Sheryl H. Simler | Parenthesis

Not unlike Emily Dickinson’s poetry, many of the poems in this collection also seem to be important for what they purposely do not say; the spaces between the lines demand thought, and then you think again while reading the line.

—Dr. Alfred Dorn, director of The World Order of Narrative and Formalist Poets, former Vice President of the Poetry Society of America

Whether sharing a story, amusing us, or asking important questions, Simler’s striking poetry often has an eye for the urban, and always an ear to the heart.

—Patricia Kelly, poet, Tarotphile and blogger

With her direct style, sly humor, and subtle warmth, Sheryl H. Simler takes you places you thought you’d been before and makes you look again.

—Sondra Audin Armer

PARENTHESIS
by Sheryl H. Simler
soft cover/saddle stitched/12 pp.
$6.25 (+ $1.50 S&H)





Credit: Israel Fishman

Sheryl H. Simler is a poet, monologist, singer-songwriter, actor, artist and natural foods chef from New York City. As a graduate of New York University’s School of Social Work, her poetry often reflects upon “the ways of the world” and its inhabitants. She studied the craft of writing poetry at The Hudson Guild with Sondra Audin Armer, and has been a featured poet and singer at most of the popular reading series in N.Y.C., including television and radio programs. During the past twenty years her poems have been published in over thirty literary journals and anthologies.

Entanglement West 4th Street subway couple    out of luck:            his green Mohawk,                   caught      in her pierced eyebrow ring,               halts                        their parting kiss.

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Jee Leong Koh | Payday Loans

Jee Leong Koh in NYC at The Back Fence on January 15, 2006 (Video by Roxanne Hoffman)

GOOD NEWS

Jee Leong Koh's poem “Brother”, originally appearing in Ledge Magazine, has been selected by Natasha Trethewey for Meridian magazine's 2007 Best New Poets, an anthology to be published by the University of Virginia Press. Each year, Best New Poets sponsored by Meridian and Samovar Press features the work of fifty emerging poets selected from nominations by writing programs, literary magazines, and an Open Internet Competition.

Smart, irreverent, often unnerving, these sonnets smirk, smile, argue and bless. Jee Leong Koh has taken a month of days and rendered a very contemporary version of the artist as a young man. Cash in your paycheck and buy this book.

— Marie Howe

...this book refreshes our sense of what can be done in a traditional form when the poet uses his wits and has the wit of Jee Leong Koh.

— George Held

Click here to read Held's entire review for Home Planet News



PAYDAY LOANS
by Jee Leong Koh
soft cover/saddle stitched/30 pp.
$10.00 (+ $1.50 S&H)




Credit: Jee Leong Koh

In 2006 the Singaporean government banned the reading of his poem, “Come on, straight boy, and make gay love with me” (from this book) at ContraDiction, the second national gay pride poetry reading. The ban makes Jee Leong Koh out to be more dangerous than he is. Born in Singapore, he read English at Oxford University and studied creative writing at Sarah Lawrence College. His poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Singaporean anthologies and American journals such as Crab Orchard Review, The Ledge and The Gay & Lesbian Review Worldwide. Based now in New York City, he blogs at http://jeeleong.blogspot.com.

Click my Hypster player to hear me read selections from my chapbook and discuss the book on Art Waves with Host Anne Cammon. (Originally aired on WKCR 89.9 FM NY on Friday August 24, 2007 at 9PM EST.)



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April 10, Sunday My love is curling dumbbells to his chest because he thinks I don’t love him enough and since he thinks I don’t love him enough my love is curling dumbbells to his chest. I turn the page of a flesh mag, obsessed with groping bodies beautiful and buff. Groping for bodies beautiful and buff, I turn the page of the flesh mag, obsessed. My love is groping dumbbells to his chest to turn his body beautiful and buff because he thinks I don’t love him enough since I am curling the flesh mag. Obsessed, my love is curling as I turn the page, because he thinks I love a beautiful image.

