Books published by Pinyon Publishing

"Yin Xiaoyuan holds back nothing. Their poems are bulky, cinematic, suddenly despondent, pulling back and the poem ends. I applaud the richness of the work, its bravery, its quirkiness. I turn the pages for another vista and another reshuffling of what a poem is. I feel like a fledgling lover, abandoned, happy and surprised."-Eileen Myles

"Without pretense, with the clarity of William Stafford, these poems embrace a wide-ranging reach in subject matter expressed lyrically with original juxtapositions of ideas and words. The voice in these poems pays homage to the past, the present."-Michael Miller, author of Waking in the Dark"Entsminger shares poems about his youth in Virginia, his journeys, and his present life in the mountains of southwestern Colorado. These poems attest to the author's awareness of the fleeting nature of experience: 'Summer of '74 he traveled with the band / wore tee shirt and blue jeans like the other guys / climbed scaffold to place speakers in the Wall of Sound / happy for the job yet already beginning to understand / none of this would happen again' "Time moves in only one direction. Yet, from an early memory of looking down on "the small town / tucked below / steepled and shimmering / with all you didn't know / in the distance" to a more recent one where men 'in the evening sat on the porch / once it was cool enough / and watched the breeze and shade /easing summer heat with conversation' the poems in Four Ravens offer a sense of having come full circle-from experience to memory to all we can know of a life."-Neil Harrison, author of Where the Waters Take You"Clearly marked, deeply anchored poems-like a good guide, Entsminger makes sure you don't fall from the stones across the currents. You'll stop to look the way you've come, like the woman in 'Before Crossing,' to reorient and prepare for what's ahead. One poem has it exactly right: 'Stories that determine us.' As in Nancy Willard's work, questions are asked, the answers to which surprise, delight, and help to 'develop a soul.' Accompanied by masterly musical diction, so the words' tunes embed. So much to say (everyone should have an Aunt Jean!); to quote ('it was always the two of us / under the grand piano I was never alone / Mom was always playing')-Rilke must be smiling, too (see his 'Memories of a Childhood'!). A last regret: Frost, who is said to have put a gun on the kitchen table between his kids and told them to choose between their mom and him, won't read 'Counter Intuitive,' a poem that should be framed on many a kitchen wall for many a family."-Stuart Friebert, author of Decanting: Selected & New Poems

She has been called "the Dutch Elizabeth Bishop." These are poems that readers cherish for their intensity, intimacy, and cinematic effects.SIMULTANEITY Six in the evening, in the kitchenThe little dog with pricked-up ears,the potatoes boiling on the stove,the wooden tick of the clock - the skyfar and gray-blue and the jewelweeds,tall as people. The pasturewith uneven tussocks and their shadows,like drawings in a cave. And the knifelike lightthat burns through the leaves, a glittering mystery.And I - another creature, watching it.It blends together and it doesn't change.Oh Lord. I feel that something oughtto be made clear to me. That I've been granted time,and yet, however overwhelmed I am,something is missing that would help me say: this order,however slipshod it may be: I see it, I'm awakened.Forgive my deafness and my lack of seeing,and hold me in your greatness - I am small,but have, as well, too many tentaclesthat grope in the different-being Being.M. Vasalis (1909-1998) was the pen name of Margaretha Drooglever-Fortuyn-Leenmans, a Dutch psychiatrist who specialized in children. Her poems come out of her life, her experience of the natural world, her professional practice, and her family relations. They arise from the pressure of occasion and necessity rather from an ambition to originality or greatness-their relative modesty is one of their secret strengths. Vasalis remains one of the most widely read and admired poets of her language and country.

