Bottom Dog Press, Inc.          

 Cycling Through

Columbine

     by JRW Case

  

This book is at once a memoir, a travelogue, a dispassionate look at a notorious school massacre, by an author coming to terms with unresolved memories and heart-felt parental uncertainties. The reader isn’t just pushed along but rather propelled forward through the external and internal experiences of an insightful scribe relentlessly pedaling across space and time. –Brent Green, author of Questions of the Spirit: The Quest for Understanding at A Time of Loss

As I bicycled along in my mind with JRW Case on the “blue highways” of this country, I couldn’t help but also tag along on his inner journey to explore those important 21^st century questions of values that we all face…who am I and what is my role in creating the world I desire for my children, and my children’s children? I encourage everyone to read this book and “cycle along” on their own journey of self-exploration. ~Mark Gilbert, author of Be Yourself Evolving the World Through Personal Empowerment

$18.00In stock

Taking a Walk in My Animal Hat

Poems

Charlene Fix

Taking A Walk in My Animal Hat is a tapestry of exquisite poems, phrases and lines that stun, rejuvenate, and have, as Audre Lord hungers for,” the potential to 'set us free.'” These poems are for those of us weary of what Adrienne Rich terms the “atrophy of our power to imagine other ways of navigating into our collective future.” Charlene Fix’s collection is the antidote to that atrophy. It is a call to don the “animal hat," to “manifest the state or aspiration of the soul.” One poem after another takes us there, always surprisingly….The poetry is knowledgeable, wise, whimsical, challenging, loving, and draws from a wide repertoire-–paintings, farms, porches, family, the marketplace, loss, life. This collection is a foundation for recovery, for restoration, for inspiration. ~Anna Soter, is Professor Emerita at The Ohio State University, the author of Breathing Spaces.

 In Taking a Walk in My Animal Hat, Charlene Fix, noticing hair on her arms, places us not with "those positioned in High Places," occupying a separate link on The Great Chain of Being, but at ground level, humbly sharing the earth with our sister and brother animal life forms. Considering theirs and our dewlaps, calves, pigeon-toes and myriad transformations, in the manner of each species plying its gifts, Fix employs a nimble, powerful intellect and deep senses of humor and rhythm with empathy and understanding classically human, uniquely hers. -Jerry Roscoe, author of Solving for X 

Charlene Fix

The Pears

Poems

Larry Smith

Harmony Poetry Series

64 pgs. $15.00

"I don’t wish to give too much away, this book is your ticket. It’s your turn now to ride this glass-bottom boat across a new lake. You will hear music and see the wind smooth the waves as underwater blurs become crystal clear. One delight after another, Larry Smith has made these poems out of dreams and diners with memories on the menu."

~Allen Frost, author of Pinocchio in America

 I’ve been reading Larry Smith’s work for over 20 years. That’s long enough to make his work seem like it’s always been there, and maybe that’s because the people Larry writes about are ones I recognize: mill workers and farmers, waitresses and librarians. He writes about family and everyday concerns. Sometimes those are scrambled eggs. Sometimes they are snow birds. He is a very tactile poet.

 This new book shows someone who is not afraid to change, even after many books. Along with his normal meditative Zen insight, there’s a joyful surrealism here. Even the most black and white, photographic poems don’t take themselves too seriously and open us up.

 Smith’s people spend a lot of time waiting. They wait for money, for night, or for the dark laughter of an epiphany to hit as a hard as “a busload of bibles.”  These poems exist right outside of town in a peddler’s encampment where fairy tales and bad luck mingle with white bread and pennies. These are magical riddles made up of the real and the nearly so. Feast on them and dance.~Mike James

        Larry Smith

(photo by Ann Smith)

          

MAGGOT

Robert Flanagan

  "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

 

Without a Plea

Poems

by Jeff Gundy

                                                       

“How can we put the eroded/loaded world back into language?” Jeff Gundy asks in his splendid new book Without a Plea.  His answer, in poem after adventurous poem, is that “the world is full/of little possibilities for love” if one stays in conversation with everyone and everything—from Bob Dylan to the Book of Job, from “grouchy” geese to the “sweet tangle of sound” from his own guitar.  Impish, probing, and expansive, Gundy’s poems reward the mind and replenish the spirit, “speaking truth in the most human way.” ~Lynn Powell, author of Season of Second Thought

 Jeff Gundy’s ambitious new collection Without a Plea plunges into the moral conundrum of our spectacularized interconnected world, where suffering and impotent witnessing abound. For Gundy, every privilege—including the making of art—is a likely subterfuge, even as it is a blessing. These poems reconnect us to the destinies we hold in common. I’m deeply grateful for them.

