Halloween news, treats but no tricks

Probably the biggest news is our own Stuart Kestenbaum is the new Maine Poet Laureate. His titles continue to be popular. This and other news can be found on the new Website.

Other news includes a new review for No Passing Zone also reviewed in the American Book Review, along with Wars Don’t Happen Anymore and links to that review, as well as poems appearing in journals, are on the Website page. Take a look at the new Website with new navigation features like drop-down menus, pages for author’s info and books, and of course free shipping in the US when you order from the Website. In the past 16 months, twelve new titles have been added to the list, so check out the quality work.

Lots of new books from 2015 & 2016: check the site for the latest titles

The Vagabond’s Book Shelf by Dawn Potter

Richard Kostelanetz

Wars Don’t happen Anymore by Sarah White

Descent & Other Poems

The Conversation by Dawn Potter

A Passing by Joan Siegel

Beautiful Day by JR Solonche

Middle of the Night prose & poetry by HC Hsu

Once It Stops by Florence Fogelin Cover photo by Rosamond Orford

Yellow Horses by Martin Steingesser

The Congress of Human Oddities by Teresa Carson

The World Disguised as This One by Mimi White

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Circadian adrift essays, waiting

even in the absence of light

Middle of the Night

HC Hsu

Available Now at Deerbrook Editions

 

Night. When serotonin levels in the brain are pulled to their highest, aching peak. When the soul ventures away from its cage. When a woman exchanged a story for her life; when men, drunk, spoke to each other of love. Night is when ‘ghosts and demons are most powerful,’ and when men turn into wolves. Night is for dreamers. Night is for insomniacs. Night is death. Night is rest. Night is wandering. Night is waiting.

Taking Tang poet Bai Juyi’s poem ‘Come in the middle of the night/Gone at the break of dawn/Come as a fleeting dream of spring/Gone as a morning cloud vanishing without a trace’ as inspiration, Middle of the Night is The Best American Essays nominee HC Hsu’s collection of award-winning personal essays from 2009-2014. Arranged by time written rather than date, these circadianly adrift essays explore love and sex, history and identity, hopes, nightmares, and other nocturnal joys and quotidian tyrannies haunting our sunlit existence.

From a ghost-hunting chronicle in a famed Buddhist temple in rural Japan, to childhood memories of night markets, ancestor worship and martial law in metropolitan Taipei; from praising Elfriede Jelinek’s pitch-black contempt, to lambasting Christ’s ideal of compassion; from a vignette on crying at night and other habits after dark, to a sustained somnambulant philosophical meditation on the ontological virtues of chicharrónes—a synchronicity emerges in these essays in the way they reveal the shadowy memories and experiences of a young ‘Easterner’ living in the ‘West,’ as well as of all those who consider themselves migrants, in the broadest sense, in the first light of a new dawn of globalization and diaspora.

Middle of the Night will appeal to fans of such contemporary essay works as Phillip Lopate’s Against Joie de Vivre, Richard Rodriguez’s Hunger of Memory and Ha Jin’s Writer as Migrant. This tightly themed collection filtering the kaleidoscope of Asian migrational and transmigrational phenomena—from WW2 to MAG—through a 1001 Nights-like parable introduces a new and exciting literary voice and will appeal widely to Asian and Asian American audiences, as well as anyone interested in what makes the lives of these people, here and now, unique and universal.

Author

HC Hsu is the author of the short story collection Love Is Sweeter (Lethe, 2013). Finalist for the Wendell Mayo Award and the South Pacific Review and The Austin Chronicle short story prizes, Third Prize Winner of the Memoir essay competition, First Place Winner of A Midsummer Tale Contest, and The Best American Essays Nominee, he has written for Words Without Borders, Two Lines, PRISM International, Renditions, Far Enough East, Cha, Pif, Big Bridge, Iodine, nthposition, 100 Word Story, China Daily News, Liberty Times, Epoch Times, and many others. He has served as translator for the US Congressional-Executive Commission on China, and his translation of 2010 Nobel Peace Prize winner Liu Xiaobo’s biography Steel Gate to Freedom (Rowman & Littlefield) is out July 3, 2015.

Three Tankas, and what’s to come

Please consider picking up the newest books on the Website, Wars Don’t Happen Anymore by Sarah White, A Passing by Joan I. Siegel, and Beautiful Day by JR Solonche.

  

In the works are at least two books of poetry; available now – Wars Don’t Happen Anymore  poems by Sarah White of N.Y. City; another called Once it Stops, poems by Florence Fogelin of Vermont due in summer; one book of fiction called Middle of the Night by HC HSu due later in the summer; and a book of tankas called A World Disguised As This One by Mimi White of New Hampshire; a new book os poems by Martin Steingesser called Yellow Horses will be out late July. Also very soon The Conversation: Learning to be a Poet by Dawn Potter. I know we’ve all been waiting for this one and you can find more about it here on the blog head.

Today I want to post a poem by Martina Reisz Newberry from her book Where it Goes called Three Tankas. 

Three Tankas by Martina Newberry

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