Böcker utgivna av Golden Antelope Press

Dreaming Vienna begins with a quote from Missouri's Mark Twain on how novels carry their authors away, and a preface from Conley listing 36 kinds of dreams discussed by Vienna's Sigmund Freud. These openers foreground a tension between objective and subjective realities. How, exactly, does one believe a novel or interpret a dream? And what exactly does Vienna symbolize, especially for Americans? In Dreaming Vienna, subjective reactions generally prevail over conventional expectations. Conley is especially adept at painting the shadows and fogs which surround his characters, creating moments of confusion, chaos, despondency, acceptance, and wisdom. Thus, Felix Kulpa ("Happy Fault" in Latin) struggles to find meaning in St. Louis, MO, first in his family's Catholicism, then in philosophical systems, and finally in Vienna where, in a joyous explosion of passionate folly, he dies. Kulpa's experiences resonate. His cousin Victor barely escapes sexual abuse by a priest, but carries scars from Missouri to Vienna, where he "researches the priesthood." The very word, "research" changes meaning as Viennese students quarrel over versions of stories or mock pretentious mentors. There's a carnival feel to large sections of Dreaming Vienna as characters pass near one another without quite meeting--leaving traces, overlapping moods, fragrances, fragments, memories of bickering brothers, a guilt-ridden veteran, snow-covered children and orange-clad streetcleaners. To tour guides, Vienna may symbolize cultural depth, artistic aspiration, and human achievement, but for Conley those interpretations are radically incomplete. Only the gold-tipped cane of the mysterious Herr Winklemann can offer reliable direction; only rugs handmade by a one-armed feminist can keep readers fully warm.

In five sets of "broken" sonnets, Jack Powers pulls readers into and through the lives, decisions, regrets and celebrations of a score of deeply human characters--himself included. From teenager Jack, who tries to "rig" the Catholic confessional system, to ancient Bob, who tends his dying Joan gently after 62 years of marriage, we watch and find ourselves rooting for Powers' people. We want his seeds to grow, his buds to blossom, his dying leaves to drift in pleasant breezes. We hear the quiet laughter hiding under the songs. Still, life is complex, and Jack Powers feels that complexity with thesensitivity of a seismometer, records it with the accuracy of a mathematician or painter, and plays it like jazz.So listen-and watch--as sonnet rules loosen, lines lengthen, images double back and become symbols, and stories echo other stories. Last Acts come first in this collection, followed by portraits of relationships which are Still Love: a stoned teen grilling burgers for his family; Alice Neel painting brutally honest self-portraits. Sonnet form runs like tangled wire through Powers' book, perhaps most noticeably in the Still Love pieces, and in the section titled Unruly Love, where form and content collaborate in unruling the expected rules. Noble Suffering poems are case studies testing philosophical notions about the value of suffering-with ... tentative results. Still, the final section of Still Love, aptly titled Surrender, ends with a memory of ayoung Jack, "floating, surrendering/ to the current, a contented speck of the quick river, white moon, black night."

From Vienna in the 1930s to England in the 1940s, and back, The Third Man is a story of dispossession, refuge, and the search for justice and humanity. Focusing on two Jewish families as the Holocaust approaches, the book gradually homes in on two individuals who survive but have to make difficult moral choices. At age five, Julie Bernstein is sent to safety in England via the Kindertransport. Growing up in a foster family, troubled by traumatic events, Julie thrives, but the growing violence in British-controlled Palestine-violence that spills over into Britain itself-forces her to reevaluate who she is and what she stands for. Ignaz Natanson, a butcher''s apprentice, escapes to England, is interned as an enemy alien, changes his name to Nigel, and joins the British Army. He winds up in Vienna and returns, post-war, to track down the person who, for him, epitomizes the Nazi nightmare. The famous 1949 film noir The Third Man provides a revealing lens through which to view the events and characters of the novel. With the help of the film, Ignaz/Nigel comes to a new understanding of himself-and of ordinary citizens lured by the false appeal of fascism. Inspired by the author''s family, the novel presents a dark yet beautifully drawn world, a world of dehumanization and death but also of courage, love, and shared humanity.  

