“William Huhn, in a wonderfully supple and natural idiom, turns out to be the Ovid of our present milieu. His poems observe, and tenderly participate in, metamorphoses that signal miraculous events transpiring right before our eyes, if only our eyes were as keen and clear as his. Bachelor Holiday is a collection that makes me grateful, and almost glad, to be living in this havoc of a century.”

—Donald Revell, author of White Campion and twice Winner of the PEN Center USA Award in Poetry

“William Huhn’s Bachelor Holiday is a bittersweet, multi-dimensional recollection—of past loves, historical mysteries, moments of weather, of philosophical obsession—whose subject range and command of language dazzles. Here ‘stuff’ exists confidently near a ‘dew-pearled spring,’ while four-line poems match the strength of 7-pagers. This is a journey through an acquisitive, though unhurried, mind, one within which any reader would be lucky to spend time.”

—Rachel Abramowitz, author of The Birthday of the Dead, winner of the 2021 Marystina Santiestevan poetry prize

“The precise, evocative poems in William Huhn’s Bachelor Holiday bring us to places we’ve never been, then bring us back to where we are today. We witness the riches of Babylonia and Herculaneum, and then we are home, shutting the windows as a thunderstorm hits. Along the way, the speaker guides us with an artist’s eye for detail and a poet’s sense of language. My favorite among the many jewellike lyrics is ‘Expedition,’ about a difficult ascent, the loss of friends, and a final rebirth. These poems will lift and transport…”

—Thaddeus Rutkowski, author of Safe Colors and Haywire, a No. 1 best-seller on Small Press Distribution’s fiction list

William Huhn grew up in Pennsylvania, in an old colonial house overflowing with books. He studied classical violin from age five, then took up old time fiddle. Shortly after graduating from Vassar College with a chemistry degree, he published his first poem. Uninspired by lab work, he played fiddle across Europe, to finance his poetry. The poems he wrote during this period found their way into journals and magazines and would form the backbone for Bachelor Holiday, his first full-length collection. The travels themselves led to a sequence of narrative essays found in American Literary Review, Sport Literate, Pembroke, Rosebud, etc. Eight of these were listed as a “Notable Essay” in The Best American Essays series. His biography of Alcoholics Anonymous cofounder Henrietta Seiberling, his late grandmother, is forthcoming. Today, Huhn works for a testing and certification company, overseeing its East Coast laboratories. He lives just outside New York City with his wife, son, and baby girl.

Book Information:

· Paperback: 86 pages

· Binding: Perfect-Bound

· Publisher: BlazeVOX [books] 

· ISBN: 978-1-60964-468-0

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In Cebula’s Tender, moments are captured like museum dioramas: an intricate balance between stillness & movement; approachable from multiple angles; and distilled down to their essential elements, shimmering like childhood. Cebula offers a tour of these dioramas that you won’t walk away from, in which the glass eyes look back at you, will hold your gaze. This collection brings together family history with the science of cleaning (Borax) and the quandary of how a text becomes a crystal and how crystal becomes a mother. You’ll learn that objects age just like humans and how their function has little to do with what sustains us. Objects are memories as well as potential. They somehow gather what is past and possible at the same time. And eventually, you’ll break your gaze, knowing that memories are mothers, too.

—Julia Cohen, author of I Was Not Born (Noemi Press)

Cebula’s text is a calico lens, reflecting glare, memory, obscured by facts and shadows, distilled into poetry. We zoom in and out of visual and emotional spaces, which reveal a fragmented story. An alternately transparent and translucent window into a singular family vocation, a mother, tenderly shared as yet unseen light.

—Alison Grace Koehler, author of Stained Glass Poetry (Paris Heretics)

In Tender Travis Cebula transforms raw, emotional experiences into preserved moments of artful reflection. Like crafting a glass eye through which we gaze and are gazed upon, without blinking, Cebula delves into the delicate balance between preserving the past and embracing the transient nature of life. These poems, “more like boiled tears than // a story,” crystallize on the page in jagged but meticulous patterns the essence of fleeting moments—the permanence of love, the fragility of existence, the imprints left by those we cherish and must inevitably lose.

—Janaka Stucky, author of Ascend Ascend (Third Man Books)

Once upon a time, Travis Cebula was a classically trained chef and sommelier, and before that he studied philosophy, but now he lives in Colorado with his wife and trusty dogs, where he writes, edits, photographs, builds things, and teaches creative writing. His poems, short stories, essays, book reviews, and photographs have appeared internationally in various print and online journals.

