http://www.conundrum-press.com Conundrum Press Tue, 08 May 2012 20:34:37 +0000 http://www.conundrum-press.com en http://www.conundrum-press.com/Thread-of-the-Real http://www.conundrum-press.com/following/conundrum-press.com/Thread-of-the-Real Tue, 08 May 2012 20:34:37 +0000 Conundrum Press 3365707 <img src="http://payload53.cargocollective.com/1/3/116154/3365707/hutchison_250x387_web.jpg" width="250" height="385" width_o="250" height_o="385" src_o="http://payload53.cargocollective.com/1/3/116154/3365707/hutchison_250x387_web_o.jpg" data-mid="17294778" border="0" align="left"/> New poetry by Joseph Hutchison Thread of the Real Who’d have thought: setting out from a gap in the seam between foothills and plains, a pinch of cocoonish dust like me might take wing northwest and seaward, away from Nixon’s nightbound America and mine,     to settle where vast sounds pour their profundities into the folds of b.c.? Who’d have thought I’d sleepwalk into Canada’s wooded raininess, there to be startled awake by a stogie-puffing Irish Taoist? Who was it who’d led me to believe there was no magic anymore? <img src="http://payload53.cargocollective.com/1/3/116154/3365707/hutchison_author_photo_web.jpg" width="287" height="214" width_o="287" height_o="214" src_o="http://payload53.cargocollective.com/1/3/116154/3365707/hutchison_author_photo_web_o.jpg" data-mid="17295043" border="0" align="left"/> Joseph Hutchison is the author of eleven collections of poetry in addition to Thread of the Real, which include The Rain at Midnight, Bed of Coals (winner of the 1994 Colorado Poetry Award), House of Mirrors, The Undersides of Leaves, and the Colorado Governor’s Award volume Shadow-Light. Born and raised in Denver, Colorado, Hutchison teaches graduate level writing courses at the University of Denver’s University College. He lives with his wife Melody Madonna in Indian Hills, a small community in the foothills southwest of Denver. Thread of the Real New Poetry by Joseph Hutchison ISBN: 978-0-9713678-5-2 $12.99 http://www.conundrum-press.com/Let-the-Birds-Drink-in-Peace http://www.conundrum-press.com/following/conundrum-press.com/Let-the-Birds-Drink-in-Peace Wed, 19 Oct 2011 05:17:20 +0000 Conundrum Press 2171562 <img src="http://payload.cargocollective.com/1/3/116154/2171562/mcbrearty_300x500_web.jpg" width="250" height="387" width_o="250" height_o="387" src_o="http://payload.cargocollective.com/1/3/116154/2171562/mcbrearty_300x500_web_o.jpg" data-mid="10844824" border="0" align="left"/> Each of Robert Garner McBrearty’s stories has its own sensibility, but what his characters share is a desire to know how best to live when confronted by unforeseeable chance. Here readers will meet budding writers, ailing professors, reluctant gunslingers, and kidnapped kids; they grapple with conflicts of conscience and the mysteries of love. McBrearty excels in devising believable worlds and characters with open, sometimes breakable, hearts. ISBN 978-0-9713678-2-1 $14.99 Now Available Purchase this book from Conundrum Press $14.99 <img src="http://payload.cargocollective.com/1/3/116154/2171562/mcbrearty.jpg" width="288" height="216" width_o="288" height_o="216" src_o="http://payload.cargocollective.com/1/3/116154/2171562/mcbrearty_o.jpg" data-mid="10844924" border="0" align="left"/> Robert Garner McBrearty’s stories have been anthologized in the Pushcart Prize and widely published in leading literary journals including: North American Review, Missouri Review, New England Review, Narrative Magazine, StoryQuarterly, and Mississippi Review. He is the author of two critically-acclaimed short story collections, A NIGHT AT THE Y, and EPISODE, which won the Sherwood Anderson Foundation Fiction Award. His stories have been selected for performances at Stories on Stage in Denver, and at Arts and Letters Live at the Dallas Museum of Art. Other awards include fellowships to the MacDowell Colony, the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, MA, and a New Mexico State Arts Grant. He teaches writing at the University of Colorado. Read Houston, 1984, a story from Let the Birds Drink in Peace. Read Houston, 1984 onscreen Open publication - Download a Kindle file of Houston, 1984 Link to Kindle file Download a PDF of Houston, 1984 to your computer Link to downloadable PDF http://www.conundrum-press.com/Wire-Song http://www.conundrum-press.com/following/conundrum-press.com/Wire-Song Wed, 24 Aug 2011 16:01:43 +0000 Conundrum Press 1905726 <img src="http://payload.cargocollective.com/1/3/116154/1905726/ws_cover.jpg" width="250" height="388" width_o="250" height_o="388" src_o="http://payload.cargocollective.com/1/3/116154/1905726/ws_cover_o.jpg" data-mid="9436537" border="0" align="left"/><img src="http://payload.cargocollective.com/1/3/116154/1905726/todd_photo.jpg" width="150" height="174" width_o="150" height_o="174" src_o="http://payload.cargocollective.com/1/3/116154/1905726/todd_photo_o.jpg" data-mid="9436548" border="0" align="left"/> Softcover: $5 Hardback: $10 Buy here Mark Todd is the New West incarnate. A working rancher and a professor of English, his poetry embodies local knowledge of his Colorado home as much as it does the great traditions of English and American poetry. His craft covers the range from the ballad and the sonnet, to the free verse lyric and his subjects range from meditations on nature worthy of