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A Map to the Spring is a translation of collection of poems praising the vitality of life on Earth—including us humans—by Korean poet Lim Deok-Gi. A Map to the Spring invites readers on a poetic journey through the seasons, intertwining reflections on nature and humanity. Through the lens of the poet's experiences, the book explores themes of winter and fall, urging readers to pause and contemplate the beauty and significance of life in all its forms. Lim Deok-Gi's verses serve as a gentle reminder to pay attention to the world around us, lest we overlook the richness and depth of existence. With lyrical prose and profound insights, A Map to the Spring beckons readers to embrace the interconnectedness of all living things and find solace in the ever-renewing cycles of nature. Lim Deok-Gi is a poet and an essayist. She was born in Pohang, North Gyeongsang Province, in Korea. She graduated from Ewha Womans University's Department of Korean Literature and worked as a teacher in middle and high school. She made her debut in Essay Age in 2010, and Essay Literature in 2012 as an essayist. As a poet, she made her debut in Eji Poetry Literary Magazine with “Salt Fields in the Himalayan Valley” and four other poems, in 2014. Her poetry collections are Kondrappda and A Map to the Spring. Her essay collection is Dream of Sculpture Cloth. “A Slanted Tree” was selected by Sejong Sharing Book in 2015, “Different Colors of Water” received the Won Jong-rin Literature Award, Permeate. Currently she is a member of the Women Writers' Committee of the Korean Branch of International PEN Literature, and Director of the Korean Essay Literature Promotion Association, and Ewha Womans University Graduate Writers Association. She is a member of the Korean Writers Association and the Korean Women's Literature Association. About the Translators Kim Riwon graduated with a Masters Degree in Korean-English Translation from the Graduate School of Translation and Interpretation at Ewha Womans University in Seoul, Korea. Karis J. Han graduated with a B.S. in Psychology at the University of Utah. She graduated with a Masters Degree in Korean-English Translation from the Graduate School of Translation and Interpretation at Ewha Womans University in Seoul, Korea. Paperback Page count: 108 Trim size: 4.5 x 7 in. ISBN: 978-1-949933-27-7
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Happy Poems & Other Lies is a poetry collection that details the experience of an exiled speaker who struggles to conform to the rigid religious beliefs imposed by their family. The speaker's various identities revolve around being a son, a wanderer, and a self-proclaimed prophet. The manuscript combines elements of biblical language, surrealism, and absurdism to explore the speaker’s longing for acceptance and their internal conflicts as they navigate their own spirituality. The manuscript is divided into three sections, each portraying the evolution of the speaker’s identity. The initial section delves into the speaker’s origins, highlighting their struggle to reconcile personal beliefs with familial expectations and traditions. The second section captures the speaker’s return home after an extended absence, where they confront their past and navigate complex family dynamics. In the final section, the speaker embarks on a transformative journey away from home, distancing themselves from their past and religious constraints. This separation leads to a profound revelation as they embrace their true self, finding solace in their own spirituality, embracing a liberating transformation. Jeddie Sophronius is a Chinese-Indonesian writer born in Jakarta, Indonesia. He is the author of Interrogation Records (Gaudy Boy, 2024), Love & Sambal (The Word Works, 2024), and the chapbook Blood·Letting (Quarterly West, 2023). He holds a BA from Western Michigan University and an MFA from the University of Virginia. The recipient of the 2022 Gaudy Boy Poetry Book Prize, their poetry has appeared in The Cincinnati Review, The Iowa Review, Prairie Schooner, and elsewhere. They divide their time between the United States and Indonesia. Read more of their work at nakedcentaur.com Paperback Page count: 72 Trim size: 4.5 x 7.5 in. ISBN: 978-1-949933-26-0
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Written and gathered together in an era of pandemic, rising authoritarianism, war, and climate crisis, the prose poems in Eric Pankey’s The History of the Siege chronicle the eschatological age we live in, where everyone, as the Polish poet Zbigniew Herbert argues, “suffers from a loss of the sense of time.” Pankey, in his third collection of prose poems, continues to investigate the formal and rhetorical possibilities of this already subversive genre. In a 1987 interview, Zbigniew Herbert said, “It is vanity to think that one can influence the course of history by writing poetry. It is not the barometer that changes the weather.” While these poems—sometimes solemn, sometimes hermetic, sometimes funny—do not attempt to influence history, they do hope to capture what it is like to live within history, and it looks like, as the old song says, we’re in for nasty weather. Eric Pankey is the author of sixteen previous collections of poetry and a collection of essays. His work has been supported by fellowships from the Ingram Merrill Foundation, The National Endowment for the Arts, and the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation. He is Professor of English and the Heritage Chair in Writing at George Mason University. Paperback Page count: 130 Trim size: 4.5 x 7.5 in. ISBN: 978-1-949933-24-6
