Books published by Nixes Mate Books

Comito’s range is expansive, painting emotions and scenes with a stunning ferocity. Bury Me in the Sky is a marvel of language and insights. The imagery alone is enough to steal your breath.Underlaid in each piece are layers of tripwire that make youreexamine what you’re reading so as not to miss out on the full scope of experience Comito renders seemingly effortlessly. She can beguile you with sardonic humor and then take you out atthe knees with sharp sprigs of pathos, often in the same piece.— Len Kuntz, author of This is Why I Need You

There is a deceptively light touch here. The humor is nevervicious but is always cognizant that we laugh when we have cried enough. Brad Rose’s microfictions and prose poems – each piece the exactly right size and shape – slide easily into the mind fromseveral directions at once, then stick around to scratch at the brain. Read this book and savor it.— Sally Reno, Editor of Blink Ink

With their ravening grace, these blood bright poems call echoes of their kindred – Sappho, Plath, di Prima – not as source but as sisters. Deweese understands the empty spaces between loneliness and desire and the sanctity of flesh as refuge. Her poems seduce. She speaks of “the most pure incarnation of human love,” and I believe her. Here is a masterful poet glowing in her power. Donot miss this book.— Jeff Weddle, winner of the Eudora Welty Prize

Lauren Leja is a terrific writer. Her characters inhabit that elastic, kaleidoscopic space between believing that they are good people while all along they are drenched with the backwash of their own decisions. Ms. Leja doesn't go for the easy knock out in these stories full of keenly observed mayhem populated by a range of quirky and spontaneously combustive types. Instead, she deftly jabs them around the ring, giving them, and the reader, just enough hope that maybe they will punch above their weight class.- Jack Gantos, author of Hole In My Life

In his latest collection, accelerant, Bill Yarrow bears witness to nature's and mankind's fierce wiles. But Yarrow never forgets to be poetic, nor does he skimp on his trademark zaniness. While most poets opt for serenity, Yarrow opines that "the only chance for happiness / is to excommunicate all calm." By eschewing tameness for his unique brand of mayhem, Yarrow does exactly what poets should do: speaks his mind and throws caution to the wind.- Cindy Hochman, author of Habeas Corpus

Body Bag should be required reading for every President and member of Congress considering sending their citizens to war. These poems, none more than four lines, are dollops of horror, heartbreak, endurance, humanity, vulnerability and a whole lot of love. Although I wish Borczon didn't have to write Body Bag, I am grateful for this book and I am grateful knowing Matt is out there using his immense artistic skills to give us an idea of how it was and what it's like.- Bob Pajich, author of The Trolleyman

The poems in Heather Sullivan's Method Acting for the Afterlife bring me to a world of Donny and Marie songs, of hollowed out oak trees, to a world of "unseen demons and/long dead ghosts pushing addiction and/melancholy." As only a master poet can, Sullivan blurs that line between the seen and the unseen, the living and the dead. As the "toll keeper of existence," the poet connects us with "everything that I've lost forever." Loss is ever-present, but tempered with humor, with such real imagery - the popular girl's table, Deadheads, and Limoncello - that my heart is allowed to "break again and again." I trust Sullivan's "deliberate, direct" voice - the voice of a "Sabbath child made wise." Method Acting for the Afterlife is an important book, full of urgency and truth.- Jennifer Martelli, author of My Tarantella

In her impressive first collection, Liljegren retells the Lucy stories from the iconic tv show, revealing depths and a darker side behind the slapstick. With great skill and exquisite language, Liljegren takes us through a series of episodes and imagined therapy sessions, complete with dream analysis, a Rorshach test, role reversal, and free association - associations that lead always to Ethel, and the endurance of women's friendship. Liljegren reveals the courage behind the humor, the power dynamics of marriage, the conflict between the good wife and the professional woman, of how we become the roles we play. We love Lucy, these poems say, because we know she is us. Cheryl Savageau, author of Dirtroad Home and Mother/Land

Poetry and Fiction from: Hussam Jefee-Bahloul · Gene Barry · Robert Beveridge · Matt Borczon · Pris Campbell · Alan Catlin · Linda M. Crate · Lori Desrosiers · Mari Deweese · Susan Mann Dolce · James Duncan · Karen Friedland · Roberta Gould · Mitchell Grabois · Doug Holder · Richard D. Houff · Tim Kahl · Mignon Ariel King · Kay Kinghammer · Susanna Lang · Jennifer Martelli · Gary Metras · David P. Miller · Suchoon Mo · Phil Montenegro · Polly Richardson Munnelly · Edward Mycue · Philip Nikolayev · Carl Nelson · Renuka Raghavan · Melissa Rendlen · Tree Riesener · C. C. Russell · Margarita Serafimova · Scott Silsbe · Meg Tuite · Bill Yarrow · Donald Zirilli · ryki zuckerman

