Surprise Comes Slowly

By David Oates

Wildness is the inner life not just of writers and artists, but of anyone who has found his or her way. I am always looking to see what I can learn from other fields and disciplines, other lands and other ways of being. In particular I’m engaged with music (Schubert!), with visual art (Bill Viola, Cy Twombly, Caravaggio!), with French and German language and literature, and with the perplexing delights of “new urbanism.” All of these are expressions of human wildness. In them I think we may find many hidden clues about how we must go about reforming our polluting, acquisitive, unjust global civilization.

“A masterwork from an exceptionally accomplished writer, Surprise Comes Slowly is a wondrously welcome collection. In turns reflective, satiric, reverential, and playful, David Oates’s poems give us poignant and insightful glimpses into ‘the invisible machinery of living.’ With inventive tropes, with compelling imagery, with remarkable political and personal wisdom, these deeply humane poems ‘spiral up and up / until the widening gyre finds at last the heart.’ Praise be for David Oates and this work ‘flashing its signal across the darkness.’ Five stars. Highly recommended.”

— Paulann Petersen, Oregon Poet Laureate Emerita

Price $15

(March 2025)

I Weave a Nest of Foil

By Arlene Naganawa

The poems in I Weave a Nest of Foil unfold like a beautifully awry fairy tale populated by ghosts, untranslated histories, palimpsests, warnings, and manifold wonders which even all the darkness they portray cannot erase. A classroom preparing for mass shootings – the latticed, shiny scars of the human body – the community effects of the pandemic – our recent history is woven into this glittering work and made strangely nurturing there.

“The poems in this astonishing collection are utterly tender and completely peculiar. Lullabies sung by apparitions, they stroke and prickle at once with lush, precise langauge. In Naganawa’s work another world – uneasy, strange and beautiful –  is superimposed on this one, and it is in the thin places that we encounter spirits and angels. But that world is no more surreal than ours: the neighborhood park during pandemic quarantine, aclassroom of children in a time of everyday mass shootings. The work is often ekphrastic and art-inspired, but equally informed by the human body, its tissues and fluids, its latticed, shiny scars. These poems are gorgeous and intriguing, each a lemon drop on the tongue: round, sharp, the color of sunshine, dissolving in spit and a lingering tingle of sweet and acid.”
— Sati Mookherjee, author of Eye and Ways of Being

Price $22
ISBN 979-8-218-32090-4

(April 2024)

She may be lying down but she may be very happy

By Jody Gelb

Everything was going right in the delivery room until, suddenly, it wasn’t. The baby’s brain was damaged; the new mother, unprepared for the life she and her family would now be living.

In dense, lyrical prose, Jody Gelb pays tribute to her daughter’s short life. She May Be lying Down but She May Be Very Happy is a marvel of compression and potency. Gelb lays her experience bare in the full range of its emotional complexity, from profound suffering to ecstatic joy. It is a mother-daughter memoir scrubbed of sentiment. She May Be lying Down but She May Be Very Happy isn’t so much a book as the naked truth of being human in this imperfect world.

“This astonishing memoir lives in the sacred space where life and death meet.”
— Martin Moran

“There is a space between private and public where we humans waver. . . . Gelb explores that liminal space by and through both her body as a mother, lover, performer, and the roles she has inhabited in her life. With raw emotional intensity threaded through with poetic gentleness, these micromovements travel the terrain of how we find home not by running from grief, loss, difficulty, but through them, writing our small prayers to tuck into broken places. A tender triumph.”
— Lidia Yuknavitch

Price $20
ISBN 979-8218231323

(November 2023)