4/16/2013 Fall of ’33 is Now Available!!

Fall of ’33, by Gary Lee Entsminger & Susan Elizabeth Elliott was released by Pinyon Publishing in Montrose, Colorado on 4/16/2013 (6"x9" paperback, 214 pages,  ISBN: 978-1-936671-13.7, $17.00). For more information, please contact gs@pinyon-publishing.com.

In Ophelia’s Ghost (set in the American Southwest in 1958) Eva, an anthropologist in her mid-30s, disappears from her campsite in the Canyons of the Ancients . . . Now, 25 years earlier in Fall of ’33, from the window of a train, 12-year-old Eva looks back—observing, associating, remembering the fall of 1933, her last twenty days on her family’s farm nestled in Virginia’s Blue Ridge Mountains.

With her parents Doc and Leah, Eva rides the train west, to the Century of Progress World’s Fair in Chicago, across the Plains, and on to their new home in Django, Colorado. With Billy, she finds her first young love, learns about her family’s ghostly past, and discovers mysteries about herself. Grandfather Poppy prepares her for life-changing journeys as he relates the stories of her family’s Indian and mystical ancestry in Virginia, dating back to Shakespeare’s time and before.

While inventing new games, exploring the woods around their farm, and joining family and friends in traditional social gatherings in 1933 rural Virginia, Eva’s experiences unveil secrets of the past, present, and future. The darkness of this period—economic depression, drought, and burgeoning eugenics—is balanced by the shining potential of the human imagination.

AUTHOR BIOS

GARY L. ENTSMINGER—writer, naturalist, computer programmer, and poet—studied English at Washington and Lee University. He has written two novels, numerous nonfiction books and scientific articles, and null-model biodiversity software.

SUSAN E. ELLIOTT—writer, ecologist, and artist—studied botany and French at Humboldt State University and has a Ph.D. in biology from Dartmouth College.

Gary and Susan’s first novel, Ophelia’s Ghost, sets the stage for Fall of ‘33. In Remembering the Parables, they use prose, poetry, and art to demonstrate the Art of Memory (a key theme in both novels). Gary grew up in Lexington, Virginia, where he and Susan continue to explore the Blue Ridge Mountains. They live in the Colorado Rocky Mountains.

4/22/2013 Into This World is Now Available!!

Into This World  by Michael Miller was released by Pinyon Publishing in Montrose, Colorado on 4/22/2013 (6"x9" paperback, 88 pages,  ISBN: 978-1-936671-14-4, $16.00). For more information, please contact gs@pinyon-publishing.com.

Michael Miller’s poems are finely tuned meditations on war, nature, friends, and love. The cycles of light and darkness, of fear and hope, of life and death echo from poem to poem. One realizes reading these poems that one must climb to get to the light, that certainty is uncertain.

For “Corporal Sayers,” “The war is over, / The dead will not run across a ridgeline, / And he has returned, / Refusing to kill a spider.” And the spider survives to appear in another poem, “Cracks:” “My black coffee is cooling down, / Early light falls through the window / Where I sit beside the spider / Crawling out of cracks in the house. / I let it live.”

Even love must be earned, not something we can take for granted. In “Rose,” “A drift of beauty / Will fall with each petal / As permanence eludes us.” These are poems that can be read almost effortlessly yet offer new rewards with each reading.

“I read Michael Miller’s poems with great pleasure in their accurate seeing, their assured phrasing, their true and proportionate feeling.”—RICHARD WILBUR

“No other poet I know writes so beautifully about seasoned love—love within the context of a life-long marriage. In writing about people and the places they share, Michael Miller achieves in his poems a deep sense of emotional integrity. His poems value clarity, understatement, love in the context of its turbulence, and the accuracy of each detail.”—STEPHEN HAVEN

August 21, 2013 A Word’s Worth Review:

“... Michael Miller’s Into This World rivals the latest blockbuster novel in terms of being a page turner–I read the 73-page volume in one sitting and closed the book with thoughts about Donald Hall’s evaluation of poetry: ‘Poems are not about anything because they are about everything.’ Michael Miller’s work encompasses that everything–love, war, the natural world, death … ladybugs, bumble bees, dogs, polar bears …” Read the Full Review

AUTHOR BIO

MICHAEL MILLER’s first book, The Joyful Dark, was the Editor’s Choice winner of the McGovern Prize at Ashland Poetry Press. His poems have appeared in such publications as The Sewanee Review, The Kenyon Review, The New Republic, The Southern Review, Ontario Review, The American Scholar, Raritan, and The Yale Review. His play, Transplants, which won the New England playwriting competition, was produced by Oldcastle Theatre Company in Bennington, Vermont. Born in 1940, Michael Miller lives in western Massachusetts.