Wordsworth, Gerard Manley Hopkins, and Robinson Jeffers, to reflections on ranching worthy of Baxter Black. In Wire Song, Todd’s first collection, each poem brings another element of contemporary life in the rural West into focus. Many poems detail the difficult, sometimes comical, sometimes beautiful, and sometimes heartbreaking work of ranching, telling stories of everything from the death of a foal to the arrival of spring, from what kind of hat to wear on the job to the traditional work of a farrier day. In his longer narrative poems, Todd recounts a present in which dirt bikers and ranchers collide (guess who wins), and a past in which he reimagines one of his own notorious forebears, John Wesley Hardin, at the moment he decides to take the path of crime and violence.Throughout Todd’s work there is a delicate balance between the facts of nature and the domesticating work of man, in which something as ordinary as barbed wire comes to embody an entire way of life. As he writes in the poem “Wire Song”: It smoothes the sense of harsh And unforgiving land, The stumble through pastured Grasses fed by stone-fast Roots, by tangles of brush. Taut and strong in the wind, Wire strings tales from steel yarn, Singing the lines of place Through rusted, untold words. In his own wire song, Todd makes sure that some of those words are in fact told, that some of those lines of place are sweetly sung, and that some of our history therefore becomes articulate. Eclipse I couldn't tell you the numbered times I've seen The moon's arc, its flat medallion a traced Path across the canopy-sky, its face In two dimensions, like a spotlight-beam; Or the thoughtless times I've assumed that its scheme Of things was merely a bright plate that effaced The stars, a celestial disk too long encased In the time-weary lines of a lover's theme. But that still night, when the earth's shadow licked Away the moon's full milk-veneer, I stood On the dark deck, and through a reddish trick Of light, it seemed a suspended world I could Almost touch, suddenly a solid place, A sphere that hung int he deep room of space. The Doyleville Schoolhouse squats against foothills, a tiny solitary block of salt to the eye that travels the straight-across mile from the highway. Its paint skin, snow-weary and cracked, tells of years since anyone learned, or lived cubbyholed beneath the roof. But those who live ranch-distant still feel its rituals—its pie socials and Halloween apple bobs. It connects homes too often separated by calving, haying, by winter wind and snow-drifted fields. Some traditions run deeper than concete. Thsi morning the old schoolhouse wears the full moon like a bonnet, weathered but proud, and a reminder: the were can sometimes tell us who we are. From the Forward by Dana Gioia "Mark Todd’s . . . verse gives memorable expression to a particular place—the high plains and mountain valleys of the Colorado Rockies. There is nothing homespun about his deft and sophisticated work, but it could not have been written anywhere else. Not only his subjects, but his imagery, style, and tone originate in the geography of his home. He is passionately local without ever being parochial, and his work reminds us of how many great poets—Thomas Hardy, Robert Frost, E.A. Robinson, Robinson Jeffers, to name only a few—have purposely situated their verse in a particular place." Praise for Wire Song “He paints some dead on pictures and feelings.” —Baxter Black “These poems from the back roads of the west are a triumph of place, of sweetness, and of form.” —James Tipton Reviews “[Todd] was not yet a poet when he came to the Upper Gunnison valley. This valley and this place made him a poet—rather than the other way around…The title of the book is taken from …a poem claiming that the stories of this valley are “told in Wire” and that fences are “singing the lines of place. [His] perspective seems validated in the quality and honesty of good poetry.” —George Sibley, Colorado Central Magazine “In Wire Song Mark Todd crafts viable, sensual metaphors of the Southwestern landscape — its earth, its sky, and its creatures, including man. Just as importantly, he demonstrates a sensitive control of the music of his lines that is quite extraordinary. Wire Song is a significant work, well worthy of its subject.” —Keith Wilson “[Todd] writes in a manner that chronicles and respects the geographical region. At the same time, his verse is so powerful that he transcends region and speaks to the heart, regardless of where you live.” —MikeNobles, Tulsa World “Mark Todd’s often lyrical poems…have an innate appeal to those of us who recognize both the romance and the tough reality of a life in [these] parts of the West.” —Marion Conger Stewart, High Country News About the author Born in Texas, raised in New Mexico, and now settled in Colorado, Mark Todd has been a professional musher, a mortician, a mountaineer, and is currently a professor of English at Western State College in Gunnison, Colorado. He also runs a small ranch in the nearby Cochetopa Hills, thirty miles south of Gunnison, where he lives with his wife, Kym. Todd descends from a family that claims, on one side, Mary Todd Lincoln and, on the other, the outlaw John Wesley Hardin. When he’s not teaching journalism and creative writing, he spends his time mending fences, raising horses, and trying to