Sky Under the Roof

Poems

by Hilda Downer

Hilda Downer's poems in Sky Under The Roof  affected me deeply. The poems are powerful expressions of hard truths of human life. They are beautiful, sophisticated, brave poems that do not flinch from the challenges of living and of writing. Grounded in details of Appalachian life and land, Hilda Downer's poems are products of a good heart, mature sensibility and developed talent. These poems have moved me and taught me about things I thought I knew but didn't. –Gurney Norman (former Poet Laureate of Kentucky)

Hilda Downer’s splendid new book of poems does just what its title promises. It magically melds the realm of the natural world – its mystery, its unbridled impulse toward the sacred – with the daily offices of domestic life deep in the mountains of Downer’s beloved Appalachia….Sky Under the Roof  brings it all back, restored, and rarified in the preternatural light of Downer’s dazzling poetry. –Joseph Bathanti (Poet Laureate of North Carolina)

126 pages...$ 16.00 (special $15.00 and free shipping from Bottom Dog Press)

Hilda  Downer

 

 

Green-Silver and Silent: Poems

"Marc Harshman knows these people, these places, and he has the wisdom of someone who knows when to be quiet, when to watch, and listen, so that he can come to us and tell these heart-felt stories. These poems earn their keep, weaving together the physical and spiritual worlds in a landscape that can both sustain us and break our hearts."  -Jim Daniels, author of Show and Tell: Selected Poems

 *Nominated for a Pushcart Prize

                                             Author Marc Harshman



American Poet: A Novel

by Jeff Vande Zande

"This coming-of-age tale centers on a young poet, who is ill-prepared for and frustrated by the hometown he returns to, where he fights with his father and with himself. Set against the backdrop of a broken city and   a failed relationship, the novel champions poetry and the underdog--whether it be our seemingly-incompetent narrator, a baseball team, or a failing non-profit. With American Poet, Jeff Vande Zande has written a love poem for the city of Saginaw, and, by extension, a love poem for Flint, Gary, Cleveland, or any forgotten city in the Rust Belt."   --Gina Myers

  Winner of the  Saginaw Valley State University’s Stuart and Vernice Gross Award for Excellence in Writing by a Michigan Author

Read Article About Award.

"Jeff Vande Zande’s new novel, American Poet, is an important book—a tour de force. It seems to do everything that an excellent novel does. Consider this: A good book tightly grips its target readers and holds onto them to the end. Some good books make their main points so well that in the end readers not only clearly see what the author is saying, but also agree. But really great books respect the reader’s intelligence and leave us thinking new things or seeing old things in new ways. A synthesis takes place in our mind and we close the book realizing it has provided a truly enriching experience. Simply put: American Poet is a success." -Sally  D. Ketchum, New York Journal of Books

160 pgs.  $16.00

Author Jeff Vande Zande 

The Homegoing: A Novel

Michael Olin-Hitt

Healings. Snake handlers. Stills. Quotes from the Bible. Family feuds. Chicken coops. Speaking in tongues. Indian medicine bags. Laying outs. Intergenerational rivalry. Forty lashes of hot wax. Old-fashioned tent revivals. Michael Olin-Hitt, in The Homegoing, has, with skillful writing and a true knowledge of home, combined the aura of the mid-twentieth-century Appalachia of southern Ohio with the puzzle of a mysterious disappearance and the solving of a family mystery. Read and enjoy.
-- Jane Piirto, author of Saunas and A Location in the Upper Peninsula.

In our Appalachian Writing Series...180 pages...$17

Review in New Southerner

Michael Olin-Hitt 

Early Review:

"Much of Bryner's writing speaks of things she could not talk about before she became a writer.  As she says in "Why the Nurse Retired Early," she needed time to go over her life, to come to understand the truths she was too busy to see in the thick of things, to go "to the altar of my desk asking for words to paint what's sacred."  She tells the truth in the most exact and tough images.  They have a spiritual rightness to them, even as they make you wince. " NYU Medicine and Humanities

 *Nominated for a Pushcart Prize

  96 pages  $15

Jeanne Bryner 

These poems breathe the West—the love of the land, the hard prices paid in blood, water, and soil—but also they breathe the spirit of a man who gave a way of seeing to a young girl; this seeing now alive with adventure, love, and family in these beautifully crafted poems.               –Jan Beatty, author of Red Sugar

There’s a lot of room to breathe in the West and, using family stories, her naturalist father’s journals, and her own clear-eyed memories, Norman evokes its vastness with stunning imagery and sonorous lines. I am both delighted and taught by these wild and welcome poems.    – Maggie Anderson, author of  Windfall:

                                                                         Liane Ellison Norman

                          Winner of the Wisteria Prize for poetry in 2006

 *Nominated for a Pushcart Prize

As Read by Garrison Keillor on Writers' Almanaci

Give a listen.