6/17/2013 The Wilderness Poetry of Wu Xing  is Now Available!!

The Wilderness Poetry of Wu Xing  by Peter Waldor was released by Pinyon Publishing in Montrose, Colorado on 6/5/2013 (6"x9" paperback, 90 pages,  ISBN: 978-1-936671-16-8, $16.00). For more information, please contact gs@pinyon-publishing.com.

One is bound to ask who Wu Xing was and what were the particulars of his life. Was he a mountain sage hailing from a distant time and far off place? Was his teacher Do Sa the prophet of a lost religion? Across the centuries, only the poetry has survived. Even the name Wu Xing was probably not his real name but a pen name taken to better reflect the spirit of the poetry. The name translates to “nothingness.” Nothingness here means its very opposite. Wu was so quiet, his mind so empty, that he could fill himself with these timeless lyrics. This is deep wilderness poetry, but it can be read or recited just as profoundly, whether you are caught in a big city traffic jam or are yourself, like Wu, finding your own trail far away from everyone else.

“Peter Waldor’s new book combines the unaffected, wise, intimate tone of the old Asian masters, sometimes joyful, sometimes heartbroken, often affectionate, with a tone of his own, a 21st century, ‘first world’ voice, more jaunty and optimistic-seeming, yet sometimes struggling for breath, for the ground under his feet: ‘… cups of thin air. / Knife edge. / Nothing on the sides. / Nothing in the past. / Nothing in the future.’ (‘Knife Edge Ridge’). Many sounds and textures of wonder and of nothingness are drawn here, to keep us warm and uninsistent company in our own wilderness.”—Jean Valentine, winner of the National Book Award for Door in the Mountain

“Spare, trenchant, whimsical … these small gems of poetry seamlessly meld the heart of a sage with the soul of a mountain man.”—Cynthia Bourgeault, author of Love Is Stronger than Death, The Wisdom Way of Knowing, and The Meaning of Mary Magdalene

AUTHOR BIO

PETER WALDOR is the author of Door to a Noisy Room, which was a finalist for the 2009 National Jewish Book Award. His book length poem “Leg Paint” appeared in the online magazine Mudlark. His work has been published in many journals, including The American Poetry Review, Ploughshares, The Iowa Review, Colorado Review, Pinyon Review, Poetry Daily, Verse Daily, and Mothering Magazine. Waldor works in the insurance business and lives in northern New Jersey and Telluride, Colorado.

7/22/2013 Magical, Fantastical, Alphabetical Soup is Now Available!!

Magical, Fantastical, Alphabetical Soup by Chuck Taylor was released by Pinyon Publishing in Montrose, Colorado on 7/22/2013 (6"x9" paperback, 190 pages,  ISBN: 978-1-936671-17-5, $17.00). For more information, please contact gs@pinyon-publishing.com.

Insane, witty, hilarious, ironical, sincere, grumpy, and original, Chuck Taylor brings together in Magical, Fantastical, Alphabetical Soup the alpha and omega of existence in a series of mini-fictions, prose poems, and rants written to challenge and delight the reader.

“Magical, Fantastical, Alphabetical Soup is just what its name implies, a tour through multiplicities of the human heart, a deconstructive exploration of the interpretive mind, a clever philosophical clutch at the divine sweetness of the human soul waiting beneath the exterior. Barbra Streisand sings of ‘animal crackers’ in her soup, but this book, with too long a title to repeat here, may begin with a man’s most closely guarded secret, ‘the man has a toupee.’ Bon appétit!”—CONNIE WILLIAMS, author of Dancing Backwards in Texas

“Chuck Taylor’s Magical, Fantastical, Alphabetical Soup is the best book of prose I have ever read! It is part philosophy, part flash memoir, and everything prose poetry is supposed to be. This is an important book that creates an entertaining alphabetical narrative that reads like a novel. Get this book! You won’t regret it.”—DR. CHRISTOPHER CARMONA, author of Beat, UT/Brownsville

AUTHOR BIO

CHUCK TAYLOR’s most recent books have been memoirs, Saving Sebastian: A Father’s Journey through His Son’s Drug Abuse and The One True Cat: A Life with Cats. Taylor has worked as a balloon clown, soft water salesman, janitor, laundry worker, survey taker, children’s magician, animal lab assistant, nursery school teacher, bookseller, and publisher. Currently he operates the independent literary press, Slough, and teaches creative writing, Beat Literature, and American Nature Writing at Texas A&M. He has worked as a Poet-in-the-Schools and as a CETA Poet-in-Residence for Salt Lake City. Chuck has written two novels and three books of short stories. His book of poems, What Do You Want, Blood? won the Austin Book Award. He is married to Takako Saito Taylor and has three children.