He has authored six chapbooks and eight full-length collections of poetry, including Dangerous Things to Please a Girl, a sequence of Parisian poetry, The Sublimation of Frederick Eckert from Black Lawrence Press, and Refugee, a series of poems written over the course of six rather intense hours inside a retrospective exhibition of Marc Chagall’s work at the Musée du Luxembourg—and, thanks to the internet, available this very instant from BlazeVOX [Books].

He is also a graduate of Naropa’s MFA program in Writing and Poetics, AKA The Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics, a distinguished writer in residence at the Left Bank Writers Retreat in Paris, France; a Pavel Srut Fellow, a finalist, an honorable mention, innumerable rejections, and generally tries to be a nice guy—which offers him a few excuses. On most days, you can find him somewhere between the margins. On some days, you can’t.

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· Paperback: 116 pages

· Binding: Perfect-Bound

· Publisher: BlazeVOX [books] 

· ISBN: 978-1-60964-462-8

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Breaking into song, or breaking it apart? Maybe a bit of both. Simultaneously a celebration & a send up of iconic pop culture lyrics. SongBu®st is a book-length serial poem that plays like a metafiction anchored on Marcel Duchamp’s concept of infrathin, & featuring characters, or rather figures, recurring & reframing themselves throughout.

Stephen Bett’s new book SongBu®st sounds like a ship-wrecked wit (“We are coast people”) riffing at the end of the world. Here you’ll find snippets of old American pop songs morphed into takes on gun carnage and quotes from tech bros, each separated from the other by an “infrathin delay.” I’ve sometimes wondered what I would see (hear) if my actual life flashed before my eyes when I died. It might be a lot like this.

—Rae Armantrout (Pulitzer Prize winning poet)

These SongBu®st poems are quicksilver, mercurial, reJoycean. You get whisked away and the ride is full of surprises, dark trouble and elation all at the same bumpy time. I get the music, the rhythms as they disintegrate. In fact I’m jarred by all the songs and melded songs in play here. The concept “Infrathin,” too, is so fascinating and black holish that I’m already moving / pulled into a call to engagement with these poems. The footnotes are a blast, as well: I’m caught by them and what that space (allusion, explanation, fishook) is and does. The poems, above all, are smart and sassy. They are fabulous, and the collection as a whole is greater than its parts.

—Michael Kenyon (ReLit Award winning poet/novelist)

What I began to realize, reading these sinuous poems from SongBu®st a second time through, is the musicality of the pieces. There is a syncopated energy, a forward drive that is very appealing. I have to say, they sparkle!

—Ken Cathers (author of Missing Pieces and Letters From the Old Country)

Stephen Bett is a widely and internationally published Canadian poet. His earlier work is known for its sassy, edgy, hip… caustic wit―indeed, for the askance look of the serious satirist… skewering what he calls the ‘vapid monoculture’ of our times. His more recent books have been called an incredible accomplishment for their authentic minimalist subtlety. Many are tightly sequenced book-length ‘serial’ poems, which allow for a rich echoing of cadence and image, building a wonderfully subtle, nuanced music.

Bett follows in the avant tradition of Don Allen’s New American Poets. Hence the mandate for Simon Fraser University’s “Contemporary Literature Collection” to purchase and archive his “personal papers” for scholarly use.

He is recently retired after a 31-year teaching career largely at Langara College in Vancouver, and now lives with his wife Katie in Victoria, BC.

His website is StephenBett.com

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· Paperback: 104 pages

· Binding: Perfect-Bound

· Publisher: BlazeVOX [books] 

· ISBN: 978-1-60964-476-5

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In Cloud of Witnesses memoirist and poet Linda Norton laments and celebrates her bicoastal, peripatetic life (much of this material was assembled during the pandemic lockdowns of 2020) via the cento writ large: every paragraph of prose, every stanza of poetry, is informed by books she has read, half-read, collected into that well-known pile of to-be-reads. Poring over a life spent roaming libraries, museums, and public walkways in New York and California, Norton comes close to Benjamin’s dream (perhaps nightmare) of fashioning a book entirely out of quotations. Fortunately for her readers, she fails, allowing her own insights and observations to serve as the warp and woof of these familiar and unfamiliar citations. Like W. E. B. Du Bois finding solace in his library, Norton moves back and across “the color line,” sits with Shakespeare, Fanny Howe, James Joyce, Toni Morrison, etc., and they wince not, welcoming her into their esteemed company.