Kenneth Patchen

The Definitive biography of

American author and artist.

Selected Correspondence of Kenneth Patchen

Edited and Introduction by Allen Frost

Foreword by Larry Smith

With 30 illustrations & photos from the correspondents:

Harvey Breit - E.E. Cummings - James T. Farrell - Lawrence Ferlinghetti - James Laughlin- Henry Miller - Miriam Patchen - Kenneth Rexroth -Wallace Stevens - Dylan Thomas - Leon Trotsky - Amos Wilder - Thomas Wolfe - Jasper Wood, and many others others

 

"Reading Patchen is a profound literary experience, an absolute delighting in humanity’s possibilities yet also a despondence, sometimes even anger, over our shortcomings.  These themes play themselves out here in Patchen’s impassioned letters to such friends and colleagues as Henry Miller, E.E. Cummings, Wallace Stevens, et. al.  To read this correspondence is to be astonished by Patchen’s insatiable quest for all that is good in life, a quest that led him from proletarianism to concretism to jazz to painted poems.  Embrace hope, ye who enter here."  –Eckhard Gerdes, editor of Journal of Experimental Fiction

In perfect bound ($18)  and hard cover with dustjacket ($28)

See Hard Cover Order below.

Review in New York Journal of Books

Review in England's  ShadowTrain by Ian Seed

Nominated for a New York Book Show Award

         She Who Is Like a Mare:

Poems of Mary Breckinridge and the Frontier Nursing Service

"The skillfully rendered dramatic monologues of Karen Kotrba’s She Who is Like a Mare document the remarkable history of the Frontier Nursing Service in eastern Kentucky in the early twentieth century...She has brought to light a little known piece of women’s history--a story of cunning, courage, and caring- and has done so with unforgettable imagery, beautiful music, and love.  This is a book I want to keep near me and reread, to remind myself of what is still possible in poetry and in our lives."

                                        -Maggie Anderson

 "No matter / what the weather nor how far the cabin, / we must go"  the nurse midwives tell us in these poems.  And through the capable hands of Karen Kotrba’s artistry, we saddle up, heave ourselves into the night’s saddle and ride off to Kentucky’s back country.  In this book we witness the birthing of Mary Breckinridge’s vision for healthcare delivery. These well-crafted poems reconstruct a community of women pushing the boundaries of their lives.

                                             -Jeanne Bryner

 *Nominated for a Pushcart Prize

 Author Karen Kotrba    

---

  Broken Collar: A Novel

by Ron Mitchell

"Ron Mitchell’s writing weaves an authentic working-class world of sinners and saints. From the first paragraph, one feels pulled in, swept up, as though called to the text like a priest to the collar."  -Jeff Vande Zande, author of the novel American Poet

"In Ron Mitchell’s capable hands, the story of a priest’s return to the steel mill village and people of his youth takes on aching, redemptive qualities. It turns gritty and exuberant, Broken Collar draws us into the turmoil of one man's longing for both the heavens and the heart."   -Lori DeBoer, author and director of the Boulder Writer’s Workshop

 Author, Ron Mitchell  

              "When it comes to novels written about boot camp life in the United States military, nothing compares to Robert Flanagan's revealing and wonderfully written classic, Maggot." 

                                                 -Donald Ray Pollock                                                                      



A thousand miles from the nearest war zone--in a foreign country call the U.S. Marine Corps, a few good men are finding out what living hell is all about. The place: Parris Island, S.C. The time: basic training. For Tom Adamczyk and Joe Waite--two of the seventy raw recruits of Platoon 197--it's a bizarre and violent journey into degradation, fear, and confusion under the onslaught of drill instructor Sgt. Maguire. Maguire is out to turn lowly maggots into Marines--and he'll use any means he can. But when Maguire crosses the line between cruelty and sadism, and an official investigation is launched, each man is forced to make a choice between the truth and a lie. And for Adamczyk and Waite the choice will shape the rest of their lives--not as maggots, or Marines, but as men.


