Poetry 
Paperback: ISBN 978-1-931236-76-8, $15. 
Hardcover: ISBN 978-1-931236-71-5, $25. 

Cadenza
Charles North

Formally adventurous, emotionally and musically rich, Charles North’s poetry has received numerous honors, including two NEA grants and four Fund for Poetry Awards. In Cadenza, he displays all the qualities that made James Schuyler call him “the most stimulating poet of his generation” and the Washington Post hail him as “one of the most memorable of contemporary poets.”

“In Charles North’s sublime Cadenza, desirables abound – not only beauty, mystery, and wit (as well as humor – oh, my!), but knowledge and passion, overtly chaste but no less intense for that. A dazzling profusion of simultaneous passions: he is the master of multitasking – all experience open to him at every moment – as well as a master tout court. He belongs on the summit of our American Parnassus.” —Harry Mathews

“Charles North has the wry, sparkling wit of a poet who has been around the aesthetic block more than a few times but keeps the trips as fresh as a new morning in an old town.  In Cadenza, he moves in, around, and about everyday life with an improvisatory élan that soon becomes an almost familiar tune, sung to the friend you become every time you lend an ear.  The direction is true North; the vintage just right.” —Charles Bernstein

Comments on previous books:

“Poetry is that elusive entity generated by the effort to stave off the departure of poetry which has already taken place. Somehow, North manages to fix this necessarily transient quality without violating its mercurial nature, and he does so precisely by concentrating on the essential paradox of what he’s doing rather than by trying to evade it…I’d love to know how he manages to keep such beautifully mobile balance as everything turns into something else.”
                                                                                      —Barry Schwabsky, The Poetry Project Newsletter

“Like Keats’s poems, North’s are urbane but with just enough of the ‘cockney’ to be vital. The longest are so elequent and passionately thoughtful as to remind one of Keats’s longer poems, or perhaps Joseph Warton or William Cowper…North’s poems are at once meditative and funny, sincere and sophisticated, pious and wiseass.”
                                                                                                       —Gary Lenhart, American Book Review

“As brave, conceptual and big-minded as Jack Spicer’s lifetime of conference calls with the underworld, North’s work constantly greets us with the deft presence of a mind devilishly enamored of improbable form and substantial ideation.”
                                                                                                                                          —Publishers Weekly

“The core value of North’s work is in the freedom with which he operates. His “risks inside art” become exhilarating risks for his readers. It is good to read a book and be delighted by it, to feel one’s imagination engaged for its own sake, to get the sort of workout that poetry alone gives.”—William Corbett, The Poetry Project Newsletter

Fiction, 432 pages
paper, $24.00
ISBN-13 978-1-931236-69-0
ISBN-10 1-931236-69-0

The Brooklyn Rail Fiction Anthology

The Brooklyn Rail Fiction Anthology presents a generous selection of prose that first appeared in the pages of that monthly tabloid publication of arts, politics, and culture during Donald Breckenridge’s tenure as fiction editor. This anthology was conceived not as a “best of” the Rail fiction section, but as an overview of the variety of short fiction that has appeared in its pages. As the Rail Fiction Editor, Breckenridge’s goal has been to highlight the talents of emerging writers, many of whom live in Brooklyn, as well as to showcase the current writing of established authors who have been marginalized by an increasingly risk- averse, profit-driven publishing industry.” The Brooklyn Rail Fiction Anthology contains about one-third of the fiction that Breckenridge chose to publish in the journal since 2002.
Contributors include: Diane Williams , Caila Rossi, Lynda Schor, Sharon Mesmer, Susan Daitch, Jill Magi, Leslie Scalapino, Douglas Glover, Jonathan Baumbach, Jacques Roubaud (Translated by Guy Bennett), John Yau, Kenneth Bernard, Brian Evenson, Michael Martone, Barbara Henning, Lewis Warsh, Bart Cameron, Aaron Zimmerman , Jim Feast, Will Fleming, Evan Harris, Blake Radcliffe, Meredith Brosnan, Pat MacEnulty, Martha King, Carmen Firan,, Elizabeth Reddin, Jeremy Sigler, Constanza Jaramillo Cathcart, Marie Carter, Lynn Crawford, Johannah Rodgers,Robert Pinget (Translated by Barbara Wright), Jean Fremon (Translated by Brian Evenson), Doug Nufer, R.M. Berry, Albert Mobilio, John Reed , Thomas D’Adamo, and Kurt Strahm

“Donald Breckenridge’s anthology brings together a brilliant collection of writers, recent, new, and newest. It’s a bewilderingly impressive achievement.” —Harry Mathews, author of My Life in CIA, Cigarettes, and The Sinking of the Odradek Stadium

“Here is a welcome anthology of inventive fictions by celebrated practitioners— Williams, Daitch, Evenson, Martone—and newer writers deserving celebration.” —Christine Schutt, author of Florida, A Day, A Night, Another Day, Summer, and Nightwork

Paperback: ISBN 978-1-931236-72-0, $15
Hardcover: ISBN 978-1-931236-73-7, $25.

