Made in Michigan Writers Series Brochure

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Made in Michigan Writers Series

Wayne State University Press

General EditorsMichael DelpM. L. Liebler

Advisory EditorsMelba Joyce BoydStuart DybekKathleen GlynnJerry HerronLaura KasischkeThomas LynchFrank RashidDoug StantonKeith Taylor

The Made in Michigan Writers Series is devoted to highlighting the works of distinguished statewide writers to showcase Michigan’s diverse voices. The series publishes poetry, creative nonfiction, short fiction, and essays by Michigan writers with the aim of encouraging the recognition of the state’s artistic and cultural heritage throughout Michigan, the Midwest, and the nation.

Made in Michigan Writers Series

Thank you to our series sponsors:

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On the Cover

Practicing to Walk Like a HeronPoems by Jack Ridl

Poems that delight in discovering the comic, sorrowful, empathic, and spiritual in what is often overlooked.

In Practicing to Walk Like a Heron multiple-award-winning Michi-gan poet Jack Ridl shares lines of well-earned wisdom in the face of a constantly changing world. The familiar comforts of life—a warm fire in winter, a lush garden in summer—become the set-tings for transcendent and universal truths in these poems, as moments of grief, sadness, and melancholy trigger a deeper ap-preciation for small but important joys. The simple clarity of Ridl’s lines and diction make the poems accessible to all readers, but especially rewarding for those who appreciate carefully honed, masterful verse.

Many of the poems take solace in nature—quiet deer outside in the woods, deep snow, a thrush’s empty nest in the eaves—as well as man-made things in the world—a steamer trunk, glass jars, tea cups, and books piled high near an easy chair. Yet Ridl avoids becoming nostalgic or romantic in his surroundings, and shows that there is nothing easy in his celebration of topics like “The Letters,” “But He Loved His Dog,” “A Christmas List for Santa,” and “The Enormous Mystery of Couples.” An interlude of full-color pages divides Ridl’s more personal poems with a section of circus-themed pieces, adding visions of elephants, trumpets, tents, sequins, and sideshows, and the uniquely travel-weary per-spectives of jugglers, trapeze artists, roustabouts, and clowns.

2013 • 6 x 9 •176 Pages ISBN 978-0-8143-3453-9 • $17.95 PapereISBN 978-0-8143-3539-0

Jack Ridl is the author of Broken Symmetry, named best book of poetry for 2006 by The Society of Midland Authors, and of Losing Season, and is co-author with Peter Schakel of Approaching Literature. He is professor emeritus at Hope College, where he was named Michigan’s Professor of the Year in 1996 by the Carnegie (C.A.S.E.) Foundation. More than 75 of his students are now published authors.

“If you don’t believe you have a soul, reading this book will give you one —its

soulfulness is that far-reaching, generous, persuasive, and real.”

—Mary Ruefle

Also by Jack Ridl:

Broken Symmetry Ridl leads readers into reflective

connection with the everyday world in this unique and enjoyable volume.

2006 • 5.75 x 8.75 •136 Pages ISBN 978-0-8143-3322-8

eISBN 978-0-8143-3520-8$15.95 Paper

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Short Fiction

Living TogetherShort Stories and a Novella by Gloria Whelan

Stories that explore the unexpected and sometimes amazing ways we live together.

We all have to live together, whether we do it with enthusiasm or grace, reluctance or despair. In this skillfully drawn collection, National Book award-winning Michigan writer Gloria Whelan presents short stories and a novella that look at people living to-gether who have reached a crisis point. Whether her characters are old or young, male or female, in settings that are urban or rural, they wrestle with anger, loneliness, and frustration, but ul-timately demonstrate bravery, trust, determination, and, often, the ability to learn something new.

Whelan considers a variety of narratives about people coexisting, breaking apart, or coming together. The subdued lives of older women are shaken by a scandalous invasion; a man looks around him to discover he will be living the rest of his life in the wrong place with the wrong people; a married couple, grown apart, find themselves locked together; suburbanites reach out tenta-tively to the distant city; a house and the ghosts who inhabit it change lives. A final section contains Whelan’s novella, “Keeping Your Place,” which follows a family as their lives and their home change during the years of the Vietnam War. After the loss of her husband, a mother and the three children must make a final visit to their beloved cabin in the woods and come to a crucial deci-sion.

Well known for her writing for young readers, Whelan’s stories in Living Together will be a welcome surprise for adults who may be new to her quirky, relatable characters and quietly powerful narrative.

Gloria Whelan’s short stories have appeared in a number of literary quar-terlies including The Gettysburg Review, The Ontario Review, and The Mis-souri Review as well as in anthologies including The O’Henry Awards. She has written numerous books for young readers, and her novel Homeless Bird was a National Book Award winner.

2013 • 5.5 x 8.5 • 184 Pages ISBN 978-0-8143-3896-4 • $18.95 PapereISBN 978-0-8143-3897-1

“Gloria Whelan is a writer of preci-sion, grace, intelligence, and wit. Her stories, many set in Michigan, are a pleasure to read, in particular the elegantly composed novella with its examination of loss and unexpected happiness.” —Joyce Carol Oates

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Short Fiction

The World of a Few Minutes AgoStories by Jack Driscoll

Stories in the realistic tradition of lives overlooked, voices unheard, and characters trying to overcome and transcend confining circumstances.

In The World of a Few Minutes Ago, award-winning author Jack Driscoll renders ten stories from the point of view of characters aged fourteen to seventy-seven with a consistently deep under-standing of each character’s internal world and emotional strug-gles. All of the stories are set against the quiet, powerful northern Michigan landscape and share a sense of longing, amplified by the beautiful but often unforgiving surroundings. With keen at-tention to the nuances of his characters and their lives, Driscoll explores both their attachments to the past and their as-yet-unseen futures as he considers relationships between loves, old friends, and parents and their children.

A twelve-year-old boy accompanies his father on a secret run to the slaughterhouse where he recently lost his job. A middle-aged divorcé waits to witness the execution of the man who murdered his daughter decades earlier. A seventy-seven-year-old man reas-sesses both his fifty-year marriage and his career as an AP war photographer. A sixteen-year-old girl drives through a snowstorm in a clandestine meeting with her driver’s education instructor. A twentysomething couple breaks into houses to ignite the passion in their relationship. Each story is carefully crafted and lovingly delivered, as characters weigh their own feelings against their complicated perceptions of other people and the action swirling around them. Driscoll’s Michigan shapes these people as surely as their grief and joy, as the setting often becomes a physical touch-stone to which characters turn to navigate the immensity of the unknown universe.

