A grisly death near her new homestead draws Brigid Reardon into a complicated mystery soon after her arrival in Cheyenne, Wyoming, in 1881
After the harrowing events that entangled her in Deadwood, Brigid Reardon just wants to move west and get on with her new life in America. But shortly after traveling to Cheyenne to join her brother Seamus, she finds herself caught up in another deadly mystery—beginning with her discovery of a neighbor’s body on the plains near their homes. Was Ella murdered? Are either of the two men in Ella’s life responsible? With Seamus away on a cattle drive, her friend Padraic possibly succumbing to a local’s charms, and the sheriff seemingly satisfied with Ella’s fate, it falls to Brigid to investigate what really happened, which puts her in the crosshairs of one of Cheyenne’s cattle barons, called “big sugars” in these parts. All she really wants is something better than a crumbling, soddy homestead on the desolate plains of Wyoming—and maybe, just maybe, she wants Padraic—but life, it seems, has other plans: this young immigrant from Ireland is going to be a detective on the western frontier of 1880s America, even if it kills her.
Loosely based on the true story of Ellen Watson in Cheyenne in 1889, The Big Sugar continues the adventure begun in Mary Logue’s celebrated mystery The Streel, which introduced a “gritty, charming, clever protagonist” (Kirkus Reviews). With a faultless sense of history, a keen eye for suspense, and a poet’s way with prose, Mary Logue all but guarantees that readers, like Brigid, will find the mystery at the heart of The Big Sugar downright irresistible.
Beltane at Aphelion collects all of John Matthias’s longer poems and is published simultaneously with Swimming at Midnight, which collects his shorter poems. The volume includes his exuberant experiments from the 1960s, Poem in Three Parts and Bucyrus, followed by The Stefan Bathory & Mihail Lermontov Poems, his comedic diptych from the 1970s set on a Polish and a Russian ocean liner, and by Northern Summer, his meditation on history and language set in Scotland. It concludes with the three long poems first published in A Gathering of Ways which explore ancient paths and river routes in the East Anglian region of Britain and the American Midwest, and, in the most ambitious poem he has yet written, the famous pilgrim trails to Santiago de Compostela in Spain. About the books in which these poems originally appeared, critics and poets have written with enthusiasm.
Cormac McCarthy told an interviewer for the New York Times Magazine that “books are made out of books,” but he has been famously unwilling to discuss how his own writing draws on the works of other writers. Yet his novels and plays masterfully appropriate and allude to an extensive range of literary works, demonstrating that McCarthy is well aware of literary tradition, respectful of the canon, and deliberately situating himself in a knowing relationship to precursors.
The Wittliff Collection at Texas State University acquired McCarthy’s literary archive in 2007. In Books Are Made Out of Books, Michael Lynn Crews thoroughly mines the archive to identify nearly 150 writers and thinkers that McCarthy himself references in early drafts, marginalia, notes, and correspondence. Crews organizes the references into chapters devoted to McCarthy’s published works, the unpublished screenplay Whales and Men, and McCarthy’s correspondence. For each work, Crews identifies the authors, artists, or other cultural figures that McCarthy references; gives the source of the reference in McCarthy’s papers; provides context for the reference as it appears in the archives; and explains the significance of the reference to the novel or play that McCarthy was working on. This groundbreaking exploration of McCarthy’s literary influences—impossible to undertake before the opening of the archive—vastly expands our understanding of how one of America’s foremost authors has engaged with the ideas, images, metaphors, and language of other thinkers and made them his own.
The first and last poems in the collection are explicitly devoted to Moten’s mother; the others relate more obliquely to her life and legacy. They invoke performers, writers, artists, and thinkers including not only James Baldwin, Roland Barthes, Frederick Douglass, Billie Holiday, Audre Lorde, Charlie Parker, and Cecil Taylor, but also contemporary scholars of race, affect, and queer theory. The book concludes with an interview conducted by Charles Henry Rowell, the editor of the journal Callaloo. Rowell elicits Moten’s thoughts on the relation of his poetry to theory, music, and African American vernacular culture.
