Catalog
Afternoon in Cartago
By Margaret Mackinnon
2021 Richard Snyder Memorial Prize Winner, selected by Maggie Anderson. "In Afternoon in Cartago, Margaret Mackinnon reminds us why we turn to art in our hours of darkness." -- Kathleen Graber
Last Night I Aged a Hundred Years
By Peter Grandbois
"Tinctured with the wisdom of Rumi and the passion of Neruda, Last Night I Aged a Hundred Years is a book to savor—night, day, and always." —Phil Brady
Midwest Gothic
By Laura Donnelly
Winner of the 2019 Richard Snyder Memorial Publication Prize, Selected by Maggie Smith. "These difficult times have tested my faith in many things, including language, and Midwest Gothic arrived just in time to remind me what poems can do. " —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
Museum of Small Bones, The
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 Richard Snyder Memorial Prize, selected by Mark Jarman. "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
Idea of the Garden, The
By Michael Moos
Winner of the 2017 Richard Snyder Memorial Publication Prize, selected by Elizabeth Spires. "In The Idea of the Garden, Michael Moos brings a distinctly contemporary sensibility to subjects of timeless importance. What more could we ask from a poet?" – Jim Moore
Burning My Birth Certificate
By Pamela Sutton
Winner of the 2016 Richard Snyder Memorial Publication Prize, selected by Andrew Hudgins. "All those disparate aspects of herself grieve for American wrongs and the wrongs of history, as well as the more intimate depredations life itself inflicts on those we love and on our own bodies. Burning My Birth Certificate is a passionate investigation of the responsibilities of anguish and the consolations of the inconsolable." –Andrew Hudgins, 2016 Richard Snyder judge
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
Genome Rhapsodies, The
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
Rattling Window, The
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.