April 11, Monday I pound and pound this what-do-you-call-it, Elliptical, EFX546, pumping the body all that chemical shit, shooting morning its new daily fix, instead of pondering over a new sonnet: a little song to turn the body cold; a debt requiring its pound of meat; a Mini made from an injection mold. It’s true I haven’t moved although I’ve run 3 miles and, like my writing, I’m as far from what the mind wants and the mirror sees, and though it’s true I pound like everyone on these mass-produced wheels, my chariot-car signals I’ve lost four hundred calories.

Austin Alexis | Lovers and Drag Queens

Wow. You have a winner with Austin Alexis. What a wonderful poet, and what an elegant, simple, lovely book.

—Mary Orovan, former Features Editor of US Camera Magazine, photographer, poet and writer.

...a clear-eyed, queer exploration of urban characters and dilemmas from the perspective of the talented African-American New York Poet, playwright, and fiction writer, Austin Alexis. In free verse and prose poems, Alexis offers an enticing palette of ordinary and outré people who populate New York...a fine chapbook, well worth perusing.

—Small Press Review by Clifton Snider,

Author of The Alchemy of Opposites

(Chiron Review Press, 2000)

Click here to read Sniders's entire review for Small Press Review



LOVERS AND DRAG QUEENS
by Austin Alexis
soft cover/saddle stitched/12 pp.
$6.25 (+ $1.50 S&H)

Austin Alexis's poetry, fiction and non-fiction have appeared in a variety of anthologies, journals, magazines and newspapers including Barrow Street, The Journal, The Writer, The Pedestal Magazine and online at Poetz.com. His theatre, dance and film reviews have been published in the The Arts Cure (formerly New York Dance Fax) and have been translated into Japanese. His plays have been performed in New York City, and one was selected for the Samuel French Short Plays Festival. He is the recipient of a Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference Scholarship, a Virginia Center for the Creative Arts Scholarship, as well as residency fellowships from the Millay Colony for the Arts and Dorset Colony House. He has performed his poetry at The Back Fence, The Glines Theatre, La Mama La Galleria, The New York Public Library, as well as on WBAI and WBAU, among other venues. Austin has taught creative writing at Hunter College’s Continuing Education Program and has taught and tutored at The College of New Rochelle, Empire State College and Long Island University. He has worked on the staff of Queens College Library and the Lincoln Center Library for the Performing Arts. Currently, he lives in Manhattan and teaches at New York City College of Technology (CUNY) in Brooklyn.

Brain Waves The person you can’t forget who comes to you at 3:00 a.m. who floats over the barriers of many miles, multiple rivers. The serene, eager face you think you just might love flash-appears in your mind or seeps into your head. So a chime via air waves infiltrates silence. You are a city; that person: the suburbs: attached, inseparable, circling, circling your home, your room, your bed at 3:30 a.m., at 4. You can’t, want to, don’t want to escape.

Austin Alexis at Bowery Poetry Club in NYC on New Year's Day 2008
[Video Credit: Roxanne Hoffman, Poets Wear Prada]

Peter Chelnik | Paradise Highway

Peter Chelnik in NYC at The Cornelia Street Cafe on November 14, 2007 (Video by Roxanne Hoffman)

Peter Chelnik continues his quest of the American Dream on his highway of language in a style evocative of that true American Art, Jazz He forges this highway concrete image by concrete image, and his voice is not only fiercely brave, but also one of powerful affirmation.

—Laura Boss, editor of Lips, author of

Arms: New and Selected Poems

PARADISE HIGHWAY
Poems by Peter Chelnik
soft cover/saddle-stitched/12 pp.
$6.25 (+ $1.50 S&H)

His latest collection, Paradise Highway, takes the reader on a journey down the mythic roads of the contemporary American landscape. These poems will resonate with Chelnik’s most loyal fans, and provide newcomers the ideal introduction to this unique American voice.

—Sara Liebling, Disney Publishing Worldwide

Credit: David Elsasser

Peter Chelnik’s books include Railroad Heart, East Coast Line, Manhattan Wilderness, Eternity Road and Wildflower Serenade. He has had seven plays produced Off-Off-Broadway. These dramatic works include Street Rag, Prairie Fire, Parking Lot, Moving Target, Scarsdale Station and Tremont Vortex.

