Books published by Press 53

The poems in The Taste of the Earth weave together personal history with the complex cultural heritage of Hedy Habra's countries of origin. Steeped in memories, loss and longing, these poems invite the reader to revisit Egypt's mythical past and Lebanon's turmoil, recalling the intersecting roots of culture and language in an act of artistic recollection that bridges time and space. Through the lyrical power of the senses, Habra's poems bring to life scenes of strife and upheaval as well as profound joy. Such images linger in the mind and keep evolving in search for the permanence of beauty within suffering as they are evoked by trees, houses, fountains and familiar objects, each voice offering with its testimony a broader perspective on the interconnectedness of worlds and universality of emotions.

Julie Zuckerman's moving and engrossing debut novel-in-stories, The Book of Jeremiah, tells the story of awkward but endearing Jeremiah Gerstler -- the son of Jewish immigrants, brilliant political science professor, husband, father.Jeremiah has yearned for respect and acceptance his entire life, and no matter his success, he still strives for more. As a boy, he was feisty and irreverent and constantly compared to his sweet and well-behaved older brother, Lenny. At the university, he worries he is a token hire. Occasionally, he's combative with colleagues, especially as he ages. But there is a sweetness to Gerstler, too, and an abiding loyalty and affection for those he loves. When he can overcome his worst impulses, his moments of humility become among the best measures of his achievements.Spanning eight decades and interwoven with the Jewish experience of the 20th century, Julie Zuckerman charts Jeremiah's life from boyhood, through service in WWII, to marriage and children, a professorship and finally retirement, with compassion, honesty, and a respect that even Gerstler himself would find touching.

Self-Portrait in the River of Déjà Vu is the fourth and final book by Susan Laughter (pronounced Law-ter) Meyers, who suffered a stroke and died in June of 2017. Meyers was the author of two collections of poems: My Dear, Dear Stagger Grass, the inaugural winner of the Cider Press Review Editors' Prize, and Keep and Give Away (University of South Carolina Press, 2006) which received the South Carolina Poetry Book Prize, the Southern Independent Booksellers Alliance (SIBA) Book Award for Poetry, and the Brockman-Campbell Book Award. Her chapbook Lessons in Leaving (1998) won the Persephone Press Book Award.

In Bleachers, the debut short fiction collection by award-winning poet Joseph Mills, fifty-four stories take place during two youth soccer games, capturing the thoughts, concerns, realizations, and perspectives of the parents on the sidelines and in the stands. As these spectators watch (or don't watch) the players on the field, their narratives interweave to form a portrait of community and of parenting-always unpredictable, often complicated, and rarely what it seems. From A to Z ("Aging" to "Zidane"), Bleachers can be read as a primer on parenting and family, as well as a paean to sports. If, as Dr. King said, Sunday morning is the most segregated hour in America, then Saturday morning may be the most integrated as families gather to experience the victories and losses, both great and small, of the game that brings them together, "forming, then breaking apart, then reforming . . . . temporarily cohering" as a team.

Kelly Cherry takes on what few contemporary poets are willing to: the ways and hows of human existence, in both personal and historical terms. Tonally and technically, she has a wide range, being capable of writing touchingly intimate love poems on the one hand and treating natural objects with scientific precision on the other. The common denominator is the sensibility of a poet for whom all human perceptions, whether of inner experience or external things, turn into metaphor; that is to say, a language of meaning through connection. -Lisel Mueller, winner of the Pulitzer Prize

As Fady Joudah states in his praise for Stacy R. Nigliazzo, "[The] many arresting poems in Sky the Oar row us through many life and death narratives, through the medical gaze: American in their specificity, universal in their compassion." These brief, lyric poems by emergency room nurse Nigliazzo strip story down to the essential words, speaking volumes in less than a breath. In three erasure poems, she tells the story of a friend's murder in words buried within a news article. Kevin Prufer adds, "Stacy R. Nigliazzo writes of sickness, pain, love and beauty with enormous precision and skill. The result is one of the most moving poetry books I have read in years."

The poems in Howard Faerstein's Googootz and Other Poems journey by their own inimitable logic, finding their way as they go, because "you keep travelling on / whether life invites you or not." In this wide-ranging volume of praise and protest, subtle humor and elegy, finches fly through fire, Hiroshima shadows a New England beach, space aliens reveal a secret connection to spaghetti and meatballs, a wasp and wind chimes conjure mystery "outside the borders of definition," and seemingly respectable citizens harbor "cavernous hate camouflaged like terrorist conviction." Even as Faerstein confronts the worst of our current moment, these poems "never refuse love's lure," never forget "the great glory" of creation. Googootz is a large-souled book that gives courage to "go on living." -Jay Udall, author of The Welcome Table and Because a Fire in Our Heads, winner of the X. J. Kennedy Prize

Leopard Lady: A Life in Verse by Valerie Nieman tells the story of Dinah, an orphan child of Appalachia who runs away to a carnival, and the emotional, physical, and spiritual journey she embraces. Born in the depths of the Depression, the biracial child is "given" to the childless Gastons to raise. She eventually finds her way out of exploitation into a life on the road as a carnival hootchie-kootchie dancer and fortune-teller. Self-educated with the King James Bible and a volume of Shakespeare, her voice blends Elizabethan phrasings with Appalachian and carnival speech. When Dinah is afflicted with vitiligo, she adds a turn as a "freak" called the Leopard Lady as the show travels back roads from the Carolinas to Pennsylvania. A dropout from divinity school joins the show, and they begin a debate over the nature of God and man-each seeking an understanding of their place in the universe-that becomes a close friendship.

