CavanKerry Press – förlag

A collection of power and humor in earthy eroticism, invoking both the fever and hope in wakeful dreams. A bold work of the elegiac past and the visceral present converging in provocative imagery. There is often an undercurrent of longing in Chase's poems-the longing of hunger, of sex, of unfinished business with the dead. Central to the collection is the title poem, a spiraling nightmare that explores the messy and terrifying commingling of religion, death and history's unpardonable sins.

A collection of 130 poems contributed by Frost Place residents, many of whom have risen to prominence. Some contributors' poems were written during their tenures on the farm. Such poets as Robert Hass, Gary Miranda, Mary Jo Salter, Cleopatra Mathis, Denis Johnson and Stanley Plumly explore the depth and breadth of their time spent in Frost's New Hampshire. Eminent poet Donald Hall wrote the foreword and includes a cache of Frost's poems from Mountain Interval.

Founded twenty years ago by poet, memoirist, and clinical psychologist Joan Cusack Handler, CavanKerry Press has published fine literary work by established and emerging writers focused on the pursuit of understanding what it means to be human through insightful, accessible writing. This unique collection looks back at CavanKerry's first two decades with excerpts from each of the one hundred books in its publishing catalog, featuring poems and memoirs that capture the heart of living—through life's joys, illnesses, and moments of both gratitude and challenge.This collection features work by renowned writers of contemporary poetry and memoir such as David Cho, Robert Cording, Ross Gay, John Haines, Joan Cusack Handler, Marcus Jackson, Gray Jacobik, January Gill O’Neil, Jack Ridl, Mary Ruefle, Maureen Seaton, Jack Wiler, Baron Wormser, and many others. Places We Return To is the perfect introduction to CavanKerry’s catalog, representing the deeply resonant writing for which the Press is known. Several authors in the CavanKerry library have gone on to find acclaim as poets laureate, Pushcart recipients, and finalists in national prizes. Places We Return To is a collection of work of the highest caliber.

Martin Mooney's poems are darkly comic, muscular, inventive and highly charged. Politics simmer beneath the surface of poems that find their energy in the everyday urban experience, be it work at the shipyards, an early morning fishing expedition, the building of houses, or a visit to the local pub. A patently Irish humor, replete with shadows and irony, informs the poet's observations-and the second part of the collection is a kind of novella through poetry that follows the exploits of a young Irish expatriate and a cast of people on the fringe as they stumble through daily unpleasantries.

The title poem takes its name from a passage by Simone Weil, "We must not weep so that we may not be comforted." But in this and other poems, Robert Cording offers a more hopeful vision of our ability to find consolation in the world we inhabit-a world endowed will offer endless spiritual possibilities, both in nature and within ourselves.

Joan Handler's poems speak of the transmigration of a woman from an emotionally stifled girlhood through the first tentative steps of self-discovery, to, finally, the apostasy of womanhood and the ecstasy that everyday rebellion can bring. Handler undertakes daring experiments with form, shifting and thrusting words to underscore the power of the emotions in her words. Words dance on the pages of Glorious. The poetry is at once lyrical and colloquial in its language, almost narrative in its appeal.

The collection is Liz Hutner's powerful testament to her son, Sam, bravely battling leukemia. The quietly eloquent photographs by Hutner's brother and Sam's uncle, Simeon Hutner, beautifully enhance this portrait of intimacy and courage. The poems do not shy from the gritty details of the medical ordeal the mother faces with her son. But there are many glimpses of joy, too, often found in the ordinary moment of childhood, so few of which Sam is permitted to know.

Kenneth Rosen's poems are, at turns, idyllic, comic, conciliatory, passionate. He finds his imagery in nature, in history and literature, in contemporary political discourse and in mythology. He finds a thread with artists from the past who like the poet himself, perpetually seek to make sense of the turmoil of life. In this, his seventh collection, Rosen's diverse subjects-childhood, sex, politics and music--illustrate the full breadth of his poetic vision.

A collection of poetry about dislocation in an unexpectedly childless marriage. A time of wandering follows a period of exile and adjustment both within and without. The poems are both lyrical and colloquial with a fascination for invented forms that mirrors the altered circumstances of life.

The Silence of Men confronts and breaks the silence in men's lives surrounding sex, family, power and violence; graphic and intimate, celebratory and heartbreakingly painful, these are the poems of a survivor for whom writing, because it breaks that silence, has been a primary means of survival.