Jack Driscoll is the author of four novels, four poetry collections, and the AWP Short Fiction Award winner Wanting Only to Be Heard. He has also received the Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers Award, the PEN/Nelson Algren Fiction Award, the Pushcart Editors’ Book Award, Pushcart Prizes, PEN Syndicated Fiction Awards, and Best American Short Story citations. He currently teaches in Pacific University’s acclaimed low-resi-dency MFA program in Oregon.


“Jack Driscoll has long been one of this country’s best short story writers, and this book confirms it. Each enthralling

story in The World of a Few Minutes Ago is filled with lyrical energy and

vivid insight. A marvelous, show-stopping performance.”

—Brady Udall, an American Novelist

• 2013 Michigan Notable Book Award

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Short Fiction

In Which Brief Stories Are ToldStories by Phillip Sterling

Brief encounters with the suffering and triumphs of characters living in northern Michigan.

In Which Brief Stories Are Told presents a collage of moments in the lives of average people—car salesmen and motel maids, mothers and fathers, neighbors and professional colleagues—with small-town northern Michigan as a backdrop. Author Phillip Sterling invites readers to share his characters’ small tragedies and victories in fifteen deceptively simple, intimate stories. While varied in length from short glimpses to longer narratives, each of the stories is defined by a unique perspective, as characters pres-ent their version of a story—sometimes other peoples’ stories—clouded by the same emotion, judgment, and passing of time that inhabit all of our memories.

The stories in this collection contain laments and mysteries: a car salesman implicates himself in a crime that he is not sure ever took place, a third-shift convenience store clerk accepts her un-fortunate disfigurement, dinner parties generate jealousy and resignation among their participants, a sister’s disappearance creates a long-standing familial black hole, a sailboat comes to symbolize the longing of an elderly couple, and a daughter finds answers in her father’s speechlessness. In what is often unspoken or unacknowledged, Sterling’s narrators draw readers into com-plicity. Readers will identify with these characters, who weigh the what-ifs and could-haves at length, often for longer than it takes to recount the actual events of their stories, revealing the telltale signs of our own heartache, guilt, or feelings of forgiveness in the process.

“In plainspoken language, the stories leave a lasting impression. Some of them end with a twist, many of them are full of Michigan imagery. Take the time to track down this slim volume. You will be glad you did.” — Joyce Pines


Phillip Sterling is the author of Mutual Shores and three chapbook-length series of poems: Abeyance, Quatrains, and Significant Others. The recipi-ent of an NEA Fellowship, two Fulbright Lectureships, and a P.E.N. Syn-dicated Fiction Award, he is also the editor of Imported Breads: Literature of Cultural Exchange and founding coordinator of the Literature in Person (LIP) Reading Series at Ferris State University, where he has taught writing and literature since 1987.

• 2011 Midwest Book Awards – Finalist • 2011 The Micro Award – Finalist • 2011 ForeWord Book of the Year Award – Finalist

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Short Fiction

Love/ImperfectStories by Christopher T. Leland

Short stories that explore love in all of its forms and complexities.

Whether it is romantic, parental, or platonic, we all aspire to find perfect love, even though we know love is notoriously imperfect. Depending on the lover and the beloved, love can be unrequited, blind, feigned, cowardly, confused, and even murderous. In this compelling collection, Christopher T. Leland explores the notion of such imperfect love in eighteen stories, as characters struggle to understand both love’s essential strangeness and its shifting meaning over time.

While each story points to the tremendous task of understanding the human heart, each also suggests that the notion of loving—even at its most violent and terrible—is a gift. In the moment of murder, the nameless narrator of “Traveler” loves his victim just as estranged friends and former lovers Esther and Tim still some-how love each other in “Reprise.” Young husband and wife Del and Dora love each other despite the pressures of war, meddling families, and childbirth in “How the Coe Boys Got Their Names,” as Gogan loves his uncle even though the uncle’s violence be-comes too much to bear in “Last Frontier.” Even the horrified fa-ther of “Swim” grants to his mad son an opportunity to control his own destiny, while the sentimental father of “Peach Queen” offers to his son a talisman of their bond.

Christopher T. Leland was a novelist, translator, scholar, poet, and teach-er. He was professor of English at Wayne State University, where he had taught since 1990. He was the author of nine other books, including Mean-time, The Book of Marvels, and Letting Loose.


“There is a surprising edginess in Leland’s stories that has nothing to

do with their edgy subject matter, but with timing, the multitude of one-line

paragraphs in which so much happens so swiftly. The many asides give the

stories their strange power, as if they are being overheard rather than read.”

—Laura Kasischke, author ofEden Springs

• 2011 ForeWord Book of the Year Award – Finalist

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As If We Were PreyStories by Michael Delp

A dark, rollicking collection of stories about men prone to foolishness trying to make their way in a modern world.

In As If We Were Prey Michael Delp presents working-class male characters who are tried, tested, and pushed to their limits. Struggling with the demons of childhood and the indignities of adult life, they work dead-end jobs, keep the peace within their families, and attempt to assert themselves against authority whenever they can. While Delp’s characters are fathers and sons, students and teachers, they all share a sense of alienation and melancholy that propels them to antics and ill-conceived plans. Although they hope that their rash actions will prove their inde-pendence, they generally only reveal their essential vulnerability.

Set mostly in small-town northern Michigan, Delp follows boys and full-grown men who know how to fight, fish, and hunt, but struggle to use those skills to overcome the emptiness and dys-function of their day-to-day lives. A boy takes revenge on the neighborhood bully and watches his downfall with unexpected emotion, a man visits a tourist attraction with a caged bear and empathizes with the creature, a teacher quits his job and hits the road as a one-man trivia quiz show, a father shares his childhood stories of defeat with his young daughter and inspires her to set-tle a score, two men catch a giant bass and keep it in the bathtub all winter to fatten it to prize-winning size, and a Vietnam vet and shop teacher switches into combat mode to teach his students a chilling lesson.

“Delp finds dark inspiration for these loose stories in the complicated transformation of boys to men. Delp is very at home in places where there’s little hope amid the self-perpetuating ordeals of failure and defeat.” — Publishers Weekly

2010 • 5.5 x 8 • 120 Pages ISBN 978-0-8143-3477-5 • $15.95 PapereISBN 978-0-8143-3532-1

Michael Delp is a writer of poetry, fiction, and nonfiction whose works have appeared in numerous national publications. He is the author of Over the Graves of Horses, Under the Influence of Water, The Coast of No-where, and The Last Good Water, in addition to six chapbooks of poetry. He teaches creative writing at the Interlochen Arts Academy and has received several awards for his teaching.

