Louise Fabiani | The Green Alembic | Gazelle Books

The alembic was a vessel used in distillation one of the most important processes in the ancient art of alchemy. In these lyrical poems Louise Fabiani explores the prevalence of transformation in Nature as well as in the human realm. She finds alchemy in the creation of haute cuisine from raw ingredients, girlhood rites of passage, Mozart’s suspicious death and, most of all, in the familiar otherness of flora and fauna. Continue reading

Goli Khalatbary | Diary of a Tree | Gazelle Books

Diary of a Tree is a poem in two books from the point of view of a tree. Born in Tehran, Iran in 1944, Goli Khalatbary followed her father through his diplomatic postings as a girl. She saw many countries, many towns, and many landscapes, but could not have childhood friends. Poetry was the revelation of a summer day in a classroom, at 14, when she glanced at the window and was entranced by the way light transformed a drab scene into one that changed her heartbeat. Her earliest studies were in French, in schools and by correspondence. The full power of art occurred to her like another language when, at 18, she took a course in photography in England. In a career in this field spanning over 35 years, she produced mostly portraiture and illustrations for poetry. After moving to India she wrote the first book of “Diary of a Tree”, and showed it as a text exhibition at the India International Center, Delhi. In recent years she has expanded into new media and started working with silver, as well as bronze, iron, stone, and photography. She is now back in Tehran, where she shows her work in annual exhibitions. Continue reading

Victoria Brockmeier | My Maden Cowboy Names | Gazelle Books

Victoria Brockmeier composes a mosaic of storytelling myths, and feminist ideas in her award-winning collection of poems, My Maiden Cowboy Names. Both linguistically playful and genuinely experimental, these poems explore the smallness of human experience. The sumptuousness and vitality of this collection does not sacrifice the capacity for excavating observation and sharp wit. Lush and spacious, these poems revel in the unexpectedly beautiful and the beautifully broken. Continue reading

Pasquale Verdicchio | This Nothing’s Place | Gazelle Books

Revealing the instability of location and the illusory nature of identity this poetry collection traces the edges where the multidimensional blends, blurs, and merges, envisioning a place where form is formless and perception boundless. Taking its title from Emily Carr’s “Klee Wyck”, which describes a strip of land that belongs to Nothing, this compendium explores the indefinite place where imagination and vitality converge to become creativity. Continue reading

Robert Alexander and Dennis Maloney | The House of Your Dream: An International Collection of Prose Poetry | Gazelle Books

This collection is unique in its diversity and includes voices from Europe, Asia, South America, and the United States. Poets include Nin Andrews, Robert Bly, Aleš Debeljak, Russell Edson, Marie Harris, Juan Ramon Jimenez, Peter Johnson, Kim Kwang Kyu, Morton Marcus, Gabriela Mistral, Pablo Neruda, Naomi Shihab Nye, Charles Simic, Tomas Transtromer, James Wright, and many others. Continue reading

Karis Shearer | All these Roads: The Poetry of Louis Dudek | Gazelle Books

A passionate believer in the power of art — and especially poetry — to influence and critique contemporary culture, Louis Dudek devoted much of his life to shaping the Canadian literary scene through his meditative and experimental poems as well as his work in publishing and teaching. This collection brings together thirty-five of Dudek’s poems written over the course of his sixty-year career. Much of Dudek’s poetry is about the practice of art, with comment on the way the craft of poetry is mediated by such factors as university classes, public readings, reviews, commercial presses, and academic conferences. The poems in this selection — witty satires, short lyrics, and long sequences — reflect self-consciously on the relationship between art and life and will draw readers into the dramatic mid-century literary and cultural debates in which Dudek was an important participant. Continue reading

Martha Ronk | In a Landscape of Having to Repeat | Gazelle Books

This book is the Winner of the 15th Annual PEN USA Award in Poetry (2005). With each poetry collection, Martha Ronk has further refined her unique use of the sentence, its textures and tangents, to extend the ways that a meditative lyric might address the most intimate and subtle experiences of living. Yet Ronk’s diction remains as direct and urbane as it is mulitvalenced in its range from serious to wry to confidential to questioning. In these poems, we find Ronk’s most stealthy syntactic turns, returns, and juxtapositions, which expose to us the rhetorics we unconsciously use to frame our perceptions of the daily. In a landscape of having to repeat, Ronk offers a language of attention that is composite, disruptive, and vibrantly immediate. Continue reading

Robert Swearingen | Street Milk | Gazelle Books

HIDING THE GUNS FROM OUR MOUTHS: THE STREET MILK OF DARKNESS Writing poetry is dangerous work. Dangerous because nobody pays you to do it. So, why try, right? Dangerous because it can tear off the top of your head and expose the deepest most secret part of your self to the universe. And, dangerous because it invites all your private demons to dance on your eyelids. I read STREET MILK when it first came out several years ago, thought about writing a review, but had no real place to publish it. Since then the book has haunted me in strange and peculiar ways. I’d known Robert Swearingen only because we had occasionally appeared at the same readings. But I didn’t know Swearingen’s work that well. I recall his reading Interview In Milwaukee which was a savagely comic take on a poet who is interviewed for a job by feminist but I didn’t know much else about the man. I didn’t know that he was from Hammond, Indiana, which is not that far from Chicago. I didn’t know that he had a degree in English. I didn’t know that his uncle had worked most of his life for the Illinois Central Railroad. My grandfather, my father, and my uncle had all worked for the Illinois Central back in the 1920s. — Todd Moore Continue reading

Harvey Stanbrough | Beyond the Masks: New and Selected Poems | Gazelle Books

Harvey Stanbrough is a poet, essayist, and fictionist. Collections of his poetry have been nominated for a National Book Award, a Pulitzer Prize, a Frankfurt Award and, along with Maya Angelou, the Inscriptions Magazine Engraver’s Award. Harvey works as a full-time freelance editor and speaks at writers’ conferences around the nation. His previous poetry collections include On Love & War & Other Fallacies, Residua, Lessons for a Barren Population, and Intimations of the Shapes of Things. His comprehensive collection, Beyond the Masks, is available from Central Ave Press. Harvey’s nonfiction titles include Punctuation for Writers and Writing Realistic Dialogue & Flash Fiction. Continue reading