Child of the Snows brings to life the world of a sixteenth century Aymara community, one small part of the powerful Inka (Inca) empire. It opens with a pair of 20th century treasure hunters finding the tomb of a child in the snowy Cerro El Plomo mountain of southern Chile, then segues to the naming ceremony for an Aymara toddler-K''uchi-Wara. We learn quite a lot about the community''s culture as it celebrates the Lupaka headman''s son with feast, song, and clever speeches. As K''uchi-Wara grows, we watch bonds develop naturally in this close-knit group. Villagers care for their alpacas, trade wool for food, teach children about their mountain deities. Children play, compete, dream, nag, and question. Life is full-until young K''uchi-Wara kills a white puma and attracts the attention of Inka overlords. At eight, he''s chosen to become a qhapaq hucha, an offering to the Inka deities. As he and his parents, priests, and an Inka official walk the five million steps south to Cerro El Plomo, K''uchi-Wara questions camel drivers, befriends other qhapaq huchas, sees temples and huge city centers, carved caves and tunnels, and observes the intricate patterns of services the Inka require from various conquered peoples-services which provide grain to arid areas, fish to inland ones, alpaca wool to places where the animals don''t thrive. He, and especially his parents, also see how fully the Inka maintain control of their vast empire-and how powerless any individual Lupaka headman would be against that control. Besom''s experience as anthropologist, and particularly as scholar of Inkan human sacrifice, leads him to create characters whose deeper questions get careful attention. Do priests and officials actually believe the mythology they teach? Is belief a form of rationalizing--a way to live with actions whose real intent is to intimidate? How does a mother deal with her rage when told it''s an honor to lose her only son? How does a child deal with the knowledge that his own death-and "elevation"--will happen soon? And what about the priests charged with keeping the qhapaq hucha pure as they travel? Child of the Snows asks these and other questions, even as it looks admiringly at the system created by the Inkas-and even as it marks the end of that empire-itself soon conquered by pale men with guns, ocean-crossing boats, and a different religion. Each chapter of the book opens with an image derived from the sixteenth century chronicles of Felipe Guamán Poma de Ayala, Christian son of Quecha nobility, and the first to document the harsh transition from one empire to the other.

What would it feel like to find your middle-aged self suddenly living back in a college dorm room? Four faculty members at Prairie State College in Minnesota are about to find out after their administration comes up with a bizarre strategy to improve graduation rates - The Faculty Dorm Dweller Program.While the idea seems promising to the administration, it doesn''t take long for problems to arise-problems which readers will find appallingly funny, situations they''ll find stimulate both empathy and snark. As Johnson says, "It''s not so much a fish-out-of-water scenario as it is an older fish returning to a pond she''d lived in years ago."So Juanita Jane Ruckler, a fiftyish English professor, proves that she''s not old by having an affair with a nineteen-year-old student. Lyla Benson, recently divorced and thirty-eight, runs into her old college flame and finds herself searching: is there something more than ashes left in that relationship? Bert Rojas, a math professor, is using the program to escape a boring home life with a nagging wife-the woman he''s married right after college, back when youth had seemed eternal. As the FDD crew gets to know one another, they provide balance, experience, and understanding to one another. Even fresh-faced and naive young Joy McPherson, assistant professor in Political Science, can sometimes teach her older colleagues-though her own choices seem inexorably wrong. And the students? They''re teachers too, in their own inimitable ways.

