Books
Awkward Scrapes
Honeysuckle Season
Soliloquy to the Night Sky
Goodbye, Baby
The Infinite Beauty of Reality
Smoke
Plant Daddy
Tainted
Love House
Boney-Fingered Reach for God
Cheeseburgers
A Hollow Muscular Organ
Open Burning
Available Light
Second Skin
Wash the Dust from My Eyes
Lost and Found
How I Became an Angry Woman
Black Achilles
Kingdom of Speculation
Square Feet
Scotch Tape World
Communion
Broken Tulips
Animal Time
Numbered Bones
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
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
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
The Infinite Beauty of Reality
On every page of this collection of selected poems by late poet, thinker and scientist Vijay Pal Singh, you will find the fruits of intense presence, expanding awareness and commitment to fully experience every moment. "Vijay's poetry has a way of working miracles within the reader's mind. Many of his poems are a guidebook to a state of being I long to exist in, but only visit on occasions, like now, reading this collection, The Infinite Beauty of Reality. Vijay's poems show us the ocean's depths as a womb, enlightenment as waves, the air we breathe a unity of our being. Love, time, light—jewels to free us into infinity. This collection is a womb of nourishment and warmth that aims to transport its readers beyond the torments of the world into a cosmic ecstasy."—Catherine Perkins
Smoke
After a lifetime of writing, poet, writer, journalist, photographer and podcaster Kevin Nance publishes a full-length collection of longer poems. Smoke is an immersive and evocative, celebratory and heartbreaking journey towards a life of authenticity, personal values and hard-earned freedom. "Kevin Nance's Smoke is a major literary achievement, from a voice distinctly Southern and at the same time universal in its themes of longing, memory, and love for the created world in all its manifestations. Such a delight to read poems from a fellow farm boy! I hear echoes of W. H. Auden and Maurice Manning, another great Kentucky poet. Nance's poems are tender, poignant, elegiac, and at the same time as invigorating as any honest engagement with the past—the real past, the authentic past—should be."—Fenton Johnson
Plant Daddy
Vulnerability, strength and introspection interlink in the singular voice of Renée Rigdon's debut poetry collection, Plant Daddy, and the poems in it sing of growth through a journey of acceptance and change. "Rigdon's Plant Daddy, like the flora it venerates, is alive in generative possibilities. Each poem creates new worlds in strange and small places—places that break us, that make us whole, that bring us together until our roots intertwine. You will relish this collection and its love for sounds, for color, for life, for memory and love evoked and turned into a natural resistance, no need for chemicals."—Willie Carver
Tainted
From the author of Girl comes the next instalment of the multigenre story of a girl growing up in difficult circumstances. Friendships, family relationships, domestic violence, health challenges come into focus in this beautiful, hopeful, heartbreaking, relatable book. "Tainted picks up where Wendy Jett's first book, Girl, left off, wrestling cosmic questions posed by the family, creatures, and spirits accompanying Girl's journey. Tragic and tender, magical as God and real as beans and cornbread, Tainted is a triumph and true to the bone. If you liked Girl, you'll absolutely love Tainted."—Mike Wilson, author of Arranging Deck Chairs on the Titanic, political poetry for a post-truth world
Love House
If you liked Frank X Walker's first poetry collection, Affrilachia, you will love Love House—a book highlighting family life with its joys and challenges, with special attention to social justice placed in historical context. "In Love House, Frank X Walker not only brings the collective past back to us in living color, but these poems delve into the sacred personal, the psychohistory of what it means to be father, son, husband, brother, Black. Up close and personal, he writes poems that are on a pendulum, bringing us through the intersection of what is deeply personal in the intimate glances of the depths of our insides; what we find in birdsong and the garden, the devastation of a flood and erosion, then back to the passing of his closest loved ones, what it means to age, violence and the abuse of power, what it means to be human."—Crystal Wilkinson
Boney-Fingered Reach for God
"Boney-Fingered Reach for God is a remarkable debut, a testament to Mark Brown's striking imagination, energetic vocabulary, and devotion to intense love relationships. This three-part work is fueled as well by the poet's appreciation for the bizarre in historical situations, culminating in poems that literally radiate around the life of Marie Curie. Brown's vulnerable investigations of love and his wacky narratives are made all the more vibrant by the poet's metaphorical skill. It is bittersweet that the gracefully sequenced Boney-Fingered Reach for God is also Mark Brown's posthumous signature, the life of a poet cut short."—Molly Peacock, author of A Friend Sails in on a Poem
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
A Hollow Muscular Organ
In this psychologically complex and linguistically sophisticated love story, A Hollow Muscular Organ by Meg Files immerses the reader in the process of dissolution of a long and loving marriage. "A Hollow Muscular Organ combines the intimacy of a two-person play with the insight of a wry all-seeing observer. The alchemy that results is magical. Meg Files's remarkable gifts—she has published both fiction and poetry in a long and distinguished career—are in full bloom here. She renders a lively, headlong story of marital infidelity and its aftermath so fully and deeply that we come to know her characters as we know our life-long friends."—Ann Harleman, author of Tell me, Signora, winner of the Elixir Press Fiction Award
