Books published by Spuyten Duyvil

In these mysterious poems, David Need grants us a vision of a world-scaffold made up of narrative traces, the poetry of overheard and overlaid realities. Beauty and difficulty are each other''s descant here, and in the soft burr of their vibrations, space and time open into the "edgecup of beyond crossed."

This second book in the MAX series is set in Brooklyn''s famous Vinegar Hill as well as in the middle of a major cancer research center in Manhattan. Ms. King once again thrusts the reader into her protagonist''s specific geographic space and puts him or her among New York''s downtown artists, writers, and hangers-on.

Ann Tracy is a master of intersection. Her new collection, Measuring and Other Stories, reads with the fluidity and familiarity of memoir, the succinctness of short story, the coherence of novel. The authorial voice itself is as if Robertson Davies meets the Marx Brothers but they are all staunch feminists. In each gem of a story she takes an extended metaphor (e.g., “Measuring”) and polishes it till it sparkles with wit, wisdom, and poignancy. I began to list favorite passages to quote and gave up when the document was three pages long. Pressed to name a favorite in this array, I would have to say that it’s impossible. I want to read every one of them over and over. And over.      Jan Maher, author of The Persistence of Memory and Other Stories

Fiction. New York Times: "111 Held in St. Patrick's AIDS Protest" -December 11, 1989 While some 4,500 people demonstrated outside St. Patrick's Cathedral yesterday, several dozen disrupted the Mass at 10:15 A.M. to protest John Cardinal O'Connor's recent statements on abortion, homosexuality and AIDS. Some of the protesters chained themselves to pews inside the cathedral, while others shouted or lay in aisles. The police said 111 people were arrested, including 43 inside the church. Many of the protesters were carried out on stretchers after refusing to stand up. Dozens of protesters blocked traffic on Fifth Avenue by lying in the street.

Pedro Mir (1913-2000) is recognized as the Dominican Republic's foremost literary figure of the twentieth century. In 1982 the Dominican Congress named him National Poet.

Fiction. "This powerful novel, which pays out its rewards gradually, carefully, but also crisply, dare I say electrically, may be Joshua Corey's first, but it feels exactly like the highly satisfying product of the fully formed imagination that birthed it. All of Corey's hard-earned skill as a poet is put here to useful work. The push-pull between stunning language and inventive narrative is pure pleasure."--Laird Hunt "Joshua Corey's BEAUTIFUL SOUL offers a swirling, shadowy cosmos lit by intelligence, urgency, and heart. Its swirl is cinematic--"estranged and operatic"--but never at the expense of the body, be it the bitten nipple, or the "bloody middle" of history. I especially admire Corey's conjuring of Ruth: fulcrum of readerly empathy, inheritor of mysterious and difficult histories, navigator of the present's strata, honorary "new reader." Go on her journey with her; "the book is waiting."--Maggie Nelson "All the beauty of the world is in the flow of each living person's narrative, from moment to moment, and the way these stories also encompass the ghosts of the past--this is the angle of incidence Joshua Corey is attempting to recreate in a novel as precisely defined as the images in a mirror and as diffuse as the colors and shadings in a prism. BEAUTIFUL SOUL, with its ever-shifting parameters, from periphery to center and back again, is a testament to the infinite longing for something or someone who isn't there, the last word on a world where everything matters."--Lewis Warsh

Literary Nonfiction. Memoir. "Hers is the most authentic voice I've heard from the expat fifties. She brings to life a seminal decade in literary and sexual history, one that she and her fellow expats, coming home, passed on to the next generation of Americans who thought that they had invented the Sexual Revolution. This is an essential book. And a damn good story as well!"--Edward Field "A well-observed account of the texture of life for those resistant spirits who actively held out against the cultural norms of 1950's America. To read ABROAD is to take a wander down the pleasure path of a sadly bygone era."--Moe Angelos "ABROAD is a beautifully felt and rendered story of a fascinating woman in a fascinating time. Harriet Zwerling's account of her life in Paris in the fifties is entertaining and important. Don't miss this wonderful book."--Mary Dearborn "Abroad, and how! We see in this diary a beautiful, brave young woman escape Cold War America's stifling paranoias to conduct her own intimate search for the truth of desire. Bravely, she questions pleasure itself: Where is it most to be found? In encounters with men or with women? What are its costs? How does it challenge emotional, mental, and physical well-being? A reader marvels at the vitality with which Harriet Sohmers Zwerling meets those challenges, the honesty with which she records her experience, and the generosity with which she offers the record to us today."--Sarah White

From one of Italy''s most widely read and deeply treasured poets: an essential collection of verse, selected from all five of his major works, bringing this unique, mesmerizing voice to an English-speaking audience for the first time. Whether writing of his snowy home in the Italian alps, of his beloved father, of his extended circle of friends and family, Pierluigi Cappello comes to the reader with his all-embracing spirit, a tenderness and generosity expressed in an everyday language that defies its own simplicity, and a serene clarity that recalls the lyrical work of W. S. Merwin and Wisława Szymborska. Beginning with his masterful Go Tell It to the Emperor, this selection moves backward toward Cappello''s early work and closes with a "coda" of poems from the last years of his short life. The victim of a motorbike accident at age sixteen, which severed his spine and left him paralyzed from the waist down, Cappello is a poet of extraordinary resilience, who gazes out on the world with patience and persistence, summoning it with language, refusing to let it drift.