“Poet Alicia Ostriker is also a highly original scholar/teacher of midrash, the commentary and exegesis of scripture (the same root as madrasa, place of study). Here she ‘studies’ Jewish history, Jewish passion, Jewish contradictions, in a compendium of learned, crafted, earthy and outward-looking poems that show how this quest has informed and enriched her whole poet’s trajectory.”
—Marilyn Hacker
Frank comes into contact with a host of rural and urban characters. Of central importance is his Lutheran girlfriend, Marianne, whom Frank seduces, begrudgingly marries, and eventually loves. Frank’s extended family is just a generation removed from polygamy and still energized by old-time grudges and deprivations. Along the way Frank encounters a closeted secular humanist, a polygamist prophet, a psychiatrist, a Mason, government employees, college professors, lawyers, and entrepreneurs—all drawn with heightened realism reminiscent of Charles Dickens or the grotesque forms of William Faulkner and Flannery O’Connor.
The story engages readers as it alternates almost imperceptibly between Frank’s naïve consciousness and the more informed awareness of its narrator. It can be read as a love story, a satiric comedy, or a dark and sobering study of self-mutilation. Shifting from one to another, it builds suspense and elicits
complex emotions, among them a profound sense of compassion. More joyous than cynical, it sympathizes deeply with the plight of all of God’s backsliders.
The 1963 publication of Thomas Pynchon’s V. changed the landscape of American fiction. Becoming Pynchon: Genetic Narratology and V. offers a detailed examination of the dramatic transformations that took place as Pynchon’s foundational novel went from typescript to published work. Luc Herman and John M. Krafft develop and deploy a rich theory of genetic narratology to examine the performance of genre in the novel. Pushing back against the current dominance of cognitive narratology, they discuss focalization, character construction, and evocation of consciousness as clues to Pynchon’s developing narratology of historical fiction. Their theoretical interventions offer an important and timely corrective to the field of narratology with a method that brings the author back into the analytical frame.
Herman and Krafft use as their guide the typescript of V. that surfaced in 2001, when it was acquired by the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, as well as Pynchon’s editorial correspondence with Corlies Smith, his first editor at J. B. Lippincott. Becoming Pynchon assembles a comprehensive and unequaled picture of Pynchon’s writing process that will appeal both to Pynchonians and to postmodernism scholars more broadly.
Foreword by Martín Espada
This chapbook collection offers new poems from the prolific career of a community leader, activist, and healer. Luis J. Rodríguez’s work asks profound questions of us as readers and fellow humans, such as, "If society cooperates, can we nurture the full / and healthy development of everyone?" In his introductory remarks, Martín Espada describes the poet as a man engaged in people and places: "Luis Rodríguez is a poet of many tongues, befitting a city of many tongues. He speaks English, Spanish, ‘Hip Hop,’ ‘the Blues,’ and ‘cool jazz.’ He speaks in ‘mad solos.’ He speaks in ‘People’s Sonnets.’ He speaks in the language of protest. He speaks in the language of praise."
In Black Drum, Enid Shomer fuses mind with body, knowledge with physical being, and affirms the capacity of language to accomplish this fusion. With clearly fashioned images, her focus often narrows on close particulars or leaps to wide angles, as in these lines from the title poem in which the narrator is battling a fish:
We had been struggling for ten
minutes—a lifetime—over whose world
would prevail: his, with its purled
edges and continuous center, or mine
with its yin and yang,
its surface incised into sky
and sea, the land like a scar
between.
The characters in Shomer’s poems discover the ceaseless motion of living in the body and the inevitability of decay. In “Notes from the Sketch book of Gustav Klimt,” Shomer boldly says, “I have always balked / at the purely decorative, / but then I saw that the symbolic / could stir us by its absence.”
Black Drum insists that life on earth speaks of transformation and transience; epiphany can happen any where, with “schemes illegal and grand” with slot machines, race horses, dead or estranged relatives, and lost love. Enid Shomer signals us to make the most of life, despite our limitations and in the face of bewildering catastrophe.