8/12/2013 Widow Zion is Now Available!!

Widow Zion by Perle Besserman was released by Pinyon Publishing in Montrose, Colorado on 8/12/2013 (6"x9" paperback, 226 pages,  ISBN: 978-1-936671-18-2, $17.00). For more information, please contact gs@pinyon-publishing.com.

Set during the hopeful yet turbulent years of the Clinton-sponsored Camp David peace talks between Yasir Arafat and Yitzhak Rabin, Widow Zion traces the unlikely romantic encounter of Stella, a wealthy Jewish American widow on a “Holy Land Tour,” and Aryeh, her recalcitrant escort, an Israeli widower and war-weary old soldier. Their meeting results in a poignant, and eventually tragic, series of misadventures set into motion by Aryeh’s well-intentioned matchmaking cousin Leo, a Holocaust survivor driven by conflicting desires for material success and an almost mystical passion for tikkun—spiritual repair of a broken world. Bruised by her troubled marriage and traumatized by the recent suicide of her favored son, Stella is initially cynical and resists Leo’s mission; while Aryeh, too literally and figuratively wounded by Israel’s legacy of never-ending war, clings to old family grudges and resents his cousin’s intrusion. But Leo is a force too powerful to resist, and both inevitably succumb to his undeliverable promise of spiritual renewal.

Based on the centuries’-old struggle between Jews and Arabs in its current Palestinian/Israeli incarnation, this contemporary re-telling of the ancient biblical story of exile and return reveals that the source of the so-called “clash of civilizations” lies within the Jewish Diaspora itself.

AUTHOR BIO

Recipient of the Theodore Hoepfner Fiction Award and past writer-in-residence at the Mishkenot Sha’ananim Artists’ Colony in Jerusalem, Pushcart Prize-nominee PERLE BESSERMAN was praised by Isaac Bashevis Singer for the “clarity and feeling for mystic lore” of her writing and by Publisher’s Weekly for its “wisdom [that] points to a universal practice of the heart.” She has written two previous novels, Pilgrimage and Kabuki Boy, and two story collections, Marriage and Other Travesties of Love and Yeshiva Girl. Her short fiction has appeared in The Southern Humanities Review, Agni, Transatlantic Review, Nebraska Review, Southerly, North American Review, Bamboo Ridge, and many others. Besserman’s recent books of creative non-fiction include Zen Radicals, Rebels, and Reformers (coauthored with Manfred Steger) and A New Zen for Women.

Perle holds a doctorate in Comparative Literature from Columbia University and has lectured, toured, taught, and appeared on television, radio, and in two documentary films about her work in the US, Europe, Canada, Australia, Japan, China, and the Middle East. Her books have been recorded and released in both audio and e-book versions and translated into over ten languages. www.perlebesserman.net

9/2/2013 Wires Over the Homeplace is Now Available!!

Wires Over the Homeplace by Paul Dickey was released by Pinyon Publishing in Montrose, Colorado on 9/2/2013 (6"x9" paperback, 86 pages,  ISBN: 978-1-936671-20-5, $16.00). For more information, please contact gs@pinyon-publishing.com.

Wires Over the Homeplace is a late eighteenth-century Pennsylvania frontier of ancestors clearing fields across America to raise young families and new generations. It’s also a coming-of-age story for a postmodernist computer programmer retiree in the early twenty-first century writing his second book of poetry. Somewhere it may contain a story snatched from your own heart.

Wires happens in places that once were prairies, wheat fields, ball fields, hospital waiting rooms, and schools—and occupied by jack rabbits, snakes, and rusted tractors in the fields. The only constant may be the dark birds perched on the wires. The cinematography is Dickeyville, Wisconsin; Iowa; Wichita; Oklahoma; and Omaha. At this very minute, or perhaps the moment you start to read, the book means what it says, which is a Great Plains value. In the book though, much will happen and meaning can’t always be rigidly predicted and controlled. You’ll drive the I-80 Interstate through Iowa and buy nails or a bucket of paint in an old hardware store in Weeping Water, Nebraska. A lovely young lady will buy a loaf of bread. You might get hungry for your own grandma’s homemade sausage biscuits and gravy. You’ll discuss ovenbirds with Bertrand Russell.