Preverbs are not so much assertions as events. Read on the page or, better yet, spoken, each of Quasha''s lines is an occasion for becoming aware of meaning in the making. Releasing words from semantic routine, reinventing syntax on the fly, the preverbs provide us with endless opportunities to entangle ourselves in ambiguity and seeming contradiction. As they bring us to the verge of unintelligibility, entanglement becomes an embrace and we generate new powerful meanings- not once for all but in a succession of instants that carry us from line to line, page to page, precipitating us into an expansive, endlessly renewable present.

Poetry. Annotated and translated from the Russian by Henry W. Pickford. "Loseff is one of the chief representatives of Russian exilic poetry, a great master of ironic postmodern verse. Pickford's work merits the highest recognition: this perfectly annotated book is indispensable for any student of new Russian poetry." Tomas Venclova"Henry Pickford does a splendid job of capturing the distinctive voice of Lev Loseff's poetry, at once witty and profound. The translations are remarkably accurate, yet still convey the rich linguistic play of the original." Michael Wachtel"

Kearney is one of those unsung cats who has been producing intelligent thoughtful snarly deeply musical poetry, deeply felt wryly wrought astute poetry of the first rank for decades for a select few-you're in for a rare treat. David Meltzer

Sexually curious and intellectually adventurous, adolescent Marie begins journaling about her life in Western Michigan's Bible Belt during the rise of the Christian Right. Over the span of many years, her writing becomes a meditation on the ways in which language makes, unmakes, and remakes us. In The Reconception of Marie, Marie's many voices coalesce in a reimagined bildüngsroman, where coming-of-age becomes coming-into-awareness, a spiritual quest navigated with humor, fervency, and the multivalency of queer grace.

Radius's narrator, Augati Quick, speaks to us from her uneasy, lonely and boozy exile as a faculty wife in Abu Dhabi about, well, pretty much everything, but especially about a domestic tragedy of sisters and step-sisters that climaxed one winter in Montreal 40 years before.

The dates are important to mention in order to put the open sensuality in the novel in perspective., that is, pre-AIDS, when male-male sexuality was being liberated from its centuries-long subterranean hiddenness into a visibility if only, in this instance, of the twilit and claustrophobic “freedom” of a bath house.     (M.R. from the intro)

Poetry. "SAPPHOPUNK is a vivid, visceral experiment in 'somatic abundance, ' a hybrid text blurring prose, poetry, history, and theater. Set in a sensual, imaginary academy, hastain's text describes a teacher, S, who 'conjures cooperative thrive' among her female students. Their idyllic rituals are disrupted when S encounters Phaon, an 'outcast' whose gender play disturbs the initiations S orchestrates. 'Can S conceive of a reason to transcend the anatomy of her academy?' asks hastain. What's at stake here is how to value lesbian literary history built on gender binaries while simultaneously writing queer literature that interrogates those binaries." Carol Guess"

Fiction. "Open MULTIFESTO anywhere, careful reader, and your feet will come unmoored from the ground, your liver will be eaten by hungry jackals, substituting for an eagle, and your eyes, feeding your brain phrases such as 'I am reading a book, ' will grow thick with beautiful cataracts. The text spins like a square planet into untold dimensions of heat and light where heat, no longer warm, and light, no longer bright, are free to assume new costumes in a Mardi Gras drag show." Raymond Federman"Very seldom does a book come along that's as difficult to characterize as Davis Schneiderman's MULTIFESTO: A HENRI D'MESCAN READER, a baroque architecture of writing, a wedding-cake of literary history, criticism, politics, and art. It's as though Duchamp, Deleuze and Guattari, and Burroughs have collaborated to create a work that is part artist book, part biography, part album, all send-up-a work that is determined to throw the definition of literature into flux once again." Steve Tomasula"

Poetry. "Quirky, electric poems, spare and challenging." Peter Matthiessen"Martine Bellen is a poet of refreshing complexity. Her unpredictable disjunctions and conjunctions and her baroque mix of vivid images and meticulous abstractions make one uncertain whether these poems (in verse composed of prose segments) are precise narrations of the contingent or of dreams or of the former masquerading as the latter. They are full of surprises." Jackson Mac Low"Martine Bellen's poems dissolve the world of ordinary conversation and etch out patterns that demand another kind of world, one in which Satan is satin but still Satan. And then it comes as something of a shock to find it's in fact our ordinary world still, which she has somehow gotten from a new angle. A real achievement." Keith Waldrop"

The implicit heart of Gavronsky’s imaginary meditation lies in the daunting similarity of the dialogues on the two fronts of the war between terror and authority.                        Harold Bloom, “On Gavronsky”