separate the romance from the reality of life in the rural West. http://www.conundrum-press.com/Living-Loving-and-Other-Heresies http://www.conundrum-press.com/following/conundrum-press.com/Living-Loving-and-Other-Heresies Wed, 24 Aug 2011 15:45:30 +0000 Conundrum Press 1905706 <img src="http://payload.cargocollective.com/1/3/116154/1905706/zsolt_cover.jpg" width="250" height="388" width_o="250" height_o="388" src_o="http://payload.cargocollective.com/1/3/116154/1905706/zsolt_cover_o.jpg" data-mid="9436448" border="0" align="left"/><img src="http://payload.cargocollective.com/1/3/116154/1905706/zsolt_photo.jpg" width="150" height="288" width_o="150" height_o="288" src_o="http://payload.cargocollective.com/1/3/116154/1905706/zsolt_photo_o.jpg" data-mid="9436446" border="0" align="left"/> Hardcover: $10 Softcover: $5 Buy here “If this is heresy, we need more of it! A timeless book of compelling prose and poetry.”—Bill Moyers The author of Living, Loving, and Other Heresies, writer, musician, dancer, and teacher, had been living with a progressive neuropathy since 1998. In 1999, Zsolt, a writer, musician, dancer, and teacher suffered from a progressive neuropathy, and when he was no longer able to write, began a group e-mail list to which he sent out regular essays about how the disease was affecting his life. As the illness progressed and he lost the ability to walk, speak, or even to take care of himself, he was able to continue writing by using a word-recognition keyboard program. By this means, he was able to chonicle the disease’s effect on him. At the same time, Living, Loving, and Other Heresies goes far beyond coping with degenerative disease. Zsolt’s essays and poems range across a passionate and deeply examined life, in which his debilitating illness played but one part. By turns tender and passionate, playful and indignant, humorous and committed, Zsolt affirms the beauty of life and transforming power of love while simultaneously confronting his own stark fate. With a Foreword by David J. Rothman First Runner-up, Writers Notes Award Praise for Living, Loving, and Other Heresies Reviews “Living, Loving, and Other Heresies lingers upon the absolute specter of mortality…both as the author confronts it and as the reader will one day experience it. A timeless expression of philosophy, moral dilemmas, and the pain of confronting the inevitable, written with great artistic and literary flare.”—Midwest Book Review “Zsolt’s collection of short essays is remarkable, not only for the physical effort required in their production, but also in their unflagging optimism and fearless acceptance of death…Zsolt’s writings provide us a template for a compassionate life and the courage to face our own transfiguring dance of death.”—Lance Waring, Telluride Watch “For the people who will not meet Zsolt in person, this book will be a bridge to an aliveness that is poetic, a sense of humor that cancels despair and beauty that can be breathed in effortlessly. Renew your commitment to living, loving and heresies of every order by journeying with the companion you always hoped would meet you: with Zsolt and his irresistible gossips.” —Barbara Riley, Southwest BookViews http://www.conundrum-press.com/Letters-From-a-Stranger http://www.conundrum-press.com/following/conundrum-press.com/Letters-From-a-Stranger Wed, 24 Aug 2011 15:31:13 +0000 Conundrum Press 1905637 <img src="http://payload.cargocollective.com/1/3/116154/1905637/ls_cover.jpg" width="250" height="388" width_o="250" height_o="388" src_o="http://payload.cargocollective.com/1/3/116154/1905637/ls_cover_o.jpg" data-mid="9436099" border="0" align="left"/><img src="http://payload.cargocollective.com/1/3/116154/1905637/tipton_photo.jpg" width="150" height="185" width_o="150" height_o="185" src_o="http://payload.cargocollective.com/1/3/116154/1905637/tipton_photo_o.jpg" data-mid="9436105" border="0" align="left"/> Hardcover: $10 Softcover: $5 Buy here James Tipton is the world’s preeminent surrealist beekeeper. At his home on a high mesa near Grand Junction, Colorado, he bottles 10,000 pounds of honey each year, and writes poetry in the tradition of Neruda, Vallejo, Breton, Blake, and Robert Bly, extending the vision of a world that is simultaneously real and magical. In Letters from a Stranger, Tipton’s first and long overdue full-length collection, each poem testifies to the bedrock of imagination. Taken together, the poems are extravagant yet earthy, tender yet passionate, wild yet intimate, crazy yet hopeful, and they describe how love can transform the world, renewing everything that is and calling forth everything that might be. It is a poetry of transformations, an invocation of exuberant vitality. As Tipton writes in “There are Rivers of Oranges”: When we deeply imagine we no longer imagine at all, but dive, at last, naked and alive, into the flesh of oranges, into the steaming jungle, into words that hang like orange rain, like love just before it happens. Tipton’s poetics, echoing Emerson, have led him to become “a master at following whims,” and the leaps of Tipton’s whimsical and profound metaphors are leaps of faith, bringing otherwise invisible or forgotten connections to light. As remarkable and surprising as they are, however, they are still manifestations of this world, flowers of a correspondence with Isabel Allende, who observes in