Prolific Books

Poetry by Genevieve Betts. An Unwalled City is Betts' debut collection, filled with rich and iconic imagery. Her world is rich with humor and reflection. An Unwalled City is an approachable poetry collection that can be enjoyed by everyone. Whether writing of childbirth, caring for an adventurous pet tarantula as a child in Arizona, or reading Sendak’s A is for Alligator to her son as, on the other side of the wall next door, a murder-suicide unfolds in Brooklyn, Genevieve Betts is an empiricist of the im/material world, crossing real borders in that imaginary country called memory, traveling across states lines of the mind and heart. An Unwalled City opens with an epigraph from Epicurus about life being a city without walls of protection from death, and in wry, stark poems, Betts observes life and death in the balance with a keen and unblinking eye. “How will death come for me?” one speaker, a new mother after a hard birthing, asks. The answer is startling and fresh: “like a giant black-eyed moth / closing its white velvet / around the winter of my body.” An Unwalled City is a breath-taking debut volume. Cynthia Hogue, author of Revenance In Genevieve Betts' An Unwalled City, her human babies are animalish creatures while desert insects and spiders are cared for as carefully as the babies. A collection as much about her family as it is about Arizona, we are given a world in which "latch key was just another way to say freedom," and in which poisonous giant desert centipedes that jump at her face during sex are quickly termed "centipedus coitus interuptus." This book will make you laugh aloud, but it will also make you feel tender about all junky, ugly, poor, poisonous, regular, and vulnerable things of this world that Betts so tenderly notices. Sarah Vap, author of End of the Sentimental Journey

Body Politic adds to the conversation of a generation with poetry that invokes thoughtful reflection. Whether you read for the love of poetry, to cheer and contemplate your beliefs, or simply to get a better understanding of other viewpoints, Body Politic delivers stunning poetry and deeply interesting reflections on relevant topics today. This is a must read! Praise for Rich Murphy! Rarely do I like explicitly political poetry, yet Richard Murphy may have convinced me otherwise. Murphy shows in Body Politic how poems can be polemical without being didactic, philosophical without throwing out any of a poems linguistic or moral core. Murphy manages to be both heartfelt and playful, ironic and sincere, language-driven and wild with the material world. Truly worth savoring a few times both as individual poems and as an entire collection. - C. Derick Varn, editor of Former People The poems found in Body Politic are the essential poems of today, a persistent and passionate fugue, an irony, something we need, an elixir for the malaise of paralysis that has engulfed an increasingly terrified humanity. We only have to consider the facts. We need to read these poems. - Michael Rothenberg Rich Murphy’s Body Politic delivers a litany of lyrical and surreal protests against the “conspicuous unsaid [that] rules the state for the mind” of a nation addicted to perpetual war and processed news. Murphy’s songs of struggle are strong medicine for “the subject and the drunken, resilient question mark behind the eyes.” Body Politic is a diagnosis and antidote for the cancer of our times. “No one with a breath escapes.” These are poems of resistance and revival. — W. Scott Howard, University of Denver

Also available for Amazon Kindle. Welcome to the Free Fire Zone, also known as a free kill zone. In Vietnam, it was enemy territory, all the friendlies and neutrals moved out. Anyone found in such an area was considered hostile, a legitimate target that could be killed on sight, no questions asked. Each of the sixteen stories in this book originate from this zone, any subject, any genre fair game. The short stories are bound together by the main character, Rod Teigler, traveling through his life beginning in the mid-sixties Vietnam and extending to the current day. Teigler’s war experiences, helped along by government experimentation, leave him with a severe personality disorder. Fear or anger turn the hero into something you don’t want to meet up with in broad daylight let alone in a dark alley.

Scudder’s Gorge shines a harsh light on what man is capable of doing to his fellow man, beginning with the day of the “bomb” in Hiroshima and then moving backwards in time to Eighteenth Century Vermont to a village founded by post-Revolutionary settlers. Nestled between pine-clad ridges, the valley is home to a small band of Abenaki. The settlers and Native Americans trade with each other and live in peace until a love affair blossoms between a young Abenaki and the daughter of a village elder. A crime reverberates down the generations, leading Everett Scudder and his daughter, Roseanne, to struggle for the dignity of all people. Geoffrey Craig’s fiction, poetry and drama have appeared in numerous literary journals. He has received two Pushcart Prize nominations. Wilderness House Literary Review serialized his verse novel, The Brave Maiden, and his novella, “Snow”. Four of his full-length plays (one co-authored) and nine of his one-acts have been produced. He has directed productions of five of his plays with three more in rehearsals. Geoffrey has an MBA and an MA in history. He served in the Peace Corps and had a successful career in banking before turning to writing. Scudder’s Gorge is his first prose novel.

