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After the death of James Gandolfini in the summer of 2013, David Starkey decided to pay poetic homage to The Sopranos TV series and its star. Like a Soprano features one poem for each episode, with the poem sharing the episode's title. Like the series itself, the poems are by turns violent and sexual, comic and absurd. Never before has an entire television program received such close attention from a serious poet: this is a landmark in the crossover between poetic and popular culture.

These black and white photographs and poems reveal the cultural geography of a vanishing America, using images of New Jersey that look back to a place in our collective memory: old state highways, greasy roadside diners, abandoned movie theaters, the vanishing Main Streets of Woolworth's five and dimes and of post-industrial inner-cities. It is an unusual collection in that the photographer is also a poet who documents the beauty amid the desolation of rust-belt America. In both verbal and visual imagery, Hillringhouse gives us a shadowed world caught between elegy and silence and that moves us from vastness to intimacy. Between Frames weaves family history, personal guilt, feelings of loss with meditations on the strangeness of being in a world fraught with beauty and decay. As the poet Gerald Stern says in his blurb, "The absolute sadness of America is in these poems and these photographs; and all the old hopes and dreams--and the rage--scattered throughout..." And as the writer Phillip Lopate states in his blurb, "...they conjure another world, shadowy and haunted, a royal vision lurking just beyond the everyday, like de Chirico's streetscapes."

A Vision of Neon is a story of two friends - one who survives the complex years of adolescence and one who does not - and the unconditional love and commitment between these young girls. Wild, sharp-tongued red-head Kelsey embodies the confidence that her shy and quiet best friend, the story's narrator, only dreams of. But as time passes, Kelsey's seeming confidence and acts of teenage rebellion become overshadowed by day-long crying spells, invented stories of fictitious friends and thin slashes of scab that mark her skin. In high school, Kelsey descends into mental illness, while the narrator attempts to maintain a normal teenage life, despite continuing efforts to support her suicidal friend. However, both girls must ultimately face one difficult fact: regardless of their longings, Kelsey's sickness has a debilitating stranglehold on them both.

A Dark Gamble, a Western epic inspired by the great epic of Gilgamesh, is set in New Mexico during the era when gold and silver were being discovered and prospectors, miners and ranchers were pouring into the territory, the local Apaches consequently being hunted down and displaced. The novel is an attempt to explore an aspect of the American past, with its roots in an untamed land and the uneasy transition to the modern world. The action takes place in the town of Destiny, which shoots up when gold is discovered in the region. The story is told by a narrator who has heard tales of Gil Weston and Jack Cameron since his youth, men who still engage his imagination of those around him. Out of his own fascination and curiosity, he feels compelled to take up their story himself as part of his own quest for an understanding of the past and a meaning for his own life.

In this anthology incarcerated me in the Prison Literacy Project at S.C.I. Graterford contribute pieces about regretful decisions made or painful experiences in their youth, fearlessly exposing their vulnerability. The men chose many methods for sharing their messages; some wrote letters to their young selves or family members, telling of their struggles growing up in difficult circumstances. They reached out from behind the prison walls to caution young offenders while they still have time to change their lives, but they speak to us all. They remind us all about choices, consequences, and caring for others.

Steve Kowit's Lurid Confessions, his first full-length poetry collection, had two printings with Carpenter Press in 1983 but has been out of print for years. It's been our loss not to have access to the wit and insights of so many excellent poems. Serving House Books is proud to be the publisher of a new edition.

These stories, Greg Herriges says, were born of individual, fleeting glimpses and memories, seemingly unbound by any linear reason. But once they were arranged in this collection, the recurring themes were evident-of desire and loss, of the intense isolation each of us necessarily endures and struggles with, as well as the redemptive-if sometimes elusive-power of love. Some of the stories are new, appearing here for the first time in print; others were published before on either side of the Atlantic. All of them evidence the expansive range of Herriges's imaginative vision, the distinctive richness of his voice, informed by the conjoined power of his musical and literary talents and experience. Greg Herriges's stories will make you remember the breaking and the mending of your heart.

As Chloride, a dying New Mexican mining town, whirls toward a rendezvous with truth, its people find themselves precariously balanced between a lost past of blood-deep spirituality and an unknowable, terrifying future, between the world of drama and the drama of the world. A filmmaker trying to turn his disillusionment into truth; a once celebrated film star who disappears; a look-alike who takes her place; a trickster who enjoys the chaos he creates around him are all part of the play. In this eerie, beautifully crafted novel, Gladys Swan presents an impressionistic palimpsest of myth and modem life. The present is revealed as only a play of light and shadow over a ghost dance that-tenu¬ously-ensures the world's continued exis¬tence. Part history, part myth, part meditation on truth and illusion, the novel reveals a kaleidoscope of plots and subplots, each refracted through the perceptions-the voices-of a cast of characters as intriguing as the Southwest itself. Ghost Dance: A Play of Voices is the second novel in a trilogy that includes A Dark Gamble and Ancestors. A Dark Gamble is available from Serving House Books, and Ancestors is forthcoming. Nominated for the PEN/Faulkner Award

Artifacts and Other Stories explores the exhilaration, disappointments, and surprises of love and connection. These fourteen short stories portray relationships-between lovers, spouses, parents and children, and friends. Desire, longing, memory, secrets, marriage, betrayal, adultery, loss and fresh starts dominate lives. Men and women navigate their feelings and domestic struggles, wrestle with the shifting tides of affection, aging, and illness. Past and present weave together, spilling into the future, as these vibrant, memorable characters face unexpected changes in their lives and in themselves.

