Poems, like politics, can be local and global, personal and cultural. In Daniel Bourne's Talking Back to the Exterminator, we see this interplay at work in these ruminations on place-- our connections and disconnections to it-- from Bourne's upbringing in southern Illinois to his later homes in Ohio, Poland, or the American Southwest. This connection certainly involves a sense of celebration, but also of anxiety and tension in realizing the fragility and impermanence of both self and surroundings. Yet, despite the opportunity as well as the challenge of memory-- the way it is continually erased yet also continues to scribble in the brain-- these poems also bear witness to how we push back against all the " exterminations" in our lives.
Ophelia, a professor of Dante, is stricken when she discovers that her husband Andy has been cheating on her with a winsome colleague. What follows is Ophelia's figurative descent into hell as she obsessively tracks her subjects, performs surveillance in her beat-up Volvo, and moves into the property next door to Amber' s, which has gone into foreclosure. She spies on the lovers, growing more and more estranged from reality. Andy's betrayal reawakens the earlier trauma of abandonment by her mother at the age of eight. When Andy and Amber become engaged, Ophelia snaps. The story is a jailhouse confessional, a dark comedy, an oeuvre of women's rage, a suspenseful revenge fantasy, and a moving portrait of one woman's psychological breakdown.
"Before the Silk Road had a name, nomads roamed the Asian steppes and women fought side by side as equals with men. Like all women of the Sauromatae, Akmaral is bound for battle from birth, training as a girl in horsemanship, archery, spear, and blade. Her prowess ignites the jealousy of Erzhan, a gifted warrior who hates her as much as he desires her. When Scythian renegades attack, the two must unite to defeat them. Among their captives is Timor, the rebels' enigmatic leader who refuses to be broken, even as he is enslaved. He fascinates Akmaral. But as attraction grows to passion, she is blinded to the dangerous alliance forming between the men who bristle against the clan' s matriarchal rule. Faced with brutal betrayal, Akmaral must find the strength to defend her people and fulfill her destiny. Drawn from legends of Amazon women warriors from ancient Greece and recent archaeological discoveries in Central Asia, AKMARAL is a sweeping tale about a powerful woman who must make peace with making war."--
Janelle Wolf longs to be the woman she once was-- an adored wife, a loving mother, a career woman, a force in her community-- before a mysterious car accident stole her memories, ruined her reputation, and upended her life. These days, her troubled family needs that capable woman from the past, the one she calls " Janelle Before." Enter Lana, an alluring and magnetic psychic healer who meets secretly with Janelle. Lana coaxes Janelle to remember the circumstances of her accident in order to recover Janelle's " best self." Instead, Janelle uncovers the ugly truth behind that night. The revelations unravel Janelle's marriage, disrupt her family, and turn her small southern town upside down. Written with wry humor, this diabolically entertaining tale of deception, temptation, and love is filled with dark twists, exploring what happens when the transgressions of the past come back with a vengeance.
In 1926, during Prohibition, Vital Bow is abducted at gunpoint during dinner at the family cottage in Rye Beach, Ohio. His intrepid fourteen-year-old daughter, Norah Bow, discovers her father's involvement in a rum-running gang operating on Lake Erie and determines to sail north to rescue him. En route, Norah rescues Ruby Francoeur, an enigmatic woman of easy virtue who conceals secrets of her own. With Ruby as crew, Norah enters an island-and-city world of eccentric and monstrous characters who test her resolve, strength, and knowledge as both a young woman and a skipper. NORAH BOW is a coming-of-age story told by an elder Norah, a tale filled with characters steeped in betrayal, remorse, and a fierce desire for more lives. Norah Bow is a story about family secrets, self-reliance, and the complicated nature of memory itself.
