Drive-By Vigils
R. Zamora Linmark

R. Zamora Linmark has written two poetry collections, Prime Time Apparitions and The Evolution of a Sigh, both from Hanging Loose Press, and two novels, the best-selling Rolling The R’s, which he’s adapted for the stage, and the just-published Leche. He resides in Honolulu and Manila, and is at work on another novel and a play But Beautiful.

Praise for Drive-By Vigils:

“R. Zamora Linmark’s extraordinary Drive-By Vigils takes readers on a high-speed chase to the heart of “today’s madness,” where Manila intersects with Hollywood, and where a rap artist might croon pidgin translations of Federico García Lorca at the Korean karaoke bar. This global landscape thrives with conflicted hybridities and memory mestizajes, its speakers world history savvy and fluent “in the gay lingua of Goth and camp.” Dazzling and dizzying, these startling poems talk back to the collage of pop-cultured contemporary society—a critical reckoning as the “ghosts of the past start colliding/with demons in the making.” —Rigoberto González

“You’ll want to carry R. Zamora Linmark’s Drive-By Vigils on your trip to the far side of the world, during the B-side of your life, within the aftermath of globalization. These transitory and migratory vigil-poems mark a time of wakefulness, ritual sleeplessness, and devotion in the poet’s life. You’ll fall for its cast of unforgettable saints: friends, family, and lovers; heroes and victims; moody outsiders and brooding insiders (Hamlet, Montgomery Clift, Paul Anka, and Anderson Cooper all make cameos). Linmark’s poetics is akin to method acting. Through accumulation and subtlety, he embodies emotions “from grief to grand descent,” from error to wonder, from rainbows to warriors. He d(e)rives with global poetic license to write in a polyphony of forms and languages, even translating Shakespeare, Lorca, O’Hara, and a Coqui frog into Hawai’i Creole English, or pidgin. Finally, Linmark’s work is a prayer to the Filipino diaspora: from maids in Spain to the death of eighty-four migrant plantation laborers who mysteriously died in their sleep in Hawai’i between 1937 and 1948. Bangungot, nightmares. Since death may find us all unexpectedly, reading Drive-By Vigils reminds us to be vigilant about living, to ” portray life as if it were your last sorrow,” to sing into being a ” fabulous fibrous future” .” —Craig Santos Perez

 

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What It Is Like
Charles North

What It Is Like, Charles North's tenth book of poems, contains new work as well as a generous selection from his previous books. North's poetry has received high praise from a wide variety of aesthetic camps. Among his awards are a Foundation for Contemporary Arts grant, two grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, four Fund for Poetry Awards, and a Poets Foundation Award.

Praise for Charles North:

"North's joy in words, and the things words adumbrate, is infectious: we catch a contagion of enlightenment. To me, he is the most stimulating poet of his generation." —James Schuyler

"The business of examining exactly what one means is central to North's concept of the role of the poet, and he is especially alert to the way particulars and ideas interact in our constructions of meaning. The urge to hold out 'particulars' to the reader is mediated through an alert, sophisticated consciousness insistently aware of convention and genre."—Mark Ford, PN Review

"The challenge of writing about the sensual qualities of New York City, which seems so tired, by North's pen becomes transcendent again. And that's only one of the things his poetry accomplishes. He is witty when wit seems all but lost, gorgeous when gorgeousness is supposed to have crawled off to wherever Frank O'Hara's odes came from. The Nearness of the Way You Look Tonight is about as flawless a book of poetry as I have come across." —Ange Mlinko, Poetry Project Newsletter

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Threads
Steven Schrader

Steven Schrader is the co-chair and former director of Teachers & Writers Collaborative and was the publisher of Cane Hill Press, which specialized in fiction. He lives on New York's Upper West Side, a strong presence in his stories, with his wife, Lucy Kostelanetz, a documentary film maker.

