Böcker utgivna av DOS Madres Press

The poems in this collection beg the question of what leads up to and what is happening as things labor to come into being.According to the scholar and poet, Charles Stein: "Magic is pragmatic, or better performative, phenomenology. But phenomenology is the magic of ontogeny." Robert Podgurski's IN THE SHADOW OF THIS BRANCH is itself deeply invested in a thaumaturgy or wonder working of the magic of nascency. The poems in this collection beg the question of what leads up to and what is happening as things labor to come into being. As Michal Ajvas expressed in his novel, Empty Streets "I realized that in trying to express what a thing communicated, I was making a thing of the communication--an unusual and fantastic thing perhaps, but of what is not yet a thing, a matter from which things are formed." And yet, Podgurski is not so presumptuous as to assert he knows precisely what this process of emergence is, but that it warrants acknowledgment, further exploration, and to facilitate the possession of the senses in its sway."Robert Podgurski's poems deploy systems and structures akin to the sacred geometry of the temples and monuments he meticulously elucidates in his rare scholarly works. The micro-macro play in these poems show the center is everywhere."--Raymond Foye"If Robert Podgurski didn't exist, I think I would have had to invent him -- a practicing magician who also thinks about magic; whose careful scholarship and conceptual clarity are dimensions in an intensive, theurgic armamentarium; and a poet whose poems are hazards in a vital ontological probing. One enters them to the degree that one is correspondingly willing to hazard what might be found there: events in the living future of magic, a future not at all Not Yet, but more pertinently -- From Now On."--Charles SteinPoetry.

PROVOCATIONS explores arguments about literary and spiritual Creations, through definitions of selves and others, and the self with others. Questions of resistance and transcendence, both internal and interpersonal, and to the "facts" of our existence are addressed throughout. Questions about mortality are the convergent points, ultimately, of the 'provocations' in the self-questioning that is the central thrust of the text.

CONTINUED CASES is a collection of poems satirical, social, and political. A sequel to Hague's Public Hearings (Word Press, 2009) it was written partly in response to the 45th presidency of the United States. It addresses practices, policies, and personalities as well as opines on education, the arts, and the fate of the environment. One of the book's epigraphs is from the 2017 prayer card at the funeral of Wayne Barret, author of Trump: The Greatest Show on Earth: The Deals, the Downfall, the Reinvention. "Our credo must be the exposure of the plunderers, the steerers, the wirepullers, the bosses, the brokers, the campaign givers and takers ... So I say: Stew, percolate, pester, track, burrow, besiege, confront, damage, level, care." In CONTINUED CASES, Hague does his best to offer opposition to the outlandish, the illegal, the inhumane. At the same time, as a native Appalachian from the Ohio Valley steel town declared in the 1970s to have the worst air in the country, he recollects the personal damages of industrial extractive industry. Aware of the agrarian traditions of Jefferson, the democratic, populist appetites of Whitman, and the counter-cultural politics of the Sixties, Hague offers seasoned witness to our times.

Knock-knock! Who's there?Ultimately for all, it will be age. At first, it seems like a bad joke--needing a cane, memory loss, more care, forgetting even one's own name. In KNOCK-KNOCK, Lewis creates the persona of an older physician who should've known what's in store. Sometimes the reality is grim, but there's humor, love, and even romance in his inventive and poetic story-telling. "Lost-and-found / is not a planned / destination." Yet we all eventually find ourselves there."Old age is no joke. The body breaks down; the mind wanders away. For many, if not most, aging is existentially challenging and physically demeaning. And yet Owen Lewis' KNOCK-KNOCK finds a variety of entry points into this penultimate human experience. The eighteen poems (in the numerology of the Kabbalah, life) gathered here range from mild ruminations on the disconcerting experience of losing and forgetting inconsequential things, to more intense poems, exploring critical conditions: impaired ambulation, deterioration of vision, cardiac failures. Like all good healthcare providers, Lewis - a medical doctor, himself - is always writing toward the fear of mortality that lies at the heart of aging, and that frightens most of us, nearly to death. Through poetic storytelling, deep empathy, psychological courage, and a gimlet eye, he finds both solace and meaning (and yes: sometimes humor) in this phase of life."--Kate Daniels"KNOCK-KNOCK is a sophisticated chapbook about aging and the brain by a prize-winning poet and professor of psychiatry. The poems come to the reader in a variety of shapes, moods and sounds. The book opens with the speaker's tender first encounters with such age-related issues as the use of a cane for mobility and the occasional challenges of memory. Music is an important element (and subject) in the subsequent poems about more serious symptoms and the fears they inspire. Only a clinical expert in diseases of the mind could have constructed the drama of the scenes that follow."--Michael SalcmanPoetry.

