Recent & Forthcoming

The following books were published by Turtle Point Press in Fall, 2009

Essays

Creaturely and Other Essays
by Devin Johnston
978-1-933527-22-2, $14.95

In compact and vivid prose, Devin Johnston's Creaturely makes forays across the border between humans and animals, seeking out intersections between culture and nature. These eight essays describe encounters with creatures common to our city parks and empty lots: dogs, crows, starlings, squirrels, mice, and owls. In each case, Johnston explores the sensory experience of his subject; with each patient observation, he edges closer to an alien consciousness.

"Creaturely, like its subject, eludes definition. It's a book of exquisite essays – or are they prose poems – that tesselate into something larger: a meditation, perhaps, or a vision. Johnston's subject is at once the absolute otherness of the creatures with whom we share the world's everyday spaces – dogs, owls, mice, squirrels, crows – and the worth of our attempts to come to know them. As he puts it, these are creatures that "alight in the vicinity of meaning and move on." Modest, calm, and beautiful in its movements of thought as much as in its turn of phrase, this is an exceptional book and one I felt lucky to have read."
— Robert Macfarlane

Devin Johnston, born in 1970, teaches at St Louis University. He is the author of a previous book of essays and three books of poetry including Sources published by Turtle Point Press in 2007. He co-directs Flood Editions.

Aphorisms

Marbles
by James Guida
978-1-933527-24-6, $14.95

Marbles is a collection of lucid, whimsical, and sometimes biting musings on twenty first century urban life. James Guida revives an old form, the aphorism, in ways that are sardonic, topical, and continually thought-provoking.

"It takes a rare gift to write in the aphoristic form, which must be witty and modest at once, and must state in a fresh, arresting way observations which the reader will recognize at once as true. It goes without saying that the aphorist must work out of an unusual perceptiveness and self-knowledge, and I am grateful to James Guida for this book, which I have read from start to finish and shall read again."
— Richard Wilbur

James Guida is an Australian living in New York. He studied literature and philosophy at University of Melbourne and Irish Literature at University College, Dublin. His work has appeared or is scheduled to appear in Yale Review, Kenyon Review on Line, Agni, Orion, Southwest Review, and Raritan.

Poetry

In This House
by Howard Altmann
978-1-933527-33-8, $15.95

“Howard Altmann interrogates the sky, the light, the world, about their intentions. If he seldom finds reassuring answers, he finds something better: "When all that consoled consoles no longer/ loneliness finds a room inside the one it knows." These poems are as essential as a glass of water.”
— John Ashbery

“Though not exactly a nature poet, Howard Altmann is a poet of his own mysterious natural kingdom, a house in which he has built a house, whose walls are open to the inspiration of air. ("Frightened of the next life/ being exactly like this life/ he asked to be a bird" or "Let it not be words/ you reach for you say -- / where the trees stand/ far from man.") To have discovered this kingdom and inhabited it (like Keats' Imagination, as monk to monastery) -- to have found words for what is nearly unsayable -- is a measure of this poet's uncanny transformational gift. Enter the house of these poems and stay on, a grateful tenant in this remarkable state of wonder.”
— Carol Muske-Dukes

By Myself: An Autobiography
by D.A. Powell and David Trinidad
978-1-933527-29-1, $9.00

If there were an award for Chapbook of the Year it would surely be given to By Myself: An Autobiography. In the spirit of Goethe's comment, "One is never satisfied with the portrait of a person one knows," two celebrated poets, D.A. Powell and David Trinidad, have collaborated to create a perfect portrait of an unknown star in 300 lines by taking one sentence from each of 300 celebrity autobiographies. The result is poignant, poetic and hilarious — a perfect and imperishable performance.

Photography

Sydney and Flora
by Geoffrey Biddle
Essays by Susanna Moore and Geoffrey Biddle
978-1-933527-30-7, $29.95

"These photographs concern themselves with paradox. There is anarchy in them as well as serenity; they are overwrought and calm, remote and intimate, solemn and comical (the distinction of male/female is subtly absent). There is witchery here, and the omnipresence of spirits."
— Susanna Moore

Geoffrey Biddle is a photographer and educator. He was Assistant Dean of Photography at Parsons. His book entitled Alphabet City, which documents Puerto Rican life on the Lower East Side of New York won the Essay of the Year Award from the National Press Photography Association. With his wife, Jane Gottesman, Biddle co-authored Game Face: What Does a Female Athlete Look Like? published by Random House. Geoffrey Biddle lives in the San Francisco Bay area.