the Foreword to the book that “these poems were written by a man who was born to write poetry.” With a Foreword by Isabel Allende Winner, Colorado Book Award From the Foreward by Isabel Allende "Jim Tipton’s poems have accompanied me like faithful nightingales in the long night that followed my daughter’s death. Now I am back on my feet. I have the will to live and the joy to write again. Now I can read Jim’s poetry with new delight, linger at the images, the magic and the language. I cherish these letters from a stranger that talk of ordinary experiences—wings, canyons, rocks, flesh—but mainly that other extraordinary experience…love. These poems are written by a man who was born to write poetry." Two poems So Many Times I Have Felt the Sea Rising So many times I have felt the sea rising in my heart, when in my hands I hold your letters, like singing nets of words lifted out of some blue solitude for me alone. So many times again I open your golden letters, reading them to bees, to canyon walls, to tiny lizards that dart like thoughts through these deserts of perpetual loneliness. So far away, so far, I felt, wanting to live at last with only spirits, but oh, dueña del amor, the feather I found, fallen from the angel's wing, means nothing to me now. Those Evening When All of God's Conundrums Those evenings when all of God's conundrums arrive at once, I look for something solid, like the cook, caught in the lick of thyme, when she looks into her red soup, pondering the interminable tomatoes of the past, of like the old man in the cathedral in Cuzco, muttering under his breath, "Jesus be damned," and the one good eye of the Pope too!" These evenings when God's conundrums arrive, I remember the dead universities, the knowledge that grew there like extra fingers, until the hand was no longer able to find a glove that fits against the cold; I remember the words that fell like brilliant rain, dazzling the dark out of the hair, turning it this unruly and early white. These evenings when all of god arrives at once— conundrum and clumsy shepherd, three-personed and inconclusive, like water filled to the brim with jugs— He asks me whether I have any wool, whether I have any weather left in me to turn this drift of sail to land. only one answer comes to hand: "Yes Sir, yes Sir, three bags full." When all the evenings conundrum together to this single lost star moment, God gathers around me—and I stare, with the intensity of the feeble minded, at some gap that like some heavy iron passes over these buttery cells, until even the very soul seems to be only breakfast for some imbecilic chorus "We'll be together yet, mi campesina," I sing, while guns and conundrums bugle out God to the winds not yet born, to the lazy hearts, to the ladder of day, to the fetal angels, to the distances that always repeat themselves, to mouths that open like sockets of eyes, to the delirious roses that bloom on the cheeks of love, to the herds on high, the horse that swallowed the sea That campesina conundrum is also not satisfying, arriving like a country Madonna, a fixture on a tomb, like gold faucets in the homes of the wealthy, that campesina, that piece of break, that rosy God always just out of reach, that benign and treacherous presence that sighs out hope and the false peach of future possibilities, that siren against which I have hoarded the wax of bees. These evenings when God's arrival all at once conundrums, what I lack in purity of spiritual intention I compensate for with purity of desperation; and some compensation, unexpected, sets in, like the subdued pain in the ring finger from the bite of the Black Widow six weeks ago; like the soft ecstasy that is sinking into me now while I sip this delicate tea of mangoes and marigolds I received today in the mail from a stranger. Praise for Letters from a Stranger “Truly a pure and beautiful voice, a light. What a beautiful poet Tipton is, what new ways he shows the soul, just when we think it had no place else to go…When I say he breaks open the heart it come from finding something I didn’t even know I had lost. I carry these poems with me.”—Grace Cavalieri “James Tipton writes a spare, deeply disturbing, indeed shocking poetry, which never descends to the soft option of the current degraded language and scatographics of those who affect candour these days—thereby showing how much he honours the language and respects himself and most of all, us, his readers and beneficiaries.”—Arcangelo Riffis “Tipton’s poems are a great celebration—lovely & lush, just what we need as antidote to the pared-down self-pity that seems to be the going thing.”—Conrad Hilberry “James Tipton’s poetry fuses Neruda and Whitman, and adds something new and sensual too: a fragrance of desert honey. And his poetry sings, soft but strong, to the souls of women. Every woman would love to be loved in the way Tipton loves."—Michelle Lovric Reviews “Tipton’s images are strong and striking, yet tender and at times more delicate than the proverbial butterfly’s wing. The author is keenly, joyously alive; his almost painfully sharp powers of observation cut most deeply when he reveals the wondrous in the commonplace, recalling mica “that flaked like the pages of angels,” or a cat “who dances off the bed…to go outside and hunt the day.”