Books published by NYQ Books

The Backwards Year collects poems written between June 2018 back to June 2017, more or less, in reverse order and juxtaposes the poet's childhood with love poems for his own neural atypical children, Clare and Gabriel. The book returns to childhood in some of its rhyming poems, but also by exploring the dark spaces where childhood is a kind of fevered dream that keeps informing and shaping the present. This is the most reflective and meditative book Weil has written yet.

In The Calculus of Imaginaries, Gerard Grealish explores in poetry not only the elusive and transitory aspects of the physical world, but also our misperceptions of what “reality” is and the ramifications of discovering that it is otherwise, and largely unknowable. Within the uncertainties of such inner and outer worlds there emerges alternately from time to time a litany of anger, frustration, sorrow, guilt, pain, tragedy, and death, but also love and beauty. Addressing El Niño, the climate phenomenon, as if it were indeed a child, Grealish asks in the poem “El Niño 1997,” “Whose child are you anyway?” and receives in Spanish the answer “I don’t know! I don’t know!” finding the child’s words and inflections paradoxically beautiful. Such paradoxes abound as Grealish takes the reader in five sections through the “Imaginary Roots” of things and people, their existence as “Infinitesimals,” “The Transfer Principle” that often reshapes them, the “Impossible Conditions” they are confronted with, and the “Transcendent Curves” that take them to another place. Grealish’s poetry in this volume metaphorically reenacts Webster’s definition of the book’s abstractly mathematical title, to wit: “a method of investigating the nature of imaginary quantities required to fulfill apparently impossible conditions, using √-1 [the square root of negative one] as a unit.”

Tony Gloeggler writes narrative poetry with the lyrical nonchalance of everyday NYC language infused with splashes of Monk's jazzy stop and start, quirky intonations that interweave the past and present. What Kind of Man is filled with stories to tell on late night Brooklyn stoops, secrets and confessions whispered to your closest friends or maybe only yourself that seek a heightened form of unguarded communication. The poems in What Kind of Man emanate from the narrator dealing with kidney disease to engage everything from family, sexuality, race, work, aging, love, loss, and loneliness to finding blessings in the most unexpected places. The book explores how his world changes, the way he views it, and the people who fill it, especially himself. Tony Gloeggler's What Kind of Man finds and defines the kind of (hu)man the narrator was, is, and hopes to become.

Poetry. LGBTQIA Studies. Michael Montlack's second collection of poems, DADDY, reminds us that many people in our lives are daddies to us in one way or another. With humbleness and respect, he pays homage to these many parents in his life while addressing his own role as an uncle and middle-aging gay man. Playful but poignant, his poems move from the personal to the political, from sorrowful to sexy to silly. Somehow in its darkest moments, Montlack's colorful cast--a dramatic twin sister, mysterious birth mother, aloof ex-boyfriend, even Stevie Nicks and Medusa--win your respect and maybe even your heart.

My NarcissusMy narcissus was a gift, a raw round heart encased in paper brown skinthat flaked off in my hands. He slept in my palm, nestled into the darkspace as my thumb closed around him.After I put him into his bed, covered with cold earth, I waited, and he opened his fist, reached up through the soil with his three fingered hand.You know the rest of the story, how he became lost in himself, drownedin his idea of himself.All that’s left now is his withered body, cut off, turning to dirt, the snow slowly burying him. But his heart, the one I loved first, beats underground.Kris Bigalk's second full-length collection, Enough, traces the interplay between the experience of codependency and the myths of Echo and Narcissus. Lyrical, raw, and honest, these poems invite us to consider what it means to be satisfied, how to make peace with each other and ourselves, and how to know when enough is enough.

What the Gratitude List Said to the Bucket List is an invitation to notice the world around us and appreciate its gifts. Heffernan pays homage to the loved ones who have shaped her world view, and the poets who have inspired her to express that view. A firm adherent to Jack Gilbert's declaration that we must "risk joy," Heffernan invites readers to do exactly that—even while recognizing grief that often goes hand-in-hand with gratitude.

