John Martone feels the world around him intensely. Sometimes he uses words to share the intensity of that feeling. Sometimes he uses images. Sometimes he uses combinations of words and image and actual pieces of the world around him. With this collection you'll be able to feel the world around him as if it were the world around you. An excerpt:

—John Martone

24 pages. $10, includes standard shipping within the Continental USA.

Jessica Breheny turns the life of myth inside out by stepping inside and then stretching not just the mind’s eye, but the mind’s arms around what is found there—the myth of life. An excerpt, from WHAT IS WRONG:

The first doctor said it was a virus and the second said it was a parasite. The third said it was bacteria and the fourth said it was inflammatory. All agreed there was a secret hidden inside her body. The secret was so deep that even she didn't know it was there, and the doctors' hands could not press, prod, or palpate it. Only the MRI machine could catch just the greywhite mothwing shadow of it. There were treatments and surgeries the doctors could provide, pills made from the urine of horses, vitamins, tubes. The secret, the doctors said, might eventually have to come out.

—Jessica Breheny

40 pages. $10, includes standard shipping within the Continental USA.

Steve Giasson delivers an amazing document comprising all of the comments to a YouTube posting of the classic shower scene from Hitchcock’s Psycho. At times hilarious and at times terrifying. Nothing short of a snapshot of everything wrong with the internet, and possibly humanity in general. An excerpt:

kthevsd Lame movies ? Kid I like all movies, old films, new films, etc. How is this classic lame ? Have you even ever watched it ? What would some 16 year old teenybopper know about cinema ? You probably have never even heard of Kurosawa and I bet you have never even seen a Daniel Day Lewis or Meryl Streep movie in your life. No wonder everyone laughs at your generations taste in films. 4 days ago markymark93 actually i have seen this movie, and i have seen movies with daniel day lewis AND meryl streep.....so i wouldnt be so quick to judge. how can you say you "like new films" if you've been bashing my generation's movies the whole time? 3 days ago kthevsd @markymark93 If you have seen it than how can you find it lame ? It's an iconic movie. A masterpiece. Everyone bashes the movies of today, some are good(Scorsese movies) but most are mindless(like transformers). If you understand cinema you have to admit the quality of films had drastically gone down. 3 days ago XxINCHAINSxX @markymark93 And whos obsessing over their opinion on youtube? Hmmm...

—Steve Giasson

44 pages. $10, includes standard shipping within the Continental USA.

Carlos Colón breaks this New and Selected collection up into four parts: Haiku, Eyeku, Structured Poetry, and Free Verse Poetry, taking us on an extended inventory of the different kinds of arrows, darts, bolts, and flechettes that should be in every poet’s bandolier. An excerpt:

Where I Wake Up

A dark room
except for the white light
shining on me
on the operating table.

Across
the school yard,
over the fence,
through someone's house
and out the front door . . .
Whoever is chasing me
has lost the trail.

No shackles
on my ankles,
no more hound dogs
howling after me,
no memories
of prison-yard baseball
or selling secrets
for cigarettes.

The funny thing,
the funny thing
about it all
is the dream,
the dream
I never have,
the one where I wake up
from this nightmare.

—Carlos Colón

60 pages. $10, includes standard shipping within the Continental USA.

Peter G Res writes right out on the edge of sense, where hanging on to a thought too too long might leave blisters, where it becomes more important to follow the glint and the glimmer of where the thought leads rather than force it into a predictable furrow. When poetry works, it makes sense in ways that logic will never follow. An excerpt:

So Meditate In Traffic

So I met the kid once
at a porch party

the day I decided to skip class
for coffee he stood
to offer me a free drink

hot black with soy
a small table
stained newspapers
cars and laptops crushed
into oblivion

I dance with my cell phone
call Alexis to break every promise

I won’t be coming back

—Peter G Res

20 pages. $10, includes standard shipping within the Continental USA.

Felino A. Soriano does with words what Jazz does with music. Lines stray, explore, steer, turn, twist, and change but always, always, when you think the way has been lost, aha!, there’s the path we were on, right under our feet. An excerpt:

—after Sam Rivers’ Tranquility

Of inexistence.

Reflection rendered
down into evaporating
blossoms of musicless
aromas. Mostly
as dawn opens into
unwinding scarcity of
philosophic colors, movement
hides and denotes disability,
that of an otherness self-
defined by impressionistic
focus, splayed into directional
mourning, past, purity
absent most relevant now as
topical adulation.