In Volume I of Everywhere Stories: Short Fiction from a Small Planet, we discovered that it's a dangerous world. In Volume II, we concluded that it's also a mysterious world. Now the world's no less mysterious, and it's still as dangerous as ever, but it's also filled with adventure! Our twenty stories in Volume III take us on an expedition in Australia's outback, to a discovery on the steppes of Mongolia, and a leap of faith on the coast of Croatia. We come upon an American boy exploring Saudi Arabia, a war veteran dealing with his past in Finland, and a political dissident who vanishes in Chile. With fictions on every continent, we take readers to places they might not otherwise see. We hope you will join us on this great adventure!

Libby Bernardin's poems summon a landscape of vivid imagining-her birds, skies, stars, and wind. Yet these are not merely poems of the outer natural world, no matter how beautifully they render it. Stones Ripe for Sowing has immense inner life and displays the power of the poet as seeker, showing us how to "forage in hard and doubtful places." -John Lane

In The Arrows That Choose Us, Marilyn Annucci's poems of quiet observation startle with their precision: a curmudgeonly crow trapped in a yard "opens his wing like a set of black cards"; the knife at the bottom of a dishpan is "a mute battleship gone down on its side"; Houdini is "holding his breath at the bottom of your bathtub." Metaphysical in scope, this collection offers meditations on intimacy and mortality, technology and luck. Annucci finds humor even in places of loneliness or disappointment, reminding us how "the arrows that choose us" never fail "to tear us awake."

Behind surfaces that can sometimes be wryly comic, Mark Cox is unafraid to risk adult tenderness ("brutal tenderness" he says in one poem) and great empathy for this world's sufferers. Which is to say that beneath a rich variety of occasions (from an ancient Egyptian mummifier doing up a fifteen-foot crocodile, to a current-day housewife doing up an angel food cake), Cox's bedrock concern is that impossible thing of endless grief and joy that we call the human condition. These poetic meditations and monologues are some of the least prosaic prose you'll ever read. -Albert Goldbarth

In these bittersweet, compelling stories, Virginia Pye's characters in Shelf Life of Happiness long for that most-elusive of states: happiness. A young skateboarder reaches across an awesome gap to reconnect with his disapproving father; an elderly painter executes one final, violent gesture to memorialize his work; a newly married writer battles the urge to implode his happy marriage; and a confused young man falls for his best friend's bride and finally learns to love. In each case, Pye's characters aim to be better people as they strive for happiness-and some even reap the sweet reward of achieving it.

Our World, by North Carolina Poet Laureate Shelby Stephenson, is a love letter to his wife, Nin, and to the homestead where he was born and on which he still lives. Poet Dannye Romine Powell, says, "Shelby Stephenson drags the river of love and memory in this new collection, from sassy-sweet songs to his beloved wife Nin, to the "deep and wide gladness" of being alive, to thoughts of his father's Stetson hats and White Owl cigars, of his mother humming as she cuts cloth for a dress. . . . If poetry gets more visceral than this, quick, show me where."

The core of White Portals by Jennifer Holley Lux is a pair of elegy-sequences, like binary black holes that have captured each other, spinning and emitting energy witnessed from history measured in light years. In one sequence, she elegizes her husband, the poet Thomas Lux, and in the other, her beloved mother Lorraine Pobat Holley. The poet has woven her binary pattern in a web strung with memories and musings in coastal towns, worldwide, that braid together like tissue in our bodies: Positano, Studland Beach, New Guinea, Kazahana, and Lux's Connecticut home. Each elegiac thread in this quilt, woven with the skill of a loomer, goes to create a quilt of death, mourning, and consolation. They all fit into a passionate, beautiful collection, Lux's first. -from the Introduction by Tom Lombardo

Lifting each rock, / we felt its weight in our palms, / closed our eyes / until a name arose…. Even as a child, as the first poem in Beasts of Eden reveals, Michael Beadle took upon himself the joyous burden of naming even the all-too-often unnamable things of this world. In this new collection, Beadle lures us into a realm of fact and fantasy, of history and myth, where we are all-at once-both native and stranger, neighbor and trespasser. With senses so alert to the sounds, the tastes, the textures, the sights, and smells of this world, nothing escapes the fresh wit and seasoned wisdom of this big-hearted poet. Here is a poet who wields a magician's pen that is both worldly and colloquial, as at home in the past as it is in the present. Give yourself-and everyone you love-the gift of this beautiful new collection. -Cathy Smith Bowers, former Poet Laureate of North Carolina and author of The Collected Poems of Cathy Smith Bowers