Lovemaking in the Footnotes

Mahsa Mohebali

Translated by Saba Riazi

Winner of the Loose Translations Award,
Presented by Queens College-CUNY and Hanging Loose Press

MAHSA MOHEBALI was born in Tehran in 1971. She started her writing career in Dr. Reza Baraheni’s creative writing workshops. Mohebali graduated from Tehran University with a degree in music and currently works as a piano instructor as well as a leader of creative writing workshops in Tehran. She has been a fellow of the International Writing Program at Iowa University. Her novels, screenplays, and short story collections have been widely translated and her honors include the Golshari Foundation Award, the Press Critics’ Award, and the Fajr International Film Festival Best Screenplay award. Lovemaking in the Footnotes is banned in Iran.

The Mercy of Distance

Harley Elliott

Harley Elliott was born in South Dakota to a short line of Norski wheat farmers, but has spent most of his time in Kansas. He was awakened to contemporary poetry while attending a reading by Ed Dorn. Since 1971, he has published ten books of poems, a children’s book, and a memoir. Not a disciple of specialization, he believes that artistic expression, not the maker, will suggest the appropriate medium. He expresses himself in writing, song, and visual art. This is a collection of expressions which have chosen the form of poetry.

“One of the truly gifted poets of our generation” —National Public Radio

“These are genuine poems of the live world” —Choice Poetry

“Elliott’s work defies narrow classification.  His poems reflect a strong connection to the land and open sky of Kansas…the true history of people…[He] is a highly imaginative poet.” 
—The Kansas Literary Map, Washburn University

The Migrant States

Indran Amirthanayagam

“I want to write to all the corners of the far-flung universe,” Indran Amirthanayagam announces in “Marked,” and accomplishes this goal magnificently in The Migrant States. These poems engendered by “Heart and Memory,” are hellos and goodbyes, obituaries, salutations, and celebrations addressed to his children, his friends and heroes, his lovers, Walt Whitman, and any other fortunate reader who strays into his orbit.”
— Terence Winch

“ Migrant States is a book where passion and memory meet, a book that calls for open borders of the mind, it is a book that knows that everyone and no one is a foreigner on this planet and that the country of the poets has no customs. With Whitman as his interlocutor, Indran Amirthanayagam takes us on the journey with no return, where our ticket is a moving and beautiful song ”
— Ilya Kaminsky, author of Deaf Republic and Dancing in Odessa

“Indran Amirthanayagam was born in Sri Lanka but he’s certainly American-made. When ideals are shattered, poetry saves; and this book conveys truth from a master storyteller representing the high tradition of poetry with dignity and conviction throughout this powerful collection; and there are no better poems of Walt Whitman than are found here. Amirthanayagam’s voice is a sword of light. “Speak to me. We have/ little time. Though the sun/ will explode long after/ we’ve disappeared.”
— Grace Cavalieri Maryland Poet Laureate

“ An activist poet is rooted in revolutionary change as opposed to a “literary” poet who, like Auden, believes that a poem “does nothing.” It just survives. Sri Lankan-born Indran Amirthanayagam, who writes poetry in 5 languages (Haitian, Spanish, French, Portuguese and most of all in American-English), is one of the truly great activist poets in these United States. Read this book and I’ve no doubt you’ll agree with me. ”
— Jack Hirschman, emeritus Poet Laureate of San Francisco

Wite Out: Love and Work

Linda Norton

“ With Wite Out, Linda Norton breaks fresh ground as an autobiographical poememoirist. Combining an exploration of her familial roots, an interrogation and critique of whiteness as lived experience, a diaristic account of relationships in all their complexity, and a personal, social, and cultural history of certain precincts in American poetry’s late 20th-century avant-garde, Wite Out is a masterpiece. ”
— John Keene

“Reading Wite Out also made me wonder where that missing letter went? What did it stand for and what was crouching in the lean-to of its variously broken loop? Horror? Responsibility? It’s just that how to take responsibility for horror has always seemed impossible because it means approaching the mass that assures annihilation. Whiteness is a black hole in this regard, but Linda Norton braves its event horizon, its point of no return, giving us leave to let go absolution to abolish, and fray the singularity to survive into some other dance we’ve been dancing, but denying, all along. In the proliferation of such release, we might hold on. ”
— Fred Moten

“Wite Out is a gorgeous book. Its spare, crystal-clear, non-confessional prose highlights feminine honesty rather than masculine concealment and makes you both sad and glad to be human. A memoir about a single working mother coping in a rough world she sees all too clearly, this is a courageous book about a courageous life; I couldn’t put it down.”
— Norman Fischer

