Bøger udgivet af Steel Toe Books

Memory and myth. Cigarettes and summer nights. Worship songs and circle pits. don't call us punk because we hate that traverses the backroads ofAmerica's suburbia in the days before smartphones and AirPods at the very time of life when the aimless youth are waking up to their disillusionment atthe world their parents were planting for them. These starkly direct poems speak to the human need for authentic community and escape before theydrown in middle-class expectations. The characters, places, and times are pulled from a lived experience and expanded into a universal narrativearound the search for something sustainable and true. Adam Oyster-Sands has written a love letter to punk and to those who wove in and out ofthe various shows, record shops, skate spots, and fast-food joints of his formative years. Whether you've spent a Saturday night in a circle pit andSunday morning in a church pew or not, don't call us punk because we hate that speaks to anyone who, at the exact right time, found their people inthe unexpected places beyond the boundaries of a world passed to them through the stories they inherit.

The poems in The Ghost Owl Says Go Now focus on place, specifically the vast American landscape from California to Key West and points in between. Guided by the wandering spirit of Bash¿, some of the travel poems in this collection are wistful; others reflect on harsh realities experienced under the spell of wanderlust. Along the way, there are encounters with a variety of people-neighbors, relatives, strangers-that might be described as instances of synchronicity: encounters that seemingly offer significance beyond the random. Still other poems take their cues from culturalmanifestations of Americana: music, artwork, literature, film. In this collection of poems, Stephen Benz continues his probing explorations into the topographies of Americana.

"Magic the real" writes Nancy Botkin in The Honeycomb. These poems explore the necessity of art and the imagination, the ability to see that even the darkest places can resonate with beauty when the eye is trained to see it. Memory, that constant companion, also resonates; its fuzzy and fickle nature can be buoyed by artistry. As she combs the past, she discovers that a rich inner life is a powerful defense against a random and precarious existence. She delivers this message with clear language, subjecting the ordinary events of life to pressure, making them new, bright.

Curtis L. Crisler sings a midwestern blues filled with Mama's cake batter and ashy legs, boomboxes and T-ball. Walking through these pages, I swear I could hear the music of the streetlights turning on, telling me to get home before dark. Curtis' poems live in the dark - and they capture the scent of laughter and tears like lightning bugs in a mason jar. Open these pages and drink in the light. --Tyehimba Jess, Pulitzer Prize winner, and author of Olio

"In Street Calligraphy, Jim Daniels continues to enchant and transport us across state lines while rooting us in tragic heart lessons and the triumphs of love. These are moving, unflinching poems -- brutal and brave in their pulse to assert that even after a world where "We drew lies with chalk / and the truth with tar. / We lit our hair on fire / to cover the smell," -- there comes a beautiful reassembling of what it means to have people who sing you home." -- Aimee Nezhukumathil, author of Oceanic

"Chrys Tobey's a woman is a woman is a woman is a woman is a book in which Gertrude Stein's roses and Freud's cigars collide. These witty, poignant poems--eco-feminist in their approach, abundant in their gestures and forms--engage our cultural moment while re-imagining the world's flawed history that got us here. Anaphora abounds, building, then subverting, then building again. The personas of her 'bitch goddesses' will make you laugh and rethink everything." -- Denise Duhamel

"Hovering over and shooting through this collection is the spirit and symbolic heft of an ancient faith under contemporary pressures, to mean at all much less be found meaningful. Who is left, these poems ask, to cast out the demons? The God of her father, long ago having left the building, thankfully left the cable hooked up and the refrigerator stocked; the present moment these poems depict and within which they instruct is one where depth must be sought in shallow and hollowed-out cultural ruins." -- John Estes, author of Sure Extinction

Christopher Citro may be the love child of poet Russell Edson and The Twilight Zone... From the ashes of domesticity and order a new American surrealism blooms, in which the charming, the unsettling, and the strange colorize the quote unquote normal." -- Amy Gerstler