    Author Robert Flanagan

The Pattern Maker's Daughter

 Poems

Sandee Gertz Umbach

 “The Pattern Maker's Daughter is a remarkable debut collection full of honesty, wisdom, and heart. Like a fine photographer, the author has empathy for her subjects, an eye for the telling detail, and a commitment to the truth….These are simply the stories we tell each other to stay alive.” -Jim Daniels

                   90 pages of poems of place and person.

Sandee's Facebook Page for the Book

 Author Sandee Gertz Umbach  

 The Free Farm

A Novel by Larry Smith

In this sequel to his The Long River Home novel, the characters move on into the turbulence and idealism of the late 1960s and early 1970s on an Appalachian farm commune.

"Forbidden love. Counter-culture. The shadow of Vietnam. Sexual revolution. Social unrest. Marijuana and LSD. In this intriguing coming-of-age novel by Larry Smith, The Free Farm, we journey back to America’s turbulent late 60s and early 70s…. Smith provides a unique window into Lee’s young life that is driven by idealism, love of Emerson and Thoreau, and devotion to his beautiful partner, who practices Zen, meditates, and can fix cars….In this realistic yet often surprising and tender novel, a quoted line from 'The Waking' by Theodore Roethke serves as a guidepost: 'I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow/ I feel my fate in what I cannot fear/ I learn by going where I have to go.'"              ~ Laura Treacy Bentley, author of Lake Effect

YouTube Video of A Reading from The Free Farm

 Larry Smith Homepage

*Nominated for a Pushcart Prize 2011

 Author Larry Smith 

Sinners of Sanction County: Stories

by Charles Dodd White

 Fine stories of character and place set

in the South

In our Working Lives and Appalachia Writing Series

Sinners of Sanction County is one of the best story collections to come out of the American South in recent times. Writing in a spare, poetic style that fairly crackles with energy, Charles Dodd White makes his mark as a major new talent as he masterfully explores the raw beauty and pathos of life among tough people caught in bad situations. With this book, he has nailed the coonskin to the wall.      -- Donald Ray Pollock, author of The Devil All The Time and Knockemstiff

Early Reviews:

"True, Hawkins buried his son more than once that summer," begins "Hawkins' Boy," the lead story in Sins of Sanction County. "Buried" is the key foreshadowing in this first line because the subsequent stories are full of attempts to bury the past and the dead and, sometimes, entomb the living. White renders stories that burrow deep to the pit of private pain, revealing an ever-burning blaze too powerful to battle that we should quietly let engulf us, and learn to suffer the eventual scarring.

Although White's sensibilities will surely evoke similarities to fellow Southern writers as Ron Rash and William Gay, I felt his kinship more in line with Walt Whitman, who, like White, extoled in the ecstatic naturalism of the world, supplanting the inherent foibles of human nature with the disinterested glory of everlasting nature as elicited in this passage from "Hawkin's Boy" ~Matt Baker, Oxford America

“So I will say it in simple language: Buy this book. Read this book. It is masterful. It is one of the best short story collections published this year. It should win a bushel-full of awards. . . . Mr. White exposes that which has a truth beyond the limits of language. He leads us to understand that we are all sinners; and, there is no redemption save that of his beautiful words proclaiming us so.”  ~Debra Leigh Scott (New York Journal of Books)

Read an excerpt: "The Hawkins's Boy"

Charles Dodd White Homepage

Fresh Review of Sinners in Southern Literary Review

Newest Review in Smoky Mountain News

*Nominated for a Pushcart Prize 2011

*Nominated for Weatherford Award as

Best Book of Fiction about Appalachia 2011

 Author Charles Dodd White  

Learning How: Stories, Yarns & Tales

by Richard Hague

22 Stories, Yarns, & Tales, rich in character, voice,

and landscape.

"The fiction in this collection is as comforting as it is challenging, as familiar as it is surprising, and, in all of the aspects that matter to the serious reader of literature, it is thoroughly satisfying." 

               -Chris Holbrook, author of Upheaval 

In our Working Lives and Appalachia Writing Series

Early Reviews

 “. . . a story about storytelling can be about both what’s true and what ought to be true. Mr. Hague’s studied delivery, vivid color descriptions, and sense of place imagery make Learning Howa storyteller’s delight.”

Review in New York Journal of Books...Aug.5, 2011

Review in Appalachian Journal

*Nominated for a Pushcart Prize 2011

*Nominated for Weatherford Award as

Best Book of Fiction about Appalachia 2011

 Author Richard Hague 

Our Best Seller...Two Years Running

Short Stories of Contemporary Appalachia

 

Recent Review in Now and Then magazine: "What this collection presents is an often painful reality that has its own beauty...This is an all-star line-up of stories."

