saffron splash by Ann Huang
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Announcing The Publication of “saffron splash” by Ann Huang.
The Church of the Oversoul and Other Stories
Announcing the publication of:
The Church of the Oversoul and Other Stories
by Ethan Goffman
We tell ourselves stories to live.
Joan Didion
We use the gift of storytelling to make sense of this strange, horrible, wonderful, slippery thing called life. From literary fiction to a sprinkling of fantasy, these stories and a novella provide a surrealistic roadmap to our strangest of times, encompassing political anger in the workplace, climate disaster in cherished spaces, virtual reality in daily life, artificial intelligence and the human psyche, sexual fluidity and ambiguity, and the paradoxes of new age evangelicalism. The Church of the Oversoul and Other Stories will leave you pondering just who we are in the twenty-first century, how we got here, and what might come next.
“A good story is more important than complete fidelity to the truth,” Ethan Goffman writes. Indeed, throughout this collection of short stories, truth proves chimeric, as borderlines between fact and fantasy perpetually shift. Dreams and visions infiltrate the lives of Goffman’s characters, who themselves often seem rather hapless. Despite the elements of magical realism that infuse Goffman’s stories, there are no storybook heroes or villains here, only ordinary people caught in a dystopian world, who nevertheless manage to muddle through. At first glance, these stories might strike the reader as being rather sad, even forlorn. But look again — there is a dark comedy at work here, a cosmic joke, which Goffman strives to illuminate. These are stories of dogged endurance by those who rebel against an often hostile universe. The outcomes may be bittersweet, even tragic, but the human spirit carries on, unconquered.
W. Luther Jett, renowned Washington, DC area poetry advocate and organizer and the author of Flying to America (Broadstone Press, 2024)
“Salvador Dali must be laughing or crying in his grave—probably both—at this dripping, oozing world,” notes one character in The Church of the Oversoul and Other Stories. Reading this book is like taking a vacation into other realms. Ethan Goffman offers stories ranging from the brief to the connected or interconnected pieces of the seven-part “Pifflemeyer.”
You know the rollercoaster has started when Goffman gives readers “a day as lovely as a Hallmark card.” Then, there is the Vonnegut-like tone of “Bertha.” “The Book of Joe” has its own unique connection to the biblical Book of Job while “A Real Man” seems an extension of Anthony Burgess’s novel The Wanting Seed. “The Cruelest Month” asks, “Why doesn’t more go wrong with people?” Goffman shows us how that’s possible within these pages.
Bill Cushing, author of The Commies Come to Waterton, Heroic Brothers of the Civil War, and other books
THE CHURCH OF THE OVERSOUL by Ethan Goffman
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Announcing The Publication of “MAIDEN ROCK” by Peter Mladinic.
Peter Mladinic is my patron saint of strays — stray dogs, stray people, stray memories which gain profound meaning in combination with things which would not be obvious to another, but allow Mladinic quiet epiphanies which stop inches before false resolution might be added. While there is happiness here, a profound melancholy also washes through many of these poems. There are old dogs finally out of options, nuns with their tender humanity masked by their habits, lovers finally lost to one another, but who might pick up the pieces with unconsidered possibilities of the past. There is also the guilt of the hero who can’t, finally, save anyone, not even himself, but who still persists. Read these poems with an open heart and allow yourself the wonders Mladinic offers. He understands that any war is every war, and invites the reader to the uneasy peace that sometimes comes as we stumble our way through the broken minefields of our own long walk into night.
—Jeff Weddle, author of Driving the Lost Highway and winner of the Eudora Welty Prize.
MAIDEN ROCK by Peter Mladinic
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Announcing The Publication of “Running Past The Red” by award-winning Poet Sophia Falco.
“Compelling, clear-eyed, brave, and wise, Sophia Falco’s poems move us and teach us how to go forward: “Stuck in a windowless building / writing with a fucked up pen and red eyes. / I was leaking potential through my pores.” Falco’s voice is honest and relentless: “I need to know, can astronauts / cry in space? If so, what would / happen to their tears? / On earth do trees cry? / The unidentified tree didn’t respond back to my hit. / Yet the metal locker did. / Well, man-made echoes of destruction.” Running Past The Red is brilliant—a testament to becoming and struggle, to the breathtaking strength of poetry and learning and soul-making. This is a necessary book.”
