Books published by Urban Farmhouse Press

Finlay''s poems are the works of a person who has traveled the world in search of himself and his place in it. He is a Midwestern poet in the sense that his poems hide narratives that seek honesty above all else, and he is not a Midwestern poet in the sense that he doesn''t apologize for the truth when it is found. Mammoths draws from his experiences and from a wide survey of human history to make us look at someone who isn''t quite at home yet, exploring themes of place, memory and history. His collection often rejects the division between personal history and objective world history, instead opting for a hyper-local reinterpretation of the stories we tell about the world.

In Mark Luebbers debut poetry collection, he frames his discussion with the condition of "flat light." A condition that makes it more difficult to see surfaces and details in contrast, distorts distances, and reduces color values. In order to see well in flat light, one must learn to see "without eyes." And in these poems Luebbers uses this more encompassing poetic vision to reconsider boundaries between wildlife and humanity,the depth of artists and their lives, and the manner that all of it touches the familiarity of our lives.

When Erdem Çelikta┼ƒ, a writer from Turkey, wakes one day to find he can no longer speak or understand anything but English, his life is overturned. While Erdem’s native Turkish has always held him as father, author, and political activist in a familiar light, Erdem’s English mind offers an altered perspective, awareness, even character. With no explanation or cure to be found, Erdem must find a way to reframe his thoughts, his work, even his memories in order to understand his fractured world.Mother Tongue is an elegant journey that examines how we may be shaped and reshaped by language. Üstündag creates a clever and bittersweet pilgrimage of empathy and change, quietly shining light on the overwhelming isolation of the immigrant, the refugee, and the traveler.

In this compact collection of new short fiction we witness a spectacle of creation from the profound and the everyday. From the central position of video games in our world to free-roaming magical rabbits these enrapturing pieces of new storytelling afford us both mediatations of grand subjects as well as engaged and entertaining storytelling. Immerse yourself in one of the newest voices in fiction from the Rocky Mountain West.

A horseback riding accident in June, 1973 leaves Buddy Scott, the central character in The Way to Go Home, with a broken body in a remote ravine. As he awaits rescue, thinking that his life is about to end, his mind wanders into his past. His journey began at age thirteen, when he was suddenly orphaned along with eight other siblings. Unable to keep their Wyoming ranch, Buddy and his older brother, Ray, stay with an uncle, which turns out to be a harrowing ordeal that ends with them running away. What ensues is a road-adventure story that crosses the United States over a period of years. As drifters, Buddy and Ray encounter a host of engaging and unusual characters-from the poorest to the most elite, from shysters and connivers to decent folk. When Ray leaves to go back to the west, Buddy lands in Canada, where he finally sets down roots in the hopes of finding a place for himself. The idealized "home" inscribed deep in his heart through the stories of his childhood is not the one he makes for himself in Southern Ontario. A drifter's past and the scrappy lifestyle that accompanied it leads him off course, and he falls into self-destructive behaviour. His wife Meg and his four children can't restore something he lost long ago, and until he seeks his own personal redemption Buddy can not find a sense of belonging. Home is not where he thought it would be.

Borrowing its title from astronomy, the counterglow is a faint light in the night sky that appears directly opposite the sun. Made up of interplanetary dust, this glow is difficult to detect unless one observes from a place without light. These lyric poems of Patricia Killelea speak from this darkness as she seeks a language of redemption- some kind of brightness to cling to, however faint. Spanning terrains of spiritual and literal hunger, where ecological and personal crisis intertwine, this collection is an unwavering affirmation of the power of words in the face of wordlessness.

In Black Magic Death Sphere: (science) fictions a young man cites his obsession with the creation of alternate universes as a rationalization for not answering his girlfriend's marriage proposal; James Franco travels to the edge of the universe where he meets a slightly different version of himself with whom he lives out the rest of his life; a man, snowed in at his hotel, meets a future version of himself who has questionable intentions; and the famous Schrödinger's Cat thought experiment comes to life in the form of a Choose Your Own Adventure story. These are just a few of the genre-bending tales contained within this weird, funny, and anxious set of mind-blown and broken-hearted science fiction stories.

