Ausable Press – förlag

“Few poets of the last thirty years have approached his diversity of formal innovations; few have communicated so intensively via performances and recordings, as often as not with integral musical settings; and few have proved so effective politically… a living modern classic for real.” —London Magazine

“You can just hear the reggae drumbeat as his verse vacillates among fire, anger, fear, profound loss, and victory.” —Savoy Magazine, January 2007

“The man writes some of the most moving poetry to be found in popular music.—David Bowie in Vanity Fair

“His observations are the rich fruits of both a lyrical childhood on a Jamaican farm, and his bottled anger on the streets of London. During his teenage years in Brixton, Johnson witnessed serial episodes of racial abuse and joined the Black Panthers movement in protest. There, he learned his history and culture, but found his own outlet.”—Caroline Frost, BBC Four

Linton Kwesi Johnson is the most influential black poet in Britain. The author of five previous collections of poetry and numerous record albums, he is known worldwide for his fusion of lyrical verse and reggae. Much of his work is written in the street Creole of the Caribbean communities in which he grew up in England. Mi Revalueshanary Fren includes all of his best-known poems, which concern racism and politics, personal experience, philosophy, and the art of music, among other things.

Contains a full-length CD of Johnson reading.

The fifth book by poet Steve Orlen, who is known for his passionate, secret-spilling explorations of the inner life. His language is colloquial, accessible, and frequently very funny. He writes about sometimes-dark subjects, particularly childhood and adolescence, with hindsight that illuminates and transforms them.

James Richardson is one of the finest poets now writing, and the best contemporary practitioner of the art of aphorism."—Publishers Weekly

"Not since the appearance of W. S. Merwin's translations and adaptations of aphorisms in Asian Figures, some thirty years ago, has an American poet managed to put down so much delightful and compelling wisdom."—American Literary Review

"No one theme or moral pervades these tesserae of specificity. Rather, Richardson's elegant compression invites the reader to fill in the blanks with personal experience… Richardson's knack for the quintessential, sustained for more than a hundred pages, left me satisfied yet hungry for more."— Times Literary Supplement

"Readers will be obsessed by this book; they will memorize passages, give copies to friends, proselytize. That's because Vectors so generously provides the best that poetry can offer. It is a masterpiece of practicality, beauty, and solace."— Boston Review

"James Richardson's Vectors... penetrates to the very heart of human nature. I stand looking in the mirror, alert to my own foibles, shaking my head as I tolerate what I know he knows about who I am."— The Georgia Review

"Almost every entry... introduces a new insight, provides a revelation, supplies a surprise... it is a book one wants to spend time with, a wonderfully friendly book, generous, witty and entertaining."— Gulf Coast

"Vectors is the kind of book you read, reread, thumb through, and pick up several extra copies because you want to share the joy you found in perusing it with friends."— Barrow Street

"James Richardson's Vectors is a book of subversive wonders. Stunningly precise, these brilliant aphorisms and ten-second essays show a mind assessing, reassessing, discovering, and interrogating assumptions in ways that feel diamond-sharp, at once good-natured, quietly sly at times, and always, always, very shrewd. 'It can never be satisfied, the mind, never,' wrote Wallace Stevens. Vectors is a remarkable testament to such questing, vivid minding, as these aphorisms alight on everything from the nature of perception, to God, success, fear, shame, self-consciousness, love and friendship."—Laurie Sheck

Intense and pristine lyrics by a poet living in the age of AIDS. He takes his subject head-on without a shred of sentimentality or self-pity. In spite of its difficult subject, this is not a dark book. Gregory Orr has said of Donnelly that “everything he writes is suffused with tenderness and intelligence, lucidity and courage.” This is Donnelly’s first book.

Winner of the Kate Tufts Discovery Award for a first book of poetry. In wild, zany, often hilarious language, this poet writes about what it’s like to be a woman, a mother, a wife, an ex-wife and a poet in 21st century America. Linda Gregerson has commented that Blevins writes “the freshest poetic line that America has produced in 30 years.”