—Tyrone Williams

The Irish writer Dervla Murphy said one thing that made her sad about dying was not having enough time to re-read all her favourite books. Linda Norton’s pandemic response to the “death” of her life in public was to re-read books as a kind of replacement for lost community. Cloud of Witnesses is a one-woman, New-Deal-WPA poetry intervention, privately funded by the writer’s voracious reading, care, rage, and love. These poems are an emergency response to hollowness: to lockdown isolation, to erosion of public space by rapacious capitalism, to crumbling US democracy. Stacks of books –from the public and personal library—serve as laptop props for Zoom calls with friends. But then the books themselves start talking, and Norton is their witness. And, lucky for us, ours too.

—Alice Lyons

About The Public Gardens: Poems and History and Wite Out: Love and Work

The Public Gardens is a brilliant, wonderful book, a sort of a wild institution, intense and readable. . . . I find myself loving this writer’s mind, light touch, and generous heart and I, reader, didn’t want to go when it was done. My bowl is out. More! — EILEEN MYLES

Steeped in the language of Scripture and Emerson, the poetry here is fresh and wild, cultivated and desperate. . . [Norton] documents her losses and loves, both as a free person and a mother, and every word she writes has the bittersweet taste of Dinah Washington. — FANNY HOWE

A memoir about a single working mother coping in a rough world she sees all too clearly, Wite Out is a courageous book about a courageous life. I couldn’t put it down. — NORMAN FISCHER

Wite Out is a masterpiece. — JOHN KEENE

Linda Norton is the author of Wite Out: Love and Work (2020), a memoir with poems, and its prequel, The Public Gardens: Poems and History (2011, introduction by Fanny Howe), a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. Norton is also the author of two chapbooks, Hesitation Kit (2007) and Dark White (2019).
Norton received a Creative Work Fund grant in 2014, the year she exhibited her collages at the Dock arts center in Ireland with support from the US Embassy in Dublin. Her collages have appeared on the covers of her own books as well as books by Claudia Rankine, Julie Carr, and other writers. She was a 2020 columnist-in-residence at the SFMoMA Open Space.
Norton was born in Boston and lived in Brooklyn for many years before moving to Oakland, where she raised her daughter and met her foster son. Norton’s children are the heart and soul of Wite Out, a book John Keene and Eileen Myles call a “masterpiece” and Norman Fischer calls “a gorgeous, courageous book.”
Norton is a dual citizen of the US and Ireland/EU. She teaches online at the Yeats Academy at IT Sligo/Atlantic Technological University in Connaught, Ireland.

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· Paperback: 102 pages

· Binding: Perfect-Bound

· Publisher: BlazeVOX [books] 

· ISBN: 978-1-60964-464-2

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What links the “Polaroids of Turbulence” in this debut volume is the ominous uncertainty that has become an increasingly prominent feature on our shared cultural landscape. This abrupt dismissal of assumptions that were once safe bets regarding the environment, the U.S. government, the media, and some of the world’s beloved sites and cities is a thread and climate pursuing these poems wherever they happen to wander. And wander they do: over an expansive map including Harrisburg, PA, Berlin, Krakow, Cluj, Phnom Penh, and South Australia among its points. Undergirding these texts is the conviction that the shifting political landscape is not only a worthy but compelling occasion for the poetic transcript. The chronology of the events referenced extends from Central High School, Philadelphia, in the early 1960’s and the Cambodian genocide of a decade later, through 9/11 and on to the U.S. presidential election of 2016. Whichever outgrowths of contemporary culture the poems address (TV miniseries, aimless recreational travel, runaway capitalism), the “Polaroids,” as filmstrips of language, are propelled by a common irresistible blast of chaos into their consolidation, digression, and wandering–from one articulation to the next.

Polaroids of Turbulence is a chronicle of culture trouble, a verse report of the unfathomable depths of our times: “barbarism’s eternal return.” Sussman’s sharp observations and linguistic play mark a “jagged trajectory” through “the outerbanks of / introspection.”

—Nancy Kuhl

“Snap, snap…” With each click, the polaroid captures a global landscape of the “kaleidoscopic jerking of the real.” From Germantown to Washington Sq., Venice to Paris, Krakow to Basel, and Cluj to hometowns never inhabited, its O’Haraian urban surrealist surface is overcast with a Historicist vision, fusing past with present, history with culture, sarcasm with introspection, and anger with humor. To open Henry Sussman’s Polaroids of Turbulence is to open to a “manifold of seeing,” to face the “incursion of the real” head on, and to plunge into the turbulent vertigo of a Möbius strip of the real, relentlessly twisting, unedited and unexpurgated.

