UNCOLLECTED PRESS: The Raw Art Review

Bob Dylan said a song was anything that could walk it on its own. It’s the author’s hope that each letter in this book of dreams can walk by itself like “Louie Louie” jumping off the radio but when read together will tell a story not unlike Horses, Smile, Berlin, Madame Bovary or Flowers of Evil. It’s an album too, so play it . . . LOUD.

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“HURRICANES IN MICHIGAN” is a staggering collection of stories, set in the farmlands and forests of an evocatively captured rural Michigan. Filled with rugged characters often teetering on the brink of self-destruction within a violent meth-fed culture, the stories bring to mind work by other country noir writiers such as Daniel Woodrell and Bonnie Jo Campbell. Shek is a marvel at blancing the grotesque with the mundane, at illuminating the humanity beneath the circumstances. A new and important voice in fictioln

DARYL FARMER, author of Where We Land

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The following books have been selected as Winners of the UnCollected Press 2023 Book Publication Contest. The books on this list will be produced in 2023. (Additional book selections for the 2023 publication year may be forthcoming).

Driving the Lost Highway by Jeff Weddle

How to Love a Fisherwoman by Clare Chu

If My Hands Were Birds by Sophia Falco

Night Bones by Caroline Hayduk

Saffron Splash Ann Huang

The Shape of My Absence by Gary Beaumier

A Scattering of Words by Robert Guzikowski

(Additional Books selected as Winners of the 2023 Book Publication Contest will be announced as the year progresses)

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The poems in Kris Falcon’s “some blue, a little spur” function like a map of dark watercolors, where the speaker is building a way through a space-time collage. “You say there is nothing there. I see a lake…// I see how I am to depart.” The pathfinding work of Falcon is grounded in logic, and the surreal nature of reality holds the reader in shared experience, for instance of being in lockdown, “We are stepping out after 36 weeks of showering / at sundown.” Falcon carries us across a landscape where, “Any piece of fabric can look like / a body after a storm” and asks that we accept the lack of certainty, the fact that “Nobody understands you and your map / shaped like an infected tree.” This collection holds both our felt experience of not having the answers, and requires our acknowledgement of how that “muscles what heals.”

• Amelia Martens, author of The Spoons in the Grass are There to Dig a Moat

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Plunge by Taunja Thomson is a sensory deep dive into the natural world.  This lush full-length collection celebrates human immersion into creation’s color palate while offering the reader a taste of life’s “gasp/& gravity/its slow spin/mouthful of light.” Many of the poems are ekphrastic in that they are inspired by works of visual art. Yet, each poem is skillfully positioned in the arc to usher the reader through the rush of passing seasons— “between the tumbling/umber of dreams/and the roar/of age.”  What emerges is a breathtaking meld of sense and sentience, underscored with natures’s patterned music. Cicadas rise with “red eyes & membrane-thin wings clambering up through ground/rattling their golden tymbals–/summer kettledrums.” The poet invites “raven and wind/and creeping moonflower/to come and settle” inside her as she bids us “watch this life leap over/the gate to moon/disappear into its brilliance.” Thomson’s gift for imagery knows no bounds.

—Roberta Schultz, author of Underscore, Dos Madres Press and Asking Price, Workhorse Writers.

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The galleys for The Raw Art Review Winter 2023 are in progress and nearing completion. We will be finalizing the galleys in the next several days and will send them to all contibutors for review and comment.

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Alan Britt is the poet. He doesn’t need philosophic pragmatism to help; although, it never hurts the basic truths. His poetry speaks for itself. Straightforward, concise, matter of fact, practical, and yes, right to the bullet point. The straight shooter, at the ready with prolific trick shots, targets the bullseye of our shared dilemmas. At odds with a reality that’s not always real. Where the norm isn’t quite normal. In the Garden of Earthly Delights, like the Bosch triptych, Britt paints a profound, reluctant world where redemption and damnation are one in the same flower. Things happen, forthwith, and sans reason. The very same dualism, two headed, twin critter of dictums conjecture, and plain facts. A surreal approach, in the garden, dwelling with purpose, in and around fanciful notions, those earthly delights to savor. A good meal at the rest stop, on the road trip of the word. Traveling along the wayside, direct to the poet’s journey.

~Tom DiVenti, Apathy Press Poets

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