Remember Love
a book of stories by Jody Lisberger (2008)
$13 softcover

"Like the best of Anne Tyler, Jody Lisberger's stories mine the complicated private truths of seemingly comfortable American families with compassion, insight, and, above all, fearless honesty."

The Moon with the Sun in Her Eye
a book of poems by Nana Lampton (2007)
$15 hardback

In The Moon with the Sun in Her Eye, Nana Lampton boldly explores the tension between the feminine moon and the masculine sun. Using the dual lenses of metaphor and image, she asks all of us, Why can't we see more clearly? and then shows us how. Through the moony imagination, we can apprehend the invisible and feel compassion beyond our usual limits.

Nana Lampton's poems respond to our local, global, and cosmic situations. Hers is an inclusive aesthetic, one that places what it is to be a human alive in our time among the plants, animals, rivers, mountains, continents, and cultures of our world.

With a mythic embodiment who might have leapt from the brain of William Blake, Nana's Potain Sieblung gives us a female figure both powerful and vulnerable, penetrant in her honest insights, bold enough to go where she needs to go, and brave enough to sweep us stunned gawkers along in her wake. Thanks be, for Nana Lampton's book of poems!

Mirel's Daughter
a novel by Kay Gill (2006)
$20 hardback

Mirel's Daughter is the haunting story of a young girl who loses her family death by death in the pogrom massacres of Ukrainian Russia. In beautiful, vivid language, Kay Gill pieces together a story woven from fragments of her grandmother's history and the archives of history. Her discovery of how one intrepid mother taught her daughter the spirit of survival-that people are good if they are given the chance, is a tale that reads almost like a legend. Set historically just after WWI, when the Germans were withdrawing, the Communist revolution beginning and gangs of nationalist and tsarist 'bandits' rampaging through Jewish villages, Gill skillfully chronicles what it was like for the Jews of the Ukraine as they endured the prototype of the ethnic extermination to come. A valuable addition to the great witness literature of the twentieth century, Mirel's Daughter is a testament to the human spirit, for it shows how dehumanization and torture ultimately fail to stamp out the will to love and prevail.

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The Triangle Pose
a novel by Mary Welp (2005)
$20 hardback

Mary Welp has not forgotten that literature started out as entertainment, and The Triangle Pose is a stunner, paced by dancing prose, quick wit, and characters who consistently
surprise the reader. Yet it is held together by utmost seriousness: a woman on her own dealing with the way we live now. In The Triangle Pose, I found a charming story, one that is still with me.

Among the multiple pleasures of The Triangle Pose are a biting wit, a sharp eye and a smooth, engaging narrative, but larger than all of these are its characters: Anna Wallace, tart-tongued new mother and wavering wife, Jasper Clayquot, infuriatingly stubborn conservative political writer who is also Anna's surprisingly tender suitor, their spouses, friends and relatives. No matter how briefly on the page, even the minor characters are full-blooded, and Anna and Jasper, as they flirt with each other and disaster, come to seem not people we've read about, but ones we've lived with.

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High Horse: Contemporary Writing by the MFA Faculty of Spalding University
Sena Jeter Naslund & Kathleen Driskell, eds. (2005)
$14 paperback

From all over the United States and several foreign countries, both students and faculty come to Spalding University's brief-residency MFA in Writing Program to study the writing of poetry, fiction, creative nonfiction, writing for children, and playwriting & screenwriting. We invite you to enjoy the work of the Spalding faculty presented in the pages of High Horse.

It Was the Goodness of the Place
by Lucinda Dixon Sullivan (2003)
$18 hardback

It Was The Goodness of the Place shimmers along humanity's fault lines with unerring wisdom, clarity, and grace. Lucinda Dixon Sullivan casts a steady, sure light onto the souls of her characters, revealing hardscrabble patches of pure terror but also verdant landscapes seeded with hope, decency, and redemption. This is a stunning debut.

Lucinda Dixon Sullivan captures the time and place of this novel so brilliantly that I felt as if I had stepped back to mid-century and found a fully realized town called Milan, Kentucky. The plot never loosens its grip and the language is beautiful, tight and graceful. It Was the Goodness of the Place is a completely wonderful novel and Lucinda Dixon Sullivan is a stunning new voice.

You Are Not Here by David Jauss
(2002), $10.00
Winner of the 2002 Fleur-de-Lis Poetry Contest

David Jauss's book of "night thoughts" is a meditation on mortality, and on the ways we transform the pain of our brevity into art. At the heart of You Are Not Here is a fierce elegaic sequence remembering a brilliant poet, Lynda Hull. Hers is a grievous, particular loss, but as any deep grief seems to do, it draws all losses unto itself, until the poem becomes what real elegies are: both a lamentation and a search for a way to move forward in a world where "without words there can be no return."

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