Browse Autumn House Press' complete catalog of fine poetry and fiction.
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The Gift That Arrives Broken by Jacqueline Berger |
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This is an art that is centered everywhere. It brought me closer to my own center, and it will bring you, whoever you are, closer too.
–Alicia Ostriker
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The White Museum by George Bilgere |
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Once again, George Bilgere has shown that imaginative wonders and deep emotional truths can be achieved with plain, colloquial American speech.
–Billy Collins
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The Divine Salt by Peter Blair |
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Peter Blair’s acute devotion to his central subject — our damned and locked-away, our despised and our sub-human — is solid and true. These narratives, elegant and plain, possess unforgettable interior tonal bursts and vocal keenings. The visual layers in the poem “Courtyard,” garden of our brief reprieve, moved me to read the poem aloud and then repeat it to myself as if I’d dreamed those images. Maybe Blair, while sitting in with his companion muses Weil and Whitman, listens in on us, too, in our most desperate and most enlightened milliseconds and gives back to us our own good sense and compassion. From the so-called “quiet-room” of the asylum arrives an aching emotional disorientation with the power to upset our peculiar cold American complacency.
–Judith Vollmer
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Farang by Peter Blair |
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Peter Blair’s Farang utilizes the best elements of travelogue, memoir and documentary. These poems are panoramic and introspective, foreign and intimate. Crossing genres and cultures, Blair writes lucidly from the crossroads where memory and empathy intersect.
–Terrance Hayes
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Blood Honey by Chana Bloch |
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These poems of intimate memory and sure-handed imagination survey the human condition with a tender, compassionate, and unflinching gaze. They take place in the world of the daily — they eat, dress, make love, ponder, remember, mourn, and observe. They know some things about life that are hard to put into words, and for those things, they find words, and more. Chana Bloch’s poems carry their reader into a hard-won, music-ripened wisdom.
–Jane Hirshfield
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When She Named Fire: An Anthology of Contemporary Poetry by American Women Edited by Andrea Hollander Budy |
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When She Named Fire: An Anthology of Contemporary Poetry by American Women features 460 poems by 96 of the most exciting poets in America including:
Kim Addonizio, Natasha Trethewey, Robin Becker, Lia Purpura, Hilda Raz, Tracy K. Smith, Chase Twichell, Marilyn Nelson, Marie Howe, Judith Ortiz Cofer, Martha Collins, Jan Beatty, Maxine Kumin, Naomi Shihab Nye, Claudia Emerson, Lynn Emanuel, Mary Oliver, Jane Mead, Mary Ruefle, Kay Ryan, Laure-Anne Bosselaar, and Pattiann Rogers. The collection includes a photograph and a brief biographical sketch of each poet.
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Woman in the Painting by Andrea Hollander Budy |
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Andrea Hollander Budy knows what to hold back as she lets us in. And so we willingly bring ourselves into her subtly registered emotional world. There’s a lovely blend of qualities at work here – an unsparing eye, and a heart that humanizes what that eye sees.
–Stephen Dunn
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Dixmont by Rick Campbell |
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Dixmont is more than a blip on the Doppler screen of American poetry; it measures the weather of our times. Against a background of wars past and present, Rick Campbell wages his own personal battles on several fronts. With an alchemist’s magic, he mixes his “artifacts of impermanence” — humor with history, intelligent design with the toss of a coin, the muse with the scalpel, his daughter’s swing set with his father’s troublesome legacy, finding his own “reference points” in the daily obligations of family life. Because life is literally at stake, somewhere beyond metaphor, Dixmont brings us all “home.”
–Judith Kitchen
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Keeping the Wolves at Bay: Stories by Emerging American Writers Edited by Sharon Dilworth |
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Jennifer Bannan, Keith Banner, Monica Bergers, Jane Bernstein, David Busis, Marjorie Celona, Katie Chase, Jason England, Sherrie Flick, Kevin Gonzalez, Diane Goodman, Derek Green, Honorée Fanonne Jeffers, Samuel Ligon, William Lychack, Andrew Malan Milward, Dustin Parsons, Matthew Pitt, Donald Ray Pollock, Casey Taylor.
