New & Noteworthy Books

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Posted on 26 January 2012

Afterimage

Cross-Genre by Damon Krukowski, Naomi Yang

Ugly Duckling Presse, December 2011

ISBN-13: 978-1-933254-88-3

Paperback: 80pp; $15.00

A hybrid of lyrical poetry and nonfiction memoir, Afterimage is the testimonial of the son of a survivor of war. The text thinks through a problem prompted by confusions between the author's imagination and his father's history: "Do we only tell each other's stories? Ask others to tell our own? Can we tell our own? Or is that what stories are for—to tell someone else's, and allow another to tell yours?" Naomi Yang’s subtle, quiet photographs bookend the text.

American Mastodon

Poetry by Brad Ricca

Black Lawrence Press, December 2011

ISBN-13: 978-0-9828766-2-6

Paperback: 62pp; $14.00

Here is an America of absences, monsters, perfect sandwiches, and opposites. Here Sasquatch hides in Sears at Christmas. The night sky remembers a dog that died in orbit, compliments of the Soviets. And here, in the beginning, a five-foot-four human girl was sniffed for by hounds that stayed on Earth. Brad Ricca was born and lives in Cleveland. He teaches at Case Western Reserve University, where he got his Ph.D. in literature and was managing editor of The Emily Dickinson Journal. He produced a documentary film called Last Son (2009) and has a book about Superman forthcoming from St. Martin’s Press. American Mastodon is his first book of poems and was the winner of the 2009 St. Lawrence Book Award.

Country Album

Poetry by James Capozzi

Parlor Press, December 2011

ISBN-13: 978-1602352773

Paperback: 82pp; $14.00

James Capozzi was born in West Milford, New Jersey. He attended The College of New Jersey and The University of Texas at Austin, where he was a founding editor of Bat City Review and the recipient of a James A. Michener Fellowship. Country Album is the winner of the 2010 New Measure Poetry Prize. He lives in Binghamton, New York, where he is a PhD candidate.

Drastic Dislocations

New and Selected Poems

Poetry by Barry Wallenstein

NYQ Books, February 2012

ISBN-13: 978-1-935520-43-6

Paperback: 226pp; $18.95

Barry Wallenstein was born in New York City. He received his PhD in modern poetry from New York University in 1972. Early poems first appeared in 1964 and since then six collections of poetry have been published; this new volume includes the author’s choices from each of these previous books. In the early 1970s he began collaborating with jazz artists in the performance and recording of his poetry, and he continues to perform with musicians internationally. From 1965 until 2006 he taught literature and writing at the City College of New York where he founded The Poetry Outreach Center, in which he continues to be involved as Professor Emeritus. He currently resides with his wife, Lorna, on Riverside Drive close to where he lived as a child. He lives part of each year in an old log house in the Catskills.

Hagar Before the Occupation,
Hagar After the Occupation

Poetry by Amal al-Jabouri

Translated from the Arabic by Rebecca Gayle Howell, Husam Qaisi

Alice James Books, November 2011

ISBN-13: 978-1-882295-89-0

Paperback: 160pp; $17.50

Amal al-Jubouri, a native of Iraq, is the author of five collections of poetry in Arabic. Also an active literary translator, she is the founder and editor of East West Publishing, a press with the mission to introduce works of international literature into the Iraqi literary scene. In 1997, she took refuge in Germany after being listed as #1 on Uday Hussein’s list of renegade Iraqi writers, but returned to live in Baghdad after the fall of the Ba’ath Party. Today she lives and writes in Berlin.

Higher Ground

Fiction by James Nolan

Univ of Louisiana at Lafayette, October 2011

ISBN-13: 978-1935754060

Paperback: 271pp; $20.00

Winner of the William Faulkner-Wisdom Gold Medal in the novel. Higher Ground is a comic noir novel that begins five months after a hurricane has devastated New Orleans. Nicole Naquin, home for the first time in decades, is living next door to her mother, an elderly evacuee from Lakeview reduced to pushing pills in a French Quarter gay bar. On the day Nicole’s brother is killed in a drive-by shooting, she crashes her car into her high-school sweetheart’s FEMA trailer, igniting a sexy romance among the ruins. Meanwhile, Lieutenant Vinnie Panarello works at furious cross-purposes with hippie sleuth Gary Cherry to find the brother’s killer.

The Hudson Line

Poetry by Margo Taft Stever

Main Street Rag Pub Co, January 2012

ISBN-13: 978-1-59948-338-2

Paperback: 40pp; $10.00

Margo Taft Stever is the founder and board member of The Hudson Valley Writers' Center and founding editor of Slapering Hol Press. Her poems have appeared in numerous journals and anthologies, including The Cincinnati Review, Webster Review, New England Review, Connecticut Review, among others. Her articles, essays, and reviews are found in the CT Review, Minnesota Review, Rain Taxi Review, Poets & Writers, and elsewhere. Her book Frozen Spring was the winner of the Mid-List Press First Series Award for Poetry and was published in 2002. Reading the Night Sky (introduction by Denise Levertov) won the 1996 Riverstone Poetry Chapbook Competition.

The Life of an Unknown Man

Fiction by Andrei Makine

Translated from the French by Geoffrey Strachan

Graywolf Press, June 2012

ISBN-13: 9781555976149

Paperback: 192pp; $15.00

In The Life of an Unknown Man, Andreï Makine explores what truly matters in life through the prism of Russia’s past and present. Shutov, a disenchanted writer, revisits St. Petersburg after twenty years of exile in Paris, hoping to recapture his youth. Instead, he meets Volsky, an old man who tells him his extraordinary story: of surviving the siege of Leningrad, the march on Berlin, and Stalin’s purges, and of a transcendent love affair. Volsky’s life is an inspiration to Shutov—because for all that he suffered, he knew great happiness. This depth of feeling stands in sharp contrast to the empty lives Shutov encounters in the new Russia, and to his own life, that of just another unknown man…

The Odditorium

Fiction by Melissa Pritchard

Bellevue Literary Press, January 2012

ISBN-13: 978-1934137376

Paperback: 252pp; $14.95

In each of these eight lyrical and baroque tales, Melissa Pritchard transports readers into spine-tingling milieus that range from the astounding realm of Robert LeRoy Ripley’s “odditoriums” to the courtyard where Edgar Allan Poe once played as a child. Whether she is setting the famed figures of Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show, including Annie Oakley and Sitting Bull, against the real, genocidal history of the American West, or contrasting the luxurious hotel where British writer Somerset Maugham stayed with the modern-day brothels of India, her stories illuminate the many ways history and architecture exert exert powerful forces upon human consciousness.

Open Winter

Poetry by Rae Gouirand

Bellday Books, November 2011

ISBN-13: 978-0-9793376-4-2

Paperback: 84pp; $14.00

Winner of the 2011 Bellday Poetry Prize. Rae Gouirand's poems have appeared in American Poetry Review, Boston Review, Columbia, The Kenyon Review: KROnline, Seneca Review, Bateau, jubilat, two recent volumes of the Best New Poets series, and on Verse Daily. The winner of the Avery Jules Hopwood Award, the Meijer Fellowship, fellowships from the Vermont Studio Center and the Santa Fe Art Institute, and an award from the Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Foundation for outstanding work by emerging poets, she lives in Davis, California and serves as Writer-in-Residence for the Cache Creek Conservancy.

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