Doing Seventy
Hettie Jones

Doing 70 is Hettie Jones’s third collection, following All Told and the prize-winning Drive. Her celebrated memoir of the Beat Scene, How I Became Hettie Jones, is regarded as a model of the genre, and she has published many other books for children and adults, including No Woman No Cry, with Rita Marley. A longtime resident of Manhattan’s East Village, Jones lectures widely and teaches at The New School and the 92nd Street Y Poetry Center.

(on Drive, 1998)

“…This collection of poems, her first, will establish her as a potent and fearless poet… writing both deeply personal and strongly political poems, all of which are utterly free of sentimentality yet warm with compassion.”
-----Donna Seaman, Booklist

“Her gift is to paint with vivid words and to cloak her wit with images in such a way that they linger in the mind long after the reading.”
 ----The Midwest Book Review

(on All Told, 2003)

“…Jones’s  poetic debut…combined prosaic diction with a knowing, urban wit that could turn serious on a dime.  This new collection of several dozen short, unsentimental works primarily located in New York City, Jones’s longtime home, extend her territory.”
----Publishers Weekly

“Readers who have appreciated Hettie Jones’s previous literary works…will be intrigued and exhilarated by her recent book….an engaging meditation from the personal to the collective that…touches upon a variety of themes….”
---Rochelle Owens, World Literature Today

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ISBN: 978-1-931236-80-5 (paper)Price $15
ISBN: 978-1-931236-81-2 (cloth)Price $25

Boy Drinkers
Terence Winch

Terence Winch is the author of Irish Musicians/American Friends, which won an American Book Award, The Great Indoors,  The Drift of Things, and Contenders.  His last book, That Special Place: New World Irish Stories, draws on his experiences as a founding member of the acclaimed Irish band Celtic Thunder. His work is included in the Oxford Book of American Poetry, three Best American Poetry collections, and has been featured on “The Writers Almanac” and NPR’s “All Things Considered.” Winch is the recipient of an NEA Fellowship in poetry, among other awards.

Boy Drinkers looks with sober eyes at the people, tragedies, and traditions that shaped any of us who grew up in a community where alcohol and God were equally able to bring us to our knees. With his musician’s ear and Irishman’s humor, Terence Winch pokes fun at the Holy, makes sacred the mundane, and redefines the meaning of “grace.”  —Meg Kearney

In a voice that manages to be understated, precise, and casual all at once, Winch exposes us to a set of characters struggling with a world that’s changing too fast not only for them, but for anyone. These are poems you’ll remember. Clear-eyed, unsentimental, and hilarious, they’ll also break your heart.   —Mark Wallace

About That Special Place: New World Irish Stories:

“You can see the sights, taste the air, hear the sounds, and smell the atmosphere (no matter how smoky and boozy) in all his stories. A delightful read!” —Lahri Bond, Dirty Linen magazine

“Terry Winch reminds us again that he is the voice of Irish America.” —George O’Brien

“A joy to read. …Winch’s book is full of the soul’s stories, and it will occupy that special place in readers’ own memories.”  —Earle Hitchner, The Irish Echo

“The narratives…focus on the wild, the profane, and the often simply crazy world of the itinerant performer and are often hilarious. A vital contribution to Irish American writing.”  —Eamonn Wall, The Irish Literary Supplement

“A powerful collection of stories and lyrics.... The author’s compassion for all his characters shines..., as well as his ability to observe and unthread the smallest nuance of human word, emotion, or behavior.”  —Kathleen Cain, The Bloomsbury Review

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Hardcover:  978-1-931236-75-1, $26. 
Paperback: ISBN 978-1- 931236-74-4,  $16. 

My Body: New and Selected Poems
Joan Larkin

Joan Larkin’s previous volumes of poetry include Cold River, which received a Lambda Literary Award for Poetry.  In her fourth decade of teaching writing, she is a member of the core faculty of the MFA Program in Poetry at New England College. 

Praise for My Body:

“Over the decades of writing, Joan Larkin has proved her mastery, whether the poem is mythic, elegiac, or biographical.  Her honesty is overwhelming, but it is coupled with poetic cunning, gorgeous language and a rhythm and tone so precise and appropriate that it is––as in the great poets––transparent.  There are no tricks and no evasive moves, nothing that in ten years she will be ashamed of or confused by.  She is a poet of compassion and pity.  Where it is appropriate, she is merciless, especially to herself.  I love reading her poems; I love reading them over and over.  I salute her.”  —Gerald Stern

 

“Joan Larkin’s high-wire poetic acts unite both electric tension and steadfast balance.  Deft, probing language surges in these poems, to the music of free verse, metric invention, high rhetoric, & demotic wit.  She needs all these, to reach the full range of felt life she intends for us.”  —Marie Ponsot

 

“Joan Larkin knows how to write a crown of sonnets so vividly revelatory that it gave this reader goosebumps.  Deaths from AIDS, family deaths, a suicide––dark subjects deftly and honorably portrayed.”  —Maxine Kumin

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