28 pages, 5.5 x 8.5" paper, hand-bound w/ blue spray of ink on cvr
Price: $10.00
ISBN 978-1-888553-36-9
"Frost Heaves is powerful mediation on grief and reclamation. This is the story of Katherine Crossly, as she assesses her life after a half century of marriage. What happens when a woman realizes that her dreams were not deferred, but stifled before they are even fully imagined? Set against the beautifully drawn landscapes of a small town in Maine, this is the story of a thaw, both literal and metaphorical.
Teresa Stores writes with compassion and insight, finding the inescapable truths hiding in the plain sight--layered over an ordinary life.With vivid details and an original and convincing voice, "Frost Heaves" manages to be both uncompromising and triumphant. Teresa Stores is a beautiful writer and I look forward to seeing her work for years to come."
Chapbook, 30 x 36" when unfolded, folds down like a map, with coffee cup prints on the cover. Yellow or white paper.
Price: $9.00 ISBN 978-1-888553-35-2
"Stephanie Balzer's book of poems is masterful and transporting in its form and in its orchestration of themes. Her handling of the prose poem form transforms the prose “box” into a playground, a diorama. The reader enters the speaker’s imagination of a woman rents a house in a scraggly desert neighborhood as she is absorbed into the vacated rooms of the previous tenant who killed someone before moving out. This tenant and the person he killed are, in turns, the Revenant of the title, the ghost who haunts the speaker, the reader, the book. In this we are confronted with the inner life of a seer, one who survives by way of lyrical resonances with the quotidian human world, one who finds meaning and merit in the other desert we deal with, the stark, often vacated world of faded blue fence, scientific information, weather, groceries, and work. There is humor here, a lively imagination--surprise, movement, heart, heat. Here the caring for others emerges in the desert slowly, as surely and as necessary as the rain. This is a work in which a recognizable local landscape is transformed through the medium of poetry, and we are elsewhere, and grateful, for it."
LA Liminal closely examines what lies beneath the “glatzy” spectacle of Los Angeles. Through the x-ray eyes of a failed Hollywood hopeful, with the advantage of distance and a sharp tongue, the reader gets a guided tour through an internalized, apocalyptic landscape. Transitional places and phases are imagined as both frightening and ripe, capable of producing a space where anxiety and creativity co-habit in the narrated realm of the speaker. Readers will enjoy the dryly personal tone, surprising refractions of language, acute sense of metaphor, and humor. Armed with these, Becca Klaver’s probing meditations and acerbic wit poke a careful hole through the scummy, glittering surface, to put a cocktail-ringed finger right on the humanity beneath it, until LA functions not just as synecdoche for country and national identity, but becomes a trope for personal identity, and more specifically, a feminine identity rebuilt from the wreckage of failure.
“This is really exciting material. Becca Klaver grabs my attention with her use of the city of Los Angeles, and surreal, hyperreal, and reel/ real imagery. This is quite a ride!” — Jane Miller, author of Midnights
In the dark alcove of the potato room, the unexpected blooms. The surrealistic imagery in this strange little book takes the reader on an otherworldly descent where pores open like baby mouths, bones flower, and even the Real is eerily surrealized when the narrator confronts death in the mundane of the supermarket.
This poet’s forceful, startling syntax lends to the kind of Japanese-horror film aesthetic where things just “are:” unexamined, unexplained and we must simply accept them in all their dreadful wonder. The random fascination in antique medical apparati, a Foucauldian rigor, the occasional Absolute, combined with an unfussy flow of bare, vertebral prose and a bizarrely twisted narrative make for an engaging read.
My friends want me to see Juanita. Soon. If you hear a donkey, find the damn donkey. My house a stall in desperate need of a shovel. I barely sleep, books piled on the dining room table, sheaves of computer print-outs. The donkey in myth. The donkey as “other.” I compose, too, or will, a libretto based on Juanita already suggesting itself, sung across a loop of her bray or a computer generated facsimile. And snapshots, donkey-shaped clouds, clouds that looked like they would turn into donkeys before an ear blew off, a muzzle moved left. Images not easy to catch. Here’s a picture of my cat, smiling, after I whispered Juanita three times. I should put the photos in an album or shoebox but I like seeing them when I walk by, Juanita in the sky.