In this striking collection of poems, Joel Bettridge crafts a poignant mix of lyrics, half-stories, epigrams, speculations, histories, and songs to study how evolution, especially that of people, is guided more or less by magic. OF SPECIES documents the relentless transmutations of our human selves and the environments we inhabit; reveals the facts coded in myths, prayers, and rituals; unearths the forgotten gods who live in gene pools, artifacts, and biomes. These poems map our created and changing world, offering a vision for how to belong now to what we are on the brink of losing."'Awake, awake: look awry, look new, ' insists Bettridge's new breathtaking collection, OF SPECIES. Gods, gullies and crevasses, Homo georgicus and horses, bark beetles, and more, all burrow out from the 'artifacts of light' that are these poems. Too fierce to be pastoral, too urgent to be elegiac, this collection widens the imagination of what nature poetry might be, what it must do. Some books are meant to be read--this one wants to be lived."--Richard Deming, author of This Exquisite Loneliness"Bettridge's collection invites the reader into an entangled existence where we have permission to be curious and intimate about everything: What even is a species or an animal body without other species or other animal bodies? What is the unlearning required for a human to see beyond the categories of human and nonhuman, to look beyond categories at all? 'What is the ambition of grasses? / What dreams as they throng / With the winter in abeyance?' The conversations that emerge from these questions are perhaps the conversations we should all be having more often. Beautiful and expansive, OF SPECIES is a significant work."--Janice Lee, author of Separation Anxiety"OF SPECIES begins with a knock-out introduction, 'HORSES, ' in which the poet confesses that horses in two beguiling illustrations by artist Rick Bartow have begun speaking to him, initiating him into a world of metamorphosis, one that he duly records in a series of stunning theriophanies--of beast, of person, of divine power. This book is a marvel of formal and tonal shifts that Joel Bettridge manages with enviable ease, from the stateliness and earnestness of the 'Transmutations' that initiate each new section to the magical open-form free verse interspersed by the short, pungent epigrammatic poems the poet has been dazzling us with for years. In this daring collection, Bettridge has devised a creation mythology for evolution and it really sings. A masterful book!"--Peter O'Leary, author of The Hidden Eyes of ThingsPoetry. Nature.

Poetry. In this powerful sequence of poems, Owen Lewis bravely revisits the death of his younger brother in 1980, trying to make what sense he can of inexplicable loss. He summons his brother by 'taking every memory that [comes] to me like a hand in the dark, ' by listening attentively to what his brother's spirit might be saying from beyond the grave, and by speaking back to him and offering him a troubled but loving place in the poet's current life. Like the dune fences that make up one of the sequence's motifs, these poems are stays against confusion that, paradoxically, do not attempt to fully wall out that confusion but, instead, let it in: 'Enough slats / to keep things together, but still / some sand pours through.' The result is a poetry that is deeper and more moving, open both to pain and vision.--Jeffrey Harrison

