Books published by Raw Dog Screaming Press

Poet. Pirate. It's all the same really. They both pillage, plunder, drink rum, look for treasure, and sometimes, after too many drinks, they're known to throw a right hook or two. But that's the beauty of poetry and piracy-it's unhinged, a stream of emotions that make you laugh, cry, bleed, bruise, and eat oranges to prevent scurvy. It's an adventure. It's feeling the wind on your face from the sea or the page. It's tasting the salt in the ocean or in your tears. But most importantly, it's the experience of getting from one port to another, one page to the next, killing one more siren and murdering just one more darling. You see, piracy is about rules, and the number one rule is that there are no rules. Pirate-poets live for the journey, they do what has to be done to survive, and hope that karma, or a Kraken, doesn't come around and bite them in the arse. Poetry is like that, too. It's a fleeting moment, an image, that the writer is hoping will leave you breathless, bruised, and stranded on an island. Underwater Fistfight does just that, because Matt Betts is a pirate-poet who takes science fiction and throws it in the brig with horror while he sits outside the cell, laughing as they duke it out. He's a regular Davy Jones, a sailor's devil, claiming the lives of these poems and dragging them down to the locker to dissect, inspect, and sift through their stories and characters like plunder.

Taking its cue from the theme song of Kill Bill by Tomoyasu Hotei and the Japanese yakuza film, BATTLE WITHOUT HONOR AND HUMANITY is a thought experiment in the short story form. The deranged politicians, simian film directors, choleric tyrants, fevered academics and berserk everymen that populate this first volume scurry like vermin through dreamlike environments that have been imploded by the hammer of media and information technologies. Based in part on the author's lifelong practice of the martial arts, especially judo and Jeet Kune Do, unlikely English professor D. Harlan Wilson weaves a tapestry of narrative ultraviolence and wages an attack against conventional fiction while calling for a higher understanding of what it means to write, to read, and to make meaning. Challenging, absurdist and stylish, this book is a mad Rottweiler that goes for the jugular at every turn.

In this book of creative non-fiction essays Gills tells us stories from his life. The title piece, "White Indians," is a "visionary memoir" that recounts Gills' experience as a participant at a Native American Sundance ceremony on Zuni Territory, New Mexico during July 2005. The ceremony unfolds on a wolf refuge and at night, tending fire, the howling is startling music that informs this text throughout. Sixty men and women dance and pierce themselves during four days, offering flesh to a ninety-feet tall cottonwood, wrapped and glimmering with thousands upon thousands of prayer ties. The breathtaking pageantry of the dance is offset by the shock of seeing flesh offerings taken in the splendor of elaborate costumes and the continuous drumbeat and singing under an enormous sky.As firekeeper, the narrator is responsible for heating stones for the sacred inipi. Later in the dance, a scarred old heyoka (backward/forward man) ushers him into the arena where for some time he moves among the dancers under the tree. His perspective is an insider's, riveted by every detail. The result is the first of a two-book work, seldom if ever seen in American Literature, that places this ceremony in the larger context of Native American prophecy-the return of lost white brother, and the end of the fourth world.