The Lost Bookshelf Author's by last name S

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Catherine Sasanov

Tara by Catherine Sasanov Červená Barva Press, 2008: In 2005, poet Catherine Sasanov made an unsettling discovery: slaveholding had been an unspoken part of her family's history. Sasanov's painstaking search to find out what happened to the men, women, and children held by her ancestors is at the heart of her new chapbook, Tara. In its pages, Sasanov conjures Missouri's Antebellum landscape out of the ravages of urban sprawl. She pieces together a portrait of slaves and freedmen in poems haunted by the question: How does one write a coherent life of a people if only bits and scraps of their existence can be found?
$7.00 | 30 Pages | In Stock: 25

All The Blood Tethers by Catherine Sasanov Northeastern University Press

The 2002 Morse Poetry Prize
Selected and introduced by Rosanna Warren

The poems in Catherine Sasanov's All the Blood Tethers arise from an ancient, violent, and sacrificial world, a world of Roman Catholicism so atavistic, so embedded in relics, body parts, 'hair strands, blood spatters, bone,' as to seem nearly pagan....Like a restorer cleaning a fresco, the poems wipe away layers of piety and orthodoxy to uncover some violent, primal, stark expressiveness, a dream of Eve's original protest. ...The result is a sophisticated poetry of presense realized as image, as dramatic statement, and as a record of mind and heart collaborating in anger, yearning, testimony, grief, and wonder
--Rosanna Warren

$10.00 | ISBN 1-55553-538-0 | 82 Pages | In Stock: 1

Traditions of Bread and Violence by Catherine Sasanov Four Way Books, 1996

(Excerpts from the back of the book)

Catherine Sasanov breathes spirit into flesh and blood and turns tears into our daily bread. Her poems should be said out loud like prayers. It has been years since I have read poems of such humanity.
--Elena Poniatowska

These extraordinary poems dwell on violence, dwell in the violent truth of the world - Christ's body torn, or a lover's chest cut open, and the Milagro stamped from tin into the shape of a body part...
--Gregory Orr

$12.00 | ISBN 1-884800-09-2 | 54 Pages | In Stock: 1

Lynne Savitt

the deployment of love in pineapple twilight by Lynne Savitt PRESA :S: PRESS, 2005

…Lynne Savitt is the Janis Joplin of poetry.
--Charles Plymell

These poems are heart-breaking, funny, introspective, angry, and masterfully-crafted.
--Dan Crocker

No one writes lust and life and our secrets, fantasy and actual, like this. If you are breathing, Lynne Savitt's poems are a must.
--Leo Connellan, poet laureate of Connecticut

Ambulance sirens ring through her words with the same burning intensity for life…
--Linda Lerner

$6.00 | 48 Pages | In Stock: 3

Richard A. Seffron

The Selected Poems by Richard A. Seffron Pygmy Forest Press, 1996: I know of no other young poet who speaks so eloquently about his personal life and how he integrates it into the real world. I, personally, am at a great loss when I think of his death-and I believe literary judgment will find him to be one of the most potentially explosive writers of the nineties. Born on December 26th, 1967, Richard took his own life on August 4th, 1993. I was unable to explain it to myself then, and have no more answers now. Richard, you will be missed.
--Leonard J. Cirino, Pygmy Forest Press
$8.00 | ISBN: | 68 Pages | In Stock: 2

Don Share

UNION POEMS by Don Share Zoo Press, 2002

Excerpts:

Union presents a moving and original combination of vernacular directness, subtlety of tone and cadence, and imaginative vigor. Poems of mythologized autobiography--grief for a smashed marriage, for a lost childhood--are framed within the larger historical and political context of the poet's pained reckoning with his native Tennessee. --Rosanna Warren

Share's quest takes him back into the green heart of the country, looking down Union Avenue in Memphis where the Arkansas joins the Mississippi, flowing toward the Gulf, and where "the past still hurts, and gets sung about." Like those earlier singers, Whitman and Dickey, Don Share discovers again the distinctly American narrative, "the original catastrophe of our history," as he calls it: "We fought America in ourselves." And still fight, I might add. I delight in the precision of these chiseled poems and in the sizeable, important ambition of Share's imagination. --David Baker

But Union also sings the eternal concerns of love and time, death and longing...Few books are as lovely or profound. --Alice Fulton

$12.00 | ISBN: 0-9708177-7-0 | 67 Pages | In Stock: 5

Glenn Sheldon

Bird Scarer by Glenn Sheldon Červená Barva Press, 2008

MARTHA COLLINS-Structurally and emotionally expansive, Bird Scarer covers more territory than most first books. Beginning as a displaced Bostonian who finds himself in Chicago, where a "terrible blankness fills my eye," Sheldon next moves into a more abstract landscape, where he finds a "permanent address" that is both actual and mental. Finally, he opens his emotional eye to the variety and vibrancy of Latin America, where his travels become the metaphorical basis for a "Geography of Desire." Though often playful, the book is carefully observant and edgily serious: "I'm alert," the poet says, "like a bus rider / with a drunk driver making up / the names of the streets." Metaphors like this, usually emerging from setting, as well as less easily defined conceits ("The anarchists' picnic is / a disaster: Where? Why? When?"), turn these well-grounded poems into delightfully non-linear narratives that keep the reader as alert as the poet.

