Tag Archives: Book Release

Black Achilles by Curtis L. Crisler

Black Achilles by Curtis L. Crisler is now available from the Accents store.

Damn … these poems are fiercely human, they call out the names of gods and demigods like reluctant lovers writhing in joy and in pain …

–Frank X Walker
Kentucky Poet Laureate,
Author of Turn Me Loose: The Unghosting of Medgar Evers

“Such a small wound, such a huge nuisance, death. In Black Achilles, Curtis L. Crisler takes the very human suffering of a torn tendon and uses it to explore our love affair with convenience, our ever-growing cloak of invulnerability, our pining for youth, immortality—how we unhinge at its loss. It is b-ball and score, the opposite of frustration/fragility &ellip; weakness. It is crutches and numbness, swagger and ‘what tender means.’ All this with a deft rim shot, a language of swerves and dunks, rebounds and alley-oops.”

-Leslie Anne Mcilroy,
Managing & Poetry Editor, HEArt,
and author of Slag (Main Street Rag)

“If Achilles is the mythologized Greek warrior-hero from the Trojan War, who is Black Achilles? Curtis L. Crisler’s collection of poems invites the reader to the freeways, playgrounds, and hospitals in search of Black Achilles. He is launching a stale jump shot, removing a stale bandage, limping on stale tendons. His legend is further cemented by his godly ability to ‘still hobble like monsters do’ on one leg. In the inner most soul of these poems, Black Achilles is the body deconstructed. We are moved to ask questions germane to the conversation between science and sport: what are the risks? Or, questions germane to science and ghetto: what are the risks? These poems are visceral; we are uncomfortable in the name of compassion. How do we celebrate the perfect imperfection of the body and its capacity to break? Crisler does this elegantly. The elegance and stable construction of these poems only add to the complex dimensions here. Black Achilles is another gift from a poet who’s gifted at giving.”

–Derrick Harriell,
author of Cotton and Ropes
(Aquarius Press/Willow Books)

ISBN: 978-1-936628-32-2
Softcover, 5½” x 8½”
$8.00
Purchase at the Accents Store

Curtis L. Crisler’s forthcoming poetry book, “This” Ameri-can-ah,will be released in 2015 (Cherry Castle Publishing). His books are Pulling Scabs (nominated for a Pushcart), Tough Boy Sonatas (YA), and Dreamist: a mixed-genre novel (YA), and his poetry chapbooks are Wonderkind, Soundtrack to Latchkey Boy, andSpill. He’s been published in many magazines, journals, and anthologies. He is Associate Professor of English at Indiana University-Purdue University Fort Wayne, and a Cave Canem Fellow.

Kingdom of Speculation by Barbara Goldberg

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Accents Publishing is proud to announce that Barbara Goldberg’s Kingdom of Speculation is now available from the Accents Store.

“In this book you will be under the spell of imagination that is truly impressive. But, more than that: you will fall in love with Barbara Goldberg’s syntax. The way her sentence works against her line-breaks, creating fireworks, is a fairy tale in and of itself. Her poems are magical, not because they contain princesses and ravens and thieves of eggs. They are magical because their music grabs us and won’t let us be. The secret to true music cannot be understood. It can only be applauded.”

—Ilya Kaminsky,
Author of Dancing in Odessa

Kingdom of Speculation is available from the Accents Store.

Barbara Goldberg is the author of four prize-winning books of poetry, including The Royal Baker’s Daughter, winner of the Felix Pollak Poetry Award. She is the translator of Scorched by the Sun, poems by the Israeli poet Moshe Dor. The two selected and translated four anthologies of contemporary Israeli poetry. Goldberg received two fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts as well as awards in translation, fiction and speechwriting. Her poems appear in Best American Poetry, Paris Review, Poetry and elsewhere, Goldberg is the series editor of the Word Works’ International Imprint.

Mother, Loose by Brandel France de Bravo

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Accents Publishing is proud to release Brandel France de Bravo’s Mother, Loose. Mother, Loose was selected by Patty Paine for the Judge’s Choice award in our 2014 chapbook competition. In the foreward, Patty says that she was, “struck time and again by how France de Bravo transports the reader from familiar to utterly unexpected contexts through startling imaginative leaps and unexpected metaphors.”