Alison Stone's sixth collection deals with the myths, both classic and contemporary, that shape our psyches and our world. From Caligula and Medusa to Gabby Douglas and Ivanka Trump, these speakers illuminate the timeless struggles for power and love that play a central role in literature and art. Stone's speakers tell their stories in poems that both transcend culture and time and illuminate this particular historical moment.

Alongside We Travel is the first literary anthology to gather over two dozen poets from Canada, the United States, the UK and Israel whose lives are intertwined or affected by the autism spectrum. Included in this anthology are poems from tutors and teachers, aunts and grandmothers, friends and siblings, and from poets with autism themselves. Most of the work here is by highly accomplished poet-parents of autistic children written in a variety of traditional and experimental forms. But be warned. Much of the work articulates the despair, guilt, anger, as well as the joy that arises from engagement with such a complicated and diverse disability. As the editor Sean Thomas Dougherty writes, “I can only hope the range of these poems teaches you, the reader, what they have taught me, the editor, about my own autistic daughter, about art, and how we can be brought together through language towards love.”

In On the Chicopee Spur, the haibun form allows Ortolani to speak plainly in the bread of prose, and then slice the loaf with haiku. It's the form Basho used to highlight his journeys across Japan in the seventeenth century. Many of the haiku are not written in the traditional 5-7-5 syllable format, but instead, speak tersely in the spirit of the haiku, experimental, American. Some of the subject matter comes from the immediacy of the hospice experience, others from memories and daydreams along the way.

With each poem in her debut collection Sznyter peels back one of the tender, horrific, humorous, and often magical veils through which we view ourselves, others, and the collective "We" that for better or worse, comprises the human race. The core she exposes may differ from person to person, but the unforgettable images-from a couple's tender moment at the gynecologist to a mother-daughter bonding experience at a concert-will fracture and restructure every reader's bones.

Rebecca Schumejda's second full-length collection, CADILLAC MEN, explores the pool hall subculture before the economic downturn in 2008, when the narrator and her husband took a calculated risk and purchased a pool hall in downtown Kingston, New York. During their arduous planning, they did not consider that their business and livelihood would depend on men who threw pebbles in church collection plates, shot up in the bathroom, and had nicknames like Bobby-Balls-in-Hand, The Butcher, and Mikey Meatballs. CADILLAC MEN is a fractured poetic memoir about the year the narrator's husband chased his lifelong dream by starting Crazy Eights, and the recessions that occurred as her family, the economy, her health and The Cadillac Men all took downward spirals.

And So I Was Blessed weaves together three narrative strands: a tourist visiting Viet Nam, a son sojourning to his father's village in the Mekong Delta, and a professor leading his students on a term abroad, all for the first time. Running throughout this poetry collection is the refrain of the central character-the tourist, son, and professor-missing the daughter he left behind. This is a book about history and memory, tourism and education, arrival and departure, loss and alienation, longing and misrecognition, and above all, a father's love for his daughter.

Laura Boss' newest collection The Best Lover continues the author's signature style of audacious, irreverent, ironic narrative poems that somehow often fuse heartbreak, humor and intensity in unflinchingly honest poems that explore relationships: both family relationships and lovers, including living with the "L'Enfant Terrible" Beat poet that Allen Ginsberg called the best poet of the last quarter of the 20th Century. This book examines the grief that follows a long term relationship, 9/11, internet dating, the randomness of fate and the way choices made or not made affect the course of our lives. Baudelaire said, "the worst sin of poetry is to be boring." Laura Boss' poems are never boring. Ultimately, the book transcends its author's journey and becomes an adventure of survival with which each reader can identify.