Jahan Ramazani has written that “These dazzling lyrics and sequences create one of the most compelling portraits we have of a mind, a sensibility, a language emerging from the hybridization of cultures.”

“Startling in their mystery, these poems are entirely original; abstract and passionate, sensual and otherworldly, trance-like and exciting . . . . The Ardors is a book that takes us beyond ourselves, beyond our workaday bodies and souls.”—Jean Valentine.

This book gathers under one roof poems from all of Richardson's earlier collections, a number of which are out of print: Reservations (1977), Second Guesses (1984), As If(1992), A Suite for Lucretians (1999), How Things Are (2000), and Vectors: Aphorisms & Ten-Second Essays (2001), as well as a large selection of new poems and aphorisms.

A distillation of three decades of work, Interglacial will introduce this poet to a new generation of readers. Richardson fans will be pleased to discover early poems long out of print, and to see this poet's work in a larger, retrospective context.

Praise for Vectors: Aphorisms & Ten-Second Essays:

“Not since the appearance of W.S. Merwin's translations and adaptations of aphorisms in Asian Figures, some thirty years ago, has an American poet put down so much delightful and compelling wisdom.”—Daryl Scroggins in American Literary Review

“Page after page there is the exciting sense of something hidden and true coming to light, bringing with it a sense of delighted recognition and discovery for the reader, and articulated in a way that has never quite been done before. I can think of no deeper pleasure a work can bring.”—Laurie Sheck

“Vectors is the kind of book you read, reread, thumb through, and pick up several extra copies because you want to share the joy you found in perusing it with friends.”—Scott Hightower in Barrow Street

James Richardson was born in 1950, and is the author of six books of poetry and three critical studies. The recipient of the Cecil Hemley and Robert H. Winner Prizes from the Poetry Society of America and fellowships from the New Jersey State Council on the Arts and the National Endowment for the Humanities, he is Professor of English and Creative Writing at Princeton University.

Gardening in the Dark, Kasischke’s sixth book of poetry, continues to explore the transformative power of imagination. Her poems take us to the flip side of human consciousness, where anything can happen at any time. Tinged with surrealism, her work makes visionary leaps from the quotidian to sudden, surprising epiphanies.

Jeffrey Skinner's poems come at the world from many different directions. Some are outrageous and very funny, like “Experiment,” which begins, “I sewed my father into a specially designed, handmade bear suit. He was indistinguishable from a real bear, and yet retained the necessary functions of a human. I also provided a G.P.S. radio collar. Then I air-dropped him into a densely forested preserve. When I returned a year later I found he had mated with an Asian black bear. He and she and their two cubs lived a quiet life in a mountain cave.” In other poems, Skinner explores more familiar domestic landscapes, taking us with great tenderness and precision into the life of the human heart. By turns poignant, brainy, and hilarious, Salt Water Amnesia is a book that will surprise and delight.

Reading the Bay

A calm water morning. After what was said on both sides. Don't you talk to me that way. My daughter. We cannot speak, now, nor stand to touch.

The bay, covered with tiny script Moving rapidly right to left. Words Crossing over One another, whole passages Torn from an asylum diary. I lifted her

Body, a huge flailing penknife, into the car.

A seagull sits bobbing on the text. My brother. It appears that, today at least, all language moves out to sea.

Jeffrey Skinner has published four collections of poetry: Late Stars, A Guide to Forgetting, The Company of Heaven, and Gender Studies. His work has received wide recognition, including fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Ingram Merrill Foundation, and the Howard Foundation. Currently director of the creative writing program at the University of Louisville, he is also co-founder and editorial consultant for Sarabande Books.

Body of the World, Sam Taylor's first book, is the work of a poet whose sense of what it means to be human is inseparable from the physical world, about which he writes with unnerving intimacy. The voice, while grounded in the familiar landscape of twenty-first-century America, is also transparent. It regards itself as integral to that place in time, so that to speak of the human mind and body is to speak of the world, just as perception of the world becomes perception of the physical and mental self: not himself, but the human self. Thus, his subject is the enduring mystery of consciousness in all its embodiments: memory, the rain, a credit card, death, an air conditioner, the scent of eucalyptus. His language is like granite, a substance unto itself yet at home in the flux. As we enter what the poet has called elsewhere “a global age of distance-less information and virtual experience,” Body of the World is a necessary book.