An exploration of the various ways language can help us transcend both the banal and unusual cruelties which are inevitably delivered to us, and which we equally deliver unto others. These poems comb through violence and love, fear and loss, exploring the common denominators in each. Against Which seeks the ways human beings might transform themselves from participants in a thoughtless and brutal world to laborers in a loving one.

Baron Wormser brings to life the immense force poetry can have in people's lives. In stories funny, tender, sad, and edgy, the narrators register how poetry has changed how they see themselves, how they live, and what they care about. As it bends genres by adapting aspects of fiction, biography, essay and monologue, The Poetry Life shows how poetry can be lightning in the soul. "Baron Wormser has pulled off a miraculous feat-he has written a collection of stories that reveals the absolute necessity of poetry in our lives. His prose style is riveting, and his characters are as diverse as a phone book. Each voice conjures up a passionate portrait of inner life, telling us-through episodes both comic and tragic-that the world of the deceased poet remains eternally relevant to our own."-Clint McCown, author of The Weatherman: A Novel"'Poetry,' Baron Wormser writes, 'is about generosity.' So too are these ten stories you hold in your hands. They are about generosity. And mystery. And loneliness. And life. They are about how poetry helps us 'stay in our skins.' You will fall in love with these stories and with the ten poets who appear in them. What Baron Wormser says about William Carlos Williams, I say about him here, 'He nailed it.'"-Ann Hood, author of The Knitting Circle: A Novel"A book of stories not about poets but driven by the presence of poetry and the shadows of poets: madness undoubtedly. But the best kind of madness! With this book, Baron Wormser invites us to reconsider the connection between poetry and our lives, to remember that we really do live hungry for inner vision, for small insights that can save us from the slag heap of goofdom and pointlessness. It's a wonderful book. It's the kind of stuff that makes you want to stay in the world." -Tim Seibles, author of Buffalo Head Solos

"...in these poems, (there is) a family of 12 with the mother, father, and speaker as the prime characters....In a brilliant crown of sonnets, its most important character, the speaker's brother, who died a suicide, by drowning, fully emerges. The strictness of the form is never obtrusive-it just does its job...to give a frame, a tension, something for the powerful emotion to work off of or against, thus increasing its powerful sentiment...By writing this book...Teresa Carson has rescued her family and her brother. That a book of poems can do this is a miracle." -Thomas Lux"These poems...convey with beauty and power the emotions that pour from loss, love, trauma, reconciliation and healing. It is difficult in an academic article or a clinical process to capture the full measure of what it is we seek to heal. But in these powerful poems...one can connect to a fragment of the pain, and hope, of Teresa Carson. Her words can teach. Teresa Carson is wise. She shares her wisdom in this remarkable book." -Bruce D. Perry, M.D., Ph.D. Senior Fellow, The Child Trauma Academy

A practicing psychologist and former marriage therapist unveils the role of parents, religion, children, illness and the emotional fiber of spouses on the treacherous terrain of marriage. Red Canoe is a valuable tool for professionals and a must read for couples.

"...The word "mad'' may conjure up notions that are either arty or primitive. Neither would apply in this case. One of the more stunning qualities of these poems is their composure, their lack of interest in histrionics. The poet's ability to examine her behavior is both edifying and harrowing. A poem such as "Offering", that speaks to the narrator's burning herself with a lighted cigarette, is remarkable in its ability to turn and turn again as it considers the behavior...One realizes that once this poem was written this poet could write any poem because she has the ability to indulge metaphor yet not let up a jot on the terror of real circumstances. Whatever else has befallen her, in her poems she seems incapable of backing down..."-Baron Wormser

The Reader was co-sponsored and co-conceived by CavanKerry and LaurelBooks partner, The Arnold P.Gold Foundation for Humanism in Medicine. Publisher Joan Cusack Handler and Gold Foundation President and CEO Sandra Gold observed that patients, while waiting to learn about their physical health, typically are provided only pop culture magazines-perhaps entertaining but without the solace and comfort that literature provides. The Waiting Room Reader was designed to address that need by bringing fine and accessible writing to "keep the patients company." Here are uplifting and inspiring poems that focus on life's gifts - everyday pleasures: love and family, food and home, work and play, dreams and the earth. This collection, originally offered only to hospitals and physicians' waiting rooms, was received with great success and is now available to a wider audience.

Whether they're graveside tourists in Rome or lovelorn girls on a bus, the characters in Dawn Potter's ravishing second collection of poetry, "betray a fatal longing" for love's complications. By turns comic and melancholy, hungry and euphoric, these poems surrender again and again to the passions and panics of experience.

