Bøker utgitt av Unsolicited Press

From a place of solace and chaos comes OF DAISIES AND DEAD VIOLINS, a poetry collection by the renowned S.B. Borgersen, author of WHILE THE KETTLE BOILS and FISHERMEN'S FINGERS. The poems in this marvelous collection sow seeds that burst into unforgettable moments that crack the world open time and time again.From the collection:A Sliver of a Nova Scotia SummerIt dawns on you one morning late in Juneas mayflowers start their fade:soon the lady's slipper orchidswill arrive to tell their messagein gentle pink-tinted voicesas if in secret 'summer's on its way' you know you've yet to see the yarrowthe partridge berry and rhodorabut on the shaded forest floorpainted trillium and Angelicaunfurling ferns and wild irislet you know for sure 'summer has arrived' Monarch butterflies arrive in cloudswith ruby-throated hummingbirdsall this way north from Mexico.Dragonflies and damselfliesflirt hints of purple greensaround still pools 'yes, summer's really here' wild strawberries and blueberriesfor summer picnics on the shoreyou feel the soft white sand beneath your feet and diptoes in the welcomeclear warm ocean. and now you taste,smell, feel, gaze,hear those gentle lapping waves of summer

"Playground" picks up momentum from Benevento's previous two books of poetry, his volume of "selected" poems, (Expecting Songbirds 1983-2015), and his chapbook of poems in his own invented form, After, by including poems with an even wider range of publication dates than in Expecting Songbirds, and the presence of eight new "After" poems among its twenty-six lyrics. Themes such as the after effects of unrequited love, growing up in working class Queens, the redeeming potential in family, all make their appearance. This collection offers far more than recapitulation, though, with poems set in places as varied as a bagel shop in Columbus, a tapas bar in downtown Miami and a barrio in East Oakland, and subjects ranging from rehabbing a shoulder impingement, to participating in a track program for underprivileged youth to inventing a new kind of cake. Throughout these poems, Benevento affirms, as he has in published work for over thirty-five years now, his obsession with the paradox of poetry's ability to offer hope to a world that seems often hopeless without it.

"The Gospel According to B." is a queer autobiography of Jesus of Nazareth's life. A series of persona poems both in Jesus's voice and in the voices of those he impacted, "The Gospel According to B." delivers a queer account of Jesus's early life and times, from his childhood to young adulthood, periods curiously omitted in canonical Gospels. Combining midrashic, gnostic, and queer thought, the poems ditch heteronormative assumptions about Jesus's experience, sensibilities, and era and imaginatively insert new, and especially queer, angles to biblical stories. Though the collection draws from a Judeo-Christian tradition, its appeal is broad regardless of one's spiritual, religious, or atheistic orientation. The poems unlock a queer dimension to both spiritual experience and biblical history and throw open surprising revelations about the nature of the sacred.

Life is short. We blink, and it is gone. In a world filled with joy and pain, beauty and magic, how does one even attempt to experience it all? How can a person possibly find that moment of nirvana and hold on to it forever? For most of us, we call the day a success if we simply get out of the door on time. Wells Lowell Monasmith, however, has a secret, one that has been passed down for generations allowing certain individuals the chance to have their cake and eat it too. A chance to hold on to those special moments a little longer.As the Monasmith family gathers at the funeral of their only brother and son, they learn about an unbelievable familial trait that has been hidden from them for their entire lives. With a little post-humanous help from their son, Margaret and Charles Monasmith must guide their adult children through the implications of the power that courses through their veins. In Wells' Time is the story of a family with a little magic in their blood. For Wells, it is both a gift and a curse. For his family, it is a reality they must come to terms with as they learn from the triumphs and failures of the brother who died too young and lived an entire life between the pages of time. With any luck, the Monasmith family might just get a little closer to answering the question: How should we spend our time?

After her mother is killed in a rare Northern Michigan tornado, Sadie Wixom is left with only her father and grandfather to guide her through the pitfalls of young adulthood.Hundreds of miles away in western Saskatchewan, Stefan Montegrand and his Indigenous family are forced off their land by multinational energy companies and flawed treaties. They are taken in temporarily by Sadie's aunt, a human rights activist who heads a cultural exchange program.Stefan, whose own father died in prison while on a hunger strike, promptly runs afoul of local authority, but Sadie, intrigued by him and captivated by his story, has grown sympathetic to his cause and complicit in his pushback against prejudiced accusations.Their mutual attraction and struggle for equilibrium is stymied when Stefan's older brother, Joachim, who stayed behind, becomes embroiled in the resistance, and Stefan is compelled to return to Canada. Sadie, concerned for his safety, impulsively follows on a trajectory doomed by cultural misunderstanding and oncoming winter.Let Evening Come is the love story between the son of an Indigenous family displaced from their ancestral home on the Tar Sands of Canada and a motherless farm girl from Michigan. Together they combat suspicion and bigotry on both sides of the border and the cultural differences that separate them.

