Books
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
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
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