Bøker utgitt av Persea Books

Straddling genres--prose poetry, micro memoir, fairy tale, autofiction--Where Will We Live If the House Burns Down is first and foremost the story of a marriage. Borrowing elements from surrealist writer and artists, it explores the affects of chronic illness, disability, and a spouse's gender transition. All of these issues swirl through the central marital relationship and the daily lives of its two lead characters, Sergeant and Grim--even as the book's narrator, unreliable and unobjective, increasingly takes center stage. Reminiscent as much of contemporary fiction by writers like Sabrina Orah Mark and Sarah Shun-Lien Bynum as of poets or memoirists, this book is as engrossing as it is experimental, traversing complicating difficult domestic and emotional terrain by way of Allison Blevins' vivid imagination.

In poems that bring together traditional American patriotic songs and current American horrors--and in which Yeats' famous apocalyptic figure of the Rough Beast takes a painting class, wears a spacesuit, and listens to public service announcements--[ominous music intensifying] takes on the too-muchness of contemporary, apocalypse-prone America with humor, conscience, and the occasional fiddle duel. In this fourth book of poetry, Alexandra Teague expands her subject matter to include chronic pain, generational poverty, and what it means to stay safe--physically and psychologically. Her new poems are reckonings with sexism and dental trauma, Mitch McConnell and UFOs, torture devices and sad clown paintings--and with some of the most urgent crises of our time: gun violence, pandemics, and climate change.

American Analects uses the Analects of Confucius as an inspiration to mediate upon the life, death, and the subsequent loss of the poet's influential, beloved mentor-the painter Gene Holtan. These poems are juxtaposed with poems about other losses-of parents, of friends and friends of friends. Some of these deaths were caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, others by age and the inescapable journey we all take. Still, this is not a dour book. Many poems celebrate our ability to inspire, to comfort, and to nurture one another, and the collection is leavened with poems about family, about poetry, and about the healing influence of landscape and of nature. In the end, American Analects is about resiliency, about moving on from personal loss, from the pandemic, and from catastrophic fires, to rejoice in what remains. These poems encourage us to acknowledge the fragility of our lives and of those we love, while we celebrate those who guide us, even in memory.