Böcker utgivna av Ragged Sky Press

Daniel Weeks's book of poetry, We No More Sang for the Bird, named for the final enigmatic phrase poet Edward Thomas inscribed in his journal before his death, tells the harrowing story of five British poets of different backgrounds-Rupert Brooke, T. E. Hulme, Wilfred Owen, Thomas, and Isaac Rosenberg-all of whom volunteered to serve their country during World War I and died in that service. The long opening poem, a lyrically rendered modern epic, and its six attendant hymns on the process of reading about these five poets' short lives provide a meditation on the nature of tragedy, the brutality of modern war, our own place in history's sweep, and the redemptive value of poetry. Homer has risen from the Underworld to write this epic paean to the poets of World War I. But wait! It's Daniel Weeks who has revived Rupert Brooke, T. E. Hulme, Wilfred Owens, Edward Thomas, and Isaac Rosenberg. The immediacy, imagery, and music of We No More Sang for the Bird is so searing, we become these soldiers, intimately sharing their passions, fears, and desires. This is a 4-D travelogue through time and space. With its vast embrace of history and literature, it supersedes dry texts on the war to end all wars. This is a jazz musician's masterpiece, syncopating political and personal notes. World War I poets were silenced. In this tour de force, Daniel Weeks takes up their song.-Susanna Rich, author of SHOUT! Poetry for Suffrage Like Siegfried Sassoon reading the younger Wilfred Owen's poems, "taking / words seriously even in war's wake, / noting the music they made," Dan Weeks too has read Owen's poems, as well as those of Rupert Brooke, T. E. Hulme, Edward Thomas, and Isaac Rosenberg, deeply and passionately, toward the making of his own poem, an epic of WWI focused on those poets caught up in its blood and "mothering mud." This ambitious, biographical, scholarly and wondrously wrought poem views the Great War from their perspectives: "We / were the little gods, [Brooke] mused, / his nose tucked in Webster or Donne / before turning to the soft abrasions / of an English sun." We No More Sang for the Bird is a major accomplishment.-Michael Waters, author of Caw What made some of the most gifted poets and thinkers of the early twentieth century offer themselves to the "calamitous war," "search out art /in grit and rawness," choose trenches over sentences, blood over ink? Was it love, pride, duty, the need to protect the mother tongue, the pull of immortality and the awareness that "the war needed its Homer, / its Whitman, someone to make sense/of senseless things"? In We No More Sang for the Bird, Dan Weeks awakens us to the impossibility of a single answer and, on rhythms of exquisite verve and elegance, he gifts us a tour de force. Carefully researched and bold in its empathic reach, the collection reads as ode, hymn, and dazzling historical retelling. -Mihaela Moscaliuc, author of Cemetery Ink

Spring Mills, a small town in rural, central Pennsylvania, becomes in these poems by Mike Schneider a gathering place for four generations of a family over a century of time. Schneider takes readers to where a grandfather recalls using a hand-crank to start his Model T-"shining image of youth & freedom"-and Guernseys in a pasture bellow to be fed. Readers learn how father and son form links in a chain of "manual transmission, / hands-on sequenced pattern of the letter H," and the poet's sonic facility opens our ears to the "metallic / industrial click / of shifting gears." With these poems, we also go to where physicists search among what's "fizzy out there in the universe"-not only for elusive cosmological "dark matter" but also to hear our inner voices, human "dark matter." In "Once Upon a Time," a remarkable marriage of poetry with skilled science writing, the Big Bang is an "unfolding like a rose in bloom" and "Love is evolution of the cosmos. What else can we do?"-a thought the poem answers with longing for, perhaps, a simpler time, a Spring Mills of "Summer evening quietness. A breeze. / The big tree across the street. / Everything made sense."

Some 40 of the 80 poems in the collection Agitations and Allelujas, authored by Harvey Steinberg and published by Ragged Sky Press, first saw the light of day in literary publications ranging from those containing a variety of genres, such as Wisconsin Review, Epicenter, Diner, Aries, and dozens more, to those that specialize: in form (The Lyric), attitude (Parody), and content (Dissections). The subjects the poet writes about differ widely too. A reader will take excursions into singular behaviors ("At sixty he still plays hockey on the frozen lake/and urges boys to clip him, aggrieves them so they must") and subliminal reveries that culminate in action ("portents toll to fasten acquiescence/. . . come day's toils I'll do what needs be done."). Steinberg's wealth of worldly experience, accompanied by substantial credentials in the arts and the academy, impel the book's diversity of themes and prosody: reflections on Hemingway and Matisse in free verse and of Dickinson in rhymed quatrain; a passionate sonnet of abandoned love ("Love's Losings") in counterpoint with licentious limericks; sightings into war, Americana, the outdoors, China, Poland; imaginings about myth-laden Greece. Humor, outrage, sighs are embedded in this volume. "Art," says Steinberg, "is taking risks."

