In these eleven short stories by a true master of the form, Grant Tracey guides us across a wide expanse of time and place but always deep into the interior lives of the characters we encounter. From 1918 New York to 1971 Toronto to contemporary Cedar Falls, Iowa - instantly we become involved in the complex relationships of movie actors, college professors, school custodians, teenagers, housewives - always firmly and richly enmeshed in their cultures via copious allusions to history, literature, cinema, TV, and the slang that punctuates their spot-on dialogue. Final Stanzas is a tour de force by a writer who is always mindful of his craft and attentive to the minutest of details.

Final Stanzas

Literature & Fiction

Tracey, Grant

Literary

Twelve Winters Press

"The Necessary Poetics of Atheism" collects poems and essays by three award-winning contemporary poets who demonstrate how atheism informs their poetics: as "a vehicle of political protest" in the work of MartIn Espada, as a form of activism and secular goodness in Lauren Marie Schmidt's poems, and as an aesthetic confrontation of a theistic worldview in J. D. Schraffenberger's writing. An enlightening foreword by the atheist philosopher Andrew Sneddon and a compelling introduction by poet Heid E. Erdrich invite us to read these "uneasy, contentious, complex, powerful, triumphant voices that allow goodness to shine without God." Espada asks, "Where, then, does an atheist poet put his or her faith? Where do we find our salvation? Some poets would say: Poetry." Put your faith in "The Necessary Poetics of Atheism" and find salvation in these provocative pages.

The Necessary Poetics of Atheism: Essays and Poems

Espada, Martín

Schraffenberger, J. D.

Schmidt, Lauren Marie

Essays & Correspondence

With linguistic precision and visual dexterity, Starfish explores the bottomless depths of human intimacy and loss, reconciled against the vastness of the ocean and infinity of the cosmos. What if we had to pick: "The ocean or the stars. / A reputation in truth telling or a prize in diplomacy?" ("Elements of Style"). At times rendered through the perception of a "year-rounder" residing in a tourist locale, its poems offer close-up portraits of individuals bounded by shorelines yet attuned to expansive horizons. Alert to how elemental symbols delight as well as unsettle us, the book as a whole weighs the ceaseless negotiation of our actions against the limits of temporality.

Starfish

Uchmanowicz, Pauline

Poetry

Hektr Pastrovich, a journalist and poet, travels to the front of a war his country has been fighting for nine years in search of an enigmatic traveler who calls himself the Prince of Ithaka. Along the way he meets Helena, a beautiful and captivating woman who becomes a mystery to Hektr as well. Men of Winter is a revisionist work drawing from Homer's Iliad and Odyssey, set in early twentieth-Century Russia. It features a Preface by the author, in addition to an Interview, Afterword and Discussion Questions that make it ideal for book clubs and classroom study.

Men of Winter

Ted Morrissey

In the novel An Untimely Frost, or The Authoress, set in 1830s London, American author Jefferson Wheelwright seeks out the reclusive English novelist Margaret T. Haeley, creator of Dunkelraum's monster and widow of the poet Stephen Haeley. The story is inspired by Washington Irving's rumored courtship of Mary Shelley, author of Frankenstein. The book also includes the author's essay "Researching the Rhythms of Voice" and discussion questions.

An Untimely Frost

Morrissey, Ted

Figures in Blue is the story of Esteban Espiritu, a young Spanish artist who is commissioned to paint the portrait of Kristena von Lichtenberg, an elderly Baroness living in a deteriorating mansion that overlooks a provincial German village. However, Esteban uncovers a local mystery regarding the disappearance of her brutish husband, the Baron. The novelette is set in the beginning of the twentieth century and references classical mythology.

Figures in Blue

Contemporary

An anthology of poems, prose poems and flash fiction centering on the theme of things that are extinguished or extinct, from jukeboxes to insects to languages, and more. Editor John McCarthy has brought into existence the work of 37 contributors.

Extinguished & Extinct

Informed by brothers both classical (Hypnos and Thanatos) and biblical (Cain and Abel), The Waxen Poor is at once a lamentation and a psalm of brotherly love. These are personal poems of psychosis and paranoia, of strangeness laced with beauty and grief, of lyrical mourning and narrative meditation. Poems in the collection have previously appeared in Best Creative Nonfiction, Blaze Vox, Cold Mountain Review, Hayden's Ferry Review, Notre Dame Review, Prairie Schooner, and elsewhere.

The Waxen Poor

"Weeping with an Ancient God" is a novella set in the Marquesas Islands in the summer of 1842. The protagonist, Melvill, has jumped ship from the whaler Acushnet into a wild, savage and exotically beautiful land. Melvill contemplates his dangerous present, his sad past and his wholly uncertain future on an island teeming with cannibals.The novella is based on author Herman Melville's real-life adventures as a young seaman. It includes nine illustrations by Adam G. Perschbacher, and a conversation with the author by Beth Gilstrap.

Weeping with an Ancient God

Part fable, part portal, "The Endless Unbegun" moves through prose and poetry, the past and the present, the mystical and the carnal, to tell a love story through many lifetimes. The twenty-first-century romance of Jon and Marisol opens into the sixth-century friendship of Radegunde and Fortunatus, which opens into poems that speak intimately of connection-with others, with the future we engender, and with the Earth that sustains us. Here, poetry meets myth in timeless writing that recognizes and renews the soul.

The Endless Unbegun

Webster, Rachel Jamison

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