Over the Line
Fifteen-year-old Justin Lyle does not see in himself the qualities he admires in heroes like his paternal grandfather, awarded a medal of honor during World War II, or in the fictional heroes of television and comic books. Growing up in the declining manufacturing town of East Liberty, New York—beset by unemployment, rising crime, and an influx of drugs, and encircled by struggling dairy farms—Justin feels isolated and decidedly unheroic. These feelings are intensified by his parents’ divorce, his longing for an unattainable girl, and the death, eight years previous but still a potent memory, of his infant brother. When Justin steps "over the line" one afternoon, attempting to help the drug-addled girlfriend of an unstable bully, he triggers a series of increasingly perilous encounters. By week’s end, Justin has been drawn into his community’s sinister underworld and compelled to unexpected action and a fresh understanding of the complexities of heroism.
WARRIORS
The historic and domestic subjects in David Lloyd’s new collection are drawn from myth, history, popular culture, family, the animal world, and the environment. In addressing public and private conflicts and transnational borders, Warriors uses an array of forms: the sestina, the parable, the lyric, the narrative, the poem sequence.
BOYS:
STORIES AND A NOVELLA
Set in 1966, the 12 story sequence and novella of Boys re-create the world of lower-middle-class adolescent boys coming of age in Upstate New York. In part an indictment of how American society shapes and misshapes its children, Boys also celebrates the creativity and wonder that are a part of adolesence.
THE GOSPEL ACCORDING TO FRANK
a poem sequence
This poem sequence merges elements of Frank Sinatra‘s public persona with Biblical and mythological representations of divinity. As a gospel narrating Sinatra‘s life from birth to death, the poems use (and misuse) styles and forms from Greek mythology, the Old and New Testaments, the eighth-century Irish epic Tain Bo Cuailnge, and the Welsh medieval tales of The Mabinogi, such as gnomic utterance, symbolic narratives, parables, proverbs, and psalms.
Includes a foreword by Frank Sinatra expert Gilbert Gigliotti.
THE EVERYDAY APOCALYPSE
Winner of the 2002 Maryland State Poetry & Literary Society 6th annual chapbook contest
These poems, which form a unified work, come from poetic instinct honed by craft. No inexact or excess worlds keep the lines from moving crisply and colorfully through a cast of characters as varied as Frank Sinatra, Houdini, John Glenn, and St. Peter. The writer imagines "outside the box," and deftly uses the particular to reach the universal. The images bring the reader closer to a level of insight beyond the poems themselves.
- Comments by the chapbook contest judge,
Joyce S. Brown
IMAGINED GREETINGS: POETIC ENGAGEMENTS WITH R. S. THOMAS
For the centenary of R. S. Thomas' birth, this anthology gathers poems written over the last five decades that respond to the acclaimed poet's life and work. Poems by 35 poets, including Dannie Abse, Gillian Clarke, Menna Elfyn, Jeremy Hooker, Twm Morys and Harri Webb.
OTHER LAND
Contemporary Poems on Wales and the Welsh-American Experience
This anthology features ten poets, each with an American background and an active, creative engagement with Wales. The poetry deals with the 'matter of Wales' and the 'matter' of being Welsh-American, developed through divergent poetics and perspectives; as attuned to degrees of difference as those of connectedness; and, as attentive to cultural cross-currents as to the 'other land'. The "Otherland" of Wales, Cymru, hen wlad fy nhadau, the mother ship - as perceived by Welsh, American, American-Welsh or Welsh-American poets. The poets include Jon Dressel, Denise Lever, William Greenway, William Virgil Davies, Margot Farrington, Anne Stevenson, Sarah Kennedy, Margaret Lloyd, Joseph Clancy, and David Lloyd.
WRITING ON THE EDGE
Interviews with Writers and Editors of Wales
The title of this collection of interviews reflects ongoing debates about the nature and direction of contemporary Welsh literature in English, which is often perceived as peripheral both to Welsh-speaking Wales and to the literary culture of England. As one contributor puts it: "This is what it is like to be Welsh ... It's an edge. There's no moment of life in Wales that hasn't got that edge, unless you decide you're not Welsh.
THE URGENCY OF IDENTITY
Contemporary English-language Poetry from Wales
This anthology brings together work by more than 15 Welsh poets who, apart from R. S. Thomas, are little known in the U.S., and includes interviews with poets and critics that place the poetry in the context of Welsh politics and culture. Central to that culture is a debate over language: ... Chris Bendon sums up the quandary of the Welsh writer writing in English: "Someone speaks Welsh. Wales, (whatever that is) / becomes Wales again." ... Some of the common themes of Welsh poetry are nature, Wales's industrial past and economic hardships, and working the land. But although "many of the poems / Carry the smack of loam," the younger poets here are innovators, too, influenced by other traditions than their own. Gillian Clarke's work stands out particularly, reminiscent of the metaphoric vitality of contemporary Irish poetry and the sensual frankness of the American.
-Publisher's Weekly
THE MOVING OF THE WATER
Stories anchored in the Welsh American immigrant experience.
“This collection of stories has a great-grandfather: Joyce’s Dubliners. Like Joyce’s, Lloyd’s stories are in the realist mode, yet sometimes broken up with startling, dream-like, hallucinatory passages that are decisive in opening up another range of experience. The final title story is magnificent, no other word will do, and it recalls ‘The Dead,’ the concluding story of Joyce’s book. If Joyce were from Utica, New York, as Lloyd is, he’d have written this book and called it Uticans.” — Frank Lentricchia, author of The Music of the Inferno