Steve Denehan''s wholehearted response to family life is the cornerstone of this wise and canny book. Through the tiny, everyday moments, we come to know an energetic seven-year-old daughter, a wife whose presence heals, a father aging into forgetfulness, and a host of others. We see bonds between parent and child strengthen through conversations about dinosaur-shaped clouds, questions about death, quiet humming, loud car-singing, evening bike rides. We witness an adult father re-seeing his own childhood, the parental decisions which had shaped him, and the decisions which he and his spouse are making as they give their Robin her wings. As songwriter Mark Nevin says, Steve Denehan is a "beautiful soul with an all too rare lightness of touch."In "Adopted," for instance, we study a packet of photos delivered by an unknown uncle. In "Your Old Cherry Datsun," we watch a role reversal as ourpoet/narrator addresses the only father he''s known, one with whom he can sing himself hoarse, but who now has trouble with simple tasks: "You are still my father/ but you are changed/ and you are other minor-key words/ unsure/ fading/ nervous/ elderly/ forgetful/ you are still my father/ butsometimes, now/ in these darkening dusks/ I have the privilege/ of being yours."Structurally, Days of Falling Flesh and Rising Moons is fluid and natural, with poems about stage fright or lizards intermixed with those about lung cancer and love. Quick surges of anger are paired with lullaby moments, and lullaby moments might be followed by nightmares, or by memories ofbeing a slightly wild lad called DENO. Deeply personal poems may be surrounded and balanced by pieces of cultural history. The final defeat of a once-famous boxer is described with anguished empathy, for example, as is "The Last Dance of Eva Braun." Fantasies about becoming increasingly mechanical-until you aren''t sure whether you''re made of bone or metal--find their places between celebrations of birds and bogs, and a magical December day so sunny it seems to be summer.The collection was finished before a virus named Covid-19 shook the globe and sent Ireland into acomplete lockdown. However, that event seemed to require poetry, so ten of this collection''s final poems arelate additions, Denehan''s responses to the pandemic. Taken together, they constitute amicrocosm, not just of the Covid-19 world but of this poet''s interior landscape. They range fromshock to acceptance, from strict observance of painful rules to moments of deep peace and ...bright wings.Such intertwining keeps readers aware that both happiness and pain can be fragile, easily cracked orcrumbled. Though wholehearted devotion to a rich family life is the collection''s cornerstone, it''sthe awareness of complexity that gives Denehan''s Days of Falling Flesh and Rising Moons its essential shape.

Raya Tuffaha’s To All The Yellow Flowers is a deeply personal reflection of self through poetry. Dealing with topics of sexuality, culture, and love, Tuffaha’s poetry speaks truthfully to her experience with these issues as a queer young Muslim woman. Often, she compares her culture’s expectations for her life to her own, highlighting the places where the two intersect, and acknowledging the flash points. Many of her poems are formatted to reflect the speed and pace of a speaking voice, which magnifies the experience of Tuffaha’s written word. Some twenty pen and ink drawings by Timothy St. Pierre further enhance the experience.In her poem, “Lot’s Wife,” for example, Tuffaha assumes the woman’s perspective on the famed biblical story about what happened in Sodom and Gomorrah: “She falls for men so they won’t hurt her /takes care of others before they take it from her.” Tuffaha often flips common narratives on their heads and forces readers to look at situations from different points of view. Culture is a key feature in “When Exotic Becomes Side Dish,” as the food and customs of the author’s culture are juxtaposed with an outsider’s view. The lines, “Jasmine nights /and za’atar mornings catch/ in between my teeth /dirty fangs bared ready /for the carnage” showcase the narrator’s willingness to defend parts of her traditional Muslim culture while questioning others.Raya Tuffaha takes readers through the trials of her life and ends the journey on a hopeful note. Family is the focus of her final poem, “After Javon Johnson: When the Cancer Comes,” in which she remembers her Palestinian family before concluding: “When family trees bear olives,/rupture the sunbeams and entwine /home in their fists/ we march, we march.” Raya Tuffaha’s To All The Yellow Flowers is a celebration of the hard times which can lead to good, and the beauty and chaos to be found in the intersection of the cultures that comprise a person’s life.