About The Public Gardens: Poems and History, the prequel to Wite Out:

“The Public Gardens is a brilliant, wonderful book, a sort of a wild institution, intense and readable. Linda Norton looks at the world like a dog who likes to tear apart couches-repressed but not for long. Though full of shame, this book is shameless. A life is freely divulged as are the multitude of homeopathic bits from the author’s reading list. The overall experience of moving through The Public Gardens’s shuttling prose and poetry is quietly breathtaking. I have felt and learned much from this book! Her ‘Gardens’ are both organized and entirely disorderly-anything and anyone from any point in history might saunter through, and that’s the meaning of public, isn’t it? I find myself loving this writer’s mind, light touch, and generous heart and I, reader, didn’t want to go when it was done. My bowl is out. More! ”
— Eileen Myles

My Name is Immigrant

Wang Ping

Wang Ping’s remarkable history has taken her from farm worker during the Cultural Revolution to an international reputation as a teacher and writer. In her spare time, she climbs mountains and rows the Mississippi. Her energy and courage are both legendary.

Internationally acclaimed writer and poet Wang Ping’s timely new book of poetry, My Name Is Immigrant is a song for the plight and pride of immigrants around the globe, including the U.S., China, Syria, Honduras, Guatemala, Nepal, Tibet and other places. “Shortly after arriving in the U.S.,” writes Wang, “I walked into the wrong class, which turned out to be a creative writing workshop taught by a poet. I decided to stay in the course and wrote my first poem there. It was about my experience in New York as an immigrant. It got published, then selected by the Best American Poetry. I went on to write more immigrant stories about people from around the world, as I discovered we are one giant village of immigration, and as the topic has grown in importance.”

Praise for Wang Ping

“Immigrant Can’t Write Poetry” renders a moving argument about language and expression, and about the freedom poetry sometimes claims, the freedom to speak in ways that are obedient to the urgencies and irregularities of life… it’s moving, and on the surface, simple, and it reminds me that what all poems are truly in search of sits outside the words.”
— Tracy K. Smith, USA Poet Laureate, The Slowdown

“Wang Ping’s poetry is riddled with surprises that bite and soothe. There’s something wise and original in these poems wrung from need. ”
— Yusef Komunyakaa, Pulitzer Prize winner

“Meeting her for the first time in person was an impressive experience and my admiration for her only grew. Her work with rivers and with other aspects of the landscape is totally refreshing, and her broad intelligence, delightful political wit and poetic vision expands understanding of the American nation.”
— Gary Snyder, Pulitzer Prize winner

“Her truth telling emerges from a deep well, describing the movement of people and the stories, the hope, and the desire they carry with them across deserts and oceans, over walls and through every barrier. The age-old question remains, with sharp clarity in these pages-who among us decides who is allowed in, accepted, celebrated? ”
— M.L. Smoker, Montana Co-Poet Laureate

Buried Alive: A To-Do List

Carole Bernstein

This is Carole Bernstein’s third poetry collection. Her previous books are Familiar (Hanging Loose Press)-which J. D. McClatchy called “an exhilarating book”-and And Stepped Away from the Circle (chapbook, Sow’s Ear Press), winner of the Sow’s Ear Chapbook contest. Her poems have appeared in Antioch Review, Bridges, Chelsea, The F-Word, Hanging Loose, Light, Paterson Literary Review, Poetry, Shenandoah, Yale Review, and elsewhere. Her work has also been included in three anthologies: American Poetry: The Next Generation (Carnegie Mellon University Press), Unsettling America (Viking) and The Laurel Hill Poetry Anthology (Laurel Hill Press). A Brooklyn native, she lives in Philadelphia and works as a freelance writer and marketing consultant.

