{"title":"Box Turtle Press","description":null,"products":[{"product_id":"mudfish-24","title":"Mudfish 24","description":"\u003cp\u003e\u003ci\u003e\u003cb\u003e Mudfish 24 \u003c\/b\u003e\u003c\/i\u003e is \"thick and handsome,\" as Donald Hall said of all its issues in his book, \u003ci\u003eNotes Nearing Ninet\u003c\/i\u003ey, and this issue lives up to Mudfish's stellar reputation for beauty, intensity, originality and excellence. Each poem is a miniature novel, a universe. Poems by Tim Nolan (the winner of the 17th Mudfish Poetry Prize judged by Deborah Landau) and by the two Honorable Mentions, Doug Smith and Francis Klein are featured, along with Dell Lemmon, Jonas Kyle, Stephen Ackerman, Rodger Moody, Paul Schaeffer, Richard Fein, Joyce Wang, the poetry in the fiction of Stephanie Emily Dickinson, and artist-writers Alexander Iskin, and Paul Wuensche, and a wide variety of art by Jasper Krents, Ben La Rocco, Alaiyo Bradshaw, Mary Flinn and many others.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Box Turtle Press","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":49439888965949,"sku":"9781893654334","price":23.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0477\/8731\/1254\/files\/195149e68e63f8f3043e56026cb63396.jpg?v=1727787802"},{"product_id":"kimono-with-young-girl-sleeves","title":"Kimono with Young Girl Sleeves","description":"\u003cp\u003eThe poems from Jill Hoffman's new book \u003cb\u003e\u003ci\u003eKimono with Young Girl Sleeves\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e talk about difficult subjects - aging, death, the loss of loved ones. But they do it with honesty and the audacity of youth. The fearlessness of her work makes it relevant and very much alive. -- Anna Halberstadt, \u003cb\u003e\u003ci\u003eVilnius Diary\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eJill Hoffman's poems have a compulsion to throw themselves into tumultuous life. Their flamboyance and pleasures cannot be divorced from the anxieties of family life or friendship. And the poems keep on returning asking for more. Her devotion to dogs—and their own perilous lives—cannot be separated from friendships, lovers and children. No one is left off the hook here. There is a courage to this experiencing of life and facing up to its contradictory needs. The poems evince themselves in the risk of life. A courage of writing exemplified in such poems as \"Lame Villanelle,\" \"Relay,\" and \"Ellipsis.\" -- \u003cb\u003eRichard Fein\u003c\/b\u003e, \u003ci\u003eLosing It\u003c\/i\u003e \/ \u003ci\u003eDear Yiddish\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cstrong\u003eJill Hoffman\u003c\/strong\u003e's poems have an honesty that teeters on the edge of revelation and then swipes left before too much family blood is spilled, and from the flesh wounds memories emerge whose lethal points are wrapped in olive leaves. Hoffman namechecks various contemporaries with praise both robust and faint, more generous nevertheless than most of her fellow scriveners in the insular world of New York poets. This lively collection from her octogenarian period is a muscular, tender and singular contribution to an overcrowded field. -- \u003cb\u003eMax Blagg\u003c\/b\u003e, \u003ci\u003eLate Start for Mardi Gras\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eIt's very comforting to live in the world of Jill Hoffman's poems. These are full of poets out and about in the world, always talking and writing. The poems have such tender affection for efforts at honesty. Poets' thoughts, on paper and in life, mingle with one's own, providing some inkling—in the back of a mind, as one buys one's groceries—of what life might actually be like. -- \u003cb\u003eKarin Roffman\u003c\/b\u003e, \u003ci\u003eThe Songs We Know Best: John Ashbery's Early Life\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Box Turtle Press","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":49439889097021,"sku":"9781893654341","price":23.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0477\/8731\/1254\/files\/db75b2b0a2dd7ec0f91eb7f098bbb50f.jpg?v=1727787806"},{"product_id":"stoned","title":"Stoned","description":"\u003cp\u003eIn Jill Hoffman's irresistible \u003cem\u003eStoned\u003c\/em\u003e, the poet Maud Diamond not only indulges in reefer madness in her Beresford bathroom, but takes a much younger live-in lover, a handsome Russian (would-be-famous) artist, to the horror of her precocious children. An explosive triangle, by turns hilarious and heartbreaking, brilliantly drawn with outsized characters worthy of Dickens, lavish imagery, and impeccable comedic timing. Hoffman has written a book so poignant and pleasurable, like a Crème Brûlée for the eyes, you'll read it again and again. And yet for all its seeming decadence there is a purity here like a fawn running into the water.  --\u003cb\u003e Stephanie Emily Dickinson\u003c\/b\u003e, Author of: Razor Wire Wilderness\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Box Turtle Press","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":49439889195325,"sku":"9781893654280","price":23.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0477\/8731\/1254\/files\/11869327f74cb2d30e809713b52a24bd.jpg?v=1727787811"},{"product_id":"death-please-wait","title":"Death, Please Wait","description":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cb\u003e\u003ci\u003eDEATH, PLEASE WAIT\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e by Rochelle Jewel Shapiro is full of wrenching details and remarkable humor. A teenage romance leads to a long marriage, followed by the husband's violent dementia and death. The intimate workings of love are laid bare. The couple is separated from the start (he is in a nursing home), but we see them together through all the years of their union, the details of which are so specific that we see ourselves as well. We see the ambivalence and the steadfastness of love in all its phases. The poetry is powerful and raw and original, full of flowers and the \"whine of anonymous farts.\" The range of emotion and expression is astonishing.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Box Turtle Press","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":49439889293629,"sku":"9781893654327","price":23.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0477\/8731\/1254\/files\/bcdebebe42ff52315cabec519a1bd382.jpg?v=1727787815"},{"product_id":"dear-yiddish","title":"Dear Yiddish","description":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cb\u003e\u003ci\u003eDEAR YIDDISH\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e is a startlingly brave and candid rendering of life in the shadow of death. \"Sex is over and death soon to come.\" The beauty of the language and perceptions make 'maturity' one with 'excellence.' Or, as Yeats put it, \"Bodily decrepitude is wisdom.\" It is a celebration of the poet's Jewish heritage, of the roots of his love of language, of the whole of his life in a nutshell, of the drop on a nostril that is the last moment of life, the last line of a poem. Like Donne in his shroud, in \"Getting Ready,\" Fein lists the famous writers and the Yiddish poets and his dearest friends and loved ones and says if they can die, or know that they soon will die, \"Why can't I, with my poems, get ready to die?\" He will live forever in these poems. The book is an affirmation of the power of poems to keep us alive.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Box Turtle Press","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":49439889391933,"sku":"9781893654310","price":23.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0477\/8731\/1254\/files\/a541f7775b052118b2d1a4bd75dc382e.jpg?v=1727787819"},{"product_id":"the-cruelties-of-brooklyn","title":"The Cruelties of Brooklyn","description":"\u003cp\u003eAn amazing book that effortlessly poem by poem adds up to a novel. Unsparing vision of all the characters in the poet's childhood and adulthood that is nevertheless suffused with a love of humanity. With almost as few words as possible, Schaeffer conveys a world of meaning and abundance of detail, telling his outrageous stories. They are colorful, earthy, perceptive, empathic and brilliant. His intense realism lifts into the visionary: The coffin lid flew open \/ Her body so light \/ She lifted into the air \/ A white sheet escaping a clothesline. He mourns Aunt Helen \"the last of the gang,\" but not before he immortalizes each and every one of them. His parents become as familiar to us as our own. Twin cameos: Dad Talking Honestly to Mom; Mom Talking Honesty to Dad. These poems were all written the year following the death of his mother who he misses: \u003ci\u003eI want to call... Tell you I'm worried about something.\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Box Turtle Press","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":49439889555773,"sku":"9781893654303","price":23.