Poetry. Art. We know many of the photographs as threads woven into our lives and into our understandings of the world and of history. And in some ways we don't know the photographs at all. The photo poems are not captions; their evocative language--in one case, chanting; in another, the subject's monologue--creates a unique relationship with each photograph, bringing the images alive in new and startling ways. Although the collection is serious, it also celebrates photography. Perhaps paradoxically, the precise, varied, and imaginative language keeps everything in this gallery intensely alive. The photo poems in EVERYTHING IN MOTION, EVERYTHING AT REST enlarge as you read them. I am energized by these photo poems, and grateful to John Bradley, whose work goes beyond the usual to open the borders between these arts.--Veronica Patterson

Poetry. Literary Nonfiction. Winner of a Distinguished Favorite Award in the 2020 New York City Big Book Awards. FIELD LIGHT, written as an extended, multi-sectioned poem that moves in and out of prose, is a personal and historical exploration of the Berkshires through poetry and prose. Physician-poet Owen Lewis becomes a figure in his own epic as he learns to see himself and the abounding history that lives in the towns of western Massachusetts. From the writers Hawthorne, Melville, nearby Stanley Kunitz, Chris Gilbert and others, to artists Daniel Chester French, his daughter Peggy Cresson and Norman Rockwell, from the young lawyer Theodor Sedgwick who undertook a trial in 1781 to free Elizabeth Mumbet ending slavery in Massachusetts, to civil rights champion W.E.B. Du Bois, to Arlo Guthrie, to physician Austen Riggs and his psychiatric hospital, to Gertrude Smith and the founding of Tanglewood, FIELD LIGHT investigates layered histories to create a compelling cultural, political and social narrative, with its cycles of privilege and racism, that continues to unfold. It is the story of finding one's voice amid many voices, and the importance of the community of voices.

Poetry. 'What are the tones, the minor notes, ' he asks, 'dizzying me tonight, from a cafe / fifty-five years late?' That's a question George Kalamaras elucidates time and time again throughout a dazzling collection of scars and stars, worries and wondersâ tributes to brother Surrealists like Nikos Gatsos and jazz greats like Sonny Clark, tooâ figures who 'were meant to caress the keys // inside the soft places we show no one.' These poems form a series of long-after-midnight, everyone-else-in-the-world-is-asleep broadcasts that slip between laughter and tears like shortwave messages from faraway, incantatory and incandescent. 'How many moons' can we find 'in the golden yellow dead?' More than we thought. George Kalamaras sets off to discover them all.â Joseph Gastiger

Poetry. Owen Lewis's poems do us the huge favor of restoring a radical and essential strangeness to the so-called 'everyday.' He is a shaman riding upon the storm-split house, the family tree that wanders through Minsk, Brooklyn, and Jersey, the love-sculpted bedclothes, the parent grown perplexing, and the handwriting of the dead. Nothing that is human is alien to Lewis in these fine poems, which perform again and again the gutsy feat of stealing the graveyard flowers.--Patrick Donnelly

Poems born out of the author's experiences from living forty years in Greece.Celebrating four decades of living in Greece, A DIFFERENT HEAVEN: NEW AND SELECTED POEMS joins the more prominent poems from Donald Schofield's five previous collections (three full length books and two chapbooks) with more recent work and a sampling of translations from modern Greek that have influenced his writing and continue to resonate off it. Taken together, the poems in this collection chart one American's experience of living in a part of the world where the ancient and modern, the urban and rural, and the mythical and mundane intermingle in wondrous and sometimes disconcerting ways. As the poems go deeper into the land, language and culture the author has come to embrace, they engage in an ongoing dialogue with such ancients as Homer, Herodotus, Plato and Aristotle. Other poems speak in the voice of marginalized biblical figures, such as Hagar, Joseph and Lazarus. Earlier free verse looks out at the world from within Egyptian sarcophagi and beneath the gilded surface of Byzantine icons. More recent blank verse and sonnets interact with shepherds and poets; painters and refugees; archaeologists, cemetery workers and assorted others who people the landscape that he now calls home."For the past three decades Don Schofield has been writing and publishing the deeply affecting and finely crafted poems gathered here in a single volume, poems 'determined by nothing / but rhythm, ' the rhythm of our lives as we lean into 'the glittering present.' Ranging from his adopted Greece with its cries of lambs--I aam, I aam--and its refugee camps to Nepal where he watches 'a tiger eating what remained of a baby water buffalo' to Hart Island in NY with its 'unclaimed dead in their plywood coffins' to the dusty Fresno of his violent boyhood where he imagines a place 'where love isn't fear, ' these poems cast a precise eye on the natural landscape and our place in it: 'You can tell we're humans / by our short-billed caps.' A Different Heaven is a book best read slowly to savor the 'gentle lure' of these necessary and enduring poems."--Michael Waters"Wherever the poem comes from--from the poet's earthly place, I mean: say, Nevada, Montana, Italy, Greece, Egypt. anywhere--in the case of Don Scofield's work, the poem comes from somewhere the reader will recognize as implicitly true, minutely accurate, and abundantly beautiful. This is work by a man as in love with language as he is with the world and with this earth. You will be moved; you'll be astonished. You'll be very glad you read this book."--Robert WrigleyPoetry.