In The Pain Trader, James Fowler creates timeless narratives around the people, history, and landmarks of rural America. Divided into “Hereabouts” (the Ozark region) and “Thereabouts” (a broader area), his 48 poems find meaning and beauty in the seemingly ordinary—from cheap roadside attractions ("IQ Zoo") to an impromptu chivaree. (“Ozark Yarn”), to local resentment of “Mr. [Woodrow] Wilson’s war” (“Over Here”), to a set of “Mountain Airs” documenting a long and mostly uneventful marriage.The Pain Trader opens with pioneers settling in the Ozarks, aware of the Indian cultures and the (Louisiana) Purchase. Fowler’s quiet, often wry, voice guides readers through Ozark perspectives on the Civil War, the Sultana disaster (“Aftermath”), saltpeter mining (“Below, Above”), and sundowner laws (“Sundown”). Eureka Springs gets an especially memorable treatment in “Eureka,” as a place in which layers of past are still accessible under the current wash of artist colonies and Bible belters.From the titular poem, “The Pain Trader,” readers feel the ordinary become something to be revered. They watch a peddlar/artist listening to his customers as he carves: “All this while a shape emerges,/carved, etched: creaturely perhaps;/blossoming; stark, like crystals./A thing of power rough hewn.” These lines could describe Fowler’s poetry, “a thing of power” which can make readers feel welcome in the rolling, cavernous hills of the Ozarks: “Setting shrewdness/ aside,” readers may find themselves “surprised what value/ something neither finery nor tool/ can have.”In the words of Phil Howerton, editor of the 2019 Anthology of Ozark Literature:Fowler unfolds a many-sided verbal diorama of the history and culture of Arkansas and the South. Observer and participant, he combines wit, irony, acumen, empathy, and a sense of place to salvage the sacred and noble from even the most chaotic remnants of human recklessness. Fowler, like his protagonist in the title poem, absorbs regret, sorrow, guilt, and pain and translates it all into vigorous and vibrant art that humanizes the past and offers redemption.

“Architecture doesn't just apply to buildings. It can apply to the way we shape our environment and the habitats of other creatures,” says Monica Barron. “There's also an architecture to our emotional/intellectual makeups.” Deeply aware of how humans read their surroundings, and how these readings become the bones of a culture, Barron takes us from pond to prairie, from beauty salon to abandoned gas station, from fireside loving to winter ice. Often meditative, often whimsical, the songs, sonnets, and postcard poems in Prairie Architecture cluster naturally around ideas or images, though Barron rejects the rigidity of sections with titles. “I’ve focused on sequencing poems that might help reveal the bones of the body of the book,” she says.Thus, we see how environment shapes perspective in “Why We Need Ponds,” (“to break the monotony of crops,” for example, and “to teach us patience/ when the water we prepared for doesn’t come.” We see environment shaping perspective again two poems later, in “Kansas makes her think about.” In this small and precise poem “banks of wild, cream-colored iris/ mark where a house used to be,” and we sense past and present blend in beauty.And just a few poems later, in a set of seven linked sonnets titled “Meditation from West of the River,” we watch the poet remembering how “a heart/could hold heat like sand after a sunset,” and again, how “a steady heart can hold heat across/ two states. Mine did. Light and color/ sustained me.” This seemingly simple means of sustenance gets immediately complicated as Barron names the colors: “the silver of frost on rotting soybeans” and the red of “a carcass left to the dogs as the sun bled/ the afternoon away.” The linked poems here together convey a long and rich love in which closeness and distance play their parts, and in which “whatever it is that connects the heart and mind/ it’s at the mercy of memory.”In the words of Jamie D’Agostino, describing the half-dozen “postcard poems” scattered through the book, “Barron’s the perfect poet to write these: armed with the photographer’s eye, the traveler’s restlessness, and the poet’s imagined scrawl on the back of the card, she’s out there, missing us, taking in the world she wants to share.” Prairie Architecture gives body to the wide expanses of the human heart by quickly, lightly touching the tiny nerves and arteries which feed it—whether they are heated by a funereal bonfire (“Fare Well”) or warmed like butternut squash simmering in wine (“Sometimes your only muse is The Minimalist”) or as empty as Audrey’s Place after the owner shot her husband in the abandoned kitchen (“Hunting Song.”) The medieval concept of microcosm/macrocosm finds a natural place here as word-become-image grows into rich, dense, sweet, sharp metaphor, and human concerns find their place in the midst of it all.As Lori Desrosiers concludes, “we will always remember grandmother’s signs of rain, and find beauty in this exquisite journey of a book.”