" If you found us, you're likely lost, we like to tease strangers." When Birdie Barker Price finds an old ballot box on her front porch, she opens a Pandora's Box full of clues to Coweetsee County's corrupt elections, hidden crimes, and guilty passions. She enlists the help of her ex-husband, Roy Barker, currently campaigning for sheriff. Suspicions soon fall on Charlie Clyde Harmon, a felon who served time for a fatal arson at a Black church. He still insists he was framed by the disgraced former sheriff, but no one believes him. Filled with false charges, child brides, and murder ballads about the heartache of wronged women and the revenge they seek, Kings of Coweetsee introduces us to a people and place with a vanishing culture and an uncertain future.
As a catastrophic drought plagues the United States, Vicki Truax, a lonely Baltimorean, inherits land outside a remote Appalachian town. Amid the quirky townsfolk, she finds herself at home for the first time in her life. Vicki meets and befriends Alaric, an eccentric local who supplies townsfolk and moonshiners alike from his own meager water source. But danger lurks; a merciless businessman with a lucrative well attempts to seize her land, and water thieves roam her land at night, attempting to tap an aquifer. When Vicki discovers a small spring on her land, fears of a water war force her to keep the knowledge to herself. But Alaric's source runs dry, and a poorly planned raid ends in the collapse of Steen's well. Now Vicki's land is the only source of water, and she's left to decide who gets water and who dies.
Oliver Curtin grows up in a nocturnal world with a mother who is a sex worker and drug addict, and whose love is real yet increasingly unreliable. His narration alternates between that troubled childhood and the present of the novel, where he is serving the last months of a thirty-years-to-life sentence in a maximum-security prison in upstate New York, for a crime he committed at age seventeen. His redemption is closely allied with his memories, seen with growing clarity and courage. If he can remember, then life in the larger world is possible for him.
In 2007, Beck Randall moves with his wife and teenage daughters into a long-abandoned cabin deep in the woods, built a century before by his grandparents. Once there, daughters Tina and Lucy discover that their predecessors have left an imprint of suffering and violence the girls refer to as " The Whistler," an eerie presence infused in the nature that surrounds them. As the 1907 and 2007 storylines braid together, characters and events intrude upon each other, blurring the boundaries between eras and illustrating that people and lives are not forgotten; instead, they are woven into the fabric of the land itself. With gritty, lyrical storytelling, Let Gravity Seize the Dead is an intergenerational literary horror story featuring a blend of suspense, beauty, and terror.
"The novel is a quiet but strong tour de force." Marly Swick, author of Evening News: A Novel1992. Tyler Manning-- high school teacher, part-time farmer, bachelor of 38--is planning his first day of summer vacation when a strange car approaches his Kansas farmhouse. By the time the battered Ford departs, Tyler is holding a three-week-old infant. The baby's father is his estranged brother. Woven throughout the narrative of May Manning's upbringing--assisted by long-time neighbors and school colleagues--is the parallel story of Tyler and his younger brother, the charming but deceitful Mickey Manning. The possibility of Mickey's return haunts Tyler throughout May's childhood. When Mickey does reappear, he brings unexpected danger into their lives. The Manning Girl reimagines George Eliot's 1860 fable, Silas Marner, and places it in a contemporary Midwestern frame, following the girl and her uncle/father from May's unexpected arrival to her 21st year. The Manning Girl explores, with tenderness and humor, the unique situation of a single father, supported by a surprising community.
"... Take the leap: fall in love with Jazz, with Serena, with Fletch, with Rocky - maybe even with a ball python or a dusky pygmy rattler." Laura McBride, author of We Are Called to Rise and In the Midnight RoomThe theft of Trina Leigh Dean's beloved snakes - including a rare Eastern indigo named Unicorn, Banana Splits the yellow ball python, and Bandit the banded king snake - coincides with the disappearance of a troubled young man named Gethin Jacobs. While his sister Serena searches for him, she gains an unlikely accomplice - Jazz, a homeless community college student. Meanwhile, Trina's friend Fletch, a burnt-out cop, scours St. Augustine, Florida, for the stolen snakes. His quest puts Fletch on a dangerous collision course with Gethin, raising questions about community, family, and the power of compassion.