When Lara was four years old, her father moved from Rochester, New York, to Anchorage, Alaska, a distance of over 4,000 miles. She spent her childhood chasing after him, flying a quarter of the way around the world to tug at the hem of his jacket. Now that he is in his eighties, she contemplates her obligation to an absentee father. The Truth About Unringing Phones: Essays on Yearning is an exploration of responsibility and culpability told in experimental and fragmented essays.

Passport to Perdita is a story of how a man handles unexpected truth. When Gordon's elderly father dies, he leaves his sixty-year-old son alone with no family. He also leaves a suitcase full of clues to a secret life. Another life. This is a work of fiction set in Nova Scotia, Canada, and Chile.

She Asked Me Where explores the various ways in which the demons, darkness, and pain, both of ourselves and of others, manifest in our lives. It captures the pull of several spectrums innate to the human experience: pain and triumph, fear and power, longing and overcoming, the perfect and the flawed. This collection approaches the liminal spaces of these binaries through recurring themes that are connected in their struggle for control and understanding over what cannot be controlled or understood. Grounded in recurring themes such as unearthing and rediscovery, the collection begins by creating a sense of instability before seeking to find some semblance of coping throughout the narrative.

The broom tree may be identified as a place of hope, provision, providence, sustenance, growth, faith, and calling. The broom tree may also be identified as a place of fear, doubt, despair, depression, anxiety, hiding, running, failure, uncertainty, loneliness, suffering, loss, struggle, and even confrontation. The broom tree may be some or most or all or one or a few or none of these things. For Elijah the prophet, it was the collision of them all. The broom tree was the end, and also the beginning. It was both burial plot and birthplace, both failure and freedom. It was a place of getting beyond the self-image, beyond the projection. It was a place of nakedness, a place of surrender, a place of examining actions, weighing frailty; a place where Elijah weighed himself on the scales of God and found himself wanting. The broom tree is a place I am, a place I thought I was, a place I hate, a place I love, a place I wish I never had to come to and a place I don't wish to leave. The Broom Tree dares to challenge, "Where will you find shade in the desert?"

A meditation in a rush, kiss & release is driven by the intense voice of an observant, insistent & emotional "I." He's an urban gay man who admits he's here with a date, but you never know how the night will end. He has several loves, at least a few fuckboys, and many questions:most spells are made with words & broken by a kiss, why not the other way around?what is more intimate than a whisper?how long will yr wife be gone?Have you ever noticed it? asks "Love Is Finished Again," a poem cycle revealed in seven movements. The sequence muses on how we end up in the same place over & over in sex & love & everything. The only real change is through decay that makes ruins, noseless busts, caves of Pompeii, brothel rooms. Even language & communication decay, as a number of mashup and collaborative poems explore.Are you ready for the beats? This book is a party and a romance. It's a lucid dream.This poetry accuses, brags, confesses, obsesses, panics & promises. It discos, raves & swings. It falls in love during a hookup but gets bored at a four-way. It woos the Zodiac; tries to get its virginity back; invents sex as a religion, mythologizes masculinity & succumbs to its devils; kills a snake to resurrect a lover; gives a blowjob at a dirty book store; goes to see bad performance art; looks for love & finds it everywhere/wherever.

At the age of forty-nine, driven by an urgent restlessness, Laurie Woodford rents out her house, packs her belongings into two suitcases, and relocates to Asia. What begins as an opportunity to teach college English overseas, evolves into a nomadic adventure as Laurie works and volunteers in South Korea, Ethiopia, Peru, Spain, and Mexico. After four years of traveling, Laurie's return "home" to the U.S. becomes an unexpected adventure of its own when she ends up in Arkansas and meets Bruce, a bird-loving, bearded Quaker, who challenges her to reconcile her life of fierce independence with her longing to feel settled and loved.

