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2011 Next Generation Indie Book Award
For Sale by Owner
short stories by Kelcey Parker
144 pages, 5.5 x 8.5" paper, trade
ISBN 978-1-888553-55-0
Price: $17.95
In Kelcey Parker’s tales of twisted domesticity, a woman gives her family up for Lent; a mother finds redemption at Chuck E. Cheese; a former best-friend-forever wreaks baby shower havoc; a bride swallows a housefly at the altar; and a suburbanite’s obsession with “memory books” puts her family in jeopardy. These stories offer a contemporary and dryly funny view of marriage, parenting and loss. Fans of Lorrie Moore and Antonya Nelson will find kinship in Parker’s wit and generosity of spirit. This debut collection marks the appearance of a writer with a new perspective on family, home, and an evolving American subculture.
"If there's a book that can cure what ails us, then it's Kelcey Parker's amazing story collection, For Sale by Owner. These are fantastical, ingenious, deeply imagined and felt stories about the homes, families, jobs, lives that we dream about, that we disappoint and are disappointed by in equal measure. In Parker's hands, our dead ends become something other than dead ends, something hopeful and beautiful and mysterious. Art, in other words. What a first book!"
-- Brock Clarke, author of Exley and An Arsonist's Guide to Writers' Homes in New England
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Love and The Eye
by
Laura Newbern
SELECTED by Claudia Rankine
74 pages, 6 x 9" paper, trade
Price: $16.95
ISBN 978-1-888553-34-5
First Book Award Winner 2010
Kore Press presents new poetry from Georgia author Laura Newbern. Pulitzer prize-winning poet Natasha Trethewey praises Newbern's work as a "lovely first collection. . . a chronicle of the observations of a self in solitude. . . taking in the world in wonder-a transformative vision in which beauty is evident everywhere." She describes these poems as "a quiet grief like the dark edge of a cloud or field: ever-present and capable of making one who loves love harder."
"One leans into the beauty of this collection because of all the ways it does not settle down, because of all the ways it insists on seeing."
—Claudia Rankine, 2010 First Book judge
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BEING REPRINTED
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LA Liminal
poetry by Becca Klaver
88 pages, 6 x 9" paper, trade
Price: $16.95
ISBN 1-888553-375
LA Liminal closely examines what lies beneath the “glatzy” spectacle of Los Angeles. Through the x-ray eyes of a failed Hollywood hopeful, with the advantage of distance and a sharp tongue, the reader gets a guided tour through an internalized, apocalyptic landscape. Transitional places and phases are imagined as both frightening and ripe, capable of producing a space where anxiety and creativity co-habit in the narrated realm of the speaker. Readers will enjoy the dryly personal tone, surprising refractions of language, acute sense of metaphor, and humor. Armed with these, Becca Klaver’s probing meditations and acerbic wit poke a careful hole through the scummy, glittering surface, to put a cocktail-ringed finger right on the humanity beneath it, until LA functions not just as synecdoche for country and national identity, but becomes a trope for personal identity, and more specifically, a feminine identity rebuilt from the wreckage of failure.
“This is really exciting material. Becca Klaver grabs my attention with her use of the city of Los Angeles, and surreal, hyperreal, and reel/ real imagery. This is quite a ride!”
— Jane Miller
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Something in the Potato Room
by Heather Cousins
SELECTED by Patricia Smith
80 pages, 6 x 9" paper, trade
Price: $16.95
ISBN 13: 978-1-888553-39-0
First Book Award Winner 2009
In the dark alcove of the potato room, the unexpected blooms. The surrealistic imagery in this strange little book takes the reader on an otherworldly descent where pores open like baby mouths, bones flower, and even the Real is eerily surrealized when the narrator confronts death in the mundane of the supermarket.
This poet’s forceful, startling syntax lends to the kind of Japanese-horror film aesthetic where things just “are:” unexamined, unexplained and we must simply accept them in all their dreadful wonder. The random fascination in antique medical apparati, a Foucauldian rigor, the occasional Absolute, combined with an unfussy flow of bare, vertebral prose and a bizarrely twisted narrative make for an engaging read. |
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Powder: Writing by Women in the Ranks, from Vietnam to Iraq
Edited by Lisa Bowden and Shannon Cain
168 pages, 6 x 9" paper
Price: $19.95
ISBN 13: 978-1-888553-25-3
POWDER brings us poetry and personal essays from 19 women who have served in all branches of the United States military. Contributors to Powder have seen conflicts from Somalia to Vietnam to Desert Shield. Many are book authors and winners of writing awards and fellowships; several hold MFAs from some of the country’s finest programs. The essays and poems here are inspired by an attempted rape by a Navy SEAL; an album of photos of the enemy dead; heat exhaustion in Mosul; a first jump from an airplane; fending off advances from Iraqi men; interrogating suspected terrorists; the contemplation of suicide; and a poignant connection with women and children in Bosnia. Their writing exposes the frontline intersection of women and soldiering, describing from a steely-eyed female perspective the horror, the humor, the cultural clashes and the fear.
Read about the stage adaptation, Coming in Hot, a one-woman play with Jeanmarie Simpson and Vicki Brown that premiered in Tucson Sept 24-27, 2009.
Read excerpts and see the full list of contributors here.
See the Powder blog
Read about Powder's news appearances here.