These are the writers in Autumn House Press’ first anthology of short fiction. The writers, some well published with collections of their own, some newer to the literary scene, present stories that celebrate the boundless imagination and energy of the contemporary short story. The narrative premises are varied, always original. They sweep the grand landscape of an ever-changing world like the trio of expatriates negotiating the perplexing foreignness of the world in which they work in Derek Green’s “Samba.” The stories also focus on under-represented voices such as the young woman from California who is asked by her employers to maintain the quality of life of their dead golden retriever. There is the overweight transvestite keeping the peace in Keith Banner’s “Winners Never Sleep,” and the postal worker hoping for love in Casey Taylor’s “Calvary,” and the delusional chef who is forced to confront her lover’s infidelity in Diane Goodman’s “Beloved.” Keeping the Wolves at Bay reminds us that reading stories is an affirmation that life, no matter how difficult, is always fascinating.
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Collected Poems by Patricia Dobler |
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For all their differences, when I think of Pat I sometimes think of Flannery O’Connor. The tough-mindedness — the passion — the spiritual life — the humor — and of course, they were two absolute originals. They were also two who were well acquainted with illness. And who had an enormous hunger for life, and for art; and who died too young…. What grew in her was mystery, and her thirst to drink in deeper and deeper histories, and also life ‘outside of history.’
–Jean Valentine (from the Introduction)
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What the Heart Can Bear: Selected and Uncollected Poems, 1979-1993 by Robert Gibb |
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For Robert Gibb, “almost nothing” is “almost enough,” and his achievement in this long-awaited and essential collection of his early books lies in the results of his labor: “The work of memory is permanence.” Gibb is one of the folks to whose work I turn when I seem to forget how poems are written, or how they should be written. This book belongs among those worn American classics crammed on the rough-hewn shelf nailed onto the mudroom wall.
–Michael Waters
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Deja Vu Diner by Leonard Gontarek |
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Gontarek’s lyricism — his aphoristic reticence — is unique in its precision, its refusal to use emotion carelessly, its eerie fragmentation. How almost not to say what must be said is the structural heart of these poems that express the ordinary surreal experience of our lives, and embody the tradition of Beckett’s “Every word is a stain on silence and nothingness.” Gontarek makes this dangerous territory his own — “I am a crazy man in a bathrobe,” he says as he meticulously sings his hypnotic songs.
—Stephen Berg
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New World Order: Stories by Derek Green |
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In this wide-ranging collection of stories, Derek Green takes readers on a tour of the world as America’s military-industrial complex reels into a new century. Written with grace, masterful precision and brutal honesty, New World Order shows us characters stripped of the familiar and forced to face the world on its own harsh terms. By turns frightening and comical, fierce and suspenseful, these eleven stories turn our attention outward, to a world where our role as Americans is no longer as clear and secure as it once seemed.
Derek Green’s New World Order is a sharp, stirring collection about Americans abroad, full of the eerie loneliness and hidden menace that comes with global travel in the age of terror. These vivid stories about greed, fear, and the thirst for adventure are also haunting, suspenseful dispatches from the front lines and back alleys of America’s corporate-military alliance. –Dean Bakopoulos
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67 Mogul Miniatures by Raza Ali Hasan |
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Great contentious pressures create these gem-like miniatures: East and West, rich and poor, fisc and spirit, landmines and butterflies, indictment and song. They take their hexagonal shape in a landscape that spans from Gilgamesh to Karachi. Over the humbled landscapes flies the paper kite of the great Urdu poet, Muhammad Iqbal, as Raza Ali Hasan channels the high-flying intentions and grounded tensions of his mentor. The poems are solemn and funny, a call to prayer and a call to arms. They are smart, scathing, and demand to be read with attention and concern.
–Bruce Smith
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The Song of the Horse: Selected Poems 1958-2008 by Samuel Hazo |
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Samuel Hazo’s new book brings us once again, in poem after poem, the flow of thought in a lively mind. His work is meditative and yet, because of its humane warmth and wit, it seems continually shared. I enjoy the variety of his sentences as they move in the best sort of broken-field running, down the page…. It is good to have this fresh selction of Hazo new and old.
–Richard Wilbur
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A Theory of Everything by Mary Crockett Hill |
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A Theory of Everything is deeply original, magical, and WEIRD in a good way, as we used to say back in grade school. Some kinds of “weird” were desirable since they suggested potent originality, quirky insight, and startling but necessary twists of humor — as in, when is the last time YOU considered a flea’s memories or regrets? Mary Crockett Hill has made a significant, fabulously welcome contribution to the world of theories in general, and elegant poetry you will want to keep close by — for the days when your own elements of existence don’t fit neatly into compartments or jingle sweet harmonies in your ear. Here’s a place where darkness lives comfortably, studded with breathtaking light. Like a mesmerizing sky.
