Books published by Nixes Mate Books

Rusty Barnes is a rugged and honest poet. He is a student of Frank Stanford and Larry Brown. His language is pure Americana, deeply entrenched in the everyday, in family and in place. The poems in Jesus in the Ghost Room, pay homage to memory, and are an ode to his late father, but with lines such as "Oh Father / I wish I could invoke your smell, / the way your cigarette ashed onto / the sick-filled carpet on the edge / of what we could readily say," it is clear, that this collection is about salvation, an epic prayer for the human spirit and for an increasingly tumultuous world. Even when the poem is about pissing out a fire, Barnes raises his voice to what could only be a Higher Power: "Long live the resin- / filled pine and the twigs I used for tinder." Rusty's poems are like the man himself, large and gentle. He's a man who loves his family, especially his wife and four children. He's the type of man who, within his own quietness shakes his head and wonders how he ever became so lucky, and a man who doesn't take his luck for granted, but within poems gives thanks and praise. Joshua Michael Stewart, author of Break Every String

Paul Brookes takes us through five stories, pictures of the great and small ironies of life drawn as we observe the daily routines, rituals and reactions in lives where birds have jam sessions on rooftops, mausoleums live on fridge doors, the memory of a touch stays with the skin; lives where hands are telling and people hunger, give what's not wanted and take what's not given. - Jamie Dedes, editor of The BeZine

From the trapdoors and "spy/code" that once enchanted her while reading Nancy Drew, to bumblebees struck by frost "still sucking from the cups/ of blossoms," Jessica Purdy feels the pulse of mystery underlying ordinary life. Purdy negotiates the bumpy terrain of responsibility, loneliness, dreams, and estrangement in poems that often begin in the natural world and end with meditations on her place in the family landscape. Cover to cover, STARLAND is a complex, deeply felt, and finely written book. -- Joyce Peseroff, author of Know Thyself

Living is a chaotic system that rips the Poet's guts and splatters the entrails across the page, every mischievous side-slam and frantic headkick is an image, texts are snapping synapses, sparks from a grinding wheel. For Jeff Weddle it's a broken world shortchanged by truth, a sensorium of failure where chaos kicks your ass, yet although we're defeated, still these tender sparks, these true moments of grace, are the things that matter. -- Andrew Darlington, author of The Poet's Deliberation on the State of the Nation

There is pain, the pain of life, of death, of war, of childbirth. And then there is the pain of a migraine. An ocular nightmare with a surfeit of auras and screaming and monsters clawing inside a sufferers' head. Through the noir pinhole of a beleaguered gangster the migraine is filtered in a stuttering, cartwheeling ghost ship full of death and night and blood. Through war, assassinations, Catholic apostasy, and crime, Smokey of the Migraines has gone to the edge of the world where sea monsters hunt a migraine is a fall from grace.

An undeniably human exploration without romanticizing the past, or turning it into a spectacle, My Southern Childhood is whittled in pure Americana, "the" universal southern memoir for the post-millennium. A master poet, Pris Campbell achieves that universality through carefully chosen details of a child's life in a small southern town during the 40s and 50s.

Long overdue, Bud Backen's The Paul Bunyan Ballroom is, by its very nature, as BIG as a ballroom. It feels as if one's mind is dancing the tango or an old French waltz, reading/hearing these poems. His careful use of language & line-breaks & an internal rhyme & rhythm create a pronounced musicality inside the inside (etymology: mythology) of this book, with subtle humor, comic/tragic situational realities, with surprising, honest imagery, & a down-to-earth perspective (which may be extraterrestrial). -- Ron Androla, author of Confluence