Bøger udgivet af Two Sylvias Press

Martha Silano's new book What The Truth Tastes Like, (Two Sylvias Press, 2015) is a second edition of her original, award-winning collection published in 1999. This revised book includes twenty new poems, a Foreword by David Kirby, and an Afterword by Martha Silano. Praise for What The Truth Tastes Like: From clear-eyed attention to the ordinary world, Martha Silano makes poems that instruct, startle, and give pleasure as only a great poem can. -David Kirby Martha Silano reveals that she invented the perpetually grieving Linzer torte and the self-effervescing catbox lid and I believe her. Her poems are full of good stuff-sausages and Oklahoma villages and dreams of parrots. Even when love has gone sour and the lover has gone south, the energy and inventiveness never flag. We know she'll be right back, offering more truthful tastes. Take a big bite, this is a strong first serving. -Robert Hershon Martha Silano writes with wit and intelligence, and she is equally at home naming the birds on a beach and the arcana of the yellow pages. It is her love of language that distinguishes these poems and makes them so full of startling awareness, and this not only at the level of the word, but also in the syntax, which reveals the mind's continual approach and avoidance of its emotional home. -Alison Hawthorne Deming The truth tastes like these succulent poems. Their refrains will form on your lips and ring in your heart. In these rich, elegant--and wickedly witty--pieces, Martha Silano has captured the rhythms that percolate, unheard by the rest of us, just beneath the surface of everyday life. -Laura Kalpakian

SHE RETURNS TO THE FLOATING WORLD (Second Edition) is a book about transformation that examines two recurring motifs in Japanese folk tales and popular culture: "the woman who disappears" and the "older sister/savior." Many of the poems are persona poems spoken by characters from animé and manga, mythology, and fairy tales, like the story of the kitsune, or fox-woman, whose relationships are followed throughout the book. Gailey's abiding interest in female heroes and tales of transformation, love, and loss bristles to life with a cast of characters including wives who become foxes, sisters who become birds, and robots with souls. "I deeply admire the skill with which Jeannine Hall Gailey weaves myth and folklore into poems illuminating the realities of modern life. Gailey is, quite simply, one of my favorite American poets; and She Returns to the Floating World is her best collection yet." --Terri Windling, writer, editor, and artist ("The Year's Best Fantasy and Horror" series, "The Armless Maiden," "The Endicott Studio")

landscape/heartbreak (Two Sylvias Press, 2015) is poet Michelle Penaloza's first book. Praise For landscape/heartbreak: Peñaloza's poignantly beautiful landscape/heartbreak is more than a suite of breakup poems, its own veritable tradition in American poetry. Hers is a sequence that plumbs the meaning of what it means to love, sacrificing to secret away bits and pieces of one's self whose other parts remain scattered on corners, in parks, and bridges. This collection is about the business of reconciling memories and ghosts, the toughness in learning how to breathe again. -Major Jackson I've been in love with landscape/heartbreak since before it was written, from the moment I first learned of Michelle Peñaloza's wild idea: to map heartbreak. What if strangers told their stories while wandering the avenues and backstreets of a city? What if trauma could be healed one footfall at a time? Peñaloza enacts an urban alchemy, transforming the walkers' personal struggles into art and thereby coming closer to her own persistent ghosts. A collection for anyone who has ever had her (or his) heart stomped on. This means most of us. A powerful and exciting debut. -Susan Rich The question-"What hurt you into poetry?"-lies at the center of Michelle Peñaloza's landscape/heartbreak. And her poems urge us to seek the answer, following Peñaloza's speaker on her sojourn where walking and breathing create the meditative cadence to lull the body into the ecstatic state necessary for conjuration. From the beauty of these poems emerge the ghosts of those loves that have splintered us into jagged pieces. As we traverse Peñaloza's lyrical landscape, the "sueded/beads of unopened wild poppies" and "renegade ferns/growing upon the stumps of old docks" smooth over the serrated edges of what cuts us deep. This is a marvelous and haunting collection. -Oliver de la Paz As you read this remarkable collection, you might think that each poem begins with two people walking through a city. But then, dear reader, you realize that it's no longer two people in the distance, for you've been invited on the journey as well. These poems will transport you like that, and then they'll walk beside you through a landscape of heartache and longing. While there, "You can look back," Peñaloza writes, "remember the stories beneath all this shine." And these stories do shine. And you will remember them. -Matthew Olzmann

