In one of the prayer-poems compiled in Matt Mauch's Prayer Book, the speaker prays to a rock without coming across as phony. Though essentially secular, there is, in these poems, a gut-level understanding of an individual's turn toward that which is instinctually divine-a rejection of dogma and rules in an attempt to take back something essential: the feeling (rather than the idea) of prayer as hope, prayer as song, prayer as poem. Among the laundromats, VFWs, parking lots, and backyard cookouts-many of the poems occurring in places where urban and natural landscapes meet-are often-humorous portraits of vulnerability warring with a kind of I-don't-want-to-wilt-too-much strength. The various speakers are lying in a ditch, wanting to become a brick in a building, communing with a pigeon, stuck in moments they want to get out of (or get something out of), wandering and wondering when they crave the ability to be arriving and deciding

Prayer Book

Literature & Fiction

Mauch, Matt

Poetry

Lowbrow Press LLC

Tendril of Alabama yet wintry spoke, MC Hyland is attuned to the physical aspect of print and its measured and immeasurable construction and dissemination. Out of text she constructs a poetics of space, evoking films, maps, magazines, homes-things with plots, markers, events. Neveragainland addresses addressing: in one sense epistolary-Dear So and So or Chairman Mao, and in another sense, dialogue with a house that responds. You've built your house/ of words like these. These are spaces in which to play, to dream, to feel at home. -Farrah Field, author of Rising MC Hyland deals with the problem of living in a world wherein emotions & sensations expire immediately as we live them through a process of vigorous reinvention & energetic estrangement. Each moment is fundamentally shaped & recharged by its passage from actual happening to genuine experience. With admirable verbal dexterity matched by the multivalent modes of feeling & thought in evidence, Neveragainland challenges the reader to be brand new. -Nate Pritts, author of The Wonderfull Yeare & founder/editor of H_NGM_N

Neveragainland

Hyland, MC

Brad Liening's poems capture that cuckoo clock moment when the bird comes out and sings of the uneasy comforts of a fecund imagination. Their hunger for transcendence is purposefully comic but no less deep; their slapstick restlessness of consciousness, of what to do with consciousness is devilishly nimble, absurdly heroic and always about the business of the miraculous. This book makes me happy. -- DEAN YOUNG, author of Primitive Mentor and elegy on toy piano The poems in Brad Liening's Ghosts and Doppelgängers offer up a surrealist melting pot full of oozing, bubbling, nightmarish Americana. They sound like Emma Lazarus on acid; like Thomas Paine and Eric Bogosian playing Exquisite Corpse exquisitely; like a young Charles Simic guest hosting TMZ. Through ironic memoirs, political rants, dramatic monologues in the voice of Nicolas Cage and other sizzling larks, Liening pokes fun at the wounded, consumerist megalomaniac in all (or most) of us. Ghosts and Doppelgängers is a fabulous book full of both absurdist pyrotechnics and satirical force. There's a new and complicated beauty here that's "like what you see / when you stare at the sun / with your eyes closed." -- GREGORY LAWLESS, author of I Thought I Was New Here

Ghosts and Doppelgängers

Liening, Brad

The poems in this anthology were read at the inaugural Great Twin Cities Poetry Read in Minneapolis/St. Paul Includes poems by: Richard Robbins, MC Hyland, Joyce Sutphen, Katrina Vandenberg, Paula Cisewski, Kathryn Kysar, William Reichard, Tim Nolan, Cass Dalglish, Jim Lenfesty, James Cihlar, Eric Lorberer, Richard Terrill, Margaret Hasse, Matt Rasmussen, Candace Black, LouAnn Shepard Muhm, Leslier A. Miller, Patricia Kirkpatrick, Gretchen Rueth, Todd Boss, Brad Liening, Morgan Grayce Willow, Greg Hewett And essays, reviews, and interviews by: Matt Mauch, Richard Robbins, MC Hyland, Lynette Reini-Grandell, Kate Shuknecht, Brad Liening, Morgan Grayce Willow, Richard Terrill

Poetry City, USA, Vol. 1: Poems read at the inaugural Great Twin Cities Poetry Read + essays, reviews, interviews

Mauch Editor, Matt

Nicelle Davis’s powerful debut poetry collection, Circe, masterfully chronicles the complex inner life of this all too human enchantress from Greek mythology. Primarily narrated by Circe herself, the book records her post-Odysseus “withdrawal”... Her laments are interrupted and enriched by a series of poems voiced by a bevy of canny and dangerous sirens. Their incantatory “recipes” produce a provocative admixture of visceral wisdom and sensual bravado... Circe is a deeply moving, endlessly inventive, and enlightening exploration into the terrors of abandonment, the ageless plight of aggrieved women, and the bittersweet and sustaining powers of love. Nicelle Davis has given us an entirely new and riveting version of Circe, a woman painfully scorned, whose path towards healing leads her into a greater awareness of herself. —Maurya Simon, author of Cartographies Nicelle Davis’ work emerges from the origins of light and fire, quickly, wildly and with cracks from which tendrils emerge, a longing for sense to be made for those left behind by Odysseus, those sirens, singing gasps of poetry. This poetry wills the reader into a time/space where light burns and language runs off the edge of the world. —Kate Gale, author of Mating Season “To fight the quiet, I talk to my selves,” Circe says. Nicelle Davis’s poems are the manysided chorus of that complicated character: passionate and resigned, angry and forgiving. They shimmer with Circe’s energy and despair, and, most of all, with her love: for her son, for Odysseus, finally even for his wife Penelope. Not least, Davis’s vibrant language is a love song for us, her readers and listeners, “entering me with my eye / in your palm—seeing my face, not / as a void, but a window.” —Dawn Potter, author of How the Crimes Happened “There was never enough about the sirens,” says the foreword to Nicelle Davis’s book of poems, which then remedies that omission by giving voice to the “other woman” of the Odyssey. “I thought love would swallow pain,” says Circe, whose Homeric version turns her enemies into animals. The magic in Nicelle Davis’s poems, however, is the blend of anger, regret, and love that spurs them—the complicated brew that poetry exists to make clear. —Natasha Saje, author of Bend

