Eighty-five-year-old Helen Bryan thinks she might have found a new bird species on one of the many feeders in her yard. On the same day, her dead husband appears and tells her a riddle that brings back memories she would rather leave behind.
As she tries to solve the mystery of the new bird, she must also find answers to the riddle. The two quests become deeply intertwined as she seeks help from her former ornithology professor, a mentor turned tormenter. When the professor kills the one new bird Helen knows exists and takes it back to his laboratory for study, her anger sends her on a quest to find more birds of the same kind.
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With severe arthritis, balance problems, and a recent painful shoulder injury, Helen is poorly equipped for searching the rugged mountains where she thinks a flock of the new birds might be. However, she secretly sets off to seek the evidence she needs. Along the way, her dead husband appears to her several more times, offering little help in solving his riddle but causing her to review and re-think the life she’s lived.
All she endures on her trek into the mountains fails to achieve the results she longs for, and she nearly dies in the effort. Only the intervention of the young editor of the local newspaper, a woman Helen wants to trust but still holds at arm’s length, saves her.
Helen winds up in a nursing facility, diagnosed with rapidly developing dementia. She learns from the newspaper editor that her nemesis has claimed credit for the new bird species. But the editor also has a secret, one Helen asks not be revealed until after her death. It’s a secret that will, in small but significant ways, change history
Discovery
by Christopher Ryan
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151 pages
$18.00
Greenwich Connection
The history of New York’s iconic Greenwich Village comes alive in novelist and filmmaker Richard Natale’s Greenwich Connection, a novella and interconnected short stories that span the second half of the twentieth century, from the waning days of WW II to September 11, 2001. The novella and stories feature a rainbow collection of eccentrics, misfits, lovers, and friends, all united in their quest for love, acceptance, and a sense of community.
The novella, In the Fall of Forty-Four, begins in war-torn Naples and quickly moves to the razzle-dazzle of post-war Manhattan. We follow Terry and Monty’s often tempestuous lives through the end of the twentieth century, during which their on-again, off-again relationship is buffeted by political and social upheaval. The subsequent short stories expand on the lives of several minor characters in the novella, who have flocked to the bohemian enclave of Greenwich Village from near and far searching for a haven in which to express their dreams and desires. Their respective fates become inextricably entwined in the enormous historical and social changes unfolding around them.
Greenwich Connection
Novella & 15 short stories by Richard Natale​
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226 pages
$20.00
Voices from the Past
Voices from the Past
by Peter Mladinic
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87 poems
118 pages
$18.00
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Voices from the Past is about memory. It’s about beauty, loss, destruction, despair, and joy.
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It’s about things both local and universal, the individual and the community. Its words represent people, places, things of yesterday and today. It’s a book about reflecting on the past to live well in the present.
How something is said is equally as important as what is said. Poems in Voices from the Past are spoken in the poet’s voice and in the voices of others, characters who muddle through perplexities, who inhabit a world in which there are no easy answers.
It’s a book about the self alone and with others, and universal verities such as cowardice, courage, envy, pride, sacrifice, hope, fear, unconditional and imperfect love. It’s about suffering and joy, about what it means to remember and what it means to be human. The illogical coexists with the logical, the mundane with the profound. The extraordinary is found in the ordinary. It’s about looking back and going forward.
The poems aim to show the dignity of all people, and of all living things.
Being a book about lives at once ordinary and uncommon, special in varied ways, the poems reflect any one person’s moods at particular times, and any one person’s life’s journey at particular times. Religion, art, music, politics, gender, race and nature are some of the concerns in these poems. Language itself is a concern, language as a medium of communication from one individual to another, and from one individual to a group or a community. The poems are about tangible things and human situations, about relationships and about how individuals see themselves. The abiding notion is we live in a world with others who are both near and far.
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What one does, or does not do impacts others. Words have consequences and words redeem. Poetry itself has the power of redemption. Some years ago a poet said that poetry brought him back to life. The poems in this book have that high aim, to give hope, to enhance the quality of a person’s life, to find out of despair joy, out of misery happiness, out of restlessness solace.
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— Peter Mladinic
The Beautiful Losses
The Beautiful Losses
by Frederick Pollack
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101 poems
125 pages
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$18.00
The Beautiful Losses is an unusually beautiful book, telling with wit, irony and occasional satire, stories that feel lived, advancing thematically towards a kind of goal. The stories are informed by a complex of loves — ‘Our fridge, the size of love’ is a generous fridge. The voices are often those of older people in conversation. Moving through the world they have memory, resentment, anger, but integrity, too, so they hang on to the possibility of rapport. They keep talking, and the end — even at the very end of the book — is not silence. Old age has a very different sensuality from what the young enjoy, and it is wonderful to find it here so intensely evoked, so that the reader lives it.
— Michael Schmidt, editor of Carcanet and PN Review..