In thirty-six poems written between February 2020 and July 2021, distinguished poet Rachel Hadas captures moments of her personal version of the first year and a half of the pandemic. With candor and elegance, these poems, which vary in form and mood, limn both the inner and outer landscapes of what the poet calls shared privacy. Like countless other people (and not only writers), Hadas has kept going partly by keeping track, striving to balance "our mortal mix of hope and love and dread." In the process, she has assembled a strong new collection.

In this richly imagined collection of poems, Michael Simms draws inspiration from history, psychology, biology, and astronomy, yet at heart he is simply a man with stories to tell. A poet returns home from the funeral of his parents to find that the language of grief is inadequate to describe his complicated relationship with his father, so he invents new words to describe his feelings. An autistic boy on a family vacation to Carlsbad Caverns descends deep into the earth, and breathing the darkness, he becomes a bat. A high school performance of Euripides's The Trojan Women becomes a terrifying prediction of what will happen to one of the girls after graduation. A conversation between two old men about Schubert's Death and the Maiden recalls accusations of sexual harassment one of the friends faces. And in a humorous ars poetica, Simms dreams of kidnapping Charles Bukowski and spiriting him to an AA meeting where Buk slings insults, jumps out the window and flies to the nearest bar on black wings, leading Simms to realize that American poetry needs its misfits and outlaws, and in fact, he prefers poems with a little dirt on them. Simms is a poet who writes as easily about the microfauna in a compost bin as about the complexities of love. He explains the hermeneutics of suspicion as adroitly as a visit to a dog park. He describes an old couple at the seashore through the eyes of an artist drawing them and the climate crises from the perspective of a bronze age king watching his city crumble. Gifted, smart, and flawed, frank about his alcoholism and other personal failings, Simms gives us poems that twist and turn and yet always remain clear in their intent. His empathy is all-embracing, and he challenges the reader's expectations by elegantly expressing abstract ideas through wildly creative, wholly original imagery. These poems keep returning to their central concern of how love can endure in a world that is collapsing. In language both musical and vernacular, Michael Simms stretches the limits of poetic autobiography until personal anecdote rises to the level of timeless myth.

This is a collection of original poems by Christopher Bursk. The poems are inspired by Vergil's Aeneid and deal with modern issues of love, loss, family, masculinity, and more. Many of the epigraphs are in Latin from the Aeneid and some are translated into English.

We never planned to write this book. In 2017, Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Yusef Komunyakaa was working on an epic poem and part of it took place at Classics Books. Independently, I was working on some flash fiction that also took place at Classics Books. We bumped into each other (at Classics Books) and decided that we should collaborate on a collection of poems and stories that all take place at our favorite bookstore. We thought a collection of excellent work with a shared setting-and a shared love of bookstores and the people in them-might be an exciting project. We reached out to some of our favorite writers and artists to make it happen.

Look Again is a book of scrupulous and relentless looking, scrupulous thinking, scrupulous judgment of our "incurable" world, with its human and animal cruelties....but sees, as well,the world's myriad exquisitely detailed lives, from "green's dream of itself" in April beech trees, to "how resistant living things seem/to giving in." And it is a book full of creatures bursting with life-life for which Danson amazingly always finds the right words. -Alicia Ostriker, author of Waiting for the Light

The poems in this collection have a level gaze. We smile at the foibles of people and relationships exposed here-the church organist, Snow White, the carefully balanced "un-couple"-yet finally we're sympathetically implicated with them. Spare, quick-moving narratives carry us along for a day at the beach, a family reunion, a last ferry ride, each of which is more-is a key to the meaning of a life. Foos is particularly appealing when writing about flawed but loving families. These are deeply compassionate poems. Even a searing political poem-and it's a knockout-gets its power as much from sorrow as from anger. After all, as Foos says, we're just happy mutts, "looking for crowns for our efforts." "These poems open with the relentless push of small flowers. They grow in a tight corner plot bright with iris, marigold, and brave truth." -Michael R. Brown, author of The Man Who Makes Amusement Rides "I simply can't resist a poet whose prayer is 'Give us this day our daily bread/in the form of toast'-or who gives drowned virgins a second chance to 'tread the mucky earth.' Ellen Foos' work combines startling candor with effervescent wit. She makes being human seem breathtakingly easy, a difficult task in a world as complicated and cluttered as our own. Read her and you can't help but be refreshed. This is a book of small, big, and offbeat pleasures." - Elaine Equi, author of The Cloud of Knowable Things