Book of Hours by KevinYoung

A decade after the sudden and tragic loss of his father, we witness the unfolding of grief. “In the night I brush / my teeth with a razor,” he tells us, in one of the collection’s piercing two-line poems. Capturing the strange silence of bereavement (“Not the storm / but the calm / that slays me”), Kevin Young acknowledges, even celebrates, life’s passages, his loss transformed and tempered in a sequence about the birth of his son: in “Crowning,” he delivers what is surely one of the most powerful birth poems written by a man, describing “her face / full of fire, then groaning your face / out like a flower, blood-bloom,/ crocused into air.” Ending this book of both birth and grief, the gorgeous title sequence brings acceptance, asking “What good/are wishes if they aren’t / used up?” while understanding “How to listen / to what’s gone.” Young’s frank music speaks directly to the reader in these elemental poems, reminding us that the right words can both comfort us and enlarge our understanding of life’s mysteries.

 

Blurbs

“Young’s tone is always pitch-perfect in these poems.”
— Los Angeles Times

“An impressively musical exploration of grief and endurance. . .Young wrestles with loss and joy with enviable beauty and subtlety.”
— Publishers Weekly

“If you read no other book of poetry this year, this should be the one.”
— Atlanta Journal-Constitution

“What could be better, or harder, than death and birth in one book? Young is our prolific chronicler of the state of the African-American union, but also of fatherhood, of son-hood. These poems counter the grief of the father’s death with the bewildering joy of a child’s birth. This is mourning with its feet on the ground—of the dead father’s dogs, Young writes, “Their grief is colossal// & forgetful./ Each day they wake/ seeking his voice,//their names.” He also evokes new fatherhood with all the grit: “Like the rest of us,” he says to his newborn son, “You swim// In your own piss.” Young has captured true adulthood between the covers of a book.”
— Craig Morgan Teicher for National Public Radio

 

Publisher Information

• Hardcover: 208 pages
• Publisher: Knopf; First Edition edition (March 4, 2014)
• Language: English
• ISBN-13: 978-0307272249

PURCHASE HERE

 

---

Kevin Young is the author of six previous collections of poetry and editor of five others. Jelly Roll was a finalist for the National Book Award and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, and won the Paterson Poetry Prize; For the Confederate Dead won the 2007 Quill Award for poetry. The recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship and a United States Artists James Baldwin Fellowship, Young is currently the Atticus Haygood Professor of Creative Writing and English and curator of Literary Collections and the Raymond Danowski Poetry Library at Emory University in Atlanta.

 

House of Coates by Brad Zellar

Washed up in the shadow of a refinery, Lester B. Morrison, legendary recluse, documents his life in a series of photographs taken with a disposable camera. In a landscape of off ramps, warehouses, and SRO hotels occupied by terminally lonely men, love and faith break in, quietly offering human connection and the possibility of redemption.

 

Blurbs

“An exquisitely haunting, melancholic treasure of a book about people who drop out and populate tiny towns and rural communities, and the longing and loneliness of the human condition.”—Judy Natal, Photo-Eye

“One of the great American moves is vagrancy, the freedom to drift, the right to look at things from outside the mainstream. The prose in House of Coates hums with this irreducible freedom. The photographs are both perfectly artless and undeniably visionary. Any question of fiction, non-fiction, subterfuge, or narrative trickery is superfluous in a book like this one, so appealingly strange, so delicately balanced, and so incontestably bound to its time and place.”—Teju Cole, author of Open City

“As Brad Zellar so vividly illustrates in his new limited-edition collaboration with photographer Alec Soth, ‘House Of Coates,’ broken men have always been with us, haunting us, providing a mirror. Society may label them bums, homeless, or pariahs, but Zellar’s empathetic writing allows the reader to get inside one broken man, and therefore all.”—Jim Walsh, MinnPost

 

Publisher Information

• Paperback: 140 pages
• Publisher: Coffee House Press; Reprint edition (October 21, 2014)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1566893704
• ISBN-13: 978-1566893701

PURCHASE HERE

 

---

Brad Zellar has worked as a writer and editor for daily and weekly newspapers, as well as for both regional and national magazines. He is the author of Suburban World: The Norling Photos, The 1968 Project, Conductors of the Moving World, and House of Coates. He has received awards from the Society of Professional Journalists, The American Association of Alternative Newsweeklies, and the Minnesota Magazine Publishers Association, as well as a grant from the Minnesota State Arts Board. His fiction has appeared in numerous publications.

Alec Soth is a photographer born and based in Minneapolis, Minnesota. His first monograph, Sleeping by the Mississippi, was published by Steidl in 2004. Since then Soth has published over a dozen books including Niagara (2006), Dog Days, Bogotá (2007) The Last Days of W (2008), and Broken Manual(2010). In 2008, a large survey exhibition of Soth’s work was exhibited at Jeu de Paume in Paris and Fotomuseum Winterthur in Switzerland. In 2010, the Walker Art produced a large survey exhibition of Soth’s work entitled From Here To There. Soth is represented by Sean Kelly in New York, Weinstein Gallery in Minneapolis, and is a member of Magnum Photos.

---

 

A Girl is a Half-formed Thing by Eimear McBride

 

Eimear McBride’s acclaimed debut tells the story of a young woman’s relationship with her brother, and the long shadow cast by his childhood brain tumor, touching on everything from family violence to sexuality and the personal struggle to remain intact in times of intense trauma.

 

Blurbs

“Eimear McBride is a writer of remarkable power and originality.”—The Times Literary Supplement

“An instant classic.”—The Guardian

“It’s hard to imagine another narrative that would justify this way of telling, but perhaps McBride can build another style from scratch for another style of story. That’s a project for another day, when this little book is famous.”—London Review of Books

“A Girl is a Half-formed Thing is simply a brilliant book—entirely emotionally raw and at the same time technically astounding. Her prose is as haunting and moving as music, and the love story at the heart of the novel—between a sister and brother—as true and wrenching as any in literature. This is a book about everything: family, faith, sex, home, transcendence, violence, and love. I can’t recommend it highly enough.”—Elizabeth McCracken

 

Publisher Information

• Hardcover: 227 pages
• Publisher: Coffee House Press (September 9, 2014)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1566893682
• ISBN-13: 978-1566893688

PURCHASE HERE

 

---

Eimear McBride was born in 1976 and grew up in the west of Ireland. At twenty-seven she wrote A Girl is a Half-formed Thing and spent the next nine years trying to have it published. In 2013 it was the recipient of the inaugural Goldsmiths Prize. She currently lives in the UK with her husband and daughter.