2013 Short Fiction Award Winner

To Boil Water

by Myha T. Do

selected by Kate Bernheimer

5.5 x 8.5" 16 pgs, photograph affixed toKraft paper cover

ISBN: 10978-888553-68-0

"To Boil Water" is so iconoclastic, so elliptical and so very mystic—I just couldn't stop thinking about it. This story channels Yoko Ono via Franny Glass; it’s a prayer: an occult and traditional meditation on loss that lives in the past and future at once. I found myself reading it over and over again, as if I myself were alive inside of its words—this story contains eerie wisdom. I admire the author’s direct engagement with words. The story has a concrete, tale-like abstraction, expressed with the handmade quality of careful hushed phrases." — Kate Bernheimer, judge

Price: $11

2012 Short Fiction Award Winner

A Parallel Life

by Mary Byrne

selected by Karen Brennan

5.5 x 8.5" 32 pgs, color cover on Kraft paper

ISBN: 978-1-888553-73-4

This remarkable story traces the life of a Serbian woman, Zorica, marooned for years in Paris, struggling with illiteracy, bureaucracy, aging and the forces of history that have shaped her life. Told by a nameless narrator with an effortless blend of humor and pathos, “A Parallel Life” is structured like a document—eschewing the traditional dramatic action of literary realism and straddling the borderland between fiction and nonfiction ... the author’s modesty, intelligence, and wonderful writing, contribute to a moving, authentic rendering of a life, which becomes extraordinary in its ordinariness. From start to finish, “A Parallel Life” rings with integrity and wisdom.” — Karen Brennan, judge

Price: $11

2011 Short Fiction Award Winner

The Death of Carrie Bradshaw

by Patricia Grace King

selected by Antonya Nelson

5.5 x 8.5" 16 pgs, hand coloring, hand stitched

ISBN: 978-1-888553-51-2

“Patricia King shows us a character haunted by the past and coming to terms with the complicated present. Smart, empathetic, and humane, this is a terrific debut by a writer with a very bright future." — Alix Ohlin, Author of The Missing Person, Babylon and Other Stories, Signs and Wonders, and Inside

Price: $10

That Place Where

by Barbara Cully

7 x 8.5," 32 pgs, hand-stitched

ISBN 978-1-888553-57-4

“Here is a consummate poet, at the height of her interrogation of language, philosophy, and philology. Barbara Cully is a poet’s poet. She works passionately, without ambition, fanfare, or guile.” — Jane Miller

Limited edition of 500 copies.

Price: $12

Her Name is Juanita

prose by Sally Ashton

44 pages, 5.5 x 8.5" paper, hand-bound

Price: $12.00 ISBN 978-1-888553-38-3

"A beautiful tribute to the fecundity of obsession." 

--Amy Gerstler

"Sensual & luminous, mystical & comic."--Nin Andrews

Excerpt from Her Name is Juanita:

"The Donkey’s Role in Spiritual Awakenings"

My friends want me to see Juanita. Soon. If you hear a donkey, find the damn donkey. My house a stall in desperate need of a shovel. I barely sleep, books piled on the dining room table, sheaves of computer print-outs. The donkey in myth. The donkey as “other.” I compose, too, or will, a libretto based on Juanita already suggesting itself, sung across a loop of her bray or a computer generated facsimile. And snapshots, donkey-shaped clouds, clouds that looked like they would turn into donkeys before an ear blew off, a muzzle moved left. Images not easy to catch. Here’s a picture of my cat, smiling, after I whispered Juanita three times. I should put the photos in an album or shoebox but I like seeing them when I walk by, Juanita in the sky.

2010 Short Fiction Award Winner

All Sorts of Hunger

by Heather Brittain Bergstrom

selected by Leslie Marmon Silko

28 pages, 5.5 x 8.5" paper, handbound

ISBN 978-1-888553-33-8  

Price: $10

Kore Press announces the release of our 4th annual Short Fiction Award Winner All Sorts of Hunger by Heather Brittain Bergstrom of Yuba City, California. Selected from over 300 contest submissions by Kore Press Judge, novelist, poet, NEH Discovery Award recipient and McArthur Fellow “Genius” Leslie Marmon Silko, All Sorts of Hunger traces the course of a young hooker’s trick-turning living, not on city streets, but through truck stop cafes and small farming towns. All Sorts of Hunger unravels with healing, literary hands the deep rooted web of oppression and underrepresentation that tethers the individuals of the dry, dusty rural Interior West to its abused land. Here, orphaned twenty-one year olds, middle-aged river barge pilots, and Indian cooks in country cafés navigate all the sorts of heartache and hunger that lead them to moments of hopeful, human humility: conversations with ghosts, visions of mothers long passed.

“Readers will return to [Bergstrom’s] words again and again for their sheer artistry, their profound humanity.” -- Carole Simmons Oles, recipient of the Pushcart Prize, NEA Grant for Poetry, and Writer’s Choice Award.

2009 Short Fiction Award Winner

Frost Heaves

by Teresa Stores

28 pages, 5.5 x 8.5" paper, hand-bound w/ blue spray of ink on cvr

Price: $10.00

ISBN 978-1-888553-36-9

"Frost Heaves is powerful mediation on grief and reclamation. This is the story of Katherine Crossly, as she assesses her life after a half century of marriage. What happens when a woman realizes that her dreams were not deferred, but stifled before they are even fully imagined? Set against the beautifully drawn landscapes of a small town in Maine, this is the story of a thaw, both literal and metaphorical.

