Ages of Chaos and Fury Oswald LeWinter Price: $12.95 ISBN: 978-0-9766593-8-9 Like his great model, Hart Crane, LeWinter seeks a language in which to capture the modern world and to celebrate its endurance in the midst of chaos. Can there be a more difficult task for any poet in a century which George Orwell so aptly described as a "cesspool full of barbed wire." This may be the reason why so many of LeWinter's most compelling poems deal with war, with death, and with impermanence.  In this sequence as well as in the rest, LeWinter's divided nature is everywhere visible, as it is in the story of his life.  (Oleg Vygotsky, Translated by Hannah Pichennik) This is his first poetry collections in more than forty years. What is one to make of such a silence? It is as much a paradox as the poet himself, a man who has improbably combined the vocations of poet, soldier, and spy.  LeWinter started publishing again about ten years ago, from Europe, where he now resides after having left America for good. His politics seem to be complicated, and it would be tempting to review the complications behind the poetry rather than the poetry itself. Suffice it to say that after a career in the U.S. military and military intelligence that encompassed Vietnam and Iran-Contra, LeWinter retired from politics.  The poems in these books minimize that colorful background. It would be hard to deduce LeWinter’s exact involvement in global conflicts by reading the war poems. Instead, the war poems speak in a present tense of grimness and futility. The poems in these books almost all bear scars of loss, regret, and bitterness, but they have an underlying aspiration toward beauty and innocence that is deeply affecting. (Rachel Dacus)

Arbitrary Tales Daniel Borzutzky Price: $15.00 ISBN: 978-0-9766593-1-0 In the tradition of Ben Marcus, Matthew Derby, and David Ohle, Daniel Borzutzky's fictions mine the fables that comprise our understanding of ourselves: the tales that are woven up so intricately with us we cannot tell where we begin and our histories end. He turns these stories inside out and makes them new. He frees us from them so we can weave them back again. This is his first collection and it met with considerable positive comment.

Atlassed Jane Unrue Price: $14.95 ISBN: 978-0-9766593-9-6 Jane Unrue's Atlassed has many of the characteristics of a short story sequence, but its carefully composed language recalls the prose poetry of Fred Wah or perhaps Lyn Hejinian. In a sense, Unrue reproduces the peripatetic urban roaming of Paterson or Leaves of Grass -- except that the stomping grounds of her metropolitan flaneur is not the city, but the human body itself. The book is composed of a series of prose vignettes, some that are more or less narrative, and others that are more like stylistic improvisations, or prose poems that read like grab-bags of linguistic synergy. The result is both a mapping and an erotics of the body, as indicated by the evocative chapter headings (eg. "Brow and Chin Variations," or "Topmost Portion of the Forehead, a Common Omission"). These headings supply in large part the "unity" of this book, which attempts to nominally fasten these evocative if not necessarily transparent prose pieces to a conceptual map of the body which though present, hovers just beyond our comprehension.  (Gunnar Benediktsson)

The Book of Ruth Frank Lentricchia Price: $16.95 ISBN: 978-0-9766593-5-8 Ruth is not exactly a conventional sequel to his novel Lucchesi and the Whale. Lentricchia has included two characters from the first book--the vaguely autobiographical protagonist, writer Thomas Lucchesi, and Ruth Cohen, who appeared briefly as a flight attendant in a dream sequence in Lucchesi, but who now, as a photographer and the writer's wife, shares narration duties; otherwise the book takes off in new directions. Interlacing the narrative with flashbacks, the story follows the couple from Utica, New York (Lentricchia's hometown), to secluded "Ninth Lake" in upstate New York, and eventually to Baghdad. Where Lucchesi was an abstract musing--equal parts novel and lit crit focusing heavily on the writer's own experience of Moby-Dick--Ruth is more plot driven.