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0477\/8731\/1254\/files\/e706f2059991d747e38424b2dd5020b5.jpg?v=1727787827"},{"product_id":"the-gates-of-pearl","title":"The Gates of Pearl","description":"\u003cp\u003eDecades in gestation, the riveting, poem-memoir \u003cb\u003e\u003ci\u003eTHE GATES OF PEARL\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e is woven together from a mother's Overeater's Anonymous journal written in the 1970s, mother-daughter telephone conversations, and the poet-daughter's exquisite verses... And here is the mother-daughter relationship with Pearly confessing her most private self to her grown child over the telephone. No attempt is made to prettify the mother's fragments and idiosyncratic stream-of-consciousness. Too much of Pearly's shimmering originality, her lyricism, and transgressive voice would be lost. Taboos of silence are broken. I leave the bed—I go towards an icy box—holding out its frozen breasts and erect Penis to me. The daughter responds in meticulous, impassioned verse that provides a counterpoint to the mother's flying-off-the-shelves imagery. Chiseled, Sappho-like in places, unscripted free-style in others, The Gates of Pearl is an impassioned lament of dark beauty. It is also a celebration. Listen to Pearly: My eyes were riveted on the huge banana trees... Lo and behold thru the dark purplish large leaves right before our eyes like a birthing came the stalk of bananas. I had seen Nature's unabashed sexual blaze of glory—an erection. -- \u003cstrong\u003eStephanie Emily Dickinson\u003c\/strong\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThere is no other poem on the face of the planet like this one. This is a poem that will blow the top of your head off. This is a poem in which the past is present and the present is in the past, because this poem makes the past seem so contemporary that the present feels less immediate. This is a poem written by the poet's mother in her journals, and the poet and her mother in telephone poems, and the poet in her mysterious, lyrical poems. All the voices, past and present, mingling together in this book-length poem creates a sound as piercing and clear as a scream. This is not a howl. This is a scream - a fantastic, feminist scream grounded in eating disorders, sexual frustration, divorce, failure, the difficulty of motherhood, profound disappointment and despair where the only hope is the truthfulness of the narrator, the goodness of her daughter, the determination of both of them, and the beauty of poetry. You want to read this poem despite its hard truths, because it is unlike anything you have ever read before. -- \u003cstrong\u003eDell Lemmon\u003c\/strong\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Box Turtle Press","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":49439889621309,"sku":"9781893654198","price":20.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0477\/8731\/1254\/files\/fea764bee24809c7522ecffb1cbd6df2.jpg?v=1727787831"},{"product_id":"mudfish-23","title":"Mudfish 23","description":"\u003cp\u003e\"You tell me,\" is the theme of MUDFISH 23. Honesty, emotion, shock, subtlety, poems whose reverberant language and intensity awaken more poems in the reader's mind. Poems that remind us of our own forgotten lives, that stick in our mind like burrs on a woolen sleeve\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eDonald Hall, in \u003ci\u003eA Carnival of Losses: Notes Nearing Ninety\u003c\/i\u003e, writes: \"Jill Hoffman, a painter and a poet and a fiction writer, edits a thick and handsome literary magazine called . Mary Florio in NewPages writes: Mudfish \"marries poetry and art in a spellbinding series of verve and verse .... The volume is so well-edited that one has difficulty celebrating any particular poet out of the entire collection.\" In its generous layout, it is as if every poet is featured. And a story-teller. Mudfish 1984 was the first slender issue and Mudfish gradually expanded to include fiction. Now \u003cb\u003e\u003ci\u003eMUDFISH 23\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e presents Stephanie Emily Dickinson's \u003ci\u003eLastness\u003c\/i\u003e celebrating the life and death of the poet Ted Jonathan, blurring the boundaries between prose and poetry, and fiction and nonfiction. Each work selected is a memorable experience, and each issue is a work of art. The Mudfish Individual Poet Series are companion volumes each featuring the work of a single Mudfish poet. The art, Florio writes, is \"exquisite,\" and \"moving,\" and the poetry \"likewise compelling.\"\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eArt editing done by Jacques Louis Vidal.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Box Turtle Press","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":49439889719613,"sku":"9781893654297","price":23.