Say It Hot Volume II: Industrial Strength is a collection of essays on American poets, fiction writers, nonfiction writers, and issues of interest to artists and academics. A companion volume to Say It Hot, these essays are brutally honest and acutely intelligent. From the book: “Literary authors these days no longer make livings off their work. Their books are not to be found in bookstores, and the books are rarely printed by major New York publishing houses. No one reads their works except for other literary authors and the professors who are evaluating their tenure and promotion folders at the colleges and universities at which they are employed, and it’s a minor miracle if a literary book from a small press sells a thousand copies. Fiction writers from wealth write about writing or they write about the ridiculous “sufferings” of the rich. Fiction writers from the lower classes write about the primordial filth from which they’ve physically escaped but from which they’ll never mentally be able to leave behind. Like war veterans, people who’ve fought it out in the miasma of poverty and blue- collar hell can never get the stink out of their skins, try as they may. Just like people who haven’t been to war can spot vets who have, middle-class people and the rich can spot people who’ve grown up poor, no matter what their position in life or the quality of their designer suits. Those suits just don’t fit right, and the neckties make them fidget and sweat. What the well-heeled authors and the working-class writers have in common is that they’ve been trained not to pronounce moral judgment.”

Say It Hot, Volume II:: Industrial Strength Essays on American Writers

Literature & Fiction

Williamson, Eric Miles

History & Criticism

Trp: The University Press Of Shsu

The Gold Piano tells the story of Emerson Wainwright, a young man whose idyllic life in a small North Carolina town is turned upside down after his father is caught on videotape in a homosexual act at the county hospital. To escape from his hometown and its painful memories, Emerson enrolls at an under-funded historically black college a hundred miles away, attending on a minority grant. As the only white student living on campus, he struggles with his loneliness and his role as an outsider. His relationship with his roommate, a black activist from Brooklyn, is challenged when Emerson begins to fall in love with Zena, a gifted black artist. The novel’s final scenes bring a quiet but hopeful sense of resolution to Emerson’s quest to define himself and find his place in the world.

The Gold Piano: A Novel

United States

This collection, Morton’s tenth, is a bold book of poetry delving into risks. It’s the moving forward; the constant discovery of new things. Using a combination of quotes, mythological images, and exquisite metaphors from nature, Morton delivers poems that describe the absolute urgency of giving one’s heart over to life, the burning drive to have faith in the world, the insistence that everything, in its own way, is holy. This book is unfettered joy. Tending Fires I wanted to write a sonnet last night, because that’s what lovers do, but the fire needed tending, and all I could think of were your shoulders, and that’s not romantic, so I put on another log, and thought about that hot summer day underneath that oak, when our shoulders brushed, and I blushed at the nearness of you, and how we made love that night . . . still . . . that’s not what I wanted to write . . . But it’s you; you, my love. You are my night and my morning, and the hot coals beneath these logs . . . hear them hiss and whisper like cicadas―cicadas of the trees, and the summer, and of all things that burn.

Constant State of Leaping: Poems (Volume 15) (21st Century Poets)

Morton, Karla K.

Poetry

Lucas has inherited his mother's bakery, as well as her obsession for baking sourdough: a bread conceived by wild strains of yeast, and ripened until its flavor becomes both pungent and startling.  Running the family business was a safe bet for Lucas, and a lucrative one at that; but when he finds that his soul has become infused with the same untamable character of the sourdough itself, he discovers that a safe bet can be the most dangerous thing a person can dare to make.“The masterful way Benjamin Ludwig establishes and stays true to an analogy ultimately sells the integrity of the idea and creates a continuing sense of surprise in a subject that has been exhaustively treated and in two characters who are less than perfect, but who somehow are remarkable in their ordinariness and the genuine passion they find for each other and in their journey of self-discovery. The truth is that I didn’t want to like this story, but Ludwig made me love it by remaining faithful to his characters and allowing them to carry the tale, while they develop and round out into credible and evocative, convincingly empathetic individuals who moved me with the genuineness of their hearts.”―Clay Reynolds, Series Judge

Sourdough: A Novella

Ludwig, Benjamin

Contemporary

Set in the suburbs and cities of the Midwest, Mid-South, and Texas, these stories explore the lives of characters biracial, black, white, and all sorts of in-between. The intersections and collisions of contemporary life are in full effect here, where the distinctions between fast food and fine art, noble and naked ambitions, reality and reality shows have become impossible to distinguish. Read these stories and understand why Steve Yarbrough said Williams “writes like Paul Auster if he were funnier or like Stanley Elkin might have if he’d ever been able to stop laughing.” " Tom Williams has done the near impossible in penning a book that is both undeniably entertaining and deeply thoughtful, Millhauser meets Bukowski meets Ellison." --Alan Heathcock, author of Volt “Sure, we need the nudge of category to help us all think straight, but we also need the rangy trickster, Tom Williams, to do the bang-up boundary work of imaginary anthropology in these deadpan dead-on gems. These infiltrating texts take us sideways, through and through, turn us inside-out.” . --Michael Martone, author of Michael Martone and Four for a Quarter