—Lynda La Rocca, Colorado Central Magazine “The poetry of James Tipton…is unique, engaging, splendidly crafter, and enduringly memorable.”—The Midwest Book Review “He smoothly fits the abstract and the concrete together, as if they were old friends. Tipton is an author who speaks to our hearts and can be enjoyed by all.”—Peter Thorpe, Rocky Mountain News About the author James Tipton is widely published, including credits in The Nation, South Dakota Review, Southern Humanities Review, The Greensboro Review, Esquire, Field, and American Literary Review, and also in various anthologies and other works including Aphrodite by Isabel Allende (1998), and Bleeding Hearts, edited by Michelle Lovric (1998). He is currently at work on two other volumes of poetry, The Alphabet of Longing and No Thoroughfare Canyon. http://www.conundrum-press.com/The-Geography-of-Hope http://www.conundrum-press.com/following/conundrum-press.com/The-Geography-of-Hope Wed, 24 Aug 2011 15:27:14 +0000 Conundrum Press 1905617 <img src="http://payload.cargocollective.com/1/3/116154/1905617/gh_cover.jpg" width="250" height="388" width_o="250" height_o="388" src_o="http://payload.cargocollective.com/1/3/116154/1905617/gh_cover_o.jpg" data-mid="9435990" border="0" align="left"/> Softcover: $5 Buy here Where the Bluebird Sings to the Lemonade Springs (1992), a collection of essays, is the last book Wallace Stegner published in a long and productive life of thinking and writing about the West. In the Introduction to the book, Stegner writes that “the West at large is hope’s native home, the youngest and freshest of America’s regions, magnificently endowed and with the chance to become something unprecedented and unmatched in the world”. These are inspiring and hopeful words for a man in his 80s, and in darker moods in the same book, when contemplating, for example, the desperate foolishness of water policy west of the hundredth meridian, Stegner repudiates them, saying of the West that “neither nostalgia nor boosterism can any longer make a case for it as the geography of hope”. The phrase “the geography of hope” is also Stegner’s coinage, and when he says he can no longer make a case for the American West as its native home, he is arguing with himself, against himself, over the crucial tensions out of which he made his life’s work. In the end, however, despite considerable pessimism about our historical, cultural, and political blunders, Stegner did think that people could come to belong to the land where they lived, rather than merely owning it, even a land as harsh as the West. The vitality of his history and criticism, and the force of his fiction and teaching about it, are testimony to an entire life spent in devotion to that idea. …The West is a big place, and this is a rich book. Humor, love, nature, politics, and magic nestle within its lines, along with sadness, anger, regret, and grief. Yet even in confrontations with the darker side of things these poets are still speaking from young country, describing lives which call out for words. Like all poets, they are imagining ways to live, which has to mean living in a given place, and therefore with each other. Further, although what brings them together in this anthology is a regional fact, I think all of them aspire to put the best possible words in the best possible order, connecting this region to far more than itself. Simply by focusing human attention, putting pen to paper, and then sending their verses out into this place and the wider world, they fulfill a small part of Stegner’s vision of the West as a geography of hope, coming home to places they’ve never been before. Reviews “Because of the Western Slope’s topography, the region has been settled later than other parts of the country and state, and as a result, is still finding its cultural voice…There is the possibility to create something new. And this possibility of creation, constructing a unique and expansive identity, is the hope in The Geography of Hope.”—David Buck, Glenwood Post “Whatever your taste in poetry you are sure to find something that speaks to you in this volume. Humor, regret, nature, politics, love and a dash of magic are all represented in light and darkness. The diversity of the poetry is wonderful. That is speaks to us through the common ground of Western Slope writers is both moving and significant.”—Mike Nobles, Montrose Morning Sun “…All the poets share a common thread—a reverence for the land, a deep love for the high deserts and higher mountains we live upon in western Colorado. And through this reverence, they further our understanding of the soil and rock under our feet.”—John Nizalowski, Telluride Times-Journal “This book of poetry…is an expression of the kind of hope and humor that is still possible in the American West.”—Phaedra Greenwood, The Taos News “The Geography of Hope…is tied together by love for a place—the West—which, paradoxically, is known for its rootlessness and lack of connections… [It is] a pleasure to look at and to hold.”—Lynda La Rocca, Colorado Central Magazine “The book defines the place and the place defines the poets. Good stuff.” —Suzanne Cheavens, Mountainfreak “I like sampling this wonderful anthology in little bites, savoring one poem at a time.”—Suzanne Cheavens, Mountainfreak “There is a cohesion in the anthology despite the diversity, and it is truly delectable to the senses. The poems are fraught with beauty, delightful imagery, politics, nature complexity and fury.”