"In the world made by Charles Rafferty's poems, men travel with hawks in their suitcases, clouds of bees disrupt wedding receptions. Rafferty sees through "the concussed air of streetlamp, mall and interchange" to the small wild heart fluttering in the center of our mostly-tamed lives. But in these poems where "a bracelet of barbed wire, a pendant of living bees" might be decorations lies a love for all the risk and beauty of being human. Charles Rafferty is a poet of vision and imagination, and The Unleashable Dog is a mature and beautiful collection." -- Al Maginnes (from the back cover)

"Gabriel Welsch's remarkable third collection boisterously offers up a wonderfully imaginative romp through the wilds of pop-culture and various amusing suburban conflicts. These poems are at once hilarious and tender in their resolve to praise the very pulse of a busy life-even if we face the knowledge that 'loss fires the blood/ loss starts the day, blood fired is the day.' In poem after poem, Welsch displays a rare understanding of what it means to reward the reader by uncovering wild, brave, and beautiful truths about the human condition." -Aimee Nezhukumatathil, author of Lucky Fish

"Ron Salutsky takes his readers from the deepest memories of childhood to the edge of our loneliest moments when the stars bloom in the night sky, and the trees and wind tell us their secrets. This is a world in motion, a world filled with goodbyes. Cars travel deserted highways, and we witness acts that he translates into poems of arching bravura. This is a deeply felt and moving debut collection." - Barbara Hamby, author of All-Night Lingo Tanto

"Sharp, pointed, the poems confront the sacred and the profane and find them often to be made of the same elements, the same common dust. The mode here is not devotional, but confrontational, a contemporary Jacob wrestling with the questions of flesh and the spirit." -- Erik Pankey

the first book by National Poetry Series finalist Simpson, the first graduate of Oklahoma State University's Master of Fine Arts (MFA) program in creative writing and the editor of The Fiddleback.

If I were Colen's agent, I'd pitch these poems to a movie producer as "David Lynch meets Gertrude Stein." Money for Sunsets, like Tender Buttons, is syntactically rich and varied, using fragments, repetition, and word associations.If I were Colen's agent, I might not mention her complicated and smartobservations on women, violence, and money - since I'm assuming that most movie producers are capitalists. In "Des Oeufs," Colen writes, "A naked woman as a motif is too easy." Too easy, indeed. Innovative and evocative, these poems have arrived at just the right cultural moment. And I, for one, am grateful they're here. - Denise Duhamel, Judge, 2009 Steel Toe Books Prize in Poetry

"a musical confrontation with the difficult and painful recurrences of middle age -- love lost and love renewed, the depredations of time and change, the fear of aging as diminishing possibility . . . a book about enduring need and the transormative power of song." -- Alan Shapiro

Blue Collar Eulogies is the second full-length book of poems by Michael Meyerhofer, the award-winning author of Leaving Iowa. Poet Dorianne Laux says, "Michael Meyerhofer takes us with him everywhere he goes, from the back rooms of hash-slingers to the Star of Africa. He weighs a whale's brain and imagines the "cattle-dark eyes" of Neanderthals. I like these poems, kinetic and half-crazed, they remind me that poetry is an explosion, that energy plus mass equals a dark magic."

"If you want to laugh out loud while simultaneously weeping silently, read Chris Goodrich. If you want to meet a poet with far more than his rightful share of wisdom and tenderness laced with iodine, Goodrich is your man. Talk about love and marriage, in poetry that's inventive, playful, and right on target about just how needy we all are? Read this book for pure pleasure."-Alicia Ostriker

Jump Start is a poetry anthology celebrating the Jump Start Workshops, held from 2000-2006 by Northwest Renaissance, a non-profit literary and performing arts organization with a thirty-year history. Notable contributors include Washington State Poet Laureate Samuel Green, Kevin Miller, Pesha Joyce Gertler, Allen Braden, Alice Derry, and Peter Pereira (among many others).