• 2010 ForeWord Book of the Year Award – Winner

Short Fiction

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Short Fiction

Eden SpringsA Novella by Laura Kasischke

A novella set in the House of David religious colony that bubbles with mystery, scandal, and little-known history.

In 1903, a preacher named Benjamin Purnell and five followers founded a colony called the House of David in Benton Harbor, Michigan, where they prepared for eternal life by creating a heaven on earth. Housed in rambling mansions and surrounded by lush orchards and vineyards, the colony added a thousand fol-lowers to its fold within a few years, along with a zoo, extensive gardens, and an amusement park. The sprawling complex, called Eden Springs, was a major tourist attraction of the Midwest. The colonists, who were drawn from far and wide by the magnetic “King Ben,” were told to keep their bodies pure by not cutting their hair, eating meat, or engaging in sexual relations. Yet ac-counts of life within the colony do not reflect such an austere atmosphere, as the handsome, charming founder is described as loving music, dancing, a good joke, and in particular, the com-pany of his attractive female followers.

In Eden Springs, award-winning Michigan author Laura Kasischke imagines life inside the House of David, in chapters framed by real newspaper clippings, legal documents, and accounts of former colonists. Told from the perspective of the young women who were closest to Benjamin Purnell, the novella follows a growing scandal within the colony’s walls. A gravedigger has seen some-thing suspicious in a recently buried casket, a loyal assistant to Benjamin is plotting a cover-up, talk is swirling about unmarried girls having babies, and a rebellious girl named Lena is ready to tell the truth. In flashbacks and first-person narrative mixed with historical artifacts, Kasischke leads readers through the unravel-ing mystery in a lyrical patchwork as enticing and satisfying as the story itself.

2010 • 5 x 8 • 160 Pages ISBN 978-0-8143-3464-5 • $18.95 PapereISBN 978-0-8143-3533-8

Laura Kasischke is the author of seven collections of poetry, two novels for young adults, and five novels, including, most recently, In a Perfect World. She was the 2009 recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship for poetry. Kasischke was awarded the 2011 National Book Critics Circle Award in po-etry for Space, In Chains.

For more on Laura Kasischke please see p. 13 (Ghost Writers).

“Eden Springs is a page-turner of the highest literary quality. Part thrilling true-crime drama, part heart-felt ro-

mance novel, part astonishing history lesson, part enticing mystery, and to-

tally satisfying high art, this short book is a masterpiece of blended genre.”

—Antonya Nelson, author of Nothing Right

• 2010 ForeWord Book of the Year Award – Winner• 2011 Independent Publisher’s Book Award • 2011 Michigan Notable Book Award• 2011 Next Generation Indie Book Award – Winner• 2011 da Vinci Eye from the Eric Hoffer Awards – Finalist

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The Lost Tiki Palaces of DetroitStories by Michael Zadoorian

A quirky and compelling collection of short stories set in and around Detroit.

In The Lost Tiki Palaces of Detroit Michael Zadoorian follows char-acters coming to terms with the past and the present in a broken city. Rusty, ornery, and down at the heels, Zadoorian’s characters have made the wrong choices, been worn down by bad news, or survived traumatic events, but like the city they live in, they are determined not to let tragedy and rotten luck define them. Rich with detail and brimming with feeling, Zadoorian’s deceptively simple stories lead readers into the inner lives of those making the best of their flawed surroundings and their own imperfec-tions.

Zadoorian’s stories are drawn from the everyday events that come to define his characters’ lives. A woman responsible for put-ting down animals at a veterinary clinic travels to Mexico to stage a ritual for her victims, a veteran returns a flag stolen from a Japa-nese soldier he killed in World War II, an elderly couple takes a fi-nal road trip to a mystery spot out west, and a man spends his life waiting to inherit his parents’ kitschy 1960s furniture but instead sells it all. Characters also find their lives shaped by seemingly random occurrences, like the junk shop owner who must stop the stranger with a vendetta against him, the woman who becomes obsessed with her in-laws’ talking dog, and the urban spelunker who finds love and acceptance with a reader of his blog. Their close connection to Detroit also infuses Zadoorian’s stories with themes significant to the city, including issues of racial tension, political unease, and economic hardship.


Michael Zadoorian is author of the novels The Leisure Seeker and Sec-ond Hand, which won the Great Lakes Colleges Association’s First Fiction award. His stories have appeared in Literary Review, American Short Fic-tion, Beloit Fiction Journal, North American Review, ARARAT, and the col-lection Detroit Noir.

“The Lost Tiki Palaces of Detroit by Michael Zadoorian is a collec-tion of glorious short stories about Detroit’s quirky characters, told with Zadoorian’s pitch-perfect renditions of the unique sounds of Detroit.” — Lansing Online News

• 2009 ForeWord Book of the Year Award – Finalist• 2010 Michigan Notable Book Award

Short Fiction

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Short Fiction

American SalvageStories by Bonnie Jo Campbell

A lush and rowdy collection of stories set in a rural Michigan landscape, where wildlife, jobs, and ways of life are vanishing.

American Salvage is rich with local color and peopled with rural characters who love and hate extravagantly. They know how to fix cars and washing machines, how to shoot and clean game, and how to cook up methamphetamine, but they have not figured out how to prosper in the twenty-first century. Through the com-plex inner lives of working-class characters, Campbell illustrates the desperation of post-industrial America, where wildlife, jobs, and whole ways of life go extinct and the people have no choice but to live off what is left behind.

The harsh Michigan winter is the backdrop for many of the tales, which are at turns sad, brutal, and oddly funny. One man prepares for the end of the world —scheduled for midnight December 31, 1999—in a pole barn with chickens and survival manuals. An ex-cruciating burn causes a man to transcend his racist and sexist worldview. Another must decide what to do about his meth-ad-dicted wife, who is shooting up on the other side of the bathroom door. A teenaged sharpshooter must devise a revenge that will make her feel whole again. Though her characters are vulnerable, confused, and sometimes angry, they are also resolute. Campbell follows them as they rebuild their lives, continue to hope and dream, and love in the face of loneliness.

2009 • 5 x 8 • 192 Pages ISBN 978-0-8143-3486-7 • $19.95 ClotheISBN 978-0-8143-3491-1

Bonnie Jo Campbell is the author of the novel Once Upon a River (July 2011, W.W. Norton). Campbell is also author of the novel Q Road and the story collection Women & Other Animals. She’s received the AWP Award for Short Fiction, a Pushcart Prize, and the Eudora Welty Prize, and she has been awarded a 2011 Guggenheim Fellowship from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation.