In Singer's latest book, the engine is story-telling, but beneath the plots lurk layers of madness and magic, as well as startling, genre-busting juxtapositions. For example, two related stories, "Buying a Car" and "Selling a Car," are N.Y. City picaresques combined with technical automotive detail and the history of a marriage. Written almost three decades apart, these two stories mirror their times, from the 1970's recession to the wave of immigration that was a by-product of the war in Afghanistan.The play, "Voir, Dear," is also about an immigrant (Russian-Jewish); its themes are race, justice, language, and family relationships. Race and justice are also the themes of "Simple," and family relationships are at the heart of "Norman's Cousin." The final piece in the collection, "Flagman," is about a Cuban immigrant, but the narrator is a racist and nativist. A constant note in this edgy, passionate collection is mockery of public officials. A leitmotif is the inexorable rise in the cost-of-living, as well as other important changes to life in the city.Norman's Cousin & Other Writings is full of allusions to literature and the other arts. "Simple" takes its title from Langston Hughes, and alludes to the history of rhythm-and-blues. "Carla, the Copy-Shop Girl," a satirical libretto, is an analogue to Melville's "Bartleby, The Scrivener," with echoes of Horatio Alger. "The Rented Pet" combines several genres, including local color, animal saga, and Grade-B Hollywood melodrama. As the heroine, Mildred Schapp, says when she rents the grizzled canine hero, Rex, "I like ... an older dog."

In a post pandemic world, how do we rebuild what is broken? Pool Parties dives into dinosaurs, pop culture, hospital beds, barnacles, geology, and the soil of the midwest to dig through and sift our aching to heal psyche. Found poems about crystals, Sabrina the teenage witch, and building trails are just some of the topics of these playful yet sometimes dark poems. Once shielding ourselves from the world in tiny boxes, we now long to break the glass, feel the sun, and one another, but it is scary. Try to connect we must, if we fail, we must fail better. What rooms are our safe spaces? What woods? From Ranch for Sale, As is: "In the god trees you disappeared into Port wine and too many off ramp brown eye role playing games. My heart in a 1960s ranch style basement. Thought you'd come in, shake out the red and white checkered tablecloth, pull aside the daisy patterned curtains." MacBain-Stephens invites us to dive into the deep end of the pool where it is always too cold at first. We don't trust our own pleas for help and need a third operator to repeat our words back to us: "the operator whispers / plays the soundtrack to the The Third Man / listens in, but this isn't Orson Welles in black and white beauty..." (from The Telephone Operator Knows When to Plug in.) Pool Parties is a delicious awkward visit to that place you left too quickly, just when it was getting interesting.

Set in the early days of the Trump presidency, A Symmetry of Husbands probes the inner workings of marriage and long friendship. As she grieves the death of her friend, Megan, Abigail struggles with complicated feelings of lingering desire for Megan's husband, and guilt over their affair. Abigail also entertains a growing suspicion of the circumstances of Megan's death, and her own possible complicity.

As climate change ravages the small beach town of Sunport, Alabama, Devin feels increasingly unfit to prepare her children for what can only be a bleak future. Her mental health devolves overtime into lethargy and despair until Devin meets an unhoused woman, Trinity. With Trinity's guidance, Devin explores a newfound freedom and will to live.

Riding atop grief's didactic waves, Rancourt skillfully writes in a variety of poetic forms that support the intimate melding of shared experience as healer, elder, and human being. Prose, lyric, ballad, couplets, and haiku inspired - Rancourt continues to push the boundaries of trauma. Songs of Archilochus is an odyssey of soul recovery over great distances, time, and place: a migration from moral injury to a momentary place of peace. It takes courage to age with grace. It takes courage to sing the songs that we have been given - but sing we must for that is how the healing is carried - that is how the stories take shape - how they become a part of history whether personal, societal, global, or Universal. Songs of Archilochus reminds us that the vibration of human life knows no border, boundary, box or cage. Warrior. Poet. Lovers. Sing.

THE WOMEN, a short story collection by Sommer Schafer, tests women in everyday situations in which the challenge requires a unique, and sometimes fantastical, approach.In 'Mary and the Machine,' the main character desperately usurps a comfort meant exclusively for her newborn. In 'My Little Pet,' the main character finds an unusual and mysterious creature on her doorstep one morning who initially seems to offer her the love she has always desired. In 'The Women,' a women-only book club takes a bloody turn, and in 'The Trappings,' a new mother finds herself and her toddler lost in a wild Alaskan forest until stumbling across a cabin hiding in the woods.

