Books published by Tupelo Press

Poetry. It is rare to come across a first book that embraces the world--the way we see it, and the way it can be imagined--with such a wise and graceful mixture of humor, loss, intelligence, wit, self-deprecation and hope. AMERICAN LINDEN is such a first collection. The poems in this book are valuable, even necessary. They are, in the most important sense, love poems: to people, to ideas, to feelings, and to the mind itself, which--by means of language--move with honesty, wit, and distinction among the fleeting things of this world. "Matthew Zapruder is a dangerous poet; his poems implicate us in demonstrations of lift-off and escape velocity while also proving the calamity of gravity"--Dean Young.

Poetry. In 2007, the Tupelo Press Poetry Project was established to provide poets and creative writing teachers with engaging, challenging prompts or provocations for writing new poems.The Winter 2012 edition of the Poetry Project celebrated Valentine's Day with a simple challenge: write a stunningly good erotic poem. Be bad. Be good and bad. To our delight, that challenge was met and then some. Sensual, witty, cerebral--the results are this anthology, modest in size only, which includes the winners, plus our favorites of the submissions.Contributors: Cynthia Rausch Allar, Michelle Bitting, Lisa Coffman, Amy Dryansky, Li Yun Alvarado, Paula Brancato, Gillian Cummings, Darla Himeles, Joel F. Johnson, Christopher Kokinos, Amy MacLennan, Stephen Massimilla, Barbara Mossberg, Susanna Rich, Aubrey Ryan, Anna Claire Hodge, Janet R. Kirchheimer, Conley Lowrance, Lea Marshall, Mary Ann Mayer, Steven Paschall, Liz Robbins, Jo Anne Valentine Simson, Jeneva Stone, Molly Spencer, Judith Terzi, Gail Thomas, Kim Triedman, Bruce Willard, and P. Ivan Young.

Chitwood's seventh collection of poems is tremendously varied in shape and pace, from terse, reflexive aphorisms to rangy narratives.

You Can Tell the Horse Anything is a debut collection of prose poems that explores the many manifestations of longing-true love, spiritual redemption, a good night's sleep, the list is long and varied. Using humor and lyricism, they give voice to an array of animals as well as human characters who inhabit the sometimes rocky terrain between the common place and the absurd. Ultimately, these poems - these tightly packed mini-dramas - are microcosms of our own everyday lives. They challenge our sense of self, our sense of belonging and comfort. They ask us to tread carefully in a world that is easily turned on its side. Yet, ironically, they also encourage us to be hopeful, to realize that solace and small joy can be found talking to a horse or raising worms on a moonlit mountain.

Poetry. In her second book, Jennifer Militello investigates the tensions of identity as a source of illness and health. BODY THESAURUS presents the human physique as a flawed conduit and, through poems highlighting symptoms, antidotes, and diagnostic tests, seeks alternate renderings for the complexities of self. Even as the endangered psyche supplies a filter, gods are confronted, maladies are faced, and actualities are marked, remembered, or lost. The beauty of struggle and the chance for redemption act as counterstream, increasingly evident and--again and again in the poet's verse--indisputably real.

In her Los Angeles Review of Books essay "Who Is Who: Pronouns, Gender, and Merging Selves," Dana Levin describes Stacey Waite's fusion of gender identities: "Pseudonyms, heteronyms, personae, all the ventriloquizing literary arts; point of view and tonal shifts: these are tools for speakers and speaking. But the sentence too has a voice: 'i will not be the kind of boy who can not bear the memory of her body' ... This is [Waite's] genius ... to take innocuous syntactical phrasing and change the players mid-sentence - to get around English's pronominal either/or by creating a syntactical both/and..."

To go without food from dawn to dusk for the month of Ramadan - how does this feel? When we deny our major appetites, what do we become? Kazim Ali brings a poet's precision and ardor to his brilliant meditations on ritual fasting.Jane Hirshfield, author of AFTER and NINE GATES, says: "Kazim Ali -- a writer whose powers astonish in everything he puts pen to -- has made in FASTING FOR RAMADAN a book that is hybrid, peregrine, and deeply, quietly revelatory. Ali's meditations on the month-long ritual fast unfold, across cultures and spiritual practices, the deep meaning of a chosen foregoing. These journal-born pages are both intimate and public, at once ecumenical, particular, daily, and eloquently learned; planted on the deep roots of tradition, they breathe this moment's air. Is it possible for a work to be at once modest and an undeniable tour de force? This book proves: it is."

Literary Nonfiction. Poetry. Editors Ilya Kaminsky and Katherine Towler have gathered conversations with nineteen of America's leading poets, reflecting upon their diverse experiences with spirituality and the craft of writing. Bringing together poets who are Christian, Buddhist, Jewish, Muslim, Pagan, Native American, Wiccan, agnostic, and otherwise, this book offers frank and thoughtful consideration of themes too often polarized and politicized in our society. Participants include Li-Young Lee, Jane Hirshfield, Carolyn Forche, Gerald Stern, Christian Wiman, Joy Harjo, and Gregory Orr, and others, all wrestling with difficult questions of human existence and the sources of art.