Echo Her Lovely Bones

Literature & Fiction

Robinson, Sherry

United States

Shadelandhouse Modern Press, LLC

" Marianne Peel takes a reader on a journey of the heart-from Greece and Turkey to Nepal and China, from Ukraine to the US. With passion, curiosity, and a keen eye for detail, Peel introduces readers to places and lives that seem, on the surface, to be far removed from her own. These are people-loving, shattered, joy-filled, and oh so human-with whom Peel shares the intimacy of story, music, and dance. No Distance Between Us is indeed the message, not just for Peel in her travels, but for all of us who are transported with the poet." -Laura Apol, author of A Fine Yellow Dust"Marianne Forman's poems inspired by travel around the world and refugee experience reflect an astonishing awareness of detail, encompassing empathy and transformation. A haunting poetic accomplishment."-Jan Freeman, author of Blue Structure and Simon Says" Marianne Peel's evocative poetry collection travels to faraway places inside a rich diction. Her lyrical tenderness and compassion for humanity reveal a keen eye and an abundance of the heart. Each poem tells a story, and each story tells a truth. Stunning."-Julie Maloney, founder and director of Women Reading Aloud" Peel's pen brings us into a community of wise women and caring men scattered across the globe, in out of the way places. Her book is a rich estuary, a houseboat of stories full of heart. -Jeremy Paden, author of World As Sacred Burning Heart. "From the beautiful to the unimaginable, compassion radiates from 'the underbelly of each word' of No Distance Between Us by Marianne Peel. The author's exquisite storytelling voice brings to life vivid characters with their human joys and heartbreaking struggles. The flavors and beauty of distant lands coexist with sickness, poverty, and tragedy. The poetry in this book opens our hearts 'to let in the light.' To hold each other's hands, and sing. And what brings me to tears the most is the life-changing personal journey of the speaker, the appreciation of each gesture, the generosity extended and received. Thank you, Marianne, for inviting us 'in your country.'"-Katerina Stoykova, author of Second Skin

No Distance Between Us: a journey in poems

Peel, Marianne

Poetry

"The Tillable Land is a heart-racing, heart-breaking lyric, a liberating coming of age for our stunted relationship to all that feeds us."-Rebecca Gayle Howell, Author of American Purgatory and Render/An Apocalypse and Poetry Editor, Oxford American 
In The Tillable Land, Melva Sue Priddy's poetry tells the story of a girlhood made of both land and family in midcentury Kentucky. There is a growing up and a coming of age in these poems. Part memoir-in-verse, part praise song, The Tillable Land-through the story of one woman's hard-won Kentucky life and the physical and emotional work of growing up close to the land in a man's world-reminds us that it is possible to be both a farmer and a woman and that healing can be found in both the earth and the power of Mother Nature within us. "Priddy makes brilliant use of the repetitive, braiding form of the villanelle to convey the relentless cycles of farm work. But somehow, amid this punishing labor, 'another god spoke with [her] . . . and words songed through [her] veins'. She never let go of that singing, and now she offers it to us." George Ella Lyon, Kentucky Poet Laureate, 2015-2016, author of Back to the Light 
" Priddy's The Tillable Land is a double helix of a book. One strand is a story about a family's life-dairy farming and growing tobacco, and also food for the table-beginning with an initial purchase of an unforgiving seventy-acre plot of land that had been deemed untillable. The other strand concerns the oldest daughter who, from a very young age, bears onerous responsibilities both inside and outside a house ruled by a father who believes that children-and women-should be seen and not heard. Because she 'could not be silent' as she matures, her life is marked by the 'tingling numbness' of this past. Robert Frost's 'The land was ours before we were the land's' is a line that maps the trajectory of Melva Sue Priddy's teeming book. This book, often not pretty, formally enacts a winding, unwinding, rewinding journey that leads one woman, buttressed by smarts and beauty, to salvage from memory a place written into her DNA."-Debra Kang Dean, author of Totem: America 
"'The farm raged with run-down fences, ' Priddy tells us early on in The Tillable Land, and 'the family had no such boundaries.' The poet sets those boundaries now, by chronicling a childhood where her father required his small children to do work they had neither the size nor strength to perform. Priddy makes brilliant use of the repetitive, braiding form of the villanelle to convey the relentless cycles of farm work. But somehow, amid this punishing labor, 'another god spoke with [her] and words warm songed through [her] veins.' She never let go of that singing, and now she offers it to us. "-George Ella Lyon, Kentucky Poet Laureate, 2015-2016, author of Back to the Light

The Tillable Land: Poems

Priddy, Melva Sue

"A durable love that celebrates resilience fuels Small Acreages, in essays that range from satire to self-reflection, humor to history. Stamper's clear, graceful style and passion for place bring Wendell Berry's work to mind. But Stamper fills a space that Berry cannot: she writes a woman's experience of family, community and landscape, as housewife, historian, teacher, daughter, thinker, and mother. The essays in Small Acreages shed light on who we are-all of us-and how we might proceed from here."-Leatha Kendrick, author of And Luckier. 
Small Acreages completes a trilogy of connected essays told in Georgia Green Stamper's unique Kentucky voice. In Small Acreages, readers are returned to Stamper's Eagle Creek world and its colorful characters, but her voice has both deepened with time and widened to include her journey beyond Natlee. Many of the essays in this new collection are reflective or as Stamper phrases it, she hopes "to add a handful of words to the ongoing conversation about what it means to be human." Her wry humor endures, however, popping into even the most poignant of pieces, grounding her, cutting through the absurd as her daddy taught her to do, reminding her as her mother did that "you might as well laugh." 
Small Acreages introduces new essays to her readers and collects some of Stamper's most requested and popular essays from her earlier books. Returning readers will not be disappointed as they reconnect with Stamper's unique world. New readers will delight in discovering this authentic Kentucky voice. Both will find her voice true as she weaves effortlessly between the lyrical to the vernacular, from sublime topics to the mundane. With wisdom and humor and compassion, Stamper reminds all readers that if we strive to unite with the universe, we must pay attention to the "small acreages that have been entrusted to us" for safekeeping.\nCover art: Jana Kappeler