—Felino A. Soriano

47 pages. $10, includes standard shipping within the Continental USA.

Jenny Hill builds a lattice-work from the status updates of her Facebook friends, and constructs a cycle of poems which respond to each as if it were a prompt. The dynamic that results creates a flux-field where the details of the everyday don’t merely gain significance, they earn it. An excerpt:

Ron: I delivered a fucking BABY tonight! Yep, a fucking BABY!!!!!!!!! what did u do today? Nursing school is AWESOME!!!!!!!

Someone asks if it was slimy, another wants
the placenta, most are stumped
at how to comment
on all your exclamation marks.

Your hands are a blueprint,
lines mark where life and love dwell
even though you have a habit
of laughing off the diagnostics
of your own pains and accomplishment.

This morning was a full round
of desertion in the hallways,
like an international festival
of mime and puppetry, white coats
coupled around you, disciplined
in their notes and nods.

Then, democrazy seized the moment,
and you were arrowed
into a deserted tunnel of duty:
Deliver a baby. Hold a child in your hands.
This is not childish, this is the hook,
the page in a book that will gauge
your honor, make you wiser.

—Jenny Hill

48 pages. $10, includes standard shipping within the Continental USA.

Tantra Bensko produces texts which skim along the liminal, stitching together scrims of the thin business of the daily. This book is a blend of fiction, poetry, and photographs working together to contain both the reality of the surreal and the surreality of the real. An excerpt:

from The Terrace Steps

The rest of the story shall go unexplained, but the steps were the first token of my affection for the birds, and we shall end there. They became being. Nothing else really mattered at the time, and the steps were the most beautiful rocks I could find in the quarries of the imagination, the shapes being suggestive of alterations in the seamless. The rocks never spoke to me directly, but they called to me in another time, and often their names were apparent in a kind of transparent liquid sensation that would take me over each time I discovered a name I couldn't understand in words.

—Tantra Bensko

52 pages. $10, includes standard shipping within the Continental USA.

Matthew Hinton takes us ten rounds with two titans who could have, possibly should have, but actually never did fight: Norman Mailer and Chet Baker. A play that is a must read for anyone who loves to imagine “What if?” An excerpt:

(Lights up on an intimate jazz scene: small table/bar near center. BARKEEP hands a seated NM a drink. A fight bell is struck twice, and BARKEEP, a well dressed referee, struts across stage with a card that reads "Round 1". Bell sounds once. A trumpet solo can be heard ending offstage, followed by applause. Enter CB with his horn. BARKEEP presents CB with a drink.)

                    NM

CB.

(CB doesn’t react.)

                    NM

I say, CB!

(CB remains silent.)

                    NM

Tough crowd tonight? Hey! It's me ... NM?

                    CB

Are you talking to me? That ain't my name.

                    NM

Yeah, I've been calling you. I've said "CB, CB!" at least two, maybe three times.

                    CB

That's not my name.

                    NM

Ten times, at least. Is my voice off tonight or something?

                    CB

But that ain't me, babe.

                    NM

(The word "babe" startles him - he eyes CB. Beat.)

Me neither.

                    CB

What about the crowd?

                    NM

Tough. A tough bunch of gangsters. Regular hoods.

                    CB

Oh, I didn't realize -

                    NM

Good company. Comrades. Familia Cosanostra. Fellow hoods.

                    CB

You're a hood?

                    NM

You'd better believe it, baby.

                    CB

Cute.

                    NM

The hell it is! This is serious! Here, CB ... imagine I'm a shylock and gaze upon my baubles, baby.

(NM produces several empty gun shells.)

                    CB

Where'd you get those, NM.

                    NM

Guess.

                    CB

Sounds like footsie with the devil.

(NM slugs CB. Teeth pour out of CB's mouth - landing in drink glasses, on both men, the floor, etc. Fight bell rings. CB exits as BARKEEP walks with sign that reads "ROUND 2". Bell. Same offstage trumpet, audience applause. Enter CB.)

—Matthew S. Hinton

24 pages. $10, includes standard shipping within the Continental USA.