The Beginner's Guide to Minor Gods & Other Small Spirits reels from poetry to prose to mythical field guide in a matter of pages, leaping between genres and embracing the surreal. Kimberly Ramos finds minor gods across disciplines: meet the swirling black abyss that lives in internet question forums, or better yet, spend a moment with the humble hero of biology, the fruit fly. Fusing imagery from astrophysics and anatomy with symbols from folklore and pop culture, this "Frankenstein's monster" of a book is a delightful stitching of unusually harmonious odds and ends. Readers will enjoy journeying through this bestiary of oddness. Traverse lunar maria, tip toe past dolphin-man hybrids, and spelunk through the long-abandoned lead mines of Southern Missouri. From the "hazy shapes and staggered light" of minnows to the "jagged maw" of one's familial past, Ramos searches for the small theophanies present in the everyday. Even more, this journey is just as humorous as it is earnest: watch Socrates get blackout drunk at a house party, admire the secret love lives of face mites, and pity God, who cannot afford a phone plan but instead communicates using a simple tin can and string. Part spellbook, part Midwestern mythos, The Beginner's Guide to Minor Gods & Other Small Spirits is an ode to the interconnectedness of the sciences, the arts, and history. Have a seat and take part in this "dream blunt rotation" of cloud-obsessed scientists, monstrous philosophers, and strangers on the internet.

Cormorant is a work of contrition. The poems are political and personal. A response to the federal government's plan to kill thousands of cormorants in the name of salmon recovery and a tribute to the person who died from heartbreak because of it.

Roy Robbins is an award-winning playwright with four plays and, more recently, a book of poems to his credit. North is his debut novel. Robbins studied poetry with James Dickey at the University of South Carolina, theater in New York, and literature at the University of Virginia. His most recent work, a book of poetry entitled Poster Art Nights, was published in 2015. Robbins lives in rural Virginia with his wife, the author Susan Pepper Robbins, who writes novels about the South and teaches writing at Hampden-Sydney College.

How to Monetize Despair is a captivating exploration of a wide range of subjects and ideas, from traumatic loss and the sorrows of human relationships to the natural but absurd world of neurotic caterpillars and philosophical cockroaches. With a unique blend of imagery, self-help inspired titles, and Mottolo's peculiar brand of humor, this collection takes readers on a one-of-a-kind journey through human experience. This collection is a must-read for anyone seeking to explore the complexities of trauma and struggle, and to encounter a sea creature or butterfly along the way.

No ecological system is without conflict. Uncomfortable Ecologies is an exploration of relationships and their tenuous nature. Levinson explores the domestic and wild, the macro and the micro, the familiar and the other, the objective and the confessional. These poems seek to uncover vulnerabilities within ecologies as a bridge to a new level of understanding and intimacy. The speaker parallels the irreparable losses faced in our environment due to habitat destruction and climate change with the challenges of families facing poverty and addiction. Trees shatter in extreme weather, oceans rinse a family of their dreams, wolves protect one another by inflicting pain. But the pain is punctuated by moments of visceral tenderness, a bird in a hand, the velvet of a bee. Difficult choices made for the sake of love. The very heart of this book is the belief that our disconnection from nature is a disconnection from each other. The heart of this book is grief and loss, but the hope of this book is healing.

What if we "Fast forward a hundred years?" as the first poem in The Book of Leavening asks. Would our "voices turn votives: every hour/ candling from windowsill to sea"? Would we "find fortune in last casts of light?" These poems are deeply concerned with imagining a future far beyond our current lives. Through free verse poems mixed with ghazals, the poet considers not simply the joys and storms of our current lives, but also how those joys and storms will ripple into future generations. Wrestling with questions of how the personal affects the universal, these poems interrogate milestones and rituals--marriage, childbirth, the loss of friends and relatives--to explore how these common passages feel from the inside. They also question the vows we make, personally, and as a civilization: "What can I do to love/ the way I promised?" What happens, when our world seems to make it ever more difficult to define and live out one's values? What does one hear, when one listens deeply to what the landscape tells us? This narrator finds hope and even salvation in that deep listening; as she states, "I listen at times to backs of bread,/ backs of books, fronts of hands. Listen/ so long, I question if anyone courts/ noise anymore." There may be no simple solutions--but, through the act of paying close attention, and directing compassion at what she sees, the poet shines a light on a hopeful path forward.

In the Bodies is a collection of poetry for shapeshifting. The poems investigate possibilities of mutual transformation, as our relational encounters with others co-create meaning, poetry, environment, and even our bodies. What might we co-create when we press against the taught borders of body, of place, of time, of what is accepted as possible and holy? These poems press, inviting readers to get in the bodies of other creatures, people, and places-to taste what melts their tongues, feel their bone breaks, scry through their eyes, sense the world rotating through their dirt and updrafts, shift shape, and maybe sprout new growth together in shared gardens.

