Böcker utgivna av Red Hen Press

A woman who is suffering from a tragic loss is placed on a jury with her estranged ex-husband.

John Proctor, about to turn seventy, spies a disconsolate young man eyeing him from outside his remote studio window. Invited inside from the bitter cold and fed dinner, the visitor, who calls himself Eli, implies that he is no stranger to the man, having been told by his grandmother that "e;you might take me in."e; Astonished to learn that the woman was his wife who decades earlier had aborted their marriage, which lasted "e;but the length of a wedding candle,"e; the narrator ruefully explains he has since relished living alone by making no lasting connections to anybody or anything. Whereupon Eli confides, "e;She also said you had profaned my mother,"e; the daughter John Proctor never knew he had. Thus commences MacLeish Sq., a tale of awakened remorse and familial longing recounted by an aging recluse when his life is abruptly upturned by the young visitor-captive to a mythical past of his own creation-who intimates that he and the narrator are unlikely strangers. Their unresolved relationship ultimately challenges the reader to question if he and his coincidental guest are one and the same . . . that Eli may be who the narrator has carefully hidden from himself throughout his adult life.

Human Heartbeat Detected is a collection of essays that explores how we are wonderfully and terrifyingly human. Hitting on themes such as trauma, emotional abuse, marriage, mental illness, and grief, these essays delve into how humans are simultaneously beautiful and terrible to one another. Though regardless of how we might make each other shatter, our hearts continue beatingeven when we might not want them toand we wade through the wreckage of our lives to find ways to survive. With exquisite language and captivating storytelling, the essays in Human Heartbeat Detected face what it means to be human.

David Mason was born in Washington State, forty-odd degrees north latitude, and now lives on the Australian island of Tasmania, forty-odd degrees south latitude. That Pacific crossing is the work of a lifetime of devotion and change. The rich new poems of Pacific Light explore the implications of the light as well as peace and its opposing forces. What does it mean to be an immigrant and face the ultimate borders of our lives? How can we say the word home and mean it? These questions have obsessed Mason in his major narrative works, The Country I Remember and Ludlow, as well as his lyric and dramatic writing. Pacific Light is a culmination and a deepening of that work, a book of transformations, history and love, endurance and unfathomable beauty, by a poet at the height of his powers.

Full of warmth, terror, and underhanded humor, If I Were the Ocean, Id Carry You Home, Pete Hsus debut story collection, captures the essence of surviving in a life set adrift. Children and young people navigate a world where the presence of violence and death rear themselves in everyday places: Vegas casinos, birthday parties, church services, and sunny days at the beach. Each story is a meditation on living in a world not made for usthe pervasive fear, the adaptations, the unexpected longings. A gripping and energetic debut, Hsus writing beats with the naked rhythms of an unsettled human heart.

When an elderly woman goes missing, the women of her neighborhood dig into the secrets and lies of her husband’s past to save her.

GONE TO EARTH brings to light, late in the long, distinguished career of poet Eleanor Wilner, her early uncollected poemsan unveiling of the first stages of a vital, imaginative process, in whose evocative, imagistic landscapes is enacted a drama of emergence from entrapment. In the often-painful drama of new birth, from the deadly strictures and oppressions of the older social forms, come the living forces undermining themnew life seeded out of a decaying order: ';a wet nose / breaks the earth, and sniffs the river air.' Written during the poet's immersion in the civil rights movement and the protests against the Vietnam War, an inner liberating struggle is tuned to a collective channel where communal memory and vision are undergoing transformation.

Like Mark Doty’s Heaven’s Coast, The Book of Timothy: The Devil, My Brother, and Me weaves a lyric voice into a difficult subject matter; in this case, a sister’s attempt to extract a confession from the Catholic priest who abused her brother. When the legal system fails, is restorative justice still possible?