—Mitzi-Jill Rapkin, Crested Butte Chronicle & Pilot “Destined to become a classic…”—Mike Nobles, Inside/Outside Southwest Magazine http://www.conundrum-press.com/The-Elephant-s-Chiropractor http://www.conundrum-press.com/following/conundrum-press.com/The-Elephant-s-Chiropractor Wed, 24 Aug 2011 15:22:19 +0000 Conundrum Press 1905597 <img src="http://payload.cargocollective.com/1/3/116154/1905597/ec_cover.jpg" width="250" height="388" width_o="250" height_o="388" src_o="http://payload.cargocollective.com/1/3/116154/1905597/ec_cover_o.jpg" data-mid="9435881" border="0" align="left"/><img src="http://payload.cargocollective.com/1/3/116154/1905597/rothman_photo_small.jpg" width="150" height="217" width_o="150" height_o="217" src_o="http://payload.cargocollective.com/1/3/116154/1905597/rothman_photo_small_o.jpg" data-mid="9435880" border="0" align="left"/> Softcover: $5 Buy here "What impresses one first about David J. Rothman is his immense imaginative and intellectual range, but the more one reads his striking and exuberant poetry the more deeply one feels its emotional force and quiet but genuine ferocity. He is an Apollonian touched by the divine madness of Dionysus. Diverse, demanding, and delightful, his poems abundantly reward the reader’s attention." --Dana Gioia The Infinite Work of Daybreak The infinite work of daybreak crosses the world A line dividing light from dark and darkness. It makes each hour and every eye embark Into particular replies, like trees. Still, you imagine the ocean swell by swell In darkness, out to where the line of dawn Trails ragged curtains through doldrum and storm Toward this smooth lip of sand. Here small black waves Rise, curl, then break to spreading bars of foam Which murmur up the beach into the visible. The waves collapse into smooth apron shallows. And when the infinite daybreak reaches them, outfiguring blank depths and tidal keys, The history of their stoic generation-- The earth and moon and sun and wind and time All moving like a mindless algorithm-- They'll send blue streaming, blue announcing more. Now points above the shimmering horizon In growing dimmer signify the wing Of love, however wild, however dark. For there is always loving as today Arrives, for love must cross imagined distances To play in royal coconut palm crowns. If you have ever stood and waited for The infinite work of daybreak to arrive, Be blessed in its innumerable hours, And ounting them, go out into the day. A Stone in My Rice There was a stone that I did not see In my rice, as I lifted it to my laughing mouth In the heart of a sticky clump. It must have escaped the sifting And then steamed into its soft shell Like a pearl's ugly heart, Drawing the small grains around To disguise its unhappiness. It rolled Across my tongue like wasted time Or a terrible, secret truth, Until probability tossed it between my teeth, Where it now has taken a revenge Both silent and invisible to everyone else, And incomprehensible To me. Praise for The Elephant’s Chiropractor “These wonderful poems are by a man who has wandered around inside of himself a long time, knocking on door after door, discovering in the end that the world is his lover.”—James Tipton Reviews “You can almost hear Rothman’s heart pounding triumphantly as he seizes upon and captures yet another of the small, ephemeral, but ultimately defining moments that can bring a soul to its knees or raise it to the heavens.”—Lynda La Rocca, Colorado Central Magazine “The qualities I love in David Rothman’s poetry—vitality, variety and precision—are those I love in all the best poets. Whether he’s writing about China, New York or the Western Slope of Colorado, his poems bring me close to his own wildly learned personality. The Elephant’s Chiropractor is by turns funny, and deeply moving; its art affirms life.” —David Mason “This collection is a pleasure to read, especially aloud. The imagery is vivid and conveys a love of life and a deep appreciation of nature, art, music, food, and all other joys of the senses. These poems give special meaning to the ordinary and find awe in the familiar.”—Cindy Jaye, Colorado Libraries About the author David J. Rothman was born in Northampton, Massachusetts in 1959. He earned an A.B. cum laude in History and Literature at Harvard University in 1982, an M.A. in English at the University of Utah in 1984, and a Ph.D. in English at New York University in 1992. He has taught courses in literature and writing at the University of Utah, Zhejiang University (People’s Republic of China), New York University, Western State College of Colorado, and several secondary schools. His poems and essays have appeared widely. He lives in San Juan Capistrano, California, with his wife, Emily, and sons, Jacob and Noah. http://www.conundrum-press.com/Beethoven-in-Denver http://www.conundrum-press.com/following/conundrum-press.com/Beethoven-in-Denver Wed, 24 Aug 2011 15:12:47 +0000 Conundrum Press 1905534 <img src="http://payload.cargocollective.com/1/3/116154/1905534/bd_cover.jpg" width="250" height="388" width_o="250" height_o="388" src_o="http://payload.cargocollective.com/1/3/116154/1905534/bd_cover_o.jpg" data-mid="9435622" border="0" align="left"/> <img