–Naomi Shihab Nye
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Monongahela Dusk: a Novel by John Hoerr |
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In 1937, as labor turmoil sweeps across western Pennsylvania, traveling beer salesman Pete Bonner picks up hitchhiker Joe Miravich, a blacklisted coal miner running from the law. The two overhear a plot to kill a national union leader in Pittsburgh and warn the intended victim only to become targets of the man who ordered the assassination, a mysterious industrialist who conspires with racketeers to control mill-town politics. As the industrial region moves from Depression to postwar prosperity, the businessman and union militant form an unlikely alliance to defend themselves. A violent showdown reveals the exploitative nature of the economic and political powers that would, forty years later, turn the mill towns of the Monongahela Valley into blighted relics of the industrial era.
“Hoerr, a McKeesport native and veteran labor journalist, has become a leading chronicler of the demise of industrial America.” –Bob Hoover, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
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Half Lives: Petrarchan Poems by Richard Jackson |
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This remarkable series, athletic in its passion, sonorous and brave, reconfirms that love dines on both a lover’s heart and brain, and that the mortality of love encompasses the world. It also reminds us by its example that literature is a grand conversation spanning centuries and cultures. Petrarch is the spark, but Jackson’s the one on fire.
–Marvin Bell
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My Life as a Doll by Elizabeth Kirschner |
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These poems are dark, iridescent beads strung along a narrative of embattled childhood that supports but never overrides the lyrical force of Kirschner’s voice and vision. The narrative begins with a mother’s violence and follows its effects upon the daughter’s inner landscape — the visions, the bouts of madness, the circling smoke of memory — as she grows older. It’s the landscape that generates the force behind these poems, rendered as it is with stunning imagery at every turn, and with urgent rhythms that push towards a kind of exorcism. These poems confront hard things head-on, but far from being sensationalistic or depressing, they are lush, fierce, and lovely.
–Leslie Ullman
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The Dark Opens by Miriam Levine |
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“No break between the voice and the word,” writes Miriam Levine, and indeed this is a speaker who seems entirely herself but somehow edgeless, too, so that she shades into whatever engages her attention. “It’s terrible to be rooted forever like Daphne,” she writes; she’d prefer to accept the invitation offered to her by Night: “Touch my face, I’ll make you…unending.” Somehow these effortless poems manage to be deeply connected to the solid physical world of friends and children, husband and neighbors, but also touch upon an airy, unfettered interiority, so that they’re both straightforward and complicated at once, both earthly and awash in a world of light.
–Mark Doty
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Drift and Swerve: Stories by Samuel Ligon |
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Drift and Swerve is an extraordinary collection–fourteen feverish stories propelled by Samuel Ligon’s vigorous, perfect prose. Darkly funny and surprisingly moving, these tales of collision and escape feature unforgettable characters, like Nikki, who careens through the book’s hard America with a ferocious, incurable case of hope.
–Jess Walter
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lucky wreck by Ada Limon |
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Ada’s new book has a smart clip of anger to some of the poems, edgy parameters of disappointment to others, lots of personal relationship narratives, conflicts and emotional realizations; decisions, choices, changes, hopes and sadness, a type of survival poetry searching the world, getting into a deeper knowledge of people, and as the searchlight strobes out from the lighthouse through the fog and mist to lost travelers and explorers, structure changes toward an inventive orthodoxy of the heart’s stormy reign….bravo.
–Jimmy Santiago Baca
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She Heads into the Wilderness by Anne Marie Macari |
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Our world needs poetry that can speak openly of body and spirit—their desire to live. It needs poetry that can speak to our difficult time about our cohabitation with nature. She Heads into the Wilderness is an important book as well as a beautiful one. It is populated by beasts, insects, birds, human children and men, growing-and-dying things, and among them walks an open-eyed woman who happens to be a gifted poet. Is she our foremother Eve? Yes and no, no and yes. Read her words. Walk alongside her. Line by line, phrase by phrase, take pleasure and wisdom from Anne Marie Macari’s radiant poems.