Bad New Age mother seeks miracle cure in Germany but encounters her past with an aloe plant instead.

tender gravity charts Marybeth Hollemans quest for relationship to the more-than-human world, navigating her childhood in North Carolina to her life in Alaska, with deep time in remote land and seascapes. Always the focus is on what can be found by attention to the world beyond her own human skin, what can be found there as she negotiates lossthe loss of beloved places, wild beings, her younger brother. do not think, she says to her mother, that i love a bear more than my brother. / think instead that i cannot distinguish / the variations in / the beat of a heart. Inevitably, solace is found in the wild world: step back toward that joy-sap rising, step back / into the only world that is. In a narrative arc of seeking, falling, and finding, we hear in Hollemans exquisitely attentive immersion clear reverberations of Mary Oliver, of Linda Hogan, of Walt Whitman. These poems of grief and celebration pulse in and out, reaching to the familiar moon and out to orphan stars of distant galaxies, then pull close to a small brown seabird and an on-the-knees view of a tiny bog plant.

American Bastard is a lyrical inquiry into the experience of being a bastard in America. This memoir travels across literal continentsand continents of desire as Beatty finds her birthfather, a Canadian hockey player who's won three Stanley Cupsand her birthmother, a working-class woman from Pittsburgh. This is not the whitewashed story, but the real story, where Beatty writes through complete erasure: loss of name and history, and a culture based on the currency of gratitude as expected payment from the adoptee. American Bastard sandblasts the exaltation of adoption in Western culture and the myth of the ';chosen baby.' This journey into the relationship of place and body compels and unhinges, with the link between identity and blood history as its driving force. Beatty rescripts the order of things: the horizontal world of the birth table where babies are switched, the complex yard of the body where names and blood shift and revolt, and the actual story into the relationship of place and the insurrection of the body erased. Issues of class and struggle run throughout this book, this narrative river between blood and continents, between work and desire.

Jane is a Los Angeles nurse who grew up in a Christian cult that puts celebrities on trial for their sins. Daniel is a has-been actor whose career ended when the cult family members nearly killed him for flirting with her. Eight years after a romantic meet-cute in Battery Park, both search for someone to fill the gap they imagine the other could've filled if given the chance. Jane compulsively goes on dates with every self-professed expert in art, music, and food hoping they will teach her the nuances of the culture she couldn't access in her youth. Daniel looks for a girlfriend who will accept the disabilities left from the cult attack. A loving woman will prove to Daniel's blockbuster star brother, Steve, that he's capable of a supporting role in Steve's upcoming movie and relaunching Daniel's career. When a chance encounter unexpectedly reunites them, Jane and Daniel not only see another chance at the love they lost, but an opportunity to create the lives they've always wanted. The only question is whether their families will let them.

From the brokenhearted to the afflicted, the women in these often macabre stories fight like hell to find their voices and survive the darkness inherent in the modern South.

"Eloise Klein Healy's A Brilliant Loss is a poetic journey into the loss of language and the reclaiming of it. Healy had Wernicke's aphasia in 2013 when she was the first poet laureate of the City of Los Angeles, and the virus hit her the night of her reading with Caroline Kennedy at the Central Library. Also called fluent aphasia, Wernicke's aphasia affects language and the use of words. Healy's collection shows that her brain has access to its deepest unconscious, and that place is poetry. Her deepest language is poetry. It's as if a dancer was denied the ability to walk or run, and could only dance. Healy writes of losing her words and finding big love"--

Josh Sapan's debut poetry collection offers a glimpse into the sometimes painfully delicate and beautiful parts of life.

In her award-winning second book, Anna V. Q. Ross transforms motherhood into a lens, examining narratives of girlhood, migration, trauma, and inheritance. Compassing home and horizon, this tightly woven, image-rich collection plumbs the political within the domestic and traces the routes of the past within everyday life. A bruise becomes a flower and then a flag planted to claim an adopted land; the hull of a Viking ship becomes the fuselage of a plane carrying an immigrating mother home; the daily routines of carpools, math homework, and bedtime stories are interrupted by memories of abuse and reports of school shootings and environmental collapse. But at heart, these are poems of reclamation, reminding us that "e;in those days, we were fast and best, but didn't know it."e; Wary and watchful, never resigned, Flutter, Kick maps the spaces for compassion we carve in a dangerous world.

