Böcker utgivna av Western Michigan University, New Issues Press

"The poems of Rebecca Dunham's Strike invoke the terse, noiseless monstrousness of the toxic-domestic, the 'once-us, ' in which 'to fall numb is not to fall/out of pain.' This collection is Plathian in its riven depiction of anger, which both 'presses/down and in, ' where denial 'is beaten to silver foil, to silver leaf, ' and in which '[o]ver the butcher/paper's sheets' her 'red story sprawls.' In poems whose edges are honed on a whetstone of impeccable craft, and which delve into history, archetype, and ekphrasis, Dunham exposes the face that 'ripples beneath her mask' and builds a ravishing myth of the unveiled lyric interior." --Diane Seuss "In Rebecca Dunham's gorgeous new book there are secrets, shames, and a fury that bites like frost. Strike reminds me that 'fidelity / demands not only virtue's deep mortal stab, / but the love of it'; that anger burns clean; that forgiveness can burden the one who was hurt, asking them to console the one who made them suffer. Dunham brings to light a rage that has felt unutterable to me for so long, as well as the lineage of women who know betrayal's slow burning. When you read this stunning book, you can't fail to feel these poems strike you as well, how even after you set it down, you can still feel the scorch of it." --Traci Brimhall "D.T. Suzuki describes the start of a bad poem as one that 'does not fly straight to the target, nor does the target stand where it is...' Rebecca Dunham's Strike is a campaign of targets all hit, dead-center, by furiously composed poems--arrows that cannot miss. Whether real life fortifies her aim, or pure imagination, or the progeny of both, the reader need not know. What matters is that this writer is on fire--and for sharing her archery, her heartache, and her hunger for catharsis, we thank her, as this is poetry that confirms the weirdly compatible damnation and grace of language used to expunge and expose and exalt. 'Heap of tortured hairpins/at my feet..., ' Strike hurts, and thereby saves." --Larissa Szporluk

Poems that acknowledge the existential anxieties of our age while continuing to celebrate the beauty and musicality of language.    In Would We Still Be, James Henry Knippen crafts the anxieties that emanate from human existence‿grief, fear, hopelessness, uncertainty‿into poetic reflections that express a deep reverence for the musicality and incantational capacity of language. Like a moon or a wren, two of the book‿s obsessions, these haunting poems call us to consider beauty‿s connection to the transitory. Among the ghosts that wander these pages‿those of loved ones, those we are, and those we will become‿Knippen asks if image is enough, if sound is enough, if faith is enough. In doing so, these poems seek out the soul‿s communion with voice, encouraging us to sing our fate.

A collection of poems that delve into the experience of living with bipolar disorder. This collection of poetry explores the disruptive state of psychosis, with all its insights and follies, and the challenges of living life after a departure from the self. These poems reach for an understanding of the ecstasy and tragedy of madness through both lyric and prose forms that mimic the sublime state of mania through their engagement with language. Ordinary life becomes strange in these poems, which are playful and humorous at times and dark at others, as they seek resolution to the question of what happens when the mind overthrows the body.

To Zenzi is the extraordinary story of Tobias Koertig's odyssey through the apocalypse of Berlin in 1945. An orphaned thirteen-year-old who loves to draw, Tobias is coerced into joining the German youth army in the last desperate weeks of the war. Mistaken for a hero on the Eastern Front, he receives an Iron Cross from Hitler himself, who discovers the boy's cartoons and appoints Tobias to sketch pictures of the ruined city. Shuttling between the insanity of the Führer's bunker and the chaotic streets, Tobias must contend with a scheming Martin Bormann, a deceitful deserter, the Russian onslaught, and his own compounding despair--all while falling for Zenzi, a girl of Jewish descent (a mischling) who relays secret news of death camps and convinces Tobias to make a treacherous escape to the Americans. With thrilling risks in plotting and prose, with moments of pathos and absurdity, Shuster richly conjures a mad, tragic world.

Landscape with Plywood Silhouettes is a book hell-bent on making sense of a life after divorce, of making sense of the middle years of life, of finding love in the middle of raising a family in the rural North.

Poetry. "'Not // I Have a dream // A cold, cold feeling' closes Hopper's 'The Good Caucasian;'...these unsettling poems trace Hopper's struggle to make sense of terrible legacies, from racial violence in the name of white female bodies to a father's terminal illness as a site of private and public histories. Hopper's lines halt, knot, interdigitate, and stutter, but they never flinch. She leaves that to the reader. What she doesn't offer us are easy epiphanies, a bid for being a good caucasian, or post-race snake oil. This is difficult work for a time when 'any touch / will bruise.' DARK~SKY SOCIETY insists we reach and be reached anyway."--Douglas Kearney