For decades, a certain photograph-I don't know who took the picture-has been lodged in my mind of an ash-smeared, half-naked, crazed-looking man peering through a thicket of brambles in what might be called The Wilderness of No God. He looks tragically alone, bereft, cut loose from the comforting anchors of religious faith, and yet he seems surprisingly tranquil. In this collection, I have transcribed the poems-I think of them as songs-which I believe this man sings in the depths of his heart. Yes, his Mystical Faith Exploded in the Midst of a Cathedral, but after years of wandering, he has found joy, coherence, cohesion-his voice. I have titled this book God: A Handbook for the Disbeliever because I think of it as a comforting treasury of verses for all of us who travel this treacherous journey of life alone.

In A Satisfactory Daughter, Jane Julius Honchell celebrates the legacy of family, the slow revolution of the seasons, and the sense of order she finds in structures of all kinds. Like candid snapshots, the short poems in this collection create evocative images that bring all our senses into play. Jane confesses that words and their sounds obsess her, and her pleasure in their multiple possibilities is evident in every poem. True to her belief that laughter is our saving grace, she uses flashes of ironic humor as a counterpoint to her darker poems. Above all, like Linda Loman in Death of a Salesman, this poet insists that "attention must be paid," even to the seemingly insignificant, and invites the reader to share the sense of wonder and pleasure she finds in everyday life.

Focus is a collection of poems by Donald Lev written for the most part after 2012, and is intended as a sequel to his collection published that year by NYQ Books, A Very Funny Fellow, whose concluding poem, "This Big Window," imagines needing a telescope. The heavens, it seems to the author "are seriously overgrown" like his "neglected yard," "his sluggish imagination," and his "boxloads of books and neuroses." From this point, Focus struggles bravely, and perhaps blindly, on.

As is well known, the Fourteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution enables a corporation to be considered a person--with many of the rights granted to (human) individuals. But has anyone considered how this person might talk, or, for that matter, write poems? Corporations Are People, Too! is the first to explore such an idea. It begins with thirty "Corporate Sonnets," many constructed out of the corporate speak we hear and use ourselves every day. Then it goes on to examine how this language becomes part of who we are--from the products we consume, and their meanings, to the ways we think and speculate. The result is something new--both elevated and crass at the same time. The great American pragmatist philosopher John Dewey urged thinkers of his own time to "acknowledge the significance of economic factors in life, rather than evading the issue." In a witty, satirical and entertaining manner--that employs both traditional and innovative forms--this collection takes up that challenge up for today.

John Amen's Illusion of an Overwhelm offers four distinct series: "Hallelujah Anima," in which the poet explores desire, self-inquiry, and ambivalence, as well as the torturous journey of inner healing; "The American Myths," highlighting the intersections between politics, religion, and archetypal dynamics, inspired in part by Black Lives Matter and other progressive forms of populism; "My Gallery Days," which focuses on multiple characters and overlapping narratives, offering poetic commentaries on art and the fleeting nature of life; and "Portrait of Us," the poet's celebration of enduring love and romance, presented from multiple viewpoints and timeframes. While covering wide ground thematically and imagistically, Amen makes use of searing language, the book resounding on conceptual and aesthetic levels long after the final line is read.

Somerset is an elegy for the Kensington section of Philadelphia in which the author was raised. Using a variety of styles and forms, it remembers people and cultures struggling to survive in the aftermath of deindustrialization and, now, an opioid epidemic. It is also a study in how our past continually informs our present, how we never fully leave those places in which our younger selves were formed. Somerset bears witness to racism, poverty, violent crime, and drug use, but also finds forgiveness, thankfulness, and love.

At times funny and at times savage, sometimes implacable and sometimes resigned, YELLOW TROPHIES is a deep-mine exploration of bittersweet ironies. It is a cohesive composition of random notes on chaos theory and childhood mischief; a defiant sneer at the changeless guards of corruption; an echo from reverberating myths of vague ancestors and youthful excess; a document of the glory of loss. Equal parts testimony, insult, love letter, challenge, and apology, it is a partial list of what gets left behind and what gets carried forward, itemized while swallowing the inevitable regrets we all need to develop a taste for—set in the curious vortex and vacuum of Scranton, Pennsylvania.