Next Newsletter: July 1st

New Release June 12th, 2009: Anthem poems by CL Bledsoe

CL Bledsoe has published work in over 200 journals and anthologies, including The Cimarron Review, Nimrod and The Arkansas Review. Winner of the Blue Collar Review's Working People's Poetry Contest, he is also a 3-time Pushcart Prize nominee. He is an editor for Ghoti Magazine. http://www.ghotimag.com and the author of a chapbook entitled_______(Want/Need)

CL Bledsoe's Anthem is succinct, shrewd and contemporary. Bledsoe is a modern-age poet with the unique ability to bring the reader smack into the moment with him ... Anthem's poems are no exception. Often confessional, occasionally biting, Bledsoe proves once again that he is the poet for generation X, Y and whatever lies beyond.
- Patricia Gomes, editor of Adagio Verse Quarterly and poetry moderator of iVillage's Poet's Workshop

Fresh, funny, hip, anarchic, jaded, secretly hopeful, angry, wry, laid-back: to read CL Bledsoe's Anthem is to enter a world that may make you twitch - but will surely help you keep on keeping on. These songs of punked-out innocence stage-strut across the page, even when they claim they're simply slacking on the couch. Join Frog and Death and the absinthe squirrels on a savvy, consciousness-jolting road-trip through the landscape of right now. I loved this smart and artful book. I bet you will to. Open it. Find out.
- Jeanne Larsen, winner of the AWP poetry book award

$15.00 | ISBN 978-0-615-25796-9 | 65 Pages | In Stock

New Release June 12th, 2009: Anezka Ceska by Jaromir Horec

Jaromir Horec was born on December 18, 1921 in Chust, in Sub-Carpathian Ruthenia, which in 1919, at the treaty of Versailles, had voted to become part of the newly formed Czechoslovak Republic with an enlightened, freely elected government led by the humanist philosopher, Tomas Garrigue Masaryk.

Throughout the Nazi occupation of Czechoslovakia, Jaromír Hoec was active in the underground anti-Nazi youth movement. After World War II, Sub-Carpathian Ruthenia was not returned to Czechoslovakia but was annexed by Stalin to the Soviet Union. Thus Horec, living in Prague, became an expatriate in his own country. He was a prolific poet, who was not allowed to publish for two periods of twenty years each: 1948-1966 and 1969-1989.

In 1977, he signed Charter 77 and two years later, he founded the Czech underground press Ceska Expedice for which he was imprisoned in 1981. His many works of poetry, include Anezka Ceska, and Chleb Na Stole, as well as many other publications, such as Why I Am Not a Communist and Sub-Carpathian Ruthenia-an Unknown land have been coming out only since 1989.

$15.00 | ISBN 978-0-578-02262-8 | 54 Pages | In Stock

New Release June 12th, 2009: Pretty Little Lies Ten Generations Of Southern Hypocrisy by W. R. Mayo

Pretty Little Lies, as told from the perspective of a member of the southern Mayo clan, reads like a gothic novel spanning centuries. In a take no prisoners accounting. W. R. Mayo's memoir is a serious undertaking that makes for fascinating reading. Though not from an old southern family, I, for one recognize much of what we all carry in our DNA.
- Susan Tepper, author of DEER

In his biting family memoir, Pretty Little Lies, W. R. Mayo courageously puts a dagger into the heart of the southern plantation myth. By unflinchingly facing his own dysfunctional past, Mayo gives the romantic, idealized version of ante- and post-bellum life below the Mason-Dixon Line a well-deserved paddling. In moving prose, he reveals the underbelly of the "big house"- a way of life created and sustained by traffic in human slavery and one reliant upon the manipulation, or far worse, of the land and those who lived and toiled upon it. Pretty Little Lies is a must read for anyone looking to see past the mythology of the Old South.
- J. B. Hogan, author

Unflinching. Revealing. In this exhaustively researched family history, Mayo charts the rise of a Southern family from its roots in England to the founding of a plantation in Southeastern Arkansas in the middle of the nineteenth century. Through the degradations of the Civil War, two world wars, and countless family conflicts still raging to this day, Mayo lays bare the mythology of Southern "Nobility." He frankly examines the treatment of slaves by his family which led to "the other Mayos," a family of blacks descended from these slaves, and describes the uncompromising natures of his progenitors. From his mother who never apologized for anything, considering it a waste of time to his racist, domineering father, Mayo chronicles the infighting, manipulation, and xenophobia prevalent in his family's past. Mayo digs to the core to face head-on not only the lies, exaggerations and conscious-salving stories of "pride" passed down within his family, but also to uncover the real story of Southern history. As Faulkner said, "The past is never dead. In fact, it's not even past." Mayo's past is certainly not dead, though this book is an attempt to put a stake through it's heart.
- C. L. Bledsoe, author of Anthem, Riceland and editor for Ghoti Magazine

$15.95 | ISBN 978-0-9773695-4-0 | 211 Pages | In Stock

New Release May 5th, 2009: Opuscula Small thoughts, hardly worthy of note by Steve Glines

Steve Glines, in addition to being the editor of Wilderness House Literary Review, is an essayist, journalist, storyteller, occasional poet and bon vivant. His motto is, "The best is barely good enough." Steve has published six books, only one of which might be considered even remotely "literary," a travelogue about Fiji. He has been published in Ibbetson Review, The Belmont Citizen, The Littleton Independent, Unix Review, Technology Review, The Boston Globe, The New York Times and The Hartford Current among others. He has never been published in The Paris Review, The Antioch Review, Crazyhorse, The Atlantic Monthly or The Kenyon Review. To these awesome credentials it should be added that he has never received a McArthur Award nor been nominated for a Pulitzer or Pushcart Prize. Still, for some reason, people like what he writes and, on occasion, even pay him for it.

$7.00 | 37 Pages | In Stock

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