Studios in Greenwich Village, then served in the U.S. Army Military Police, gaining an honorable discharge. Eventually, I moved to Kansas City, Mo., completing most classes toward a Masters in English Lit. at UMKC, but not taking a degree. Except for three years in the St. Louis area, I've lived in Kansas City ever since.

Joseph Anthony Davis has lived most of his life in Kansas City, Mo, where he attended Bishop Hogan High School and went on to somehow con(vince) the monks and nuns and Benedictine College in Atchsion, Ks, to give him a B.A. in English. When not writing poetry, he tries his hand (and sometimes his voice) at music, with songwriting, composing, and the electric bass getting the most attention. He works for the Broadway District of MainCor, a blue shirt counterpart to the ubiquitous red shirts seen helping to make midtown Kansas City clean and inviting for residents and visitors alike. Black Lives Matter and Other Poems is his first attempt at literary adulting, and it shan't be his last.

Brett Lars Underwood is a bartender and a gadabout whowrites, promotes and produces happenings and mishaps in St. Louis. Once upon a time, he co-published a 'zine en- titled Lick My Squaggle Noose, Clam Tick. He penned Zen koans for the Riverfront Times and St. Louis Magazine as well as Curator. He has performed in back rooms, backyards, ball rooms, barrooms, basements, coffee houses, courtyards, galleries, museums, rock venues and taverns. His verse and riddles have been published by the Bicycle Review, 52nd City, The Subterranean, Bad Shoe and included in Flood Stage: An Anthology of Saint Louis Poets and The Gasconade Review presents 39 Feet And Rising. He unleashed Sunlit Insult, his first chapbook, in 2011 and Its Bush Lent Subtle Hints in October, 2013. He can be reached at brettlarsunderwood@gmail.com