Winner of the 2016 Two Sylvias Press Wilder Series Poetry Book Prize."When you're lucky enough to get your hands on a book of poems this alive, everything you say about it feels like an understatement. Yes, Appalachians Run Amok is utterly original, wild yet tight, feisty, vibrant, combustible. Yes, it's bursting with keen-eyed tenderness and unshushable attitude. Yes, the poems' startling emotional intelligence blends with myriad other intelligences (e.g. maternal, earthy, topical, humane, etc.) to create this voice, "all hot and giddy." A proud daughter of Appalachia, Blevins gifts us with vivid glimpses of where she came of age. Reading her beautiful, linguistically limber, cascading descriptions is like shooting the rapids with an expert river rider at the helm." --Amy Gerstler

The Blue Black Wet of Wood by Carmen R. Gillespie is the 2015 winner of the Two Sylvias Press Wilder Series Poetry Book Prize. Praise For The Blue Black Wet of Wood Unflinching in its exquisite poignancy, concentric as a Russian nesting doll, Carmen Gillespie's The Blue Black Wet of Wood, chronicles the myriad losses within the greater loss of her husband. Dazzlingly intelligent in its circling back through her life, and the life of her family, Blue Black explores the refocusing of the world through the shattered lens of grief and recollection, elegance and hardship. Gillespie's mastery of craft-evident in her blending of forms, both traditional and experimental-serves as the alchemy that transmutes her loss into brilliant lyric intensity. -Indigo Moor, author of Through the Stonecutter's Window, Tap-Root Drawing on myths ranging from Mayan prophecy ("If there was warning, I didn't see it") and Buddhist thought ("This will also change") to Ovidian metamorphoses, Greek and Shakespearean tragedy (Orpheus and Eurydice, Pandora, The Tempest), and the "fall" of Adam and Eve from Paradise, the speaker in Carmen Gillespie's The Blue Black Wet of Wood finds herself, in the middle-passage of her life's journey, in a dark wood: the welter of a husband's unexpected, advanced cancer diagnosis, his precipitous death, and the profound aftermath of that lost love, the wages of which are an almost unfathomably deep, blue-note grief. Wet wood cannot be lit; it smolders. With forthright honesty ("Voices from the hall, / 'Who's that black woman with him?'/ 'I think it's his wife'") and tender humor ("Today in the pile, / your gray sock. No madeleine, / but it will suffice"), Gillespie bravely makes her way through the ash and smolder, right to the liminal edge between shock and bereavement, land and sea, wet wood and fire, personal loss and history, to where "the sea seeps through / in waves that remember the determined descent / of drowning slaves" and one can "learn now to love, yes, love, / the letting go." -Lisa Russ Spaar, author of Vanitas Rough and Orexia There is a way these beautifully made poems-sonorous, precise-make us forget the profound sorrow which engines them along. That's not quite right. They make us understand-they MODEL for us-how loss might be made into music. That is hard work. And these poems do that hard work beautifully. -Ross Gay, author of Bringing the Shovel Down and Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude The arc of Gillespie's collection traces elegies for the beloved. The poems are haunted by images of birds and sky at various times of day, of seas and lakes, of the landscape in every season but especially of the fall and especially October. Gillespie's artful rendering of loss takes root and deepens. Through the poems' syntax, formal measures, sparseness, and restraint, language itself enacts the way death unmoors us. At the centre of this deeply moving collection is the 'simple story' the book re-inhabits. After the loss of the beloved, we are formed out of and from the fact of their absence-"I am. / The space is. / The cracks are." -Shara McCallum, author of This Strange Land and Madwoman

