Books published by Verse Chorus Press

From the author of lnsectopedia, a powerful exploration of loss, grief, endurance, and the absences that permeate the present.Unconformities are gaps in the geological record, physical evidence of breaks in time. For Hugh Raffles, these holes in history are also fissures in feeling, knowledge, memory, and understanding. In this endlessly inventive, riveting book, Raffles enters these gaps, drawing together threads of geology, history, literature, philosophy, and ethnography to trace the intimate connections between personal loss and world historical events, and to reveal the force of absence at the core of contemporary life.Through deeply researched explorations of Neolithic stone circles, Icelandic lava, mica from a Nazi concentration camp, petrified whale blubber in Svalbard, the marble prized by Manhattan's Lenape, and a huge Greenlandic meteorite that arrived in New York City along with six Inuit adventurers in 1897, Raffles shows how unconformities unceasingly incite human imagination and investigation yet refuse to conform, heal, or disappear.A journey across eons and continents, The Book of Unconformities is also a journey through stone: this most solid, ancient, and enigmatic of materials, it turns out, is as lively, capricious, willful, and indifferent as time itself.

Mother Paul, June Wright¿s beloved nun-detective, returns to her sleuthing ways after she takes up a new position as warden of a student hall of residence at the University of Melbourne.No sooner has Judith Mornane arrived on campus than she startles her fellow residents by announcing her intention to discover the murderer of her sister, who disappeared from the same dorm a year earlier. The ever-curious Mother Paul is drawn to investigate what happened to Judith¿s sister¿did she simply run off for reasons best known to herself, as the police concluded, or could it be she really was murdered? Was her disappearance perhaps linked to a tragedy that happened at around the same time¿the accidental drowning (in her bathtub) of the wife of one of the college¿s professors? Was that drowning in fact as accidental as the official investigation suggested?Mother Paul believes the two events are connected somehow, and a further tragedy, the faked-suicide death of one of her student charges, convinces her that a particularly cruel and clever murderer is still at work within the college. She is not above a little subterfuge in the interest of discovering the truth and moves her colleagues, the students, and even the police around like so many figures on a chessboard until finally, amid high drama, the murderer is revealed.

A new collection of essays from this acclaimed critic on photographers, musicians, artists, and writers (from Patti Smith to Weegee to David Wojnarowicz). Most of the pieces have a strong autobiographical element and sense of place, the Lower East Side of New York City where the author came of age in the fertile 1970s/80s. He traces his engagement with music and photography, his experience of the city, and his development as an artist and observer, in a series of articles that range from memoir to essay, fiction to critical analysis, humour to poetry.

A definitive portrait of the 80s/90s indie-rock music scene in the form of 60 profiles/interviews and many rare photographs. This collection takes as starting points the psychodramas of Throwing Muses and the proto-slacker anthems of Camper Van Beethoven, and follows them through to the critical triumphs of Sleater-Kinney and Neutral Milk Hotel over a decade later, taking in such pioneering artists as P.J. Harvey, Sonic Youth, Pixies, Bikini Kill, Nick Cave, Beck, Cat Power, Pavement, Sebadoh, Breeders, Jeff Buckley, Belle & Sebastian, Hole, Magnetic Fields, and many more.