Teresa Stores writes with compassion and insight, finding the inescapable truths hiding in the plain sight--layered over an ordinary life.With vivid details and an original and convincing voice, "Frost Heaves" manages to be both uncompromising and triumphant. Teresa Stores is a beautiful writer and I look forward to seeing her work for years to come."

--Tayari Jones

Revenant

prose poetry by Stephanie Balzer

Chapbook, 30 x 36" when unfolded, folds down like a map, with coffee cup prints on the cover. Yellow or white paper.

Price: $10.00 ISBN 978-1-888553-35-2

"Stephanie Balzer's book of poems is masterful and transporting in its form and in its orchestration of themes. Her handling of the prose poem form transforms the prose “box” into a playground, a diorama.  The reader enters the speaker’s imagination of a woman rents a house in a scraggly desert neighborhood as she is absorbed into the vacated rooms of the previous tenant who killed someone before moving out.  This tenant and the person he killed are, in turns, the Revenant of the title, the ghost who haunts the speaker, the reader, the book.  In this we are confronted with the inner life of a seer, one who survives by way of lyrical resonances with the quotidian human world, one who finds meaning and merit in the other desert we deal with, the stark, often vacated world of faded blue fence, scientific information, weather, groceries, and work. There is humor here, a lively imagination--surprise, movement, heart, heat.  Here the caring for others emerges in the desert slowly, as surely and as necessary as the rain.  This is a work in which a recognizable local landscape is transformed through the medium of poetry, and we are elsewhere, and grateful, for it."

--Barbara Cully

Kore Press Short Fiction Award Winner 2007

The Saving Work
Tiphanie Yanique

Short story chapbook, laser printed and hand assembled with unique burn mark on cover.

20 pages, 8.5 x 5.5" paper
Price: $10 ISBN: 978-1-888553-23-5

"Filled with images at once beautiful and stark, The Saving Work is a powerful, poetic study of why we do what we do. Tiphanie Yanique opens a new window into the complexities of island life."

-- Chitra Divakaruni

Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power
Audre Lorde
Photographs by Camille Bonzani
Price: $10 ISBN 1-8885530-10-3

"There are many kinds of power, used and unused, acknowledged or otherwise." Thus begins this powerful essay; Uses of the Erotic defines the power of the erotic, names the process by which women have been stripped of this power, and considers how women can reclaim it.

Uses of the Erotic shines among Audre Lorde's powerful legacy of speeches and essays, and has influenced feminist thinking for more than 15 years. The false dichotomies that Lorde debunks persist in our cultural imagination: the separation of the erotuc from the spiritual and political. Now, Kore Press brings this essay into stand-alone focus, reprinting it in a fine, handbound pamphlet illustrated with photographs by Tucson photographer Camille Bonzani.  Designed by book artist Nancy Solomon, the essay is offset and letterpress printed in an edition of 1000.

The Fascination Begins in the Mouth: Anger
Mary Gordon
Artwork by Shelagh Mulvaney
Paper; offset prested text sewn into letterpress printed cover. Comes with printed brown-wrapper envelope for sending through mail
16 pp. 5.5 x 9.25 1000 numbered copies
Price: $12 ISBN 1-888553-04-9

First appearing in The New York Times Book Review in 1993, The Fascination Begins in the Mouth: Anger is reprinted as a stand alone piece: an eloquent, poetic, and poinant narrative on anger. Gordon's topic, the uncomfortable yet interesting complexity of human emotion, is visually addressed by the highly charged imagery of the female figure as expressed by artist Shelagh Mulvaney.

Tell Me More
Brenda Ueland
Artwork by Cynthia Miller
Paper; offset printed text sewn into letterpress printed cover.
Comes with printed brown-wrapper envelope for sending through the mail.
13 pp. 5.5 x 9.25 1,000 numbered copies
Price: $10 ISBN 1-888553-03-0

Although she was one of the most prolific feminist writers of the twentieth century (six million published words), Brenda Ueland had only two books published during her 93-year lifetime. More than 140,000 copies of one of those books, If You Want to Write, have been sold by Graywolf Press since Ueland’s death in 1985. The rest of her writing includes articles, essays, and a newspaper column that ran for 30 years in the Minneapolis Times.

Tell Me More: On the Fine Art of Listening is accompanied by the work of Tucson painter Cynthia Miller. Her paintings recall folk art, furniture, and colors that sing. She listens.

Currently Out of Print

Shoreline Series
Barbara Cully
Paper; offset printed text handsewn into letterpress printed cover
28pp. 8.75 x 6.75
Edition of 500, signed and numbered
Price: $13 ISBN 1-888553-05-07

Redshift
Joni Wallace
Cover painting by Nancy Tokar Miller
Paper; offset printed text sewn into offset printed cover
22pp. 5.5x8.5
Price: $11 ISBN 1-888553-12-x

In the poems of Redshift, images from science and mathematics dance with artifacts brought shadowed and glittering from memory. Engines and equations encounter forsythia and the green iridescence of locusts. These poems deeply attend to place and past. Wallace studies her memories in the metaphorical light of redshift—the increasing wavelength of visible light as a celestial object recedes—revealing in the smallest detail, infinity.

Designed by book artist Nancy Solomon, Redshift’s text papers echo the gritty, tactile imagery in Wallace’s poems, paired with a painting by Nancy Tokar Miller, which is at once deeply located and full of movement, playing with opacity and transparency. On the cover, cerulean stripes lick across bare handmade paper the color of Tucson sand.