—Ming-Qian Ma

These Polaroids—brilliant, old fashioned, postmodern—instantly engage attention: passionate, bold, none too polite. Extravagant in topical detail and language. Playful. Sussman’s travels lead him to a deeply personal a culturally meaningful past, startling possibilities of the future, but most truly through the present—today’s world of planet warming and anguish, garbage and wonder. Pennsylvania, Krakow, Sydney are some of the many places “snapped” on the course of his journey, but finding the coordinates of “Where I am” and where you are is not so simple. Sussman has outdone himself here.

—Linda Reinfeld

Boasting a superb title that it delivers on, Polaroids of Turbulence is an ambitious and exclamatory exploration of pain, politics, and a speaker haunted by discombobulation. Sussman crafts a raft for that journey from repurposed dialects, some classical or commercial, some irreverent. This is a book for firebrands of the highest order, those who would edit, shed, expunge former disguises!

—Kyle McCord, Author of Reunion of the Good Weather Suicide Cult

Walt Whitman may have uttered his barbaric yawp, but throughout Henry Sussman’s stunning debut collection, Polaroids of Turblence, “The wailing of the sirens will not stop.” In poem after uncompromising poem Sussman hurtles the reader forward, as if to build up to an escape velocity, so that we might break free of noise and dissonance and dissociation in order to discover at last an undeniable, human space of the Real. Is Polaroids of Turblence exciting or exacting? Read it and find out how it can be both.

—Richard Deming, author of This Exquisite Lonelines

“Imagine an aperture open not only to light, but to the mind of light–to image and to the time passing through an image, with all the content and conflagrations of time on view. Such an aperture is the eye of Henry Sussman’s poetry, and the light it finds is the light of our complex, colloquial day. The poems in Polaroids of Turbulence are vivid companions to that day, including most especially “Three Deer in a Development near Harrisburg PA”, a poem which offers visionary companionship equal to that of Ammons’ “Easter Morning”. Sussman’s is a dearly welcome collection.”

—Donald Revell

Hardly a quick and grainy snapshot, Polaroids is a hologram built from Sussman’s keen-eyed and deeply considered experience of our recent and excruciating century. Ranging widely across histories, languages, forms, and geography, his intricate sonics and erudite critical eye distill his physical and intellectual journeys into this map of a khōra, a space or interval for being, a “topography of outback” with “unremitting luminosity by far its prominent feature.”

—Elizabeth T Gray Jr

“I am poetry, / not that you’d guess,” writes Henry Sussman. How right, and at the same time how wrong, can a man be, for even the slightest glance at this collection reveals the poetry to be of the highest originality, out-Ginsberging Ginsberg in energy, but sounding like no one else. Nothing frightens Henry Sussman. There is swerve, boldness with language and typography, but, above all, there is truth and mastery in the many moods and subjects. It is a poetry of illumination which somehow illuminates itself even more in its progress. I cannot imagine a finer debut volume of poems than this.

—Roger Craik

Henry Sussman’s ambitious, capacious Polaroids of Turbulence gathers into itself—line by line, phrase by phrase, sometimes pun by pun—the world in which we live, offering along the way glimpses of the possible future(s) into which we might be headed. Animated by a commitment to intellectual and emotional integrity, the poems explore one man’s embodied coming to terms with how the current political (in the largest sense of that word) moment informs and is informed by the only way we can live our lives: day by day, without knowing for sure what comes next.

—Richard Jeffrey Newman, author of T’shuvah

Henry Sussman is a critic and writer currently living in New York City. Trained in nineteenth and twentieth-century Euro-American Literatures and Critical Theory, he has practiced poetry for decades as an alternative text-medium to fiction and discursive prose. Literacy, the interplay of media, and the theory and architecture of prevailing cultural systems have, over recent decades, been his driving interests. Drawing their impetus from French theory and twentieth-century philosophy, the Frankfurt School, and psychoanalysis, his writings about literature largely concentrated on Euro-American modernism and its austere aftermath. Ongoing research created occasions for extended travel. His most recent work of cultural criticism is The Great Dismissal: Memoir of the Cultural Demolition Derby, 2015-22 (Bloomsbury Academic, 2023). October, 2023 saw the premier of his play, “Soirée at Walter Benjamin’s,” in the Winterfest season of the New York Theater Festival. Polaroids of Turbulence is a debut volume of poetry.

