Catalog
Midwest Gothic
By Laura Donnelly
About the Author: Winner of the 2019 Richard Snyder Memorial Publication Prize, Selected by Maggie Smith
Late Summer's Origami
By Heather Hallberg Yanda
Newly released by Heather Hallberg Yanda! About the author: A graduate of Western Michigan University’s MFA program in Poetry, Heather Hallberg Yanda teaches at Al
The Museum of Small Bones
By Miho Nonaka
Miho Nonaka's The Museum of Small Bones is now available at Small Press Distribution and Amazon. To buy directly from the publisher, please email app@ashland.edu / call 419-289-5098.
Save Our Ship
By Barbara Ungar
Winner of the 2018 Snyder Prize. As you live with these witty, satiric, and at times wrenching poems, you will find that their humor darkens while their sadness grows strangely lighter. Ungar s examination of contemporary mores, mordant while avoiding self-pity, displays a range of moods that recalls the poetry of the late William Matthews, for whom the poet contributes an elegy, Dear Bill, which may be the best I have read of that mordant, witty, and keenly insightful poet. What have we here? In part we have an apology for a generation, the Baby Boomers, who have populated their emotional lives with their intellectual acumen and savage wit and failed romances and sense of the absurd and the awful recognition that it might be too late to do anything for the planet. The book begins with the revelation of an anti-feminist Medieval alphabet and employs a running joke on the alphabet itself subversively underlined by the Morse Code. Yet emotional ambush lurks around every corner, from spousal abuse ( How It Happens ), to the contradictions of modern philosophy ( Brush Up Your Heidegger ), to the Holocaust ( I Go On the Road of All the Earth ), to the urban spirituality to be found in a Zumba session ( After Zumba ). One of the astringent reminders of Save Our Ship, including its title poem, is the disaster of climate change. There is an unsettling retrospective vision of what we have come to, a realization that Cassandra still walks among us telling her truth, being heard and yet being ignored. You will not be able to ignore Ungar s wonderful poems. They are memorable. They make us think again about our lives and the brave, complicated humor that may somehow redeem us. -- Mark Jarman, Richard Snyder Judge
More Here Than Light
By A.V. Christie
The poems in More Here Than Light are full of hard-won truths, in which the intensity of the poet’s experience is supported by language, phrasing, syntax, and structure. Reading these poems is to watch A.V. Christie growing, evolving, taking risks, and writing, in the most honest, unflinching way possible, about the pressing concerns of life’s successive stages: the formation and disintegration of families, the beginning and end of a marriage, the bond between mother and child, the exigencies of artistic making, and finally, the painful confrontation with her own mortality. There are no evasions. Christie’s poetic ‘task,’ as I imagine it, was to come to a deeper understanding of herself and the external forces which shaped her life and the lives of those around her. She succeeds admirably and unforgettably. - Elizabeth Spires, author of A Memory of the Future
The Idea of the Garden
By Michael Moos
Winner of the 2017 Richard Snyder Memorial Publication Prize, selected by Elizabeth Spires.
Burning My Birth Certificate
By Pamela Sutton
Winner of the 2016 Richard Snyder Memorial Publication Prize, selected by Andrew Hudgins.
Asking the Names
By Michael Miller
Including his debut poetry collection with the Ashland Poetry Press, The Joyful Dark, Michael Miller has published seven other collections. This latest publication includes heartfelt selections that reflect on aging and longstanding relationships, plus a section which pays tribute to patients at Water Reed Military Medical Center.
Life As It
By Daneen Wardrop
"Life as It proves Daneen Wardrop's mastery of voice. In these pieces, the past, present and future coalesce in bright bursts, and, through juxtaposition and accumulation, the connections become ever more compelling, and beautiful, and edgy, and interesting as they unspool. This is poetry of both narrative and musical accomplishments, and a book one won’t forget." - Laura Kasische
The Genome Rhapsodies
By Anna George Meek
The Genome Rhapsodies opens with Gregor Mendel’s question: “What is inherited, and how?” Like strands of DNA, the syntax in these brilliant and moving poems intertwines with the infinitely recombinant moments and utterances that comprise our lives, revealing that what we inherit, first and finally, is language itself... - Angie Estes, 2014 Snyder contest judge
American Urn: Selected Poems (1987-2014)
By Mark Irwin
American Urn draws from Irwin’s collected and award-winnning works to date, including selections from Against the Meanwhile (1988), Quick, Now, Always (1996), White City (2000), Bright Hunger (2004), Tall If (2008), and Large White House Speaking (2013).
Our House Was on Fire
By Laura Van Prooyen
Our House Was on Fire is an arresting, beautiful, and deeply satisfying book of longing, yet longing for what can never be known. And that gives this collection its powerful complexity: what is wanted or contemplated is tempting, but impossible. True desire recognizes what one might lose and also what one must give. Much is given in this book, much of the poet’s mind and honest heart. Van Prooyen’s poems offer a celebration, a carefully laid out feast. -- Maurice Manning
Tancho
By J. David Cummings
Tancho [by J. David Cummings] is a book that needed to be written and needs to be read. Its account of terrible beauty is itself beautiful, speaking of "hope and despair, the promise of each to other."