~Donald Morrill, author of Awaiting Your Impossibilities

Jeff Gundy

 

What Burden Do Those Trains

Bear Away: A Memoir in Poems

Kathleen S. Burgess



What Burden Do Those Trains Bear Away is an intriguing and evocative travelogue in which Kathleen S. Burgess interweaves the personal and the political in gorgeously lyrical ways. Her sensibilities for social justice and her recognition of the way historical record informs the present never suffer from sentimentality. Burgess’s dispatches enunciate the complexities of human experience while subtly embedding hope that there should always be a next time when humanity will do it better. ~Rikki Santer, author of Dodge, Tuck, Roll 

What a memory this poet has for details!.....Such incantatory repetitions and masterful turning of lines! Who doesn’t love a good story, especially one that reminds us of a generation’s youth even while speaking with profound relevance to the treatment of asylum seekers at our border in 2018? These poems offer a trip, a rush, all taken with a dose of compassion. The breath you feel on the back of your neck is the zeitgeist of a caring era, one that was, is, and will be again. ~Charlene Fix, author of Taking a Walk in My Animal Hat

 

Kathleen and "Ted" in 1972

and Kathleen today





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Crows in the Jukebox
Poems

Mike James

Reading Crows in the Jukebox is like driving a race car at qualifying speeds—on a track you’ve never driven before. There are more curves than straight-aways in Mike’s James’s poetry, and each new turn brings surprises that are addictive. Navigating the imagery of Crows in the Jukebox is one wild, imaginative ride.  ~Lee Passarella, author of Redemption  

In his wonderful new collection, Crows in the Jukebox, Mike James explores among many topics, his hardscrabble patriarchy, marriage and family relationships, and the clarity and persistence of nature.  As in his other work, he often surprises the reader with jarring quips and closures as in “Talking with Allen Ginsberg, in a Dream:” “I can fit you in my shirt pocket,” or the remarkable metaphor for the artistic creative process, “Swimming in the Rain:” “when she swims she’s always alone/no one who watches is with her.” This volume establishes James as a poet of the first rank, one who swims alone.

                        ~Tim Peeler, author of L2: A Poetry Novel

108 pages   $16.00

     Author Mike James



             

Hope As a Construction

New and Selected Poems

by David J. Adams

There is a strong, almost transcendent, sense of place in the poetry of David Adams. He tells you right away where you are as you read each poem in this book. The images are in focus, and rendered with the precision of a technical writer, but there is nothing technical about the emotional impact of the poems, which will take you on a journey from his Cleveland Ohio roots to the far side of the world, and back.

                                                                       $18.00   In stock

 Cold Air Return: A Novel

Patrick Lawrence O'Keeffe

 "Cold Air Return is a coming-of-age story that rings true from its first words. The bonds of boyhood are tested by the dimly understood forces of race and class and religion. The first twinges of love are shadowed by an adult world where evil is real. O’Keeffe builds his story deftly, each character drawn with knowledge and care. The climax is at once foreshadowed and unexpected, leaving our humanity exposed. I could not put this book down." –Kurt Landefeld, author of Jack’s Memoirs: Off the Road

Cold Air Return is to be enjoyed on many levels. It is about tradition, prejudice, discovery, sex, and cultural values. The story explores who we are, probing the essence of family, camaraderie, community, love, and even baseball.” –Nancy Dunham, former non-fiction
editor of Heartlands Today

  Author

Patrick Lawrence O'Keeffe

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In Plena Vita: The Full Life

Collected Poems

of Timothy Russell

                                       

 Poet of Work and Nature

"Characterized by precise observation, careful attention, and both humor and tenderness, Russell’s poems are absolutely original. The Latin titles he gave to most of his poems add a liturgical dimension to his work. Even the gritty mill poems have a sense of the holy within them. I am extremely grateful to have this book of poems and to know that new readers will discover a world here in a voice that is reliably intimate, spacious, and true." - Maggie Anderson

                                  

                                                                      $20.00

• In stock