Small Acreages: New and Collected Essays

Stamper, Georgia Green

Parenting & Relationships

Shadows Hold Their Breath takes place with the backdrop of the 1970s feminist movement and in the final years of the Vietnam War. It tells the story of Kat Hunter, a woman who decides that the only way she can understand her unresolved grief and discover who she is meant to be is to do the unthinkable-the unforgivable. In October 1979, six years after suffering the loss of Beth, her dear friend and sister-in-law, to enemy mortar fire near the village of Qu?ng Ngãi, Vietnam, Kat begins to question everything about her traditional life. In the middle of the night, she slips away from her home in Lexington, Kentucky, her husband, and her three young daughters and boards a Greyhound bus with no specific destination in mind. On the bus, she meets Molly, a young woman who reminds her of Beth. With nowhere else to go, Kat follows Molly and Molly's boyfriend, Jake, to Gatlinburg, Tennessee. Once there, Kat guards the secret that she is married and has abandoned her children to the care of her husband. Kat's journey of self-discovery ultimately leads her down an unexpected path-but what is she willing to sacrifice for that journey?"Like [Henrik] Ibsen's A Doll's House and [Kate] Chopin's The Awakening, Shadows Hold Their Breath explores one woman's decision to leave her husband and children rather than crumble under the weight of patriarchal roles. Kat is also burdened by grief and an unspoken love that perhaps even in her nascent self-awareness is still taboo. The novel offers no easy answers, no pure absolution, just Kat's honest quest to accept-and live-her truth," according to Marie Manilla, author of The Patron Saint of Ugly (Mariner Books, 2014; winner of the 2014 Weatherford Award).

Shadows Hold Their Breath

[Grenadine and Other Love Affairs] is the work of an alarming talent. An intricate gem of a poetic debut." 
"Grace's poetry is laden with sensuous imagery: 'Ignominious fruit of that garden / my carmine lips, your garnet desire.' The most compelling aspect of this ingenious body of verse is the poet's determination to excavate ever deeper layers of meaning..."-Kirkus Reviews (starred review)\n"A gorgeous and smart debut." -Rebecca Gayle Howell, Poetry Editor, Oxford American\n"In this sensuous debut poetry collection, Grenadine and Other Love Affairs, Carolyn Grace explores meaning through body, image, form, music, myth, and history-and always through language that 'must stretch to convey / only the edge' of the subject ('Grenadine'). In Grace's deft hands, stretch it does-stretch and infuse, suffuse, penetrate, undercut, probe, and play with meaning...To read these poems is to touch and taste and hold love deeply in body and soul, to celebrate love, unflinching and painful and joyful. 'Poetry, ' Grace writes, is 'prayer-a desired exactitude of thought-the magical incantation of the essential ('Delphic', in 'Reverie').' 
Come, enter this magical, essential world. Let its music sound your depths, its precision sharpen your mind. Then prepare to leave changed, your self challenged and enlarged." 
- LIBBY FALK JONES, Professor of English, Emerita, Berea College

Grenadine and Other Love Affairs: poems

Grace, Carolyn

Strange Bodies takes us on a journey-using story, science, metaphor, and myth-that brings us full circle to the essence of who we are and how closely we are connected to each other and the natural world. "¿¿¿Naffziger's poetry boldly emancipates the soul from its worldly shell." Kirkus ReviewsJust as Elizabeth Bishop wrote of her initial self-realization that "you are an I, you are an Elizabeth," we all come to a similar awakening, an awareness of the physical body and our own consciousness. Over the years, we may begin to question our understanding of the world and our place in it, which awakens the spirit, and we find ourselves longing to unite the physical and metaphysical. Strange Bodies takes us on a journey-using story, science, metaphor, and myth-that brings us full circle to the essence of who we are and how closely we are connected to each other and the natural world.The final section of the book, "Still Life," is a biography of existence through thought and image. Completed during the pandemic and initially exhibited at the University of Pikeville, in Pikeville, Kentucky, with exhibitions following at The Secret Studio (Columbus, Ohio) The Dairy Barn Arts Center (Athens, Ohio)), and Praxis Gallery (Minneapolis, Minnesota), "Still Life" is a collaboration between Naffziger and her husband, photographer Mark Hackworth, which addresses aesthetics and beauty and what those concepts inspire in the day to day. "Still Life" includes nineteen black and white photographs.

Strange Bodies: Poems

Naffziger, Deni

Religion & Spirituality

Will There Also Be Singing?: poems

Hansel, Pauletta

The Pool Guy's Kid

Teen & Young Adult

Mollin, Larry

Banana King Ngôo Tsín-suī (Literature from Taiwan Hakka)

Lee, Wang-Tai

Genre Fiction

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