Oh the body in its bedouin sleep. Always awake, always walking blocks of city scaffolding, always wrapped in rain, hot cocoa, cinnamon. Always a curled embryo, always a curved umbrella, always the handle of an unknown suitcase, always the echo that will not fit inside a cathedral. Always a brief April.

A graduate of Swarthmore College and a former Michener Fellow in the MFA program at The University of Texas at Austin, Sam Taylor is a poet, nonfiction writer, and yoga teacher. His poems have appeared in numerous publications and received The Florida Review Editor's Award in Poetry in 2002. He splits his time between teaching English at The University of New Mexico-Taos and as a caretaker for a wilderness refuge in the San Juan Mountains during its snowed-in winter months.

Beginning with a harrowing account of her childhood in a Belgian convent, where she was placed at the age of four, Laure-Anne Bosselaar shows us how early emotional and physical deprivation can be overcome by intelligence, humor, curiosity, and determination. Although many of her poems are overtly autobiographical, they are never merely personal.

Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Stephen Dunn wrote of A New Hunger: “There's a time in the life of a poet as a maker of poems, if she or he is going to become more than just good, when the voice of one's second self fully emerges, distilling and orchestrating the poet's concerns, while simultaneously infusing them with an inner melody—a music that reaches and satisfies both ear and mind. This is to say that Laure-Anne Bosselaar, with her wonderful third book, A New Hunger, has become more than just good. It's an occasion to mark and to celebrate.”

The acclaimed author of two previous collections (The Hour Between Dog and Wolf and Small Gods of Grief, which won the 2001 Isabella Stewart Gardner Prize), Laure-Anne Bosselaar grew up in Belgium, where she worked as a talk show host, commentator, and voiceover for Belgian radio and television. Fluent in four languages, she moved to the United States in 1987.

"She has, like all good poets, created a music of her own, one suited to her concerns. When denizens of the 22nd century, if we get there, look back on our era and ask how we lived, they will take an interest both in the strangest personalities who gave their concerns verbal form, and in the most representative. The future will not—should not—see us by one poet alone. But if there is any justice in that future, Kasischke is one of the poets it will choose.” —Boston Review

“Kasichke's poems are powered by a skillful use of imagery and the subtle, ingenious way she turns a phrase.” —Austin American-Statesman

Laura Kasischke in her own words: "I realized while ordering and selecting the poems for this collection that much of my more recent work concerns body parts, dresses, and beauty queens. These weren't conscious decisions, just the things that found their way into my poems at this particular point in my life, and which seem to have attached to them a kind of prophetic potential. The beauty queens especially seemed to crowd in on me, in all their feminine loveliness and distress, wearing their physical and psychological finery, bearing what body parts had been allotted to them. For some time, I had been thinking about beauty queens like Miss Michigan, but also the Rhubarb Queen, and the Beauty Queens of abstraction—congeniality. And then—Brevity, Consolation for Emotional Damages, Estrogen—all these feminine possibilities to which I thought a voice needed to be given."

Laura Kasischke is the author of six books of poetry, including Gardening in the Dark (Ausable Press, 2004) and Dance and Disappear (winner of the 2002 Juniper Prize), and four novels. Her work has received many honors, including the Alice Fay Di Castagnola Award from the Poetry Society of America, the Beatrice Hawley Award, the Pushcart Prize, and the Elmer Holmes Bobst Award for Emerging Writers. She teaches at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor.

"(Lilley's) verse brings beauty to the almost-failed world it creates."—Rain Taxi

"Lilley's power comes partly from his sound: syncopated, densely compacted, defiantly resigned."—The Believer

Alpha—the beginning; the first letter of the military alphabet; the highest rank in a dominance hierarchy; being the most prominent, talented, or aggressive person in a group. Zulu—tribe; a member of the Negroid people of eastern South Africa; a Social Aid and Pleasure Club in New Orleans; an adjective to describe the language, customs, etc., of the Zulu people. Alpha Zulu is a venture into African American storytelling; it is a blurring of secular and sacred, the tavern and the church, the fall and the ascension of the individual, the beautiful and the terrible, and the humanity found in the twist of the street and the turn of the road.

