Fluffing The Concrete: Making The Most Of Foreign Prison-or Anything Else

Humor & Entertainment

Dryden, Mack

Humor

Texas Review Press

This anthology gathers the strong voices of accomplished poets reaching into and beyond nostalgia to remember, to honor, and to document through figurative imagery their experiences of Mexico and the vibrant border areas before the ravages of narco-violence. Locals Listen to the Mariachi Band at El Jardin in San Miguel You see their silhouettes along the stone wall or arm in arm below the glow of garden lights huddled like foothills, earth you could plant maize in. Cowboy hats and serapes, the smell of beer and cinnamon churros. You think of family and language how the music rolls through your hips to the sweat behind your knees. How it rushes through you, to a place you still don’t know. ―Lois P. Jones

Goodbye, Mexico: Poems of Remembrance

Literature & Fiction

United States

Sign of Redemption tells the story of Richie Harrison, an innocent CPA who lands behind bars in a Texas prison--the unwitting "wheelman" in an unexpected armed robbery. Harrison falls in love with Elizabeth McKenna, a lawyer there to help Harrison's deaf friend, and thoughts of her--and the life he's lost--begin to obsess him. He escapes, on horseback and across a raging river, and finds safety with a drug-dealing family while scheming to win his love. To woo her, Harrison drags McKenna on a destructive journey that transforms him into the criminal he never imagined he'd become. From the book: When I first got sent down, I thought about escaping every day, and every day I thought of the bullet that would pierce my back and exit through my breastbone in a bloody spray. I thought of myself tumbling out of a dead run, my legs buckling, my face hitting the pavement. Maybe I'm just a coward if all it takes to make a coward is a vivid imagination. But I wasn't here long before I found out what it sounded like when the blood left the body in gurgling rushes.

Sign of Redemption: A Novel

Trow, Lisa

Award winning poetry critic Ange Mlinko wrote of Parsons and his work, “The Renaissance man was once a courtly ideal; Parsons shows that it is a democratic ideal too—warm-blooded, muscular, as companionable on the page as in the flesh.” Both tangible and cerebral, Parsons’s poetry lifts its readers into a new, transformational reality with a depth of insight that is truly exceptional. Reaching For Longer Water brings the reader, the most compelling of his poems from his previous four collections, poems hailed by poetry luminaries, Edward Hirsch, Stanley Plumly, Robert Phillips, and Paul Mariani. THE FRANK GAZE OF WOMEN After Baudelaire’s “Exotic Scent” Yes, yes, they bestow delights— not only in the seedy way we all know: they plant something in the littoral vacancy and in an instant there is an ineffable fire—that forging force on which so much more depends than wheelbarrows &amp; chickens.

Reaching for Longer Water: New and Selected Poems

Parsons, David Mercier

Poetry

Hush Now, Baby is the story of how a little white girl climbed out of an uneasy childhood in the segregated South…on the backbone of a black woman who loved her unabashedly. A host of African-American women permeated Southern families. One of those stalwart women was Eva Aiken, a central figure in the author’s life from her birth…until Eva staged a sit-in at the girl’s wedding. The story captures the glorious early years of the Lowcountry South Carolina family then graphically depicts its unraveling. Eva holds them together. The family and the country’s parallel struggles converge. The author lives in bubble-wrap until Civil Rights issues escalate. This story is told without pathos and with graceful restraint—the Southern way. “Angela’s prose plunges us back in time when a generation of white children were raised by the calloused hands of slaves who, despite being freed by Lincoln, remained chained to a stubborn way of life. Instead of killing us in our sleep, they became our guardian angels, for reasons still mysteriously misunderstood.” --Ken Burger, author of Swallow Savannah, Sister Santee, Salkehatchie Soup, and Baptized in Sweet Tea.

Hush Now, Baby: A Memoir

Williams, Angela W.

