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"The poems in this book reframe the daily and habitual to reveal the strange, rich interiors of ordinary moments: sitting in a traffic jam, tilted back in a dentist's chair, thinking of an old joke while looking at a famous painting. Christopher Blackman is alert to the ironies that link the comedy and tragedy of existence, yet his poems are never arch or brittle. They start, as so many unforgettable poems do, by welcoming us with lucidity and candor into the particulars of someone else's life; they end by handing us back our own lives, transformed." -Nan Cohen"The poems of Christopher Blackman's poignant Three-Day Weekend search for authenticity beneath the fluorescent glow of late capitalism. Who might we be free of our jobs and shorn of limiting social norms? What might we turn our attention to before it's too late? Blackman's candid-and often funny-poems reach out from a "stretch of time that precedes the pageant's end" to grab the reader by the shoulders and shake them awake."-Keith Leonard"I really like these Chaplinesque lyrics, the prat-fall wisdom of their lines, the stumbling beauty of their turns, the charm of the speaker's ill-timed realizations.... The book is more than a snack-pak of pop pleasure; it is secretly a solemn buffet. These passages begin in the intoxications of bars and radios and movie theaters, but lead into the enduring, sober territories of interior history, the fantods and grace of love and death, and they end questioningly, wisely befuddled, standing beside the reader, saying "I'm the last one left in the poem, and I'm a little afraid/ to be here without anything else to distract me.."-Ed Skoog

"Is this smalltown America? A place where the air doesn't move, love is thin, beer fails nightly to do its trick, and hope rides a cloud to the edge of town, then disappears? These poems are located further east than Sherwood Anderson's Winesburg, Ohio, but they offer the same story of lives where the dramas are small, their significance large, the outcome of disappointments seemingly permanent. Here is art, here is truth, poems as portraits."-Gary Soto, Final Judge, Barry Spacks Poetry Prize"A work of great candor and lucidity, In the Cathedral of My Undoing is a gutting and deeply observed collection. Everything Ayres' eye falls on takes on a stark clarity. Her straightforward lines disguise an enormous intelligence and tonal sensitivity: a fierce capacity for finding the emotional heart of things. I admire the deep attentiveness in these poems - the frontal gazes at the pain and strangeness of our most intimate connections and losses. Here are snapshots illuminating the truths of human encounter and the naked wrongs of our world; here, too, poems of eerie simplicity and praise, pulsing with a kind of desperate sadness. These are poems of our hidden lives, reminding us of the interior paths we all travel between our betrayals and our acts of courage. A wise, vulnerable, and immensely rewarding book."-Jenny George, author of The Dream of Reason"The human need for connection-what it masks and reveals-is at the heart of Kellam Ayres' stunning debut collection. Grounded in the weighted, rooted past of rural New England and the rhythms of working life, and given expansive resonance in the intimate spaces of the speaker's retrospective present, these poems explore cycles of desire and despair, the need for and inability to change, brokenness and the effort to break free. "I can't possibly protect my heart from this world," our speakerrecognizes in the final section, but the reader is witness throughout to her evolving resilience and self-sufficiency. In the Cathedral of My Undoing is a lyric journey through what would undo us into what sustains."-Debra Allbery, author of Fimbul-Winter

Inspired by Santa Barbara Botanic Garden and the trees and plants that define California's Central Coast, Out of the Ground features more than fourty local poets.Carmen Alexander Lori AnayaSarah Blakely Gudrun BortmanSally Anderson Boström M. L. Brown Christopher Buckley Carolyn Chilton Casas Clayton Clark Fran Davis Marsha de la O Kurt Duran Ana Ellickson Kimbrough Ernest Mary Freericks Cie GumucioHannah Huff Kristin Kane Peggy Kelly Isabelle Kim-ShermanGabriella KleinPerie LongoJasmine Marshall Armstrong Juliane McAdam Anita McLaughlin Anne NeubauerEnid Osborn Melinda Palacio Scot Pipkin Susan Shields George HS SingerDavid Starkey Daniel ThomasEmma Trelles Jace Ryan Turner Isabelle Walker Joseph Warren Norma Wightman Paul Willis George Yatchisin Chryss Yost

David Allen Case was born in Birmingham, Alabama. He earned a Bachelor's from the University of Alabama and a Ph. D. in English from UCLA. He died unexpectedly at age 49. His first collection poems, The Tarnation of Faust, launched Gunpowder Press. The publication of Before Traveling to Alabama further highlights Case's remarkable talent and marks the tenth anniversary of the Press.