The poems in Water & Salt travel across borders between cultures and languages, between the present and the living past.

Diane Thiel's eagerly anticipated collection of poems, Questions from Outer Space, explores fresh and often humorous perspectives that capture the surreal quality of our swiftly changing lives on this planet. The poems travel through questions on many fronts, challenging assumptions and locating unique angles of perception. This thought-provoking book reflects a deep engagement with the natural world, a questioning of our built systems, the expansive wilderness of parenting, and the complexities of navigating outer and inner space.

A collection of moving and meditative poems that richly evoke a Gen X childhood in Los Angeles, exploring how our early recognitions shape our lives.

Former best friends Scott and Errol meet unexpectedly at Oso Lake, a remote Canadian fly-fishing paradise where, five years before, fresh out of college, they had the time of their lives. Their situations, though, have changed, their high hopes quashed by workaday realities and, in Errols case, marriage to Claire, who has come with him trying to stave off divorce. But Oso Lake has changed. The fall before, a womans severed head was left in a campfire pit beside the lake. The shadow cast by her murder is darkened further by a fire-scarred white truck driver who claims to be a long-dead Native shaman and has plans to eradicate not only Scott, Errol, and Claire, but all of Western civilization. The beauty of the wilderness becomes, every day, more threatening and perverse. But the worst danger the vacationers face may be themselves.

Poet Emily Wall began collecting birth stories after the birth of her third child, Lucy. She realized that women were always quietly sharing their storiesin living rooms with a mug of tea, or whispered at the preschool playground. She saw the intensity with which women listened to each other's stories. They were shared, remembered, retold, but not collected, not treated as the art form they are. Wall began asking for, and collecting birth stories: women sent her emails, handed her their journals, and recorded their own voices. She collected stories from a lesbian couple, a story from an indigenous father who is fighting for his language, and a story from a grandmother. Some of the stories are about difficult and painful births: a woman who had a miscarriage, a woman unable to get pregnant. And some of the stories are beautiful: a birth in water that happened exactly as the mother dreamed it would. Wall has taken these stories and shaped them into poems, and then into this collection, offering the reader a look into the story that women, for centuries, have been quietly sharing with each other.

Saul doesn't get why he's misunderstood. At his high-tech day job, he hides in the bathroom writing a novel about his dead grandfather and wonders why his boss wants to fire him. He tells his almost ex-wife about a blind date and wonders why she slams the door in his face. He aches with worry for his seven-year-old son, who seems happier living with his mom and her new man.When the blind date becomes a complicated relationship, and Sauls blunders at work threaten the survival of the company, Saul has to wake up and confront his fears.I Only Cry with Emoticons is a quirky comedy that reveals the cost of being disconnectedeven when we're using a dozen apps on our devices to communicateand an awkward man's search for real connections, on and offline.

John Weir, author of The Irreversible Decline of Eddie Socket, a defining novel of 1980s New York in its response to the global AIDS crisis, has written a story collection that chronicles the long aftermath of epidemic death, as recorded in the tragicomic voice of a gay man who survived high school in the 1970s, the AIDS death of his best friend in the 1990s, and his complicated relationship with his mother, a movie star without a movie to star in, whose life is winding to a close in a retirement community where she lives alone with her last dog.