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0477\/8731\/1254\/files\/7f0bc91fce8e15e5de2ca565effa3833.jpg?v=1727787835"},{"product_id":"rabbits-are-strange-when-you-are-a-stranger","title":"Rabbits Are Strange, When You Are A Stranger","description":"\u003cp\u003eDaddy Astro is a rabbit who gives birth to a dog and a cat, he holds forth in 'rabbitish' and his message is that art is everywhere. They jump from a poster on Mia's wall, and help her to discover that she is an artist too, in this novel replete with delightful drawings, imbued with the joy of creativity and the power of \"Miagination.\"\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e \u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Box Turtle Press","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":49730948170045,"sku":"9781893654358","price":29.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0477\/8731\/1254\/files\/c852fdf455dc291d881502df514ecdd1.jpg?v=1735596968"},{"product_id":"mudfish-25-poetry-art-fiction-1","title":"Mudfish 25: Poetry Art Fiction","description":"\u003cp\u003eThis triumphant 25th issue is marked by generous representations from many Mudfish writers, such as Stephanie Dickinson, Doug Dorph, Tim Macaluso, Richard Fein, Paul Wuensche, Dell Lemmon, Tom Hunley, Angela Schmidt, Robert Clinton, Paul Schaeffer, Joyce (Chunyu) Wang and many others.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eFor the first time, we have a single artist whose work adorns these pages. Jack Pierson's nakedly gorgeous and varied art unifies all of \u003ci\u003eMudfish\u003c\/i\u003e so that it reads like a single poem, a moment's thought.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eStacy Spencer, the winner of the 18th poetry prize judged by Vijay Seshadri and the two honorable mentions, Elisabeth Murawski and Ann Robinson set a standard of excellence from which there is no decline. From first to last the voices touch you with their intimate revelations.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eYou read one poem and think, 'yes, this is what poetry is,' and then you read the next, and think, 'no, this is what poetry is,' and you are right every time.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eAnn Robinson writes: \"What a beautiful book. Starting with the cover. The layout, the poems. All. I am so proud to be in it. I was especially taken by the last poem, haunting and beautiful, full of what we know and don't know, down to the bone.\"\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Box Turtle Press","offers":[{"title":"Paperback","offer_id":50848428032317,"sku":"9781893654396","price":25.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0477\/8731\/1254\/files\/9781893654396ita_e58d467f-2da7-4197-9326-da24fa43047a.jpg?v=1760381706"},{"product_id":"the-polish-dream-machine-mudfish-individual-poet-series-22","title":"The Polish Dream Machine: Mudfish Individual Poet Series #21","description":"\u003cp\u003e“I had to go to the hospital to give birth,” the poet states. When the book emerges, it is\u003cbr\u003ewild. \u003cem\u003eThe Polish Dream Machine\u003c\/em\u003e is marked by the incredible candor Richard Fein is\u003cbr\u003efamous for. He tells us his life, what others bore, and with eloquence and wit defeats the loneliness of old age.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThese are exquisite poems about old age. In “My Doras,” he conflates Dora Diamond\u003cbr\u003efrom Freshman English at Brooklyn College with Kafka’s last girlfriend, Dora Dymant,\u003cbr\u003eand he goes to her medical appointments with her and she goes to his, and he tells how they had slipped away, when they were both counsellors at camp in the Poconos, “to the forest, or that nearby town, to make love”, until the final stanza, where he visits the cemetery in Prague with Helen, his wife: “where you had thrown yourself on the grave when Kafka was buried,\/and now you tell me what it was like to be with him\/even as we are married now, we two old people\/ who read together and fondle each other’s body at night—\/the flabs, and creases, and moles, and little growths.”\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eHe loses a classmate, Irving Levine, who disappeared (“not by moving away but just by\u003cbr\u003enot being at all”) and stuck with him all his life. “And I am now not far from ending up\u003cbr\u003ewhere Irving did. . . .Irving. . .\/Irving—my street address here in Cambridge,”\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eRichard Fein is 95. His poems in \u003cem\u003eThe Polish Dream Machine\u003c\/em\u003e bring beauty to the terrors\u003cbr\u003eof old age.” They are quintessential meditations on identity, love lost, and time gone\u003cbr\u003eby—all related with the withering wisdom of old age. They are as candid and revealing\u003cbr\u003eas the old French salesman’s screech, from which, Fein tells us, “this is how the Jew in\u003cbr\u003eme emerged.”