• 2009 National Book Award – Finalist • 2009 ForeWord Book of the Year Award – Winner• 2010 Michigan Notable Book Award• 2010 National Book Critic Circle Book Award – Finalist • 2010 Stuart and Vernice Gross Award for Excellence in Literature – Finalist

“Campbell’s an American voice – two parts healthy fear, one part awe, one

part irony, one part realism.”— Los Angeles Times

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Voices of the Lost and FoundStories by Dorene O’Brien

A gripping and original debut collection of short stories.

Voices of the Lost and Found is the first full-length collection of fic-tion from accomplished Metro Detroit writer Dorene O’Brien. In eleven first-person stories, a variety of authentic and unexpected voices come to the forefront to confess or retell stories of lost in-nocence or betrayal—from the urban graffiti artist who plots the downfall of a rival gang, to the middle-aged woman reliving a harrowing childhood abduction, to the young man who remod-els his house in a misguided attempt to win back his wife, to the teenager who is lured into a crime spree after trusting a dark and disturbed friend.

The startlingly real speakers of Voices of the Lost and Found are drawn directly from contemporary culture, and together they present a striking portrait of alienation, volatility, diversity, and violence in postmodern America. O’Brien’s characters inhabit diverse yet familiar landscapes, including abandoned buildings, convenience stores, university dorms, crisis intervention centers, Buddhist retreats, and psychiatrists’ offices. Here, the lonely and troubled characters face tremendous obstacles that will ul-timately transform their lives. When they meet tragedy, as they often do, they are forced to confront their liability and the real-ization that faulty decisions have irrevocable consequences. Told with honesty and intense emotion, the stories allow readers to experience the full weight of each character’s particular burden and to understand his or her complex personal motivations first-hand.


Dorene O’Brien is a fiction writer and a teacher of creative writing at the College for Creative Studies and Wayne State University in Detroit. She has won numerous awards, including the Bridport Prize for “#12 Dagwood on Rye,” Chicago Tribune’s Nelson Algren Award for “Riding the Hubcap,” and the New Millennium Writings Fiction Award for “Ovenbirds.” In 2004 she was also awarded a creative writing fellowship from the National En-dowment for the Arts.

“On the whole, O’Brien’s imagination is strong and the collection’s range of situations and variety of voices strik-ing. She handles action and violence remarkably well.” — Choice

• 2008 National Best Books Awards – Winner

Short Fiction

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The Women Were Leaving the MenStories by Andy Mozina

Intriguing, quirky, and deeply felt stories.

In The Women Were Leaving the Men, Andy Mozina draws readers into the everyday lives of characters who are instantly relatable but intriguingly flawed. Knocked beyond the brink by departed family members, curious obsessions, and unruly physical attri-butes, Mozina’s characters climb and scrape their way toward in-timacy, sanity, and redemption against the often-absurd odds of their lives in this unique, humorous, and poetic collection.

Though Mozina’s stories have been published by various literary magazines, this is his first full-length collection of short fiction. In The Women Were Leaving the Men, readers will encounter nu-merous haunting characters. A divorced astronaut, back from the moon, tries to rehabilitate his stroke-ridden mother. A young woman must decide whether to stay with a man she suspects of being a murderer. A son helps his mother bake a cake sculpted into the image of his runaway father. A man born with a single enormous hand can barely tell the difference between cleaning and making love. Despite their fantastic twists, every story in The Women Were Leaving the Men is rooted in emotional realism and fueled by the humor and pathos of the characters’ conflicts and relationships. Readers will recognize familiar feelings in interac-tions between lovers, friends, and strangers, all rendered with strikingly real detail and a sense of humor.


Andy Mozina is associate professor of English at Kalamazoo College and author of Joseph Conrad and the Art of Sacrifice. His short stories have ap-peared in numerous literary magazines including Tin House, Alaska Quar-terly Review, Beloit Fiction Journal, and the Florida Review. Mozina’s short story “The Women Were Leaving the Men” received special mention in The Pushcart Prize (2006) and was named a distinguished story in The Best American Short Stories 2005.

• 2008 National Best Books Awards – Finalist• 2008 Great Lakes College Association New Writers Award

“These stories are in-depth with just a few words and delightful to reread.

They gain strength and coherence with each round and are paragons of

realistic, un-storybook love.”— The Bloomsbury Review

Short Fiction

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The Way NorthCollected Upper Peninsula New WorksEdited by Ron Riekki

A stunning collection of previously unpublished works that provide snapshots of life in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula.

Michigan’s Upper Peninsula is distinct from the rest of the state in geography, climate, and culture, including a unique and thriving creative writing community. In The Way North: Collected Upper Peninsula New Works, editor Ron Riekki presents poetry, fiction, and non-fiction from memorable, varied voices that are writing from and about Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. In all, this unique anthology features new works from forty-two writers, including rising star Ellen Airgood, Edgar Award-winner Steve Hamilton, Rona Jaffe Award-winner Catie Rosemurgy, Jonathan Johnson of Best American Poetry, Michigan Notable Book Award-winner Keith Taylor, and Michigan Author Award-winner John Smolens.

In 49 poems and 20 stories-diverse in form, length, and content-readers are introduced to the unmistakable terrain and charac-ters of the U.P. The book not only showcases the snow, small towns, and idiosyncratic characters that readers might expect but also introduces unexpected regions and voices. From the powerful powwow in Baraga of April Lindala’s “For the Healing of All Women” to the sex-charged basement in Stambaugh of Chad Faries’s “Hotel Stambaugh: Michigan, 1977” to the splen-dor found between Newberry and Paradise in Joseph D. Haske’s “Tahquamenon,” readers will delight in discovering the work of both new and established authors. The contributors range widely in age, gender, and background, as The Way North highlights the work of established writers, teachers, students, laborers, fisher-men, housewives, and many others.


Ron Riekki was born and raised in the U.P. and has graduate degrees in creative writing from Brandeis, Virginia, and Western Michigan, and a de-gree in religious studies from Central Michigan. He is the author of U.P.: A Novel, several poetry chapbooks, and numerous plays, including Carol, Dandelion Cottage, A Play, and All Saints’ Day.

