Bøker utgitt av EastOver Press LLC

The electricity of wonder runs through everything, but we often fail to see it. In What is it Like to be Alive? Fourteen Attempts at an Answer, essayist Chris Arthur highlights the extraordinary nature of the ordinary.

A collection of outstanding short stories by Iowa teacher, writer, and editor Keith Pilapil Lesmeister. This second edition has been republished by EastOver Press of Rochester, Massachusetts. .

Skies of Blur, the third and latest collection by critically acclaimed poet Elijah Burrell, navigates the depths of human connection and disconnection, love and loss, and the spaces between. Burrell breathes life into every line, crafting a world both familiar and entirely new. While guiding us quietly between the realms of the natural and supernatural, these poems remind us of the chaos and uncertainty of modern life. Through metaphors of spinning plates and broken umbrellas, Burrell captures the delicate balance we all strive to maintain and the challenges we face in a seemingly incurable world. This blurring world demands we pay attention and stay vigilant at all costs. Burrell's poems deal with the struggle between our past and present selves. As only miracles and poems can, Skies of Blur brings the dead back to life and awakens memories of days long gone. Throughout the collection, Burrell introduces us to a cast of unforgettable characters, like Mr. Night, the bull who inexplicably materializes, speaks, and serves as both adversary and ally. As the collection progresses, Mr. Night engages in a series of surreal encounters, challenging the reader to question the nature of identity and the boundaries between our inner and outer worlds. In other poems, Burrell showcases an uncommon ability to infuse absurd narratives with tragedy and joy, as when a man longing for connection steals a horn shark from a local aquarium. This collection proclaims that each of us strays into unknowable places. Wildflowers will fall from our gaping wounds. We may never know our multitudinous selves, or we might meet them to destroy them. Prepare to be moved and challenged as you look up into the deep, dark Skies of Blur.

In her third full-length collection, Dirt Songs, Kari Gunter-Seymour's poems are full-throated, raw, deceptively simple, and rippling with candor, providing readers an insider's lens into the larger questions surrounding the many aspects of Appalachian culture, including identity, the impact of poverty, generational afflictions, and the brunt of mainstream America's skewed regard for the region. Readers will discover a musicality of language, a stoic sense of honor, a richly detailed tapestry of experiences, and an inspiring display of humility and courage. Throughout the book there is an overarching determination to endure, to be the last truth teller left standing, arm raised in solidarity with the land and its people. Dirt Songs does what journalists and mainstream media have failed to do: provide a uniquely intimate look at landscape and family generated from within Appalachia, recognizing that one story cannot accurately represent a region or its people.

"George Singleton is a very funny man. He could write about a tootsie roll and keep me reading," says Abigail Thomas, author of Safekeeping and A Three Dog Life, about Singleton's new collection of personal essays. Readers of his celebrated short story collections (The Half-Mammals of Dixie, You Want More, and The Curious Lives of Non-Profit Martyrs, among others) know just what a master storyteller Singleton can be. Yet in this collection of essays, readers will discover Singleton's best kept secret: he also has a keen eye for the well-told and hilarious truth.His subjects range widely: dogs, food, restaurants, jobs, music, family, and the benefits and challenges of, as he puts it, "a questionable upbringing." ¿Frequently published in magazines like Oxford American and Garden and Gun, Singleton explains in these essays how he came to be a writer (he blames barbecue), why he still writes his first draft by hand (someone stole his typewriter), and why he ran marathons (his father gave him beer.) He also will tell you why Aristotle would have been a failed philosopher had he grown up in South Carolina, how Laugh-In's Henry Gibson is to blame for his education in literature, and what was in the most delicious soup he has ever eaten. Readers are invited to join George Singleton as he gets his dogs to promise they won't use his new garden as a Porta-Potty, learns about his not so famous relations, and generally charms anyone sensible enough to read this delightful book.

The day before Robert died was an otherwise perfect June day in Connecticut: warm but not hot, with a bit of a breeze, flawless blue sky, puffy white clouds-the sort of weather a sailor loves, and Robert was a sailor. So begins Tara Kelly's moving memoir of her life with Robert Willis, her husband, father of their children, restauranteur, sailor, bon vivant, and alcoholic. From an enchanted start in Manhattan to a townhouse in Brooklyn, from an island in Maine and back to rural Connecticut, in fast cars, sleek boats, and on horseback, Tara and Robert seemed to live a charmed life. But beneath the glittering exterior was the struggle of money, alcohol, and ultimately self-control and hard-won sobriety. When this couple seems to have reached an impasse, separation brings renewed love, and then tragedy brings new challenges. Tara Kelly's memoir is a clear-eyed excavation of the lives lived together and apart by two charismatic modern Americans, a story told in love and compassion for herself and others, a story "...never unsympathetic, and refreshingly free from sentimentality and the temptation to settle old scores" (Michael Korda). A story readers will savor and remember.