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When grumpy 75 year old Charlie Messina wakes from a coma after a cardiac event on Cape Cod, he is told that he was only unconscious for a few days. However, Charlie knows he has spent the last several months living through a parallel life that lies ahead of him. Which includes a personal tragedy, an unlikely awkward friendship with two local boys, and a road trip with his playboy best friend from college and a dog that no else sees (except the children). When he shares his story about the life he lived, his wife and grown sons think he’s crazy. He then realizes he must play along with his family—and the geriatric psychiatrist—or they’ll be convinced he’s suffering dementia and will put him into a home for “dribblers and droolers.” Steve Lewis is a former Mentor at SUNY-Empire State College, longtime member of the Sarah Lawrence College Writing Institute faculty, and longtime freelancer and editor. His work has been published widely, from the notable to the beyond obscure, including The New York Times, The Washington Post, Christian Science Monitor, LA Times, Redbook, Commonweal, Ploughshares, Narratively, Spirituality & Health, Road Apple Review, The Rosicrucian Digest, and a biblically long list of parenting publications (7 kids, 17 grandkids). He is also Senior Editor/Literary Ombudsman for the spoken word venue Writers Read. His extensive book list includes Zen and the Art of Fatherhood, Fear and Loathing of Boca Raton, If I Die Before You Wake (poems), and the novels Take This, Loving Violet, A Hard Rain, and The Lights Around the Shore (Codhill Press). A poetry collection, Fire in Paradise, co-authored with Elizabeth Bayou-Funk, was published in July 2022 by Codhill. Paperback Page count: 238 Trim size: 4.5 x 7.5 in. ISBN: 978-1-949933-23-9
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The rivetting poems of Ember Days begin with ritual and end with prayer as they tunnel through Wednesday’s jammed boulevards, Friday’s cash worthless, Saturday’s prodigal feet. Plant disease incurable as colonialism inhabits nature’s solace; funds for libraries disappear, abandoned houses compel secrets. Woolf’s pen runs dry, Tesla holes up, Lincoln emerges in yet another bardo. Soldiers in Baghdad, models transformed to artists, descendants of forced immigrants, survivors of hurricanes, witnesses for peace—these and other intercessory voices step up to our world’s disasters, level with its possibilities, interrogate faith, justice, militarism, madness, and the perception and affection of intimate relationships. Mary Gilliland is the author of two award-winning poetry collections: The Ruined Walled Castle Garden (2020) and The Devil’s Fools (2022). Her poems are widely published in print and online literary journals and most recently anthologized in the Aesthetica Creative Writing Award 2023 annual; Rumors Secrets & Lies: Poems about Pregnancy, Abortion, & Choice; Wild Gods: The Ecstatic in Contemporary Poetry and Prose; and Nuclear Impact: Broken Atoms In Our Hands. She is a past recipient of the Stanley Kunitz Fellowship from the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown and a Council on the Arts Faculty Grant from Cornell University, where she created and taught seminars such as ‘Ecosystems & Ego Systems’ and ‘America Dreaming.’ Paperback Page count: 80 Trim size: 4.5 x 7.5 in. ISBN: 978-1-949933-19-2
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The poems in this collection are a meditation on themes such as illness, friendship, family, death, lost innocence, survivor’s guilt, and transcendence by a talented young poet who experienced and endured more in her short life than most people do by old age. Laura Rothenberg was born with cystic fibrosis which is a genetic disease. The poetry is connected with many different special moments, and realizations in her life. Even though she had this disease, and died at the age of twenty-two, she gave as much as she could to life, helping friends, helping others who were ill, and learning different sports. This poetry reveals all of these different sides of her, and much more. Paperback Page count: 54 Trim size: 5.5 x 9 in. ISBN: 978-1-949933-22-2
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The poems in Heaven Underfoot qualify as ecopoetry as they exemplify the four features of environmentally conscious texts, which set them apart from nature writing (as outlined by American scholar Lawrence Buell in The Environmental Imagination): they make the non-human environment central rather than marginal; they feature human interest as only one valid focus; they hold humans accountable to the environment; and they portray nature as a process rather than a fixed framework.
