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Titles Published by Steel Toe Books
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Bending Under the Yellow Police Tapesby James Doyle "Doyle's characters persevere .
. . because they are all right with the unfairness, the
sometimes absurdity, of the world. They know how to,
when necessary, turn their backs on its silly cruelties, its
cancer cells, its predatory laws, even its spoiled
fifteen-year-old girls, who think they are deciding our
ends." Click here for more information about Bending Under the Yellow Police Tapes. |
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Lightning and Ashesby John Guzlowski "The poet’s father tells
his son that in one of the slave-labor camps he had watched
‘a woman in the moments before she died / take a stick and
try to write her name / in the mud where she lay.’ This book
magnificently redeems that lost gesture. It brings us face
to face with what we cannot allow ourselves to forget." Click here for more information about Lightning and Ashes. |
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Prairie Feverby Mary Biddinger "Mary Biddinger is a beguiling shape-shifter,
one who suffuses her writing with electricity and alacrity of
language. I marvel at the elegant architecture and scope of
each poem. The veritable menagerie of animals that visit these
pages simply enchants: zebras, rhinos, marabou, goldfish, bears,
and banana spiders. These poems bite and scare, ravish and delight.
Prairie Fever showcases a beautiful mind, a beautiful debut." Click here for more information about Prairie Fever. |
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Blue Positiveby Martha Silano "Martha Silano's poems are full of sex
and birth and food, mind and body. Their richness of detail
makes reading this book like entering a home: there is a bustle
to her language as she tries to gather everything she loves.
Silano writes, 'I'm surprised how the trees keep themselves/from
falling, how mostly stable this sloping, unpredictable earth.'
By the end of Blue Positive, I trust
both her surprise and her wisdom." Click here for more information about Blue Positive. |
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Becoming the Villainessby Jeannine Hall Gailey "In this splendidly entertaining debut,
Jeannine Hall Gailey offers us a world both familiar and magical—filled
with fairytale and mythology characters that are our own bedfellows—we
wake up with Philomel and argue with Ophelia while half-listening
to a Snow Queen, amidst Spy Girls, Amazons and Mongolian Cows.
The wild and seductive energy in this collection never lets
one put the book down. For her delivery is heart-breaking and
refreshing, so the poems seduce us with the sadness, glory and
entertainment of our very own days. Propelled by Jeannine Hall
Gailey’s alert, sensuous, and musical gifts, the mythology becomes
all our own." Click here for more information about Becoming the Villainess. |
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Conditions and Curesby Ken Waldman "Full of poems that stand alone as consummate
accomplishments, Conditions and Cures nevertheless coheres as
a book about life-and-death verities, strategies for survival
or triumph or at least coping gracefully. The comic is one of
those strategies, and Ken Waldman is often at his most hilarious
when he’s addressing subjects another poet might murder with
solemnity. In addition, he frequently engages with demanding
forms like pantoums, villanelles, sestinas and sonnets, submitting
to their guidance but never losing his independence. The secret
of such a trick is his ear: a professional musician, Waldman
swears final allegiance to the body of our language, its sonorities
and rhythms, to its possibilities as song—a co-strategy with
the comic." Click here for more information about Conditions and Cures. |
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Diary of a Cellby Jennifer Gresham "In Diary of a Cell Jennifer Gresham
lays a sharply focused lens of language on the surface of experience
to learn, as she says in 'Anatomy', 'the secrets out of the
deep.' The depths here are not measured in fathoms or leagues
but by the complicated and complex scale of human emotions.
Gresham is a clear-headed and clear-eyed poet who understands
'why the memory of kindness/can find us in the dark' and her
debut volume radiates with the light of this discovery." Click here for more information about Diary of a Cell. |