Anthology

Contributors: Marty Achatz, Ellen Airgood, Robert Alexander, Julie Brooks Barbour, Sally Brunk, Jennifer Burd, Lisa Fay Coutley, Sharon Dilworth, Amber Edmondson, Chad Faries, Matthew Gavin Frank, Manda Frederick, Randall R. Freisinger, Eric Gadzinski, Steve Hamilton, Sue Harrison, Joseph Daniel Haske, Barbara Henning, Jennifer A. Howard, Austin Hummell, Jonathan Johnson, Linda Johnson, Ron Johnson, L. E. Kimball, Emily Van Kley, April Lindala, Raymond Luczak, Matt Maki, Seth Marlin, Beverly Matherne, Mary McMyne, Jane Piirto, Saara Myrene Raappana, Janeen Rastall, Janice Repka, Vincent Reusch, Ron Riekki, Catie Rosemurgy, Andrea Scarpino, John Smolens, Keith Taylor, Cameron Witbeck, Jim Zukowski

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Anthology

Ghost WritersUs Haunting Them: Contemporary Michigan LiteratureEdited by Keith Taylor and Laura Kasischke

Tales of the ghostly and supernatural by some of Michigan’s finest fiction writers.

For Ghost Writers: Us Haunting Them editors Keith Taylor and Lau-ra Kasischke asked twelve celebrated Michigan writers to submit new stories on one subject: ghosts. The resulting collection is a satisfying mix of tales by some of the state’s most well-known and award-winning writers. Some of the pieces are true stories written by non-believers, while others are clearly fiction and can be funny, bittersweet, spooky, or sinister. All share Michigan as a setting, bringing history and a sense of place to the eerie col-lection.

Ghosts in these stories have a wide range of motivations and cause a variety of consequences. In some cases, they seem to dwell in one person’s consciousness, as in Steve Amick’s “Not Even Lions and Tigers,” and other times they demonstrate their presence with tangible evidence, as in Laura Hulthen Thomas’s “Bones on Bois Blanc.” Spirits sometimes appear in order to com-municate something important to the living, as in James Hynes’s “Backseat Driver” and Lolita Hernandez’s “Making Bakes,” to change the course of events, as in Anne-Marie Oomen’s “Bit-chathane,” or to cause characters to look inside themselves, as in Elizabeth Schmuhl’s “Belief.” The supernatural stories in Ghost Writers visit a mix of Michigan locations, from the urban, to the suburban, and rural. Authors find ghosts in family farmhouses, downtown Detroit streets, an abandoned northern Michigan lighthouse, gracious Grosse Pointe homes, a mid-Michigan apart-ment complex, and the crypt of a Polish priest in the small town of Cross Village.


Contributors: Steve Amick, Nicholas Delbanco, Kelly Fordon, Lolita Hernandez, James Hynes, Laura Kasischke, Elizabeth Kostova, Anne-Marie Oomen, Eileen Pollack, Elizabeth Schmuhl, Keith Taylor, Laura Hulthen Thomas

For more information on editors Keith Taylor and Laura Kasischke, please see page 7 (Kasischke) and page 22 (Taylor).

“James Hynes’s ‘Backseat Driver’ deftly contrasts female powerlessness in

daily life with revenge from beyond the grave, Anne-Marie Oomen’s ‘Bitcha-

thane’ and Lolita Hernandez’s ‘Making Bakes’ use regional flavor effectively,

and editor Kasischke’s ‘Ghost Anec-dote’ neatly shifts focus from narrator

to reader, memory to imagination, and mundane to fabulous. Mainstream

readers will find these hauntings very accessible, and their endearing naïveté

will charm horror fans.”— Publishers Weekly

• 2011 Midwest Book Awards – Finalist • 2011 ForeWord Book of the Year Award – Finalist • 2012 Michigan Notable Book Award• 2012 Independent Publisher’s Book Award – Winner• 2012 Eric Hoffer Book Awards – Finalist

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Creative Non-Fiction


Anne-Marie Oomen is a poet, playwright, essayist, and instructor of cre-ative writing at Interlochen Arts Academy and instructor for the Solstice MFA at Pine Manor College. She is author of Pulling Down the Barn, House of Fields, and Un-coded Woman; two chapbooks of poetry, Seasons of the Sleeping Bear and Moniker (with Ray Nargis); and the award-winning play Northern Belles.

An American MapEssays by Anne-Marie Oomen

Meditative travel essays that explore new landscapes across America.

In An American Map, Anne-Marie Oomen, award-winning writer and self-confessed northern Michigan homebody, chronicles her recent travels across America, in essays that span rediscovered landscapes, wild back roads, vital cities, and everything in be-tween. Oomen takes both a wide and narrow lens to her desti-nations, giving readers a vivid sense of each locale while finding resonances between each place and her own experiences. With each new adventure, Oomen finds her sense of self deepening and becoming more clearly rooted in the larger adventure of America.

The evocative essays of An American Map consider locations across the United States, from the poetry of Alpine meadows to the terror of desert border crossings, the irony of ocean floors lit-tered with live ordnance, and the excitement of a rural film pre-miering in New York City. Oomen’s warm, personal voice takes readers into the heart of each experience, as she imagines that a place like the Smoky Mountains could offer insight into the Iraq War or that a decaying war tank could help save rare turtles. Oomen proves that the value of travel is not merely in the physi-cal place but the spiritual or meditative place it allows us to visit at the same time.

“One of Oomen’s many talents as a writer is for lovely, complicated sentences that offer a careful under-standing of the actions taking places and an acknowledgement of the deeper undercurrent that stirs below the surface. Part traveler’s guide, part soul-searching memoir, part political commentary, An American Map is a richly painted canvas of the small but resonating experiences of a woman in love with, and inquisitive of, her home country.”— ForeWord Reviews

• 2010 ForeWord Book of the Year Award – Winner

15

TrespassingDirt Stories and Field NotesJanet Kauffman

Essays and stories that contemplate the exploitation of Michigan’s agricultural landscape by modern factory farms.

Trespassing is composed in equal amounts of short fiction and es-says that illustrate the impact of modern factory farms—confined animal feeding operations (CAFOs)—on a rural Michigan commu-nity. Michigan author Janet Kauffman debunks the myth of the idyllic “clip art” farm of decades past by giving readers a close-up look at mega-meat and mega-milk, the extreme amounts of ani-mal waste and barren countryside CAFOs produce, and the peo-ple who live in the midst of this new rural landscape threatened by agricultural sprawl. Trespassing considers the consequences of violating nature’s limits, giving readers a vivid impression of the irreversible damage that violation causes to our habitat.

The writings in Trespassing range from ground-level realism to hallucinatory surrealism, from mindful discussion to poetic in-cantation, from vehicles of outrage to portraits of grief. The rural landscape includes a range of characters, and Kauffman’s stories and essays are populated with CAFO owners, immigrant workers, neighbors mired in pollution, greenhouse growers, environmen-tal activists, water monitors, drain commissions, and agency of-ficials. As a resident of rural Michigan and part of a farming family herself, Kauffman approaches the subject matter with a sensitive and informed eye. Her detailed writings take readers into this landscape of modern rural communities to experience the smells, sounds, and sights of a brutally changed world.