Book Information:

· Paperback: 92 pages

· Binding: Perfect-Bound

· Publisher: BlazeVOX [books] 

· ISBN: 978-1-60964-458-1

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Epilogue already says a great deal, and yet it concludes nothing. As Watson writes, “We wouldn’t have to ask any more of the past / if the present came back.” Which says one doesn’t spend a life in poetry without some scarring. Sometimes sardonic, sometimes wistful – but always honest, if complicated – Watson notes “every idea needs a disguise.” Scars can heal, but there’s no treatment for the experience of being a poet in the world: “The future is pretending to greet you, / and you are pretending to care.” And then, just as quickly, “The terms of extinction are inviolable.” Which isn’t pessimistic. It’s glorious clarity. “The paradox is, the deeper you go, the greater / the opacity of what cannot be said.” Watson is comfortable objectifying the poet as a lens moving through the writing, documenting that movement. But he refuses to gloss over those comforting screens we use to mask the arrant opacity of things. The elusive music of his poems will keep us reading Craig Watson’s work for a very long time.

—Larry Price

Epilogue is a brilliant collection of Craig Watson’s late-stage poetry. As such, it signals neither harmony nor resolution, but intransigence, difficulty, and unresolved conflict. The book may be in that sense the description of a catastrophe, and a humorous one at that. “To be old is to understand everything at last. / But there were so many ways to avoid arriving here.” Watson’s humor can be mordant or acerbic. Only to quickly turn exuberant and seductive. “The goal of sex and poetry is to say, ‘I’ve done it all.’ // Meet me poolside at midnight and I’ll show you how.” A lot of these lines don’t make any sense. Then they do. “It’s time to get back to the pyramid scheme / that is poetry.” Time travel at this stage is de rigueur. “Remember when this was the future?” This dazzling, posthumous work admits the reader into a shimmering, luminous present.

—Kit Robinson

Craig Watson was a man of many talents, interests, and skills. He launched what would become a multifaceted career, first in professional theater as a stage manager, producer, and director of public festivals, concerts, theater productions and poetry readings. He then led the global communications efforts for an international technology company, taught college literature courses, and served as literary manager and associate artistic director at a Tony Award-winning regional theater. Perhaps most importantly, throughout his life Craig made his civic duties a high priority, serving his communities as a volunteer firefighter, an emergency management director and a board member of various arts and cultural organizations.

But his creative work is what always sustained and nourished him, especially as a poet, and mentor to others. Craig was a unique and dynamic voice in a multi-layered community of artists. While he indulged his passion for music and expanded his creative endeavors through painting, collage, and sculpture in later years, he never abandoned his love for and fascination with words. Described as “one of our most original and compelling poets,” Epilogue is his fourteenth book and would not be possible without the help of his lifelong friend and fellow poet, Ted Pearson. It is being published posthumously following Craig’s passing in January 2022.

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· Paperback: 62 pages

· Binding: Perfect-Bound

· Publisher: BlazeVOX [books] 

· ISBN: 978-1-60964-475-8

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prairie)d is a magical meditation on the maps and rivers Cycholl has known on the American plains, and it enters a long tradition of prophetic poetry. It rehearses America’s maybes and could-have-beens, and chronicles its failures. In the poet’s attention, the prairie reads as a wonderful and uncanny ache of American names. It is something that we ‘know’ or something we have heard and never seen. The effect is both exhilaratingly strange and reassuringly familiar.

Mostly, Cycholl proceeds in dismay for the beggaring of his world. prairie)d is the song of a grieving poet. It tells of the water which dribbles muddily through a once-garden and into lives malformed by manias of profit.

—Dennis Cooley, author of The Bestiary and Body Works

Fourth in Garin Cycholl’s Illinois series of long poems, prairie)d joins Blue Mound to 161, Hostile Witness, and The Bonegatherer. This work explores water’s place and persistence in memory. What myths does water hold? What traces of human presence will persist beyond ecological catastrophe? A fading autobiographical map, prairie)d opens conversations between Tiresias, Tyrone Hayes, and human myth, “ahowl and wailing her dead into the current.”

Garin Cycholl’s novel, Rx, is a play on Melville’s The Confidence-Man, about a man practicing medicine without a license in a (Dis)united States. prairie)d is the last volume among his Illinois poems, which include Blue Mound to 161, Hostile Witness, and The Bonegatherer. Together as “local epic,” these book-length poems play with aspects of memory, myth, and place. He and his wife, Shadla, live just south of Chicago.

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· Paperback: 92 pages

· Binding: Perfect-Bound

· Publisher: BlazeVOX [books] 

· ISBN: 978-1-60964-461-1

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“In his American classic Essays before a Sonata, Charles Ives avows that ‘the substance of a tune comes from somewhere near the soul.’ It is Wade Stevenson’s singular gift to express, with a candor indistinguishable from courage, the vivid geography of that most specific ‘somewhere’. These sonatas are personal in the very largest sense. And in their expanse, we are given to see love and loss as imperishable features of a singular landscape and the departures of one soul.”

