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.

 

  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

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

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 Way-Back Room: A Memoir of a Detroit Childhood by Mary Minock

Here is one of the most emotionally honest memoirs you will ever read. Mary Minock’s The Way-Back Room offers the abidingly moving narrative of a girl’s life set against the blue-collar grit and texture of multi-ethnic, pre-Vatican II,  southwest Detroit. Her story-telling captures mood and setting with a skill evocative of Jeffrey Eugenides and with the lyricism of Phillip Levine’s Detroit poems, yet all the while with an entirely original and touching voice.  I was captured after reading the first three astonishing paragraphs. There is no sentimentality here, and there are no real enemies, just the simple truth spoken through the lens of profound loneliness and shame, insatiable curiosity, wit, and immense vulnerability.

This is an honorable story that will leave you at once with a flood of warmth and that achy breaky heart, wanting more from Mary Minock, and soon.  ~Rebecca B. Rank, author of Pears in a Porcelain Bowl

                                                 Mary Minock teaches at Madonna University

Early Reviews and Interviews

“Ms. Minock is a major talent, writing The Way-Back Room with more objectivity than subjectivity, its detachment lending it a certain matter-of-fact truthfulness unusual in a memoir. The Way-Back Room approaches some of the best of modern realism. It’s a worthwhile, engaging read.” -New York Journal of Books 

Great Interview with Mary and Dave Wagner on WCJR Radio

Hear Interview with Mary on Craig Fahl Show Radio WDET

Author Mary Minock

 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

*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

*Nominated for a Pushcart Prize 2011

*Nominated for Weatherford Award as

Best Book of Fiction about Appalachia 2011

Author Richard Hague

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

Awash with Roses: Collected Love Poems of Kenneth Patchen with biographical introduction.

Revised re-issue of this classic collection of Kenneth Patchen's love poems along with the story of the life of Kenneth and Miriam Patchen told by biographer, Larry Smith

100 love poems by this American poet rebel romantic.

Kenneth Patchen is the author of 38 books of poetry, fiction, and art as well as one of the finest performers of poetry-jazz. This book is a thing of beauty. 

 "The reissue of his love poems testifies to his talents and perhaps meets the current need to cherish the beauty of life, love, and mankind. . . . Today, with political and economic unrest, with individual expression suppressed in many parts of the world, humankind yearns for a soothing of souls." from New York Journal Book Review

Click for full Review of Re-Issue in New York Journal Book Review

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

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.

978-1-933964-28-7   104 pgs.  $15.00

  Author Robert Flanagan

---

Terru Hermsen has lived in Ohio since 1972 and holds a B.A. in English from WittenbergUniversity, an MFA in poetry from GoddardCollege, and a Ph.D. in art education from the Ohio State University. He currently teaches poetry and literature at Otterbein College. From 1979 to 2004, he taught poetry around the state via the Ohio Arts Council’s Artists in Education program, with students from kindergarten through senior citizens. He has taught poetry in the museum galleries throughout the state, including the Allen Art Museum in Oberlin, the Toledo Museum of Art, the Cleveland Museum of Art—and for seven years was a guest poet with the Columbus Museum of Art’s DepARTures program.
            The author has co-edited with Bob Fox Teaching Writing from a Writer’s Point of View, and with David Garrison, O Taste and See: Food Poems  (Bottom Dog Press). His articles on the teaching of poetry have appeared in Teachers & Writers Collaborative and Teaching Artist Journal. Two previous poetry chapbooks done with Bottom Dog Press are 36 Spokes: The Bicycle Poems and Child Aloft in Ohio Theatre.

Author Terry Hermsen

Contributors: Ed Sanders, T.L. Kryss, rjs, Karl Young, Allen Frost, Joel Lipman, Kent Taylor, Mark Kuhar, Ingrid Swanberg, Larry Smith, Russell Salamon, John Jacob, Doug Manson, Michael Basinski, Jim Lang, and others.    

Book includes 2006 dvd of Kon Petrochuk’s film if i scratch, if i write

1-933964-07-3  276 pages  $18