Bearheart, Gerald Vizenors first novel, overturns “terminal creeds” and violence in a decadent material culture. American civilization has collapsed and Proude Cedarfair, his wife, Rosina, and a bizarre collection of disciples, are forced on a pilgrimage when government agents descend on the reservation to claim their sacred cedar trees for fuel. The tribal pilgrims reverse the sentiments of Manifest Destiny and travel south through the ruins of a white world that ran out of gas.
Parker's got a couple of rules that have helped keep him alive throughout his long career. One of those is never to work on a boat. But with a gambling boat cruising down the Hudson, stuffed to the gunwales with cash, Parker’s got a plan, a team, and a new rule: a shot at a big enough score makes any rule worth breaking. Parker and his crew hit the boat, hard, but as always, there are a lot of complications—and a lot of bodies—before this one's in the bag.
Donald E. Westlake is one of the greats of crime fiction. Under the pseudonym Richard Stark, he wrote twenty-four fast-paced, hardboiled novels featuring Parker, a shrewd career criminal with a talent for heists. Using the same nom de plume, Westlake also completed a separate series in the Parker universe, starring Alan Grofield, an occasional colleague of Parker. While he shares events and characters with several Parker novels, Grofield is less calculating and more hot-blooded than Parker; think fewer guns, more dames.
Not that there isn’t violence and adventure aplenty. The third Grofield novel, The Blackbird shares its first chapter with Slayground: after a traumatic car crash, Parker eludes the police, but Grofield gets caught. Lying injured in the hospital, Grofield is visited by G-Men who offer him an alternative to jail, and he finds himself forced into a deadly situation involving international criminals and a political conspiracy.
With a new foreword by Sarah Weinman that situates the Grofield series within Westlake’s work as a whole, this novel is an exciting addition to any crime fiction fan’s library.
The sixteenth Parker novel, Butcher’s Moon is more than twice as long as most of the master heister’s adventures, and absolutely jammed with the action, violence, and nerve-jangling tension readers have come to expect. Back in the corrupt town where he lost his money, and nearly his life, in Slayground, Parker assembles a stunning cast of characters from throughout his career for one gigantic, blowout job: starting—and finishing—a gang war. It feels like the Parker novel to end all Parker novels, and for nearly twenty-five years that’s what it was. After its publication in 1974, Donald Westlake said, “Richard Stark proved to me that he had a life of his own by simply disappearing. He was gone.”
Featuring a new introduction by Westlake’s close friend and writing partner, Lawrence Block, this classic Parker adventure deserves a place of honor on any crime fan’s bookshelf. More than thirty-five years later, Butcher’s Moon still packs a punch: keep your calendar clear when you pick it up, because once you open it you won’t want to do anything but read until the last shot is fired.
Recapturing the celebratory voice of Africa in poems that are both contemporary and traditional, Liberian-born Patricia Jabbeh Wesley weaves lyrical storytelling with oral history and images of Africa and America, revealing powerful insights about the relationship between strength and tragedy—and finding reason to celebrate even in the presence of war, difficulties, and death. Rooted in myths that can be traced to the Grebo tradition, Becoming Ebony portrays Liberian-born Wesley’s experiences of village talk and civil war as well as her experiences of the pain of her mother’s death and the difficulties of rearing a family away from home in the United States, and explores the questions of living in the African Diaspora. Turning on the African proverb of “the wandering child” and the metaphor of the ebony tree—which is beautiful in life and death— these poems delve into issues of human suffering and survival, plainly and beautifully chronicling what happens “after the sap is gone.”
Inspired by the miraculously mercurial potential of words, Stephen Yenser takes readers on a heady trip through a world full of promise yet compromised by human weakness. Set in sunny southern California and Greece, the poems of Blue Guide cast the shadow of mortality, and the tones are elegiac. This combination of the deadly serious and the exuberant is natural, Yenser notes; after all, work and orgy share the same etymological root, as do travail and travel, pledge and play.
