A History of Guns in the Family John Burgess Price: $12.95 ISBN: 978-0-9791921-9-7 A second impressive collection from John Burgess, following up on his Punk Poems and expanding into an expression, from many viewpoints, of a whole life that moved across the continent, from upstate New York, to Washington State and took with it the zen, punk, beat, historical curiosity and unabashed (if ironic) happiness it found on the trip. The free, open and reflective balanced poems appeal to a wide audience and are often performed by the author with beat-influenced live music -- the author and the audience have a great time.

Human Cathedrals John Sweet Price: $8.50 ISBN: 978-0-9723329-0-3 John Sweet’s lean and muscular poetry causes a lot of excitement, evident by his long publications list and a series of earnest and diverse chapbooks. Human Cathedrals is his first major collection and Ravenna Press’ first book, what he describes as a tasty little full-length collection of angst and bile.  It is better than that, with shades of melancholy mixed in with expressed vulnerability and the voice of a skilled poet who pulls no punches and obscures nothing. This book selects a range of John's strongest work and organizes it as an extended meditation—it is a great reading experience, immediately engaging and honest from page to page. Perfect-bound with a matte cover, it contains 80 pages of poetry in the consistent, unflinching Sweet voice.

The Human Mind Angela Woodward Price: $12.95 ISBN: 978-0-9791921-6-6 These stories brim with ideas, with firm outward gazes upon the story's world and a bracing intellect involved beyond the self. Historical figures such as Edgar Allan Poe, William James and Robert Hooke people them, but so do a man made of smoke, an orphaned woman who sews hats and handbags, and the alchemist Dr. Crafft, who bottles starlight.

The Long Rowing Unto Morning Norman Lock Price: $12.95 ISBN: 978-0-9776162-5-1 In this, his fifth full-length book, Norman Lock paints the portrait of a lonely everywoman, a plain Jane who spends days pushing a mop and nights drinking tea, sitting her sadness on her elbow "by the window looking out. Out, where all is hurrying over the rainy streets." Lock paints the portrait of an "old woman with a cracked face" who, as a child, was teased to tears. Now, years later, in the last phase of her life, she is preparing for her own long rowing into death. Jane lives alone in a room that she calls "mine and locked." She tells us a secret about "the boy who put his hand on me, then went away never to come back." She returns to the image of this moment in recollected tranquility, again and again, and it becomes increasingly menacing the more often the refrain is used. But her world wasn't always so dark and alienating. It could also be quite poetic. This passage from her childhood, the happy part of it, stands on its own as a poem-in-prose: After supper we went outside to watch the night. We walked to where the sun went behind the hill. We watched the shadows spill, the birds fly. We felt the night fall. It was a cold shadow falling. It made us quiet. Behind us I saw the windows all on fire, the windows of our house. Suppose some day the house burns down? I thought. What will happen to me then without a house to live in when it's cold? Without a roof when it rains? No beds to sleep in, no table for our plates? Every night I thought of that. Then the sun sank — it always did — and the fire in the windows went out. The shadows disappeared, the windows died and nothing shone in them until we went back home and lit the lights.

A Map by a Dim Lamp Ron Starr Price: $12.95 ISBN: 978-0-9776162-6-8 Often dividing his work into the Digital and the Static, Ron Starr experiments poetically in the company of the famous Oulipo group (see note at bottom), The Workshop for Potential Literature. "Starr aims at "developing new forms," because "forms are heuristic, exploratory, each revealing new areas and new limits." These poems he has created are delightful, intriguing; anything but sterile. Consider "State of Myself," a "computer-assisted merging" Whitman's "Song of Myself" and one of Bush's State of the Union addresses: "I celebrate mothers and sing terrorism, and what I assume you shall assume..." (Jason B. Jones) [The Oulipo (Ouvroir de la literature potentielle or Workshop for Potential Literature) group was established by Raymond Queneau and François Le Lionnais, and has been associated with Georges Perec (A Void), Italo Calvino, and Harry Matthews. (Drunken Boat has recently hosted a massive and very useful online feature on Oulipo and Oulipo-inspired work.]

Mosefolket Cooper Esteban Price: $13.95 ISBN: 978-0-9791921-0-4 Reaching into the classical world but including more recent references, as to a line from Donald Justice, Cooper Renner gives us sixty-nine short lyric or elegiac poems that are muscular, adroit and handled with the unsentimental assurance of a knife set to its ends by a keen intelligence and profane desire. These are not poems for those who imagine they will console themselves in a vanished Arcadia or escape the violence of the present. These are -- in the words of Mr. Esteban’s “Medusa’s Lover” -- “lullabies / my mother sang to me; / [as I] watched the fish gaping as though mad / to take my hands / to the bone.” Those of us who wished once to be poets -- and failed -- and are no longer even young will be glad that one was able (at what price!) to release from art’s obdurate material sixty-nine elegantly wrought meditations on the savage and the sublime. (Norman Lock)

My Lovely Suicides Jody McAuliffe Price: $16.95 ISBN: 978-0-9791921-5-9 Jody McAuliffe’s poetic and darkly funny first novel achieves a vivid realization of the age of Romanticism, when suicide was an option of beauty. Heinrich von Kleist, an electrifyingly modern writer, desperate for recognition from the artistic power broker of the time—his moralistic rival Goethe— is driven finally to a notorious act of violence: murder suicide. The seven chapter titles bear the names of his potential suicide partners: if you love him, you must die with him. The story moves between Kleist and his sister Ulrike, between an eighteenth century madness and an eighteenth century reasonableness, between extreme ambition and intense family pressure to succeed. Ulrike, in an effort to fill the hole in her life made by her brother’s death, reads his autobiographical manuscript, The Story of My Soul, and journeys to the center of his obsessive desire for immortality. McAuliffe completely enters the mindset of an artist/suicide in prose so tight it feels coiled. Reading the novel is like experiencing a dream— seemingly rooted in the reality of its characters, but unsettling in its insistence on picking at the scabs of our greatest anxieties.