Welcome to the world of Ray Trotter, where ordinary humans are pushed to do things in out-of-the-ordinary ways. Trotter has conjured a world of Southern hyper-reality in And Dogs to Chase Them, his first book of short stories: a good Christian woman who has had enough and so pushes a man down the staircase, "as final as flushing the commode;" a concrete deliveryman who really ought to have double checked the address before he got out of his truck; and a man who man enacts his revenge on the self-declared Queen of the Post Office. But there is much more to these stories than humor, for Trotter has the rare gift to show us the interior lives of people trying to do the best they can, and the often tragic consequences do not dampen our admiration for their best intentions. Trotter treats his characters with honest empathy, and the result is a deeply felt connection to the hopes and memories of our fellow human beings. Through a keen eye for detail and language, Trotter brings to life a world that is at once familiar and deeply odd, and creates characters that stay with a reader long after the book is closed.Trotter's first book has gathered praise from master storytellers: Ron Rash, author of Serena, Nothing Gold Can Stay, and The Caretaker, calls And Dogs To Chase Them "a collection that is at times laugh-out loud funny and other times deeply poignant." George Singleton, author of The Curious Lives of Non-Profit Martyrs and The Half-Mammals of Dixie, says "These are everyday, mostly blue-collar, characters, putting up good fights, skeptical of their situations, and true to their beliefs." Sybil Baker, author of Apparitions and Immigration Essays, says "Set in North Georgia and East Tennessee, these stories sparkle with insight into what it means to be human in a world that is often unforgiving but offers hope."

"Imagine finding that message in a bottle you always dreamed about." So writes Paul Yoon, author of Snow Hunters, about poet and essayist Ralph Sneeden's new book The Legible Element. Although a memoir at its core, The Legible Element is much more: the book gathers lyrical essays into chapters, using prose and poetry as facets of the same aqueous gem. With a personal immersion in literature, visual art, film, and music, Sneeden establishes a nonfiction hybrid on the border between the academic and the personal. The collection's narratives about surfing, sailing, fishing, scuba diving, and swimming are earthly dispatches from an ongoing voyage fueled by joy, longing, loss, and humor.The Legible Element is a book about places, its insights and descriptions spurred by the challenge of distinguishing the personalities of different bodies of water through experience while also paying tribute to the coasts that cradle and define them. The collection's regional touchstones are in New England and California, but as Jennifer Acker, author of The Limits of the World and editor of The Common, puts it, "This book will fling you from shore to sea and back again in search of perfect aquatic moments."Water provides the language of the essays, functioning as both a lens and mirror for the author's exploration of the act and outcomes of writing itself. As he says in the preface, "...it's writing that ultimately needs to rip its own temporary swath, churn the surface of memory into something that seems more permanent." Bill Roorbach, author of Summers with Juliet, Temple Stream, and Lucky Turtle, writes, "These are a poet's sentences, a poet noticing the world even as he lives in it, language creating a world apart. These essays are profound-you'll want to follow this voice wherever it goes."The Legible Element will have you wallowing, floundering, and then swimming happily for your life off the shore of your own preoccupations before you even realize you're adrift.

In twenty-five short stories, Andrea Rinard introduces an eclectic group of women attempting to claim their own space and to find meaning in the mundanity of relationships, eating, shopping, grieving, searching, and dropping a kid off at college. Stark, spare, sometimes surreal, but always lit with a spark of truth, these stories are at once amusing and infuriating, comforting and heartbreaking, and always familiar.

Joseph Bathanti's THE ACT OF CONTRITION & OTHER STORIES, a series of linked stories and one novella, continues the adventures of Fritz Sweeney and his outrageously memorable parents, Travis and Rita, that began in Bathanti's earlier award-winning volume of stories, THE HIGH HEART. Spanning the mid-fifties to the mid-seventies, in an Italian American working class neighborhood in Pittsburgh, THE ACT OF CONTRITION celebrates and complicates the operatic glories and tragedies of an offbeat family that, fashioned from the vault of explosive family secrets, is snared in its own incendiary mythology. These fourteen unforgettable stories - a mélange of incantatory magical realism and clear-eyed documentary precision (in the vein of Raymond Carver) - are narrated by Fritz in a prophetic voice that issues at once from the very aggregate of steel town Pittsburgh and his deep yearning to escape it.