—Donald Revell

“What a wild and wonderful ride! Stevenson’s sonatas are exercises in outward growth whose root seems as much to be Whitman as Rumi. This book promises departure, and it certainly delivers, but where the reader arrives–a unbecoming and rebirth–is no less meaningful.”

—Kyle McCord, Author of Reunion of the Good Weather Suicide Cult

Read Wade Stevenson’s The Departure Sonatas as a question — “How to transcend, to rise, to go beyond / Into the pure voluptuousness / Of manifold meanings, symphonic sounds?” — or read it as a quest — “Looking for that place at the edge of understanding.” Either way, it will prove itself true to its own ideal: “to be real / As a hot dog stand.”

—H. L. Hix

Thanks for sharing “The Departure Sonatas”. The poem is heartfelt, sincere, and direct. The core of the poem is about the soul, an indefinable, ineffable part of a person with religious, artistic, and romantic implications. You asked which poets or poems it brought to mind. I thought of Eliot’s “Four Quartets” as a kind of precedent for what you’re doing.

—Sean Singer

“Memory is the great mover in Wade Stevenson’s The Departure Sonatas. But this is memory overlaid and undermined by grief, love, need, and poetry itself. As images flow into the music, revelations appear to the speaker that are then filtered through language and song to the reader, creating a shared space where the music is completed. A lovely journey through a mind attuned.”

—Rachel Abramowitz

With The Departure Sonatas, Wade Stevenson offers one of the great long poems of our time. Undaunted by epic expansiveness yet rooted in felt particularity, here is lyric intelligence surrendering itself entirely to sheer being. The four “sonatas” comprising the poem reveal profound and surprising meditations on the ways that we are, all of us, captives of Time, subject to its bewildering irreversibility as well as its sublime gifts. Stevenson remains true to “The only language I know born of the earth,” and the result is a cause for gratitude.

—Peter Campion, author of One Summer Evening at the Falls

Wade Stevenson’s Departure Sonatas pays homage to life as it dwindles “away slowly like a bar of soap.” To die in Stevenson’s mind is less a termination of desire than its transformation, an escape “from the ‘me’/ Who is no longer who I am.” “Blending sweetness and strangeness,” Stevenson is at once both “so ready to say goodbye” to a world where “it’s no longer fun to watch/ How the doors of the day open and close” and devoted to the search “for that special word, the voice / That says, ‘Come back to me.’” Stevenson’s speaker may be an “infinitesimal dot” against “a hundred billion blazing star.” But it is in his humanity that we let go of our pride and stick out our tongues. We return with our childlike wonder, in asking: “Does the sunlight have a taste/ Sweet as toasted marshmallow light?”

—Tiffany Troy, author of Dominus

In these haunting, rich, and meditative poems, Wade Stevenson performs an act of great generosity: offering an open view of the mind as it confronts life’s most difficult questions – namely, what happens when it ends? The true beauty of this work lies not in the arrival at an answer but in the questioning and requestioning, in telling and retelling “the story of how the world / through words / remembers itself. Through his willingness to engage so deeply and elegantly with this process, Stevenson provides “a new promise of illumination” and “a more or less accurate rendering” of all of our “unmappable hearts.”

— Emma Bolden

When reading Wade Stevenson’s The Departure Sonatas, I’m reminded of the great Mariane Moore, particularly the poem in which she travels the world to describe a sycamore tree. Stevenson’s poems prove equally cosmopolitan in their sensibility and approach. Like Moore’s celebrated oeuvre, Stevenson’s The Departure Sonatas is well-traveled in terms of geography, but also, in its influences and ways of seeing and understanding the world. But what sets Stevenson apart from any other poet is his ability to marry affect with these larger questions of craft, philosophy, and worldview. These poems are as emotionally charged as they are intelligent. Bravo!

—Kristina Marie Darling, Fulbright Scholar & Editor-in-Chief of Tupelo Press

Wade Stevenson was born in NYC in 1945. Educated at St. Paul’s School, he studied in Paris, and has travelled extensively throughout Asia. His first book, ICE CREAM PARLORS IN ASIA, was published in 1969, thanks to John Ashbery. BEDS (McCall Publishing Co.) became a poetry best seller. His memoir ONE TIME IN PARIS and his novel THE ELECTRIC AFFINITIES both received critical acclaim. He has published more than a dozen poetry books, including SONGS OF THE SUN AMOR, LOVE AT THE END, and IN THE COUNTRY OF THE PEREGRINE.