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Frederick Pollack is an American poetry treasure. He has written a huge amount, with an almost unparalleled dedication to poetry; The Beautiful Losses compiles poems from several collections. The world of Pollack’s witnessing is often urban and somewhat sinister. Something or someone that may or may not be named is always lurking, even in the shadows of plain sight. It is a world where “An unmarked plane is an inside joke,” and the point is neither pain nor information; “The point, ultimately, is procedure . . .” Pollack is an incomparable examiner of the procedures that govern human life, that make it at once beautiful and horrible. Walking through any cityscape with this American Original is itself a poetic act; and his work, I think, will outlive that of many more honored contemporaries.
— Robert McDowell, editor, publisher, author, and poet.
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The Beautiful Losses is a delight to read — the poems are brilliant, often wry and ironic, or humorous, with portrayals that are fearless and unforgiving. Pollack presents us with a complex world. He explores the personal and the public spheres, the emotional and the intellectual, and a prodigious range of themes: the culture wars and aesthetic values, power, international bureaucracies and their position papers, vaccines and infrastructure, “focus groups that never quite focus,” time machines, love. He masters lofty themes, yet we get concrete details: of specks on an old mirror, he writes, “here an insect/ secreted or died, there a passing drink spattered.” Pollack will infect you with his insatiable curiosity: where else will you find poems where you'll meet Zeno, Sophocles, Corelli, Viera da Silva, the Beat poets, William Corbett, Harold Bloom and his School of Resentment, Godzilla & King Kong, and engage intellectually with someone who says “my aim/ is to own and emasculate/ all gods.”? The Beautiful Losses is poetry worth a second and third reading.
— Vinod Busjeet, author of Silent Winds, Dry Seas.
Another Crescent Moon
Another Crescent Moon
a novel by Josh Cook
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221 pages
$20.00
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Publication Date: October 1, 2023
The story of Cliff Emerson, a man with cerebral palsy and a big heart but no voice, and his friendship with Ayo, a new caregiver who listens differently — and takes big risks to help him feel more human.
Cliff’s unheard narrative, told from his perspective, traces the history of his care, from his time in the state hospital to his move into the group home where he has lived for twenty years. Though it was designed to help him grow his independence, his group home program often fails him. His staff are lazy and complacent and their superiors aloof and unobservant. It seems like Cliff’s the only one who sees this — until the day that Ayo starts.
Ayo is new not only to Cliff’s home but to America. Where he came from and why he left are mysteries. He doesn’t like to talk about it much. But his optimism, like his smile, is infectious, and Cliff soon learns to trust him. For Cliff, it is a revelation, being understood by someone without having said a word. All that was required was willingness and patience, things staff haven’t given him in a long time. As Cliff begins to see himself through Ayo’s caring gaze, he starts believing that he deserves and is able to live a life as full as anyone’s. The challenge is convincing those in power of this truth.
Reminiscent of Kesey’s One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, this novel is unflinching in its portrayal of disability care and also, more broadly, of life in America. It is touching and darkly comic, at times bordering on the absurd. But at its core, it is the story of a man in search of something meaningful in a time and place opposed to his whole being, and yet who, with Ayo’s help, manages to maintain his sense of dignity and personhood — and, for the first time, to taste real freedom.
A Life Lived Differently
A Life Lived Differently
by Kathryn Jacobs and Rachel Jacobs
59 pages
$12.00
A poignant portrait of autism in verse and prose. The poet speaks in the voice of the autistic child, whose name is Dan. The prosaist speaks in the voice of the parent. This is a unique interpretation of the experience of living on the spectrum.
Although Dan is fictional, he is based on real people. Kathryn Jacobs, who identifies as autistic, writes his viewpoint in poetry which is both lyrical and down to earth. She is Dan, in writing and sometimes in emotional reality also. Rachel Jacobs writes as the mom and Dan’s primary caregiver. Dan has a brother. His father is absent from the narrative. Dan's parents seem to be divorced and the pressure of parenting a special-needs child was part of it.
Dan may be fictional but there is no question that the portrayal of autism is real. Readers with firsthand experience ‘feel seen’. Dan is loved. Perhaps this is why we are granted the privilege of entering his world.
This articulate portrayal of autism opens a door to the world and experiences of a child who faces the challenges we all do but sees and understands in a different way. At times amusing, sometimes wry, often surprising, this account offers an unparalleled view into living on the spectrum. This collection of poetry and prose is being enthusiastically welcomed by autists, their caregivers, families, friends, and by teachers.
You don’t have to have autism or have personal experience with it to enjoy the poetry and prose in this book. All you need is an interest in A Life Lived Differently. Understanding related behaviors such as masking, stimming, and being overwhelmed by sensory stimulation will uncover further layers in the book’s contents, but the poems and stories are also beautifully written from a literary perspective.
This book celebrates the strength and beauty of a unique individual living with neurodiversity/Autism and offers sometimes startling and often heartwarming insights into one such life.