Books
Honeysuckle Season
Goodbye, Baby
Woe & Awe
Udder Uproar
Killer Poems
Cheeseburgers
Places of Permanent Shade
In With the Old, Out With the New
Literary Accents, vol. 1 issue 2
This Wretched Vessel
Scotch Tape World
Frog Mantra
I'm Fine, but Thanks for Asking
Fading Into Bolivia
Honeysuckle Season
Unfolding over a single day, Honeysuckle Season tells the story of a circus van travelling through Hazard, Kentucky careens off the road, smashing into a line of parked cars, killing a local basketball star. In Honeysuckle Season, twelve different narrators offer their take on that event and its aftermath, each story complimenting, deepening, and undermining the stories that came before. "Willie Davis has crafted an exquisite and engrossing collection of linked stories set in Hazard, Kentucky. These characters are wonderfully well-drawn. Flawed and funny, odd and wounded, striving and defeated, we get to know them well enough to root for them as individuals and as people who care for each other more than they realize. Readers will be moved, entertained, and delighted by the depth of love evoked for the characters and the place they live. It's a remarkable read."—Toni Ann Johnson
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
Woe & Awe
The poems in Lisa M. Miller's debut poetry collection, Woe & Awe, draw us in with their timeless perspective and contemporary language and hold us with their fearless depth and beauty. "Throughout Woe & Awe, Lisa M. Miller invokes the voices of female ancestors, physical and spiritual, who dare to suggest, "What if adversity has always been/essential?" Sustained by their spirit, Miller wrestles intergenerational and personal trauma in poems of vision, wit, and fierce clarity. Woe & Awe spans a lifetime, addressing personal crises, cultural history, and the Jewish diaspora. By the end of the volume we've seen the poet rendered whole, daughter and mother, deep in the joy of her own daughters, carrying her darkness and bearing the care of others who've been damaged."—Leatha Kendrick
Udder Uproar
Udder Uproar is Cathy Perkins's debut collection of humorous poems. Courageous, bawdy at times, but always unapologetic, the poems in this book surprise and entertain the reader with their mixture of frankness and vulnerability. "These poems are big, and funny. They display a mind alert to the vibrance and wit of words, to our fascination with the untalked-about, and to the pathos as well as the humor in living. You will laugh ruefully, for sure, but you'll also relish this celebration of our human resilience and ways we move exuberantly through the world, owning our frailties bravely and even joyfully."—Libby Falk Jones
Killer Poems
Killer Poems is the fourth poetry collection by New Hampshire poet Andrew Merton. His signature humor and wit, as well as his penchant for the absurd are brought to a new level in these irreverent poems of intrigue and depth. "In Andrew Merton's view of poetry, brevity is the soul of wisdom. His poems are compact. He likes plenty of white space around some image or pithy utterance … Merton is like some elderly neighbor, someone we pass on the street for years without a second look, someone who—when we finally exchange a few sentences—seems to be thinking and worrying about many of the same things we have, someone we would like to spend more time with from now on."—Charles Simic
Cheeseburgers
Packed with humor and memorable characters, Cheeseburgers, the fiction debut of Kentucky-based writer Dean Crawford, is a delightful love story set in the American Wild West. "Forget your troubles, settle back in your Tom Robbins La-Z-Boy for a delightful tramp through the little Kansas cowpoke town of 'You're Now Here.' I can't think of a better way to spend an afternoon than with Calvin Cheeseburgers, Katie McGhee, (the villain) Ike Drogue, and the other characters who inhabit the town, including two ghosts-on-call-when-needed."—Jim Lally, author of Stick Tight Man
Places of Permanent Shade
"In Places of Permanent Shade, J. Kates tackles the big themes along with some smaller ones, but whether he is writing about chopping wood or the end of the world, he brings to his poetry a restless intelligence, subtle humour and a keen sense of observation, both of the inner and the outer life. His tone and use of imagery are remarkable and varied, the voice both colloquial and elegant. And often, lurking just around the corner, is a sharp wit that will jump out and bite you on the arse before you know it."—Peter Robinson, author of Not Dark Yet
In With the Old, Out With the New
Accents Publishing is proud to bring to you Jude Lally's third volume of poetry. In With the Old, Out With the New arrives eight years after I'm Fine But Thanks for Asking and eleven years after The View From Down Here—the very first book to come out of Accents Publishing. "In this year of COVID, we bump up against imposed boundaries that close in our lives. But now we have Jude Lally's third volume of poetry to help us put some perspective on what it means to live a confined life. With sharp wit, understated humor and an ear for language, he invites us into a constrained world that he has made expansive."—Jim Lally
Literary Accents, vol. 1 issue 2
If you're not already a subscriber, you can now order Volume 1, Issue 2 of Literary Accents. This issue focuses on funny poems, in the broadest sense of the word.
This Wretched Vessel
This Wretched Vessel is a 162-page collection of poems written and submitted by a diverse group of poets during the 2014 Lexington Poetry Month, in which participants were challenged to write at least one poem a day. Our favorite poems were selected from those submitted, and the result is an emotional, courageous, and sometimes funny poetry collection featuring the work of 114 authors.
Scotch Tape World
"Tom C. Hunley, on the evidence of these poems, is as in love with, as he is bewildered by, the world. And although that might seem a common way of being in the world, Hunley's ability to render his love and bewilderment precisely in his poems is unique and necessary. These poems manage to be funny without being cynical, and they manage to be honest without being cynical, and they manage to seem utterly contemporary without being cynical, and each of these achievements is a small miracle and almost an act of defiance. At one point, Hunley tells God, "I want you to fill my mouth / with water and prayer and maybe a jagged little song." I don't know how Hunley is set for water, and I don't know about his spiritual practices, but these poems read like answered prayers." - Shane McCrae
Frog Mantra
"Perhaps the rarest gift is to encounter a voice that sings from an unexpected condition. In this lucid collection, poet Suchoon Mo offers this kind of voice. Both worldly and electric, Frog Mantra is a book filled with singing. The poems approach modern life with wit, grace, and keen insight.The reader is presented with scenes that reconfigure our greater concerns about life and death. Mo presents us with a complicated world made clearer by his devotion to observation. The music of Frog Mantra resides in secretive moments, meant to be savored through each page." - Matthew Haughton, author of Stand in the Stillness of Woods Limited availability. Please contact accents.publishing@gmail.com before ordering this book.
I'm Fine, but Thanks for Asking
In I'm Fine, but Thanks for Asking, Jude Lally is "still mad as hell" and "ready for the hurt." Illuminating the mundane things in life like going to the bathroom, hopping boulders while hiking, or simply being able to jump out of bed, we are reminded of what is often taken for granted. These poems confess the dreams and demons as well as the daily joys and struggles of a writer facing a rare disease and an uncertain fate. In them, we find him living for today, fully and honestly, with a refreshing sense of humor that offers light and hope amid the darkness. He stares his condition in the face, laughs and escapes into his imagination, determined "not to dry up/and blow away." This collection signals Jude Lally is here to stay, a hardy perennial, a poet that continues to bloom.—Eric Scott Sutherland
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.