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Souvenirs of a Shrunken World
Holly Iglesias
104 pages, 6 x 7" paper
Price: $16.95
ISBN 13: 978-1-888553-26-0
First Book Award Winner 2008
"This moving mosaic of the 1904 World's Fair carries the poignancy of an old family album, a presence at once here and gone. Through the poet's pitch-perfect ear and keen eye for the voices, vantages and scraps of the actual, come souvenirs of real lives transfixed in the glare of a triumphant technology's artificial light."
—Eleanor Wilner
Read the feature and selections in the Missouri History Museum's online journal, Voices.
See full notes for this text.
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Benjamin's Spectacles
Spring Ulmer
80 pages, 6.5 x 8.5 " paper
Price: $14
ISBN: 978-1-888553-22-7
First Book Award Winner 2007
"Walter Benjamin had the heart of a poet, and always served the imagination first. Spring Ulmer finds him there, in the imagination, and recognizes him as another being of language--of angels and demons. This is poetry from the world Benjamin left behind, with all its unspeakable delights and terrors, conspiracies and heartbreaks--'thimblefuls of relation' and 'inner conversations' among a host of 'disoriented survivors.' This is poetry 'unhanging itself,' unburying itself into being."
—David Levi Strauss
Study Guide for educators
Read a sample poem from the book |
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Selected Poems
Jeremy Ingalls
96 pages, 4.5 x 7.5" paper
Price: $12
ISBN: 978-1-888553-24-3
“Jeremy Ingalls (1911-2000) was a metaphysical modernist, a formalist who worked to reconcile the tradition of fixed-form poetry with the imperative for invention. She was a scholar of world mythology and literature, and a woman committed to a poetics of psychic event and social force. From a twentieth-century anxiety about the increasing scale of violence and tyranny, and the loss of shared identity that political upheaval induces. . . Ingalls saw the mission of poetry as an aesthetic, formal, and moral challenge."
—Alison Hawthorne Deming
See the official Ingalls site
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Loveliest Grotesque
Sandra Lim
59 pages, 7.8 x 6.2" paper
Price: $16.95
ISBN: 978-1-888553-20-0
First Book Award Winner 2006
"Loveliest Grotesque is a darkly fascinating book. It’s a sweet, shape-shifting creature and a fun postmodern romp. Page after page fill with energetic surprises, keeping the reader intrigued--formal quatrains juxtaposed against prose vignettes...short-line riffs against skinny sonnets against a ballad that spreads across the page. Smartness and punnyness abound, casting vibrant spins on overused Asian-American tropes. Finally, the slippery slope of too much fun might stop for a nano moment to contemplate an important existential question: "Why were there manatees at all?" Obviously, the answer is this: after 9/11, in the new millennium, all formal discourses must explode, splinter and fragment and coalesce again into a new voice that rocks!"
--Marilyn Chin, judge, 2006 First Book Award |
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The Errant Thread
Elline Lipkin
96 pages, 6 x 9" paper
Price: $16.95
ISBN 978-1-888553-19-2
First Book Award Winner 2005
"The Errant Thread is a volume of wonderful fits and starts: well-built narratives are suddenly interrupted by a cryptic epithalamion. Short lines ease into spacious distances and big, ambling-paced arguments. An epigram suddenly grows a long neck and becomes an elegy. A lyric shears off into a one-line ending . . . . There is real verve, real invention and, above all, true craft . . . showing what the reader most wants—a poet certain of the craft, a writer certain of what the craft is there to do."
—Eavan Boland, judge, First Book Award 2004
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Various Modes of Departure
Deborah Fries
56 pages, 6 x 9" paper
Price: $16.95
ISBN 1-888553-18-9
First Book Award Winner 2004
Deborah Fries’s marvelous debut collection, Various Modes of Departure, is mostly about women and the many good-byes they say – to a marriage, a long-lived in home and beloved locale, an elderly father, a threatened landscape. Fries’s lines are mother lodes of sensory images that incorporate regional descriptions, pop cultural images, brand names, references to singing stars, and expert knowledge of earth science and botany. Encyclopedic and smart, Fries’s poems both teach and delight.
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Rigging the Wind
Jennifer Barber
80 pages, 6 x 9" paper
Price: $16.95
ISBN 1-888553-15-4
First Book Award Winner 2003
"In subjects ranging from the expulsion of the Jews in the fifteenth century to intimacies between contemporary lovers, we are made to feel our own needs and terrors expressed, our own cities left behind. These poems are transparent, yet everywhere reflect things and people darkly, in emergency."
—Jane Miller, judge, First Book Award 2002
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While Light Is Built
Tedi López Mills
translated by Wendy Burk
56 pages, 6 x 9" paper
Price: $16.95
ISBN- I-888553-16-2
Tedi López Mills is in the midst of an ongoing conversation. To read her poetry is to enter the river of philosophy in one of its clearer channels. López Mills’ poetry engages the ideas and furthers the inquiries of her sharpest contemporaries and brightest forebears. These poems hold in trembling balance the tension between space and time, time and being, being and been. They invoke and asymptotically extend the eternal questions: who am I? who am I in relation to this world? what is this world in relation to God, or the idea of God? While Light Is Built houses some of the most important poems being written today. We have been invited in to the contemplation and conversation of Tedi López Mills. It is for us to enter and respond.
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