At times the road may make a sudden jump and you won’t be prepared. That’s just life, the old-timers say. You do have your seat belt on, right? It’s the law these days. If the book gets heavy from holding it at an awkward angle, lay it down for a spell. Bottom line, if we get lucky, you might look up and see these Wires Over the Homeplace, perhaps as you yourself always knew them, but hadn’t thought about for a time or hadn’t even known you knew.

“Wires Over the Homeplace welcomes the haunting of its forebears, both poetic and personal. Indeed, as Dickey attends to the narratives, gestures, and cadences of the Midwest, those sources are brilliantly conflated. So it is that one speaker praises his father by noticing that the man ‘had his own way about words, folks / and things. He respected every tool. Everything / inhabited its own place.’ The same could be said of this poet whose candor so honors his subjects. Dickey’s way about words—subtle, reserved, but unabashedly tender—is purely his own.”—GEORGE DAVID CLARK, Editor of 32 Poems

AUTHOR BIO

PAUL DICKEY is a poet and philosophy instructor in Omaha and has published poetry, fiction, plays, poetry book reviews, and creative non-fiction in over one hundred literary journals. He gives poetry readings and prose poetry workshops throughout the Midwest in colleges and elsewhere. Dickey’s recent books include They Say This is How Death Came Into the World (poems), The Good News According to St. Dude (a play), and Liberal Limericks of 2012 (a collection of humorous political poems). His work has appeared in Pleiades, Bellevue Literary Review, Laurel Review, Prairie Schooner, Memoir (and), 32 Poems, Potomac Review, Hampden-Sydney Poetry Review, Pinyon Review, and Clements and Dunham’s An Introduction to the Prose Poem.

9/20/2013 Intimacies & Other Devices is Now Available!!

Intimacies & Other Devices by Kurt Heinzelman was released by Pinyon Publishing in Montrose, Colorado on 9/20/2013 (6"x9" paperback, 86 pages,  ISBN: 978-1-936671-19-9, $16.00). For more information, please contact gs@pinyon-publishing.com.

“In Intimacies & Other Devices Kurt Heinzelman has created a marvelous hommage to the erotic in all its forms and manifestations, a world in which, as he so originally puts it, taste’s ‘one true sommelier’ is beauty and ‘constellations of geese’ can actually be seen as ‘fellating the starstruck skies.’ This is a poet not ashamed of lust, and its accompanying hunger for beauty, at any age, and who knows how to make of those hungers a world both subtle and celebrative at once. A wonderful book, one that will bring pleasure, in the deepest sense, to all who encounter it.”—MICHAEL BLUMENTHAL, author of Hurry Up: Poems 2000-2012

“It is wonderful to experience a poet’s bounty, as we do in Kurt Heinzelman’s rich new volume, with its expansive variety of voices, inventions and moods, across a range from probing reflection to sheer rapture. It’s fine to be with a poet who can find words for the deepest intimacies of love, of what can pass between men and women. It’s a pleasure, too, to participate in the playful re-interpretation of long traditions in the hands of one who knows, to feel the spring of poetic rhythm and the eloquence of the intricately concentrated expression, as memory, desire, humor and sensuality are shaped in virtuosic language.”—NICHOLAS JOSE, novelist and editor of the Norton Anthology of Australian Literature

“Kurt Heinzelman’s wonderful new collection is full-on plural, replete both with intimacies and with the great range of devices poets and lovers employ. Ballads whose diction ranges from ‘wont’ and ‘my lady’ to ‘giddyup’ and ‘nipple rings,’ free-ranging adaptations of Horace, Neruda, and Eluard, ‘The Principles of Adultery’ based on the indices of refraction—these poems are wildly imaginative and very, very sexy.”—ELLEN DORÉ WATSON, author of Dogged Hearts

AUTHOR BIO

KURT HEINZELMAN’s latest books, both published in 2011, are The Names They Found There (poems) and Demarcations (a translation of Jean Follain’s Territoires). He is editor-at-large for Bat City Review, editor-in-chief of Texas Studies in Literature and Language, and a member of the Texas Institute of Letters.

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