Parenting & Relationships

Ne’er-do-well immigration attorney Harrison Bent can’t imagine why the wealthy and mysterious Maggie Leudecke wants him to solve her eminent domain problem. If he didn’t have an angry wife to placate, an inscrutable stalker to identify, an obsessed girlfriend to escape, and a murder to solve, a successful outcome to the Leudecke case might revive his career, pay for his autistic son’s special school, and—most important of all—help convince his young paralegal, Chloe, that the afternoon she spent with him in a cheap motel wasn’t an error in judgment, but the beginning of something profound. If only he had some clue as to what he was doing . . . . From the book: I know myself. That’s the good news. That’s also the bad news. For example, I knew I was not equipped to deal with the Leudecke case. I also knew I wouldn’t turn it down or hand it off to somebody better suited. But, seriously, what background did I have in eminent domain? Or with Mexican drug dealers? Or dead Mexican drug dealers? None. And I knew it.

Pretty Enough for You: A Novel

Hudder, Cliff

The stories in Get a Grip depict a range of imagined lives. There are Estonian brothers trekking from their blighted neighborhood to a college interview. There’s a TV meteorite hunter in town to search for otherworldly treasure. We meet a widow addicted to physical pain and a successful ad executive who loses all his worldly possessions in one day. All of the characters work out their struggles in the Baltimore region, channeling, in turns, the area’s charm, its despair, its humor, its self-doubt, its compassion. Get a Grip is a book about who we are when the cameras are off and the phone has died.

Get a Grip: Stories

Flann, Kathy

Short Stories & Anthologies

Set primarily in a garden alongside a tidal river in Maine, River Road maps the troubled path of a middle-aged man torn between longing for an idealized past that never existed and realizing he must remain vulnerable to a future of love. Over Breakfast . . . he said, We need to reinvent ourselves, meaning not so much the pair as the each of us, as if we could unroll the raw blue-print of being, right there on the table between us by setting our bowls and cups at the corners to fix it in place and staring down abstract anew the physics of stress and tolerance into other schemata, as if time were a constant and love, an infinite variable that always yields a positive future, but one yet together, as if mindfulness were will and will by necessity commands action. So we sat, long, looking each into the other’s eyes.

River Road: Poems

Self-Help

Foerster, Richard

Relationships

In this savage yet beautiful book length poem Michael Lieberman captures the rage of men in modern society. He reimagines the characters of Homer's Iliad, recasts them, and sets them in conflict in today's Houston. Unflinching is its descriptions of violence, The Houstiliad implicitly contrasts the rage of Homer's Achilles which was specific and focused with the free-floating rage of contemporary men. Though unsparing in its descriptions, Lieberman's portrait is leavened by lovely lyric passages, reflection, and humor. For those who care about the complicated role of men in modern society this book is revelatory without promising an easy path to redemption or honor. Achilles' wrath is where our tale begins then spools out venom and men's mortal sins. It's tempered true yet riffs on Homer's style, suffused with guile, grit, and mordant wile. * * * Men savage men in violent travails though in the end it's humor that prevails.

The Houstiliad: An Iliad for Houston

Lieberman, Michael

Associate Professor Gale Ruthven, a vampire with nearly four hundred years of service at eighty-three colleges and universities, teaches British Romantic poetry at an obscure commuter college somewhere in far West Texas, enjoying an existence of literary research, student papers, and the bare amount of blood-sucking necessary to survive. His chief aggravation is the Regency Romantic poet, Lord Byron, on whom he fed in 1816 and who refuses to play the role of submissive underling. When a powerful and seductive vampire named Tempest joins the faculty, Ruthven becomes entangled in a dark mystery involving ancient vampire cults in Mexico and the American Southwest, a hippie vampire named Via Medea, grave robbers in Byron’s Gothic ancestral estate in Nottinghamshire, and a shadowy vampire associate from Ruthven’s early nineteenth-century past—all of which lead him on a wild chase across two continents and to a final showdown in the New Mexico badlands.

Fools of Time: A Novel

Schmid, Thomas

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