Bøker utgitt av Western Michigan University, New Issues Press

Features poetry by: Tom Andrews, James Armstrong, Cullen Bailey Burns, Jackie Bartley, Elinor Benedict, Terry Blackhawk, Gladys Cardiff, Susanna Childress, Patricia Clark, David Cope, Jim Daniels, Mike Delp, Toi Derricotte, Chris Dombrowski, Jack Driscoll, Stuart Dybek, Nancy Eimers, Robert Fanning, and, Mary Jo Firth Gillett, among others.

Fusing lyric meditation and narrative perceptions, the poems in Cynthia Hogue's new collection 'Flux' track the natural world and the self in it -- from the Sonoran Desert of the Southwest to the far north of Iceland. In the tradition of the distilled and lyrically abstract poetry of Dickinson and H.D., Flux opens into visionary language and the search for transcendence.

Told in two alternating timelines, this novel follows a friendship over twenty-five years. Boy Meets Girl is the story of a twenty-five-year friendship between Sammy Browne (young, idealistic, and broke) and Ben Eisenberg (older, jaded, and almost unimaginably rich)--two characters drawn together, and ultimately torn apart, by their differences. This novel tells the story of their relationship over the decades--from youthful flirtation to unrequited love, to long-term friendship that flourishes in middle age, to estrangement and then reunion. The novel unfolds in alternating chapters, toggling back and forth between Ben and Sammy as young people and in middle age, showing everything the characters hoped to become and how things turned out for them. Boy Meets Girl unfolds against the political and social backdrop of the last three decades, with Bill Clinton's election, the events of September 11, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and even the Trump era providing context and contrast for the personal stories of the main characters.

Fiction. Translation. "Marie Beig's HERMINE is a heartbreaking bestiary, a human life told in sixty-four animals. The book's design is apt, since its protagonist elicits less regard from her farm family than its animals do. Imagine a world in which your first memories are of your 'father's bad-tempered scowl and the angry faces of sisters and brothers who were struck and struck back.' A world in which tenderness is 'always turning away again to someone else' -- -Jim Shepard. Translated from the German by Jaimy Gordon.

"The poems of Rebecca Dunham's Strike invoke the terse, noiseless monstrousness of the toxic-domestic, the 'once-us, ' in which 'to fall numb is not to fall/out of pain.' This collection is Plathian in its riven depiction of anger, which both 'presses/down and in, ' where denial 'is beaten to silver foil, to silver leaf, ' and in which '[o]ver the butcher/paper's sheets' her 'red story sprawls.' In poems whose edges are honed on a whetstone of impeccable craft, and which delve into history, archetype, and ekphrasis, Dunham exposes the face that 'ripples beneath her mask' and builds a ravishing myth of the unveiled lyric interior." --Diane Seuss "In Rebecca Dunham's gorgeous new book there are secrets, shames, and a fury that bites like frost. Strike reminds me that 'fidelity / demands not only virtue's deep mortal stab, / but the love of it'; that anger burns clean; that forgiveness can burden the one who was hurt, asking them to console the one who made them suffer. Dunham brings to light a rage that has felt unutterable to me for so long, as well as the lineage of women who know betrayal's slow burning. When you read this stunning book, you can't fail to feel these poems strike you as well, how even after you set it down, you can still feel the scorch of it." --Traci Brimhall "D.T. Suzuki describes the start of a bad poem as one that 'does not fly straight to the target, nor does the target stand where it is...' Rebecca Dunham's Strike is a campaign of targets all hit, dead-center, by furiously composed poems--arrows that cannot miss. Whether real life fortifies her aim, or pure imagination, or the progeny of both, the reader need not know. What matters is that this writer is on fire--and for sharing her archery, her heartache, and her hunger for catharsis, we thank her, as this is poetry that confirms the weirdly compatible damnation and grace of language used to expunge and expose and exalt. 'Heap of tortured hairpins/at my feet..., ' Strike hurts, and thereby saves." --Larissa Szporluk

A collection of poems that delve into the experience of living with bipolar disorder. This collection of poetry explores the disruptive state of psychosis, with all its insights and follies, and the challenges of living life after a departure from the self. These poems reach for an understanding of the ecstasy and tragedy of madness through both lyric and prose forms that mimic the sublime state of mania through their engagement with language. Ordinary life becomes strange in these poems, which are playful and humorous at times and dark at others, as they seek resolution to the question of what happens when the mind overthrows the body.

Poems that acknowledge the existential anxieties of our age while continuing to celebrate the beauty and musicality of language.    In Would We Still Be, James Henry Knippen crafts the anxieties that emanate from human existence‿grief, fear, hopelessness, uncertainty‿into poetic reflections that express a deep reverence for the musicality and incantational capacity of language. Like a moon or a wren, two of the book‿s obsessions, these haunting poems call us to consider beauty‿s connection to the transitory. Among the ghosts that wander these pages‿those of loved ones, those we are, and those we will become‿Knippen asks if image is enough, if sound is enough, if faith is enough. In doing so, these poems seek out the soul‿s communion with voice, encouraging us to sing our fate.

"The poems in this powerful new collection explore the history of conflict and resilience--whether it occurs during the Nazi occupation of Poland, the Balkan wars in Bosnia and Croatia, or within the intimate tableaux of a family's dissonance. Weaving poems into three distinct sections, Linda Nemec Foster pays close attention to not only what divides us, but also to what can heal and redeem our common journey: an artist's notebook; the imagined life of Mary Magdalene; a fascination with Mount Fuji; a mother's obsession with vintage movie stars; a dead father's love. The Blue Divide resonates with the landscape of the world and the landscape of the heart."--Provided by publisher.

To Zenzi is the extraordinary story of Tobias Koertig's odyssey through the apocalypse of Berlin in 1945. An orphaned thirteen-year-old who loves to draw, Tobias is coerced into joining the German youth army in the last desperate weeks of the war. Mistaken for a hero on the Eastern Front, he receives an Iron Cross from Hitler himself, who discovers the boy's cartoons and appoints Tobias to sketch pictures of the ruined city. Shuttling between the insanity of the Führer's bunker and the chaotic streets, Tobias must contend with a scheming Martin Bormann, a deceitful deserter, the Russian onslaught, and his own compounding despair--all while falling for Zenzi, a girl of Jewish descent (a mischling) who relays secret news of death camps and convinces Tobias to make a treacherous escape to the Americans. With thrilling risks in plotting and prose, with moments of pathos and absurdity, Shuster richly conjures a mad, tragic world.