Circe

Davis, Nicelle

"The only person more dangerous than a dark-hearted man is a dark-hearted man on a sunny day." - Melissa Broder "These poems go one word, one greeting, one feeling to the next. They were written particularly for all of us. They call us to action — to poems of our own and more importantly to HUMAN BEING yesterday, tomorrow, and right now — however difficult it may be, whatever the cost, with joy at the prospect of making a connection." - Matt Hart from Publishers Weekly:"In his fifth collection, Pritts strives for a poetry of urgency—”I know there’s something/ I want desperately/ to say/ so I’m saying it”— his poems hint at what’s at stake when Pritts assembles them into the erratic and formless lines that propel the collection, recalling the rapid-fire lines of Ted Berrigan. In these moments, the poems, having sloughed off their linguistic winks and nods, arrive at a place of vulnerability and sincerity."

Sweet Nothing

Pritts, Nate

"Trancelumination is unlike any other book Ive encountered in American poetry. What a wild and crazy book. What a wonderful book Trapped somewhere between poetry and the wisdom found in Chinese fortune cookies is the territory of the aphorism and John Bradley finds his way there again and again in these brilliant shards that shine like mica in a sidewalk. These are truly a delight to read, to savor, to return to. Ok, its been fun, but now back to wordlessness, John Bradley writes. But, please lets not rush back to wordlessness too soon " -- Jim Moore, author of Invisible Strings "Drop a penny into Trancelumination and receive a fortune scrawled by a teller whose clairvoyance is as clouded as it is terrifying and beautiful. Often drunk on language, these fortunes arrive in the form of aphorism, joke, horror, hallucination, and lie. The reader is warned: dont wear socks spun from human flesh because in this world what feels impossible to bear is a heart-wrenching possibility. It is John Bradleys gigantic imagination that saves and destroys this world (and its fortunes) over and over again." --Sabrina Orah Mark, author of Tsim Tsum John Bradleys aphorisms are mundanely magnificent and nonchalantly sublime, like cracking open a fortune cookie to find not a saying but a symphony orchestra. -James Geary, author of The World in a Phrase: A Brief History of the Aphorism and Gearys Guide to the Worlds Great Aphorists

Trancelumination

Bradley, John.

Poems, reviews, interviews, essays, and other prose on poetry by Kris Bigalk • Tim Nolan • Cullen Bailey Burns • David Mura • Heid E. Erdrich • Jim Redmond • Kyle Adamson • Anh-Hoa Thi Nguyen • Francine Sterle • William Waltz • Sarah Fox • MC Hyland • John Medeiros • Patrick Hicks • Matt Ryan • Caitlin Bailey Thompson • Christopher Title • Scott Vetsch • Courtney Algeo • H.C. Wiederholt • Paige Reihl • Sean Hill • Lynette Reini-Grandell • Sun Yung Shin • Anna George Meek • Paula Cisewski • Sharon Chmielarz • Jim Coppoc • Stacia M. Fleegal • Merle Depasquale • Paul D. Dickinson • Joyce Sutphen • Matt Rasmussen • Gretchen Marquette • Steve Healey • G.E. Patterson • Dean Young • Dobby Gibson • Brad Liening • John Medieros • William Reichard • Matt Mauch • Sharon Chmielarz • Cullen Bailey Burns • Joyce Sutphen • James Cihlar • Morgan Grayce Willow • Regan Smith • Leslie Adrienne Miller • Stacia Fleegal • Cass Dalglish • Tim Nolan • Kathryn Kysar

Poetry City, USA, Vol. 2: Poems read at the second annual Great Twin Cities Poetry Read + essays, reivews, interviews, and other prose on poetry

“We sometimes can browse the world but sometimes we need detail. We need to know the ugly why and the beautiful why. The poetic Queer why is often neglected. I believe this anthology will go someway to uncover and decorate our eclectic and diverse wheres and whys. In these increasingly complex times we need to understand why more.” —Gerry Potter “When we talk about literature, there are tweets and there are three-volume novels. And, selected poems and collected poems and a poem. There are so many different packages for the same energy to travel through. I think post-identity is sort of a zen concept. You know like, “Wake up!” (Smacks hands with a sharp clap). What’s the identity of that moment? What’s the gender of that moment? There are spots where there is no identity whatsoever. But by the nature of who I am or who any of us are we will need to be in groups that resemble us. It’s so crucial to have those identity groups where you gather and are reinforced by your conversations. And don’t live there. Something I’m really interested in is how queer identity is like an immigrant group. We need to find each other at various points to say, “God—Iceland!” But we don’t live in Iceland. I think “post” is a desire to have a little space, but I don’t think it’s a place where you get to stay.” —Eileen Myles

Flicker and Spark: A Contemporary Queer Anthology of Spoken Word and Poetry

Cabico, Regie

Fonte, Brittany

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