Bøger udgivet af Unsolicited Press

What is the love poem's function? Does it eternally preserve the beloved as they actually are, or does it warp and suffocate them, locking them inside stanzas and lines from which they will never escape? In Ventric(L)e, Jerrod E. Bohn dissects the heart's labyrinthine structure. The organ is an intricate house, full of delight, surprise, and possibility; however, its chambers are also walled, barred. The heart is equally a cage. What began as a series of love poems took a turn with the relationship's erosion. Are the poems themselves at fault? Did the page become the prison from which the beloved struggled to break free, and when they couldn't, did it hasten the physical act of leaving? And what remains behind when the beloved is gone? Are they still entrapped even when another comes along? Through meditations dense with sorrow and hope, the sacred and the profane, Bohn explores the love poem's power to both create and destroy.

In this stunning abecedarian poetry collection by Susanna Lang, the words come to comfort, to exhilirate, and to ignite. Lang's e-chapbook, Among Other Stones: Conversations with Yves Bonnefoy, was released by Mudlark: An Electronic Journal of Poetry & Poetics in June 2021, and her translation of Baalbek by Nohad Salameh was published in October 2021 by Atelier du Grand Tétras. Her third full-length collection of poems, Travel Notes from the River Styx, was published in 2017 by Terrapin Books. Her poems and translations have appeared or are forthcoming from Prairie Schooner, december magazine, Delos, New Poetry in Translation, American Life in Poetry and The Slowdown. Her translations of poetry include Words in Stone and The Origin of Language by Yves Bonnefoy, and she is now working with Souad Labbize and Hélène Dorion on new translations.

Queen Anne Cowboy is like rain on a windshield, breaking up the dust. The rain is a singer-songwriter named Terrell Jamestone, telling the story of his kid brother, Ethan, a seventh grader who scored high enough on the SATs to skip ahead to college, but cuts himself with a razor blade late at night. The dust is the kind of trouble that hides in good neighborhoods. Maybe you know something about that. Guiding Ethan from self-harm towards compassion, Terrell still succumbs to his own inner demons, abandoning his dreams to alcohol. The daughter he leaves behind, Belinda, grows up to be wild and strong, an aspiring teenage poet hurting from his absence. Crossing into adulthood, Ethan tries to repay his brother's kindness by looking after her. Ten years pass-ten years of rainforests and meditation, bad romances and road trips, public schools and gentrification, alternative colleges and mass incarceration, polyamory and drug addiction, house shows and red wine-before Terrell comes home again.

The fictional Sunset Inn is a seedy motel with a storied past on a neglected block of Hollywood Boulevard. In twenty linked tales, Motel Stories takes an empathetic deep dive into the eccentricities and troubled lives of the diverse guests who check in to this refuge of last resort-for either pleasure or escape, and always an interrupted night's sleep. Edward, the motel's cynical but occasionally accommodating manager, confronts a daily cast of ever-changing characters. A man who dances with dolls. Central American immigrants from civil war celebrating their honeymoon. The addict mother of a newborn infant facing a fateful reunion with her long-lost brother. A disgraced politician forced into hiding. A Vietnamese mama's boy waiting to meet his foreign bride. An elderly couple checking in to the same room where they first met sixty years earlier.¿Four interrelated stories complete the collection. A Filipina internet bride struggles to maintain her autonomy in suburban America. A teenage boy flees his hometown to escape persecution. A female impersonator replaces her glamorous mentor on stage. A gay, middle-aged gallery owner confronts his own errant past when his troubled teenage nephew visits. William Torphy portrays these characters with both empathy and wry humor, revealing their universal desire for love and connection, recognition and security. Sometimes raw, and often humorous, this timely debut collection pierces through both the loneliness and the humanity of distressed outliers temporarily set adrift by circumstance in the American underbelly.

The poems in If The Sky Won't Have Me weave a brilliant tapestry of the human condition, focusing on nature, the female experience, family drama, aging, politics, and regret. Images of water feature strongly, as do rebirth and regeneration, both physical and spiritual. A perfect sequel to the author's debut collection, the moon won't be dared, these poems expand and deepen our understanding of what it means to be alive in a complex world.