Peter has also written Trick Bag, a novel of the 1960's. And yes, he does believe "the word will set you free."

BOHEMIAN HOWL Bohemian Howl Fringe cats like gyroscope spin Memphis blues guitar pickers grace like sweet Austin, Texas outback January pasture. Bohemian Howl Touch sky clean and sober flannel dream, wide poets Cincinnati smiles, Newark, New Jersey stretch canvas, acrylic multicolor paradise, Tuesday afternoon silver rain. Miles Davis be-bop trumpet genius. Bohemian Howl Change calico America Harlem after school purple mythic tutors, National Public Radio morning Burlington, Vermont black coffee crescendo, Joan’s Drum tobacco roll, Santa Fe cool bop. Bohemian Howl Maple syrup social justice, straight back cod fish opportunity Pakistani taxi drivers Manhattan food on table heroics.

Susan Maurer | Raptor Rhapsody

For quite some years, Susan Maurer has had her incredible poems published across the United States and abroad. How great to have many of these poems collected in this one lovely volume.— Bill Kushner, Author of He Dreams of Waters, Night Fishing, Head, and Love Uncut.

This is one honest broad and it shows in her work. Brilliant!
— Brigid Murnaghan, Beat Poet & Curator of the Sunday Afternoon Reading Series at The Back Fence, NYC.

It's both innocent and passionate…a beautiful book.— Mil Thompson, Analyst and Editor

RAPTOR RHAPSODY
by Susan Maurer
soft cover/saddle stitched/13 pp.
$8.00 (+ $1.50 S&H)
Gifted and surprising.
— Nelson Lyon, Writer for Saturday Night Live, Writer & Director of The Telephone Book, Co-Producer with Hal Willner of William S. Burroughs’ Spoken Word CD album Dead City Radio

The overall tone of the book is wry, jaunty, ironic, and stoic--a fresh and original voice.— Robert Kramer, Home Planet News

Click here to read Kramer's complete review in the Fall 2007 issue of Home Planet News

Credit: Patricia Carragon

Susan Maurer’s By the Blue Light of the Morning Glory was published by Linear Arts, in2 with Mark Sonnenfeld by Marymark Press, and Dream Addict by Backwood Broadsides. Letterpress broadsides were done by Clamshell Press and The Center for Book Arts.

Her poetry has been nominated three times for Pushcart, published in 12 countries, and has appeared in over 400 magazines and anthologies, including Off the Cuffs (Softskull Press), Help Yourself! (Autonomedia), Virgina Quarterly Review, Literary Imagination, Cross Connect, and Orbis.

She participated in a Rattapalax CD and posed and read for photographer Anna Siano's INSIDE-OUT Photography & Poetry Project showcased at Hoboken’s 2006 Artists Studio Tour.

She has read at Poets House, St. Marks’ Poetry Project, Bowery Poetry Club, on the Brooklyn Bridge with the Unbearables, as well as at the National Arts Club, Harvard Coop, Barnes and Noble Booksellers and the Susquehanna Art Museum among other venues.

Stradivarius You are our instrument. I dial the number hand you the telephone. You tell me he says “I got your letter,” You chuckle, repeat. He “And I forgive you.” And he asks “Is Anthony there?” And I say “I did him twice last night” and you convulse with laughter, say “No you didn’t.” And he says “There’ll be reprisals.” And I want you to tell him the turkey was good but you two begin talking of other things. You’re playing our song.

Click my Hypster playlist to hear my interview & reading on Anne Cammon's Art Waves originally aired on WKCR 89.9 FM NY, Friday August 24, 2007 at 9PM EST.

