Books published by Full Court Press

Annette Hollander's poems are precise, richly seen, and effortless to read, all evidence of the keen mind and serious intent so often missing from contemporary poetry. Her ear is acute, her music subtle and deeply affecting. But this collection is more than simply lovely to read-it is thoughtful, wise, and enlightening. You won't easily forget it.

Mikel Carvin has employed his vast knowledge of art and design to create comforting and humane living spaces for generations of clients-from international celebrities like Louis Nizer, Henry Fonda, and Isaac Stern to artists, businesspeople, and professionals. He has a perfect sense of judgement about what will both please people and extend their lives. This book delves into the founding moments in Carvin's life that matured his formidable character and intuitive ability to relate to people of different backgrounds and to both children and adults of all ages. He survived the Holocaust, and saved his parents, by daring to outwit the Nazis who were all around him in Belgium, France, Austria, and Romania during the deadly years from 1938 to 1945. The compelling story-written with the help of poet and novelist Barry Sheinkopf-features original art of the period and a gallery of photographs, including a calling card for a Wehrmacht officer's club Carvin designed in Brussels and an Iron Cross he took from an SS officer whose life he spared while working with the underground in the Romanian countryside. You will not easily forget Mikel Carvin's extraordinary tale.

These are more than arresting poems-they overpower the reader with a directness and insight rarely seen in contemporary work; and their straightforward beauty is as irresistible as the flavor of a ripe peach or the luminous gravity of the stars. Linda Principe, it is utterly clear, has lived and felt each line she puts down;she takes the business of writing poems seriously.

The great strength of Chris Rainey's poetry rests on its lucid directness. The surprising range of subjects it engages, the various ways it exposes them, offer blissfully little ambiguity-though he leaves the world more richly mysterious for us than he finds it. The book is dedicated to the man who left a parcel of land, on the Palisades near the Hudson river in new Jersey, to be used as a public park. That resource has served the poet well; his work is one with it.

Dismayed by a basement-apartment existence supported by two low-paying radio jobs, twenty-something workaholic Nicki Rodriguez experiences a dramatic change in outlook when fate transports her to an even lousier place-a distorted world inhabited mostly by canine-humanoids trapped in a dimension somewhere between new Jersey and outer space. Nicki searches desperately for her pilfered portfolio containing ten thousand hard-earned dollars, praying that her life-threatening dimension burn will heal, so she can try to return to "regular new Jersey" and her old life. All the while, Perswayssick County''s greedy, tail-wagging leader, self-described "business maggot" Dr. B. Z. Z. Gneeecey, is selling out Perswayssick County to a mob of waxy-faced gangster-style aliens. and he''s convinced them that Nicki has something they need!

"Welcome my friends to the Upside Down House," a topsy-turvy place where anything is possible. Inside its wacky walls you'll meet a girl with a beard, a boy who never gets out of bed, a sword swallower, a pirate, a dinosaur who plays basketball, and the Grunk, who would love to take you to a dance-and maybe even have you for dinner. Find out what really happened to the three little pigs. Dare to ride your sled down Speedwell Street. Have lunch with Solid Stomach Steven, a boy who eats the grossest food imaginable, or watch a show with Jugglin' Joe, who juggles everything from soup, to staplers-to you! Not since Shel Silverstein has there been such an outrageously funny and thought-provoking collection of poems. The Upside Down House is truly a delight for all ages, and is guaranteed to keep you turning the pages!

Adele Schwartz's writing clings like dew, at once tenacious and evanescent, to the hard surfaces of life. She has an unerring eye for the sufferings and lonelinesses we all share, uncompromising humanity, and an exquisite ear for the rhythms of language and speech. Her poems stop people in their tracks, clear as a bell, vivid and unavoidable, coaxing them to remember that our existence is a continual unpeeling of layers of conscious awareness that, as Emerson said, the unexamined life is not worth living. Her earlier collections, Yesterday s Breakfast and Black Ice, are included in this omnibus volume. Her stories, collected here for the first time as well, are by turns hilarious and devastating, exposing with surgical precision the terrifying moments when people just like us find themselves sliding in uncontrolled frenzy past the usual sanctuaries of life moments we all try our best to deny. Enter this riveting world, and you will emerge the wiser for it."

Downtown c.1 is inscribed by the author.

At its heart, Trounce is the pairing of two disparate people, two cultures and two ideologies - Emilio, a Salvadorian illegal, and the beautiful sophisticate Sara, whose dark secret will embroil them both in a sinister plot that the naive young Emilio could never have imagined. Trounce presents a new voice on the fiction front by first time author George Beck, who gives fresh insight into the inner lives of desperate people in the most dangerous of times. George Beck was born and raised in New Jersey. He is a police officer and adjunct professor at Fairleigh Dickinson University. He lives in Bergen County, New Jersey, where he is busy at work on future novels."