Fiction

Wild Punch
by Creston Lea
978-1-933527-40-6, $15.95

Wild Punch is an intense, nimble, and flat-out tough debut collection that portrays loss and honesty in subtle daily revelations.

“Attentive, sure-footed, possessed of an engaging voice and best of all, a spirit of generosity, Creston Lea's Wild Punch is an exciting new find for any serious reader of short stories.”
— Rick Bass

“Creston Lea can write one hell of a story. Wild Punch is a book of wonderful awful scary marvelous stories -- I kept expecting to hit the wall, to be overwhelmed with depression at the intractable fates he chronicles, but somehow, magically, he kept me reading through and out the other side of grim right into stubborn awe. I'm giving copies of Wild Punch to everyone I know.”
— Dorothy Allison

Artists' Wives
Short Stories
by Alphonse Daudet
Introduction by Olivier Bernier
978-1-933527-23-9, $15.95

Helen Marx Books and Turtle Point Press have rediscovered a little known collection of short stories by the once celebrated author of Le Petit Chose and Lettres de Mon Moulin. The release of these observant and empathic stories written at the end of the nineteenth century coincides with the recent release of Ruth Butler's book from Yale University Press entitled Hidden in the Shadow of the Master: The Model-Wives of Cezanne, Monet and Rodin. Daudet is master of understated humor and he has an unerring eye for the competition between husband and wife. Fragility and faithfulness, fame and gossip take on whole new meanings in stories which at times are written in parallel texts and have an almost postmodern feel to their highly original presentation.

Ruins
by Jeff Clark
978-1-933527-37-6, $20.00

Written, illustrated, and designed by the author, Ruins is an endeavor to address and say goodbye to sources of pain, as well as to a poetic mode (and way of living) rejected for its lack of reality. It is also a book about fatherhood. At its center is Clark's translation of a long poem by Louis Aragon.

The book, signed by poet Jeff Clark is available in a very limited quantity for $20.00. A check may be sent in that amount to Turtle Point Press.

“Ungainly, direct, and absolutely without preciosity or smarm. And heartbreaking. What's recall'd is the kind of fuckall anti-literary messiness of Jack Spicer, the plunge of a relentless going for, "sewed" for "sowed," no matter . . . What I like here is a refusal of the current mode of quasi-surreal, quasi-"analytic" (meaning the unanchor'd abstract) hybridity. Clark's plain (and fierce) willingness to brave the sentimental weathers is admirable and necessary in such a climate.”
— John Latta, Isola di Rifiuti

The following books were published by Turtle Point Press in Fall, 2008

Fiction

All Aboard
by Joe Ashby Porter

With All Aboard acclaimed fiction writer Joe Ashby Porter ventures into new, sometimes unprecedented territory, from the luxe restraint of Merrymount through the stops-out eroticism of Pending, and the distilled heebie-jeebies of Dream On. Here reading, travel, and sexual orientation (and disorientation) loom larger than before in Porter, and the dialogue gives new play for what Harry Mathews has called Porter’s golden ear. The whole collection unfolds as does each component, laying track just ahead of the speeding train of thought.

“He takes types typically represented as American disasters and rehabilitates them through their own ability to articulate themselves. What’s more, Porter in this process sustains an effort to reclaim for all a considerable portion of our very own language that has steadily been bobbing out with the tide. Understanding perhaps the possibility that the narrower our lexicon, the more likely we are to be victimized by our own minds.”
— James Tierney

Poetry

Without Saying
by Richard Howard
978-1-933527-14-7, $16.95

We always say what Goes Without Saying, or we try to: anything is preferable to a certain silence.

