Bøker utgitt av Nixes Mate Books

New England without winter is a blessing and a curse. ¡Gracias, El Niño!Here at Nixes Mate headquarters, graveyard for pirates, mutineers, and booze cruises, we're excited about our new books, and this issue which features fifteen new authors to Nixes Mate Review. Every year or so, we change the size of the Review and our books. Of course, we've always shunned the standard size of books and journals. This year is no exception. Who needs 6 x 9 when you can have 5.83 x 8.27! The Review is 6 5/8 x 10 1/4. Go figure.You must be asking yourself, why does that matter. It doesn't. Afterall, New England with or without winter heralds a new Spring. ¡Gracias, El Niño!

In a descent toward what might make our epoch sing in its most falsetto pitch, Vincenz troubles our ears by running a narrative script thru it to plumb its bottom. In a word, the theft of his own ear has felt its echo disguise upon disguise to make these poems carom off one another thence to settle into their proper end. Thieves' Canto is a return from any meta-beyond back into our world, or, "Present Patience." - t thilleman

Dot Girl is a memoir written in verse, with technicolor story bursting from the most beautifully wrought bare-knuckle lines. With courageous truth-telling (and fierce humor!) Linda Carney-Goodrich shares her personal roadmap from childhood poverty and family trauma to remembrance, mourning, and reconnection, reminding us that it is more than possible to emerge whole. Traipse alongside her in stealthy solidarity through the darkened dirty streets of pre-gentrification Boston, to the smashed-beer-bottle sands of Dorchester Bay and, ultimately, to the imagined horizons of a girl dying to be free.- Michael Patrick MacDonald, author of All Souls: A Family Story from Southie

Eileen Cleary's Wild Pack of the Living is not simply a retelling of Steven Stayner's abduction at the age of 7; rather, the poems of this volume are haunting and intimate visitations of his experience conducted by means of startling arrangements of lyric and image. Subject matter one might initially read as fodder for tabloid tales is transmuted into the profound knowledge of the scope of the loss and its terrifying repercussions. I am both heartbroken by these poems and astonished by their writer's enviable skill.- Cate Marvin, author of Event Horizon

We're tight into hurricane season here at Nixes Mate Headquarters. No better time than to sit with our Summer/Fall 2023 issue and read your way through family dilemmas, ekphrastics, and the spirits of color and place. We have 18 writers newly joining the Nixes Mate family. In the future, we hope to read more of their work. We are happy to announce that Hannah Larrabee, who guest edited our climate change issue back in 2021, has joined our editorial staff. In addition to editorial duties, Hannah is our Explorer.

These poems let you eavesdrop on an intense lovers' dialogue at the table next to you, a dialogue completely unpredictable, comic and profound. They will refresh your views of love, and of poetry, and will make you leave the restaurant full of wonder. You should put down your fork and listen.- J.D. Scrimgeour, author of Banana Bread

Welcome to the second print issue of Nixes Mate Review featuring new voices and returning voices. In this issue, we tackle memory and mortality and what it means to publish in a winter that seems like a memory. Is it early Spring in New England when it's 60 degrees Fahrenheit out in February? Is it late winter when, a week earlier, it was -8 degrees Fahrenheit? Is it even winter when Boston has only received 8 inches snow versus its usual 2 feet by the middle of February? Where are the Nor'easters? Are we speaking too soon, jinxing us here at Nixes Mate headquarters surrounded by a rising and warming sea? Will we retain a memory of the winter that wasn't long after it fades?

Devon Balwit's Spirit Spout - a poetic vision directly engaging with Melville's Moby-Dick; or, The Whale - is an eschatological tour de force. The poet practices an intertextual jouissance showcasing singular gifts for sound and image. We encounter "the thrown gauntlet // the poking prod of the devil's own advocate"; there is salt, wind, brine and ocean; Melville as god, as demon; Melville in the throes of creation and also grieving. Ishmael, Ahab, and Queequeg beckon. Both travelogue and existential reckoning with life, there is a painterly attention to the physical, to the body; there is a grappling with sociology and philosophy: "Our thinking // always butting up against the ribs / of the paradigms we travel in." Balwit's powers are on full display - this book's spirit is deep and wide. - Charles Kell, author of Ishmael Mask

The poems in Unfoldings deftly explore many facets of a woman's identity at different ages and in relation to ancient myths and stories. Poet Clara Eugenia Ronderos reveals truths of feminine existence, in all their mystery, and then as they find life as words in the world. "From her mouth," she writes, "had sprung the rock-hard diamond stone." I would add that many gems from her pen appear in this collection.- Sandra Storey, author of Every State Has Its Own Light

