Books published by Saddle Road Press

Memoir meets true crime in Don Mitchell's exploration of a brutal 1969 murder - of which he was himself a suspect. In Hawaiian culture, shibai means "gaslighting," a concept on which Mitchell expands in this riveting first-person account of the ripples felt from the murder of Jane Britton, the Harvard graduate student who was his friend. Weaving together speculation and discoveries that excavate layers of truth and error, Mitchell moves through past and present, detailing his youth on the Big Island of Hawai'i, ultra running the high plains of the dormant Mauna Kea volcano, navigating the language and culture of the Nagovisi people in Bougainville, and meeting Becky Cooper, an investigative reporter in whose book about Jane's murder he is a continuing presence. Mitchell explores the way facts can shatter long-held perceptions, how love and connection transcend time and culture, and the way memory and meaning can shapeshift into shibai.

At age five, Marcia Meier was hit by a car, losing the left side of her face and eyelid. Over the next fifteen years she underwent twenty surgeries and spent days blinded by bandages, her hands tied to the sides of her hospital bed. Scarred both physically and emotionally, abused at school, blamed and rejected by her mother, Marcia survived and went on to create a successful life as a journalist, a wife and mother. But at midlife her controlled world began to fall apart, and Marcia began a journey into the darkness of her past, her true identity, her deepest beliefs – a spiritual and emotional exploration that resulted in the creation of Face.

Through lyric and narrative poems alike, the speaker of the poems in Crash Course attempts to understand the manner in which cultural traditions and expectations shape their understanding of the world. Watching a father patch up a truck ponders the effect of language across generations. A simple knock on the door provides a meditation on the immigrant experience, and the anxiety surrounding what it means to arrive with nothing in a different country. Other poems look at the complexity of familial relationships, dissecting specific moments that although appear mundane on the surface (shopping for items to put on layaway, barbecues, watching a cousin feed his pet snake), are - once fleshed out on the page - profound episodes that enlighten a labyrinth of memories.

After her husband died of ALS in 2014, poet Ellen LaFleche began writing of physical love and loss, of the complications of memory, of the small, personal, persistent sorrows that lived with her every day. These poems push back against clinical theories of bereavement by validating the necessary persistence of grief and remembering. They also challenge platitudes about the easy comfort of memories. The poem "Unbearable," for example, describes the sensory joys of the couple's honeymoon: We splurged on fine wine and watched sunset spreadits slow flush across evening's throat...I tipped a shell against his lips and told him to drink.Too sandy, he said, too salty, but he swallowed the broth,wiping his beard with the knuckled swipes of a pre-historic man.Now, memories of the salty taste of a littleneck clam bring an intense mixture of joy and sorrow.Memory also fails, erases: "Your face is fading into my brain's neuronal mist," the poet writes, and "I remember how you carried home a bouquet of foliage. /I don't remember the spider that crawled up your sleeve."The sensual, recurrent imagery of Walking into Lightning - fire, ocean water, corn fields, thunder, birth, the pleasures of physical love - spiral through the poems, linking them in a long, tangled journey through bereavement and loss.This is a remarkable book for the bereaved, unsentimental and undistracted, profoundly moving and cathartic.

Part song, part grito, part wail, part lullaby, and part hymn, Cuicacalli / House of Song is a multi-vocal exploration of time, place, and history.Song lives within and without the poet’s physical and spiritual experience of body, of desire, of art, of loss, and of grief on an individual and communal level.Cuicacalli / House of Song sings survival, sings indigeneity, sings some part of the tattered world back together.

At the beginning of Whale Fall & Black Sage, "three strange angels" command the poet: Go down./ Now you must love that too. She descends into the darkness of whale fall, with its strange creatures both real and imaginary, its song of death and rebirth. Returning to the upper world, her journey becomes more difficult, increasingly revelatory, ultimately transformative.The book ends with a joyous, fully embodied Whitmanesque crow. In Whale Fall & Black Sage, the praise poems of Here Along Cazenovia Creek have deepened and become more resonant: "This is the blood/of black sage:/resinous, unfailing.//A leaf crushed/between fingers like this/saves us from desolation."

At sea, the four-hour watch at the end of the work day is cut in half to make two dog watches. Drawn from thirty-five years in the Navy, in a career ranging from from seaman to captain, Rolf Yngve's Dog Watches brings to life the men and women who stand the dog watches, the moments when their decisions define them and shape the lives of those in their care. A former commanding officer finds himself powerless when he confronts young woman about to leap from a bridge. A captain blames his second in command for the crazy decision he makes that ends his career. A heroic young woman discovers the deep tragedy of trafficking. An officer pursuing his duty makes a fatal error that defines his entire life. The inventory of dead sailor’s locker haunts a young officer’s first hours on board and the life of his ship. The illicit affection between a beloved captain and a shipmate is discovered after a near tragedy. Praised by Tim O’Brien, David Kranes, and Goldie Goldbloom, widely published and anthologized, Yngve’s work has been compared to Conrad. Compelling reading and a powerful exploration of the meaning of integrity, duty and personal responsibility in 21st century America.

The Gateless Gate and Polishing the Moon Sword is a collection of poems inspired by Zen and Japanese folk traditions. The first section, The Gateless Gate, contains poem-responses to the 48 Zen koans of the Mumonkan, following a long Zen tradition of composing poems as a spontaneous, personal response to koans. The second section, Polishing The Moon Sword, retells traditional Japanese folk tales through prose poems.

Born in Tokyo to an American military father and a traditional Japanese mother, Kathleen Hellen describes the landscape of post-war America, a personal history and a hybrid culture.

Poems that take their shape from daily walks around a teeming harbor.

In Always A Blue House, poet Lisa Rizzo is an unwilling seeker, generous-hearted even in her disbelief, suspended like Chagall’s blue angel just inside the window of the infinite. Brilliant travel poems, poignant tracings of her father’s decline, and sharp memories of an Illinois childhood round out Rizzo’s second collection.

"At once earthy and full of spirit and mystery," this chapbook from award-winning poet Ruth Thompson celebrates a "vivid cycle of the seasons" in the hill country of western New York. It includes "Fat Time," which won the New Millennium Writings Award in 2007.

Don Mitchell's new collection of short stories, set among tribal people on Bougainville Island in the late 1960s, demystifies ethnography by turning it on its head. The narrators are Nagovisi - South Pacific rainforest cultivators - and through their eyes the reader comes to know the young American anthropologist, himself struggling with his identity as a Vietnam-era American, who's come to to study their culture in a time of change. Beautifully written, evocative, and utterly original, A Red Woman was Crying takes the reader into the rich and complex internal lives of Nagovisi -- young and old, male and female, gentle and fierce -- as they grapple with predatory miners, indifferent colonial masters, missionaries, their own changing culture, their sometimes violent past, and the "other" who has come to live with them.