The people in the poems—the narrators and the subjects—tell the stories. The details and images locate each poem at the crossroad of ordinary people with extraordinary, edgy, and universal situations, and their responses are spiritual and streetwise. The lyricism of the line supplies a subtle blues and jazz as the underscore for a very particular community. Narrators and personas give perspectives of place and time, placing the poems fi rmly in the continuum of African culture in America.

Gary Copeland Lilley is a native of Sandy Cross, North Carolina, and the beauty of the southern edge of The Great Dismal Swamp is what he calls his ancestral home. He is veteran of the US Navy Submarine Force and a longtime blues denizen of Washington, DC, and Chicago, Illinois. He is also an outsider artist and currently lives in Swannanoa, North Carolina.

“Nabokovian in his caustic charm and sexy intelligence, Simic perceives the mythic in the mundane and pinpoints the perpetual suffering that infuses human life with both agony and bliss. . . . And he is the master of juxtaposition, lining up the unlikeliest of pairings and contrasts as he explores the nexuses of madness and prophecy, hell and paradise, lust and death.”—Donna Seaman, Booklist

"As one reads the pithy, wise, occasionally cranky epigrams and vignettes that fill this volume, there is the definite sense that we are getting a rare glimpse into several decades worth of private journals--and, by extension are privy to the tickings of an accomplished and introspective literary mind."—Rain Taxi

Written over many years, this book is a collection of notebook entries by our current Poet Laureate.

Excerpts:

Stupidity is the secret spice historians have difficulty identifying in this soup we keep slurping.

Ars poetica: trying to make your jailers laugh.

American identity is really about having many identities simultaneously. We came to America to escape our old identities, which the multiculturalists now wish to restore to us.

Ambiguity is the world's condition. Poetry flirts with ambiguity. As a “picture of reality” it is truer than any other. This doesn't mean that you're supposed to write poems no one understands.

The twelve girls in the gospel choir sang as if dogs were biting their asses.

What an outrage! This very moment gone forever!

"Few... could have predicted the delayed depth-charge of this explosive second book, motored by vividly earthly language and disguised philosophical sophistication." —Publishers Weekly, starred review

"Throughout Made Flesh, one of the most powerful poetry books this year, Arnold gets at both the contradictions and timelessness of love." —Time Out New York

"The readers delighted with (Arnold's) first book (Shells) will be differently enchanted with these. They contain a wealth of contemplation as well as observation and experience. Their unpunctuated free style carries the reader into the poems, piling up events and details in a breathless rush....The poems of Made Flesh are unforgettable, and it is tragic that readers will have no new books from Craig Arnold."—Magill Book Reviews

A girl wakes up to find out just how completely her lover has possessed her. A couple realizes they’ve been trapped inside an ancient myth. A traveler glances out through a train window and catches the dim reflection of another world.

This is the world of Made Flesh, the long-awaited second book by Craig Arnold, a finalist for the Utah Book Award and the High Plains book award. Made Flesh delineates a new mythology of what it means to be in the body. Marrying narrative precision to lyric ecstasy, the archaic to the avant-garde, these poems celebrate the fragility of our very selves and “the joy of self-forgetting,” the acts of surrender that loves asks of us. Fierce, exuberant, and erotic, they invite the reader to share a rare and startling vision: how, if we would only permit ourselves to be drawn out of our mental privacies, out to the very surface of our skin, we might admit the beauty of being for a moment in the world, and with each other.

Craig Arnold is the author of Shells, a Yale Series of Younger Poets selection chosen by W.S. Merwin. He taught at the University of Wyoming in Laramie. In late April 2009, Craig Arnold went missing on the Japanese island of Kuchinoerabu-jima, where he was working on a book about volcanoes as part of a Creative Artists' Exchange Fellowship from the Japan-United States Friendship Commission. He was forty-one years old.