Books published by Wet Cement Press

"People have long told stories like our story but most never quite as long." And so begins Earl S. Braggs complex jazz memoir of growing up black and poor in rural North Carolina. What is long about Braggs'' story is not its length but how deeply the roots of race and history reach through the narrative in every unexpected direction. From the haphazard pleasures of a childhood in a rural shack in segregated "fishtown" to the civil unrest of Wilmington NC in the Civil Rights Era to the poet''s coming of age as a writer in San Francisco. In the midst of familiar injustices, Braggs blows open our conceptions about good and bad, revealing violence where we expect safety and friendships where we expect derision. A white man presses a revolver into the boy''s head, the bookmobile lady stops so he can get on. While the borders of Hampstead were segregated black and white, the design of this narrative never is.

Wilson Wiley Variations is an extraordinary work of imagination that brings the losses of everyday life and death into a field of perception that opens the underlying tenets of oft hidden languages of love. It's a brilliant manifestation of a poetry we need-uncovering the layers of invisible perception which can distort; yet in the hands of a master ultimately reveal an awesome beauty of a redemptive freeing of what it means to be alive, and finally home. Thoreau Lovell's Wilson Wiley Variations creates a naming that itself becomes light.--John High author of Vanishing Acts (Tailsman House)

Saraswati’s Lament conjures the Hindu goddess of poetry, in forms both sacred and profane; exploring how she speaks of every woman who questions what it means to love and create. Written over the course of a year spent alone in Bali, the poems here are part travelogue, part folktale, and part personal inquiry into the nature of marriage and exile. Weaving together images from traditional Balinese literature with contemporary scenes of the island’s exploitation by the tourist industry, Saraswati’s Lament questions what we lose and what we gain, when we leave our history behind.

Michelle Murphy knows how to 'unzip the stringed heart and strum it naked,' harmonizing the noise of the blood with the news of memory. Murphy's deep song awakens a fabulist dreamscape where broken pieces of lived experience unexpectedly fit together. The homecoming that happens in Murphy's poetry is the wild coincidence of word and world.Andrew Joron author of The Absolute Letter (Flood Editions)

Ousted by his girlfriend, Nick takes himself–and his bicycle–to New Orleans, where he sulks and cycles, prey to vivid dreams and anxieties. Along with an antiquated interest in letter-writing, he shows an unexpected knack for collage. But undercurrents of racial and sexual disharmony alarm him on his wobbly journeys around town, and even the dogs seem critical.Anthony Schlagel is a subtle, engaging, artistic writer: risky, frisky, and very funny. My Dog, Me is a striking tale of being a loose cannon at a loose end. It presents a wholly new, and honest, take on what it is to be American–and every American should know about it.--Lucy Ellmann, author of Mimi (Bloomsbury)