Writers include: Rusty Barnes,  Sheldon Lee Compton, Jarrid Deaton, Richard Hague, Silas House, Chris Holbrook, Denton Loving, Mindy Beth Miller, John McManus, Jim Nichols, Valerie Nieman, Chris Offutt, Mark Powell, Ron Rash, Alex Taylor, Crystal Wilkinson

"Hard, brilliant, and dark as coal, this brand new and necessary volume captures Appalachia today, a place where the old bedrock verities of family, community, belief, work, and the earth itself are all in painful “Upheaval”---to use the title of Chris Holbrook’s story herein. From manic to elegiac to rough, raw, beautiful, and heartbreaking,  these stories will strike the reader as both absolutely true and as unforgettable, like the high pure ring of an ax on a cold winter morning, vibrating across distance, hanging in the air long afterward." -Lee Smith, author of Saving Grace

 The Big Book of Daniel:

Collected Poems of Daniel

Thompson

Edited by Maj Ragain with a Foreword

Here at last is the collected works of Daniel Thompson, poet laureate of Cuyahoga County, a poet of great heart who served the people of his community. 

 "Thompson was a larger-that-life character. He fought and wrote for the homeless, the helpless, and the disenfranchised. He had a wicked sense of humor and an anti-authority streak a mile wide...the poet known for his generosity to other poets." -Michael Heaton, Cleveland Plain Dealer

Daniel had what Robert Frost called a lover’s quarrel with the world, as well as with his country and his Comeback City, Cleveland. . . .We hear the snap, crackle and pop of his wit playing against the weight of the world. . . .Some of his most memorable poems come out of the quarrel with himself, that dark honey, tinged with the metallic taste of loss, the old wars of the heart. . . .Daniel Thompson was a man who, as Whitman said of himself, was 'not contained between his hat and his boots’….  Daniel's last gift to us, his life's work, what he gathered in his sixty-nine years, over three hundred pages of poems, is this book, this big jug of honey, which you have in your hands.  Taste and see.   From the “Foreword” by Maj Ragain 

*Nominated for a Pushcart Prize 2011

The Long River Home

A Novel by Larry Smith

In this fine Appalachian novel, Larry Smith chronicles four generations of McCalls, their joys and sorrows, their sins and their nobility….Such regional fiction has always been about people: their connections with one another, their home place, their struggles to survive and to prosper. It’s all here, set, in the grand tradition of Wendell Berry and Conrad Richter, against the Ohio landscape: its hills and its rivers, its frontier beginnings and its later industrial development. We care about the place and its people. Finishing the novel, we understand ourselves and our nation with a deeper knowledge.
        -Annabel Thomas, author of Stone Man Mountain
 

On the Clock: Contemporary Short Stories on Work

Edited by Jeff Vande Zande & Josh Maday

978-1-933964-38-6     188 pgs. $16

 
On the Clock:

Contemporary Short Stories of Work

Edited by Jeff Vande Zande and Josh Maday

188 pages of fiction about our working lives

by some of our top writers:

Jim Daniels, Bonnie Jo Campbell, Daniel Orozco, Kennebrew Surant,Rick Attig, Lolita Hernandez, Michael Martone, Matthew Salesses, Matt Bell, M. Kaat Toy, Sean Lovelace, Billie Louise Jones, Lita Kurth, Anne Shewring, Dustin M. Hoffman, Tania Hershman, Nick Kocz, Michael Zadoorian, Steve Himmer, Peter Anderson, Pete Fromm

Jeff Vande Zande has spent most of his life in Michigan, where the talk is always of jobs, loss of jobs, and the beauty of the landscape. His books include a novel, Into the Desperate Country (March Street Press), a collection, Poems New, Used, and Rebuilds (March Street Press) and, also a short story collection, Emergency Stopping and Other Stories (Bottom Dog Press). He lives in Midland with wife, son, and daughter and teaches English and writing at Delta College.

Jeff Vande Zande's new novel is a wonderful contemporary working-class story.  This crafted story is an engaging page-turner filled with keen detailing and vivid style. Landscape with Fragmented Figures is the real deal--an intense story about real people involved in day-to-day life experiences that readers will identify with and relate to their own neighborhoods and Midwest houses, not in New York, LA or Chicago. This is a novel full of working-class heart and soul that will appeal to all readers.” 
           -M.L. Liebler, author of Wide Awake in Someone Else’s Dream

 Recent review, interview, excerpt.

ISBN 978-1-933964-23-2  234 pages. $16.00