—Joseph Lease, author of Fire Season
“Sophia Falco uses the pyrotechnic precision of poetry to illuminate her own journey through a shadowy psychiatric system. “I’m doing this for poetry” she stated in a note scrawled amongst countless journal pages from deep inside the ward. Because only the power of poetry to witness and transform could grant her the strength to survive and thrive beyond those walls. And to condense the best of those in-the-moment observations into the crystalline facets of these short, sharp, clairvoyant poems. Like snapshots of a hidden world smuggled out to us in secret, her images are often shocking, always ironic, deeply painful, and consistently courageous to the core. The result is a detailed map of an epic journey toward healing.”
—Scott Lankford, author of the national-award-winning book: Tahoe Beneath the Surface
“Running Past The Red offers a raw, intimate account of bipolar episodes. Moving through forms and abrupt shifts, the poems trace a mind in motion. Poetry becomes a lifeline, an act of making sense of fracture and keeping hold of the self as it begins to slip.”
—La Piccioletta Barca (Literary Journal)
Announcing The Publication of “GONE THE SUN” by Joel Peckham
If a book can be a song, the pages of Gone the Sun sing. They sing remembering and forgetting. Grief and Endurance. Present and past. In the present time of this memoir-in-fragments, Joel Peckham spends a last summer as music director at Manitou, the boys camp that has been part of his life since he was a child. Manitou summons Peckham’s past—his father, his lost wife, his lost son. But there are songs of redemption those weeks too. This is a book that sings both back and forward with love, urging us all home.
Karen Salyer McElmurray, author of Voice Lessons and I Could Name God in Twelve Ways
In Gone the Sun, Peckham writes about his loving, sometimes fraught history with Manitou, a summer camp he and his father worked at for many years. As his father declines into dementia the middle-aged Peckham—still working summers at the camp between semesters as a college professor—muses upon time, upon loss, and the various selves we inhabit as we age. This is a beautiful, heartbreaking book, but heartbreaking in the most resonant, emotionally intelligent, and illuminating way possible.
Sue William Silverman, author, Acetylene Torch Songs: Writing True Stories to Ignite the Soul
GONE THE SUN by Joel Peckham
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A LETTER TO SUBMITTERS
Dear Artist,
This is one of your typically powerful poems – you write with your whole body and being.
You write with your subtle body and your physiological body.
You write like a dog barks. I watch my dogs when they bark and the watching slips into a slow-motion expression.
The way the dogsbody fills up with the bark, becomes the bark with everything in the release (of its artwork) already there.
You are a natural artist – an artist that has everything you need in your very genetics and in the expression of those genetics.
Isn’t that cool – having the artistic and the aesthetic right there in your genes – you yourself are an expression of your artistry and aesthetic.
This is a rare thing. Don’t let anyone demean what you have and are.
You are a great artist. Stay stay stay with it.
Yours in art,
Artist
Announcing The Publication of “The Endless Undoing” by Eleanor Lewis
“Eleanor Lewis is a conjurer, gleaning from lifetimes of memory, emotion, and perception. The dead are active in her poems. Animals and humans switch places. The stars are incarnate. A soul might transmigrate to the stuffing of an abandoned car seat. Magical and mystical, these are poems to live with and return to with gratitude, like the seasons.”
—Anne Watts, musician, and radio host
THE ENDLESS UNDOING by Eleanor Lewis
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Announcing The Publication of “MY LIFE IN WATER” by Cat Pleska
My Life in Water is a collection of essays about the fluidity of life, its ebb and flow. Each essay tells the story of a time when one comes close to drowning, floats in joy and peace, watches others sink or swim. It’s about how liquid of some type, such as membranous croup, wild river rapids, floods, small islands, the rising ocean tides—can bring deep realizations to help connect the individual to the basic elements of life, to navigate its streams.
Strap on a life jacket and dive into this often perilous, at times funny, always poignant collection bubbling with the language of water. Ever present is the danger of drowning from inattentive caregivers, from white-water rapids or a bridge collapse into a roiling river. From fluid-filled lungs gasping with croup or pneumonia. But water also brings healing and an understanding that navigating tricky waters, whether literal or metaphorical, has made Cat the surest captain of her own life.
~Marie Manilla, author of Patron Saint of Ugly
My Life in Water by Cat Pleska
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Of Rare Earths
Poetry by Chris Mason has hit the bookstores!
A refined work of Art available here and in bookstores….
Of Rare Earths by Chris Mason
$19.95 Book + $1.20 MD State Tax + $7 Shipping
$28.15