Book Information:

· Paperback: 82 pages

· Binding: Perfect-Bound

· Publisher: BlazeVOX [books] 

· ISBN: 978-1-60964-470-3

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There are many histories of America, but none of them is as much fun as Charles Rammelkamp’s The Trapeze of Your Flesh, an account of burlesque, specifically stripping, from the 19th century to the present, as told in the voices of the strippers themselves. We hear from, among others, Fanne Fox, “The Tidal Basin Bombshell,” Sally Keith, “Queen of the Tassels,” Patti Waggin, “The Educated Torso,” Sheila Ryan, aka “Sheila the Peeler,” and my personal favorite, Lili St. Cyr, “The Anatomic Bomb.” The speakers offer unforgettable glimpses of tumultuous lives, as when Candy Barr blandly remarks, “I married, had a kid at nineteen, shot my husband a couple of years later,” or when Tura Luna says, “I had to quit acting after an ex-boyfriend shot me in the stomach,” or when June Power says, “They called me the model responsible for the first erection of so many lads in the 1960s. I call that power.” The great Chesty Morgan generously observes that “My boobs belonged to the world, even if they were attached to my body,” but maybe the best line comes from Mabel Santley, late in the 1800s: “Men have done foolish things for sex at least since Helen of Troy.” I haven’t enjoyed a book of poems this much in a long time.

—George Bilgere, author of Central Air

The Trapeze of Your Flesh is a tour de force in which maestro Rammelkamp poetically emulates his subject matter and with the grace of Josephine Baker, strips away societal taboos and prejudices to reveal these women’s towering intellects and the powerful forces for change they were, and continue to be. These largely unsung heroines are getting their just due here. There’s Gypsy Rose Lee dressing down H.L. Mencken “for that ridiculous term, ‘ecdysiast.’” “What a blowhard! The word means ‘molting,’ for Heaven’s sake!” There’s also Mistinguett who “volunteered to spy for France, [and] finally persuaded King Alfonso of Spain to intervene in 1916.” These women are true revolutionaries. Charles Rammelkamp’s linguistic agility and sly wit celebrates and gives them voice perfectly: June Power says,
“They called me the model
responsible for the first erection
of so many lads in the 1960s.
I call that power.”

I do too! —Elizabeth MacDuffie, Editor, Meat for Tea

PLEASE DO NOT OPEN Charles Rammelkamp’s latest collection of history-themed poetry, The Trapeze of Your Flesh, if
a. Your things-to-do list is still glaring at you with nothing checked off;
b. You never heard of Blaze Starr;
c. You put off your field trip to The Block until too late;
d. See (a) again. CLOSE THE BOOK. Do the laundry.
As one who often ran into Ms. Starr while buying my wee ballet shoes from the same downtown B-more shop supplying the Star’s pasties, not to mention accompanying the young, new President of a prestigious Ohio college on a field trip to The Block when he and his wife visited Baltimore, not to mention hating my stupid pectoral muscles after watching Shazell Shazaar twirl tassels, I will tell you that Rammelkamp’s poems spoken by or about various real, O very real, strippers from back in The Day may be your most delicious—and genuinely enlightening—reading experience in years. It’s a chortle-out-loud serious, seriously good book.

—Clarinda Harriss, author of MORTMAIN; The Night Parrot; the bone tree; forms of verse: British and American; The White Rail; Dirty Blue Voice and others.

The Trapeze of Your Flesh is a poetic romp ala Doctorow through the history of Burlesque. The headliners are all here—Blaze Starr, Tempest Storm, Gypsy Rose Lee, et al., with plenty of factoids about their lives (before and after), their real names, and their tricks of the trade. Rammelkamp went the extra mile with his research and it really shows in his presentation of their side of the story and the absolutely fabulous bon mots.

—Richard Peabody, Editor, Gargoyle Magazine

Charles Rammelkamp’s exposition of the “flesh trapeze” that swings through American entertainment and culture, via the voices of some of its most prominent acrobats, is vital to an understanding of our culture.

