Books published by C&r Press

With lyricism and grace, Amy Lemmon gives us a worldview to live by. The all-too-familiar "wear of sorrow's rub" is presented alongside the world's miracles, including the author's two children. Through the disintegration of her marriage and the tragic death of her children's father, she tells us, "We can believe something is always growing." With a mix of wonder and trepidation, Lemmon chronicles the blossoming of a son and daughter, each exceptional in their own way, into ever more complex beings under her care. She names other miracles as well: "This light,/wan blue sky and unforgiving sun,/the sound of crushing asphalt beneath/strong metal, the grinding of gears." The broken world is made whole by the stately yet playful lines of these masterful poems, whether wrought in received forms like sonnet, sestina, and villanelle, invented/indented forms, riffs on famous forbears, or musically crafted free verse. Fearlessly bridging the gap between tradition and artistic innovation, the author moves us forward with her into the unknown, to entertain new relationships with herself, her children, and the world.

The essays in this collection use a wide range of contemporary experimental texts as a point of entry to a single question: Is there a uniquely female variety of sorrow? This book does not provide a clean answer, but rather, an ongoing effort to refine the question. These essays ask what it means to be other, what it means to be othered by and through language, what it means to be captive to grammar and its implicit logic, and what being captive in this way does to an inner life and a psyche, what is knowable (and what cannot be articulated) in an inner life and that is restricted by the artificial order of the sentence, and whether it is possible to think or feel what exists at the very periphery of grammar. After all, there is always sadness in knowing what lies just beyond our reach.

Meet Sirius Lee, a fictive famous Chinese American comedian. He's a no good, very bad Asian. He's not good at math (or any other subject, really). He has no interest in finding a "good Chinese girlfriend." And he refuses to put any effort into becoming the CEO/Lawyer/Doctor his parents so desperately want him to be. All he wants to do is making people laugh. A cross between Paul Beatty's The Sellout and Jade Chang's The Wangs Vs. The World, NO GOOD VERY BAD ASIAN follows Sirius from his poor upbringing in the immigrant enclaves of Los Angeles to the loftiest heights of stardom as he struggles with substance abuse and persistent racism despite his fame. Ultimately, when he becomes a father himself, he must come to terms with who he is, where he came from, and the legacy he'll leave behind.

Days before his thirty-third birthday, Jacob Paul, an ordinary New Yorker, learns that his life is the dream of a man being slowly gassed in the back of a box truck headed from the Chelmno extermination camp to a mass grave in the Polish woods. And, thus begins a 500-page, 18-years-long, Quixotic, often comic, picaresque. J's adventures lead him to Chase, his fellow traveler and love interest, and to Art, Chase's husband, the evangelical governor of Mexico, who enlists J to build a new kind of Holocaust museum next to the Creationist Museum outside Cincinnati, a Holocaust museum that Art and his evangelical backers hope will finally show Jews as they really were. Yid World, which ends up being a Lithuanian-shtetl theme park, is obviously a failure, as, seemingly, are all of J's attempts to connect to his awesome and awful legacy, until finally J embarks on one last epic attempt to build the means by which to confront his dreamer. Last Tower to Heaven grapples with what it means to derive agency and identity from collective trauma, with what it means to be at once a dream of the Holocaust and, yet, messily alive in our world. Ultimately, that struggle forces J to learn how to build a story out of love, for his love.Days before his thirty-third birthday, Jacob Paul, an ordinary New Yorker, learns that his life is the dream of a man being slowly gassed in the back of a box truck headed from the Chelmno extermination camp to a mass grave in the Polish woods. And, thus begins a 500-page, 18-years-long, Quixotic, often comic, picaresque. J's adventures lead him to Chase, his fellow traveler and love interest, and to Art, Chase's husband, the evangelical governor of Mexico, who enlists J to build a new kind of Holocaust museum next to the Creationist Museum outside Cincinnati, a Holocaust museum that Art and his evangelical backers hope will finally show Jews as they really were. Yid World, which ends up being a Lithuanian-shtetl theme park, is obviously a failure, as, seemingly, are all of J's attempts to connect to his awesome and awful legacy, until finally J embarks on one last epic attempt to build the means by which to confront his dreamer. Last Tower to Heaven grapples with what it means to derive agency and identity from collective trauma, with what it means to be at once a dream of the Holocaust and, yet, messily alive in our world. Ultimately, that struggle forces J to learn how to build a story out of love, for his love.

What is it like for a cat to observe and live with humans? How does a cat experience human beings in their various modes of existence, from early sedentary societies at the dawn of civilization to the throes of empire in ancient Rome or Victorian England, or in cultures that seem dark and mysterious to us now, such as the medieval witch-hunts or Egypt in the period when felines were worshipped? With its wise, wily, and wonderfully perceptive protagonist-the cat who ceaselessly adapts himself, changing his voice, demeanor, and ideals according to the temper of the times-this novel is a brief history of human civilization as much as it is a history of feline evolution. The cat is the most fascinating of human companions because it opens up a surreal window into the human soul. The protagonist of this crafty, seductive, mesmerizing novel convinces you that there are many more windows into understanding the nature of our own perception-via the cat's all-knowing gaze-than we ever realized. What we think of as history is often reduced to stale chronology and progressive linearity; but the cat in this novel provides a profoundly circular, unknowable, mysterious dimension to the idea of human history.