In Richard Howard's new collection, voices of myth and memory prevail, if only by means of prevarication — the voice of Medea's mother trying to explain her daughter's odd behavior to an indiscreet interviewer; or first and last the voice of Henry James, late in life, faced with the disputed prospect of meeting L. Frank Baum and then, even later on, “managing” not only Maetrlinck's Bluebeard but his own unruly cast of characters, including Mrs. Wharton and young Hugh Walpole…

Richard Howard, one of America’s finest poets, continues to write poems of dazzling virtuosity, work which is intricate, amusing, and brimming with youthful spirit. He is the long established master of personnae and he is able to shift from voice to voice and era to era with grace, wit and dexterity. James Dickey once wrote that “Howard’s learning is so lightly and clearly held, his wit so delicate and hair-fine, and his poetic skill so unobtrusive, that the reader enters the poems with none of the pain that poets usually exact, but with delight, gentleness and joy.”

Sources
by Devin Johnston
978-1-933527-16-1 $15.95

“Sparkling with energy and intelligence, these poems are likes chips in a mosaic, spare, hard, precise, and with a classic humanity and grace.”
— David Malouf

Sources, Devin Johnston’s third book of poetry, returns ad fontes: to sources in Greek and Latin, secret derivations, wellsprings of feeling, and forces of nature. Sonically alert, these poems attend to the world with restless curiosity: “Pacing rugs/ or battered roads / we wait for what / we know we know.” Charged with expectation, they often take place on thresholds and sills, coming and going between house and street, private involutions and common life, past and present, human and animals, friends and strangers.

Memoirs

Dresden
by Lord Berners
978-1-933527-15-4, $9.95

A newly uncovered memoir of time spent with a German family in and around Dresden at the turn of last century and during Berners's colorful formative years. Dresden was edited with an introduction by Professor Peter Dickinson.

The following books were published by Turtle Point Press in 2007

Fiction

Now Voyagers
Some Divisions of the Saga of Mawrdew Czgowchwz, Oltrano, Authenticated by Persons Represented Therein, Book One: The Night Sea Journey
by James McCourt
978-1-933527-08-6 $17.95

Here is the long awaited sequel to James McCourt’s first novel, the comic masterpiece, Mawrdew Czgowchwz. In gloriously flamboyant prose, James McCourt in Now Voyagers tells the story of the charged atmosphere surrounding a legendary diva (and possible CIA agent) turned psychoanalyst. This rich and brave novel about the opera world and New York in the mid 1950’s is touching, inventive, and outlandishly funny. Susan Sontag called James McCourt, “a literary countertenor in the exacting tradition of Firbank and Nabokov.”

“Tragic wisdom, we discover, can also be le gai savoir, and James McCourt has made a real specialty of transforming intricate wisdom into no more than discerning frivolity, no less than divine frenzy; as he puts it: a running neon paradigm of the quintessence of divadienst! For the purposes (if that is not too grandiose a word) of such fiction, fun is fun, but folly a kind of fate.”—Richard Howard



Earthquake
by Susan Barnes
978-1-933527-11-6 $10.00

Earthquake, with its visually acute, roguish, and intimate reflections of a girl’s childhood spent in Alaska and outside of Boston, is a novella in three parts. It is a tiny, humane and quietly humorous tale of a thoroughly unconventional girlhood. Barnes writes in an unaffected style. She is a master of candor and subtlety. Susan Barnes is a painter who lives and works near Portland, Maine. Her artwork is in the permanent collections of several museums in the United States. One of her paintings was selected by Robert Creeley for the cover of one of his poetry chapbooks.

Poetry

Work Life
by Paul Kane
978-1-933527-07-9 $16.95

“Work Life, Paul Kane's wonderfully varied and assured third volume, is simultaneously literal and lyrical, imbued with the magic of the matter-of-fact....I can think of no other poet whose work is as polished, pleasurable, and affecting as Paul Kane's.”—John Koethe

“A remarkable medley of wit and sobriety....The poems in Work Life bespeak a wholeness of life and language, a fitting of elegy, diatribe, natural description, meditation and blessing into the same large work of mind and heart.”—Rosanna Warren





The Late Show
by David Trinidad
978-1-933527-09-3 $16.95

“Deeply personal, yet cooly postmodern, no other writer besides David Trinidad makes the interface between our private memories and our cultural ones appear so seemless. At times, variously giddy, gossipy, melancholy, obsessive, and euphoric, his voice has an amazing plasicity as he slips between genres and forms, tradition and invention,with assurance and grace. The Late Show is a unique collection of interlocking facets: art literary memoir, part film encyclopedia, part shrine and momento mori—and always undeniably, pure poem.”—Elaine Equi