Calling Planet Earth: Close Encounters with Sun Ra pulls us into the quirky world of the jazzmusician known first as Herman Blount, then as Sun Ra (1914-1993), the Arkestra leaderwho claimed for most of his life to have come from Saturn. The book opens with anintroduction to Ra’s “sub-underground” music, a sound which fascinated the author andturned him into a fan almost fifty years ago. Introductory sections set up key questions, like,“But is it Jazz?” and “Where is Sun Ra Coming From, Besides Saturn?” How did a black kidfrom Birmingham, Alabama, wind up proclaiming himself a Pharoah? After the introductioncomes Mielke’s play, Discipline 27-II: A Cosmo-Drama in Two Acts. That’s followed by athorough analysis of an enormous number of recordings, starting in the 1930s and continuingfor the rest of his life. Posthumous releases form a separate chapter. (Most of theintroductory material and analysis of recordings originally appeared in Mielke’s 2013Adventures in Avant Pop, though it has been updated.)In the play Discipline 27-II, which premiered in St. Louis, MO in 2015, Mielke makes SunRa’s claim to have come from outer space not an artist’s Afro-futurist proclamation but astatement of fact. The cast includes Saturn Aliens, a NASA official, and Gaia the EarthGoddess—all watching an elaborate Sun Ra concert. Ra’s actual life story is dramatized inshort scenes against this concert background. We see him growing up as Herman Blount inBirmingham, Alabama, and bantering with the racist judge who sent him to prison for refusingto serve in the Army in 1942. We see him recruiting, teaching, and sheltering the musicianswho became—and still are--the Arkestra. We watch Space Aliens as they comment onracism, estrangement, and music as healing. Scenes in a bar, in a strip club, a recordingstudio, are watched by observant aliens and NASA interrogators as well as by the play’saudience—and the cumulative effect is respectful of the man who says he’s “Mister Ra, …Mister E, but most of all, Mister Mystery.” Sun Ra claimed that his true nature was cosmic,that he had come to enlighten Earth and to teach peace. He and the Arkestra became knownfor futuristic costumes, musical experimentation, and performance art. The play’s notesincludes extensive comments on costume options, sets, and performance alternatives—evena recipe for “Moon Stew,” to be served or sold at the concession stand twenty minutes beforethe play starts. Audience involvement in Discipline 27-II begins immediately, in the theaterlobby where Arkestra members sit at random tables doing improvised riffs of increasingintensity. It continues as we listen in on conversations about philosophy and ethics andmusic, and watch exotic dancers and amazing singers and space aliens interact.

When middle-aged Martin Berman invests in a bad real estate deal, the family loses its upscale home in Shaker Heights Ohio and its savings, including college tuition funds for the kids, Lauren and Elliot. What cascades out of such a loss? A novel’s worth of disasters and adventures, rejections and new meetings, growth and regrowth. A novel’s worth of insights into human choices, coping strategies, ways of valuing and judging. A novel’s worth of deftly deployed symbols, achingly exact descriptions, subtle observations. Averbach presents protagonist Deena Berman’s reactions with wit and empathy, slowly introducing an impressive range of characters. A college librarian, Deena packs up the house which she’s seen as proof of her family’s stability and success; as she sorts and  recycles, she finds her decades-old college application essay. It tells a moving story about how her own mother had rejected an affluent family, become a hippie, moved west and renamed herself "Rain"-- and how Deena had beenraised in a primitive little commune called New Moon until, at age 14, she’d run away from her two moms and moved in with her stiff and proper Jewish grandmother. No longer called Harmony, she’d reinvented herself as Deena and never looked back.She rips the paper into tiny pieces, but this "college essay" keeps readers anchored, wondering about whether a mother named Rain might somehow be resurrected. As the present-day plot evolves and devolves, Averbach follows through with exquisitely crafted episodes, deftly drawn drawn characters--some as complex as the talented Hungarian photographer who costs Deena her job, some as surprisingly individualized as the tattooed landlord who kicks her out of her apartment in Sarasota. Resurrecting Rain does full and realistic justice to the angry son who refuses to communicate, the lively daughter who morphs into a blue-haired freegan with a cell phone but no forwarding address, and the thoroughly depressed husband, glued to the television set. Readers feel viscerally the temptations, panics, pleasures, shames, and hopes which follow the loss of a privileged lifestyle.In the middle of her long spiral down toward homelessness, Deena encounters an elderly woman, an idiosyncratic—what? bag lady?--who feeds and carries on salty conversations with crows. Raisa Goetz, like Deena’s grandmother, had lost most of her family in the Holocaust. But Raisa’s growth process has been very different from Bubbe’s. Just ask the crows. And if Patricia Averbach happens to end her novel with a New Moon celebration—well, are we really cynical enough to begrudge the very human characters she’s created their moment in the moonlight?

