"I’ve always wondered why the sixties are so hard to write about.  But Susan Streeter Carpenter proves it can be done with equal parts insight, generosity, and honesty. Her evocation of the time is among the best I've seen."
-Karen Joy Fowler, author of The Jane Austen Book Club

Susan teaches at Bluffton University in Ohio; she has received an Ohio Arts Council
Fellowship in fiction writing.

                978-1-933964-35-3    404 pgs.  $18.00   

             Photo of young Susan in Washington 1968

“Erika Meyers brings a startlingly original and honest voice to contemporary fiction. Her characters are as various and fascinating as the rats, groundhogs, and cockroaches who inhabit the dark hidden corners of their homes and lives. In this admirably thoughtful and intelligent novel she explores the shifting boundaries between human and animal, the acceptable and the repulsive, insiders and outsiders, with a wry and captivating humour. A truly original, entertaining, first novel.”  -Eilis Ni Dhuibhne, author of The Dancers Dancing

 “Strangers in America is a fascinating, richly textured novel. ‘Peoples lives can be very different from the inside,’ the narrator states early on. And that’s just where this finely crafted novel brings us–inside lives. These lives, however, are no run-of-the-mill, nor indeed are the ways in which they are explored and exposed. They are the lives of people on the edge, anonymous small timers, people who struggle daily against the often overwhelming tide of disadvantage. It is a heroic novel, unflinching in the face of cruelty and exploitation, conspicuously un-preachy and most memorably–deeply caring. Erika Meyers is deserving of all the plaudits that will, no doubt, come her way.”James Ryan, author of Seeds of Doubt

Erika Meyers is a native on northeast Ohio. She received her B.A. in English Literature
at Kent State University in 2006 and is completing her Masters in Creative Writing at the University College Dublin in Dublin, Ireland. Her work has appeared in numerous literary magazines including Bateau, Paradigm, and The Blue Collar Review, where she received the first place prize in their Working People’s Poetry Competition. This is her first book.

Reply to an Eviction Notice
Selected Poems

Robert Flanagan

Flanagan wins me with his rich humor and compassion, his keen ear and sharp eye, his technical skill, his ability to slam a poem shut with a crash, his way with simile and metaphor. Here is a rich, long overdue gathering of Flanagan’s finest and most insightful poems, the harvest of four decades. Open this book and you just might find it irresistible. – X. J. Kennedy

These intelligent, sharply focused poems recall a gritty past of rented apartments (“cramped endurances”), “cracked tar,” the fight game, and turf wars in scenes of working class urban America, 1950s.  But this poet is also at ease with the natural world as he sinks his roots in the river beds of Ohio, dreaming “peace for his children,” flashing forward to insights of a life lived through…I greet this strong and moving book with admiration and joy.     – Colette Inez

Robert Flanagan was born and raised in Toledo, Ohio. A graduate of the University of Toledo and the University of Chicago, he taught at Ohio Wesleyan University where he directed the creative writing program. Flanagan has published the novel Maggot, three collections of short stories, five chapbooks of poetry, as well as essays and reviews. He has had two stage plays produced professionally and two screenplays produced as independent films. He and his wife Katy live in Delaware, Ohio, where they raised their two daughters, Anne and Nora.

*Nominated for a Pushcart Prize 2009

978-1-933964-28-7   104 pgs.  $15.00

Beautiful Rust

Ken Meisel

Ken Meisel’s got the beat in his hit parade of Motown poems.I love his long lines and smoky fires, the effect gravity has on the living and the dead. His Purgatorio includes Marvin Gaye, an echo of better times painted onto a billboard overlooking the freeway and Dubois Street. Meisel is interested in the music of “grassy fields and abandoned places...wild pheasants and drunks.” He is our modern Virgil taking us through the Rinaldo Arms Manor. Read him and be saved.   —Russell Thorburn, author of The Drunken Piano

Ken Meisel is a poet and a psychotherapist. He was born on the west side of Detroit and educated in the Detroit Public Schools. He earned his post graduate degrees in Detroit. Ken Meisel’s father played big band jazz with Sam Donahue’s Orchestra, in Black Bottom, on Hasting Street in the 1930’s and 1940’s. Ken Meisel grew up listening to those stories. This is his fifth book of poetry and first for Bottom Dog Press.Profits from this book will go to the Inside Out Literary Arts Project in Detroit.

96 pages 978-1-933964-32-4  $15.00