Mother, Loose plays with familiar nursery rhymes. Poems with titles such as “The Old Woman in the Shoe” and “Jack Sprat” give the reader a general sense of the stories being explored, but Brandel gives her unique perspective. As Sandra Beasley commented, “Nursery rhymes become impishly twisted.”

Ladybird Ladybird Fly Away Home Your House Is on Fire

standing by the flowering white yucca between
Christmas and New Year’s in a valley surrounded
by mountains like Chinese scroll paintings
phone in my hand standing in the garden of
a house I no longer live in my mother says
“x-ray” her dry cough flowering unremarkable
except for its constancy walking less the year before
a winded valley surrounded by mountains until
the smokeless fingers grew bulbs (they called it
“clubbing”) sent smokeless signals “please”
I said “see someone” and after Christmas the
house I once lived in phoned the garden saying
“x-ray” like a painting “mass” white as yucca.

You can purchase Mother, Loose from the Accents store or find copies at neighborhood bookstores, such as the Morris book shop or The Wild Fig.

Brandel France de Bravo is the author of Provenance, which won the 2008 Washington Writers’ Publishing House prize in poetry and was a ForeWord Book of the Year finalist. Her poems, which have been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net, and essays have appeared in various journals, including Alaska Quarterly Review, The Cincinnati Review, Fairy Tale Review, Gulf Coast, and Seneca Review. She is co-author of Trees Make the Best Mobiles: Simple Ways to Raise your Child in a Complex World and the editor of Mexican Poetry Today: 20/20 Voices. A graduate of the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College with a master’s in public health, she works for a consumer health organization in Washington, D.C.

Kings of the Rock and Roll Hot Shop (or, What Breaks) by Lynnell Edwards

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Well, I’m a lucky man
With fire in my hands

—The Verve, “Lucky Man”

This epigraph starts off Lynnell Edwards’s newest chapbook with poems inspired by glassblowing in the “hot shop”.

“Through empathy and penetrating observation, Edwards goes deep inside the art of glassmaking. What she brings back in the form of poems is fascinating—she has absorbed and passes on to us the jargon of the guild, as well as the cautions and the glories the ‘kings of the hot shop’ encounter on the way to finished creations. It is a small, self enclosed universe, and Edwards its sympathetic cosmologist.”

– Jeffrey Skinner

Kings of the Rock and Roll Hot Shop (or, What Breaks) will be released on June 15th. If you think you’ll be too busy with the Lexington Poetry Month Writing Challenge, we’ll go ahead and let you pre-order! Then, halfway through a stressful month of daily poem writing, you get a cool gift delivered straight to your door!

Or, if you’re more of an “in-person” kind of person, Lynnell Edwards is having a release party at Flame Run Hot Shop in Louisville, Kentucky on June 19th.

photo by John Nation

Lynnell Edwards is the author of three collections of poetry, most recently Covet (Red Hen Press, 2011). Her short fiction and book reviews have also appeared widely in such literary journals as Pleiades, American Book Review, New Madrid, and The Connecticut Review. She is Associate Professor of English at Spalding University, and prior to that, a faculty member at Concordia University in Portland, Oregon. Lynnell is a graduate of Centre College, the center of the glass-blowing universe in Kentucky.

Pendulum ships today!

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Those of you lucky enough to have made it to this past weekend’s Book Fair at the Carnegie Center already had the chance to pick up our newest book, Pendulum by Eric Scott Sutherland.

In an interview by Christopher McCurry, Sutherland said that the book’s characters were inspired by those he saw as he worked at a small coffee shop at the Lexington Public Library’s Central branch. Those familiar with the library also know about the five-story high Foucault pendulum hanging since 2001.

plague

is always a dirty
paw away.

a hand not washed
in who knows how long.

a hand stained by soil
and cigarette resin, the filth
permanent under fingernails.

a hand sprouting long claws
the color of skin, camouflaged,
each one a hook, a tool to dig.

a hand counting out
eighty pennies for a soda.

-Eric Scott Sutherland,
Pendulum (2014 Accents Publishing

Eric Scott Sutherland is a hawk watcher, Kentucky creek walker, tree loving Lorax, community and event organizer, the author of two chapbooks and the full-length collection incommunicado (2007). pendulum is his fourth book of poems. He is the creator and host of Holler Poets Series, a monthly celebration of literature and music since 2008. Eric makes his nest in Lexington. Follow Eric and Holler at www.ericscottsutherland.com.

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