In Into the Cracks, Holly Day gives us 53 precisely crafted fragments of a carefully observed and passionate life. It's the life of a mother, a daughter, a lover, a housewife, a victim, a rebel--told in terms of concrete boots and dying butterflies, clouds of squid ink and the smudged glass of a dusty picture frame.In "Bloodlines," for example, the human impulses to procreate and to protect offspring expand to include a maple tree which "sends its helocopter seeds across the yard/ in desperation dreams of propagation." Does the tree hate the narrator/gardener who clips those seeds--or does it resign itself to sterility? Will it retaliate, tossing branches at the narrator's children during some future storm? The questions behind such questions are rich, the metaphors inventive, sometimes alarming, often humorous.In "Three Screwdriver Hello," we're warned that "I get like a razor when you say/ [you] 'understand,' mock the lonely inside me." In "Bleeding the Brakes Dry," the memory of hearing waves crash on a distant shore can become almost loud enough ("if I try hard enough") to drown out the angry mutterings of a husband out in the garage working on a car that's never going to make it back to that beach.In other poems, we learn to read cracks in pavements and in paintings, cracks made by fingernails running ragged across human skin, cracks in the facade of sanity or sobriety. As the author writes:"I have always found comfort in clutter and chaos, especially when it comes to the natural world and its constant battle with the order imposed by civilization. I delight in seeing spiders run out from underneath the sofa of a perfectly cleaned house, or watching ivy crack its way into a building's facade. For me, the pretense of order, in whatever form it takes, acts as a shield against the unpredictability and lurking chaos of the outside world. In Into the Cracks I aim to dissolve the lines between the unwritten rules which have formed our artificial environments and the reality of a chaotic universe."The cover image for Into the Cracks is a photograph of one of the author's unconventional yet emotionally intense portraits--this one done by patiently, carefully, even meditatively, using a very sharp needle to push and pull colorful threads through the interstices between warp and weft of a quite conventional piece of canvas. Holly Day captures chaos in tiny spaces and holds it there for us to see. And hear. And taste and touch and smell.

How long is the shadow of genocide? How does it affect the offspring of the survivors? Andhow do survivors and their families retain a belief in justice when atrocities go unpunished?These questions are addressed in Jerry M. Burger's novel, The Shadows of 1915. The storytakes place in Central California in 1953, where Armenian immigrants and their families liveone generation removed from the 1915 murder of more than a million Armenians at the handsof the Turkish government. An encounter between the sons of a genocide survivor and someTurkish college students forces each of the main characters to make difficult decisions that pitloyalty to family and community against personal and legal standards of right and wrong. It isa story about a displaced group of people and the consequences of real historic events thathave rarely been examined in fiction. It is also a story about culture, family, recovery fromtragedy, and the nature of justice.