“From satirizing the mechanics of the American workplace to discovering motherly devotion in the myth of Persephone, Carole Bernstein’s third poetry collection Buried Alive: A To-Do List takes readers through caves and coffins alike, showing what living things still kick inside the previously presumed-dead.”
— Claire Oleson, Cleaver Magazine

“Carole Bernstein’s gorgeous poems are unsentimental, witty, acerbically and hilariously skeptical of nature, of sex, religion, product placement, virtue-signaling-and of herself. She takes a stand for the fierce, exasperating messiness of life against abusive ideals of perfection. Preemptively mourning everything she loves, holding off death by any and all means, tending to deep griefs in secret, her compassion masquerades as a silent rebuke to the naïve, the uninformed, the as-yet unbereaved, about their own embarrassing, dangerous hopes. This wonderful book stokes in me a furnace of purifying rage against all the molesting assholes, against the new Nazis and the old ones, and against onrushing darkness in all its forms. I will follow this ferocious, reluctantly tender voice anywhere. ”
— Patrick Donnelly, author of Little-Known Operas

“Finely rendered details are things buried alive in the living and breathing, vibrant poems of Carole Bernstein, where we encounter family portraits; teenage memories (cutting school, loving Rusty Staub); quotidian, often-overlooked bits of our long days; the frank vicissitudes of pregnancy; the tiny sorrows of parenting; and always, always, a rare view of what Bernstein calls “domestic interiors” in lyric phrasings sometimes as warm as a cat in bed, sometimes as lost as a neglected fuzzy pink unicorn. Reading these poems makes me want to order pizza using reverse osmosis.”
— Al Filreis, Faculty Director, Kelly Writers House, University of Pennsylvania

“Carole Bernstein’s book, Buried Alive: A To-Do List, is full of edgy humor, a sardonic tongue-in-cheek tone, mingled with the ability to tell the truth about even the most uncomfortable memories and tell it straight. I love the wild energy of this book and the poet’s willingness to take chances. I love the sense that the poet’s unique and tensile use of language creates an unforgettable book. ”
— Maria Mazziotti Gillan, American Book Award Winner

Getting to Philadelphia

Thomas Devaney

Thomas Devaney is the author of You Are the Battery, Runaway Goat Cart, The Picture that Remains (with the photographer Will Brown), A Series of Small Boxes, The American Pragmatist Fell in Love, and the solo-opera Calamity Jane. He is a 2014 Pew Fellow. He lives in Philadelphia and currently teaches at Haverford College.

“I deeply love the poems of Thomas Devaney, and Getting To Philadelphia New and Selected Poems, is a book full of why. Every poem in this collection resonates with the subtle wit and insight emblematic of Devaney’s work. Not that who and what his poetry bears witness to is “subtle” but that his witnessing is. When I read these poems I live among the people they register and among the streets and buildings and occurrences that define his terrain. And the more I read the more I want to live among all that and the language that goes with it. As a perfect line in his poem OREGON AVE puts it: ‘Seriously, when you have a good spot, why move the car?”
— Michael Lally

“O’Hara-esque all in his own way, Thomas Devaney’s Getting to Philadelphia is a bright thing, a high panygeric in honor of one of the world’s greatest cities, splayed heavily in his spirit, and thus his limbic language. Devaney knows its hidden histories and speakeasys, literary and graf artists, legendary corners, world eminences, but even more, its deep mysteries, which he sublimely cast as a sustained lyric meditation from poem to poem such that each glory-soaked line melodically reinscribes its magic as myth and song”
— Major Jackson

Anne A Novel

Paal-Helge Haugen
Translated by Julia Johanne Tolo

Paal-Helge Haugen (b. 1945 in Setesdal, Norway) has published over 30 books (poetry, fiction, children’s books, plays, essays) and books or selections of his work are translated to some 20 languages. He considers himself primarily a poet. He has received all the major Norwegian literary prizes, in addition to the Dobloug Prize, awarded by the Swedish Academy, The Richard Wilbur Prize (USA) and ‘Edvard’ (The Grieg Prize) for texts to music. Haugen has collaborated extensively with visual artists in Norway and Germany, and has written the libretti for six operas and other large-scale works by Norwegian composers, including Arne Nordheim and Cecilie Ore. He has also collaborated with experimental jazz musicians in Europe, among others David Sylvian and Arve Henriksen. In 2008 he was made Knight 1st Grade of The Royal Norwegian Order of St. Olaf, in recognition of his services to Norwegian art and letters. His titles in English include Stone Fences (University of Missouri Press, 1986), Wintering with the Light (Sun and Moon Press, 1997), and Meditations on George de la Tour (Bookthug, 2013).

Julia Johanne Tolo is a poet and translator from Oslo, Norway. She is the author of the chapbooks August, and the snow has just melted, from Bottlecap Press, and holes of silver from Ghost City Press.