Click here for more information about the songs
Click here to create your own MySpace Playlist

Susan Maurer at Bowery Poetry Club in NYC on New Year's Day 2008 [Video Credit: Roxanne Hoffman]



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John J. Trause | Seriously Serial

GOOD NEWS: WOOD-RIDGE (Dec. 27, 2007) — Wood-Ridge Memorial Library’s director, John Trause, has a new book of his own to add to his library’s shelves. Trause released his latest collection of poetry, entitled “Seriously Serial” on Dec. 3.

— Dana Rapisardi, The Leader

Click here to read Reporter Dana Rapisardi's interview of John J. Trause that appeared in the New Jersey paper The Leader on December 27th, 2007

SERIOUSLY SERIAL
Poems by John J. Trause
Soft Cover, Saddle Stitched, 22pp
$8.00 (+ $1.50 S&H)

John Trause is unique: a classicist who loves pop. His poems capture our desire to mock and at the same learn every juicy detail of pseudo-celebrity (Edie Sedgwick, Doris Duke, Gov. McGreevey) with all the classical style of Plato writing about Atlantis. He is our generation's undiscovered T.S. Eliot.

—David Silverman, author of Typo: The Last American Typesetter or How I Made and Lost 4 Million Dollars (Soft Skull Press, 2007).

Don't trust the adverb in the title. You never can tell if John is serious or not. His deeply shallow poems are simultaneously extravagant and poker-faced.

—Mark Swartz, author of Instant Karma (City Lights Books, 2002) and H₂O (Soft Skull Press, 2006).

These poems are the ideal mixture of gravitas and fun. Trause is able to encompass doubt, and art, the Holy Land, celebrity and much more in these refined lyrics. The spirit of play moves through even the most serious of these poems.

—Matthew Rohrer, author of Rise Up (Wave Books, 2007).

Credit: Jill Greenberg

JOHN J. TRAUSE, the Director of the Wood-Ridge Memorial Library in Wood-Ridge, N.J. since 2000, has been writing and reciting his poetry for 25 years. The Serials Librarian (seriously) at the Museum of Modern Art Library from 1991 to 2000, and a participant in The MoMA Strike of 2000, he has been an active part of the NYC art scene as well as an avid devotee of avant-garde public raucousness. His poetry, translations, and visual work have appeared in Cover, Global City Review, Parse, Radix, The Rift, Now Culture, Sensations Magazine, The North River Review, The Troubadour, Xavier Review, the artists' periodical Crossings published by the Brooklyn Waterfront Artists Coalition, as well as on-line at ThePedestalMagazine.com and Sidereality.com, and is forthcoming in Sulphur River Review. His monumental performance poem “Ishtar Redux” was staged in spring 2001 at the renovated Loews Theatre on Journal Square in Jersey City, N.J., and his “Latter-Day Litany and Other Pseudo-Hagiographica” has had a number of revivals after its New York debut in 1998, most recently at the Bickford Theatre at the Morris Museum, Morristown, N.J. in late autumn 2004. In 2005 and again in 2006, Mr. Trause was featured in the Visible Word at Stevens Institute, Hoboken, N.J. which paired poets with visual artists. In 2005, he co-founded the William Carlos Williams Poetry Cooperative in Rutherford, N.J., where he continues to serve as programmer and host. Aside from his professional interest in literature and the arts, Mr. Trause also enjoys film, dance, juggling, hiking, Chinese footbinding, and Afrin® nasal spray. In his adolescence, he modeled for the monolithic sculptures on Easter Island.

Anthony Joel Lee He manifested himself amid the manifestos of the Nuyorican, slender and tender, a reed bent but not broken at the confluence of the Red and Assiniboine, muddy waters of Winnipeg, weathered by life along the Hudson. By the waters of the Passaic dashing on the rocks below, you rock. By the lazy currents of Tan-shui and Chi-lung, you rock. By the Narrows of Saint John’s, you rock and flow and go with the flow, cyber-singing on the ethernet, here now, now gone, there in that bit of cybertext silent, there in the flickering still, evanescing here now, in the stillness, ethereal there tuning to the music of the spheres.