Lakeville has fallen on hard times. But don’t tell that to the locals: There’s the former blues guitar player who never opens his case. The snake wrangler who worries about the bad intentions of his wife’s artsy friends. The firefighter who fears retirement more than death. And the grandmother who is determined to hike to the top of Fernridge Mountain. Their intersecting stories, a full stringer of unfulfilled dreams and missed opportunities, are the kind of “fish tales” best told over a pint at Bebe’s Tavern or in boat on Grady’s Lake during those quiet moments before dusk.

In the quaint shoreline town of Mystick, Connecticut, an ancient order has existed since the first violent conflicts between indigenous peoples and foreign settlers. Founded by gray-haired womyn who wanted to ensure that violence was never repeated, these Grays continue to run the town. Once you have joined them, you can't turn back. When Snowy Strangeways returns to Mystick for her grandmother's Gray funeral, she unearths information about the circumstances of her mother's murder and unveils the secrets of these Gray womyn, once and for all.

Plimsoll Lines are the marks on the side of a ship's hull to which vessels can be safely loaded. These words become lyric and capture the "unbearable lightness" of the poetic word coupled with the playful metaphor of floating. Mounsef utilizes both these individual poems and the overall collection to drift the reader around themes of wandering, water, and wanting. The collection argues in favor of a return to the word and cultural meditations of language, politics, and the body in a world dominated by the visual and the mediated. Mounsef pushes past borders and combines the abstraction of French, the symbolism of Arabic, and the immediacy of English in a grand tour of the places that poetry can bring the reader.

Welcome to the Federation of the Hub, an interstellar mosaic of governments and people. When ancient living biological machines suddenly begin to move after millennia of inaction many of the Hub’s most powerful people and groups begin vying for the secret locked in these machines. Enter Trigger Argee, the closest associate of the man who first discovered these machines, Holati Tate. Tate has disappeared and she must find him and solve the mystery of these machines and their creators. Doing so will be no easy task as she is worth a great deal, dead or alive, to more than one of the numerous factions as the galaxy battles over the secrets these machines must contain.

Kenneth Pobo’s seventh collection of poetry, Booking Rooms in Kuiper Belt, brings the reader from the Earth through the solar system and back with an uproarious lyric tour through otherworldly bodies and the everyday of life on earth. Bejewelled with homages to some of literature’s greats and with the beauty of our everyday world, Pobo’s collection holds out a consistent loving nod to our world and beyond.  

In his debut poetry collection, Marvin Shackelford brings you through the slow building that is life. From foundations hard laid during youth in Tennessee through expansive highway promises of the middle portions of America, the everyday is mingled with the profound. This is the steady and endless building of a lifetime from the underlying violence of youth to the vast spaces and promises and disappointments that make up the physical body of America. Shackelford''s poems will bring you through the spiritual, the earthly, and the profoundly personal in the recognition that as with all things in this world, we are simply in a process of Endless Building.

One of the Midwest’s finest slam poets, Osayande brings his work to the written page and delivers a lyric exploration of everyday life in Detroit in his debut full-length collection Class. In his voice you can hear and feel the lineage of some of Detroit’s finest poetic voices, stretching back to David Blair, Murray Jackson, and Naomi Long Madgett. He captures the rhythms, images, and deepest meditations of life both hardscrabble and painfully beautiful in a fashion that calls us to know that survival is much more about living than cowering in fear. As a teacher Osayande brings us before his classrooms, let’s us linger on the experiences and moments of growing up in a city that feels lost amidst the promises of America, and takes us through the high cost of being black in a place where the colour of one’s skin can deliver a trauma that only the strongest can survive. His poems show us the Detroit that has always been here. Both heartbreaking and empowering the poems in this collection ask the reader to consider the America that is kept hidden from Prime Time television, that carries on because it must, and understands that the act of speaking is the best therapy and resistance that one can offer to a world given at best to indifference and at worst insidious violence.