Books
Awkward Scrapes
Soliloquy to the Night Sky
Goodbye, Baby
It's Not Easy Being a Moth
Homegoing
The Compost Reader
Open Burning
Lost and Found
Grief & Other Animals
Black Achilles
Mother, Loose
Evidence that We Are Descended from Chairs
Fading Into Bolivia
Awkward Scrapes
Awkward Scrapes is a collection of poems that celebrates love, family, fatherhood, and the natural world while confronting grief, violence, memory, and healing. Rooted in Appalachia and Kentucky landscapes, Eric Scott Sutherland's lyrical, music-infused poems seek beauty, tenderness, and hope amid the awkward scrapes of being human. "The poems in Awkward Scrapes are the best kinds of love songs, never sentimental and always powerful. They are meditations on romantic love, on the profound connections we have with our children and the natural world, even on life itself. This book is a celebration of all that makes us human: the awfulness and the beauty, sometimes tangled. Sutherland is one of my favorite poets and I loved every carefully chosen yet organic word."—Silas House
Soliloquy to the Night Sky
The brave poems in this book, Kathleen Gregg's first full-length volume of poetry, tell the deeply moving and sometimes heartbreaking story of a family's struggle with Alzheimer's. " Kathleen Gregg's poignant portrayal of her sister's descent into dementia displays the attentiveness only deep love can bring. In Gregg's deft hands, we experience Nancy's "beautiful exuberance" and the sisters' long tight bond as well as the growing space between them that's like "standing in a cave / hearing the last echoes." These poems transmit grief and fear but also a "rush of wonder" at the richness of natural and human worlds. This collection is an homage, finally, not to loss but to life."—Libby Falk Jones
Goodbye, Baby
Goodbye, Baby, the author's first book of poetry in six years, is arguably his most personal—a taut and elegiac sequence of grief and loss, but also of lambent memory, of gratitude, of joy, delivered with lightning strikes of Brewer's wry humor amidst his signature brand of darkness. "Goodbye, Baby is an elemental book, a collection of poems that distills chaotic experience down to its most essential ingredients: food, drink, blood, wit, travel, song, love for animals, especially a good dog named Lucy. This is a volume of twelves, of completed circles, of the faces of clocks, an American sort of twelve-line ghazal emerging, each poem an egg contained perfectly within its shell. You will never forget this loved dog and the words she brought forth from one of our finest poets."—Jesse Graves
It's Not Easy Being a Moth
Accents Publishing is proud to bring to you the first full-length poetry collection by Mark Lee Webb. It's Not Easy Being a Moth contains poems sometimes whimsical, sometimes abstract poignant or wise, but always masterfully written. "Mark Lee Webb's It's Not Easy Being a Moth is a vivid journey through memory and transformative times, and it is voiced with a steadiness and an honesty that allow the poems' earned discoveries to further reverberate. This collection examines the intersections between youth and grief, between consciousness and intimacy, between perspective and instinct, all the while taking the care required to find the language that can simultaneously delight and haunt."—Marcus Jackson
Homegoing
Homegoing by Toni Ann Johnson follows a middle-aged African-American woman facing loss as she returns to her conservative white hometown. This fearless book tackles issues such as race, isolation, childhood trauma, abandonment and ultimately healing. Homegoing won the Accents Publishing Inaugural Novella Contest. "Toni Ann Johnson has in Homegoing harnessed the unique power and grace of the novella. There's not a wasted word in this cinematically told, immediately engaging story, and yet the form affords her the length to develop characters whose deeply felt humanity makes them memorable."—Stuart Dybek, MacArthur Fellow and author of The Coast of Chicago, a New York Times Notable Book
The Compost Reader
"In her first full-length collection, Karen Schubert works 'Elbows deep in compost,' sifting through that which accumulates with the passage of time, the fecund and dangerous accumulations of a life: memory, regret, joy, and loss. Schubert's fertile reflections by turns witness, correct, and renew the past, her patient gaze transforming both observer and observed. This collection runs through the events of a life like the Ohio River runs through Schubert's native terrain, and like that river 'it will arrive / with more than when it started.'"—Kimberly Johnson
Open Burning