JOHN J. TRAUSE RAPS IN MIDDLE ENGLISH [Video Credit: David Silverman]

John J. Trause doing "The Canterbury Rap" with Zayid Blackmore
at the 40th birthday party of Donald Zirilii on Sunday, July 30, 2006.
John has been performing this since 1981
(YouTube.com, October 10, 2006)

Michael Montlack | THE SLIP

With pitch-perfect pacing and an intimate colloquial voice, THE SLIP reads as engagingly novelistic even as these memoiristic vignettes are untamed by wit and scathing humor. Ouch. The poems are at once revealing yet winningly imaginative as they reignite myth—there’s even a bisexual Orpheus here who helps Montlack to rewrite the past while instructing, bruising, and exposing suburbia’s lingering melancholy.

—PETER COVINO, author of Cut Off the Ears of Winter, winner of PEN/America Osterweil Prize

The many moods of THE SLIP, from fabulous to funny to frenetic, announce the arrival of a promising new voice that can express, with consummate sensitivity and verve, the sorrows and celebrations of our complicated queerness. When Michael Montlack writes, he can make us sing or break our hearts. Each poem is a veritable “kiss of the artist”—passionate and memorable.

—Rigoberto González, author of Other Fugitives and Other Strangers

Michael Montlack's THE SLIP situates us in the middle of a life, threading together joys and sorrows. Some of the comic moments will truly make you laugh out loud. And at times, you'll get horribly wistful. Such is the richness of this collection.

—D. A. Powell, author of Chronic

THE SLIP
by Michael Montlack
ISBN 978-0-9841844-2-2
soft cover/saddle stitch/32 pp.
$10.00 (+ $1.50 S&H)




Photo Credit: Nicolas Arellano

Michael Montlack is the editor of the essay anthology My Diva: 65 Gay Men on the Women Who Inspire Them (University of Wisconsin Press, 2009) and the author of two other poetry chapbooks: Cover Charge (Winner of the 2007 Gertrude Prize) and Girls, Girls, Girls (Pudding House, 2008).

Carol Wierzbicki | Top Teen Greatest Hits

Wierzbicki's poems are like early Corso, before the Beats, when he got straight to the point quickly, with great beauty. Her words carry the necessary freight with terrific speed and economy--look how spare and yet terribly lovely "Dorothy's Poem" is--it breaks your heart with absolute efficiency. If poetry is to proceed into the future with any sort of relevancy, this is one way it might do so.

—RON KOLM, co-author of Neo Phobe (with Jim Feast)

Carol Wierzbicki’s TOP TEEN GREATEST HITS is a big hit. In each of her fourteen poems, Ms. Wierzbicki mastered the technique of storytelling through perception and simplicity—her rite of passage to be read and shared by all.

—PATRICA CARRAGON, author of Journey to the Center of My Mind, and host of the Brownstone Poets Reading Series

To read the rest of Ms. Carragon's review in the January 2010 edition of GENTLY READ LITERATURE please follow the link to:
http://gentlyread.wordpress.com/2010/01/01/the-regrettable-passage-patricia-carragon-on-carol-wierzbickis-top-teen-greatest-hits/


TOP TEEN GREATEST HITS
Poems by Carol Wierzbicki
ISBN 978-0-9817678-7-1
soft cover/saddle stitch/15 pp.
$8.00 (+ $1.50 S&H)

Photo Credit: Pieter van Hattem

Carol Wierzbicki has run poetry reading series at ABC No Rio and elsewhere in New York City. Her work has been published in Long Shot, The Cafe Review, Public Illumination, and Evergreen Review, and in the Unbearables anthologies Unbearables (1995), Crimes of the Beats (1998), and Help Yourself! (2002), published by Autonomedia. She also is an editor of the Unbearables anthology, The Worst Book I Ever Read (Autonomedia). She compiled and edited Stories from the Infirmary (Universal Publishers,1999), an anthology of fiction and poetry on chronic illness. Her book reviews have appeared in The Brooklyn Rail and American Book Review.

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David Elsasser | Last Call

Poetry again prevails – the subject this time,
coping with time and our mortality. Elsasser has
accomplished some beautifully written and
memorable work here, weaving words about the
waxing of our years and waning of our bodies,
and where it leaves us.