Using various poetic modes, Yenser offers here a quatrain written to name a painting by Dorothea Tanning; a sequence of poems for his daughter; an excursive poem at once about Los Angeles and Baghdad and his father and a petty criminal; a group of prose poems set in penumbral bars; some postcards to a dead friend; and a meditation prompted by a sojourn on a remote Aegean island. The most unexpected work is an assemblage of quotations and glosses in the tradition of the commonplace book, except that in Yenser's hands these entries are densely interrelated
.
In The Black Ocean, poet Brian Barker attempts to make sense of some of the darkest chapters in history while peering forward to what lies ahead as the world totters in the wake of human complacence. Unveiled here are ruminations on human torture, the Chernobyl disaster, the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, and genocide against Native Americans. The ghosts of Lincoln, Poe, and Billie Holiday manifest from pages laden with grim prophecies and catastrophes both real and imagined. These hauntingly intense documentary poems reflect on the past in an attempt to approach it with more clarity and understanding, while offering blistering insight into the state of the world today. Barker touches upon the power of manipulation and class oppression; the depths of fear and the struggle for social justice; and reveals how failure to act—on the parts of both politicians and everyday citizens—can have the most devastating effects of all.
Throughout the volume looms the specter of the black ocean itself, a powerful metaphor for all our collective longings and despair, as we turn to face a menacing and uncertain future.
Lullaby for the Last Night on Earth
When at last we whisper, so long, so lonesome,
and watch our house on the horizon
go down like a gasping zeppelin of bricks,
we’ll turn, holding hands,
and walk the train tracks to the sea . . .
So sing me that song where a mountain falls
in love with an octopus, and one thousand fireflies
ricochet around their heads,
and I’ll dream we’re dancing in the kitchen one last time,
swaying, the window a waystation
of flaming leaves, the dogs shimmying
about our legs,
dragging their golden capes of rain . . .
O my critter, my thistle, gal-o-my-dreams,
lift your voice like an oar into the darkness,
for all the sad birds are falling down—
Nothing in this night is ours.
Awaiting a TV talk show appearance, John Townley is quaking with dread. He has published a best-selling memoir about the Iraq War, a page-turner climaxing in atrocity. In a green room beyond the soundstage, he braces himself to confront the charismatic soldier at the violent heart of it. But John has never actually seen the man before—nor served in Iraq, nor the military. Even so, and despite the deception, he knows his fabricated memoir contains stunning truths.
By turns comic, suspenseful, bitingly satirical, and emotionally potent, A Big Enough Lie pits personal mistruths against national ones of life-and-death consequence. Tracking a writer from the wilds of Florida to New York cubicles to Midwestern workshops to the mindscapes of Baghdad—and from love to heartbreak to solitary celebrity—Bennett’s novel probes our endlessly frustrated desire to grab hold of something (or somebody) true.
In the tradition of such outstanding biography-in-poetry collections as Maurice Manning’s A Companion of Owls about Daniel Boone and Sharon Chmielarz’s The Other Mozart, Annie Boutelle’s first collection probes the layered life of one of nineteenth-century America’s most popular poets, who is now almost forgotten. The Celia Thaxter who speaks these poems disturbs the placid myth created around her public persona, and focuses on the fierce mysteries and ironies that frame her. Boutelle carefully reveals Thaxter’s childhood on the stark Isles of Shoals off the New Hampshire coast; the trap of a Victorian marriage; the struggle to invent herself as a writer and painter; her celebrated circle of friends, which included Nathaniel Hawthorne, John Greenleaf Whittier, Sarah Orne Jewett, and Childe Hassam; and the hard-won serenity of her last decade. At the fringes of Thaxter’s life a wider world clamors, particularly with the onset of the Civil War. At the center rests a quiet, almost elliptical silence.