\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Box Turtle Press","offers":[{"title":"Paperback","offer_id":50872139481405,"sku":"9781893654372","price":23.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0477\/8731\/1254\/files\/9781893654372ita_18ca823e-c13d-4795-a7bc-797a7c2d8d31.jpg?v=1760644424"},{"product_id":"topless","title":"Topless","description":"\u003cp\u003e\u003ci\u003eTopless\u003c\/i\u003e opens with Bliss Barnes opening her antique kimono and examining her breasts in the mirror. A banker is on the phone who wants her to describe them to him. From this low point in her life she embarks on a series of blind dates and surgeries. The horrors of each medical procedure — core biopsy, wired mamogragm, chemo itself, Upper G.I series with small bowel follow-through, plastic surgery—compete with sad date after date. After an operation, her breast is balled like a man's sock that just came out of the dryer. She was taught that it is a woman's job to be beautiful. A divorced woman, a poet and painter, with two grown children, she longs for love and sexual fulfillment. Her battle to achieve the latter, and her desire for her breasts to remain matching, is the backdrop to a moving and amusing story of motherhood and modern life. Even her Shih Tzu, Sachi, whose name means \u003ci\u003eBliss\u003c\/i\u003e in Japanese, is an ambiguous source of comfort and threat.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eThe men she meets, Mr. Looseleaf, Mr. Bike, Older is Better, the vulture from Sylvia Plath's poem, \"Death \u0026amp; Co,\" the \"Philip Roth-flavored math professor,\" with whom she and her friend Hedda form a triangle, provide distraction from trauma for Bliss and hilarity for the reader.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eThere are many triangles. Bliss lives in Tribeca. She paints herself nude and one such suitor points to the triangle on the canvas between her legs and calls it her signature: \"the triangle beneath Canal Street,\" he says. \"Why are there two of everything?\" he asks. \"I like to try again,\" Bliss says. \"Maybe there's a second man, too,\" he says, looking around.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eThe reader keeps looking for the right man too, till the last chapter.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Box Turtle Press","offers":[{"title":"Paperback","offer_id":51810279948605,"sku":"9781893654419","price":29.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0477\/8731\/1254\/files\/9781893654419ita.jpg?v=1780938290"},{"product_id":"dear-dog","title":"Dear Dog","description":"\u003cp\u003eWith \u003ci\u003eDear Dog\u003c\/i\u003e in hand, one of the most beautiful first books of poetry ever produced, we sit and read in an English garden, guarded by stone lions. Paul Wuensche is a painter as well as a poet and much as he wants to keep the two separate, these poems paint pictures. They are painterly, with gorgeous brushstrokes.\" Give an old lady a stick\/And a wheelchair\/And she can sit like Lincoln\/Who overlooks that long lake\/And the strange obelisk —.\" The beauty of the painting on the cover tells a lot about the beauty of the work inside.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThe title poem is about a dog who is gone (\"Many dog years\/Have whizzed by\/Since I had to let you go\"), and the poet recalls a garden party on his beloved dog's last week: \"We made fun of you I'm afraid,\/Gave you a newspaper to read\/Dark glasses to wear\/And you looked like an old man\/Who didn't understand children's games.\" One reader burst into tears.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThe poems are far-ranging in subject. History, nature, love, medical procedures, a remote funeral (\"Trust me to be late to a funeral\/In my own room\/On my own laptop\"), age, brothers, friendship.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThough the poems seem universal or general, with each there is the shock of intimacy. And the intimacy itself is surprising: \"I like to watch her\/Even at night, when she sits in\/Her little office far too late\/And fills up neat rows\/And columns on spreadsheets....Beside her on the desk\/The mug says \u003ci\u003eBest accountant\/in the world\u003c\/i\u003e.\"\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eWuensche tell us:\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\"I've always chosen as friends\/One or two old enough\/to know their lives\/Are soon to be rounded off,\" and then there is a startling image: \"Their borrowed flesh\/Soon to be returned,\/Like a folded prison uniform.\" He hopes to learn from them \"by some silent gesture of the hands -\/Like someone modelling a vase in wet clay,\/The slim, elegant shape\/Of all that matters in life.