Bøker utgitt av Ara Pacis Publishers

Few, if any, modern poets have stood up against the wave of decay and mediocrity that has inculcated modern culture. For Sanfilip, poetry's lack of importance to modern culture is indicative of a deeper trauma at work. In Poetry in the Age Impurity, he spells out the end game of our culture's long refusal to face true existence and exposes the false mirror modern society has created for itself. In Sanfilip's view, the death of poetic consciousness is emblematic of the crisis at hand. At the same time, he points a way both outward and inward to the perilous, metaphysical path necessary to find true being beyond the vacuity he sees swallowing up the West in ennui, cynicism and self-hatred. He challenges the warped values of our time, while at the same time laying out a psychic road map back to authenticity. Not since Shelley's A Defence of Poetry or the Surrealists manifestoes of the 1920's has a living poet been willing to stand up against the tide of decay eating away at the heart of modern society in such profound and articulate language. Poetry in the Age of Impurity is a courageous poet's attempt to reclaim the stilled voice of prophecy lost in the babble and irrelevance that has become the fabric of modern society.

A rare display of poetic mastery and stylistic brilliance, this new collection of poetry by Thomas Sanfilip is a unique work of remarkable emotional intensity and spiritual courage that in many ways defies categorization. Reminiscent of the fragmented elegies of the ancient Greeks, Last Poems is a riveting monody to the last days of a family in physical and spiritual decline. Shifting between dialogue with his own conscience and inner monologues with each family member, Sanfilip's voice is at once plaintive and somber, stalwart and unyielding in his effort to reconcile the tragedies that have brought each individually and collectively to despair. At the same time, Sanfilip transforms disillusionment into profound mystical appeals that set out to resolve the disparities between life and death, meaning and self-negation in the light of familial love and its struggle for affirmation. In the end, each family member becomes a distinct archetype that leads the poet to a greater understanding of the tenuous connection we hold to the world, the people closest to us, and to the living substance of the soul in all its tragic beauty.

For the first time in a single volume, this is the true adventure of John Fisk (1829-1905), who set out for San Francisco in 1849 at the start of the gold rush. A lost chronicle that hasn't been published in more than 125 years, Fisk's accounts present an honest and insightful portrait of the opening of the American West. His travels took him around Cape Horn and across the Great Plains. Along the way, he found gold, fought Indians, and made two great friends in Jim, who swung a mean frying pan, and Old Burr, their trusty hound. This is a must read that has been brought to publication by Bruce Adam, Fisk's great-great grandson and author of Dreams of a Lifetime.