Like fine champagne, these poems ravish. Clear, airy, crystalline, they move us into an elemental world where “nothing is left but water, / air, and the uncertain space between.” The spare language resonates. With restraint and lyric tenderness, Boutelle leads us toward a woman who shifts from pose to necessary pose, who survives in these pages with intelligence and grace: “The grave / flesh melts. What’s left / is light as bone.”
The Beautiful Lesson of the I is a collection of finely made poems by an accomplished poet. It will reward the scholar and the student of poetry, as well as the reader looking for the simple pleasures of poetic insight authentically felt. Winner of the Swenson Poetry Award 2005. Now in paperback.
Open this book and you are in Door County, Wisconsin, strolling down Coot Lake Road—a one-lane, dead-end gravel track just a few miles from Baileys Harbor and the Lake Michigan shore. Along the way you meet George and Helen O’Malley, who are growing old gracefully. Russell, their brave and empathetic golden retriever, wags hello and offers you a paw to shake.
The Olsons and the Berges live just down the road. Bump Olson is the local septic tank pumper and birdwatcher extraordinaire, and Hans Berge, MD, PhD, was at one time the only Norwegian psychiatrist in Chicago—or so he says. In a cottage out by the highway, you may spot Lloyd Barnes, ex–Tennessee state trooper, hound fancier, and local man of mystery. Uncle Petter Sorenson, visiting from Grand Forks, takes the polar bear plunge at Jacksonport. Around the neighborhood you’ll meet Deputy Doug, the flirtatious cellist Debbie Dombrowski, and Italian import Rosa Zamboni.
Dave Crehore’s sketches of life on the Door peninsula also expound on:
• the delights of codfish pizza
• how to insult Canadians
• what to expect at your fiftieth high school reunion
• how to lose a school board election
• the prevention of creeping old-fogyism
• Marilyn, a buxom eight-pound smallmouth bass
• and what goes on in the winter, when no one is there.
National Book Critics Circle Award Winner Cynthia Cruz reevaluates the paradox of the death drive in her eighth collection of poetry, Back to the Woods. Could it be that in ceaselessly snuffing ourselves out we are, in fact, trying to survive? In “Shine,” Cruz’s speaker attests that “if [she] had a home, it would be // a still in a film / where the sound / got jammed.” This book inhabits the silence of the empty orchestra pit, facing “dread, and its many / instruments of sorrow.” The quiet asks, “Did you love this world / and did this world / not love you?” We return to the site of our suffering, we perform the symphony of all our old injuries, to master what has broken us. To make possible the future, we retreat into the past. “I don’t know / the ending. // I don’t know anything,” our speaker insists, but she follows the wind’s off-kilter song of “winter / in the pines” and “the dissonance / of siskins.” Cruz heeds the urgency of our wandering, the mandate that we must get back to the woods, not simply for the forest to devour us — she recognizes in the oblivion “flooding out / from its spiral branches” an impossible promise. At the tree line, we might vanish to begin again.
Winner of the 2005 Drue Heinz Literature Prize
Between Camelots is about the struggle to forge relationships and the spaces that are left when that effort falls short. In the title story, a man at a backyard barbecue waits for a blind date who never shows up. He meets a stranger who advises him to give up the fight; to walk away from intimacy altogether and stop getting hurt. The wisdom—or foolhardiness—of that approach is at the heart of each of these stories. In “I’ll Be Home,” a young man who has converted to Judaism goes home for Christmas in Miami, and finds that his desire to connect to his parents conflicts with his need to move on. “The Movements of the Body” introduces us to a woman who believes that she can control the disintegration of her life through a carefully measured balance of whiskey and mouthwash. These are stories about loss and fear, but also about the courage that drives us all to continue to reach out to the people around us.
In her first collection of poems, Kansas native Amy Fleury captures images of dragging clotheslines, baked lawns, and sweet potato babies, inserting them with an earnest dignity into her stories of midwestern life. Beautiful Trouble explores the subtleties of landscape, place, families, girlhood, womanhood, and everyday existence on the prairie. Fleury writes of the Midwest with authenticity, speaks of romance with delicate allure, and recalls the heartbreak of childhood without self-pity. In meditations on resilience and life’s contradictions, Fleury engages her characters fully and paints their souls and sensations evenly in language both rare and beautiful. She is a poet in love with sound and its power to summon majesty from quotidian scenes. Her poems are brief and striking, depending on exquisite word choice and balance to achieve a simple order on the page.