Martha Deed goes where no poet has gone before. Combining cut-up and court transcript, oscillating deftly back and forth between textual poetry and visual poetry, adopting voice after effective voice, she brings us a gut-punch orb of truth where only the names have been changed, though the innocent remain unprotected. A video trailer for the book is at her website. A text excerpt:

Poppycock

Leave your common sense
outside the door
do not speculate
what I say is not evidence
the judge will instruct you on the law
when I shout at the murder victim's mother
do not hold it against me
or take it out on my client sitting here
in prison pallor, gray suit and tie
so you will not know he is in custody
I am only doing my job
even a dead child’s mother can lie
wouldn't you agree and her lies
could put my client behind bars
his freedom is at stake his innocence
so important I will tell you what to think
which facts you should ignore
do not speculate I say
leave your common sense
outside the door

—Martha Deed

48 pages. $10, includes standard shipping within the Continental USA.

Kristen McHenry brings us a collection of poems that open up like a velvet bag of marbles. Here is a steely, here a cat’s eye, here an aggie, here a clearie, here an alley, here a princess, here a galaxy. Anyone who thinks you can’t pack both breadth and depth into a chapbook will be disproven by this collection. An excerpt:

THE GOATFISH ALPHABET

For so long they’ve pitied
our sickly alphabet—
words thick as thugs
in our throats’ brown gloaming.

They’ve felt us dumbstruck
fighting loamy bloats of lung,
page-frightened, speakfevered.

So the goatfish have toiled
with rock-teeth and fins.
They’ve eaten
miracle characters
into coral and sea stone,
weed and drowned ship.

When we are slug-muffled
half-dead with unspoke,
they will lead us
to their cryptic kingdom
and unveil the Goatfish Alphabet:

A language for the redemption
of failsay and tongue-muzzle.
Every never-said will come.

Life will be so different then—
there will be words to drizzle like silver tea,
words to pluck like fruitbells.

All will be leapspeak,
sung.

—Kristen McHenry

36 pages. $10, includes standard shipping within the Continental USA.

Wendel Scutti brings us a short story which begins with a positive pregnancy test and ends with, well, what sort of a teaser would this be if we told you where it ends? This is an exploration of the dichotomy of singularity and connection, and a story that worries out the complications of a single thread. An excerpt:

Now Nancy pauses, listens to the droning sound of passing cars and inhales the faint scent of exhaust fumes. There is an entire generation lost to this city, Nancy thinks: Aborted children of women like me. Former suburban girls who arrive by bus with a few hundred dollars and vague artistic aspirations. Twenty-somethings who find the only thing they can afford is a studio apartment in some marginal, really dangerous neighborhood. Childish women who just barely survive but who are too stubborn to give up and leave. Girls who feel lonely and drink too much and miss their periods then calculate days and dollars, knowing they will be unable to rely on the casual friend or boyfriend who is too focused on his own struggles to help in any real way.

—Wendel Scutti

28 pages. $10, includes standard shipping within the Continental USA.

endwar has put together a collection of ultra-minimalist poems that don’t just look at language, they catch language in the act of looking back at us. And then they wink. It is impossible to apply one single term to the range of work in this collection. It is at times concrete, at times typoem, at times visual poem, at times conceptual poem, at times typewriter poem, but at all times it is poetry at its finest. A review and an example:

(
my
hand
remembers
 
the shape
of your
hand
)

     —endwar

60 pages. $10, includes standard shipping within the Continental USA.

Neil Ellman brings us a collection of Ekphrastic poems written in response to and in furtherance of the surreal in art. Titles refer interested readers to the works the poems responded to, but the poems stand firmly on their own and can be appreciated by all readers regardless of familiarity with the art invoked. An excerpt:

Love Parade
(Francis Picabia, oil on canvas, 1917)

When machines fall in love
There are few complaints
Only the wonder that their circuits spark.

There are no questions
Of polarity or cultural class
Mechanical differences so slight
That they cannot be engineered
Or how they would raise their young.

They take a vow
Like the rest of us-
I do take thee to be my mate
To have and to hold
In sickness and in health
Till death do us part
Knowing that death is rust
As it is with the rest of us.

They raise families, go to church
Where they worship an electrical god
Who gave them life
And the promise of not being
Stripped, disassembled and junked.

They work and seldom sleep
Devote their lives to the greater good
Face the usual dilemmas of their kind
And ours.

They grow old and their armatures creak
And then they die
Just like the rest of us.

—Neil Ellman

28 pages. $10, includes standard shipping within the Continental USA.

Kellar Wilson doesn’t bend language, and he doesn’t break it. He refashions it, reforges it, reforms it, and in the process strengthens its ability to communicate. An excerpt:

In Sane Relations And Showers II

What an incredible advance it would be
                                 to be
                            able to
               at a glance tell
if the psychosis of [the thing]
was compatible with your own.
 
