Bøker utgitt av Michigan Writers Cooperative Press

The Sound a Car Door Makes is an irascible joy ride through late capitalist fallout. In finely tuned prose poems one part whimsy, one part angst, on part rock and roll, Natalie Tomlin negotiates the culpability of our boundless mobility with speed, grace and an engine's low growl. Never do we forget we're traveling through the dark at unsafe speeds. Strapped in with toddlers and absentee fathers, Mr. Iacocca and Joan of Arc, we hurl "past twenty-four-hour diners hanging on like dried-out barnacles," serenaded by Led Zeppelin and smooth jazz, our ears ringing with car door slams, Collision Center surveys and the squawk of bodies scooting across vinyl in an endless bounty of seemingly "improvised song."Jennifer Sperry Steinorth, author of A Wake with Nine Shades and Her Read, A Graphic Poem

What a delight to explore the worlds and characters of these stories! I found myself wanting to read sentences aloud as I came across them, wondrous turns of phrase, perfectly pitched captures of voice, tiny little jokes that made me snort with laughter, followed by lines that just broke my heart in their plainspoken truth and wisdom. This earth is a blue earth -- in its oceans and its heartbreak and cloudy nostalgia, and in the blues Callie's singing for those old River Junction days. I'd follow Callie's voice across all the red-line interstate miles of the map and beyond! Sharon Bippus is a writer of extraordinary talent and self-possession.Thisbe Nissen, author of Out of the Girls Room and into the Night and How Other People Make Love

Through musically muscular verse at once tender and unflinching, Melinda LePere leads us along the fault lines of a seasoned life into spare domestic spaces, rooms populated by ghosts and puppets, Sunday gravy and severed limbs. Here, the music of the riptide competes with a cathedral's pipe organ and the slap and scratch of cars with a vacuum's roar. And to all of it, a child is always upstairs, listening. These poems know their weight. And they know us, too, how we sometimes wonder if every family is "a kind of prison." Listen, "someone is rhyming a ball against the house." Here we are, skittish as horses, a "flailing animal fighting for release." Here, we are heard; here, we are seen.Jennifer Sperry Steinorth, author of A Wake with Nine Shades and Her Read, A Graphic Poem

In Twinkies, Kathleen Quigley offers a sensual exploration of that which goes missing, creating a world of textures -- bristling hairs, the contours of a lip, the tender fingertips of a friend pressed against a face or scalp. Yet the memoir is also the tale of psychological interiors and the close emotional bond between two women, best friends and college track mates, who undergo distinct cancer odysseys separated by three decades. Despite the intensity of the subject matter, a wry humor wanders in and out of the braided narrative, heightening the pathos with a modest flourish at one moment and landing a blow directed at insensitive strangers the next. With Quigley's sure-handed voice, the world at large gains a mighty cancer foe, and the world of literature gains a dynamic and gifted writer.Dawn Newton, author of The Remnants of Summer and Winded: A Memoir in Four Stages

"The characters in Bluetongue and Other Michigan Stories recall those of Jim Harrison or even Hemingway; their circumstances are shot through with tragedy, both befallen and self-inflicted. Engaging and surprising, and told in prose remarkable for its sentence-by-sentence loveliness as well as its precision, these linked stories are exactly what good fiction should be: satisfying but also heartbreaking."Set against the region''s beauty - its farms and woods and lakes, its still-wide swaths of wilderness - these stories show us not just cautionary tales, the case and effect of lifetimes of choices, but imperfect, grace-filled human lives."- Hadley Moore, author of Not Dead Yet

"''I''m new here,'' begins the first poem in Kathy Rabbers'' The Mountain Ash. Each poem in this collection carries that same wide-eyed quality. Here is a life in poems, told simply, but nothing is simple seen with such awareness. The image of a young girl who is ''too young to know sadness,'' but still chokes on the memory of her mother with an unknown man at the beach. The same mother tries to plant a mountain ash tree and fails, as her marriage is failing, and yet she teaches her daughter to love words. Darkness and wisdom are threaded through these poems. In ''Fifth Grade Daydream,'' my favorite in this collection, the classroom fills with water which reveals at last the beauty of every detail, and brings a ''wisdom beyond the fifth grade.'' These poems manage to live gracefully in both worlds, the always-new past and the wise present."- Fleda Brown, author of The Woods Are On Fire: New and Selected Poems