At times elliptical and surreal, the emotional and psychological landscape of these poems is punctuated by flashes of the real risks and rewards of navigating difficult times with grace and compassion. Through the magic of these well-crafted poems, we become invested in the seemingly inconsequential as well as the life-changing. "The poems in this rich collection are both spare and candid, chronicling the demise of a marriage, even as it nearly coincides with a father's blooming love for his young daughter. One love is lost, but a wholly different love arrives. At times the contrast is inexplicable and the speaking voice in these poems doesn't quite know to whom the poems should be addressed. That is a perspective I find so arresting in this book, a crossroads of grief that has no bottom and love that has no end, weighted with the plain responsibility of somehow going forward.—Maurice Manning
Lost and Found
"Andrew Merton has masterfully condensed his life into potent, brilliantly composed, minimalist snapshots. Chronologically arranged, delicately layered, and driven by savage honesty and subtle tenderness, Lost and Found is an intense injection of love, loss, loneliness, and above all, the unrelenting question of one's existence. I'll slot this on my shelf next to Raymond Carver."—Jessica Bell "Almost every one of his poems has a surprise waiting for the reader, either some astonishing figure of speech or a witty observation we are not likely to forget anytime soon."—Charles Simic
Grief & Other Animals
"Patty Paine's superb new collection arises from the nearly unbearable—a mother's death, but most especially the senseless death of a husband. And, as the crucial elegiac poets know, grieving never truly arrives in 'stages,' and never ends in 'closure.' It is a process infinitely more intricate and nuanced than the platitudes suggest, and it ends, at best, in only a fraught and vexed consolation, what one of her poems calls, 'a sorrow deeper than solace.' Yet even a vexed consolation can be a form of quiet triumph, and these poems—spare, heartbroken, and always utterly precise—arrive repeatedly at such a triumph. Patty Paine has written a book of bravery and consummate artistry."—David Wojahn
Black Achilles
"Such a small wound, such a huge nuisance, death. In Black Achilles, Curtis L. Crisler takes the very human suffering of a torn tendon and uses it to explore our love affair with convenience, our ever-growing cloak of invulnerability, our pining for youth, immortality—how we unhinge at its loss. It is b-ball and score, the opposite of frustration/fragility … weakness. It is crutches and numbness, swagger and 'what tender means.' All this with a deft rim shot, a language of swerves and dunks, rebounds and alley-oops."—Leslie Anne Mcilroy, Managing & Poetry Editor, HEArt (Human Equity through Art), and author of Slag
Mother, Loose
Mother, Loose was selected by Patty Paine for the Judge's Choice award in the 2014 Poetry Chapbook competition. "Full of ripe, aching music, Brandel France de Bravo's Mother, Loose captures the overlap between what we chant as comfort and what we choose as elegy. Nursery rhymes become impishly twisted: 'Social climber, / they called me,' Humpty Dumpty admits, while Mary and her lamb pick out 'Teat Peach' polish to get their nails done. Deft and heartbreaking, these poems ask us to step out from under the sheltering wing of Mama Goose, and into the arms of Morpheus. Let this collection cradle your heart in its hand."—Sandra Beasley
Evidence that We Are Descended from Chairs
"Andrew Merton's poems have many qualities that are both pleasurable and startling. He demonstrates the simplicity that is only gained by hard application, he brings a wry approach that flips the reader from an ambience of ironic nostalgia into the abyss of historical violence and personal grief, he mixes a playful surrealism with the knack of capturing both the hilarious and the deadly, and pulls off the visual psychologist's trick of making the familiar strange and puzzling. All of this is delivered in that most serious of all modes, a graceful sense of humour. This is one of those collections you will often re-read." - Rory Brennan
Fading Into Bolivia
"Time is unrelenting, relationships fragile, loss certain, writes Richard Taylor in Fading Into Bolivia, his new collection of clear-eyed and graceful poems. But the reader is not left wanting, for what is broken, Taylor also tells us with characteristic good humor and optimism, will one day 're-incorporate with perfect wholeness.' Reality tempered by hope: what an inviting and useful collection of poems!"- Maureen Morehead, Author of The Melancholy Teacher Limited availability. Please contact accents.publishing@gmail.com before ordering this book.