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Quercus Review Press Poetry
Series
(2007 Book Award Info)
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Recent Winners
2006 Winner:
AT THE AXIS OF IMPONDERABLES
by Neil Carpathios
2005 Winner:
GRAVITY U.S.A.
by Jacqueline Jones Lamon
2004 Winner:
KISS
by Julie Lechevsky
2003 Winner:
FORMS OF LIGHT
by Paul Neumann
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2006
Selection
Vol. 4, Pub. 2007
AT THE AXIS OF IMPONDERABLES
by Neil Carpathios
78pgs.,
perfect-bound, $12.00
Sample Poems
Copies
can be ordered
by clicking here:
Or better yet, here:
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Neil Carpathios is the author of the previous poetry collection,
Playground of
Flesh
(Main Street Rag Press), as well as several award-winning
chapbooks. His poems have appeared in many literary journals and
anthologies, and recently in Poetry, The Georgia Review, Poetry East,
and Pomegranate Seeds: An Anthology of Greek-American Poetry
(Somerset Hall Press). He has received fellowships from the Ohio Arts
Council and was twice nominated for a Pushcart Prize. He lives and
teaches in
Massillon,
Ohio.
reviews
”It's been awhile since a young poet has badgered himself with has many
imaginative questions as Neil Carpathios. Beneath the recognizable
surfaces of all of his utterances, he has committed his "looking" into
the immediate possibilities of reality. Everything that he shares is
possible and he is good at predicting the imagined outcomes of our
present actions. Like a good, annoying, witness, he warns us, "A
baseball bat on a driveway dreams. A catcher's mitt, face-down, sucks
concrete . . . A garage is a grave." The gaps between this life and the
belief in a possible afterlife are lessened by this looking as if what
we know of heaven, the possibility of it, might be based on what we've
already experienced here. This is his Axis, the imperfect perfect of
shared breathing . . . thus these poems are fueled, line-by-line, by all
of life's negotiations, and the ironic relationships between our jealous
bodies and our often resentful, longer lasting things.”
--Thomas Sayers Ellis
“From Neil Carpathios's vantage point in these poems,
At the Axis of
Imponderables, he exposes daily life unflinchingly.
These are frank, razor-sharp, and tender excursions into reality, with
God, and with the dead, part of the daily round. Carpathios is not
afraid to confront the excruciating, necessary forms life takes, as when
he acknowledges that life 'is a safe full of gold/hanging by a thread out
a window and now the wind.'"
--Jane Miller |
“Reading this book I feel like I'm listening in on a conversation
between Imagination & Reality, & what is in question is the shifting
nature of both. Surreal stories are spun, metaphysics explored, &
conjectures made with a mischievous sense of humor & a seemingly
endless, exacting, & profound imagination. Despite his sometimes
outrageous premises--angels committing suicide, 'a bored baby
wallpapering his mother's womb'--Carpathios' eye is always on the main
thing: in ordinary moments, what is it like to be human? The poems are
generous & uplifting; they are heartbreaking. The epiphanies leave you
breathless, close to tears, readying yourself for the next
transformation. This is one of the finest books I've read in a long
time.”
--Steve Orlen
“Neil Carpathios's poems are lively and erotic, sweet, sad, and
funny--like the best parts of daily life--'the way my love/for Chester,
our dog, is red/but my love for you is something/further than red...,'
the way the poet watches "the father watching his daughter grow
up/before his eyes...one of those moments like a door/on its hinges,
opening into a new room." These are poems of tender observation, mindful
of the many ways we worry about each other, and about the world in
general, and about God as well, who may or may not be worrying about us.
'In whose mind as a memory do I dance?' Carpathios asks in the last line
of the book's first poem. He'll never know, but he'll continue to wonder,
imagining the possibilities, those connections a poem can lure into
looking like the truth.”
--Lawrence
Raab |
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2005
Selection
Vol. 3, Pub. 2006
GRAVITY U.S.A.
by Jacqueline Jones Lamon
Foreword by
Michael S. Harper
68pgs.,
perfect-bound, $12.00
Sample Poems
Copies
can be ordered
by clicking here:
Or better yet, here:
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Jacqueline Jones LaMon
is the
Associate Director of the Indiana University Writers' Conference. A
Chancellor's University Fellow and an associate poetry editor of the
Indiana Review, she is in her third year of her MFA studies in poetry at
Indiana University Bloomington. Her poetry has appeared/will appear in
Crab Orchard Review, Natural Bridge, Fugue, and WarpLand among other
journals. Her first novel, In the Arms of One Who Loves Me, was
published by One World/Ballantine Books in 2002.
reviews
"With
her debut,
Jacqueline Jones LaMon graces us with a collection both
introspective and out of body, her poems taking on the weight of the
everyday world, and the extraordinary within it.