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
Available Light
In her second collection of poetry, Audrey Rooney explores the joys of the present moment from the perspective and experiences of a well-lived life. We can all learn from the wisdom, generosity of spirit, as well as the language precision of these poems."Audrey Rooney's Available Light is in love with the world of texture and light. It holdsup the ordinary miracles of brown eggs under cool running water. Enter her world and you'll come out the other side more observant and alive. You can almost feels the rain in the trees."—Pat Owen
Second Skin
"Second Skin by Katerina Stoykova is a brief, but more than sufficient book. It is more than sufficient to expose the issue of domestic violence, and along with one child's fear—the fear of every child forced to love an abusive parent. The second skin you wear to hide what happens at home; second skin that cannot contain you. A book about the guilt due to the inability to forgive, about hatred towards the one who has moved on and forgotten. A book about the children cowering in the corners of their own powerlessness, who thirty years later continue hearing the screams from the other room. Difficult, true, and exceptionally important."—Natalia Deleva
Wash the Dust from My Eyes
In this first-of-its-kind collection of nonfiction, poetry, art and photography 100 years in the making, Nana Lampton combines the journal entries of her grandfather—a World War I cavalryman uncertain about the future the war holds, yet ready to play his part—with her own poetry inspired by his writing. As she reaches back through a century to see the world from his perspective, Lampton invites the words of Roman poet and philosopher Lucretius to illustrate the timelessness of feelings that we can all appreciate—apprehension, ambition, camraderie, and love—in the face of war and in the hope for what comes after.
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
How I Became an Angry Woman
"In How I Became an Angry Woman, Bianca Bargo autopsies a doomed love in razor-edged imagery 'boiling with lava and venom.' Here we have a man who has 'eaten girls' hearts like valentine candy' and a woman who has 'too many nightmares / of your old lover; / her Fingers, dirty / with knowing you first.' These are volcanic poems that ultimately understand how love—like the truth—is rarely pure and never simple."—Sarah Freligh
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
Kingdom of Speculation
In this book you will be under the spell of imagination that is truly impressive. But, more than that: you will fall in love with Barbara Goldberg's syntax. The way her sentence works against her line-breaks, creating fireworks, is a fairy tale in and of itself. Her poems are magical, not because they contain princesses and ravens and thieves of eggs. They are magical because their music grabs us and won't let us be. The secret to true music cannot be understood. It can only be applauded. —Ilya Kaminsky, Author of Dancing in Odessa
Square Feet
"Each of Lori A. May's vivid aphoristic poems in Square Feet raises a miniature window into a moment of marriage or domestic life. Unadorned and unafraid, May's lines recreate these scenes of love and angst in dioramas of plain words and short lines. Square Feet gives us sex and despair, yes, but also quizzical whimsy. The truths of wry surprises make these poems the work of a mature heart and a trenchant tongue."—Molly Peacock
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
Communion
"These poems tell the love story of s, a shy everyman who excels at tic-tac-toe and loves small, moist dumplings and n, a right-brained everywoman who reads Wittgenstein and Anaïs Nin and prefers large dumplings. Somehow they make it work. In these big-hearted, clear-eyed, short-lined gasps, Nettie Farris grasps that the key to dilly-dallying is to sigh into little poems, to amuse oneself with a pink balloon from time to time, and to pursue the Rosetta Stone to someone else's heart." - Tom C. Hunley Limited availability. Please contact accents.publishing@gmail.com before ordering this book.
Broken Tulips
"The poems in this fine collection view love as both a desire and a dilemma, the kind of passion found in other poets willing to confront the heart with such honesty, namely Neruda. If desire is ever perfect, it is only perfect once—and then what? That last flicker of a question is a sharp yet satisfying pang running through these poems. Meanwhile, behind the intensity shared by two, we have the wider world, which is either indifferent or falling apart. These poems are not simply wise or desperate—they are both at once." - Maurice Manning, Author of The Common Man Limited availability. Please contact accents.publishing@gmail.com before ordering this book.
Animal Time
"I used to believe that Greg Pape's intimate knowledge of everything that lives and breathesor gives light was earned sleeping beneath the stars at night, but these poems prove that heis everywhere all at once just like the wind. And we know the wind never sleeps... Brilliantbeautiful cinematic gems. I still love Coleman and the deer, but I think the rooster poemshave become my new favorites."- Frank X Walker, Author of Isaac Murphy: I Dedicate This Ride Limited availability. Please contact accents.publishing@gmail.com before ordering this book.
Numbered Bones
"Bobby Steve Baker pulls out the scalpel and cuts away the superficial and unsecured, slicing through the flesh of lust and musculature of ego until he reaches his own Numbered Bones. Choices are scars chiseled into the body. The bedrock of self is uncovered through the struggle and search for love. The wounds are perfect in their shape." - Eric Sutherland, Author of Incommunicado Limited availability. Please contact accents.publishing@gmail.com before ordering this book.