Turtle Point Press

News

Taken by the Shawnee

A most unusual portrait of early America based on a rare family document, in which a young mother’s years in captivity with the Shawnee prove to be the best years of her life.

It’s 1779 and a young white woman named Margaret Erskine is venturing west from Virginia, on horseback, with her baby daughter and the rest of her family. She has no experience of Indians, and has absorbed most of the prejudices of her time, but she is open-minded, hardy, and mentally strong, a trait common to most of her female descendants–Sallie Bingham’s ancestors.

Bingham had heard Margaret’s story since she was a child but didn’t see the fifteen pages Margaret had dictated to her nephew a generation after her captivity until they turned up in her mother’s blue box after her death. Devoid of most details, this restrained account inspired Bingham to research and imagine and fill the gaps in her story and to consider the tough questions it raises. How did Margaret, our narrator, bear witnessing the murder of her infant? How did she survive her near death at the hands of the Shawnee after the murder of the chief? Whose father was her baby John’s, born nine months after her taking? And why did her former friends in Union West Virginia turn against her when, ransomed after four years, she reluctantly returned?

This is the seldom told story of the making of this country in the years of the Revolution, what it cost in lives and suffering, and how one woman among many not only survived extreme hardship, but flourished.

Just the Thing: Selected Letters of James Schuyler, 1951-1991, Revised Anniversary Edition

This updated edition of James Schuyler’s letters to three dozen intimates, published on the 100th anniversary of the writer’s birth, offers delicious insights into the vital lives, friendships, and sensibilities that sprang from the influential New York School.

On New York in the summertime: “Makes me think Thoreau was right and Whitman was wrong.”

On conducting himself post-breakup: “I would like to do it with as much silence and grace as a loose tongue and a trick knee permit.”

On his sister-in-law’s antipathy toward the town beatnik: “His crimes against society seem to consist of long hair, tight pants and a Honda—I’m not sure which she minds most.”

Such effervescent and scathing takes on life, nature, love, and art are on joyous display in James Schuyler’s letters to John Ashbery, Ron Padgett, Barbara Guest, Alex Katz, Joe Brainard, Kenneth Koch, and many more. They paint an indelible picture of a charmingly self-deprecating gentleman with a deliciously wicked tongue. “Jimmy wrote letters for the most civilized of reasons,” a friend of his once said: “to inform and to entertain.” And that they do, in inimitable style. Peppering his aperçus with the occasional “tout de sweetie” and “pet noire,” the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Morning of the Poem holds forth on everything from Dante and Delacroix to travel and gardening to the delicate workings of his own poems and those of others. While his tone ranges from the lightly graceful to the racily profane, each letter is exquisitely tuned to its recipient. And they have only grown more savory and valuable with time.

Psalm to Whom(e)

In Psalm to Whom(e), the restless and astonishing Diane Glancy continues to break new ground with a hybrid collection of personal writings that considers the relationship between place and faith; the need for movement, stability, and inner exploration; and the search for home.

Psalm to Whom(e) centers on Kansas and rural Texas, places that usually see the underside of planes.  Glancy focuses on geography.  History. Origins.  Memory.  Faith.  Once in a while, in desperation, she offers a prayer to whom(e)ver is there. Glancy stretches and pulls the language to see behind the words: old Native thought patterns, for instance, or echoes of Gertrude Stein. She takes us with her into museums, churches, and national parks, shuttling freely between personal, cultural, and spiritual history, narration and poetic exploration.

Psalm to Whom(e) defines the world as a place on which to mark, as evidenced in the earliest pictographs.  Embedded in the markings on cave walls and rock facings are circles and spirals in which the impulses to move, to travel, to migrate, to explore one’s own inner wilderness and solitude are homed.

The “whom(e)” is in an essay, “Among My Friends Are Letters of the Alphabet.”  “As a loner I write a lot because I have to have something to do and the letters of the alphabet always are there.” The isolation of Covid may have driven her farther back into history, she says. Into the beginning of faith on the prairie.  Into her own believing on her grandfather’s farm and her own father’s work in the stockyards. “Sometimes I add letters to words.  As an ‘e’ as in ‘whome’ because then I see home, for which I always am looking.”

Again, the Dawn: New and Selected Poems, 1976-2022

Exquisite new work along with a selection of her finest poems spanning five decades from the essential poet and national treasure, Frost Medal winner Grace Schulman.

Again, the Dawn draws together poems from eight books plus a generous selection of new poems. In them, Grace Schulman hears the call to praise tempered by stark details of city life such as trumpets that blare “louder than street sirens.” and iron fences / handwrought with lyres, Greek frets, acanthus leaves.” Schulman brings passion and intelligence to bear on occasions she ponders, whether historical or contemporary. In joy and in grief, she gazes at the light and sees the majesty in ordinary things. This collection ranges across decades of prize-winning books, and yet, as its title exclaims, the poetry of Grace Schulman is as new as the rising sun. As Julie Sheehan has written of her most recent volume, “Read this collection if you, too, have grieved. Read it if you need your own guide to the underworld. Read it if you’ve ever felt proud to get at the meaning of poems, of art, of music. Read it if you want to be restored to the world around you, if late-stage capitalism or imperialism or politics have numbed you. Read it, then look up, breathe in, raise your own hands, and let Grace Schulman assure you: ‘I’ll be there, / gazing impiously – unless / that is what sacred is, the work, the looking up, / the wonder.'”

The Acrobat

“Delaney[‘s] splendid fictional biography of Cary Grant . . . perfectly befits the glamour and fakery of his subject.” —Publishers Weekly (starred review)

“Everyone wants to be Cary Grant,” mused the world’s most famous leading man. Even I want to be Cary Grant.”

