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Curiosities
The Imprint of Poetry
Current Titles
The Memory Palace by JoSelle Vanderhooft
The rooms in The Memory Palace are filled with holy relics, profane agonies, memories that are revelations, and windows to wonders . . . A significant poetry collection by JoSelle Vanderhooft, dealing with the raw themes of youth, pain, the Catholic faith, and the challenges of growing up gay. Structured around the Renaissance mnemonic device of a building with rooms populated by thoughts and objects, The Memory Palace is a lucid dream, a remarkably powerful memoir, and a fantasy.
"Inside The Memory Palace, JoSelle Vanderhooft constructs a painfully honest memoir in free verse, detailing one talented young woman's odyssey past the monsters of mental illness, through the brutal clash between faith and sexuality, always haunted by the terrible enigma of a father's suicide—yet these traumas are counterbalanced by earnest hope and the small, sweet moments life grants to fighters and survivors. Her eloquent and eminently readable story will resonate with any one who's ever found themselves an alien in their own world, peering in at society from the outside."
Original Press Release (4-21-08)
The Journey to Kailash by Mike Allen
Mike Allen's newest collection, The Journey to Kailash, gathers 57 poems that explore regions sometimes whimsical, sometimes terrifying, always off the beaten trail. From the title poem, in which the down-to-earth teenage narrator discovers his mother's new husband is Ganesh, the elephant-headed Hindu god of luck; to "Manifest Density," a tongue-in-cheek celebration of materialism that dares Mankind to "play a game of chicken with the Universe"; to "The Strip Search," in which the gate of Hell functions like an airport metal detector, sounding off when a damned soul hasn't yet abandoned all Hope; to an entire cycle of surreal poems in which the paintings of such artists as Chagall and O'Keeffe become reality; Allen uses a wide range of strange subjects and skewed perspectives to examine the hopes and fears that shape our times. Sometimes drawing from mythology, sometimes extrapolating bizarre futures, and not at all afraid to blend the two, Allen's poetry still addresses universal themes of love, loss and longing with candor and even humor.
"It seems most proper that The Journey to Kailash should include a poem about Jackson Pollock. Like that painter of large-scale states of mind, Mike Allen pours everything he's got onto his poem-canvases. Mythologies, science-fiction scenarios, private memories and desires, and untestable ideas crowd and overlay one another upon the pages as if flung from an overloaded brush. Here is a vividly vertiginous collection of poems, all fun and mind-games."
"Mike Allen is a poetic Shiva, whirling his thousand limbs to snatch gold from thin air and create these epics-in-miniature, each with its own metallic sheen."
"Imaginative, charming, and vivid, Mike Allen's poems in The Journey to Kailash will transport you to a world where Ganesh might be your stepfather or an ATM might eat your personality, where black holes and viruses intersect with mythological characters as well as the paintings of artists like Chagall and O'Keeffe."
"In his latest collection, Mike Allen brings together the epic and the commonplace, the nightmarish and the beautiful. Whether utilizing speculative or more traditional parameters, leaning towards the surreal or linear, he offers words that directly, powerfully, and originally give voice to a broad range of human experience. The Journey to Kailash is a deeply stirring and memorable book."
"The Journey to Kailash is an exceptional collection of poetry -- a gallery of the grotesque and the luminously strange . . . Whether he's painting an absurdist scene of a satyr in rut in contemporary Boston, or peeling back layers to reveal the sublimely horrific spiritual extremity of a hell-bound soul, Mike Allen's voice is nothing short of mesmerizing."
"These poems lead you down narrow alleys and beat you bruised and bloody before using your innards for auguries and making a carrion feast of your eyes. . . . It's terrifying and wonderful, and I dare you to read it."
A Guide to Folktales in Fragile Dialects by Catherynne M. Valente
A Guide to Folktales in Fragile Dialects by award-winning author and poet Catherynne M. Valente is a delightful collection of poetry, short fables, and fairy tales that explore myth and wonder, ancient and modern, with an introduction by Midori Snyder. Born in the Pacific Northwest in 1979, Catherynne M. Valente is the author of the Orphan's Tales series, as well as The Labyrinth, Yume no Hon: The Book of Dreams, The Grass-Cutting Sword, and four books of poetry, Music of a Proto-Suicide, Apocrypha, The Descent of Inanna, and Oracles. She is the winner of the Tiptree Award and the Million Writers Award and has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and the World Fantasy Award, the Rhysling Award, and shortlisted for the Spectrum Award. She currently lives in Northeastern Ohio with her partner, two dogs, and two cats. Her sixth novel, Palimpsest, will be released by Bantam Spectra in February of 2009.
"Structured around a series of folktale motifs, Valente's eloquent second full-length poetry collection dissects the perceived roles of women in Earth's and otherworldly fable and myth.... enlightening and enthralling."
"Catherynne Valente writes in the language of dreams, which is not rational and yet always makes sense. I could read the poems in this book a hundred times and find new meanings, new pleasures in them. It is an astonishingly beautiful and deeply satisfying accomplishment ... A brilliant, beautiful book."
"A tale of two grandmothers, one mythical, one real, that will gently, inexorably break your heart. A story of a god's petty curse reimagined as a sensual, sexual postmodern nightmare. A sinister conspiracy of black magic and murder hatched in the land of Lewis Carroll. Those are just tiny morsels in the decadent poetic feast found in A Guide to Folktales in Fragile Dialects—Catherynne Valente doesn't so much retell legends and fairy tales as twist and sculpt them into new shapes, stunning objets d'art built from exhilarating language that never flinch from painful truths."
"Her poems enchant, enthrall and devastate, and this collection takes the astonishing skill she showed in Apocrypha and distills it, deepens it, sharpens it into a tool to carve stories out of language. If Sappho had written Ovid's Metamorphoses, she could not have done better than this."
Original Press Release (6-13-07)
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