In Take the Lively Air, a minor traffic collision escalates into a confrontation between two families haunted by their pasts and apprehensive of their futures. Rage and regret butt heads against the background of America's toxic cultural climate. But saner voices discover that human frailties are best viewed through the microscope of compassion, and our common humanity must be acknowledged to make way for our futures.

In her debut essay collection, Sarah K. Lenz explores the question: How do you live knowing you're going to die? Lenz touches on moments when death brushed near, including a house fire, a car accident, and a police shooting, but in each case, the violent and tragic are interwoven with curiosity and insight. With clarity and grace, Lenz takes on a wide-range of topics. From the discovery of a post-mortem photograph of her great-uncles who were killed by lightning to the quotidian pancake-making days with her preschooler son while the COVID-19 pandemic raged, Lenz confronts the complexities of being sandwiched between aging parents and a young child, while also navigating her own thyroid cancer diagnosis. In the midst of this, Lenz finds herself comforting her father, who's fixated with where to spread his ashes in "Driving the Section Line, " and imagining all the ways her baby can die when suffering postpartum depression in "So Many Ways." Though the subjects are serious, often life or death matters, Lenz tells these stories with warmth and wisdom. The narrative is buoyed by breathtaking honesty-and a bit of the grotesque-like a misguided attempt to cook a whole hog's head from her beloved, late grandmother's recipe. This book is a moving, heartfelt meditation on how to face mortality, how to grieve, but most importantly, how to awaken to the ephemeral beauty of the world. This book is a powerful reminder that what will outlast us is those we love.

Traversing American landscapes both outer and inner, these poems veer from the personal to the political and back as they try to make sense of a senseless age. Dreams and distance, shootings and storms, viruses and violence. These poems confront all the forces that mark our troubled present and point the way to an uncertain future.

I'm Jayme is a story by the acclaimed author Susan Pepper Robbins. I'm Jayme is a touching and heartfelt story that touches on themes from family to dealing with trauma. Susan Pepper Robbins lives in rural Virginia where she grew up. Her first novel was published when she was fifty ("One Way Home," Random House, 1993). Her fiction has won prizes (the Deep South Prize, the Virginia Prize) and has been published in journals. Her collection of stories is "Nothing But the Weather" and was published by the indie press Unsolicited Press, as was the novel "Local Speed." "There Is Nothing Strange," a novel was published in England in 2016, (Holland House Books). Her stories focus on the drama of ordinary lives. She retired from teaching writing at Hampden-Sydney College and wrote a dissertation on Jane Austen at the University of Virginia.

Mary's growing dementia not only ends her teaching career, but also leads to her losing the family dog. The patience that has kept their marriage afloat for 39 years gives way to the stress as her husband suffers a heart attack.Their adult children attempt to help out but it's difficult to accept that your parents will die one day-and that day might be soon.Mary finds herself drawn to a specific place. And as strangers inexplicably tell her, she just needs to figure out where that is while she still can.The family must choose between finding a new way to support themselves and helping Mary make one last salient memory while it's still possible. And they must do this while the sun burns out, flocks of birds fall dead from the sky, and buildings full of people disappear in an instant.

MISTLETOE MAGIC AND OTHER HOLIDAY TALES is about the wonder and excitement of the holiday season, as shown through the experiences of the characters in these eight stories.Stories include:Lucinda and the Christmas List - A young woman needs a dose of elf-magic to regain her Christmas spirit. (Originally published in Peripheral Visions and Other Stories)The Snow Globe - An elderly woman, through a gift from her late husband, finds a way to fill her empty house and life. (Originally published in The Saturday Evening Post)The Little Red Sock - Despite past disappointments, a little boy still believes that Santa will come.Twelve Days Before Christmas - A harried mother of three learns that, despite a series of mishaps, the season is always better when shared with family. (Originally published in Bethlehem Writers Roundtable)Christmas Present - A middle-aged woman is reminded that the best Christmas presents are those we give to others.Charley Catches the Christmas Spirit - A seemingly straightforward case of credit card fraud leads to a surprising and heartwarming conclusion for the thief, the victim, and the team from Adams Investigation Service.Holiday Reunion - A young woman realizes that even unexpected (and somewhat irritating) houseguests can make the holiday special.Mistletoe Magic - The characters in these four interlinked vignettes find that a simple mistletoe decoration can lead to an outcome that is more than what was expected or hoped for.