Objects in Motion is the first full-length poetry collection by the well-known cultural policy leader and arts administrator, Jonathan Katz. In this ambitious book, Katz sequences the poems in sections designed to provoke a reader's exploration of connections to and separations from the natural world; of conduct, politics and ethics; of family and community relationships; and ultimately, of what artistic experience contributes to the work one has to do to fill life with meaning and value. The language of the poems is richly meditative and enhanced by vivid, sensual imagery. Readers have recommended his "dazzling lines," "surprising tropes," and have found his poems both "enjoyable to read" and "webbed with moral questions, challenges to orthodoxy, and dares…." Objects in Motion is the kind of book readers return to again and again to revisit a favorite poem.

Travis Denton makes me think that attention is akin to affection, at least here, where loss and damage continually lead us deeper into the world, not away from it. While he has a fluid and curious mind, I think he roves to stay, that a belief in the value of all things underlies these peripatetic poems. Some poets write nervously, out of fear. I think Travis Denton writes largely out of joy, to gather and bring what he finds back for us to share. This book is a harvest. -Bob Hicok, author Elegy Owed I love the unstoppable, urgently animated force of imagination in Travis Den­ton's work. I love his large-hearted need to take us all to the place beyond the mere narrative, to propel our bodies out in the open, into myth-time. I love his astonishment at the elegiac music of our world, that "curiosity like one tilting over the lip of the cliff." I love his insistence on truth, even if in danger to find oneself lost, "an urban explorer without a map of the trains." Which is to say I love his insistence on the lyric moment. The lyricism is everywhere in these pages. Here is a poet whose tenderness towards people around him, towards our ageing, disappearing bodies is apparent in each image, each turn of phrase. Yet he isn't one to despair. Far from it. Read these poems, and I promise again and again, Travis Denton's fiery imagination and compassionate detail will win you over. You will become one of his loyal readers; I know I am. -Ilya Kaminsky, author Dancing in Odessa and Deaf Republic Travis Denton is a fine poet with an explosive imagination and a keen ear. His work only keeps getting better. -Stephen Dobyns, author The Day's Last Light Reddens the Leaves of the Copper Beech

Give a Girl Chaos (see what she can do) is a survival guide for challenging times, written in the language we crave now-poetry. Heidi Seaborn 's stunning debut collection is a lyric guide to harnessing chaos-from a world swirling in terrorism, war, natural disaster to the chaos of heart, home, body and family. Through poems that ache with beauty and violence, Give a Girl Chaos (see what she can do) reveals that by controlling chaos, we can achieve resilience, power and ultimately joy.

Twenty-eight year old Horace Edgecomb, a mild-mannered and popular high school history teacher in suburban Laurendale, New Jersey, prides himself on his ability to connect with students of all backgrounds and ideologies. Yet when one of those students, Sally Royster, turns out to be the daughter of the nation's most prominent Civil War denier, Edgecomb finds himself pressured by both Royster's organization, Surrender Appomattox, and his own unscrupulous principal to teach the American Civil War as a theory, rather than as fact. Needless to say, he refuses. But after he outmaneuvers Royster's father at a Board of Education meeting, Horace finds himself recruited by an old flame, Vicky Vann, now employed as a special investigator at the Treasury Department, to convert publicly to Royster's cause and to infiltrate his organization. Surrender Appomattox's goal, he soon discovers, is to conduct DNA testing on Abraham Lincoln's bloody cloak to prove that the man allegedly assassinated at Ford's Theatre was a hired actor.Horace's plunge into conspiracy theory brings chaos to the lives of those who surround him: his sister, Jillian, who fears his notoriety may prevent her from adopting a child; his roommate, Sebastian, who hijacks Horace's first press conference to market his own line of blasphemous coloring books depicting the prophet Mohammed; Sebastian's "inamorata," Esperanza, who studies normative prosopography-the art of reading the truth from people's facial musculature; and Sebastian's friend, Albion, a schizophrenic poet who pens obscene limericks and haiku in Horace's living room. Yet as Horace becomes increasingly steeped in Surrender Appomattox's plans, he also finds himself attracted to eighteen year old Sally, an interest that clouds his judgment and leads him to a crisis of historical faith. Ultimately, he must choose between Vicky Vann and Sally Royster, and in doing so, between those who revere the Civil War as a hallowed and unifying moment in our nation's past, and those who believe the conflict to be nothing more than a hoax concocted to serve a political agenda.

"The Spite House is a book of dark vision and broad range, haunted by intimacy and anger, by a fierce fidelity to truth and to the elusiveness of truth, by emotional, spiritual, cultural, and political landscapes that are finally inseparable aspects of a single extended investigation." -Jane Hirshfield

At critical moments in world history, every political, spiritual, and cultural leader foresaw a different destiny. Columbus planned a Western sea route to Asia; Hitler applied to art school twice; Joan of Arc prophesied that she would become a mother. It is out of their failures that history itself is made. But what if the history-makers succeeded in the fulfillment of their best-laid plans? In Pages from the Textbook of Alternate History, Phong Nguyen explores a myriad of pasts in which these icons of history made a different choice, and got what they wished for.

A page by page erasure of Charlotte Perkins Gilman's The Yellow Wallpaper, Sousa's Yell subverts and contemporizes the original story of an oppressed housewife, and would-be writer, driven mad. In this version, the heroine speaks of her repression and slow descent into the amnesia of self, before finally awakening to the many women she contains. Though her emancipation is preceded by something which resembles the madness of Gilman's original, this shadow heroine ultimately claims her haunted, multifarious nature. She chooses liberation, surfacing from the nightmare conscious of her capacity for darkness and light; owning them both and fully awake.