Jazz-age Paris was the center of the artistic and literary world, and the center of the center was Gertrude Stein's salon, where the famous and aspiring creative talents gathered to gawk at Stein's Picassos and vie for status. Young Midwesterner Ida Caine arrives in Paris with her husband Teddy, a would-be Hemingway who thinks he can adventure first and write later. When Teddy falls in with the Stein set, he brings Ida to the salon, where she is shunted into a corner with the wives of famous men. She burns with resentment and wonders if she can ever develop into a real artist herself. A few days later, Gertrude Stein's partner Alice B. Toklas vanishes. Stein calls upon Teddy to investigate. Soon after, he vanishes. Forced to seek out her missing husband, Ida follows his trail through a milieu including strange Surrealist rituals, Tarot card readings, and the catacombs beneath the city. She falls in with a young American poet, T.S. Eliot. An unlikely passion grows while they seek answers to the shocking disappearances.
"Ott's prose crackles and sizzles. There's never a dull moment, right to the riveting end. It's the kind of novel Hemingway might have written had he been alive today." Erik Martiny, author of Night of the Long Goodbyes West is a man looking to flee the past, barely old enough to drink and looking to rediscover himself after several tours in Afghanistan as a POW prison guard. After going AWOL, West looks to reunite with Solomon, his childhood best friend, who exists in the dark underworld of a Los Angeles gentleman's club, Club Paradise. West soon finds himself caught in the web of an Iranian family and its patriarch, Big Z Pourali, a former wrestler with a dark side and side businesses that put his dancers, employees, and family in peril. West stays in LA to look after Solomon but soon falls for the club owner's daughter Nikki. West must come to terms with the raw underside of a Los Angeles crime family and his own past, all the while hoping to maintain his sanity in the process.
"In the rural South, a retired colonel in an upscale retirement community grieves the sudden death of his wife on the tennis court. On the other side of the highway, an elderly Black woman grieves the murder of her niece by a white man. Between them lies an abandoned field where three centuries of crimes are hidden, and only she knows the explosive secrets buried there. When the colonel runs into her car, causing a surprising amount of damage, it sparks a feud that sets loose the spirits in the Field, both benevolent and vengeful."--Publisher marketing.
"Fifteen-year-old Mattie Lee Watson dreams of men, not boys. So when James T. Cullowee, the Kudzu King, arrives in Cooper County, North Carolina in 1941 to spread the gospel of kudzu--claiming that it will improve the soil, feed cattle at almost no cost, even cure headaches--Mattie is ready. Mr ee is determined to sell the entire county on the future of kudzu, and organizes a kudzu festival, complete with a beauty pageant. Mattie is determined to be crowned Kudzu Queen and caputre the attentions of the Kudzu King. As she learns more about Cullowee, however, she discovers that he, like the kudzu he promotes, has a dark and predatory side. When she finds that she is not the only one threatened, she devises a plan to bring him down."--Provided by publisher.
"Sixteen-year-old Lava lives peacefully enough with her imperfect mother, Lila, and their boarder, Cody, an Iraqi war vet suffering from PTSD. Lava's ex-addict father, Jesse, is released from prison, and Lava's life in Detroit is upended when Jesse pressures Lava for her urine so he can pass his mandatory drug tests. After an altercation, Lava is sent to live with her mother's cousin Lola in Seville. Lola is a larger-than-life flamenco dancer who teaches Lava the language of flamenco dance; Lava's life opens outward as she becomes fluent in flamenco's structure, giving her new modes of expression as she experiences first love, friendship, and betrayal, and uncovers family secrets. Rich with lyrical, sensual prose, Duende is a coming-of-age novella about mothers and daughters, about legacy, about self-expression, about defining a way to live."--Provided by publisher.
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