\"\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThere is still time for him, and for us. You will find that slim, elegant shape, all that matters in life, in this book.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Box Turtle Press","offers":[{"title":"Paperback","offer_id":51817951822141,"sku":"9781893654426","price":27.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0477\/8731\/1254\/files\/9781893654426ita.jpg?v=1781115857"},{"product_id":"mudfish-26-poetry-art-fiction","title":"Mudfish 26: Poetry, Art, Fiction","description":"\u003cp\u003e\u003ci\u003eMudfish 26\u003c\/i\u003e, a journal of poetry, art, and fiction, features 78 photographs by street photographer, and portraitist, Lawrence Applebaum, whose candid shots of poets, friends, launch parties and Mudfish headquarters, provide an intimate glimpse into the world and aura of Mudfish. This is the quintessential Mudfish: the founding fathers—cf. the three on the cover—plus marvelous new talent. The whole issue takes on the familiarity and intimate feel of a family album.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eRenowned poet Billy Collins is the judge of the 19 th Mudfish Poetry Prize. The winning poem, Allen Brafman's \"Together on the Uptown 6,\" is a fitting companion to this photographer, famous for his New York subway photos. All the poems that follow are a full-throated declaration of the American experience.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eThe photographs chronicle the story of Mudfish and the poems, in keeping with the Mudfish aesthetic, all tell a story. They are personal and profound. And unforgettable. The end of life is a theme and the way it relates to childhood. There are \"Mother\" poems and \"Father\" poems. Beautiful and moving poems. Cancer is a leitmotif. Nevertheless, \"always leave them laughing,\" is our goal.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eA new writer, Joshua Even Eisen, seems a contemporary Hemingway. Sophie Kohler, in an excerpt from a coming-of-age novel, is a delightful new voice. Stephanie Emily Dickinson is featured once again with her exquisite, painful, medicinal prose. Her prose that is poetry. In the first paragraph of \"Cancer in the Afternoon World\" she mentions the 6 train:\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e\"For years in bright sunshine, I marched on this sidewalk to the Astor Place subway to catch the 6 Train to work, returning late. Those hurrying mornings a youngish homeless man shouted, 'City Queen!' and would kiss my hand when I gave him a dollar.\"\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eThe writing in Mudfish 26 knits itself together into a mysterious unity, as if all of these authors were being guided by an invisible hand. The lone ant of Billy Collins' poem, \"Why I'm Incapable of Writing a Novel\"\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003ea lone ant\u003cbr\u003ehauling a relatively enormous crumb\u003cbr\u003eabout half again its size, across the surface\u003cbr\u003eof the table on which he had been weeping\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003ehas wandered into Stephanie Dickinson's prose:\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e\"Ants and flying mites had lost their way landing on a page of my open book. I took a deep breath and exhaled them back into their world. When ants in pupa were sick they sent out chemical messages alerting their brethren ants to come and destroy them. They began peeling off their cocoon readying themselves to be bitten to death by adult ants. It was suicide to protect others. My cancer, too, gave off messages.\"\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eDell Lemmon writes, in her poem \"50 th High School Reunion\": \"It all started with a dream.\"\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eI never imagined living\u003cbr\u003ethis long and when you get this old,\u003cbr\u003eit's as if you are already dead\u003cbr\u003eand everything is a dream.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eAnd as she says, \"Aren't we supposed to be everybody in our dreams?\"\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eIt is as if we are all truly \"together on the Uptown 6.\"\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Box Turtle Press","offers":[{"title":"Paperback","offer_id":67754765189437,"sku":"9781893654402","price":28.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0477\/8731\/1254\/files\/9781893654402ita.jpg?v=1792534082"}],"url":"https:\/\/itascabooks.com\/collections\/box-turtle-press.oembed","provider":"Itasca Books","version":"1.0","type":"link"}