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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
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Through a combination of personal narrative and historical research, Rupture weaves together the history of enslaved women in the Americas and themes of life, love, and loss. A nursery rhyme motif in the book juxtaposes the innocence of childhood and the insidious transgenerational trauma of slavery. The poems trace the author’s own journey through pregnancy and into motherhood as it poses its own questions to the history of African-American motherhood, inevitably imprinted by the legacy of slavery in the Americas. Ultimately, the book heralds the creativity and resilience that characterizes black life. Monique is an associate professor and chair of the English, Writing, and Communication department at Emmanuel College where she teaches courses in literature and poetry writing. Her first collection—Anonymous (Jacar Press, 2018)--won the New Voices Award and her second collection, Rupture, was a finalist the Perugia Press Prize and Four Way Books Levis Prize in Poetry. Her book Between the Lines: Literary Transnationalism and African American Poetics (Oxford UP, 2011) is the first to juxtapose Cuba, Brazil and the United States in a study of nineteenth-century women’s poetry, and the first to include the Lusophone literary tradition in a comparative study of African descendants in Latin America, the U.S., and the Caribbean. Paperback Page count: 64 Trim size: 5.5 x 9 in. ISBN: 978-1-949933-18-5
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"David Appelbaum's Window with 4 Panes aims high: the poet in his "Overture" claims a prophetic mantle, aiming to speak a truth 'beyond each simulation by language,' over obstacles of 'dislocation, displacement, dissonance.' Appelbaum, whom we must thank for his work at New Paltz's Codhill Press as well as for his poetry, acquits himself well, writing of big topics with a light hand using a spare, short line. The first section takes on mortality ('sorrow/to the bone/all for petty things'), while the second traces a kind of coping, promising 'survival is rare glory.' `The garden must be praised,' he declares, for pushing on in this 'dangerous oxygen.' The final poems are precise and authoritative, rather like oracular utterance." - William Seaton, Chronogram Originally published: 2009
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The poetic writing and images of Alicia Wirt-Fox’s The Obscure Substance of Sky are divided into three parts. Each attempts to evoke three distinct realms. The Obscure pertains to the hidden, unseen, or arduous aspects of living in ourselves in the world as humans. Substance describes our material existence. Discoveries in nature, in the body, or experiences on and of Earth. Of Sky alludes to immaterial realms, abstractions and the world above. All the sections weave ideas and experiences and the character of birds dance between each distinct space. Alicia Fox is an artist, designer, poet, and teacher. Alicia Wirt-Fox was born in Chicago, Illinois. She received a BFA from Parsons School of Design in 1987 and an MFA from Yale University School of Art in 1997. Her first collection of poetry and paintings entitled Missives was published by Codhill Press in 2009. She wrote a series of poems for the book Blind Date a collaboration with the photographer Alan Barnett, published in 2012. She is a recipient of the 19th Annual Richard Kelly Grant for her experimental work utilizing reflective light and color within the context of painting. She teaches at the School of Visual Arts in New York City and currently lives and works in Greenpoint, Brooklyn. Paperback Page count: 76 Trim size: 5 x 7 in. ISBN: 978-1-949933-17-8
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Subverting received traditions, embellishing mythic figures, the lyrics of The Devil’s Fools speak to and for those wanting heaven: modern pilgrims, medieval masons; seafarer, axe murderer, alcoholic; daughter, spouse, sibling, mother; a woman on pause, a monarch of the underworld, Eve stepping out past Eden. One country bombs another, there’s mass animal slaughter during epidemic, never-ending yard work, love letters from the dead. Humans sorrow and glory, mourn and thrive, treasure the will to live—with burdock and mushroom, apple and willow, cicada, cuckoo, brontosaurus, toad. The poems represent wild and delicious creaturely delusion, deception, vigor and joy. 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 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: 82 Trim size: 5.5 x 9 in. ISBN: 978-1-949933-16-1
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A collection of poems written by father and daughter during the Pandemic Year 2020
“My father and I started talking about making a split collection of poetry together shortly before the pandemic began. And then he was hospitalized with Covid-19, and we all watched the world change. Together. Separately. It was then that I began to understand how important it was to share our voices in the same collection, to be read together. To not only write with him in the room, but to explicitly invite him in. To make something beautiful out of our conversation. To suffer together. To learn together. To dream of a better world.”