"Scant Hours guides us through Schmeidel's poetic worlds. The Early world is marked by war, by violence, by fear, by 'submarine mines,' and a 'many-thousand-year Reich.' … We see the urgent tasks: to look closely, to weigh words, soft and sharp, to take off one's armor and allow the skin to sense the individual's relationship to time: 'On one day/ […] the sun, rising, / will break through / the skin of the earth and / […] as usual / you'll / do everything normally / while the ground / under your feet / burns' ('Instructions')."The lyric voice in Later becomes increasingly inward ... the relationship to the self, love, family, sickness, inner life. In 'We Exist': 'I want to be there again where / there are questions in people's eyes. […] // I want to be there again / where the sky touches the horizon / and we go freely next to one another: / silhouettes of our finiteness.' These lines express that we exist not alone, but in plural form. They offer a perspective in which 'finiteness' can be identified as a sign of our vitality and freedom."Later Still marks the third section of poems. ... Long poems and short ones, brief and extended lines, clear stanzas and loosely grouped lines, associative suggestions and narrative sentences. As if something was ending, running out, some would say; I would say rather: as if something were beginning again. 'Possible' ends the volume, testing out possible constellations of 'yourself,' and 'death,' and 'laugh,' ending with 'died out,' which is bookended by 'laughed at,' and 'kept laughing.'"With incomparable sensitivity and linguistic creativity, Stuart Friebert succeeds not only in bringing Elisabeth Schmeidel's marvelous images and surprising word collages into English; rather, his American English creates a tone that allows the contemporary English-speaking world access to the fine overtones, the voices and moods of Schmeidel's language."-From the Introduction by Thomas Wild "Many of the poems sail into the dangerous waters of illness, anger, and despair. We had many a conversation about the eroding political landscape of her beloved Austria. She'd order another 'langen braunen' (her go-to Austrian pick-me-up), light another cigarette I'd smuggle her in some quantities, and start sketching and scribbling away on café tablecloths …"-From Remembering Her by Stuart Friebert

From the Introduction by Christiane WyrwaIt is a common view that poetry should not be an organ for answers but for questions-yet this collection shows how these opposites perform an act of dynamic balance: these poems stand firmly between question and answer.Ute von Funcke lives in Munich, where she was born. For her, the wealthy Bavarian technological boom town of today still holds memories of her childhood shortly after World War II, when people lived in bitter need in an old town completely destroyed by bombing. Between Question & Answer includes selections from her four German books, as well as hitherto unpublished poems. Von Funcke highly esteems the role and importance of women in literature, vividly expressing emotional depth and strong feelings. For her, poetry and politics belong deeply together-yesterday's evils and suffering are still just as cruel today and need to be strongly denounced.In the first section, the title Yesterday's Words mentions the material that produces all poetry-the words-and several poems refer to the process of composing. In "The Censor," for example, a guiding voice in the poet urges her to "mop up letters / get rid of unwilling ones / where to / incorporate / dispose / give away / lend out or give back." The word "yesterday" in the section's title leads to scenes of childhood evoking deep impressions via phrases rich in emotional depth, metaphor, and allegory.Into the Dark, the second section, presents poems with a window into the dark passages where aggression and violence prevail. "The black flag of terror" is never far off, showing the witnessing listener "the smoking ruins / when history repeats / on dark paths." War's never-ending horrors are described in precise, vigorous, rhythmic diction leading to the slogan "Never again war"­-and the poems following, with manifold fragments of postwar experience, demonstrate first childhood memories of bygone war-times, but then lead straight into the renewed horror of Chernobyl, and other new forms of death's everlasting horrors. This section is rounded off with poems about present day Berlin, highlighting impressions of shockingly disparate elements of the careless pastimes of the rich vis-à-vis the alarming misery of the poor.Other Worlds, the third section's poems, lead us literally into distant, mysterious realms where we meet Moses, Eve, the serpent, and Lucifer, the fallen angel from the Bible, but also some well-known characters from the world of myth via scenes from their lives described in the literary heritage of ancient times, such as the wanderer Ulysses returning home, and Cassandra's cry "still forlorn / and in vain." The "painful wound left open," with all its transient elements in the course of history, is transposed into the poet's distinctive inner experience by "the inner eyes" inside her temples.Forget, Darling, the last section's poems, moves us from realms of violent hatred to the world of love, concentrating on poems of our affections. We are introduced to the "Heartbeat symptoms / between question and answer" of the book's title that keep us all in a world of eternal mystery. At times the poem's voice-simply an "I" addressing a "you"-moves about in a world without time, somewhere under sun and moon in a field in dripping rain, where the two rock in the wind.Stuart Friebert is one of the most active, experienced American translators of German poetry; an expert in transposing wording and line structure into his smooth American-English. His translations express the same imaginativ