Kim Dower's poetry has been described by the Los Angeles Times as ';sensual and evocative . . . seamlessly combining humor and heartache,' and by O Magazine as ';unexpected and sublime.' Acclaimed for combining the accessible and profound, her poems about motherhood are some of her most moving and disarmingly candid. I Wore This Dress Today for You, Mom is an anthology of her poems on being a motherchildbirth to empty nestas well as being a daughter with all the teenaged messiness, drama and conflict, to finally caring for one's mother suffering from dementia. Culled from her four collections as well as a selection of new work, these poems, heartbreaking, funny, surprising, and touching, explore the quirky, unexpected observations, and bittersweet moments mothers and daughters share. These evocative poems do not glorify mothers, but rather look under the hood of motherhood and explore the deep crevices and emotions of these impenetrable relationships: the love, despair, joy, humor and gratitude that fills our lives.

When William Fox, a TV writer on location in Florida, is dragged by his shows toxic producers to a gentleman's club thats just appeared outside town, he meets Nicole, a mysterious dancer who claims to be an anthropologist searching for signs of rational life on Earth.Enchanted by her both playful and serious ideas exploring love, limerence, power, monkey behavior, paintball combat, creativity, and the dilemma of a rational mind compelled to serve an animals body by feeding it fantasies, Will falls in loveand his ever more troubled love-struck behavior and the acidly destructive battles among his producers and network executives during the production of his show soon begin to illustrate Nicoles theories.Nicole is charmingly romantic on a cruise up the Space Coast, but nothing about her seems authentic. After she warns shell soon leave and his producers are humbled by an uncanny encounter with the police, Will begins to wonder, is Nicole staging real world events with him and the producers as her experimental subjects? And if so, can he discover her true identity, learn the lessons shes trying to teach, and earn her love before he loses her forever?

Taking the reader across our country through the varied landscapes of Colorado, Tennessee, North Carolina, and Arizona, Refugee discusses the nature of seeking shelter. We are all refugees looking for a haven from whatever oppresses our lives. What constitutes a refugee is at the heart of the collection. Poems confront and explore xenophobia, sexism, gun violence, domestic violence, corporate greed, and their ties to environmental destruction and political and economic tyranny. An ovarian cancer survivor, the author also writes about her own courageous confrontation with death. These inspiring poems ultimately call for the reader to recognize the refugee condition as a human condition. They call for a change in consciousness in the forms of action and compassion. They call for the reader to thrive. Ranging from short lyric poems to narrative poems, this collection steeped in rich, sensual imagery draws inspiration and healing from the natural world. Truth lies in recognition of the interdependence of all life. Refugee is an odyssey to find grace and unity in a besieged and divided contemporary American society.

In Epilogue: Selected and Last Poems, Frederick Morgan reworks and amplifies, in his extraordinary poetic range, the fundamental human themes that preoccupied himlove, death, pain, the nature and transcendence of the Self. In interweaving his many themes, he recaptures the past, the confrontation with the external world of nature and the internal world of dream, the oppositions and ambiguities of body and spirit, and the reduplications of meaning in legend and fable. Assembled from eight previous collections, and including his final poems, this profoundly moving book transcends individual expression to provide a powerful insight into universal human experience.

This harvest of poems is inspired by the plant medicine latent in Gossypium Herbeceum, or Cotton Root Bark, which was used by enslaved Black women to induce labor, cure reproductive ailments and end unwanted pregnancies. Through an arrangement of stories, secrets and memories experienced, read, heard, reimagined and remixed, gossypiin reckons with a peculiar yet commonplace inheritance of violation, survival and self-possession. In this way, Ra Malika Imhotep invites us to lean in and listen good as the text interrupts the narrative silence around sexual harm, sickness, and the marks they make on black femme subjectivity. Within these pages, the poet is joined by a ';sticky trickster-self' named Lil Cotton Flower who tells of their own origins and endings in the Black vernacular traditions of the griot and the gossip. Interspersed throughout the collection, Black feminist wisdoms and warnings meld with the poets own yearnings and Lil Cotton Flower's tall tales.Gossypiin is an offering towards the holding and healing of Black beings that exceed the confines of their own bodies.