“Here is a consummate poet, at the height of her interrogation of language, philosophy, and philology. Barbara Cully is a poet’s poet. She works passionately, without ambition, fanfare, or guile.” — Jane Miller
38 pages, 7 x 12" paper, wire bound on two sides with bookboard backing
TC Tolbert's debut book of poetry uncovers the landscape of life ever in motion. In language flickering with love, loss, and liminality, and with adamantine accuracy, this work bridges many seemingly distant land masses: female and male, girl and boy, music and silence, body and space. Territories embodies the poet's transition “from woman to something less visibly female” and reveals the cyclic journeys of construction, deconstruction, and reconstruction of the person contextualized by an outward societal framework. “Having lived through the funnel both ways,” TC Tolbert acknowledges and bravely challenges traditional schemes of hegemony with a conscious commitment to the unique multiplicity of the self, who is at once (and always) transitory and timeless.
Kore Press announces the release of our 4th annual Short Fiction Award Winner All Sorts of Hunger by Heather Brittain Bergstrom of Yuba City, California. Selected from over 300 contest submissions by Kore Press Judge, novelist, poet, NEH Discovery Award recipient and McArthur Fellow “Genius” Leslie Marmon Silko, All Sorts of Hunger traces the course of a young hooker’s trick-turning living, not on city streets, but through truck stop cafes and small farming towns. All Sorts of Hunger unravels with healing, literary hands the deep rooted web of oppression and underrepresentation that tethers the individuals of the dry, dusty rural Interior West to its abused land. Here, orphaned twenty-one year olds, middle-aged river barge pilots, and Indian cooks in country cafés navigate all the sorts of heartache and hunger that lead them to moments of hopeful, human humility: conversations with ghosts, visions of mothers long passed.
“Readers will return to [Bergstrom’s] words again and again for their sheer artistry, their profound humanity.” -- Carole Simmons Oles, recipient of the Pushcart Prize, NEA Grant for Poetry, and Writer’s Choice Award.
In Kelcey Parker’s tales of twisted domesticity, a woman gives her family up for Lent; a mother finds redemption at Chuck E. Cheese; a former best-friend-forever wreaks baby shower havoc; a bride swallows a housefly at the altar; and a suburbanite’s obsession with “memory books” puts her family in jeopardy. These stories offer a contemporary and dryly funny view of marriage, parenting and loss. Fans of Lorrie Moore and Antonya Nelson will find kinship in Parker’s wit and generosity of spirit. This debut collection marks the appearance of a writer with a new perspective on family, home, and an evolving American subculture.
"If there's a book that can cure what ails us, then it's Kelcey Parker's amazing story collection, For Sale by Owner. These are fantastical, ingenious, deeply imagined and felt stories about the homes, families, jobs, lives that we dream about, that we disappoint and are disappointed by in equal measure. In Parker's hands, our dead ends become something other than dead ends, something hopeful and beautiful and mysterious. Art, in other words. What a first book!"
-- Brock Clarke, author of Exley and An Arsonist's Guide to Writers' Homes in New England