A 2023 anthology of short stories written by contemporary rural American writers of color. First in The EastOver Anthology of Rural Stories series. Edited by Keith Pilapil Lesmeister. The 2023 collection features work by Jinwoo Chong, Risë Kevalshar Collins, Jamie Figueroa, Libby Flores, Jane Hammons, Mark L. Keats, Laura Lee Lucas, Jennifer Morales, Tisha Marie Reichle-Aguilera, Jeanette Weaskus, and Erika T. Wurth.

Until All You See Is Sky is a report from the front lines of a first-generation American life: growing up as the outsider, parenting without a clue, and persevering in plague times.From the vital meaning of Stan Smiths at the Payless Shoes in his Tampa childhood to what you should have ordered at the now-closed best bakery in Manhattan, from a childhood as a first-generation Greek-Cuban boy who has never lived in Greece or Cuba to being a modern parent wondering how to negotiate life in a pandemic, George Choundas has a story to tell. This award-winning author of short stories now turns to nonfiction, telling true stories with playful language and engaging wit. He sits in the lobby of the Boston Parker House Hotel at dawn to write and imagines what is going on in every head but his own; he survives in a elementary new school by means of The Illiad; he imagines the ends of all the near-strangers who populate our lives; and he wanders through Midtown Manhattan mapping the geography of its idiosyncratic but thoroughly intriguing denizens and visitors with the eye of an expert anthropologist of everyday life. These are the best sort of essays-full of unforgettable characters rendered with clarity and compassion by an inventive and imaginative writer at the top of his form.

Whether set adrift in a marsh or canal, traversing battlefields or beaches, or wading the disorienting streams of adolescence and male identity, readers of Surface Fugue will engage with questioning poignancy and imagination the layers of history stifled by modernity. Plunging us through the ambiguous surfaces of time into the proximities of water-borne violence, predation and occupation, Sneeden maintains perspective and scale with timely anchorages in the coves of elegy and personal memory. Vivid and experiential, these poems deliver reverie and threat with equal power; as the poet's description of refraction suggests, "...a dipping oar /is able to inhabit both worlds."

In The Sins of Sweet Mortality, Marilyn Fox and Nancye McCrary combine poetry and painting, juxtaposing voice, image, and sensation, to create a multi-layered collection that readers will view as rich, textured, and full of possibility. Poetry and painting communicate and illustrate the long history of humanity. They tell the story of our journey through the centuries, documenting in artistic forms both the ordinary and the extraordinary in human experience. Both aspire for a kind of beauty that can bring tears to our eyes. Both aim far beyond what educational theorist Maxine Greene called "the anesthesia of daily human activity." As the poet Wallace Stevens opined, because poetry and painting operate at the intersection of imagination and reality, these art forms assume a prophetic stature and become a "vital assertion of self." In this book we explore how assertion of self in confluent poetry and painting can enhance the reading and viewing experience while maintaining the friction of creative independence. The intent is to awaken the reader/observer to imagine what may not be immediately obvious in either language or image alone. The convergence of both elements-the visual and the literary-are layered like a palimpsest, inviting the audience to uncover other worlds.

Ranging from the humble and poignant to the humorous, Sylvia Woods' poems explore her personal experience as an educator, as well as her own transition from daughter to mother and eventually to grandmother. Throughout Woods' work, the landscape and culture of Appalachia is a driving force. So too is the memory of family and the myth of family history.The poems in What We Take With Us are, as acclaimed poet Maurice Manning says, "as true as a river fork and as durable as the hills above." He continues, "They are also, like the many people and voices here recalled, humble and hard-won. The grit and humor walk side by side with grief and spunk, but isn't that what we ask of poetry, this lofty air?"Kentucky Poet Laureate George Ella Lyon praises Sylvia Woods' work with these words: "Like switchback roads in the mountains she hails from ... Woods' poems are going to take you places, and you don't want to miss the ride!"Author Darnell Arnoult describes What We Take With Us in this way: "Sylvia Woods 'captures' the reader in a vault of rich images, layers and layers of ideas to mine and gorgeously crafted moments of recognition for the poet and for us her readers. This may be a debut collection, but Woods is no novice to poetry. Each poem is a gem crafted by an experienced hand, strung together jewel after jewel."What We Take With Us is published by EastOver Press. (www.EastOverPress.com)

John Davis Jr.'s fifth collection of poetry, The Places That Hold, praises the dusty morning light of citrus farming and the pleasures of fatherhood as it explores the darkness of places like the infamous Dozier Reform School in Florida's panhandle. Intertwining past and present with rural life, social justice, and the value of family, The Places That Hold offers readers a glimpse into the lesser-known corridors of the Sunshine State.