Bending Under the Yellow Police Tapes is the fourth full-length collection by Doyle, a prolific poet whose work appears in a nearly every issue of nearly every journal nowadays. It is the follow-up to his critically acclaimed Einstein Considers a Sand Dune, which was selected by David Kirby as the winner of the 2003 Steel Toe Books Prize in Poetry.

"Mary Biddinger is a beguiling shape-shifter, one who suffuses her writing with electricity and alacrity of language. I marvel at the elegant architecture and scope of each poem. The veritable menagerie of animals that visit these pages simply enchants: zebras, rhinos, marabou, goldfish, bears, and banana spiders. These poems bite and scare, ravish and delight. Prairie Fever showcases a beautiful mind, a beautiful debut." -- Aimee Nezhukumatathil, author of Miracle Fruit and At the Drive-in Volcano.

a verse memoir about the author's parents' experiences in a Nazi slave labor camp in Germany

"Full of poems that stand alone as consummate accomplishments, Conditions and Cures nevertheless coheres as a book about life-and-death verities, strategies for survival or triumph or at least coping gracefully. The comic is one of those strategies, and Ken Waldman is often at his most hilarious when he's addressing subjects another poet might murder with solemnity. In addition, he frequently engages with demanding forms like pantoums, villanelles, sestinas and sonnets, submitting to their guidance but never losing his independence. The secret of such a trick is his ear: a professional musician, Waldman swears final allegiance to the body of our language, its sonorities and rhythms, to its possibilities as song-a co-strategy with the comic." -Philip Dacey

A collection of intricately-crafted poems that honestly and movingly address pregnancy, childbirth, postpartum depression, and other aspects of family life.

an award winning collection of poems, many using science motifs, written by a chemist with a Ph.D.

"In this splendidly entertaining debut, Jeannine Hall Gailey offers us a world both familiar and magical-filled with fairytale and mythology characters that are our own bedfellows-we wake up with Philomel and argue with Ophelia while half-listening to a Snow Queen, amidst Spy Girls, Amazons and Mongolian Cows. The wild and seductive energy in this collection never lets one put the book down. (In fact, any one who opens the collection in the bookstore and reads such poems as The Conversation and Job Requirements: A Supervillain's Advice will want to buy the book!) For her delivery is heart-breaking and refreshing, so the poems seduce us with the sadness, glory and entertainment of our very own days. Propelled by Jeannine Hall Gailey's alert, sensuous, and musical gifts, the mythology becomes all our own." -Ilya Kaminsky, author of the award-winning Dancing in Odessa

When Emerson was twelve, she was enamored by her grandmother Amelia and believed that what others saw as eccentricity or mental illness was instead a misunderstood gift. Five years later, hardened by her mother's suicide and worried that she might be destined for a similar fate, Emerson visits Amelia at The Lavender House, a mental health facility for the elderly, to learn more about the enigmatic women in her family who found either magic or madness in response to a world that often seemed too small to contain them. As Amelia's warped fairy tale emerges, buried stories are unearthed, and everything Emerson thinks she knows shifts as she begins to confront her own magical thinking and burgeoning feelings toward her best friend, Courtney.

Amy Roa's Radioactive Wolves inhabits an ecosystem teeming with the dreamlike imagery of a long-lost animal kingdom. To open this book is to step through a portal leading straight to the heart of a blazing meteor about to crash land on an unsuspecting planet. In this world, an electric catfish develops a mammalian heart, a two-headed rabbit predicts the future, a starling wields a machete, an American alligator wanders the streets of war-torn Berlin, a girl turns into a grain of rainforest soil, and New Caledonian crows become expert bomb-builders. Explorer of the whimsical and fantastical, builder of mangrove forests, conjurer of megafauna, platypuses, mermaids, and wolves, Amy Roa leads readers into the strange and unknown where the unexpected is sure to occur.