Among The Wild Mulattos and Other Tales

WILLIAMS, TOM

Humor & Satire

Texas sprawls. No other state can claim such varied nationalities, geographies, and cultural richness—a largesse of natural resources, cityscapes, and landscapes of every ecosystem. With a unique, raucous, and rich history, Texas also abounds with some of the most diverse contemporary poets, many of whom consider themselves “Southern,” and the eighth volume of The Southern Poetry Anthology reflects this variegation with poems both traditional and experimental, Texas-centered and universal. SOW Chomping her chocolates of fresh road kills, she swaggers through her slop, oblivious of the piglets she crushed during last night’s slumber, squishing through the splits of her thick, cloven hooves. The last boar which tried to straddle her fabulous girth fractured both forelegs. She dined on his carcass for days, grunting in the shade. --Larry Thomas

The Southern Poetry Anthology, Volume VIII: Texas (Volume 8)

This book features Morton's best work to date from her ten collections. While her poems range in style, topic and region, they capture each universal emotion, delving into our desire to know our place in this world; the reason for our very being. Her words are comfort and wonder and hope. She writes: This is a book of poems to swallow, to seep in your bloodstream/ and pound open the chamber doors/ of your own heart, reminding us of our huge capacity for love, guiding us through each tiny fold of synchronicity to discover the big picture--what it means to truly be alive. Time And where did the day go? A late Sunday of mingling legs, sermons of hawk and crow, a choir of mockingbird. Sitting outside, legs still reaching for one another, together; just words. The hours, dulcet and vaulting like dog years. These are the best unremarkable days of our life, when nothing happens but the bloom of tiny wildflowers, the kind you have to sink to your knees to see.

Accidental Origami: New and Selected Works of karla k. morton (Volume 18) (21st Century Poets)

The Empress of Kisses explores the landscape of the human heart through free and formal verse. The poems chronicle a wide variety of relationships past and present, real and imagined, with family, friends, lovers, pop culture icons, mythological figures, historical events, and with words themselves. The collection features a special focus on the experiences of Generation X, the “forgotten generation.” "This book offers all the pleasures that poetry affords—sonic felicities, skilled wordplay, resonant insights, and unexpected destinations. This is a delightful and memorable book."—Beth Ann Fennelly, final judge, author of Unmentionables November 9th, 1989 For thirty years there is no kiss. Then there is the possibility of a kiss, like a rumble or a half-heard shout— did it come from this side or that side? When the kiss breaks through, we all struggle to register the impossible, how the wall came down, how their lips found each other, every obstacle reduced to rubble around their feet, the bright paint of her lipstick smeared, unintelligible graffiti all over the changed angles of his face.

The Empress of Kisses: Poems

Hart, Gwen

Three college friends from the 50s blaze their own path in love and work, braving the stifling conventions of the age, and anticipating the social thaw that would arrive ten years later. These “wild girls” pay heavy penalties for living against the grain, but, over the years, rebound and re-set their course, drawing strength from their friendship. The novel follows them from an elite northeastern college, to Paris with Allen Ginsberg, to New York’s avant-garde scene in the early sixties, to a mansion in Newport, to the slopes of Zermatt, to Long Island’s Gold Coast, as it celebrates the nimbleness and vitality of women who defied an entire culture to forge their own journey. "Wild Girls is a novel about a few women rebels who came of age in the 50s with the Beats in Paris, Allen Ginsberg (when he was still sleeping with girls), and a Yoko Ono-based character in early 60s New York. More importantly, Erica Abeel IS a 'Wild Girl'--she lived the life, these are her friends, and this is an insider's peek into that world."—Kevin Kwan, author of Crazy Rich Asians Praise for Abeel's Women Like Us: "Smart, snappy, and compulsively readable ... Written with wit and perception."—Publishers Weekly "An old-fashioned good read."—New York Times Book Review

Wild Girls: A Novel

Abeel, Erica

The poems of Sarah Cortez flex lean muscles to build lyric intensity and a gripping edginess often backlit by an incandescent, controlled eroticism. Cortez reveals the hidden underworld of her fellow police officers, whose lives comprise the thin blue line and whose blood sometimes splashes and blackens on summer concrete. Aquarium And what of the water? A transparency we swim through, lithe white muscle, the glide of fins. We move and move forever inside reflections, refractions, ruckus from the other side. Our eyes never close. We see you coming. We don’t think we’re dinner.

Against Sky's Warm Belly: New & Selected Poems

Cortez, Sarah

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