Miriam O'Neal's The Half-Said Things is a book both meditatively considerate and bitingly eloquent. These are domestic poems on the edge of wilderness, poems from empty rooms in crowded houses, poems delighting in language and ripe with depth. "So I take my missing with me like a parting / gift of roses" she writes, reflecting lyrically on life and death from a calm, wisely wary place of earned experience, strength and knowing acceptance.- Stephan Delbos, Poet Laureate of Plymouth, MassachusettsI loved Miriam O'Neal's The Half-Said Things for its wondrous questioning and its listening "to the songs a shy girl hears." These are poems grounded in the world where yeasty dough is kneaded in "a red ware bowl the size of a small country." This is a country with a "muffin god" and a "wet wheat ocean," where the speaker is a "fugitive of her own heart." In this place, we enter churches, as well as rooms with cabbage roses on the wallpaper. O'Neal asks, "Whose world is this?/Whose world these?" This collection is a discovery of truths, which can be stark: ". . .only hunger and sea wind/only song and sway mean/anything." I'll return to this place in The Half-Said Things where I am reminded to "Be kind. We are only here so long."- Jennifer Martelli, author of My TarantellaMiriam O'Neal's poems draw one deeply into a bodily experience where all senses are evoked. In the tradition of the great Irish female poet Eavan Boland, who championed the way for women to write poems about their own lives, domesticity, and the landscape within the home, she speaks to the present, to symbol, and to memory through everyday language. There is bread and rain. There are birds and song. A seamstress of words, O'Neal's Irish heritage weaves through this collection as in these beautiful deeply moving lines from her first poem, 'still life with knowledge, ' which could also describe her style: no more than a hum of notes/ from songs her mother's sung/ before, a lullaby about losing love, and though/ she hasn't lost anything yet, she understands. - Attracta Fahy, Author of Dinner in the Fields

These fierce poems bleed love and loss, knotted with a personal reckoning of a "Vietnam of the soul" shared with a vanished husband whom neither divorce nor death can finally erase. Pris Campbell cuts herself to the quick and keeps going. Her wounds become a blessing in art, a gift to us all.- Jeff Weddle, winner of the Eudora Welty PrizeIn this poignant collection, Pris Campbell tells us the story of how she fell in love, waited for him while he trained as a naval officer at OCS, got married in the romantically magical land of Hawaii, and then divorced all the while the Vietnam War was ripping the soul of America in two. Campbell masterfully casts a spell over us as she relives their past and how the present is haunted by the hopes and dreams of her first marriage. History, particularly the events on the fringes and margins of a horrific war, walks side by side with their fated romance, told by an exemplary humane narrator."- Michael Parker, author of Divining the Spirits in the House of the Hush and Hush.Grief takes on many faces, shifts hot and cold, changes through the omnivorous jaws of time. In Pris Campbell's most recent book, Truth and Other Lies, we learn how a war can consume not only its soldiers, but also those who loved them. Her vivid and honest poems put architecture to the thinning walls of angst and PTSD. In full color, set in the trauma of the 1960's anti-war movement, we find a collection of poems that draws us toward empathy and compassion, finding in "Fourteen Months," an uncommon truth: "He's dead two years and a half now... poems spill out like the turning tide he rode on then and ride again now, touching me occasionally within our shared Vietnam of the soul." This is narrative poetry at a visceral level, provocative, naked, and essential.- Edward Nudelman, author of Thin Places.

I seldom see American poets write in Chinese. J.D. Scrimgeour is a special case. It's amazing for an American to write such wonderful poems in idiomatic Chinese. I particularly appreciate the methods of word-play and humor used in these beautiful poems.- Zhang Ziqing, Poet, Translator, Scholar, author of A History of 20th Century American Poetry (3 Volumes)

The best poetry and fiction of Nixes Mate Review published during the Covid-19 Pandemic featuring: Sam Ambler - Catherine Arra - Tina Barry - Lynn Bey - Heather Bourbeau - Christine Boyer - Eileen Cleary - Frances Donovan - Jennifer Franklin - Karen Friedland - Mary Beth Hines - Mary Honaker - Amanda Hope - Carrie Jewell - Christine Jones - Crystal Karlberg - Sharon Kennedy-Nolle - Linda Lamenza - Yvonne Higgins Leach - Kasy Long - Colleen Michaels - Jay Miner - Zach Murphy - Karen Neuberg - Jonathan Penton - Karen Poppy - Jessica Purdy - Ki Russell - Arianna Sebo - Margarita Serafimova - Beate Sigriddaughter - Sarah Snyder - Susan Tepper - Gail Thomas - Meg Tuite - Rekha Valliappan - Jessica Walsh - Emily Wolahan - Hannah Yerington

Like a fiery sea nymph, Deweese skillfully navigates the challenging waters of the universe. A questioning enchantress, sifting through memories rich in erotic imagery, she glides ghost-like through death of innocence to depths of exquisite sensual connection - transcendent in nature yet forever at odds with the test of time. - Barbara H. Moore, author of Dancing On Broken Glass