March 18, 2020Corona and CancerHow much time do I have? The man asks.With words muffled behind my double mask,I mumble something. He accepts the answer,the non-answer. Sometimes, you ask just to hear the question and not the response.Is death disguised in the cancer cells inside him? Or is it floating in the air around us?I give him chemotherapy to chase away the first.I wear a mask to trap out the second. Equal fight?Unknown. The answer hides behind the mask of uncertainty.What I had mumbled was:How much time does life on Earth have?I am glad he didn't hear it.He is glad too.Talking to people behind masks is tricky.They can only see your eyesand the frown in them can't hide behind a smile.Truth. The truth is more naked behind a mask. I feel each breath I take. How precious life is behind a mask!Unmasked, you're never aware of breathing.I hear my breath behind a mask. How loud life is behind a mask!Masks don't cover your vision. Only your gasp. Google statistics.Roll, roll, numbers roll. County's count. State's count. Nation's count. World's count. In the beginning, I could add and subtractyesterday's cases from today's. How many more?Now I can't. With six digits, you lose track.No. You won't lose your job,I answer my single-mother secretary.Did she smile? Can I see her mouth behind her mask?Did she see the truth in my eyes?Thank God for masks. No one questions the truth in the eyes if it doesn't come out of the mouth.How many masks do I have? I have to make some from scratch this weekend.

The Bunker Book is a work of poetry by Anne Babson that revisits medieval plague tales in an era of American pandemic and French Resistance literature in a divided nation. Set in New Orleans and other cosmopolitan destinations, it presents the problems of Kyiv, of the Second World War, and all fights against fascism as a way of talking about America today. This poetry collection makes the new cosmopolitan South confront the ghosts of the old problematic South and exorcise them. While it occasionally echoes sentiments present in Atwood's work, it offers hope to the reader despite all. Focused on the life of a woman who hides herself and the books banned in an oppressive society in a bunker, her library comes to life and speaks to her in the voices of figures like Machiavelli, the Wife of Bath, Marlene Dietrich, Margery Kempe, Rhett Butler, Saint Thomas Moore, and Christine de Pisan. It contemplates the cloistered life of pandemic and religious medieval women mystics in one idiom. It imagines the underground resistance of Paris during the Nazi occupation reenacted in our times in an American setting.Works as old as Beowulf find themselves enacted on the banks of the Mississippi, and poems as present-tense as the latest headlines about the war in Ukraine also find a home on Tchoupitoulas Street in New Orleans.The Bunker Book calls the reader to hope despite reasons to despair, to overcome fear and to fight the forces that would silence artists and political dissidents everywhere. Anyone feeling frustrated with our times might take solace and encouragement from these defiant and hopeful words.

Joshua Roark's poetry is crisp and refreshing -- a book of freshly squeezed lemons -- poems that reach out and grab you. Make you laugh. Fill you up. "Buy Your Own Classroom Supplies"Your classroom binder should be big, beefy, yellow maybe, or red, easy for spotting, smudged with something like chocolate, coffeesplashed across the pages and set in the rings.Your pens should be sunset colored, show thatyou mean business, even from your pocketor dry, chapped hands-oh, and don't forgetthe bottle of sanitizer. It'll sit fatlike a trophy at the edge of your desk.Your closet should hold four white button-upshirts, two pairs of heavy polyesterpants, black, creased, and a single ink-black clip-on-tie, bought at an army surplus store.Trust me, full length ties are not worth the risk.

A man decides to transform himself into a bird to escape his phone-wielding, formaldehyde-scented girlfriend. A professional clipboarder spends her days enduring the humiliation cast upon her by potential donors and her nights conjuring visions of the Appalachian Trail. A streaming video epiphany jumpstarts a drug-addled outcast's plan to become the person she's always wanted to be. A tiny spider creates just the right amount of potential chaos to inflate a dejected husband's spirit. The stories in "How to Find a Flock" reveal characters and settings - both implicitly and explicitly connected - that explore the inherent difficulties and the unforeseen elation in forming connections - romantic, spiritual, economic - amidst a post-empire landscape that inevitably crumbles as it retreats further into its digital self. Fatally marred by the cynicism, anxiety, and selfishness inherent in their generation's version of cultural currency, the mostly young and unhinged protagonists of these stories realize, sometimes too late, that even the briefest moments of genuine human touch are more potent than any keystroke or screen swipe. Featuring a prose that is variously biting, reflective, caustic, and exuberant, "How to Find a Flock" is a collection for anyone who has ever felt the crush of loneliness, the indifference of a blinking monitor, the cruelty of utter boredom and hopelessness, and the exhilaration of finally doing something to change it.