Janet Kauffman is professor emeritus at English at Eastern Michigan University. She is the author of three books of short stories, Characters on the Loose, Obscene Gestures for Women, and Places in the World a Woman Could Walk, which won the Rosenthal Award from the Academy–Institute of Arts and Letters; three novels in the trilogy Flesh Made Word: Collabora-tors, The Body in Four Parts, and Rot; and four collections of poems, includ-ing The Weather Book.

“With heart and mind Janet Kauffman writes of the land rape perpetrated

by industrial agriculture in the region where she farms. A remarkable fusion

of art and advocacy, Trespassing’s beauty and power stem from its south central Michigan locale, but its conse-

quence and merit know no bounds.”— Stephanie Mills, author of

Tough Little Beauties and Epicurean Simplicity

• 2008 National Best Books Awards – Finalist

Creative Non-Fiction / Short Fiction

16

Poetry


Chris Dombrowski is the author of By Cold Water, a finalist for Foreword Magazine’s Poetry Book of the Year, and two chapbooks, Fragments with Dusk in Them and September Miniatures with Blood and Mars. His poems have appeared in numerous literary journals and anthologies, including Beloit Poetry Journal, Making Poems, Michigan Quarterly Review, and Po-etry. He currently teaches at Interlochen Center for the Arts.

Earth AgainPoems by Chris Dombrowski

Stirring meditations on living with a strong connection to the environment, both physical and psychological.

The second full-length collection from award-winning poet Chris Dombrowski, Earth Again transports readers to an imaginative world where identity is explored and expanded. With a mixture of long poems and shorter pieces, Dombrowski probes birth, death, sex, memory, and our blessed but treacherous engagement with the natural world. While he writes from a number of points of view and employs both male and female speakers, much of the col-lection’s singular insight centers around masculine identity and being a husband and a father. Readers come away transformed, “like the land / gasping as it does each late winter evening when / the sky at tree line, nearly sapphiric, goes black,” as these poems prove Dombrowski to be a truly original American voice.

Comprised of three sections (each of which concludes with a long poem) Earth Again presents a range of narrative and emotions in dexterous rhythms, unexpected shifts, and unforgettable meta-phors. Dombrowksi introduces readers to arresting images like “the parataxis of her ass,” “cerulean, alchemical light,” “Molly with the sun in her mouth,” and “labyrinthine, lanky-stemmed, dew-magnified” leaves. These details combine with Dombrows-ki’s note-perfect language, which alternates between the most colloquial and the most elevated of diction. Readers will be chal-lenged to consider spirituality alongside Scooby-Doo Band-aids, and to meditate on death after the mower has chewed up a plas-tic dinosaur, as Dombrowski revels in exploring our connection to the environment and one another.

Also by Chris Dombrowski:

By Cold WaterA beautiful and meditative collection

of poetry rooted in a wonder and deep

knowledge of the natural world.

2009 • 6.5 x 8 • 72 Pages ISBN 978-0-8134-3422-5eISBN 978-0-8143-3534-5$15.95 Paper

“Chris Dombrowski’s new book, Earth Again, is extraordinarily powerful and graceful.”— Jim Harrison

17

Poetry

Booker T & ThemA Blues As Presented by Bill Harris

A poetic reimagining of the life of Booker T. Washington that explores issues of being an African American male of note at the beginning of the twentieth century.

The early 1900s was a dangerous time for African American men, whether famous or nameless. Punishment from any perceived transgression against the Jim Crow power structure came swiftly in legislative, emotional, or physical form, and it could well take one’s life. Despite this reality, however, a number of African Americans still lifted their heads, straightened their spines, and spoke and acted against the mainstream. In Booker T. & Them: A Blues, poet and playwright Bill Harris examines what he calls “the age of Booker T.” (1900–1915), when America began flexing its imperialistic muscles, D. W. Griffith’s Birth of a Nation was re-leased, and Thomas Edison’s many technological innovations set the tone for the United States to be viewed as the nation of the century.

In the historical and imaginative narrative of this “bio-poem,” Harris considers several African Americans who sought to be men that mattered in a racist America, including Booker T. Washing-ton, W. E. B. DuBois, William Monroe Trotter, George Washing-ton Carver, and Jack Johnson, as he traces their effects on history and each other. In tandem, he visits white historical figures like Thomas Edison, Theodore Roosevelt, and D. W. Griffiths as well as some invented characters like students and professors at the Tuskegee Institute. Throughout, Harris shows that the rapid pace of early twentieth-century American change, progress, and sci-ence coincided with persistent and reinvented forms of white su-premacy. Harris’s exciting structure offers varied rhythms and a blues sensibility that showcases his witty lines and vivid imagery.


Bill Harris retired as professor of English at Wayne State University in 2011 and is author of numerous plays, including Robert Johnson Trick the Devil, Stories About the Old Days, Riffs, and Coda. He is the author of three books of poetry, including Yardbird Suite: Side One, which won the 1997 Naomi Long Madgett Poetry Award. He was named the 2011 Kresge Eminent Art-ist by the Kresge Foundation.

Also by Bill Harris:

Birth of a Notion; Or the Half Ain’t Never Been Told

A critical look at black identity in

American history and popular culture

as told from a performative African

American perspective.

2010 • 5.5 x 8.5 • 232 Pages ISBN 978-0-8143-3408-9

eISBN 978-0-8143-3527-7$18.95 Paper

18

Poetry


Terry Blackhawk is the author of five previous poetry collections, includ-ing Escape Artist, winner of the 2002 John Ciardi Prize. She has received the Foley Poetry Prize, the Pablo Neruda Poetry Prize, the Michigan Gov-ernor’s Award for Arts Education, and grants from the National Endow-ment for the Humanities and the Michigan Council for Arts and Cultural Affairs. She is founding director of Detroit’s acclaimed InsideOut Literary Arts Project.

The Light BetweenPoems by Terry Blackhawk

Poems of stylistic and emotional range that journey widely through love’s losses and connections.

In The Light Between, award-winning poet Terry Blackhawk probes beyond and through the painful dissolution of a long marriage to examine the complexities of love with bravery and delicacy. Mythical themes, elements of the natural world, and masculine/feminine polarities resonate throughout Blackhawk’s poems as she explores loss, the nature of relationships, and the integrity of the individual soul. Ultimately, The Light Between cel-ebrates our connectedness to one another, to the planet, and to the natural world.