SUSAN AZAR PORTERFIELD-I am impressed by Sheldon's form. Always the stanza, always very regular, tercets or quatrains, etc., which seems to suggest a kind of control as does his use of short lines as well as short sentences. It suggests a kind of control and even terseness, but what I like is his unexpected bloom or rush of thought and/or feeling that really comes through. In other words, he gets us to ride on this seemingly tidy little train, but then the journey takes us on a wilder ride than we anticipated. I like the surprise of that. I also like what I perceive to be his tone and voice. Quiet, a bit sardonic, but also heavily emotional, Bird Scarer is lovely.

JIM DANIELS-Bird Scarer is an impressive collection of poems. The voice is wise and mature. The structure of the book both clear and sophisticated. One of the things I look for in a book of poetry is an accumulation of momentum from beginning to end, and I found that here. The book creates interesting tensions in terms of place-the links between physical places and emotional landscapes are explored in all their complexities. Sheldon has a fresh voice-quirky and disarming, frank and witty. And always precise. I was struck by the consistent use of tight, packed language, and his careful use of the poetic line. I love the understated humor in many of the poems, and how he uses form to reinforce that humor. The depth and tonal richness of the comparisons seem effortless and natural, yet carry enormous weight in these poems. They roll through these poems, one after another, creating surprise, discovery, insight, throughout. And fun.

LUIS URREA-Glen Sheldon's earlier poetry is certainly filled with promise. We find a full voice in play. Perhaps the poems are shaded by his expertise in Thomas McGrath. Still, this influence does not in any way dull the poems' brio. It is as an American poet that Glenn Sheldon will ultimately be remembered (and revered). He will have a major career as a poet, as Bird Scarer reveals his full maturity and trajectory.

$14.00 | ISBN: 9780615171678 | 60 Pages | In Stock: 20

Larissa Shmailo

A Cure For Suicide by Larissa Shmailo Červená Barva Press, 2008

In "A Cure for Suicide” by Larissa Shmailo, Shmailo writes (as the founder of Fulcrum Magazine Philip Nikolayev points out in his introduction) as if she is …” constitutionally predestined to sing out her lines…her eyes filled with life and love, pain and death, freedom and coercion, the real of the mind and the imagined of the heart.” In the poem “Dancing with the Devil,” the poet sings about the need to throw caution to the wind and trip the light fantastic with the Devil:

“They say if you flirt with death,
you’re going to get a date;
But I don’t mind—the music’s fine,
And I love dancing with someone who can really lead.”

Shmailo put herself in the deceptive calmness of the eye of a hurricane, asks us to tell her what makes us tic, and takes us on the Harlem River Line, like the “Duke” took us on the “A” train. In a sea of mimics this poet is an original voice.

Doug Holder/ Ibbetson Update/ May 2008

$7.00 | 47 Pages | In Stock: 20

Mary McLaughlin Slechta

The Boy's Nightmare and other poems by Mary McLaughlin Slechta The Feral Press, 2006

$10.00 | 14 Pages | In Stock: 4

Judith Skillman

Heat Lightning 1986-2006 by Judith Skillman Silverfish Review Press, 2006

Judith Skillman lets us see through her to ourselves, not as through a glass darkly, but with glorious light.
--Stephen Meats, Editor, The Midwest Quarterly

Judith Skillman has already amply demonstrated her ability to document the fragile ecology of domestic relationships with the resolutely unsentimental eye of the naturalist.
--Deborah Woodward, Prairie Schooner

$15.95 | ISBN: 1-878851-23-3 | 145 Pages | In Stock: 5

Leora Skolkin-Smith

EDGES O Israel O Palestine by Leora Skolkin-Smith Glad Day Books, 2005

Edges is an elegant and moving novel. Leora Skolkin Smith has that rare gift of the writer who can convey the sensibility-the essence of place and its people-with precision and clarity. A moving and provocative debut.
Katherine Weber, author of The Little Women, The Music Lesson

Summary of the novel as written on the back of the book: EDGES is set in a pre-1967 Israel and Palestine. Liana Bialik is fourteen years old when the suicide of her American father forces her to return with her sister and mother to Jerusalem where her mother was born and grew up. Liana's family were once members of the 1940's Haganah and are now living among the complex tensions of Israel's modernalization and expansion. Liana learns about her mother's childhood in the old city, her tragic uncle. With her young lover she lives in the Palestinian world beyond Jerusalem's border. She grows away from her intense relationship with her mother into a womanhood formed by the boundary-less spaces of a lost geography and people.

$15.00 | ISBN: 1-930180-14-4 | 176 Pages | In Stock: 5

Harry Smith

Up North by Harry Smith and Eric Greinke PRESA :S: PRESS, 2006

(From the back cover) The 30 short poems in Up North evoke "that Northern feeling" & the universal mystery of time & space. Going up North is like traveling to another time. The radical special differences between urban & rural places encourage one to appreciate the relationships between people & nature from a fresh perspective.

$6.00 | 40 Pages | In Stock: 3

Michael Spring

Mudsong by Michael Spring Pygmy Forest Press, 2005

In poems made of muck, time, magic and jazz, Michael Spring's Mudsong reminds us that nature, ours and the world's, is at once organic and mysterious… --Lex Runciman

…This is a stellar collection, dramatically envisioned, beautifully crafted.
--John Amen, Pedestal Magazine