In 2004, when middle-aged Walker Maguire is called to the deathbed of his estranged father, his thoughts return to 1974. He'd worked that summer at the auto factory where his dad, an unhappily retired Air Force colonel, was employed as plant physician. Witness to a bloody fight falsely blamed on a Mexican immigrant, Walker kept quiet, fearing his white co-workers and tyrannical father. Lies snowball into betrayals, leading to a life-long rift between father and son that can only be mended by the past coming back to life and revealing its long-held secrets. You Can See More From Up Here is a coming-of-age tale about the illusion of privilege and the power of the past to inform and possibly heal the present.

Malheur August opens with a map of Malheur County, OR and its Malheur River. "Malheur" means "bad time," we're told--and Nancy Minor plays with that notion skillfully. Set in 1971 with substantial flashback to the 1940s, her novel becomes an utterly convincing portrait of life in rural Oregon a generation or two ago. (Think of Grant Wood joking around with Dorothea Lange.)Our protagonist, Jean Algood, spends her last home-from-college summer, the summer of 1971, questioning her parents' friends and neighbors about what Clete and Oleta had been like at her age, and about what had gone wrong--what had embittered her father and hollowed out her mother in the years before she was born.The questioning here is triggered by a photograph Jean and her cousin find when they venture into the ramshackle hut of the town's recently deceased "old hermit." Who was the hermit? Why did he keep a Kodak image of young Clete Algood in an empty coffee can in his filthy shack? Who was the beautiful girl standing next to Clete in the photo, the one with the too-familiar eyes? The "mannish" woman in the photo, they remember from another Kodak back home: it's Clete's twin sister, Cloris, who hasn't been seen in Malheur County since 1946. The plot thickens as they try to identify the hermit. Sweetens as their mother's old friend recounts parts of Oleta's story. Sours when Clete's tractor overturns. Thickens again when Aunt Opal--Clete's uber-bossy Mormon sister--manages to contact Cloris. And then quietly explodes.This is not a bildungsroman, and it's not a murder mystery; it's a recovery tale, beautifully fragmented and waiting to be stitched back together into the crazy quilt which was "this American life" 50 or 75 years ago. It's spot-on about mid-20th-century rural life: it's full of affection and humor and dread. It's replete with rodeos and kittens, seductions and pregnancies, apple pies and accidental deaths and half-hearted heroism. It's loaded with secrets and their keepers. If you've ever studied the faces in old FSA photos, you've been in Malheur County. Read this book to understand those times.

Jack Powers is attuned to twists of life and language-insults refitted as endearments, families defined by their troubles, great care taken with modes of recklessness . . . . Near the start of his debut collection, he's praising the massive coronary, favoring it over the dwindling disease and dementia that took his elders. But as mortality hovers, he teases, testing wits and teasing out the good stories of lucky close calls, game grandmothers, swearing babies, and a wry mother. . . . Pretty soon, he's against the quick demise-"and the sky seemed full/ of answers, some hurtling/ like arrows into the future." --Amy HolmanIn Amy Holman's words we find the essence of Jack Powers' Everybody's Vaguely Familiar. His "twists of life and language," are like the twists of code in a strand of dna. They replicate, as much as is possible, both what we have in common and what distinguishes us. Why, this collection asks, why does everybody seem vaguely familiar? How do we relate to one another as children, as adults, as elders? Whose perspectives are most convincing--and why? How replicable/reliable are the symbols we use to code "I'm the coolest" or "Neither life nor death can frighten me"?Powers' poems, taken together, describe a full arc of living. In "Carry/Miscarry" we grieve the loss of "a not-yet being with thin veiny arms and legs and head," and in "Do Not Resuscitate," we're reminded that, though "the elderly score highest on happiness polls," it may be "just those who can answer the phone." "In Praise of Heart Attacks" morphs into "In Fear of Heart Attacks," yes, but neither is the final word. Life and language twist into a double helix of questions, which Powers' persona untangles and tangles again. In "Smokin' A Real Cool Brank," he traces a history with cigarettes from age 10 to age 29, balancing the pleasures and perils of tobacco; in "The God of Stupidity," we vicariously experience the crazy freedom of teenaged joyrides--though this poem and others also hint at something potentially destructive in that freedom.About a quarter of the poems deal with elderly dementia, though usually with a generous dose of affectionate and respectful whimsy. Take these lines from "He Couldn't Remember." "He Couldn't Remember/ why he got up, why he'd come upstairs/ . . . But then it never mattered/ what he'd been looking for anyway,/ it's what he'd found. Like this paisley-moted/ shaft of afternoon light bending/ through the dusty panes; a yellow spotlight/ like one from that thirties painter famous/ for lonely men in a night-lit diner."Everybody's Vaguely Familiar is ultimately a joyous collection. Jack Powers' voice is fully human.

