Bøker utgitt av Gold Wake Press Collective

Poetry. "In Kyle McCord's new book Gabriel empathizes, the Devil sympathizes, and an exhausted God watches a televangelist. Moving, imaginative and full of surprising turns, McCord's poems are alive with both the world and the dead who 'have no word for intimate, and a thousand words for blind.' I love the abundance of these poems, their humor, the music that made my ears howl and purr. When I dream about McCord's poems dreaming of me, I ride an aging mechanical bull, werewolves take over the city, Abraham Lincoln begs to rip off my blouse, God's love vanishes into my body like bread. I wake up hungry, afraid, laughing."-Traci Brimhall"In Kyle McCord's mercurial and visionary new book, SYMPATHY FROM THE DEVIL, we see a bold refiguring of the moral imagination that, like a Dante without a Beatrice, wanders hell bereft of the traditional compass that would clarify the archetypes. Here the eye opens wide its compassion in the dark. Play transgresses and so, in opposition to the self-servitude of sublimity and rapture, sheds light on cruelties and exclusions suffered in the name of the ideal. Everywhere we look in this book, we find the generosity and precision of paradox. The pleasure of absurdity may distance heartbreak, but it likewise binds us to it, such that the poet's lightness of touch and ranginess of sensibility becomes indistinguishable from his vision, the sense that one half of sympathy is always the embrace, the other the letting go. A stunning collection."-Bruce Bond"'What do you want from any of us, reader?' asks the first poem in Kyle McCord's SYMPATHY FROM THE DEVIL, bristling a bit, cocking its chin, letting us know that what follows will never be exactly what we expect. The book brims with wily intelligence and unsettling humor that challenge and surprise and thrill and move us so that in the end what we want is everything this terrific book has to give."-Corey Marks

"I'm enthralled by the deadpan weird found in so many of Kim Magowan's stories, where the strange doesn't so much intrude upon the real but rather insist it is the real. How Far I've Come is such a smart, moving, funny collection, by a writer who never fails to thrill and surprise me." -Matt Bell, author of Appleseed "Kim Magowan's new collection circumnavigates the tense world of fractured relationships. We're inside and outside, straddling and stomping away from divorces and affairs and threesomes with lapsed Christians. It's such an achievement, all the longing and lust stretched between two covers. I couldn't put it down." --Sherrie Flick, author of Thank Your Lucky Stars"I learn so much about writing when I read Kim Magowan. She's artful yet honest, modest yet brazen. She somehow writes stories that are at once intimate, funny, and tragic, spooling and unspooling the joys, travails, and mishaps of love and friendship and family. Under the spell of her wry wit, her wisdom, I gladly follow her exploration of the general messiness of being human, always turning the page for just one more story. Just one more." --Grant Faulkner, author of All the Comfort Sin Can Provide""Beautiful and incisive. Every piece is compelling in its own way and I love how the invention reveals itself over the course of the book. Dazzling." --Matthew Faogarty, author of Maybe Mermaids and Robots Are Lonely

Keen imagines that the ancient Irish custom of hiring women to mourn at funerals has continued into the modern day, and follows the most famous keener in world, Maeve McNamara, during the height of her career. Told in a plural first-person point of view, this book follows the group of people who adore Maeve. Through watching Maeve perform mourning, this collective voice thinks about grief, fame, community, and what we can know about ourselves and others. When a prot├⌐g├⌐ appears and asks Maeve to train her, ideas about race and gender-and ideas about who belongs to what communities, and the tradition of the art of lamentation-all begin to shift and swerve. A hybrid novel/ars poetica/autobiographical essay, Keen attempts to grapple with lineage and innovation, heritage, and what no longer serves us. 

We're The Flowover. We Come From Flyoverland. introduces a roving, Baudelarian speaker seeking to "translate pigeon into English" (the bird's music, or grammatically simplified language), among the streets of "bone and ash," post-empire USA: home to "The Longest Winter on Record." Amid "mirrors not made of metal amalgam and glass," and indexical signs replacing reality ("food we want to eat via pointing"), he mourns the tendency to kill "not the enemy but the messenger," in a world where what's sacred is unprotected: a "a temple where the door is never locked." But this speaker is not dissuaded by simulacra nor the steady thrum ("wrong, goddamnit") that "grows into what I hear": instead, he tunes into a "species forgotten," a "small print none have ever bothered to read." The title delivers its promise: the flownover (disregarded) from flyoverland (transcendent) arrive at a Carpe Diem not rapacious but ecstatic, as tourists of the body, in "climax," become those of the mind. -Virginia Konchan, author of Any God Will Do and The End of SpectacleReading Mauch's work, I'm reminded over and over of Stanley Kunitz's statement that "The first task of the poet is to create the person who will write the poems." Here we have the kind of shimmering lyric insights that can come only from a mind and heart far along the path of enlightenment. What a great gift Mauch has given us by inviting us to share in the journey, offering us no less than "a temple where the door is never locked." -Melissa Studdard, author of Like a Bird with a Thousand Wings and I Ate the Cosmos for Breakfast

"Opening these pages is like stepping through a secret doorway to discover a menagerie of wonders, impossibly beautiful. There are sentences here so fine, so perfectly worded, they made me gasp. Unsettling, mysterious, slightly subversive, deeply moving, these stories are small punches to the heart. Though collectively they feel huge, as if Bess Winter drew them from the worlds of a dozen novels, so richly populated are they with ideas, desires, dreams. Machines of Another Era is the startling debut of a thrilling new voice on the literary scene." - Josh Weil, National Book Foundation 5 under 35 honoree and author of The Age of Perpetual Light"Bess Winter''s stories are lovely and lithe and odd; much like scraps of paper and curious photographs found tucked away in old books, they haunt in corners of the mind for a long time after reading, full of ephemera and wonder." -Amber Sparks, author of And I Do Not Forgive You