–Alicia Ostriker
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Fire in the Orchard by Gary Margolis |
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Ralph Waldo Emerson once said that poetry is “what will and must be spoken,” and in his new book — his best yet — Gary Margolis speaks in a deceptively quiet but nonetheless urgent voice of what usually goes unspoken, of the spaces between people, the distance we keep, the mortality we bear. Fire in the Orchard is carefully crafted and psychologically astute, a work of emotional attainment, necessary speech.
–Edward Hirsch
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Satisfied with Havoc by Jo McDougall |
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Without fanfare — and fanfare would be in order — Jo McDougall has created a small but solid corpus of poetry that is both unique and uniquely American….Gathered together in ‘the hasty tent’ of our life, we are, for a moment, something other than ourselves, not earth but air. Call it magic, call it art: either way, McDougall’s poetry is something like a miracle.
–The Hollins Critic
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Dirt by Jo McDougall |
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McDougall gives voice to the ineffable emotions of plain people. And in the undiluted glare of the genuine, the land and its people are redeemed, if not wholly forgiven.
–The Georgia Review McDougall’s…reach is expansive, comprehensive … beautiful, witty, and unlike anyone else’s. –Kelly Cherry
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The Working Poet: 75 Writing Exercises and a Poetry Anthology Edited by Scott Minar |
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A compendium of writing exercises, discussions of craft and form, writing prompts, and sample poems, intended to help practicing poets sharpen their skills. Over 100 poets and teachers have contributed to this volume, including Sheryl St. Germain, Philip Terman, Anne Marie Macari, Richard Jackson, Pen Pearson, Andrea Hollander Budy, Terrance Hayes, Sue Ellen Thompson, Patricia Jabbeh Wesley, Robert Gibb, Jo McDougall, Martha Silano, Elizabeth Robinson, Susan Ludvigson, Robin Becker, Lawrence Raab, Ilya Kaminsky, Ed Ochester, and Ada Limon.
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Unreconstructed: Poems Selected and New by Ed Ochester |
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This collection includes the entire text of Snow White Horses, Ochester’s earlier selected poems, as well as selections from Land of Cockaigne and a generous sampling of new poems.
Ed Ochester has his thumb on the American pulse and his ear tuned to the American voice–in all its urban-suburban-backyard-backwoods- rustbelt-ad-agency and Hollywood-inspired dreaming and folly. He smiles at it, he loves it, he makes us love it too. For he is also a gardener who knows the names of things, and knows, as well, that “we have no single lives,/ we are grass, trees,/ hidden roots intertwined/ mile upon mile.” I salute Ochester’s Whitmanic yawp and tenderness. –Alicia Ostriker
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No Sweeter Fat by Nancy Pagh |
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These poems take an elaborate look at the persistent complication of desire through the lens of obesity and body consciousness. At times the language is poignantly raw, at other moments tender, understated, then humorous to get at the diffuse agonies that might, otherwise, be lost to silence.
–Tim Seibles
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Attention Please Now by Matthew Pitt |
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The central characters of these remarkable stories are oddly ordinary and inordinately odd: that is to say, they are each uniquely qualified to speak for life outside of fiction. Pitt allows them to build the worlds they inhabit from their very particular understandings of what life is, thus endowing their narratives with unpredictable outcomes, and startlingly unexpected revelations along the way. Attention Please Now is a collection possessed of a genuine fictional beauty.
—Chuck Wachtel
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Dear Good Naked Morning by Ruth L. Schwartz |
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Ruth L. Schwartz will settle for nothing less than the essential. Her passionate poems are alive to the vulnerability of the body, the daily possibility of joy, and the deep struggle not only to make sense of, but to affirm the world.
–Mark Doty
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The White Calf Kicks by Deborah Slicer |
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There’s a wild, unpredictable exuberance in these wonderful poems, one formed of equal parts grief and joy. Slicer says of a giant Percheron stallion: “He’s made from endurance/like a hummingbird.” You can’t argue with an intelligence that alert — you can only startle and bow, grateful that imagination and language still serve, still proclaim the sacramental anguish of this world.
–Gregory Orr
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Let it be a Dark Roux: New and Selected Poems by Sheryl St. Germain |
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Sheryl St. Germain’s poetry is filled with sensual delight, with the enjoyment of good food, good company, and good music. While she travels the world, St. Germain returns again and again to her native New Orleans, to the bonds of family and the forces of nature that break through and spill over human walls and barriers. In Let it Be a Dark Roux, St. Germain teaches us how to embrace all the currents of life—its pleasures, its sorrows, its inevitable challenge to step out into the street and take up the dance once more.