src="http://payload.cargocollective.com/1/3/116154/1905534/raffel_photo.jpg" width="150" height="182" width_o="150" height_o="182" src_o="http://payload.cargocollective.com/1/3/116154/1905534/raffel_photo_o.jpg" data-mid="9435630" border="0" align="left"/> Hardcover: $10 Softcover: $5 Buy here In this collection, Burton Raffel brings a lifetime of artistry to an enchanting and visionary story, followed by a sequence of jewel-like lyrics. In the title poem, set during Raffel’s time as a Professor of English at the University of Denver, Beethoven returns from the dead and moves in with Raffel for extended conversations on music, politics, women, history, chocolate, mountains, love, and God. According to the narrator, the composer returns because “Beethoven would risk anything,” but it is Raffel who has dared to imagine this magical, whimsical and inspired dialogue, forging anew the character of Romantic inspiration. Over the course of the poem, Beethoven emerges as both ordinary and supernatural, naïve yet eternal, vulgar and divine. In the end, Beethoven shows up missing, but not before Raffel transmits him to us as the generous ghost of our own creative yearnings. Raffel then presents us with eighteen lyrics about love, death, and memory. It is a sequence that unleashes the inspired promise of the books’ first part, a dark, intense vision charged with revelations of the ordinary. Filled both with creative joy and the acknowledgment of death, Beethoven in Denver and Other Poems stands as a major and mature work by one of the gifted poets of our time. Mercator Magic This ragged blob spot, red against the blue Of background, frames a shape not meant by nature, Two hundred thousand women, men, and brand-new Children, flat in cartographic stature. I sit here, work go shopping, walking, run. Ignoring draftsman-conjured scenes, I chew My three-dimensioned meals, I play with wondering Kids, I love my wife, admire the view. So welcome, truly vital facts, my map-land Acted out in living color, full With brilliant sound, displayed with no commercials! A place not shown in printed pages, wrapped And handy, sold for profit, dreams, diversions, Just peaceful, dull, no glamor, glitter, bull. Early to Rise It wasn't exactly that Beethoven ate too much: He'd never been a fat man, not even in Vienna, exposed to all those fragrant pastry shops And the thick cream and free flowing beer--not to mention chocolate. He's always burned up what he ate, and he'd always worked too hard And moved too fast to get fat. But then was then And now was now and if he wasn't getting fat He certainly wasn't getting any thinner. "Would you like to try an excercise program?" I asked him on Sunday, After he'd put in three hours watching an opera, an hour and a half taking in a ballet, And two one-hour stretches with the Boston and Chicago orchestras (He made good use of television, you have to give him that). "A who?" he asked, chuckling, and I tried to explain. "Ho-ho," he laughed, "I'll do even better than that, I'll chop all your wood for you. I'm a very handy man with an axe." I made a deferential gesture: "We don't burn wood any more. It's all gas from a pipe." "All right," he said at once, "I'l do all the family washing. How's that? My mother did all the washing once upon a time: Am I any better than my mother?" I cleared my throat: "We have a washing machine. And a dryer. And," I added, Just to make the list complete, "we have a dish-washing machine too." He wet his lips and stopped smiling. "I have decided to get fat," he announced. Finalist, Independent Publisher’s Award Praise for Beethoven in Denver and Other Poems “Burton Raffel is that rarest of poets, someone whose personality is so genuinely engaging that we totally forgive the poet’s eloquence and skill and marvelous trickery, and let them work their magic on us unaware. This delightful and entirely accessible book takes us into an extraordinary narrative dialogue between Raffel and the great Beethoven himself; and then, as a coda, gives us some of the most gorgeous and jewel-like lyrics one can find in this century.”—Frederick Turner “[Raffel's] clarity is a marvel. It’s a gift of form and detail that composers strive for, and brings to mind an ease of communication such as one hears in Schubert, who sometimes breaks your heart. [His] encounter with Beethoven is fresh, delightful, funny, thoroughly absorbing–and enviable.”—Paul Ramsier, composer Reviews “At the heart of this collection…are forty-eight poems based on the premise the Ludwig von Beethoven…returns to the planet as a guest in [Raffel's] home. This time-travel fantasy works…Most of the poems involve light-hearted conversation between composer and poet in which Beethoven, often bemused by the modern world, offers insightful commentary that illuminate Raffel’s—and the reader’s—sense of his own time, along with the ironic difficulty of getting the point.”—Walt Cummins, The Literary Review “Raffel once again demonstrates and documents his impressive ability with word images, rhythms, and the poetic communication of ideas and feelings.”—John Taylor, Midwest Book Review “Burton Raffel is a discerning poet, not to mention a patient and gracious host…I giggled (to myself) long after finishing the book.”