This volume bears witness to John Haines's position as a true man of letters. The essays, reviews, chronicles, memoirs, and poems (spanning four decades) testify to the breadth and depth of his concerns. The life – rooted for decades in Alaska – and the writing are bound together inextricably…What interests Haines throughout the various modes represented in this volume is to clear away the numerous confusing, self-justifying and downright mendacious vapors that surround various human projects – be it drilling for oil or writing poems. He is a critic in the pure sense – a truth teller who has no use for relativism. Haines's voice is an intensely American voice in the sense that it insists we can be connected to the land in ways that may redeem and vivify us. It insists that the place of poetry is central not peripheral. This volume adds to the trove that Haines has bequeathed us.

In this posthumous collection, attention is paid to the present moment. Wiler examines, with humor, compassion and fearlessness, the pleasures in life-especially the varieties of love--from friendship to sex-and how we are capable of ruining those pleasures for ourselves or for others. Jack helps us understand that life and death are each, in its own way, gifts we must live with relish, abandon and commitment.

In his poem, "The Marriage of Heaven and Hell," William Blake hypothesized that "If the doors of perception were cleansed everything would appear to man as it is, infinite." Of course, Blake's "doors of perception" are both hard to clean and even harder to keep clean. For John Ruskin, the famous 19th century art and social critic, seeing demanded a scientist's respect for fact, but also a love for what was being seen. These poems ask us to attend, with devotion and care, to a world which will always remain a mystery, but a mystery in which love calls us to the things of this world where we may become most fully human.

Little Boy Blue is a lyrically-charged dramatic monologue in the voice of a mother to her absent son. In twenty-three movements, the speaker reveals the facts, feelings, textures, perspectives and sensations that inform this most personal and intense relationship, one that survives betrayal, abandonment, neglect, mental illness and other calamities of contemporary American life. Occupying the ground between poetry and prose, and with an ever-gathering momentum and passionate intensity, Jacobik examines motherhood, sanity, and heartbreakingly tender, resilient love.

The collection presents snapshots of the Korean American experience through poems ranging from the hardships of first generation Korean immigrants, their blue-collar work (though many had professional degrees), and arduous immigration to the United States to the rise of the second and even third generation, of culturally Americanized youth attempting to reconcile their bi-cultural heritage.

"A poet whose voice and message we trust. . .a singular and significant voice. You will not forget this neighborhood, or this poet." from the foreword by Toi DerricotteFrom the twilight towns of the Rust Belt to the vivid inlets of New York City, Neighborhood Register is a ledger of the people, scenes, and sectors from which hidden music and meaning unearth. The collection evokes the beauties and difficulties within multi-racial families, the value of vernacular, and the unexpected resonances of common objects."In his fine first collection, Jackson lyrically knits together time, memory, human desires and obligations and invites the kind reader to dance along to his bright measures, which sometimes resemble the life of a young poet, deeply enmeshed in the world, and sometimes reflect like a mirror." - Cornelius Eady

In the past, the few memoirs about children battling cancer dealt mostly with death and grief. This passionate retelling by a survivor's mother is about the struggle to help shepherd her child out of illness, towards health and through survival.Now that more children survive cancer, this passionate retelling by the survivor's mother is required reading; the struggle of helping move the child out of illness.

The author's romanticizing and grieving for her lost parents and America extends from the Prohibition era, its glamour and notoriety, with figures like Warren Harding and Josephine Baker to Enron, urban decay, and illegal immigration.

Poetry that takes us from an urban beachfront in the shadow of the Boston skyline to the halls of a private prep school, from the corner drugstore to the playground basketball court."Carey's universe may be set in blue-collar New England, but out of that backdrop, we find a man very much like ourselves trying to hold on to what everyone loses eventually-his children as they grow up, his parents, long-time friends, perhaps, most important of all, his sense of where he thought he was going to be when he was young and what life is for him now."- Maria Mazziotti Gillan - from the Foreword

This powerful collection of poetry features a chain-smoking, working-class Italian American woman struggling to support herself and find meaningful work in a depressed mill town. She endures the indignity of a low-paid job that she can't afford to leave. The poems follow her tumultuous relationship with her father, a retired mill worker, her love for her educated uncle dying of cancer, and her escape from this soiled life through her ritual of doing laundry.

A memoir written in the voice of a twelve-year-old Irish Catholic girl living in the Bronx in 1954, Confessions recounts one year in the life of Joan, a very tall, religious, funny, self-conscious, emotional imprisoned, lovable girl whose journey takes her from innocence, isolation, and inhibition to the beginnings of freedom and awakening.