In ON THE LONG BLUE NIGHT, Eliot Cardinaux's debut poetry collection, language is a ruined landscape through which the estranged voice of the poem threads a narrow way. As Patrick Pritchett writes, "this is poetry written at the frayed edge of history, ushered by the tutelary spirits of Celan and Mandlestam, full of longing and a deep listening to the silence.""In Eliot Cardinaux's unsettling and intimate debut collection, 'the lateword' illuminates a landscape of ruins that is still redeemable by the yearning of logos, its flickering presence marking a way forward for the poem in a time when poetry has found itself held hostage by sociological sermonizing, empty positivism, and puritanical grievances. 'Won't you take what is given, / pain in the branches / ringing the gavel, / cradled like a lamb, ' asks the poem. Bright with spiritual darkness, this is poetry written at the frayed edge of history, ushered by the tutelary spirits of Celan and Mandlestam, full of longing and a deep listening to the silence."--Patrick PritchettPoetry.

"John Mulrooney's Spooky Action takes us on a high-velocity, free-associational journey through our times. These poems arise out of a capacious imagination determined to meet and keep in mind whatever the world delivers, to make a music out of what is. Sometimes the world offers the poet an evanescent beauty, as when, for example, he sees a gust of snow that "plumes angelic" over a city street. But more often the world confronts him, and us, with no small amount of lies, myopias, loss, and suffering. Mulrooney's poems follow our difficult human trail wherever it leads, and in the process, he widens and deepens our sense of the real, which is of course why poetry matters, and this poetry definitely matters."--Fred Marchant"The delicate imprint of a bicycle tread is what these poems look like and read like. They are magical as they avoid every unwanted impediment and make room for Mulrooney the poet. When the wheels stop spinning, they leave a whirl of words that settle into place for even a ghost to enjoy."--Fanny Howe"Einstein spoke dismissively of "spooky action at distance," the idea that separate objects could somehow share a simultaneous condition across space and time, or what is sometimes referred to as quantum entanglement. Yet the phrase persists and serves as a powerful metaphor for the work poetry does. In John Mulrooney's amazing new book, lyric performs this entanglement, bridging distant states of mind and registers of experience with a swiftness and a surprise that is indeed spooky.... The suffering and loss of this world haunts these poems with an elemental pathos, the power of a fading logos written in the language of ghosts who still speak out of the dark in a human voice."--Patrick PritchettPoetry.

