Books published by Unsolicited Press

The narrative of poetry and prose begins on the eve of Pearl Harbor. An old Croatian fisherman rows across Eagle Harbor on Bainbridge Island to light the kerosene lamps to guide the ferries in, as he does each night. Christmas lights decorate the cottages scattered around the harbor. The lights of Seattle glow to the east. A star falls "from the wayside of infinity."The next morning, a Sunday, brings the bombing of Pearl Harbor.The owners of the Bainbridge Island Review, Walt and Milly Woodward, work into the wee hours to publish a special edition. Walt Woodward reminds his neighbors, "I am positive every Japanese family on the Island has an intense loyalty for the United States of America and stands ready to defend it." Up and down the West Coast, however, hatred is stirring.Little more than two months later, President Franklin Roosevelt signs Executive Order 9066 authorizing the removal of people of Japanese ancestry from the West Coast of the United States.On March 30, 1942, 227 Japanese Americans from Bainbridge Island, under bayonet guard, are marched aboard the ferry Kehloken bound for Seattle and a train waiting to take them to Manzanar, a barbed-wire camp in the central California desert. Many of their island neighbors turned out to see them off. Not a few of them weep.The author, using historical sources and family recollections, has crafted a poetic narrative of one of the most conspicuous injustices in American history, and explores how the healing goes on.

MUSTERING WHAT'S LEFT spans forty years of Roger Aplon's career. The poetry collection is a historical investigation into Aplon's transformation as a writer. It's a evolution of spirit, style, and craft. Many of the early poems (especially - The Monologues) were cursed, celebrated, maligned &/but eventually acknowledged as 'in the spirit of their time'. Aplon captures image and tenor via an impressionistic rendering of the color and character of the world. Each rendering plays with voice and tone, generating a spectrum of speakers from one volume to the next. From the monological explorations in Stiletto to the impressionistic responses to contemporary music in Improvisations the rhythms & images Aplon has chosen were meant to encourage the curious reader to respond viscerally - maybe touching a nerve that might otherwise remain innocent.

WALKING NATURAL PATHWAYS is eclectic, each section its own ecosystem. Doherty pays special attention to the natural world, celebrating it with diverse and stylistic poems. It was the wettest spring on recordAnd the spring storm alpine rain was melting snow,With the churning muddy watersEven the biggest dam was on the verge.

What if you could look at your favorite play, novel, or poem in a whole new way? In S.R. Stewart's collection Essays:An Analysis of Traditional and Marginal Literature, she gives you just that, and then some. Essays looks at English favorites such as Beowulf, The Dream Songs, and Pride and Prejudice through a microscope tuned in to the marginal groups of those works. Stewart talks women. She talks sexuality. And more importantly, she talks about the subversion of those who are often left out of the conversation until somebody (ahem, Ivory Tower) deems them important. Of the women in Beowulf, she writes, "Wealhtheow, Grendel's Mother, and Hildeburh...these women entertain, bring peace, and contradict societal expectations of the female gender, either directly or indirectly. Women fall into these roles because the male-dominated society does not allow for women to venture out into other archetypes. The roles of the hostess and the peacemaker are inherent to the conditioned female nature, while the monster is the unmodified female in her natural state of being." Essays is the perfect companion book for the university classroom, aspiring scholars, home educators, and writers alike. Stewart worked in conjunction with Unsolicited Press and her company If You Give a Girl a Book to build the collection out of her desire to help others -- all proceeds from the book will be donated to Smart Oregon, a literacy group in Oregon dedicated to building confidence in children's reading skills.

When Lavinia Starkhurst's husband is killed in a freak accident, she takes to the open road and meets a number of strangers, all with struggles of their own. Through these unexpected and occasionally hilarious encounters, Lavinia reflects on her past deeds, both good and bad, explores her two marriages, her roles as caregiver and wife, hoping all the while for self-acceptance and something to give her new life meaning.

When a painter struggles to sell his work, with his career waning, he chooses to paint nudes. Jim Read's THE MOLLYBUSH NUDE grasps at ideas we all ask ourselves: how did life get this way?Bill Burnon, a sixty-three-year-old landscape painter, and Marion Barkley, a fifty-nine-year-old diner owner are separated by six hundred kilometres of highway. Nevertheless, they are as close as the wind on a spider's web. Bill and Marion have loved each other passionately since they were seventeen and thirteen, but only in a limited measure: always a summer, a modest stretch of some months, shorter or longer depending on their unfailing ability to irritate the heck out of each other.When Bill's gallery manager suggests painting nudes to give his career a much-needed boost, he goes with it. He plans to paint a series of nudes. Deeply, Bill wants to paint Marion, but when he approaches her about the notion, she rebuffs him -- her rejection forces him to find another model.Turmoil and jealousy haunt their love when Bill selects Libby for his paintings. She's younger. She's mysterious. She's troubled. A friendship develops between Bill and Libby as Bill wrestles with his new artistic endeavour. What happens next, nobody in Mollybush could've expected.