PRAISE FOR MISTY PUBLICATIONS BOOKS

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MOTHER-MAILBOX

With a poignant blend of heartbreak and amusement, the imaginative epistles that fill Emilie Lindemann’s mother-mailbox explore the peculiarities, wonder, and at times, acute loss experienced in motherhood, both realized and missed, as the poems’ speakers share embodied perceptions of pregnancy, childbirth, miscarriage, and postpartum depression. Lindemann’s technicolor imagery, unorthodox humor, and inventive word play subvert expectations at every turn making us wish that expressions like “blighted o[h!]vum” and stories about fireflies boogying past Zukofsky’s “Brooklyn window in shiny skirts” were tucked into the letters that land each day in our own expectant mailboxes.

—Brenda Cárdenas, Associate Professor of English, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee

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BANNED FOR LIFE

"How did the poet do that?! With only 178 words?

One answer is that Arlene Ang intuits well what to keep and what to leave out. And what she keeps—in this haibun and in poems throughout this book—often subverts expectations, delightfully so. One small example: Stillness littering the grass."  –Clare MacQueen, KYSO Flash

"Her poems speak to not only the temporary nature of life in the body, but also the temporary nature of the impressions we make while we live and interact in society.  Ang juxtaposes the beautiful and the horrifying, challenging her readers to see the gruesome allure of death, murder, and more." –Savvy Verse & Wit

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SOME KIND OF SHELTER

“Ultimately Some Kind of Shelter begins with a map—“Give me a map … [and] follow me across this / cartographer’s sketch” (“This Paper Landscape”)—and ends with a map—“you study / my palm to find the way home” (“Chickfire”). These poems about work, love and Ohio are always searching for the path back, for the map inscribed in the palm of a hand.” —Carlo Matos,  Split Lip Magazine 

"In their dignity and folly, Tracey's characters are deeply human." –Kyle Churney, Printers Row

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HUMBUG

“Clearly, Hammack is a master of the Grotesque, adept at both alienating and ensnaring her reader and often with the same image.  The objects in Herself’s home are not inanimate objects that take on a life of their own but animate things, full of vigor and mischief, to be sure, and yet they never quite add up to life.  Well, let me take that back; they never quite add up to life for Herself—the blue-dressed matriarch whose multiple stillbirths have left her haunting her own rooms— “where her almost-babies dream, tucked amid other almost things.” She has “been done to death by good advice, and, so, does death/ as wistfully as possible” (“Oriflamme”). —Carlo Matos,  Prick of the Spindle

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OVERPASS

“This gritty collection is perfect for readers who are familiar with the Illinois floodplain (across the Mississippi River from St. Louis) and will recognize names mentioned in the poems, from East St. Louis to Alton, from Miles Davis to Robert Wadlow. Even Cahokia Mounds and Sauget get a mention.” –Margo L. Dill, The News-Gazette

“One gets the sense that Steve Davenport composed much of Overpass while soaking in a bathtub, nursing a tumbler of whiskey. If this sounds like a compliment, it’s meant to be—the close intimacy, the contained debauchery, and the deep introspection in this collection compellingly establish the narrator’s personality.” –Alex Starace, TriQuarterly

“A devastating collection, full of terror and wild humor, anger, and song.”  –Kathleen Kirk, Prick of the Spindle

"Davenport's poems rise in intensity until the curtal form can no longer contain their energy."   –Kyle Minor, American Book Review

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