—EVIE IVY, The First Woman Who Danced
and Dinner With The Muse,
the Anthology of the Green Pavilion Poetry Event

David Elsasser's a dangerous poet. His art is
patient observation of what happens when time
passes and we are not looking. He nails it “past
where rails meet.” What images! Watch your
back, these rites of passage are not for children.

—GEORGE SPENCER, Co-host of the Phoenix
Reading Series

LAST CALL
by David Elsasser
ISBN 978-0-9817678-8-8
(soft cover/saddle stitched/30 pp.)
$8.00 (+ $1.50 S&H)



Photo Credit: Su Polo

David M. Elsasser co-hosts the weekly Saturn Series poetry reading in Manhattan. LAST CALL celebrates his generation’s present moment of deliberation.

Open publication - Free publishing - More poetry

Karen Neuberg | DETAILED STILL

“A trigonometry of sensation, a performance of hands” leads the reader through this sweeping, elegiac sequence of poems. And like Muybridge’s freeze-frames, this sequence slows the locomotion of regret and awe, allowing the reader to become witness to the mechanism of remembrance. These poems seem not written, but conjured, as if imprinted by a mind alive to the “tiny, Zen-bell voice,” insisting that questions reveal more than answers.

—DEAN KOSTOS, Author of The Sentence That Ends with a Comma, and
Last Supper of the Senses

Karen Neuberg’s marvelous accomplishment in DETAILED STILL is that each poem is like a tiny mirrored room that reflects and refracts experience, evoking all the complications of memory and desire. Her gift is to find the connection between feeling and thought; each poem takes place in a synapse between brain and body, curiously both abstract and concrete simultaneously. Time is this poet’s subject, and how desire is quickened or lost over time, and how we understand that only through memory. What a welcome debut this is for our American poetry.

—MOLLY PEACOCK, Author of The Second Blush (WW Norton, 2008)

DETAILED STILL
by Karen Neuberg
ISBN 978-0-9817678-6-4
soft cover/saddle stitched/18 pp.
$8.00 (+ $1.50 S&H)

Photo Credit: Alan Neuberg

Karen Neuberg’s poems have appeared in several journals and anthologies including Barrow Street, 42Opus, Boxcar Poetry Review, Columbia Poetry Review, Louisville Review, Stirring, and Riverine, An Anthology of Hudson Valley Writers (Codhill Press). A Pushcart and Best of the Net Nominee, she holds an MFA from the New School and is an associate editor for Inertia Magazine. She lives with her husband in Brooklyn, NY and West Hurley, NY.

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Maria Lisella | Two Naked Feet

In a quietly seductive voice Lisella takes the reader on journey after journey, to exotic locales like Havana, Venice and Dubrovnik, places steeped in myth and bloodshed. With crystalline descriptions reminiscent of Elizabeth Bishop, she mixes the haunted elegance of the old world and the disturbed consumerism of the new. TWO NAKED FEET is brilliantly wired with the tension of paradox. It is about exile and the movement of peoples, the destruction and pastiche of cultures, the chasm between the idealized world and the colloquial one. Lisella writes with depth and simplicity. Her “I” rarely steps outside of the observing eye to become autobiographical, and yet the poems are remarkable for their passion.

—STEPHANIE DICKINSON
Award-winning author of Half Girl and Road of Five Churches

TWO NAKED FEET
by Maria Lisella
ISBN 978-0-9841844-1-5
soft cover/saddle-stitched/24 pp.
$8.00 (+ $1.50 S&H)


Photo Credit: Stillman Rogers

Maria Lisella is Program Coordinator for the IAWA readings at the Cornelia St. Café, and is co-editing an anthology based on those readings. She lives in Long Island City and was a finalist in the competition for Poet Laureate of Queens in 2007. A longtime travel writer, she currently edits a national travel trade magazine and is a member of the New York Travel Writers Association.

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Open publication - Free publishing - More travel