Bringing the Shovel Down is a re-imagination of the violent mythologies of state and power.
"These poems speak out of a global consciousness as well as an individual wisdom that is bright with pity, terror, and rage, and which asks the reader to realize that she is not alone--that the grief he carries is not just his own. Gay is a poet of conscience, who echoes Tomas Transtromer's 'We do not surrender. But want peace.'"
--Jean Valentine
"Ross Gay is some kind of brilliant latter-day troubadour whose poetry is shaped not only by yearning but also play and scrutiny, melancholy and intensity. I might be shocked by the bold, persistent love throughout Bringing the Shovel Down if I wasn’t so wooed and transformed by it."
--Terrance Hayes
In Bogotá, a taut, moving novel set in present-day Colombia, Wilfredo decides to uproot his family from their small town, where his ferry service on the river subjects him to the gruesome errands demanded by the local paramilitary. Moving in with relatives in a slum in Bogotá, the family tries desperately to achieve the smallest measure of comfort and hope in a world of almost total ruin, wracked by deprivation, fear, and ceaseless violence.
Alan Grostephan depicts with startling immediacy an urban landscape of extreme harshness and oppressive instability. The tension between the desperate conditions surrounding his characters and their efforts to hold on to their humanity gives Bogotá a ferocious energy. As Wilfredo and his family fight to stay alive and stay together, their plight emerges as equally enraging and uplifting, constituting a portrait of a society always on the verge of disintegration.
Blooming Fiascoes is a collective of verse that deconstructs identity. We are beautiful and monstrous. We live in a beautiful and monstrous world. Ellen Hagan poetically mirrors these metaphoric adversaries, drawing on her experiences as a woman, an artist, a mother, a transplanted southerner, and above all, a human being. She plumbs origins in history, body, and living to question how we reckon our whole selves in the catacombs of a world gone mad:
We mourn, we bless, / we blow, we wail, we / wind—down, we sip, / we spin, we blind, we / bend, bow & hem. We / hip, we blend, we bind, / we shake, we shine, / shine. We lips & we / teeth, we praise & protest.
In these poems, Assyrian, Italian, and Irish lines seep deeper into a body that is growing older but remains engaged with unruly encounters: the experience of raising daughters, sexual freedom, and squaring body image against the body’s prohibitions. This is a work where the legacy is still evolving and always asking questions in real time. Blooming Fiascos spindles poetry that is not afraid to see itself and the lives it inhabits.
Silver Medalist in Literary Fiction, 2020 Military Writers Society of America Awards
Brendan Leary, assigned to an Air Force photo squadron an hour from L.A., thinks he has it made. But when the U.S. invades Cambodia and he joins his buddies who march in protest, he is shipped off to an obscure air base in upcountry Thailand. There, he finds himself flying at night over the Ho Chi Minh Trail in a secret war that turns the mountains of Laos into a napalm-scorched moonscape. As the emotional vise tightens, his moral fiber crumbles and he sinks ever deeper into a netherworld of drugs, sex, and booze.
When a visit by Nixon looms, Brendan dreams up an all-squadron bicycle race to build morale, win hearts and minds in rural Thailand, and make him and his underpaid buddies a pile of money. The Big Buddha Bicycle Race is a last gasp of hope that turns into a unifying adventure—until the stakes turn out to be far higher than anyone imagined.
The Big Buddha Bicycle Race is a new take on the Vietnam War. A caper on the surface, it is also a tribute to the complex culture and history of Southeast Asia and a sober remembrance of those groups who have been erased from American history—the brash active-duty soldiers who risked prison by taking part in the GI antiwar movement, the gutsy air commandos who risked death night after night flying over the Ho Chi Minh Trail, and the people of Laos, whose lives and land were devastated in ways that have yet to be fully acknowledged in Western accounts of the war.
