Alice James Books - Fall 2013 Catalogue

ALICE JAMES BOOKS has been publishing poetry since 1973 and remains one of the few presses in the country that is run collectively. The cooperative selects manuscripts for publication primarily through regional and national annual competitions. Authors who win a Kinereth Gensler Award become active members of the cooperative board and participate in the editorial decisions of the press. The press, which historically has placed an emphasis on publishing women poets, was named for Alice James, sister of William and Henry, whose fine journal and gift for writing went unrecognized during her lifetime.

November 2013ISBN: 978-1-938584-02-2

paper • $15.95

Hum

NEW titles

Jamaal May

Fall 2013 Catalog

“Linguistically acrobatic [and] beautifully crafted. . . [Jamaal May’s] poems, exquisitely balanced by a sharp intelligence mixed with earnestness, makes his debut a marvel.”

—Publishers Weekly

“Jamaal May’s debut collection, Hum, is concerned with what’s beneath the surfaces of things—the unseen that eats away at us or does the work of sustaining us. Reading these poems, I was reminded of Ellison’s ‘lower frequencies,’ a voice speaking for us all. May has a fine ear, acutely attuned to the sonic textures of everyday experience. And Hum—a meditation on the machinery of living, an extended ode to sound and silence—is a compelling debut.”

—Natasha Trethewey

“The elegant and laconic intelligence in these poems, their skepticism and bent humor and deliberately anti-Romantic stance toward experience are completely refreshing. After so much contemporary writing that seems all flash, no mind and no heart, these poems show how close observation of the world and a gift for plain-spoken, but eloquent speech, can give to poetry both dignity and largeness of purpose, and do it in an idiom that is pitch perfect to emotional nuance and fine intellectual distinctions. Hard-headed and tough-minded, Hum is the epitome of what Frost meant by ‘a fresh look and a fresh listen.’”

—Tom Sleigh

NEW Titles

January 2014ISBN: 978-1-958584-03-9

paper • $15.95

OrphanJan Heller Levi

Previous Praise for Jan Heller Levi:

“. . .a poet whose humanity encompasses both our urge for completeness and our necessary dwelling in the work-in-progress of the world.”

—Mark Sullivan

“Jan Heller Levi’s work countervails the implications of this curmudgeonly koan with passional, self-critical intelligence. Ardent yet free of gush, the spontaneity and conversational ease of her poems assure that the quality of wonder, like that of mercy, is not strained.”

—Alice Fulton

“. . .it’s Levi’s humanity that ultimately won’t let you loose, words as direct as bullets, as kisses.”

—Bob Holman

September 2013ISBN: 978-1-938584-01-5

paper • $15.95

ViralSuzanne Parker

“[Viral] exceeds the elegy form and becomes a shocked, beautifully anaphoric invocation—a hopeless nonstop summons, a call-out to the lost one—to bring him back. These are relentlessly tender, impossibly empathetic poems—which echo and clarify the body of grief—“. . .the need to pass/through the impassable and land/in a space I fill, exactly.” The emotional tension is unbearable, but sustained, just as the human heart goes on, after unimaginable loss.”

—Carol Muske-Dukes

“I admire poems that quarrel—without preaching or redundancy—with social injustice, with injustice, period. Part outrage, part elegy, these spare and exact poems move me deeply.”

—Thomas Lux

“In language that is elegant, tender, and uncompromising, Suzanne Parker tells a story of violation and injustice not ripped from the headlines, but lost in them. Rage, as in all good art, is immersed in craft where it smolders still hot enough to scorch the reader. Parker turns tragedy into art—not for sensationalism, but an honoring of innocence, and love.”

—Kurt Brown

We Come ElementalTamiko Beyer

May 2013ISBN: 978-1-938584-00-8

paper • $15.95

NEW Titles

Nikolopoulos’ debut is careful, sexy. . . . The body, its ecstasy and its shame, is this poet’s obsession, and he observes it with a straightforward awe.

—Publishers Weekly

“”

MezzaninesMatthew Olzmann

April 2013ISBN: 978-1-882295-98-2

paper • $15.95

Obscenely YoursAngelo Nikolopoulos

April 2013ISBN: 978-1-882295-99-9

paper • $15.95

There’s something inherently spiritual about Olzmann’s Mezzanines. . . . It’s a place of reflection and contemplation, a temporary reprieve from the world’s chaos and a reach for a vision of paradise.

—The Los Angeles Review of Books

“”

In her lovely, complicated poems, Beyer. . . suggests that queerness isn’t relegated to gender or love but is part of the ebb and flow of everything.

—Library Journal

“”

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BACKLISt

Goest Cole Swensen

pier

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W i n n e r o f t h e 2 0 1 0 K u n d i m a n P r i z e

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