The Other Mozart
Sharon Chmielarz

"Another lost chord–like Fannie Mendelssohn, like Lili Boulanger–Nannerl Mozart has always loomed and flickered as the likeliest approach to the mysteries of her enshrined sibling’s heart. Only an imagination, a poet’s imagination, can articulate the chord to something like an overheard melody, for the burnt-sugar sweetness of which I am grateful to Sharon Chmielarz, who has emerged from the labyrinth of another self, an alien century, with these identifying trophies all strung on the one bitter red clue: her brother’s exemption."  –Richard Howard

"In The Other Mozart, Wolfgang’s gifted sister Nannerl springs to life–along with her century and her world–in poetry that is quirky, comic, poignant, deliciously artful, vividly real. Through her saga of promise and waste, ardor and loss, music and money, youth and age, I have come to cherish the Nannerl Mozart of these redemptive poems."  –Alicia Ostriker

"Wolfgang’s sister Maria Anna–Nannerl, as the family called her–is the subject of this absorbing biography-in-poems. Five years older than Wolfgang, she was his partner in a piano duo that toured Europe. When she reached adolescence, father Leopold withdrew her from performance. He recognized that Wolfgang, a phenomenal composer as well as performer, would be more lucrative as a solo act, while Nannerl could be prepared to marry well. She did, but not to the man she loved, and she never lost her love of music. She died in 1829; only her son, Leopold, survived her. In the poems, Chmielarz adopts many perspectives on her life, including Nannerl’s own (but excepting Wolfgang’s), and she touches on every important occurrence in her life. She writes in many forms–couplets, tercets, quatrains, etc.–but eschews regular meters and rhyme, and she neatly modulates diction to distinguish the personas of the poems’ speakers. She never rants about women’s oppression in Nannerl’s time because the poems so artfully dramatize it. Extraordinary."  –Ray Olson, Booklist

ISBN 0-86538-101-1, $21.95 cloth

Oh How Can I Keep On Singing?
Jana Harris
With an Afterward by the Author

A vivid and memorable portrayal of the pioneer women who came to Washington's Okanogan Valley in the late 19th century. Includes photographs. Winner of the Washington Governor's Writers Award.

"The varied voices of farmers, Indian women, miners, laundresses, and school teachers tell their own harsh stories unforgettably."  —Annie Dillard

"A remarkable attempt to give voice to a group of women who have dropped out of history. Jana Harris has combined the resources of the poet and the scholar into something new." —Marge Piercy

ISBN 0-86538-079-1, $9.95 paperback

The Generation of 2000
Contemporary American Poets
Edited by William Heyen

Thirty-one poets, including Ai, Wendell Berry, Norman Dubie, Louise Gluck, Robert Hass, William Matthews, Sandra McPherson, Gregory Orr, Marge Piercy, Stanley Plumly, Charles Simic, Dave Smith, Mark Strand, C. K. Williams, Charles Wright. With photos and introductory prose pieces by each poet.

ISBN 0-86538-043-0, $14.95 paperback

Tenderness
Joyce Carol Oates

The poems gathered here range from reflections on adolescent experiences with men ("Sexy" and "Flirtation, July 1953") to sardonic musings on an American obsession ("$"); from an epiphany in a supermarket ("Tenderness") to a chilling dramatic monologue by a convicted sex offender ("Like Walking to the Drugstore, When I Get Out"). Oates is at the height of her powers here.

ISBN 0-86538-085-6, $18.95 hardcover

The Ghost of Eden
Chase Twichell

These are dark poems, frontal and unflinching, but they are illuminated by the poet's powerful love for the earth, and by the heightened, surprising joys forced from a new intimacy with her own mortality.

"This ambitious, compelling collection establishes Twichell as a major voice in contemporary poetry."
—Publishers Weekly

ISBN 0-86538-083-X, $17.95 hardcover

The Snow Watcher
Chase Twichell

"Reading the poems in The Snow Watcher is like breathing cold air. Organized as a kind of narrative of her apprenticeship in Zen meditation, they are full of sharp observation, both of the world and herself, unsentimental poems with a sinewy intellectual toughness." — Robert Hass, The Washington Post

ISBN 0-86538-093-7, $12.00 paperback
ISBN 0-86538-092-9, $20.00 hardcover

I'll Be Right Back
Tom Wayman

Tom Wayman's first collection of poems to be published in this country since 1980, I'll Be Right Back reflects the author's characteristic concern with love and death, the workplace and the marketplace, the city and the country. One of Canada's foremost poets, Wayman exhibits the robustness, straightforwardness, playfulness, social consciousness, and love of the land of his countrymen. His poems range from the erotic to the angry, from the mysterious to the tender.

"Wayman appears a true successor of Whitman and the Beats, one who is his own man speaking the truth of his experience. His poems range from the erotic to the angry, from the mysterious to the tender." —The Hudson Review

ISBN 0-86538-086-4, $12.95 paperback