Praise for Steven Schrader:

"This boychik writes arresting prose about a lifetime of heartbreak, farce, sexual voraciousness, the writing life, the civil rights revolution, and, towering over his character and fate, an unforgettable mogul of a father that Kafka and Dickens would have been impressed with. Schrader's sentences are fresh cherries, sweet and flavorful. In this, his best book so far, he reenacts a life with a concentrated brevity that spills over with feeling and hilarity. The New York he writes about, from trolley cars to the garment center to Washington Heights to the Jewish delis and Puerto Rican prostitutes of the old gritty upper West Side, is a vanished world rekindled and burning bright in Schrader's beautiful book." —David Evanier, author of All the Things You Are: The Life of Tony Bennett and The One-Star Jew

"I can think of no other contemporary writer who portrays a New York life with the honesty and humor of Steve Schrader. In these seemingly modest stories he covers all the bases; fathers, sons, families, friendship, love, literary life. Drawing on the trove of his own experiences he magically translates the absurdities of life into prose. To read Schrader is sheer pleasure intermingled with a hint of sadness, a vivid journey with a writer of dead-on vision and a generous but unsentimental heart."—Phyllis Raphael, Author of Off The King's Road, Lost and Found in London

"An album of affecting snapshots written with prose that is laid back but also always on its toes and achieving its effects through the accumulation of small fictional units. These can be like finger food, candy, or chips where you need to read another and another; by my calculation, a Schrader story takes exactly the amount of time it takes to get through two subway stops, say, from 96th to 79th. It is as if another human being has rapidly told you everything he possibly could, over such a subway ride or a cup of tea—a life so particular, so Manhattan, so Jewish, so garment district, so privileged yet so impoverished and so full of longing, it belongs to all of us." —Allan Appel, Author of The Rabbi of Casino Boulevard and The Hebrew Tutor of Bel Air

"What We Deserved is by turns, and often in combination, touching, moving, wrenching, funny, clever, hilarious, pensive, insightful, and original in structure, pace and format. It re-creates a man's entire life, and does it in half the pages it'd take any other writer, and at the end you feel nothing's been lost, everything's there, each chapter timed perfectly. The book is eminently readable, with prose deceptively simple, written by a skilled craftsman who's winnowed the words down to the essentials. Reading this, your heart will break or you'll bust your gut laughing. The range is that vast and the book is that good." —Stephen Dixon, former director of the MFA Writing Program, John Hopkins University

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Waiting: Selected Nonfiction
Elizabeth Swados

Elizabeth Swados is a composer, novelist, poet, theater director, children’s book author, and five-time Tony nominee. Her brilliant career ranges from Runaways, a hit Broadway musical, to pioneering off-Broadway work with Joseph Papp and experimental theater in Africa with Peter Brook.
 
In Waiting, Elizabeth Swados brings  her lively autobiographical pieces – many of which first ran in The New York Times and O, The Oprah Magazine – together for the first time. Among those appearing in the book are Sean Penn, Meryl Streep, Yehuda Amichai, Ellen Stewart, and Marlon Brando, as well as moving accounts of Swados’s schizophrenic brother, her work with young actors, and her explorations of the creative process – all told with grace and humor.

The Joy of the Nearly Old
Rosalind Brackenbury

Rosalind Brackenbury is English, married to an American, Allen Meece, and has lived in Key West, Florida for 18 years. Since 2007, she has spent part of each year in Paris. Her most recent novel, Becoming George Sand came out in August 2009 with Doubleday, Canada, and in March 2011 with Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, NY.

Her poetry collection, Yellow Swing published by Daniel & Daniel, CA, came out in a bilingual French-English edition in 2011 from Les Editions de l'Amandier, Paris. A new novel, The Third Swimmer is at present with her agent at Curtis Brown, London. The Joy of the Nearly Old is her sixth collection of poetry.

Praise for Rosalind Brackbenbury's poetry:

"These rich, fluent poems tell the story of a writer's pilgrimage. They are filled with the colors and vibrancy of her world, a world that includes Key West, England, Paris and, of course, literature itself. The sentences are so poised and artfully phrased that, despite their sometimes dark subject matter, they are a palpable pleasure on the tongue" —Harvey Shapiro

"Rosalind Brackenbury's new collection of poetry, The Joy of the Nearly Old keeps the promise of its title: it is an opulent anthology of the pleasures of our world."—Harry Mathews

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