This collection of 21 stories is organized into five sections, each with from one to six stories loosely focused on a particular place/time and set of characters. The Blue Heron Lake stories follow a community of Latino workers who eventually attempt to make their town a sanctuary city. The Brandon Forsythe stories feature a talented African American man wrongfully imprisoned. Unemployable as an ex-con, he becomes a successful drug lord. The Carmichael stories feature two generations of Swedish immigrants in upstate New York, facing--or avoiding--the challenges which industrialization and automation create. The Snake stories, set in 1920s South Carolina, provide disturbing, unforgettable images of Jim Crow at work. And the stand-alone story, Morocco, we believe, will convince readers that travel can help heal the deepest of wounds.

In Small Bites, Don Tassone offers readers bits of contemporary life, mostly gentle, mostly optimistic, often instructive. Stories range from flash-fiction size half-pagers to twenty-page studies of how relationships develop, how decisions are made and unmade, how persuasion and collaboration work.The collection is divided into fourteen tiny Appetizers, twelve substantial Entrees, and fourteen small but intense Desserts. Appetizers like "Friends" and "Run" are quick and easy to consume; they're secular parables, meant to produce a small, "got it!" sense of surprise as readers fill in what's implied but not directly stated. Entrees range more widely, sometimes questioning current forms of connectivity, sometimes underscoring a sense that humans need to trust and to engage with one another. "The Discord in Our Souls," for example, leaves readers puzzling over which of several bad options is least bad. "Beauty Mark" traces a model's reaction to the accident which defaces her. "Everything Is Real" includes a ghost. Most stories in the final set, the Desserts, focus on beginnings and endings--on little acts of courage, sweet though painful memories, manageable ironies.In Small Bites, Don Tassone combines insights gained during a successful thirty-year career in corporate public relations with those which come from growing up in a middle class American family, becoming a parent, watching people grow. He's the author of the novel, Drive, and another collection of stories titled Get Back. He currently teaches courses at Xavier University, writes, and enjoys cooking up stories like these.

The collection contains fifty-one poems divided into five sections, each (except the truncated last) containing eleven poems. The first section, Ozark Dark, introduces the rocky landscape and heavy mud of the Ozarks, the coyotes, bobcats, and deep poverty with which farm families cope. In the second section, Marooned, Albin sketches moments in the lives of people born into Ozark ways--ways which they accept and sometimes celebrate. At a family reunion, for example, "work-worn men" who've spent an afternoon churning ice cream "lean marooned on porch steps," listening to their children play. Section three, Axe, Fire, Mule, features farmers determining what must be done, and doing it: hefting hay bales, moving stones, repairing an old fiddle, watching deer, dealing with flood and drought. ( In "Burn Ban" the speaker accepts a neighbor's defiance of the ban, because the proud old man has always done slash-and-burn farming.) The poems in section four, Rose of Sharon, are from a teacher's point of view; he sees Latino immigrants bravely learning English while local racists sneer; he watches downsized factory workers and Iraq veterans struggle to figure out where they belong. In the final section, Will and Testament, an octogenarian, "Cicero Jack" reflects on his Ozarks. Its riverlands, once home to the Osage, are now littered with drunken tourists, and prized by land developers. Though his grandkids think he's "a mule," and he knows change is inevitable, Cicero Jack wills his city-dwelling heirs something more free and valuable than "bass boats and bank accounts."Eight photographs done by the author's sister, Kelli Albin, enhance the visual impact of the poetry.