“This book smells of damp wood, peeling paint, camphor, wounds, skin, hair, moss, and holy scripture. Julia Johanne Tolo’s translation is a vividly palpable and unique performance of Haugen’s classic.”
— Val Vinokur, author of Relative Genitive

“One of the most exciting books from Scandinavia that I’ve read in recent years. Permeated with darkness, Anne is a strange and compelling novel. Cinematic, each page feels like an intimate snapshot into another kind of life in Norway at the turn of the last century. As Haugen writes: ‘Pale, they are frail images, perhaps I can erase them with my hand.’ Documentary fragments break up Haugen’s tactile verse and make for a spellbinding mosaic narrative that I want to return to again and again. Julia Johanne Tolo’s translation is stunning.”
— Katrine Øgaard Jensen, writer, translator, editor of EuropeNow Journal

Invisible Horses

Rosalind Brackenbury

Rosalind Brackenbury was born in London, England, grew up in the UK and has lived in Scotland and France. She has lived in Key West for 25 years with her husband, Allen Meece.

She has been writing all her life and has published novels and collections of poetry, as well as award-winning short stories. She was literary editor at Solares Hill for ten years and Creative Writing Fellow at the College of William and Mary, Williamsburg VA, in 2006 and 2012. In Key West she runs yearly poetry and prose workshops at TSKW and she has been featured both as panelist and moderator at the Key West Literary Seminar. She was Key West’s second Poet Laureate in 2014-15. Her new novel, Without Her, is to be published by Delphinium Books in July 2019.

Praise for Rosalind Brackenbury’s earlier poetry books:

“With deft mastery, Rosalind Brackenbury distills the facts and feel of a deeply lived-through and profoundly attended-to existence.”
— Jane Hirshfield

“These rich, fluent poems tell the story of a writer’s pilgrimage…The sentences are so poised and artfully phrased that…they are a palpable pleasure on the tongue.”
— Harvey Shapiro

“As I read Rosalind Brackenbury’s recent poems, I sensed that in the process of creation she must have been exceptionally aware of the reader; the reader being, of course, me. She tells me what I feel in language choicer than my own; she also intuits what I should be feeling and reveals it in language of tactful purity.”
— Harry Mathews

“Her poems are easy to enter but very hard to leave. They resonate in the mind long after their note has been struck.”
— Westwords (U.K.)

Ways of Looking at a Woman

Caroline Hagood

Caroline Hagood’s first book of poetry, Lunatic Speaks, was published in 2012, and her second poetry book, Making Maxine’s Baby, a small press bestseller, came out in 2015 from Hanging Loose Press. Her writing has also appeared in The Kenyon Review, the Huffington Post, the Guardian, Salon, and the Economist. She’s a Staff Blogger for the Kenyon Review, a Postdoctoral Teaching Fellow at Fordham University, and she teaches creative writing at Barnard College. She lives in Brooklyn with her husband and two children.

In Ways of Looking at a Woman, a book-length essay that interweaves memoir with film and literary history, Caroline Hagood assumes the role of detective to ask, what is a “woman,” “mother,” and “writer”? By turns smart, funny, and poignant, Ways of Looking at a Woman is a profound meditation on the many mysterious layers that make up both a book and a person.

“Caroline Hagood’s Ways of Looking at a Woman is a profoundly unique and honest piece of work, somehow executed with an astonishing lack of ego. She will break your heart with her naked sincerity; a masterful, singular writer who sheds light with every page.”
— Mary-Louise Parker

End of the Business Day

Robert Hershon

Robert Hershon was born in Brooklyn in 1936. A graduate of New York University, he was executive director of The Print Center for 35 years and has been co-editor of Hanging Loose Press since its founding in 1966. Hershon has won two Creative Writing Fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and three from the New York Foundation for the Arts.

“In an attempt to write a blurb that doesn’t suck (doesn’t sound like a blurb) for Bob’s new book I have to make sure I don’t say things like ‘this soulful book is by turns hilarious and heart-rending’, though it is, especially the soulful part, though I’m not entirely sure what ‘rending’ means. Then I wonder if I have to leave out that Bob, I mean Robert Hershon, the distinguished author of End of The Business Day, writes about aging in this totally disarming way, because Americans seem so afraid of age & its accumulation of odd detail & language as a general rule. But by “disarming” I mean the measure and humor of this poetry puts you right up into living experience as a moving foreground, full of glimpses and asides and extended gambits performed for the sake of love and love’s civic attentiveness to the world’s ordinary absurdities and points of beauty. And if that sounds too much like a blurb let me just tell you this is a badass book of poems & you will suffer if you don’t find your way into its pages”
— Anselm Berrigan