The vast, unsettling landscape of the American Southwest is as much a character in Ryan Harty's debut collection, Bring Me Your Saddest Arizona, as the men and women who inhabit its award-winning stories. In eight vivid tales of real life in the west, Harty reminds us that life's greatest challenge may be to find the fine balance between desire and obligation.
A high school football player must make a choice between family and friends when his older brother commits an act of senseless violence. A middle-aged man must fly to Las Vegas to settle his dead sister's estate, only to discover that he must first confront his guilt over his sister's death. A young teacher tries to help a homeless girl, but, as their lives intertwine, he begins to understand that his generosity is motivated by his own relenting sense of lonliness. Well-intentioned but ultimately human, the characters in these stories often fall short of achieving grace. But the possibility of redemption, like the Sonoran Desert at the edge of Bring Me Your Saddest Arizona's suburban landscapes, is never far off. Harty's characters are as complicated as the people we know, and his vision of life in the west is as hopeful as it is strikingly real.
A lyrical meditation on time, survival, and merciful moments of joy
Sara Henning’s Burn draws readers deep into the moments that make us, focusing on instances of crisis and renewal to explore our relation to time and lived experience. In these poems, we follow a speaker as she works through the loss of young love, the death of her parents, marriage’s hardness and beauty, sexual assault, and the devastation of a pandemic—evolutions of trauma that fracture time and alter perception. Twinned with these extremes are shimmering manifestations of joy only an imperfect world can make possible.
Burn magnifies the way time leaves us both the victim and the victor of our realities. The blaze of her late-mother’s Tiffany lamps sends the speaker back to childhood, where she unearths mica from the schoolyard dirt. The devastation of an ecological crisis, the annihilating act of rape, and the unsolved disappearance of a caretaker all level the speaker’s world and upend her place in it, forcing her to reconstitute reality from what remains. In poems which summon the spirit of Stephen Hawking’s A Brief History of Time, this collection walks through the physics of temporality as refracted through love, loss, and grief, so we better understand its effect on our lives. Through this insight, Henning introduces a new way of being in the world.
A work of advocacy and uplift, Burn shines with the vibrant possibilities of narrative lyric poetry as it forges a path from grief to hope.
“What you have in your hands is a bomb. But it is the kind you need to hold on to for dear life, not run away from.”
—From the Foreword, John Lee Clark
Christopher Jon Heuer lost his hearing early, but not before “being able to hear a lot as a kid.” He also received a good education, both in a speech-oriented setting and a signing environment. These varied experiences provided him with the perfect background to write about biases he faced, not only those of a mostly oblivious hearing society, but also those of ideologically restrictive members of the Deaf community. BUG: Deaf Identity and Internal Revolution combines new work of Heuer’s with his best columns from The Tactile Mind Weekly and the National Association of the Deaf’s Mind Over Matter. He addresses all topics – exit interviews, baldness, faith healing, marriage, cats, Christmas trips, backyard campfires in boxer shorts – with a withering wit that spares no aspect of life and deafness.
Being “bugged” for Heuer began early: “When I was growing up, my mother’s response to every problem I had was: ‘Well, he just needs to adjust to his deafness.’ Bloody nose? ‘Chris, you need to adjust to your deafness.’ Homework not done? ‘I know it’s hard adjusting to your deafness, honey, but ....’ Acne scarring? ‘Lots of teenagers get zits, Chris. I know it’s hard for you, dealing with this while trying to adjust to your ....’” He rebelled then, and continues through his even-handed irreverence in BUG, a bomb that should go off in everyone’s consciousness about being deaf and Deaf.
Set in the days of small, local banks when embarrassing entrepreneurs were the one family in town who bought a new car every year—those cars everyone else called ‘gunboats—and the bad guys came with black hats, this rollicking send-up of stupid criminals who even Barnie Fife could have outwitted makes for belly-laughs while reading and memories that will bring smiles to readers’ faces.
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