Diana Woodcock holds a Ph.D in Creative Writing from Lancaster University, where she researched poetry’s role in the search for an environmental ethic. In 1974, she earned a B.S. degree in Psychology, and in 2004 an M.F.A. degree in Creative Writing. She has worked as a counselor with delinquent youth, an editor of a young women’s magazine, and a teacher of English as a second language. For nearly eight years, she lived in Tibet, Macau, and on the Thai-Cambodian border teaching and working with refugees. Since 2004, she has been teaching creative writing, environmental literature, and composition at VCUarts Qatar. She is the author of seven chapbooks and five poetry collections, most recently Holy Sparks (a finalist for the 2020 Paraclete Press Poetry Award) and Facing Aridity (a finalist for the 2020 Prism Prize for Climate Literature). She is the recipient of the 2022 Codhill Press Pauline Uchmanowicz Poetry Award, the 2011 Vernice Quebodeaux Pathways Poetry Prize for Women (for her debut collection, Swaying on the Elephant’s Shoulders), a three-time Pushcart Prize nominee, and a Best of the Net nominee. Her poems have appeared in Best New Poets 2008, Women’s Review of Books, Nimrod, Crab Orchard Review, Southern Humanities Review, Spiritus, Comstock Review, and other journals and anthologies. Her grand prize-winning poem, “Music as Scripture,” was performed onstage in Lincoln Park, San Francisco by Natica Angilly’s Poetic Dance Theater Company at Artists Embassy International’s 21st Dancing Poetry Festival. Paperback Page count: 86 Trim size: 5.5 x 9 in. ISBN: 978-1-949933-25-3 -
Betty writes with wisdom and humor about aging, as well as many of life’s stages. In a career encompassing sculpture, painting, freelance writing, and performing, the author turned to writing from her heart in her late seventies. At eighty-nine, she offers her first published book. Betty’s work has appeared in the anthologies Get Out of My Crotch, 80 Things to Do When You Turn 80, Open House, Better with Age, and Lightwood, an online magazine. She has performed her work for WritersRead, TMI Project, and Woodstock Bookfest. Betty hosts Words Carry Us, a monthly livestream of readings and interviews from Green Kill, in Kingston, NY. Paperback ISBN: 978-1-949933-21-5
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In Win or Die: Leadership Secrets from Game of Thrones, Bruce Craven brilliantly analyzes the intense journeys of the best and worst leaders in the epic fantasy empires of Essos and Westeros, offering the reader guidance and motivation to apply the skills necessary to fight his or her own game of thrones. Bruce Craven is an Academic Director and member of the Columbia Business School Executive Education faculty. He teaches across the portfolio and serves as Faculty Director for executive education programs, including the Advanced Management Program (AMP), and programs for the French luxury goods company Kering, and for the German business school W.H.U. He teaches workshops in resilience, emotional intelligence, leadership communication and flexible thinking and also teaches his graduate school management elective Leadership Through Fiction. His novel about NYC in the Nineties – Sweet Ride – was published by Codhill Press in 2021. Win or Die: Leadership Secrets from Game of Thrones has been translated into Turkish, Serbian and Russian. His collection of poetry Buena Suerte in Red Glitter, was published in 2019 with Red Dirt Press in Oklahoma. He published the novel Fast Sofa in 1993. The novel was translated into Japanese and German. He cowrote the script for the film Fast Sofa (Lionsgate Entertainment, 2001), starring Jennifer Tilly, Crispin Glover and Jake Busey. He has served on two boards for non-profit organizations focused on helping low-income families and the homeless. He received his MFA in Poetry from Columbia University’s School of the Arts. Helives with his wife and two sons in the Coachella Valley in California. Paperback Page count: 300 Trim size: 6.125 x 9.25 in. ISBN: 978-1-949933-20-8