Attractions gaining momentum
in all their dynamic senses
the closer one gets
    /to a decision/.
 
Glossing over (in this rush) non-trivial details
and thus, upon entering (that first time)
[things] ripple cold
(with papers signed
                     /unclothed and revealed/
two seconds too late)
 
/just after
(that crucial) nick of time/

—Kellar Wilson

60 pages. $10, includes standard shipping within the Continental USA.

Carol Clark Williams takes as her starting point the limberness of language and the obstacle course of the daily. By working, working, working at the knots, she is able to carefully unravel them without breaking the silver links. An excerpt:

Too Far Off to See the Wizard

A half life spent
hiding under windows
so no one can see
she holds long imaginary dialogues
with therapists her husband says
they can't afford to see
her skin draws thin over hollowing
wrist bone like the knob on the shift
in a Chevy where he ran his hands over
her shrinking body down below
the car windows she crouches
on the kitchen floor in the corner
so no one can see
she's home in the mean time
he puts his shoulder to the wheel
drives himself to work hands over
his paycheck accidentally
loses the mortgage payment
somewhere along the pavement
the key to owning their home
has tread marks on the envelope
the postage stamp in the corner
frays and flaps finally detaches
is whisked away in widening circles
on a listless wind as she is as he is
as time snaps like a high strung little dog
yapping at their run-down heels

—Carol Clark Williams

40 pages. $10, includes standard shipping within the Continental USA.

Candace Kaucher takes the line, the thread of a thought, and teases out all individual microfibers that can come loose, dips each end in the stuff that turns metal rods into sparklers, then lights them all and writes down the song the sizzle makes. An excerpt:

Some days you are trapped.
Some days you are not.
All the days are the same.
So are you but you're too stupid
to know the difference.
Relativity equalizes grandiosity.
Anomalies are all local events,
All the songs on the radio
say the same thing:
whatever you are feeling.
Injustice started in grade school
when I crossed the street against the rules.
All hurt has been the same
ever since.

—Candace Kaucher

56 pages. $10, includes standard shipping within the Continental USA.

Jennifer Hill has performed a tour de force of incomparable compactness. 36 Holiday Fictions (one for each of the possible plots in all of literature) in 140 characters each, in which the letter L never appears. Twisted and wrong and completely delightful all rolled together in red velvet trimmed in white. The perfect book for anyone who loves or hates the holidays. An excerpt:

Sacrifice of Loved Ones

The daughter recovered from her Christmas fever. “Nutter has to go,” her mother said as she washed the barf from the stuffed chipmunk’s ear.

—Jennifer Hill

40 pages. $10, includes standard shipping within the Continental USA.

Eileen R. Tabios brings us a numbered sequence of prosepoem Synopses that strike the mind’s eye like an oil-filled kaleidoscope. Patterns merge and emerge in shifting repetitions that succeed in what all poetry attempts: to cover more ground than they should have been able. An excerpt:

from Synopsis #7

It transcends the feminine gesture. [Consolation defined as the bat never reappeared]. She totters on ice despite thick ankles. [By his face, one can tell he’s about to deliver the boot.] He has a gaze like a mirror. [There is nothing like an infant tugging on a daddy’s white whiskers.] “Sulpicia, a Roman woman writer, wrote elegies in Latin that had been attributed to Tibullus.” [Whatever. True love is never chaste.]

—Eileen R. Tabios

16 pages. $10, includes standard shipping within the Continental USA.

Michael Aro’s poems speak with the voice of authority that is the natural by-product of a learning that runs both deep and wide. To read his writing is to understand that language is, indeed, the software which runs on the wetware of our brains. An excerpt:

5.

I shave him each day with shaving cream and a
Safety razor, cutting carefully around the
Surgical tape that holds the oxygen
Against his face. His face is fallen and his skin
Is wrinkled but very soft. I am careful not to cut him.
That is not to say I never cut him.
Love is not perfect.
I pull the skin tight under his neck and sometimes
Shave him twice, hoping it will help make him
Comfortable in his deep dream of life.
At other times I sit in the chair beside his bed
And read to him.
I have no mother, husband or children
To take away my time.
I have a job I need to keep.
It may only be for a few more days I am told
And then they will unplug him.
He will gather up his soul around him like a coat
And smiling to himself at his own simple humor
Leave without saying a single word,
As if that were the point of everything.

—Michael Aro

58 pages. $10, includes standard shipping within the Continental USA.