Thomas E. Kennedy enjoyed countless friends from throughout the world, sharing literary projects, walking city streets and country paths, and visiting dozens of watering holes in many countries. Where did he find time to turn out so many books, stories, essays, translations, and more-hundreds? For that alone he deserves celebration. But just as much, he deserves celebration for being a valuable friend and a major contributor to world literature.This collection includes a Tom Kennedy story, an essay, and a translation; a joint memoir of a trip to Prague by Tom and Line-Maria Lång; selections from interviews given by Tom; memories of Tom from friends in the United States and other countries; contributions from Danish friends (two in Danish and English versions); reviews of several of Tom's novels; and an extensive bibliography of works by and about Tom.

Although J.R. Solonche started placing poems in magazine, journals, and anthologies in the early 70s, his first book of poetry, Peach Girl: Poems for a Chinese Daughter, co-written with his wife, did not appear until 2002 and his own first collection, Beautiful Day, not until 2015. Just this March, Years Later, his twenty-second book, was published. That's a lot of books, too many for most readers to buy. But they don't have to. They can buy just one. It's his twenty-third. Selected Poems: 2002 - 2021 is a generous offering of his favorite poems from most of those books, including the two nominated for the Pulitzer Prize, Invisible (2017) and Piano Music (2020) and the 2020 Shelf Unbound Notable Indie Book, The Porch Poems. In her introduction to Selected Poems: 2002-2021, Grace Cavalieri says, "The absolute best remark I can make about this book is that I would give it to non-readers of poems as a conversion to poetry, for its language is as available as rain; hopeful as sunshine; and fresh as the wind. It's a perfect book to let the reading public know that this is America's poetry. This is a serious book disguised as playfulness, and we are its lucky recipients."J.R. Solonche has published poetry in more than 400 magazines, journals, and anthologies since the early 70s.

CONCORD tells the story of a single remarkable year when Henry David Thoreau and his brother John fall in love with the same girl; reclusive writer Nathaniel Hawthorne courts Sophia Peabody of the esteemed Peabody family; and the brilliant Margaret Fuller becomes a houseguest of the equally brilliant but married Ralph Waldo Emerson and finds herself engaged in a passionate affair of the mind as well as the heart. Today, these figures are icons of American literature but once they were young and in love.

The bonds of family; success and failure; philosophy and quantum mechanics; the ways in which we can - and cannot - rewrite our own lives: DUPLICITY weaves all of these together while vivisecting its own genre.

The Hot Sauce Madness Love Burn Suite is a book of poems that revolves around the beloved and sometimes notorious culture of hot sauce and hot peppers. Its 814 rhyming couplets delve deeply into that rich and addicting world, whether they focus on peppers' flavor, pain, linguistics, or history. Come take a bite out of these verses, and see if you can handle the heat.1912: pharmacist Wilbur Lincoln Scoville first measured the "heat" of peppers(the word's in quotes because there's no actual heat in this equation, just spiciness, which hoodwinks our bodies into thinking physical flames are licking our tongues, throat, lips). Chilies aren't caliente, which implies heat from an actual fire, but picante, the word weuse for heat that arisesfrom spice.

The stories in this collection represent about six decades of writing. Over time some of them have grown the "claws and wings" of novels as Vladimir Nabokov put it. But they were stories first.

J.R. Solonche's new poetry collection, A Guide of the Perplexed, is his 20th to date and his third from Serving House Books. If you are perplexed when it comes to poetry, as many of us are, then here is your ideal guide to the richness of poetry as only Solonche can serve it up: wit, word-play, insight, artistry akin to magic, the transformation of philosophical treatises into Zen koans, all of which are, in the words of Kirkus Reviews, "sympathetic but never sentimental."

Have A Heart is mostly set in New York from 1998-2001, ending a few months after 9/11. The three main protagonists include: Anna, a famous Russian ballerina; Ali, a brilliant heart doctor, the head of the heart transplant program at a New York Medical Center; and Nancy, Ali's wife who dies on 9/11.

Mamaji is a story about a daughter longing to connect with her lost mother. It's about a mother's bond to her children and how her love brings them great strength and resilience. It's a story of redemption and forgiveness despite blatant injustice and deceit. It proves a difficult past does not determine future love and happiness.

Piano Music, the new poetry collection from JR Solonche, presents him at his best. The wit, the insights, the playfulness, the craft, the profundity, and yes, at times the silliness, are all here on full display to the delight of the reader, whether that reader be new to the Solonche universe or one returning for more.

Gary Fincke's poems lead to discoveries that are both exhilarating and unsettling. In long sequences and precisely observed shorter poems, he explores terrorism, mass hysteria, climate change, political calamity, and the necessity of sustaining belief. He references science and history as well as myth. He grounds his poems in experience.

River Town Girl: A Memoir is about life in a small Hudson River town right across from Manhattan, about the delights and the power of storytelling, and about one girl's experience growing up--and out of pain--in the 1950s, '60s, and early '70s. Today that version of the town is gone, buried under New Jersey's high-rise Gold Coast.

Solonche can compress a philosophical treatise into three lines... His epigrammatic tidy poems are philosophic gems.

Poems selected from William Zander's two collections and one chapbook, with many of his drawings, photographs from his life, and memories of family and friends.

The Kuhreihen Melody examines nostalgia from various angles through an array on lenses.

Here are nine tales that bring to vivid life the early decades of the 20th century as witnessed by one of America's most well-known painters. Thomas Hart Benton sketched fiddlers and farm wives, preachers and soldiers, folks gathering in dance halls and tent meetings.