—Elizabeth Bayou-Grace (from the Introduction)
Paperback Page count: 80 Trim size: 5.5 x 9 in. ISBN: 978-1-949933-15-4 -
For the last five years of his life, Barbara Probst served as the personal secretary to Lord John Pentland, the man designated by G.I. Gurdjieff to lead his teaching in America. In this unique collection of anecdotes and vignettes, Barbara offers a vivid portrait of a man who embodied Gurdjieff’s call to awaken to oneself, “always and everywhere,” and sought to awaken that call—in deft, subtle, and unexpected ways—in those who were near him. As noted in the Introduction, not only was Lord Pentland head of the Gurdjieff Foundation and instrumental in spreading Gurdjieff’s ideas throughout North America, he was also a businessman, keenly involved in a range of endeavors. With a penetrating vision that could encompass ideas on a vast scale along with the smallest details of the individual in front of him, he left indelible impressions on those who knew him. Thanks to this memoir, those who did not know him are offered a glimpse of a truly remarkable teacher for whom the inner and outer worlds were always related. Paperback ISBN: 978-1-949933-14-7
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Sole Impression is a collection of Poetry that covers a broad range of subjects from the personal to the universal. Barry Sternlieb is the author of Winter Crows (2008 winner of the Codhill Press Chapbook Award), and three other chapbooks. His work appears in Poetry, The Yale Review, Southern Review, Virginia Quarterly Review, Sewanee Review, Gettysburg Review, New England Review, Prairie Schooner, Beloit Poetry Journal, Commonweal, and others. He is the recipient of a 2004 Massachusetts Cultural Council Fellowship in Poetry, and also edits Mad River Press, specializing in the very slow creation of handcrafted, limited edition letterpress poetry broadsides and chapbooks since 1986. The Mad River archive is housed in The Chapin Library at Williams College. Paperback Page count: 88 Trim size: 5.5 x 9 in. ISBN: 978-1-949933-12-3
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In Watch Me Trick Ghosts, Robert Krut reveals a city weaving between a surreal consciousness and concrete imagination, where speakers are fully aware that “the scars of the world are turning neon” (“Accidental Light”). Among them, spirits hide and appear in tree lines, behind bookcases, even “etching a name into a street sign pole with a knife” (“You Are the Street, You Are the Sleep”). These poems skillfully veer between lyrical moments of intimacy and urgent messages seemingly sent from the negative space surrounding a dream. It may be the case that “fear is a blade held in a lung” (“The Anxious Lever of Lowering Sky”), but in the quietest hours of night, strangers can connect through striking images that cast a spell. Robert Krut’s poetry collection Watch Me Trick Ghosts offers an immersion into the sublime, enveloping the reader in a shroud of welcome terror. Fusing narratives of ordinary life with flashes of otherworldly awe, Krut’s speaker serves as guide and protector while we venture down darkened streets, through empty buildings, and even into a forest grown out of grief. The lines of these poems haunt with remarkable clarity. “A Coffin is a Battery” states that, “Fine hairs of stray electricity twitch in wind,” and “When you come looking, I am the wires.” Whether through surreal imagery, or storylines lifted from our strangest dreams, Watch Me Trick Ghosts has a chill to rival the most ravishing Gothic novel, and the simmer of film noir. --Mary Biddinger, author of Department of Elegy Paperback Page count: 66 Trim size: 5.5 x 9 in. ISBN: 978-1-949933-13-0
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Enter the fairy-tale of pre-dawn Fifth Avenue, as ‘90s nightlife ingenue, Lilly Lejeune, strolls past Tiffany’s. Her plan is to live her own best version of the iconic Manhattan film Breakfast at Tiffany’s. The actress Audrey Hepburn is Lilly’s north-star. Up to the packed bar to order a shot of tequila in the smoke-laced neon shadows. Lilly glides from velvet-roped clubs to packed, sweaty dives, comforted by her fashion choices, her dirty martinis, the story of her glamorous rebellion and the arrangements she has with men to support her independence. But despite Lilly’s nostalgia, this is the ‘90s and the grungy, heroin-chic, pre-gentrified NYC isn’t filmed in 1961’s Eastman color film stock. In this world, the extras are cloaked in hoodies as pagers beep and votive candles flicker. This is a decade when famous models search out private spots to shoot pool, cigarettes clenched in their teeth as the jukebox clicks to Alice in Chains’ Man in the Box. Time for one more round? Hell, yeah! Because no one leaves the East Village until night fades into the searing flames of day. Much like Holly Golightly in Breakfast at Tiffany’s, Lilly, her new writer friend upstairs, George Nichols, and her dive-bar locals have a choice: hide in the neon or wake up and face the day. Join them on the streets of Manhattan and see how they face the journey of this Sweet Ride. Paperback Page count: 196 Trim size: 6 x 9 in. ISBN: 978-1-949933-07-9
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This collection of stories presents characters drawn with such depth and detail that you will swear you met them somewhere before. The self–described “old maid” who marries at 73. The high school principal who sees his orderly existence upended by a new colleague. The middle–aged, divorced woman who has a series of dreams that alter the course of her life. Whether facing the circumstances of their lives with clear vision or stumbling along with unwitting blindness, these and other characters are never less than recognizable human beings with contradictions and secrets hidden even from themselves. Told with humor and poignancy, these eight intimate stories speak to the spiritual question of what matters in life and remind us that things, and people, are not always what they seem.
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THE ENNEAGRAM OF G.I. GURDJIEFF, Mathematics, Metaphysics, Music, and Meaning, explores various aspects of the enneagram, the symbol that G.I. Gurdjieff introduced to the modern world, and which he stated represented a complete description of the laws governing the universe. Because of the importance he attached to it, it has long intrigued followers of his teaching, and others, yet the understanding of its meanings remains very incomplete. In particular, how it relates to modern mathematical and scientific descriptions of the laws governing the universe has largely been unexplored. This book explores connections between these two approaches to the truth, while also recognizing and exploring the differences between knowledge based on symbols and that based on scientific theories and mathematical formulae.