It’s 1959, and the 55-year-old man who calls himself Cary Grant is at the peak of a charmed career. He’s also on a turbulent journey to find the core of a self he hardly seems to know anymore. Introduced to the wonder drug LSD as part of his therapy at The Psychiatric Institute of Beverly Hills, he embarks on upward of one hundred psychedelic trips—at times harrowing journeys. And on the way, he rediscovers the long-ago boy who faced the world as Archie Leach, the earnest, gap-toothed stilt walker and tumbler he once was, long ago.

In The Acrobat, fiction writer Edward J. Delaney takes on the elusive character of Cary Grant. He imagines the inner life of a man who spent a career brilliantly creating a persona as ethereal as his best roles. As Grant launches on LSD-fueled trajectories of discovery, The Acrobat likewise transports readers through his fractured upbringing, his start in English vaudeville, his life on the Hollywood sets, and his relationships with fellow travelers prominent in his life: Howard Hughes, Randolph Scott, Blake Edwards, Tony Curtis, two of the five women he married, and more. Amid the endless versions of himself and the characters he’s played, he yearns to shape himself into something singular, forged from the layers of illusion he’s smilingly foisted on the world, and for which the world has come to love him. This riveting dramatization of the actor’s life takes us beyond the firm terrain that biographies tread, to offer a new perspective on a complex Hollywood legend.

(Solve for) X

Coles’s eighth collection probes the X of the unknown and of gender chromosomes with provocative smarts and sensitivity.

Katharine Coles’s (Solve for) X opens a window in a room we did not realize was stuffy. The rigidity of knowledge yields to the beauty of the search, which is both captivating and mysterious. Organized as an abecedarium, the poems are couched in spare, emotionally charged diction that plumbs consciousness and moral responsibility. Coles meditates on an imaginary sister, impositions of the body on the mind, and the human mess that remains despite death or disaster. The mastery of how Coles writes and what she knows is matched only by her ease with the uncertain X. In (Solve for) X, she breaks down contrary ideas and reassembles them, harmoniously redesigned.

The Lisbon Syndrome

A sudden catastrophe in Europe exposes the slow-motion destruction of a generation of Venezuelans and their struggle against repression.

In The Lisbon Syndrome, a disaster annihilates Portugal’s capital. In Caracas, Lisbon’s sister city and home to many thousands of Portuguese, few details filter through the censored state media.

Fernando runs a theater program for young people in Caracas, teaching and performing classics like Macbeth and Mother Courage. His benefactor, Old Moreira, is a childless Portuguese immigrant who recalls the Lisbon of his youth. Fernando’s students suffer from what they begin to call “the Lisbon syndrome,” an acute awareness that there are no possibilities left for them in a country devastated by a murderous, criminal regime. A series of confrontations between demonstrators and government forces draw the students and their teacher toward danger. One disappears into the state secret prisons where dissidents are tortured. The arts center that was their sanctuary is attacked, and Fernando is pulled into the battle in the streets.

The Lisbon Syndrome is the most trenchant contemporary novel to offer a glimpse of life and death in Venezuela. But Sánchez Rugeles’s bleak vision is lightened by his wry humor, and by characters who show us the humanity behind stark headlines.

Digging to Wonderland

With unerring detail, David Trinidad digs into his Southern California upbringing in the 1960s, his fascination with memorabilia, the mysteries of his family history, and the shadowy corners of his life as a writer.

Poet David Trinidad’s past is rich fodder for a collection of memory pieces that wind the reader through the underbelly of 1960s and ’70s America–and Southern California, more specifically. In Trinidad’s recollections, the proximity to Hollywood both glamorizes and condemns the bustling suburbs. Stains of the Manson murders and adoration for The Boys in the Band are documented with the same care as fascinations with Barbie dolls and twelve-cent comic books. The struggles of an awkward gay teenager meld into the weighty anecdotes of a young man who befriends famous writers, acts as a historian for familial legacies, and confronts the limitations of desire.

The title piece, “Digging to Wonderland,” presents a young David Trinidad and his friend Nancy as they tunnel into the ground of her backyard, in search of the next great adventure. Ultimately, we witness a childhood spent under the threat of annihilation: “So the ‘twinkly lights’ in the hills above Chatsworth were actually missiles armed with nuclear warheads. And without knowing it, I grew up under their spell.”

Droll Tales

In fourteen witty, surreal, and wildly original interrelated stories, Iris Smyles joyfully interrogates the paradoxes of life and language and gives us a new view of our world.

Welcome to the world of Droll Tales, in which reality is a mutually agreed-upon illusion, and life is painful, enigmatic, beautiful, and brief. With an oddball cast of characters who reappear in various guises, Smyles gives us a tour of an enchanted, absurd, off-kilter world with its own workings and ways of expression–one that overlaps our own.

A young suburban woman runs away to Europe to become a living statue, Mallarmé is at long last translated into pig Latin, a house full of surrealists compete for love on a reality TV show, a list of fortune cookie messages reveals the inner world of the young man employed to write them, and a story of love and betrayal is told through the sentence diagrams on a fifth grader’s grammar test.

Romantic, dark, and ironic, Droll Tales is a book like none you have read. It is a philosophical vaudeville, a cabinet of curiosities, a puzzle in fourteen pieces, and a tragicomic riddle articulated in Smyles’s singular style, with the mystery of the human heart at its center.

Eclogues in a Mustard Seed Garden

Glenn Mott’s Eclogues recast a classic pastoral form, making it uniquely suited to our times. He considers the inheritance of authority with a mixture of candor and humor in observations on social, natural, and metaphysical transactions. Inspired by China’s Manual of the Mustard Seed Garden, these epigrams, poems, and prose meditations achieve a heightened perception, transcending the garden variety truths of both East and West.