"Half wail, half exultation," is how an Apache death song has been described. In a sense, all poetry is a kind of ritual death song--celebrating life, grieving its loss, and conjuring the courage to leave it. Cottrell's SHIELING collection does all of this and more in language that is compelling in its musicality--more so than any I've read in a long time--and highly original and apt in its metaphor. Every poem offers a surprise. Cottrell's perspective is informed by such far-flung knowledge and such deep appreciation for the joys life has brought him in childhood, love, and marriage that his comparisons challenge the reader to keep up. One of the most unique features of this work is the poet's use of "obsolete" words, often of Scottish origin, suggesting the community we share with the long ago and far away. These old words offer a kind of consolation in their homeliness born out of a time when people lived closer to the natural world, less insulated from its cold and heat, seeing its ugliness and beauty up close and every day. He manages this comforting romance of words with an ironic take on objects of cliché that chides sentimentalism--sometimes with comedy, often with profundity. Whatever the key of his music in individual poems, the collection refuses easy avenues of escape from facing death, as those avenues risk fully experiencing life."--Edwina Pendarvis"In an age of distraction, the poems collected in SHIELING require us to stop, to ponder the loveliness in the worn, the second-hand, and the world-weary. They nod to the passing of time and our temporality, rewarding us with a beauty found in unexpected places and within the vestiges of nature, where the daisies just might tell you secrets."--Renée K. Nicholson"Anyone who glimpses into the shape-shifting, wispy world of Lawrence Cottrell's SHIELING, spins through mankind's pasts and futures, following in the wake of the poet's word-flourishes on triumphant tiptoes. In these deepened drifts one can easily forget the prosaic and pedestrian present and nestle with glee behind a lover's eyes or the memory of a kiss. Cottrell pens his original and oracular verse like no other. His numinous music portages transfixed, contemporary readers across a forbidden and forested and phantom land to a river of rushing consonants and delightful vowels. Cottrell's SHIELING reverberates outward. A book beyond enchanting."--Dennis DalyPoetry. Biography.

A new collection by an award winning poet, and the recipient of two National Endowment for the Arts Fellowships, a Pushcart Prize, and a grant from the Illinois Arts Council.Anyone who has ever woken at 3 a.m. unable to turn off the brain knows the value of that precious elixir we call sleep. DEAR MORPHEUS, THE GLUE THAT IS YOU explores the realms of sleep, sleeplessness, and dreams. There are poems addressed to Morpheus, looking for answers from the Greek god of dreams. There are also memories that keep the seeker of sleep from finding rest, yet how can these memories ever be released? And there are dream poems, portals to the world where Morpheus, in many forms and disguises, dwells. It's here, in dreams, that we seem closest to the mysteries of Morpheus and that "glue" of sleep that restores and heals. The book opens and closes with an invocation to "the balm of sleep," useful for those 3 a.m. islands of insomnia."In a culture where communication must be clear and sleep evades us, Dear Morpheus, The Glue That Is You reminds us that the landscape of sleep should be like poetry: an oceanic vastness where we are comforted precisely because 'one word can spin / a lemon into a lime, and two words back into a wooden egg.' Sleep, like poetry, is where we encounter the amalgamation of personal and literary history 'until there is nothing else but.' This book is everything we need to exchange one realm for another, lighter one. John Bradley offers us a balm of delirium and the weightless feeling of 'all the feathers one body can bear.'"--Beth McDermott, author of Figure 1Poetry.