Section one opens as Blackhawk visits a lonely mythical kingdom and introduces images of an empty bed and the betrayed wife Medea, whose identification with nature signals one of the book’s main motifs. Section two presents deeply personal poems that flutter through time and lingering memories, while in section three, the gaze of the poet turns upward and outward to nature. Section four returns to the social world—to the street, traffic, vi-sual art, and teaching—which poses the possibility of love once more. Section five celebrates the union of man and woman with some tender (and sometimes comical) love poems. Throughout, Blackhawk addresses heavy issues such as divorce and solitude, but also shows a playful side with lighthearted poems. She de-scribes an imaginary meeting with poet laureate Billy Collins in one poem, and in another writes about finding a dried-up egg-plant while sweeping the kitchen.

Whether writing about the intricacies of loss or our connection to nature and one another, she manages to “poke around and find the beauty of it.”

“Terry Blackhawk’s new collection, The Light Between, is an elegant meditation on loss and, in the after-math of what is lost-relationships; certain sounds; an other, younger self-that which is gained. The intricate progression of these poems reveals the poet at work remembering and forgetting, then forging the thrilling slippages and figurative language that can make the mind leap to a new apprehension of things.”—Natasha Trethewey, author of Native Guard

19

Poetry


francine j. harris is a Detroit native whose recent work has appeared in Rattle, Callaloo, and Michigan Quarterly Review and she is the author of the recent chapbook between old trees. She is a Cave Canem fellow, has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize, and is currently a Zell Post-MFA Fel-lowship recipient at the University of Michigan.

allegiancePoems by francine j. harris

A sharp, haunting, and lyrical collection that attempts to understand what we owe the spaces we inhabit.

The full-length debut from francine j. harris, allegiance is about Detroit, sort of. Although many of the poems are inspired by and dwell in the spaces of the city, this collection does not revel in any of the cliché cultural tropes normally associated with Detroit. In-stead, these poems artfully explore life in a city where order coex-ists with chaos and much is lost in social and physical breakdown. Narrative poems on the hazards, betrayals, and annoyances of city life mix with impressionistic poems that evoke the natural world, as harris grapples with issues of beauty and horror, loyalty and individuality, and memory and loss on Detroit’s complicated canvas.

In twelve sections, harris introduces readers to loungers and by-standers, prisoners’ wives, poets pictured on book jackets, Cara-vaggio’s Jesus, and city priests. She leads readers past the lone house on the block that cannot be walked down, through layers of discarded objects in the high school yard, and into various classrooms, bars, and living rooms. Shorter poems highlight the persistence of nature-in water, weeds, orchids, begonias, insects, pigeons, and pheasants. Some poems convey a sense of the un-derbelly, desire, and disgust while others treat issues of religion, both in institutional settings and personal prayers. In her honest but unsentimental voice, harris layers personal history and rich details to explore how our surroundings shape our selves and what allegiance we owe them when they have turned almost ev-erything to ashes.

“Very strong and contrasting figures emerge in francine j. harris’s memora-

ble first collection of poems. There is an odd lyric telegraphing here just in the

way strobe lighting carries movement, or serial narrative, in the dark. These are tropes of knowledge in a time of great ignorance. This is a wonderful

book of poems.”— Norman Dubie

• 2013 Kate Tufts Discovery Award – Finalist

20


Teresa J. Scollon is a native of Michigan and an alumna and former writer-in-residence at Interlochen Arts Academy. She has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and Western Michigan Uni-versity’s Prague Summer Program and is author of the chapbook Friday Nights the Whole Town Goes to the Basketball Game. Scollon teaches writ-ing at Northwestern Michigan College.

To Embroider the Ground with PrayerPoems by Teresa J. Scollon

A beautiful meditation on grief, memory, and the seasons of life.

To Embroider the Ground with Prayer is a portrait of poet Teresa J. Scollon’s several worlds, as she accompanies her father through his illness and death and records the richness of family and com-munity life in her Michigan town. These poems enjoy reverence and irreverence in equal measure as grief appears side by side with playfulness and humor. Scollon employs a wide range of poetic styles and voices: elegies, narratives, and persona poems are organized in recursive circles that evoke family, village, local characters, and the author’s adult life beyond her hometown.

The collection begins with personal history and is rooted in a re-gional voice and focus, but Scollon skillfully transforms her expe-riences into larger concerns that resonate deeply and universally. Readers will get to know Scollon’s father, in fragile health but still so vital to those around him; trace Scollon’s many paths into and out of grief; and follow her travels as she confronts the pull of memory and once again forges her way in the external world. Throughout, Scollon records her understanding with fidelity, clar-ity, and reverence for story, and finds beauty in small everyday acts of devotion, patience, and humility. As Scollon writes, “To capture story is one way of giving thanks, of paying attention, to know where we are.”

“The poems in To Embroider the Ground with Prayer, with their focus on a midwestern farming community, will remind you of the long American literary tradition that takes small-town life as its subject. There are comic portraits and unsettling revelations. But all together the poems give off such warmth and light-the light of clarity, the warmth of affection-that at times you will forget that you are reading a book of grief. Teresa J. Scollon’s is a welcome new voice in our poetry.”—Mark Jarman

Poetry

21


Michael Heffernan is a Detroit native who has taught poetry in univer-sities in Michigan, Kansas, Washington, Ireland, and, since 1986, at the University of Arkansas, Fayetteville. At the Bureau of Divine Music is his ninth book. His awards include the Iowa Poetry Prize, the Porter Prize for Literary Excellence, two Pushcart Prizes, and three grants (the maximum awarded) from the National Endowment for the Arts.

At the Bureau of Divine MusicPoems by Michael Heffernan

A thoughtful and elegant collection from an accomplished poet.

In At the Bureau of Divine Music, award-winning poet Michael Hef-fernan combines serious ruminations on the passage of years, on love and infidelity, and on remembrances and regrets with medi-tations on the more ordinary occurrences of daily life. No matter what their subject matter, the poems are united by their contem-plative tone, intelligent details, and elegant style. Written mostly in iambic pentameter, and some in formal sonnets, Heffernan’s poems effortlessly blend the surreal and the actual, the exciting and the mundane, and make for a unique and satisfying reading experience.

At the Bureau of Divine Music contains a mix of long monologues that set out dramatic narratives and shorter pieces that glimpse only a limited scene. His complex speakers are at turns funny and angry, loving and bitter. Their insightful descriptions are filled with sensory details—the tastes, sounds, smells, and sights of memories, dreams, and the trials of the moment—and they in-habit dreamy but familiar settings like “whole neighborhoods of happy people,” the suburban backyard, or the drive-in movie the-ater on the edge of town. While some of the poems are inspired by domestic disturbances, betrayals, and losses, others visit re-demptions, sweet long-ago journeys, and ecstasies.

