Böcker utgivna av Dynamo Verlag

Andrew Squitiro's debut prose collection, LOCAL WEATHER (Dynamo Verlag; 94pp; paperback; 6 February 2024) is a collection of sixteen tight dispatches as intense as they are concise. Set amid the weeping willows and Spanish moss of New Orleans, a city where climate change is felt punishingly, these essays unflinchingly explore human alienation, the human yearning for connection and love amid the twin existential horrors of climate change and the COVID pandemic. Michael Alessi, author of Call a Body Home, said of LOCAL WEATHER: "How do you build a life in the face of what feels like the end of the world? Squitiro's meditative collection charts the weather of our current climate, bearing witness to the phenomena and anxieties of finding intimacy, connection, and an impermanent place in the shadow of impending catastrophe. These essays tenderly illuminate the middle ground, the hours we fill with other people and things, the literary equivalent of a flashlight proffered from a lover's bugout bag to help us weather the way forward." Geoff Watkinson, editor of Green Briar Review, said: "LOCAL WEATHER is marvelously approachable, piercing the thin membrane of individual and collective yearning... Squitiro circles love, loss, identity, and change like the hurricanes and storms of New Orleans." Andrew Squitiro is the author of several chapbooks of poetry from Gaggle Books. He holds a MFA in creative writing from Old Dominion University and his work has appeared in numerous journals. He lives in New Orleans.

Alleliah Nuguid's debut poetry collection, A HUMAN MOON won the 2022 Dynamo Verlag Book Contest. These forty-five powerful poems work in a broad array of forms, at once playful and serious, taking risks, toying with readers' expectations and delivering seemingly effortless coups de grâce. Three-time Poet Laureate of the United States, Robert Pinsky, said: "Alleliah Nuguid's A Human Moon deals with culture and cultures intimately and abundantly, with fiery imagination, intellectual daring and rich verbal music." Paisley Rekdal, Poet Laureate of Utah and author of The Night My Mother Met Bruce Lee: Observations on Not Fitting In and Intimate, said: "In A Human Moon, ancient myths weave indistinguishably into our contemporary world while figurative concepts become literal identities: a young woman ghosted by a lover might, for example, be an actual ghost herself, while the horror movie trope of a cabin in the woods becomes an actual part of the reader's body, the cabin itself not just "a plot on the map" but a structure "inscribed on your own back." In this wonderful, weird, and always surprising debut, we find a fascinating blend of autobiography and fable, ecocriticism and race theory, where any body might finally become a "reproducible ornament": a brilliance, a monster." Katherine Coles, author of Wayward and Look Both Ways, said: "The poems in Alleliah Nuguid's terrific collection, A Human Moon, give us a look at the future of American poetry. They reach into both Filipino and American storytelling and cultural practices, considering where story sits beside or bleeds into myth. Along the way, they comment (often wryly) on horrors pop-cultural, ecological, and elemental; on jealousy or the failures of romance and parenthood; on genetic legacy; on navigating multiple identities; on gender; on our animal selves. Expressing themselves often through sharp wit, through camp, and through bumps in the night, they remain always brainy, always lyrical, and always and ever inventive and engaging." Karl Kirchwey, author of Stumbling Blocks: Roman Poems and Professor of English and Creative Writing at Boston University, said: "In her debut poetry collection A Human Moon, Alleliah Nuguid combines verbal resourcefulness and acoustic play with an appropriately-global command of folklore and mythology-Philippine and Greco-Roman-to depict a realm of constant and sometimes violent metamorphosis. Cosmogony, theogony, catastrophe: these are the ancient words that describe the blurt and flare, not only of worlds in formation, but of the human self in formation, in her work. Sometimes the most interesting poetic companions are both formidable and vulnerable: Nuguid is capable of being both."

In her contest-winning poetry collection, Star Things, Jess Parker pulls down the cosmos as if a blanket, hangs the firmament itself as if a string of festive lights to illuminate the magic in the worldly mundane. These sixty-one brief yet powerful poems work in a broad array of forms, at once playful and serious, taking risks, toying with readers'' expectations and delivering seemingly effortless coups de grâce with a sly wink. Said Josh Norman (Telescopes and Other People), one of our final judges: "Every love, every scraped knee, every abandonment, every moon is at once familiar yet alien." Cynthia Marie Hoffman (Call Me When You Want to Talk About the Tombstones) reckoned that "if the stars'' reflection in a pond creates a ''morse code'' that communications with the constellations, so do these poems transmit the intricacies of being human in orbit among the stars...holding close to the knowledge that ''we were moondust and will be again.''"

I am so very glad to see The Much Love Sad Dawg Trio reissued. Because of the untimely passing of the book's publisher, this first collection of poems by such an uber-talented poet received far less recognition than it deserved. How do I describe a Matt Sadler poem? When I read a Matt Sadler poem I feel a slow brightening in my head. It's a warmth that leads to a sudden awakening, like the speaker in "Letters to Trees," where Sadler writes "I'm listening to Brahms again and the cello sounds almost happy this time/and the light through the window forms a perfect triangle/ on the brown carpet and the whole room is this new apple/ we're living on." The poems in The Much Love Sad Dawg Trio are the difficult combination of being reverent and humble. It is not the "look at me being humble" type of humility of Christianity, but the quality of mind of someone almost inexhaustibly willing to inhabit a world before passing judgment. It's like Matt Sadler's mission is to start his own religion not beholden to the "do's and don'ts, for-the-lord-/hath-saids, and other forced wisdoms." (Imperative, 14). His poems wake and wake again, but unlike Buddhism, they don't need to quash the self or desire. In the poem "Dreaming at Kyi-Yo" where the speaker's feels compelled to dance until self and dance are one. The poems continually wonder how at human kinds endless ingenuity of self-creation. In one poem, Sadler tells a parable of a bag of potatoes that left alone in a cupboard began multiplying, reminiscent of our uniquely human ability "to make something out of nothing" (26). These lovely poems from The Much Love Sad Dawg Trio, not only brighten my head, but also spur me to action. After I read this book I find myself turning toward the window to notice the cerulean blue sky behind the pine forest. I feel my body suddenly restless to leave the house and walk around the neighborhood for no good reason except to notice the world again. In "Letter to Layne from Tucson," he writes, "I'd like to be held like that again,/ if only in your mind, with care and utility" (19). And ultimately, that is what I love so much about this collection, its care and utility, the way it holds the world.