Twenty-five years in the making, with some poems dating as far back as forty years, To Sleep in the Horse"s Belly: My Greek Poets and the Aegean Inside Me, is George Kalamaras's chronicle of his Greek ancestry--literary, artistic, and familial. This book retells the lives of some of Kalamaras's favorite Greek poets and artists, most often with his characteristic Surrealist outpouring and accretion of imagery, interlacing his inquiry with myth and the metaphor of the infamous Trojan Horse. He embraces pillars of Greek Letters, such as Odysseus Elytis, Yannis Ritsos, and George Seferis--three poets who helped form the backbone of Kalamaras's poetics forty years ago. Yet he moves beyond these well-known Nobel Laureates and Lenin Prize recipients. He delves into a plethora of modern and contemporary Greek poets who he has studied during decades of poetic apprenticeship, most of whom are little-known in the United States. Many of these figures are at the forefront of the Greek avant-garde, questioning (implicitly or explicitly) Greece's two military dictatorships in the last century. This abundant collection of poems takes us on a 300-page journey not only of Kalamaras's literary and artistic forebears but also of his familial roots from Zakynthos, Pharaklatha, and Solaki--places in Greece from which three of his four grandparents emigrated during the early part of the last century. Imbuing this collection is Kalamaras's ongoing poetic project of "seeing one in the other." He affirms the value of "an archeology of Being," a project in which he continues to chronicle the world around him, attempting to unearth the value of poets who have come before him, affirming the living presence of the "dead." Poet George Vafopoulos says in one of the book's opening epigraphs, here now I stand before all the Greek poets. George Kalamaras similarly takes this "stand," and in the process embraces his literary, cultural, and familial history, taking us on an odyssey to unexpected places both inward and outward."In his tenderly written new book, former Indiana Poet Laureate George Kalamaras is taking us on a poetic voyage of perpetual metamorphosis, deflating time and space, (re)uniting both sides of the Atlantic, invoking the Pelasgian magic of the Aegean within, and elegantly compounding both his immigrant and poetic ancestral lineages. Poetry is a haunted practice, Peter Gizzi writes, particularly well-equipped to speak with the dead. Kalamaras has artfully proven this existential fact. Like in Jack Spicer's After Lorca, Kalamaras resurrects, blows life into, and converses not with one, but with many dead, who all seem to constantly flow in and out of him and in and out of each other."--Giorgia Pavlidou, author of inside the black hornet's mind-tunnelPoetry.

HOTEL MONTPARNASSE: Letters to César Vallejo is a verse-novel composed in letters written to the famous Peruvian poet César Vallejo, who died in Paris in 1938. He was buried in the Montparnasse Cemetery, but soon after, according to these letters, found himself residing at the nearby Hotel Montparnasse, perhaps against his will. This book tells of his friendships, involvement with a resident named Jeanette, problems with the hotel management, and his eventual disappearance (or is it escape?) from the hotel. Most of the letter-poems are written by the residents of Hotel Montparnasse, except for those composed by a certain ¡lvaro de Campos, who reveals little about himself. This is a book about the mystery of the afterlife, the persistence of desire, and the lasting legacy of César Vallejo.Poetry.

A labyrinth of tantalizing yet unstable mysteries and geographies.

World famous musician and composer Lera Auerback's poems about her Russian childhood.

More than ten years in the making, George Kalamaras's We Slept the Animal: Letters from the American West, chronicles the author's years of friendship and correspondence with fellow poets, artists, and other friends. Kalamaras locates this epistolary sequence of poems in the West, where he has both lived and spent long periods of time revisiting during the last forty years, particularly Colorado and Montana. This book pays homage to its precursor, Richard Hugo's 31 Letters and 13 Dreams. The poems offer rich reflections of the living West, as well as an exploration of friendship and literary camaraderie. As in his previous collections, Kalamaras continues his ongoing project of "seeing one in the other"-giving us poems that explore the interaction of all things, particularly the interface of the human and natural world. Following his Surrealist forebears, he explores the complexity of language, with startling images and juxtapositions, as a vehicle for visionary poetics. These poems seek to connect our human impulses to the realms of the spiritual and the discursive. In the process, the poems honor the varieties of human and animal experience-mammals, marsupials, and the insect world, even probing the intelligence and "vision" that lie at the heart of molecules. We Slept the Animal also expresses an ars poetica, in part, in which Kalamaras maps the poetic process of his life of letters within the context of language, friendship, the geography of the West, and our animal selves.SAMPLELetter to Hugo from NowhereIt was the animal testicle you ate that springwhen the herds swayed down from Glacier.It brought you something low-slung through bunchgrass.First, the snows thawed like a man without a drink,all night with no ride and only the sweats.Then inside storms found rain could never heal.I want to say it right, even if I mightmiss your grave with an occasional twelve-beat line.Form, I've heard, equals content. We want order. We crave.Trains couple on the track. We're frayed, alreadystuck in our words like dogs swolleninto each other. They know no otherway. They whine. Howl. They're nowhere,and so am I, mending snow-fence against weight.. . .