“In Michael Heffernan’s disarming poetry, the pagan’s inchoate urgencies

meet the saint’s call to reflection and praise-the abject converses with the

elevated, the comic qualifies the sanc-tified. Heffernan’s voice, immediately recognizable among those of his gen-eration, is the playfully serious sound

of an enduring personality.”— Ron Slate, author of

The Great Wave

Poetry

• 2011 ForeWord Book of the Year Award – Finalist

22

Poetry

If the World Becomes So BrightPoems by Keith Taylor

A lyrical and accessible collection that explores both the landscape of Michigan and the inner life of one person who lives there.

If the World Becomes So Bright is a powerful new collection from accomplished Michigan poet Keith Taylor. In an approachable, intimate, and contemplative voice, Taylor’s poems offer quiet observation of the landscapes the poet encounters. His poems reflect a Romantic sensibility and a modern inventiveness as he travels from Michigan to Cape Hatteras to the Irish countryside and moves in reflection from uncritical observation to self-ques-tioning to exultations of gratitude and peace. The world—how-ever small and immediate—becomes bright in this collection, as Taylor’s careful lines trace our connections with the mundane but important details of our lives, details found in the natural environ-ment, with family members, and in our daily habits.

If the World Becomes So Bright is filled with the fauna and flora of Michigan wilderness, even when that wilderness is no farther away than the backyard. Taylor explores picturesque settings like Isle Royale in the Upper Peninsula, the waters of Lake Michigan, and his home in Ann Arbor, as well as settings that are a world away, all with a reverent and careful eye. He also trains the same studied observation on his inner world as he wrestles with the meanings of everyday occurrences, like visiting a deserted churchyard, following the migrations of birds through his yard, and watching his daughter grow up. Taylor’s voice throughout is insightful and curious, always thankful, and sometimes self-deprecating, sharing lessons while reflecting on all that is left to learn.


Keith Taylor is the author of numerous books, including Guilty at the Rap-ture and a co-translation of Battered Guitars: The Poetry and Prose of Kos-tas Karyotakis. He is coordinator of undergraduate creative writing at the University of Michigan and director of the Bear River Writers Conference.

For more on Keith Taylor please see p. 13 (Ghost Writers).

“Taylor’s poems are solid, seasoned and honest, unafraid to wander off-path or ask the same old questions. His lines feel like they rise from years of reading and thinking-of pressing an ear to poetry’s heart and listening closely.” — METROTIMES

23

Poetry

Wide Awake in Someone Else’s DreamPoems by M. L. Liebler

A collection from a unique voice in contemporary poetry.

Wide Awake in Someone Else’s Dream is a collection of traveling poems written in Russia, Israel, Germany, and China that take the reader on a contemplative journey through both the geography of these countries and their cultures as well as through the inward mind of the narrator. As Liebler travels the world, he wrestles with themes of self-discovery, spirituality, identity, and change, and renders poems in his signature raw and defiant style. Thoughtful and direct, these poems look toward beauty and contemplation in a bitter world that has become fraught with mistrust and mis-understanding.

Wide Awake in Someone Else’s Dream is divided into four sections, the first three of which are set in specific locales—Russia, Ger-many, and Jerusalem. The final section is not limited to a single geographic location but still finds Liebler traveling through dif-ferent lands and the resultant emotions of dislocation, alienation, and vulnerability that his surroundings provoke. Throughout this collection Liebler’s poems touch on issues of political upheaval, exploitation, and corruption and look at the personal and spiri-tual transformation left in their wake. This ability to give readers a glimpse of a bleak global reality translated by a hopeful eye has earned Liebler’s poems comparisons to the richly imagistic and spiritual work of George Trakl. In all, this collection is character-ized by its calm and powerful voice, which has a musical sensibil-ity in its spare and straightforward presentation.

2008 • 5 x 7.5 • 96 Pages ISBN 978-0-8143-3382-2 • $15.95 PapereISBN 978-0-8143-3525-3

M. L. Liebler is on the faculty of the department of English at Wayne State University and is the author of several books of poetry, including The Moon a Box, Written in Rain: New and Selected Poems, 1985–2000, and Stripping the Adult Century Bare: New and Selected Writings. Liebler is also the editor of Working Words: The Literature of Work, Class & Art. He is the director of Springfed Arts: Metro Detroit Writers Literary Arts Organization.

• 2010 Barnes & Noble Writers for Writers Award • 2009 Indie Excellence Book Awards – Winner• 2009 Paterson Award for Literary Excellence for previous finalists of the Paterson Poetry Prize• 2009 AAUP Book, Jacket & Journal Show Award • 2008 National Best Books Awards – Finalist

“M. L. Liebler brings poems of great zest, joy, and large heart to apprecia-

tive audiences worldwide. He deserves our praise.”

— Colette Inez, author of Spinoza Doesn’t Come Here Any More

24

After-MusicPoems by Conrad Hilberry

After-Music is a varied and rich collection of meditations on both the personal and universal. Among the many intriguing places, people, and events that Hilberry brings to life in these poems are watching manatees in a Florida canal, a reluctant priest blessing the animals in Mexico, a rushed and sullen checkout girl in the supermarket, and Day of the Dead skeletons that form a mariachi band. Some poems are formal-in sonnets, quatrains, and tetram-eter couples-but most are free verse, all of them accessible and enjoyable reading.

2008 • 6 x 9.75 • 152 Pages ISBN 978-0-8143-3352-5 • $15.95 PapereISBN 978-0-8143-3522-2Conrad Hilberry is emeritus professor of Eng-lish at Kalamazoo College and author of sev-eral books of poetry, including The Fingernail of Luck, Player Piano, and Sorting the Smoke, and co-editor of Contemporary Michigan Poetry: Po-ems from the Third Coast.

Vievee Francis is a well-known poet in the Detroit area whose poems have appeared in numerous journals. Blue-Tail Fly is her first full-length book of poetry.

• 2008 National Best Books Awards – Finalist

Blue-Tail FlyPoems by Vievee Francis

The title of Blue-Tail Fly comes from an antebellum song com-monly known as “Jimmy Crack Corn.” The blue-tail fly is a sup-posedly insignificant creature that bites the horse that bucks and kills the master. In this collection, poet Vievee Francis gives voice to “outsiders”-from soldiers and common folk to leading politi-cal figures-who play the role of the blue-tail fly in the period of American history between the Mexican American War and the Civil War. Through a diverse range of styles, characters, and emo-tions, Francis’s poems consider the demands of war, protest and resistance to it, and the cross-cultural exchanges of wartime.


• 2009 Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers Award – Winner

Poetry

25

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