–Mary Swander
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Not God After All by Gerald Stern |
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With drawings by Sheba Sharrow
Stern is one of those rare poetic souls who makes it almost impossible to remember what our world was like before his poetry came to exalt it. –C. K. Williams
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Joyful Noise: An Anthology of American Spiritual Poetry Edited by Robert Strong |
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“All poetry is spiritual,” Robert Strong points out in his introduction. “As I worked on this anthology, I heard this sentiment again and again, from poets and readers alike. The spiritual, after all, is what our existence soaks in; it is both everywhere and ineffable, always right here and just out of reach. We see it in blades of grass, sense it in love and in the cries of newborns, in the eyes of the dying, in volcanoes and choirs…”
This anthology of over 300 poems brings together America’s diverse spiritual traditions in one volume. Ancient Native songs from the Chippewa, Inuit, Ojibwa, Osage, Hopi, Pawnee, and Sioux are included beside traditional Protestant hymns and generous selections from Anne Bradstreet, Phillis Wheatley, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Walt Whitman, Langston Hughes, Wallace Stevens, T.S. Eliot, and many contemporary poets such as Frank O’Hara, Linda Pastan, Gerald Stern, Toi Derricotte, Agha Shahid Ali, B.H. Fairchild, Anne Waldman, Bob Hicok, and Mark Doty.
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The Dark Takes Aim by Julie Suk |
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Who would have thought that any writer so acutely beset by what Emily Dickinson called ‘Heavenly Hurt’ could find so many ways to transform lamentation to consolation and leave us ‘singing / heedless of the dark taking aim’? The poetry of Julie Suk is at once deceptively spare and metaphorically rich, and the sensual mystery of her perfectly pitched and etched lines is haunting, elemental, and wild.
–R. T. Smith
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Rabbis of the Air by Philip Terman |
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Personal experience acquires the monumentality of mythology…. Here is a resolution that shifts between history and modernity, between old and new conceptions of Judaism, binding the generations.
–Jehanne Dubrow, Prairie Schooner
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The Autumn House Anthology of Contemporary American Poetry Edited by Sue Ellen Thompson |
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Over 300 poems by 94 of the best poets in America including:
Philip Levine, Rita Dove, Wendell Berry, Maxine Kumin, Billy Collins, Sharon Olds, Denise Duhamel, Gerald Stern, Stephen Dunn, Judith Ortiz Cofer, Robert Hass, Jane Hirshfield, Tony Hoagland, Charles Harper Webb, Jane Kenyon, Li-Young Lee, William Matthews, Linda Pastan, Campbell McGrath, Alicia Ostriker, Larry Levis, Ellen Bryant Voigt, Tim Seibles, Naomi Shihab Nye, B.H. Fairchild, Brigit Pegeen Kelly, Jean Valentine, and Dean Young. The collection includes a photograph and a brief biographical sketch of each poet.
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The Golden Hour by Sue Ellen Thompson |
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…a book of both courage and the finest sort of craft: elegant, wild, beautifully disciplined, seemingly effortless, stunningly precise…
–B. H. Fairchild
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The River is Rising by Patricia Jabbeh Wesley |
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Patricia Jabbeh Wesley’s The River is Rising is both brilliant and heartbreaking. Survivor of the brutal Liberian Civil War, Wesley bears witness to a life she lost to that war, and to what it means to be a refugee who has remade herself…. “To every war,” she says simply, “there are no winners”…. I am in awe of these beautiful, necessary poems, and the glory and largesse of Wesley’s vision.
– Cynthia Hogue
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Where the Road Turns by Patricia Jabbeh Wesley |
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Wesley possesses a distinctive, lyrical gift of the highest order…. The emotional appeal of her poetry is direct and accessible. She also has a dramatic gift and a masterly command of place.
–Robert H. Brown, Liberian Studies Journal
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House Where a Woman by Lori Wilson |
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Wilson’s seemingly quiet lines will haunt you, hunt you down in the middle of the night, and change the way you feel about peace and quiet….[She] gives us women on motorcycles, women on country roads, women on the verge of flight as we are delivered straight to the reckoning: what days and nights brought us here and what prices have been paid? This is a book that is in love with sound and precision in an organic, necessary way—giving us more and more faces to whatever can be called truth, giving us an astonishing range of play, tenderness, and brave voices—arousing us to our own desire.
–Jan Beatty
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