Fiction. MOTHERLUNGE is an eloquent and irreverent debut novel about first sex, true love, and chronic sibling rivalry; it's about the deepest fear of young (and not-so-young) adulthood: the fear of inheriting a disappointing life. It's motherly advice, too--featuring wigs, dogs, road trips, and medicine--a guide to the essential experiences of being female, "born unto a librarian, named for the goddess of sight," waiting for the future to arrive. With sly wit and surprising joy, MOTHERLUNGE considers the flaws in the family line and celebrates the promise that staggers alongside."[V]oice is where Kirstin Scott astonishes, both in the gutsy yet precise and lyrical voice of her narrator Thea, and in the brilliantly realized voices that Scott bestows on the rest of Thea's family. Here we have a tribe of mothers-gone-wrong and their sidelined, well-meaning, hapless men--and yet, owing to the sheer inventiveness of Scott's prose style, the family portrait that emerges is almost (well, not quite) affirmative. We believe in these characters and even believe that some good--some human equivalent of that ribald, generous and knowing voice--will come out of all this."--Jaimy Gordon

Fiction. Winner of the AWP Prize for the Novel, judged by Jim Shepard. Follow four friends as they move from The Brady Bunch to Seinfeld, from junior high to middle management. There is Quint, whose rebellion frays into self-destruction; Slow, who struggles to become the world's first teenage father figure; Chimes, who fears losing his friends while picking up a 7-10 split; and Barb who escapes the conformity of Minnisapa only to find herself returning by dark of night. You will feel as if you've always lived in Minnisapa, Minnesota. And you will never underestimate nice kids from the Midwest again. "MERIT BADGES is hilarious, painful, lovely, nostalgic, generous and true. Kevin Fenton creates an unforgettable group of characters, in whose lives and thoughts and actions readers will often recognize themselves. This is a very funny, very moving, and wonderful book"--Julie Schumacher.

"These poems love. Prophesize. Return us to our beginnings. To days that we want to remember. Or forget. But don't. Thus in our sister's memory, we survive in the luxury of dying. The courage of loving. The re-imagining of our souls for another generation. Thank you, my dear sister for your words saluting our living, our lives." --Sonia Sanchez, winner of the 2018 Lifetime Achievement Award from the Academy of American Poets "In exquisitely crafted poems of heart-accelerating candor and clarity, Lauren K. Alleyne says to all the black bodies slain by hatred and militarized fear, 'Nothing I say will save you, but how can I say nothing?' Honeyfish is an elegy for all the countless lost, and a praise song for the many black lives that persist in their wish to give and receive love." -- Tracy K. Smith, Poet Laureate of the United States of America "Even in the places we think of as most beautiful, the endless gong of the body being broken and defiled will find us. How can we see the sun and the ocean and the clear blue sky as anything other than a kind of cruel joke in the face of so much suffering? The extraordinary gift of Lauren K Alleyne's, Honeyfish is that she shows the world in all its brutality and loss and somehow lets us mourn within the poems, which in turn allows us to begin some kind of healing. These are poems whose elegy is ongoing, whose elegy need never happened but for hatred. The waves go in and out and so many people keep being killed. And here is this extraordinary poet, making a heaven that is freedom, that is the dream of being welcomed and loved and tended to. This is a book for our times and for the day when these times are over and we can rejoice." -- Gabrielle Calvacoressi, author of Rocket Fantastic

"The poems in 2nd Chance are written in the voice of a doctor; the speaker often imagines he is talking to students, residents, patients, families--anyone who is ill or has witnessed illness and suffering. The poet, Daniel M. Becker, has been a physician for over thirty years, working in general medicine, geriatric clinics, and addiction clinics, supervising medical students and residents, and more. With poems such as "Goals of Care," "Before Flu Season," and "Advance Directives," 2nd Chance covers the full spectrum of medical care--birth, death, and all the surprising moments in between. Written with warmth and empathy for the human condition, these poems attempt to understand, share, and honor what both patients and medical professionals experience. Serious matters are approached with intelligence, humility, and humor, making this collection an affecting entry into the growing field of medical poetry.'--

This collection is named for a "swale," a shallow channel used to direct the flow of rainwater. Similarly, Swale looks outward to the natural world and directs its focus inward to the landscape of the mind. The past presses in like a thick mist: plundering colonial ships and the cracking edges of empire coincide with contemporary scenes and personal erosions and failures. Alongside humans are animals both living and extinct: manatees, sea turtles, and whales; roaming bears, horses, and lambs; and the flightless dodo and Steller's sea cow, gone for centuries. What happens when the mind eclipses what the body sees, and neither can be trusted--when demarcations between land and water blur, and one's sense of self begins to recede? Swale interrogates the violence of colonialism and its reverberations over time, as well as the extinction and the rapid decline of animal species. By turns tidal and cloistered, Swale speaks of science, reliquaries, and lapis lazuli, traversing forests, seascapes, and meadows. Here, the ocean becomes a field, a medieval tapestry transforms into a space that can be entered, and the body is fleshless, struck through with light. The speaker of these poems is ultimately unfixed--and with that comes both imaginative possibility and a personal unmooring. In poems that cast and recast the interior self in different guises--from the perpetually off-kilter Alice to the divergent voices of the shorn lamb and predatory foxhound--an unsettling anxiety grows starker, along with the wish for repair.