Mallarmé's symbolism invoked early on, DeCarteret's poems speak of a life spent in conversation with the self and other poets. The poems weave themselves, tease out meaning the more you read them. Anagrams constantly talking back to themselves, they honor as they grieve for poets and poetry. Genius segues link these poems' motifs, hold them up to the light: from window to water, sun to flame, pen to tongue, words and wordlessness, paper crumpled, balled up like asterisks, webs to madness to mazes. They are the lack as much as the purposefully left blank. These poems will make you pay attention - to elements, ghosts and chairs - reckon with religion. The poet's trick, "throwing one's latest voice", tricks the poet. Marrying language with meaning. Leaving punctuation to ampersands, question marks, and slashes, the line break is the modus operandi. Not a period in sight, the poet ends lesser case with itches still left to scratch. They reach the reader, who might be holy if they would make the poet whole. - Jessica Purdy, Author of Sleep in a Strange House

As I read Eileen Cleary's 2 a.m. with Keats, I felt breathless, suspended in a place of red keys, plum stones, cats, willows, and sphinxes. It would minimize the reach of this brilliant collection to call it an elegy or a eulogy, or even a love story to Lucie Brock-Broido or John Keats - though it is all of those things. Here, in this place where "the elm says Grief and the oak, Grief," the poems shine and scatter across the pages like "a phantom of stars." Cleary engages the rhythms of another world, of "sweet music honeyed and unheard," where "Lucie reaches forty years back. . . ." Embracing the quirkiness of Brock-Broido's imagery and the love of Keats's line, Cleary creates a séance of astronomy, searching for the origins of human and poetic magic, where "looking for signs means I've / once been broken." I will return to 2 a.m. with Keats again and again, to remember Lucie and Keats, to inhale "rose milk . . . mint." - Jennifer Martelli, author of In the Year of Ferraro

"Three thousand ancestors ask how I straddle / the sea, a foot on either shore," Anastasia Vassos writes. One answer is this lovely book, which begins and ends in Greece, the home of both her ancestors and the mythological and literary figures she references throughout. Woven through the geographical fabric is a loose chronological thread connecting a midwestern childhood, a lasting love relationship, and the aging of parents. "Let me be a book before it's written," Vassos writes. Here is the book, written, with its vivid imagery, its attention to sound and form, its "words lined up . . . behind the heart." - Martha Collins

Dog-Walking in the Shadow of Pyongyang provides voyagers with all the essentials: map, compass, machete and water bottle. This book was written to exhort and document, to console and celebrate, to inhibit the impulse for flight while also discouraging the reflex to fight. Devon Balwit's poems stroll down a left handed path that is salted with fire, a trail between thick bristled hedges leading the reader back to this glorious world which was in front of our eyes all the time. Can you hold your ground? Then leash the beast. Don't let the bullies or bullets distract you. Relish the dawn as well as the dusk. - Casey Bush, author of Student of The Hippocampus

Comito’s range is expansive, painting emotions and scenes with a stunning ferocity. Bury Me in the Sky is a marvel of language and insights. The imagery alone is enough to steal your breath.Underlaid in each piece are layers of tripwire that make youreexamine what you’re reading so as not to miss out on the full scope of experience Comito renders seemingly effortlessly. She can beguile you with sardonic humor and then take you out atthe knees with sharp sprigs of pathos, often in the same piece.— Len Kuntz, author of This is Why I Need You

There is a deceptively light touch here. The humor is nevervicious but is always cognizant that we laugh when we have cried enough. Brad Rose’s microfictions and prose poems – each piece the exactly right size and shape – slide easily into the mind fromseveral directions at once, then stick around to scratch at the brain. Read this book and savor it.— Sally Reno, Editor of Blink Ink

With their ravening grace, these blood bright poems call echoes of their kindred – Sappho, Plath, di Prima – not as source but as sisters. Deweese understands the empty spaces between loneliness and desire and the sanctity of flesh as refuge. Her poems seduce. She speaks of “the most pure incarnation of human love,” and I believe her. Here is a masterful poet glowing in her power. Donot miss this book.— Jeff Weddle, winner of the Eudora Welty Prize

Lauren Leja is a terrific writer. Her characters inhabit that elastic, kaleidoscopic space between believing that they are good people while all along they are drenched with the backwash of their own decisions. Ms. Leja doesn't go for the easy knock out in these stories full of keenly observed mayhem populated by a range of quirky and spontaneously combustive types. Instead, she deftly jabs them around the ring, giving them, and the reader, just enough hope that maybe they will punch above their weight class.- Jack Gantos, author of Hole In My Life

In his latest collection, accelerant, Bill Yarrow bears witness to nature's and mankind's fierce wiles. But Yarrow never forgets to be poetic, nor does he skimp on his trademark zaniness. While most poets opt for serenity, Yarrow opines that "the only chance for happiness / is to excommunicate all calm." By eschewing tameness for his unique brand of mayhem, Yarrow does exactly what poets should do: speaks his mind and throws caution to the wind.- Cindy Hochman, author of Habeas Corpus

Body Bag should be required reading for every President and member of Congress considering sending their citizens to war. These poems, none more than four lines, are dollops of horror, heartbreak, endurance, humanity, vulnerability and a whole lot of love. Although I wish Borczon didn't have to write Body Bag, I am grateful for this book and I am grateful knowing Matt is out there using his immense artistic skills to give us an idea of how it was and what it's like.- Bob Pajich, author of The Trolleyman