This poetry is alive. The author's voice is so present, and the pictures they are painting and the emotions they are evoking are so clear, that it is undeniably excellent. Hominis's words are so frank, clear of any metaphor or illusions that try to take you off course of what the author is trying to say. The poems are not pretenious, nor are they academic. Instead, what you get is a massive dose of refreshment. His words reach the folks that need poetry in their lives.Well crafted.Well cared for.Hominis gives us just enough information about the characters and settings to give us a picture of the subject, but does not bombard us with needless description or fluff. This is an excellent example of modern poetry. Crafted, but not confined to rules, descriptive without rambling and insightful without being too philosophical. The author understands how to use the free verse style of poetry to its best advantage.

Watching Ourselves is a collection of poems gathered in groups: how we watch ourselves grow up, observe others, love, look back; how we watch ourselves come to grief, age, receive, and reflect.We watch ourselves, of course, with difficulty and incompleteness, tasking the poems to strive for a measure of clarity-however partial-as they, like us, struggle to know themselves.The collection title is not Watching Myself, for the poems are concerned with not only the poet but with a range-a complex-of people and circumstances. The title could as easily have been Watching Each Other.While the poems are all written in free verse, their poetic approaches vary: couplets, tercets, quatrains, poems with slashes for punctuation, poems with slanted line lengths, short lyric poems, long narrative poems: whatever the poem itself seemed to call for, as each poem was begun because something happened that the poet didn't understand but needed to. Watching Ourselves is a collection of poems addressing, and written out of, bewilderment.

Marvelous. Honest. Generous. From the first story to the last, "By the Wayside" catches your attention and demands that you give into its every whirl. Each character unfolds with a precision that will have you wondering how Parrish managed to create such real-to-the-bones people within a world that captivates you with ease."By the Wayside" was a finalist for the International Book Awards's short story category.

"The poems in Little Human Relics weave themselves through various notions of home: a family farm, the mythic backdrop of Bavaria, a cityscape rife with urban noise and expectations, and the quiet interiors of domestic life. Whether overhearing a lament about marriage at a nail salon, or standing vigil over the grave of a newly-buried horse, these poems invite readers to step over the page's threshold into a kitchen, a gothic cathedral, a lover's bed. These poems celebrate the ways in which devotion elevates all things in one's life to a position of reverence; a poem which marvels at the brutality of religious relics is placed alongside a poem depicting the mending of a child's nightgown, and suddenly that small act of love inspires equal awe. As the title suggests, these poems are carefully captured moments in a person's life that may have easily flown past her, but they all represent a constellation of objects, events, and characters who are undeniably worthy of praise. Like relics, they exist to both conjure memory, as well as teach readers a little bit more about what it means to be human."

In Waitress at the Red Moon Pizzeria Eleanor Levine has crafted a collection of poetry that will challenge her readers to view their pasts through a new lens: one that is untainted by regret, shame, or fear. She invites her readers to reflect on the honesty in the desire, love, and pain that have driven their lives by following the journeys of narrators using the same lens to view their own lives. A daughter worries about her father buried deep in the ground, alone except for the cicadas that cover the ground every seventeen years. A mother attends Wagnerian acupuncture lessons and struggles to maintain the sanctity of her children's Jewish heritage even as it slips into the cracks of passing time. A sister laments the monotony of her brother's chosen lifestyle but wonders if the commotion of her own life merits any higher worth. A woman faces rejection and acceptance from the women she desires as sexual and emotional companions. The quiet moments of life are on display in this collection that refuses to accept that the past is something to be ashamed of. Deeply personal and joyfully candid, Waitress at the Red Moon Pizzeria is an invitation to look beyond the mistakes and missteps that lead us to believe our histories might be nightmares.

POSTER ART NIGHTS explores interior and exterior spaces ranging from the broken hopes of men and women in love, to a field in Virginia where a kite is flying or the stars are looking down, to a home where dogs lie sleeping, to a city high rise where office meetings go forward, to a Florida lake where a speedboat kills or a village in Bolivia where the yard is being swept, to a small town where cars are sold. There are lyrics, satires, narratives and haiku. The poems reflect an observer on whom "nothing is wasted."