"I have to keep looking; try to see more, speak more, turn away less," says Lisa DeSiro in her fine first book, Labor. And this is what her poems do: they keep their eyes peeled, their ears open, and their hearts receptive. (Boston street bustle comes vividly alive in many of these poems.) But receptivity demands a tolerance for paradox, and DeSiro's poems--in disarmingly simple, idiomatic language--plumb the secrets of the world's contradictions. "Go ahead, enjoy this day" begins a poem titled "9/11 Anniversary, Public Garden." At home with the prose poem as well as the tightly rhymed lyric, DeSiro distills memorable music from the most colloquial moments--"We were all thumbs on our dumb phones"--and offers readers a vibrant panoply of sights and sounds, captured and conveyed in her impressively taut writing. -- Steven Cramer, author of Clangings and Goodbye to the Orchard

Temptation of Wood exists in three worlds at once: a fabled yesteryear, an aching present, and a tarnished tomorrow, with poems that roam endless highways between myth and history, human nature and the natural world, where shadowy neon lit cafés offer the house special: the twin delicacies of hope and desperation.

Anne Elezabeth Pluto's Lubbock Electric is a gushing exploration of life in which she gives you, the reader her world to make your own. You can dive into poem after poem and swim with familiarity, frequently learning new strokes. Einstein maintained that the definition of genius is taking the complex and making it simple, and this is precisely what Pluto has achieved in this stimulating collection.The skeleton of this book is cast swiftly with the introduction of the resplendent Peregrine. A poem constructed using admirable craft that pulls you into the poet's emotional, mental and physical world. Pluto's verve and acute awareness delivering the reader to a wealth of love and compassion. Annie Pluto has an inbuilt ability to poetically emote a specific feeling, situation or scene with admirable craft.Between the lines of the poem, Love Letter to Lubbock, the poet has placed a seat for every reader. This heartfelt and warm, cleverly woven tapestry delivers wishes, regrets, celebrations, acknowledgments and love with extraordinary economy.The subtlety Pluto masters in delivering a history lesson in The Home Borough, rides in tandem with the poet's utilitarian ability to ground the reader. The poems in Lubbock Elecctric ride on a conveyor of poetic pleasures that underlie the current of seriousness that will ground each reader. Gene Barry - Poet and Psychotherapist; author of Stones in their Shoes, Unfinished Business and Working Days; Founder of the Blackwater Poetry Festival; publisher and editor at Rebel Poetry.

In her new book of poems I Wish Francisco Franco Would Love Me Gloria Mindock continues her examination of brutality and its toll on humanity. Here, her resurrected Francisco Franco leaps from her imagination to ridicule and condemn all dictators who believe they have the right to control and murder at will. Her poem "The Fruit Fly" reminds one of Osip Mandelstam's famous takedown of Stalin. Satirical, powerful, lush and even at times displaying a certain beauty history can still carry, I Wish Francisco Franco Would Love Me will leave you thinking and changed.-- Tim Suermondt, author of The World Doesn't Know You

Nixes Mate is a navigational hazard in Boston Harbor where, during the Colonial period, pirates and mutineers were gibbeted. Thirty years later out of the ashes of the 1980s Allston zine scene Philip Borenstein, Michael McInnis and Annie Pluto started new journal of hand-crafted artisanal literature. As they edited this anthology, a theme emerged that surprised them ... Death & Rebirth, those twin-barreled human indulgences. It was if an estranged microburst, a love sick hurricane came through shuttling tree branches, pedestrians, small animals, unhinged children along with various signs, portents, carriages, bicycles and small cars, enmeshed in a chiaroscuro of words and light, sifted thorugh the ecliptic sluice of the Charles River.

In an ambitious first book Lee Okan draws a daring parallel between the life of the universe and our own lives and loves. Here is a remarkable weaving of metaphysics and physics, in dreamlike writing as much poetry as prose. Here is a fiction aware of its construction - and willing to let us witness its sequences and discoveries. -- Danielle Legros Georges, Poet Laureate, City of Boston

Mark Borczon's He Was A Good Father is a hard-earned devotion to the facts. In these poems you sense a man's life being redeemed before your eyes. With every word you can feel the effort of a wise man rising from bed. His pean to John Henry, working-class hero, will make you bust a gut laughing and, in the same breath, gasp in pain. And don't miss "Bottom Shelf Vodka...", a love poem so piercing in its purity it will stop you from reading. Spread the word, this book is a long-awaited celebration. -- Geoff Peterson, author of 3:30: Nocturnes and Etudes

This collection of poetry by Devon Balwit takes a beautiful look at intimate moments, secret dreams and confessions. Her language and rhythm are as lovely as they are startling. The poems in this book pull you deep into their story and leave you changed. She writes at the end of the poem "Down There," I could do this forever. I feel the same way about reading these miraculous, powerful and honest poems. This book will leave you breathless, and I often found myself so moved that I actually spoke out loud my enthusiastic response of yes!! This collection is a powerhouse. -- Matthew Borczon, author of A Clock of Human Bones