Out of Place
By Richard Jackson
His lines are clouds of love, piercing the sky with enormous empathy, rolling in the azure, torrents of passion, and are arrows at the same time, reaching a peak where they break, crying, cleansing the air, becoming ether. It is impossible to describe this in discursive language. With a melody that is unmistakably his own, his poems seem to come to us in Europe from the heart of the heart of America, the totally open (and hidden) center from where the power of the continent sprouts. He is a kind of Scorzese in poetry, but where Scorzese almost succeeds in his films, then stops, seals and terrifies us, Jackson adds a tender, vulnerable voice that blossoms and transforms us and that is so unique and great, great in its truest sense in Richard Jackson's poems. - Tomaž Šalamun
American Psalm, World Psalm
By Nicholas Samaras
"...[Samaras] is a stern and original poet, whose seriousness and morality seem almost foreign, like that of the Turkish writer Nazim Hikmet or Czeslaw Milosz or Pablo Neruda. His poetry combines social and personal intensities, ancient reverberations and American intonations... this is a poetry of beauty and purity, often painterly..." —Liz Rosenberg, New York Times Book Review
Luminous Other
By Robin Davidson
These beautiful, wise and moving poems live in the shadow of history and art. They inscribe a contingent world where, as the sign above the "Main Street Fire Sale" reads, "New losses arrive daily." In the face of such inescapable loss, the speaker of another poem is prompted to ask the question that haunts all human life: "How can I sing when I know / I will die?" And the answer comes back as another question, the only answer there can be: "When I know I will die, how can I keep silent?" Luckily for us, Davidson can t keep silent; she sings. - Susan Wood
Coney Island Pilgrims
By John Hennessy
"In his new collection, CONEY ISLAND PILGRIMS, John Hennessy does more than catalogue the things of this world; he sanctifies them: bruised strawberries, Kangols, an unleashed pit bull, Puccini's Suor Angelica, rainy afternoons, Big Bird. It's all here, reconstituted in language and forms that do more than lodge a mirror before our mind's eye. These poems are the gateway to a kingdom of rhythmic feeling, linguistic order, and imaginative explorations."—Major Jackson
The Rattling Window
By Catherine Staples
The poems in The Rattling Window reveal an imagination caught up in the wondrous ordinariness of simply being, knowing how complicated in fact such simplicity is. Staples manages this magic by the quality of her attention, the articulate, luminous sympathy she brings to whatever her eye takes in. Whether it’s a seashore, a field in winter, the “whiplong honeycomb casing of a snake,” or the astonishing, unforgettable thereness of a horse, it’s all illuminated by this poet’s “bright lines of light.” She speaks of “unearthly singing—just the wind in the ear of a whelk.” Of such singing—bringing the ordinary and the amazing into illuminating alignment—are these poems made. - Eamon Grennan
The Rigid Body
By Gabriel Spera
Gabriel Spera tiptoes a fine line, maintaining a balance between formalism and free verse, traditional tropes and verbal originality. When Spera casts his long, clause-riddled sentences into a formal structure, the result is often spectacular. The sentences tumble down through the stanzas like downhill skiers, swerving almost breathtakingly to clip the gate of each rhyme...
Blue Orange
By Robert Grunst
In Robert Grunst’s poems the city’s forgotten signs rise from memory into mid-day light. Blue Orange conveys the luster of words, revealing both an older and brightened sense of the world. These poems are at once both shrewd and true.
Traction
By Mary Makofske
Traction is a collection of poetry that repays attention. The poems are intelligent and well-crafted. Makofske ranges widely from moving meditations on prehistory to an homage to Walt Whitman, love poems, family poems, poems about nature, mortality, and growing up in the fifties. These poems are not just for the eye but sound in the ear.
Expedition: New and Selected Poems
By Arthur Vogelsang
. . . generated by energetic, unconventional inquiry into all manner of human experience . . . . the sweeping, ironically interrogative aspect of the poems . . . the authoritative, oddly direct original persona . . . . These are dreamlike yet wide awake poems, and they are vulnerable, despite their big-time bravado. They are doors, opening onto new vistas.
Striking Surface
By Jason Schneiderman
Jason Schneiderman is a sly, dextrous, and in many ways existential poet. Intellect and feeling meet head-on in his work; their collision elicits arresting moments of clarity, of understanding. These poems seem to believe without believing, betraying the depths (always scary) beneath their surface veneer. Sometimes Schneiderman stands naked, as in the breathtaking elegies to his mother. I feel this book has taught me something new about mortality and human need.
Appetite for the Divine
By Christine Gelineau
In this series of long poems Christine Gelineau brings us the poetry of awakening, perception, birth, and seasons as well as loss, tragedy, and despair and shows that the whole universe beats with one heart (‘the systole-diastole of the cosmos’) as language somehow pursues truth (‘In the absence/ of answers meaning/ may yet find space/ to emerge’) where all things are a tale in themselves. Of the human reaching for understanding she asks questions which only the cosmos can answer: ‘What satiation would Eve have imagined/ as her teeth cleaved the apple?//What were we made for/ if not this appetite for the divine?’”
Resonance
By Richard Jackson
It's the combination of soulfulness, intellectual rigor, and a courtly, almost Petrarchian ardor for the beloved that has always fueled Richard Jackson's poetry. They are also poems of dazzling associative vigor--funny, elegic, and political by turns. I wish that more of our poets possessed his big heart and breadth, and RESONANCE is his best collection yet.
Vengeful Hymns
By Marc J. Sheehan
Marc Sheehan’s poems are reflective, wry, and humble. They are also quietly stubborn and assertive. The humor in these poems hurts a little with their recognition of our own foibles and pure flat-out goofiness. Sheehan celebrates the good, ordinary, imperfect life full of improvisations, going through life on hunches and goodwill. His poems would break your heart if they weren’t so warm and funny, wistful and accepting.