The Cardiologist's Daughter is the debut poetry collection of poet and medical student, Natasha Kochicheril Moni. Praise for The Cardiologist's Daughter: Lovingly rendered and tenderly drawn, Natasha Kochicheril Moni's poems pulse with wonder and compassion as she examines the concerns of the heart. Kim Barnes, author of In the Kingdom of Men Natasha Moni is the poet who comes to us "from the clan of butterfly watchers." I love her poems in this book, I suggest you open it to a poem such as "As in Dutch, As in You" or her sequence of the "Cardiologist's daughter" and you will find a voice which is able to find lyric in moments of each day, to find music in medicine, to find strange clarity in each of us. This is a beautiful debut. Ilya Kaminsky, author of Dancing in Odessa This doctor's daughter sings of the literal as well as the figurative heart, in poems that are haunting and elegiac. Moni's love of the language of medicine and anatomy, as well as a deep respect for her Indian and Dutch family roots, are evident throughout these delightful poems. Though her life path may evolve differently than her Cardiologist father's, they both bend toward healing as art. Peter Pereira, author of Saying the World Natasha Moni writes with unflinching honesty and subtle surprise. The Cardiologist's Daughter is both cryptic and conversational, self-deprecating and transcendent - a tender homage to her Indian and Dutch family roots and an intense reflection on the quest for personal identity. Anjali Banerjee, author of Haunting Jasmine and Enchanting Lily

Winner of the 2014 Two Sylvias Press Chapbook Prize (judged by Aimee Nezhukumatathil), Earth is the sixth book by poet Cecilia Woloch. Praise for Earth: In Earth, Cecilia Woloch writes with the wonder and resilience that are essential, not only to empathy, but to transformation. Woloch weds us to the natural world through language that is both straightforward and particular. A "river's lifting dress" comes to represent history; branches swaying "like the arms of a woman waving goodbye" come to represent mortality. These remarkable poems are hymns and requiems; they are made of "blood mixed with earth." -Terrance Hayes These poems reflect a mature writer, a woman unflinching in both love and craft. The love is unabashed; the language boldly lyrical and image-rich. As a devoted reader of Cecilia Woloch's writing, I relish anything she offers, so I welcome Earth, this book of passionate, vigorous poetry, in which grandeur of spirit always redeems sorrow. As Woloch writes in the gorgeous prose poem "Afterlife" "I want to be fierce and joyful and a meadow when I'm dead." May we all be meadows with you, Dear Poet. -Holly Prado These poems gel together beautifully with a musical sense of foreboding and epiphany inhabiting the lines. These pages give us a terrain where a "honey of birdcall in our mouth" seems equally at place with a landscape populated with a willow that leaves the speaker "half afraid that the tree would fly." I want to return to Earth again and again. -Aimee Nezhukumatathil

Winner of the Two Sylvias Press Chapbook Prize judged by Danez Smith. If poetry were a biathlon, Stella Wong would take the gold. She's a solid skier and a crack shot, each poem a bullet hitting its mark. Thank God she's turned all of this energy and accuracy into poetry. 'Where do you put your body of color' she asks. Then proceeds to school everyone. Stella Wong is a force, a maker, a master.  —D.A. PowellYou and Stella Wong are the last two people on Earth. You’re going to witness her “ride in/to hell” and you will need to prepare yourself for the moment when she decides to use her “daddy voice” on Jesus. You’re the last two people on Earth because the truth—the truth of Stella Wong’s voice, the truth of these poems—has scared away the timid. But be strong. The apocalypse of American Zero is scary and dangerous, yes, but it’s also a lot of fun. —Josh Bell

The Inspired Poet, which comes out of years of teaching and leading workshops, offers writing exercises, prompts, poems, and facts for poets, teachers, workshop leaders, and prose writers. They are meant to be invites for the Muses to come visit.Even if you’re not a poet and don’t like to write, these invites might entice you to see yourself and the world in a new light. This book may give an insight into grief or a respite from grieving for something or someone lost—or for celebrating something found.The exercises in The Inspired Poet can be used for your personal writing practice, for writing groups, leading poetry workshops, and in the classroom. Both novice writers and established writers can find inspiration in the 37 chapters of this book, each of which offers unique exercises on such topics as structure, pop culture, revision, mythology, grief, relationships, nature, symbolism/imagery, women’s voices, psychology/sociology, and personal reflections on creativity/inspiration.