"The lines in this book are vespers, a prayer to the broken hearted. We are swept up in the beauty of form, the spaces in between, the images of a red-tail hawk and a cantering horse. The book masterfully hones the sounds of grief, gutteral and raw, flowing through a body, a mouth, a soul."--Sarah Sandman, author of The Sinew of 47 Years"Out of grief, out of longing, out of her ravishing gift for noticing, comes this numinous and memorable debut by Erica Anderson-Senter, whose sensibility has been born out of her gift for surviving. I adore the rough music of this book, its candid appraisals, and this poet's fearless descriptions of the sources of fear, sadness, love, life."--Mark Wunderlich, author of God of Nothingness"These poems root us deep in Midwestern landscapes as we encounter litanies, psalms, and a lush unsentimental tenderness that sings out "that swift, / startling joy" in the same breath as gutting loss. This is an extraordinary, courageous debut collection."--Emily Mohn-Slate, author of The Falls

Crow Funeral is the end result of intention and design gone off script. What began as fascination with a phenomenon of crows congregating in overwhelming numbers around one of their fallen, eventually became a collection that merges an interest in the neurological wiring of birds with a mother's battle with postpartum depression and anxiety. We as humans have the tendency to anthropomorphize what we have deep need for-ritual, spectacle, and ceremony, and above all, meaning. If crows can orchestrate an event to mourn their own, then perhaps it is proof that even birds have a built-in urgency to center themselves inside of life's chaos. And yet, it's likely that crows do not mourn at all, and instead they simply reflexively react to something potentially dangerous. There is no deeper significance to the event at all, profound as it may appear. How do you raise children, pray, or write poems in a world with no meaning? Crow Funeral dismisses meaning as a construct concluded from a certain set of metaphysical "signs," and instead simultaneously accepts and rejects God and meaning in search of an exactness that only language can create.

In Exquisite by September, Shayla Hawkins merges the female form's everyday with the exotic, acknowledging the male gaze through ekphrastic poems inspired by the artwork of men who were inspired by women. These poems will awaken all the readers' senses and light the way to celebrate the sensual.

Richard LeBlond has had quite a life-he's been stranded on a Montana mountaintop, chased by a bear in Labrador, splashed through torrential downpours to document the unsuccessful mating game of the spadefoot toad, crossed a union picket line as a teenager in Oregon, and wrangled errant lovers on a Cape Cod dune as a park ranger.LeBlond travels across North America with his eyes and ears open, and reports in these essays with clarity and humor on the natural world and the two- and four-legged animals who inhabit it. His wit and compassion for the foibles and blessings of being human shine through in each chapter. He also shares what he has learned about the supportive role writing can play in the aging process.

Intimacies in Borrowed Light: Poems is Darius Stewart's first book-length collection of poems drawn from his three previous chapbooks in addition to new poems not collected in those volumes. The result is a book that is more than the sum of its parts, but one that coalesces around themes of love, addiction, violence, sexual identity, and the corporeal body to betray the intimate moments that illuminate, especially, Black gay male experiences. Discovering the self is fraught enough, let alone under the ever-present threat of HIV and AIDS. Ranging from the private to the confessional, the lyrical to the narrative, the elegiac to the celebratory, Stewart's writing is gritty, often blunt, but always beautiful as he strives to understand the grief of lost love and lost youth without losing hope.

From Vietnam to America, this story collection, jewel-like, evocative, and layered, brings to readers a unique sense of love and passion alongside tragedy and darker themes of peril. The titular story features a love affair between an unlikely duo pushing against barely surmountable cultural barriers. In "The Yin-Yang Market," magical realism and the beauty of innocence abounds in deep dark places, teeming with life and danger. "A Mute Girl's Yarn" tells a magical coming-of-age story like sketches in a child's fairy book. Bringing together the damned, the unfit, the brave who succumb to the call of fate, All the Rivers Flow Into the Sea is a great journey where redemption and human goodness arise out of violence and beauty to become part of an essential mercy.