Gravity, U.S.A. is not just a book filled with subtle,
sorrowful, and ultimately brazen power, but a place where you'll want to
visit, and stay."
--Kevin Young
"LaMon's
poems are packed with sharp detail, street parlance and jazzy riffs. The
stuff of real lives. Greetings to a bright new voice."
--Dorianne Laux
"In this bravo performance, Ms. J. LaMon uses her gorgeous poetic
"vocabulary," to translate keen observations and exquisite moments into
poems so lyrically delicious you want to lick them with your eyes."
--Wanda Coleman
"Jacqueline Jones LaMon has a wonderful ability to hear what the
rest of us don’t, and the great gift of being able to dramatize the unheard
and the half-spoken. In Gravity, U.S.A. she braids murmurs and muted
cries with come-ons and chats, making us witnesses to human dramas from
both the hushhush world of the past and from the iPod world of the
present. LaMon is fearless as she investigates the other sides of closed
doors, gathering sounds to make her own brilliant music. This is a book
of marvelous voices and portraits, an impressive debut collection."
--Maura Stanton
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"Woven throughout this finely-tuned collection is the recognition
of the difficulties of communication, as in the lovely “Teetering”
wherein the poet suggests our dilemma: “One of us always leaving, one of
us always left behind.” Amid the barriers we face in trying to reach
each other—the weight of history, the “hushed mumbling” and “drone of
life’s most heavy traffic”—these poems are forged from an acute
knowledge of the “off –note” that still signals “the fugue of
intention.” In lively, resonant language, they show again and
again the necessary reaching toward song that connects us."
--Natasha
Trethewey
"Jacqueline
Jones LaMon's poems embody a stillness and grace. They illuminate the
mysterious distances between us that are essential to love."
--Toi
Derricotte
"These poems are so precise and natural that you may not, at first,
notice the room and weight they are making in you--the lines break, the
lines surprise, the lines ride through some very honest regions of
witnessing and listening. A powerful balance is at work(ful) play,
tension and exclamation, the weight of the languag(ed) self and the
weightlessness of the lyric soul. Wherever you are when you read
Gravity,
U.S.A.,
mercy, depends on wherever you are when you need Gravity,
U.S.A.
Each poem flirts with the skin of a new born drama and dream. And then,
sometimes, inside the hush hush between prose and song, where most poems
stay poems, the vernacular (and its logic) strikes again and every
thinker and feeler going to the territory is lifted high, high, er."
--Thomas Sayers Ellis |
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2004
Selection
Vol. 2, Pub. 2005
KISS
by Julie Lechevsky
80pgs., perfect-bound, $12.00
Sample Poems
(CURRENTLY
OUT OF STOCK)
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to top) |
Julie Lechevsky was
awarded the 2001 Tennessee Chapbook Prize for
Doll,
her first
collection of poems, two of which
were selected by Billy Collins for inclusion in his
Library of Congress website "Poetry
180." Her second collection, I'm a Serious
Something, was winner of
the 2003 Riverstone Poetry Chapbook Award.
Twice nominated for a
Pushcart Prize, subsequent poems have appeared in
Seneca Review, The
Literary Review,
5 A.M., Hanging Loose, West
Branch, Cimarron Review, Southern
Humanities Review, Southern Poetry
Review, and numerous
other magazines. Having attended Oberlin
College, she currently lives in
Blacksburg, Virginia, where she works as
a massage therapist and sings the
blues in local clubs.
reviews
" . . . cleanly and beautifully
designed book. It feels great in the hand, and the inside pages are very
attractively laid out, and I love the cover. It's both sassy and
classy."
--Margaret Holley, Riverstone Press
"Gorgeous . . . I cannot begin to tell you how completely envious I am of
KISS."
--Joanne Lowery
"I loved it."
--Alan Catlin, author
of Drunk & Disorderly, Selected Poems, 1978-2000,
Pavement Saw Press.
"Quercus did a great job on the production & the selections are
outstanding."
--Joseph
Shields,
Nerve Cowboy. |
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2003
Selection
Vol. 1, Pub. 2004
FORMS OF LIGHT
by Paul Neumann
76pgs.,
perfect-bound, $12.00
Sample Poems
Copies
can be ordered
by clicking here:
(Back to top)
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Paul
Neumann
was born and raised on the coast of
California. He now makes his home in Modesto, in the heart of the
Central Valley, and travels extensively. He published widely in the
seventies and then stopped for twenty years, though he continued to
write. This is his first book-length publication.
reviews
"Paul's beautiful and highly
personal collection of poems gave birth to Quercus Review Press. It was
this collection and his generous donation of its profits that enabled us
to host our annual book award. We are indebted to Paul for his gifts of
poetry and friendship."
--Sam Pierstorff, Editor, Quercus Review |
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