—Jeffrey Donlan, Colorado Libraries About the author Author of more than sixty books, including a translation of Beowulf that has sold more than one million copies since it was first published in 1963, Burton Raffel is one of the most widely read American poets of the second half of the twentieth century. In addition to six previous volumes of his own poetry, he has published critical studies of T.S. Eliot, Robert Lowell, Ezra Pound, and many other figures, and translated major poetic works from a dozen languages, including a recently completed translation of the complete works of Chrétien de Troyes. The son of immigrant parents, Raffel was born and raised in New York City. He received his B.A. in 1948 from Ohio State University. He was a Ford Foundation teacher in Indonesia from 1953 to 1955. In 1958 he received his J.D. from Yale University and practiced law on Wall Street from 1958 to 1960. In 1964 he received two American Philosophical Society grants to write The Development of Modern Indonesian Poetry. From 1964 until 1987 he was a full-time university teacher at schools including the State University of New York, the University of Haifa in Israel, the University of Texas, Ontario College of Art, York University and the University of Denver, where he taught for twelve years. He currently holds an Endowed Chair in Humanities at the University of Louisiana in Lafayette. http://www.conundrum-press.com/Beauty-at-Night http://www.conundrum-press.com/following/conundrum-press.com/Beauty-at-Night Wed, 24 Aug 2011 14:58:05 +0000 Conundrum Press 1503248 <img src="http://payload.cargocollective.com/1/3/116154/1503248/bn_cover.jpg" width="250" height="388" width_o="250" height_o="388" src_o="http://payload.cargocollective.com/1/3/116154/1503248/bn_cover_o.jpg" data-mid="9434884" border="0" align="left"/> <img src="http://payload.cargocollective.com/1/3/116154/1503248/rothman_photo_small.jpg" width="150" height="217" width_o="150" height_o="217" src_o="http://payload.cargocollective.com/1/3/116154/1503248/rothman_photo_small_o.jpg" data-mid="9434842" border="0" align="left"/> <img src="http://payload.cargocollective.com/1/3/116154/1503248/min_rothman_photo.jpg" width="150" height="251" width_o="150" height_o="251" src_o="http://payload.cargocollective.com/1/3/116154/1503248/min_rothman_photo_o.jpg" data-mid="9434843" border="0" align="left"/> Hardcover: $10 Buy here Imagine a world where pharaohs have wheelbarrows, bicycles are made of ice, tigers live in apartment buildings, trees speak, kites think, and cats fly. This is the world of Beauty at Night, where even adults can secretly enjoy vivid colors, beautiful drawings, playful verse, and a certain magic. Anyone who has ever wondered where the wind comes from, or what old rose bushes say, or in what way a poem resembles an answering machine, will find the answers in this book. You will also see how the elephants looked when they were dancing with their umbrellas, what happened when the snails chased the horses, and where the Chinese hat landed when it blew away. Finally, if you are old enough to know that not all children’s books are only for children, read the Afterword by David J. Rothman to yourself – and love your family that much more. Praise I scrub my back in a room fifty feet off the ground As a flock of sparrows whirls around my head, chirping in delight! It is a bathtub in an apartment with an open window. My friend whispers to me from Utah, Telling me about blue sky, white clouds, red rocks, green pines! It is a telephone. I zoom across the city in a chair, The slightest motion of my hands and feet Deciding my fate, my hours, my journey! It is a car. Invisible men and women sing From the past, from other places, all in a tiny box! It is a radio This comes quietly into your mind. It is poetry. Stars Standing, spinning, Upward looking, I saw dropping Drops of light. Sitting, sprawling, Downward falling, I lay on the grass And watched the night. Stunned Finch The finch was fine. I had been holding it, Then it was flying back and forth in the rafters Of the barn, then out the door. I didn't see It stun itself on a beam or wall, then fall. I found it after that, mysterious, A sleeping yellow thumb with folded wings, Eyes closed, heart quick, small feathers on small chest Senselessly ruffling in the breezes crossing The hay-covered floor. It woke up with a start Upon my clumsy palm, blinked twice, and then Decided to go, first up into the rafters, Then out the door and up into the sky. All proceeds from the sale of this book go to the Michael H. Rothman Endowment for Music and the Arts. Reviews “When the poems are combined with perfect companion drawings and a splash of vibrant color, you get a certain magic that playfully merges poetry and art into a most unusual book.”—Mike Nobles, Tulsa World “A lovely collection of poetry, Rothman’s book reads easily to children or can be enjoyed by adults. The poems are innocent in their simplicity and purity, but the truths they speak of are universal. Observant without being silly, David Rothman takes old ideas and makes them fresh.”—Merrie W. Valliant, Colorado Libraries About the author David J. Rothman’s poetry, essays, and scholarship have appeared widely. He lives in San Juan Capistrano, California with his wife, Emily, and his sons, Jacob and Noah. About the painters Michael H. Rothman (1961-1998) was an artist and musician who graduated from the San Francisco Art Institute. Cynthia Min (1965-1990) was an artist and designer who graduated from the San Francisco Art Institute.