—Roman Gladstone, author of A Crisis of Faith

Charles Rammelkamp is Prose Editor for BrickHouse Books in Baltimore, where he lives with his wife, Abby. Rammelkamp’s previous BlazeVOX collection, Transcendence, dealt with psychedelic drugs and yoga, an historical examination of the CIA’s covert “mind control” programs, Timothy Leary, etc. Rammelkamp is the author of several collections of “historical” or “biographical” poetry sequences, written in dramatic monologue form, including Fusen Bakudan (Time Being Books), about World War Two Japanese balloon bombs and leper colony missionaries in Vietnam; Mata Hari: Eye of the Day (Apprentice House), about the life and career of the World War I femme fatale spy; American Zeitgeist (Apprentice House), which deals with the populist politician and Scopes Trial buffoon, William Jennings Bryan; Catastroika (Apprentice House), another collection of dramatic monologues in the voices of Maria Rasputin, the mad monk’s daughter, who escaped Russia after the Revolution and became a lion tamer for Ringling Brothers, and a fictional Jewish character, Sasha Federmesser, who likewise escapes and immigrates to Baltimore. A chapbook of poems about female sailors in the British Royal Navy during the 17th and 18th centuries, Jack Tar’s Lady Parts (Main Street Rag Press), is also written in this style. His collection on Harry Houdini, A Magician Among the Spirits, winner of the Blue Light Press Poetry Prize, is another. Other poetry collections include Ugler Lee, The Field of Happiness and See What I Mean? (Kelsay Books) and Mortal Coil, a chapbook published by Clare Songbirds. Another chapbook of poems, Me and Sal Paradise, was published by FutureCycle Press.

Book Information:

· Paperback: 174 pages
· Binding: Perfect-Bound
· Publisher: BlazeVOX [books]
· ISBN: 978-1-60964-465-9

$20

Pre-Orders Welcome

The Trapeze of Your Flesh by Charles Rammelkamp Book Preview by BlazeVOX [books] on Scribd

“Pete Mladinic’s new book, The Homesick Mortician, is a poetic buffet of the ordinary and extraordinary, the real and surreal, the monstrous and marvelous. Past and present weave seamless stories that will stay with you long after you put this book down.”

—Nolcha Fox, author of Cancer Isn’t Just a Constellation. Editor for Garden of Neuro. Nominee for 2023 Best of the Net and 2024 Best of the Net Anthology.

“The poems in Peter Mladinic’s The Homesick Mortician restlessly probe. Beneath each piece, there’s the “why” that perplexes the poet. In “How Amazing,” Mladinic, an animal rights advocate, asks why we can’t see the value of animals. And in his most harrowing poem “Light and Dark,” he shows us how power can be both a gift and a crime. Even in Mladinic’s persona poems, written in the voices of people who have committed heinous acts, one finds deep compassion. This is the book to read when you need a partner in outrage, and when your heart needs healing.”

—Tina Barry, author of Beautiful Raft and Mall Flower.

:There’s a fierce sense of history in Peter Mladinic’s The Homesick Mortician, some of it real, some imagined. Bad things happen in moving cars. Lost souls abound, with killers and victims, and many others barely surviving their trials on Earth. There are those wounded in the flesh and others wounded in the spirit. Blame no one? Hardly. Some poems are quiet character studies, some are cautionary narratives, with wonders taken from headlines, old and new. There, too, are moments of rare grace, good memories of friends gone too soon. Mladinic gives us a world where “a man with a wooden leg/ and a boy in a white shirt/ talk weather/ and look like an argument.” The strange and the mundane combine into sharp mystery. This is exquisite poetry and worthy of your time.”

—Jeff Weddle, author of Driving the Lost Highway and winner of the Eudora Welty Prize.

Peter Mladinic lives in Hobbs, New Mexico. He was born and raised in New Jersey and has lived in the Midwest and in the South. He enlisted in the United States Navy and served for four years. He received an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Arkansas in 1985, and taught English for thirty years at New Mexico Junior College in Hobbs. He has edited two books: Love, Death, and the Plains; and Ethnic Lea: Southeast New Mexico Stories, which are available from the Lea County Museum Press, as are three volumes of poetry: Lost in Lea, Dressed for Winter, and Falling Awake in Lovington. His most recent book, Knives on a Table was published by Better Than Starbucks Publications in 2021. He is a past board member of the Lea County Museum and a former president of the Lea County Humane Society. An animal advocate, he supports numerous animal rescue groups. Two of his main concerns are to bring an end to the euthanizing of animals in shelters and to help get animals in shelters adopted into caring homes.

Book Information:

· Paperback: 96 pages
· Binding: Perfect-Bound
· Publisher: BlazeVOX [books]
· ISBN: 978-1-60964-471-0

$18

Pre-Orders Welcome

The Homesick Mortician by Peter Mlandinic Book Preview by BlazeVOX [books] on Scribd