Kelson Books is proud to announce new poetry from Kimberly Krawolec, The Saplings Think of Us as Young.

The Saplings Think of Us as Young

By Kimberly Krawolec

In her visionary debut collection, Kralowec explores the intimacy of living in close relationship with extremes of beauty and distress—in both the human and non-human creatures around us.

“Kimberly Kralowec’s poems haunt in the best of ways, moving through the loved and marked spaces of our lives. The voice is rhapsodic, songlike, but never lulling: at any moment, the torsions of her syntax may pull you into their undertow.”
— Jay Deshpande, author of Love the Stranger

“The poems draw us beyond words and into images, that murky place where art is primed for the elements of unknowing and mystery. This searching collection rings out far beyond the margins of the human. A fabulous book.”
— Michael McGriff, author of Eternal Sentences

ISBN 978-0-9827838-9-4
(May 2023)

Ask for Horses: Memoir of a Dream-Guided Life

By Tina Tau

“. . . Ask for something so alive, so surprising, that it will crack your life wide open.”

An adventure story in two realms, a conversation between the visible and invisible worlds: in this eloquent memoir, Tina Tau reveals the life-saving intelligence of her dreams. As a young woman she tries to outrun her pain by moving every year, often thousands of miles at a time. But by paying attention to her dreams, she is finally able to slow down, heal, and begin to shine. Her story is a guide to the daily practice of saying yes to your own life’s innate wisdom.

ISBN978-0-9827838-8-7
(30 August 2022)

Soft-Boiled

By Stephen J. West

At its center, Soft-Boiled follows Stephen J. West as he shadows a private investigator by the name of Frank Streets. What starts out as West’s last-ditch effort to write his first book—while juggling responsibilities as a husband and a new father—becomes a critical reflection on art-making, storytelling, and masculinity in America. Blending memoir, reportage, criticism, and detective thriller into one capacious yet focused narrative, Soft-Boiled is a lyrical and aching self-reflexive portrait of an artist that asks the questions so many men are afraid to ask. 

ISBN 978-0-9827838-7-0
196 pages
(July 2022)

Kelson Books is proud to initiate its poetry series with this collection of new work from Iowa Poetry Prize winner Andrew Robin.

Stray Birds

By Andrew Robin

“Luminous, awake, and grieving, these poems find openings and move in. Once inhabited, I discover blossoms, ancestors, stillness, ease, and stars. The rest of the cosmos swirls amongst the words on the page. Whole seasons pass. This book is a translation, an end, and a song with a chorus: I am heartbroken, and so I am free.”

— Emily Kendal Frey

ISBN 978-0-9827838-6-3

(December 2021)

A Place of Exodus: Home, Memory, and Texas

By David Biespiel

Acclaimed poet and essayist David Biespiel tells the story of  the rise and fall of a Jewish boyhood in Texas, and his search for the answer to his life’s central riddle: Are we ever done leaving home?

Raised in the 1970s in a historic Jewish neighborhood of Houston, Biespiel explores the story of triumph and shame that changed his relationship to the world around him. With cinematic fluidity, he writes of his early years as a teenager who yearns for bold self-invention as he grapples with the enigmas of illness, death, love, and the meaning of faith. Growing up in a family devoted to Jewish identity, Biespiel comes under the tutelage of the head rabbi of the largest conservative congregation in North America. But after the rabbi kicks him out of the synagogue during a very public quarrel, Biespiel leaves Texas and his religious upbringing behind.

After a near-forty-year exile, Biespiel returns for a day to the world he left behind as a different person, to offer a moving meditation on the meaning of home, uncovering bittersweet realities of age, youth, and family with tenderness and devastating honesty.

Written in the years that followed the devastation of Houston wrought by three 500-year floods in three years, including the worst flood in Texas history, Biespiel’s account is by turns personal and philosophical, a meditation on time’s inevitable losses and a writer’s hard-won gains.

A Place of Exodus is not only a memoir, but an essential companion for anyone who has journeyed far – and equally those who have stayed close to the unresolvable paradoxes of home, the aches of time and heart none of us can escape.

“In the great American tradition of improvised cultural makings and unmakings, migration and recurrence, David Biespiel unfolds our national quest onto an unexpected terrain: a decidedly Texan and traditionally Jewish neighborhood of Houston. A surprising, heartbreaking and inspiring story.”

— Robert Pinsky

ISBN 978-0-9827838-5-6

(September 2020)

Every Writer Has a Thousand Faces:
For writers, artists, musicians, dancers, and anyone else who leads a creative life

By David Biespiel

Here is the classic book, re-issued for its tenth anniversary with a new Foreword by novelist Chuck Palahniuk, who writes:

This book has been in print forever because what it offers works for people. . . . you’re about to read magic.

This book cracks open the creative process and invites readers to take a fresh look at the mysterious pathways of the imagination. First insight from acclaimed poet and critic David Biespiel: “Failure is the engine of creativity.”

Biespiel candidly tracks his own development as a writer and challenges traditional assumptions about writing that can stifle creativity. The liberating message:

Working past the brink of failure —being free to try and discard and try again—is what allows the creative process to playfully flourish, keeping the spirit open to unexpected discoveries.

Both beginning and experienced writers—as well as anyone else on that “creative path”—will benefit from this elegant and surprising perspective based on methods developed exclusively at the Attic, the unique literary studio Biespiel founded in Portland, Oregon, in 1999.

Every Writer Has a Thousand Faces will revolutionize the way readers look at their own creative process. It is a rich and rewarding book, a captivating glimpse into the inner life of writers and painters—and above all, a guide to a lifetime of discovery.

ISBN 978-0-9827838-4-9

(March 2020)