The Brave Maiden is the story of a young woman who – in a quest for revenge – prevails against greed, treachery and brutality in medieval England. She is destined to bring peace and justice to the country; but first, she must discover her inner strength and nurture the qualities required of a leader. About the author: Geoffrey Craig’s fiction, poetry and drama have appeared in numerous literary journals; and he has received two Pushcart Prize nominations. He retired from banking in 2002 and began his second career by writing poetry. One of his first poetic works was The Brave Maiden, an adventure novel in rhymed couplets that he originally wrote as a Christmas present for his then eleven-year-old daughter, Danielle. In addition to his fiction and poetry, four of Geoffrey’s full-length plays (one co-authored) and ten of his one-acts have been produced. He has directed productions of eight of his plays. He loves directing, in part because the theater is a cooperative endeavor and Geoffrey gets great satisfaction from working with people. In his first directorial opportunity, the cast all knew far more about theater than Geoffrey; but he persisted and learned. Prior to both banking and writing, Geoffrey served in the Peace Corps, a life changing experience that taught him much about the world in which we all live. As for Danielle, she is in law school.

In this masterful collection of poetry, Dr. Anna Cates showcases her extraordinary prowess with open form and free verse. This collection represents the darker side of Cates’s voice, perhaps the reader’s most beloved side of any poet, with themes like poverty, insanity, crime, and war. This is a collection that belongs in any serious library of poetry today.

This book recently won an Honorable Mention by the Council for Wisconsin Writers in their annual contest. This is a GREAT BOOK! Robert Nordstrom grew up in Ohio but found his true home in Wisconsin, where he has lived for the past 35 years. His fiction, essays and poetry have appeared in numerous state and national literary publications. A graduate of the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee master’s program in creative writing, he served as editor for various scholarly and trade magazines, as well as a writing instructor at the university level, for over 30 years. His poetry has won several awards, including the Wisconsin Fellowship of Poets Triad contests and the Hal Grutzmacher Literary Contests. His poem “Old Lovers” won the 2014 Hal Prize and a residency stay at Write On. These days he stays busy writing poetry sandwiched by a stint as a school bus driver teaching kindergarteners how to snap their fingers and warning that it’s probably best they not lick the seat in front of them. Praise for The Sacred Monotony of Breath Just read “Waiting for the Kitchen Floor to Dry” and try to tell me Robert Nordstrom is not a powerful and sensitive witness. Nordstrom asks the big questions about love and death, old lovers and the celebration of living (“Recalling Happy”). Tell me there’s a better title than “Drinking Tea Downwind from Auschwitz” or a better first line than “my dog’s a liar and she’s not very good at it” (“Good Dog”). Read these poems. These are good poems. Bruce Dethlefsen, author of Small Talk and Unexpected Shiny Things, Wisconsin Poet Laureate (2011-2012) Robert Nordstrom's poems live richly in the space between memory, breath, and desire. Nostalgic, doubting, and doubling-back over the lost country of childhood and adolescence, he affectionately searches the past for clues that will illuminate the mysterious and haunting present. Alison Luterman, author of Desire Zoo and Feral City Robert Nordstrom writes with lyrically gritty understatement, compassion, and humor about the ordinary personal and its historical and political shadows: a dead mother “hair in curlers,/ nibbling an egg salad sandwich/ on the dark side of a screen door,” “a shoplifting orgy/ of squirt guns and yo-yos the morning after” a trip to the altar, returning from Vietnam to a shopping mall’s parking lot, a locker room in which “we’re all a bunch of cheerleaders and assassins/ with remotes,” a bus-load of school kids … already programmed with the high and low impulses of humans. “These children, these children, these children—/ why do I love them so? Because they open the windows / on the first warm day of winter,/ inhabit their stories before parody obscures.” Listen as Nordstrom allows his readers to inhabit their stories too. Wendy Vardaman, author of Obstructed View and founding co-editor of Cowfeather Press. She is one of Madison, Wisconsin's two Poets Laureate (2012-2015). 6" x 9" (15.24 x 22.86 cm) Black & White on White paper 120 pages ©2015 Robert Nordstrom Published by Prolific Press Inc. Harborton, VA (USA) ISBN-13: 978-1632750280 ISBN-10: 1632750287 BISAC: Poetry / General

Waiting for the Light to Change is bursting with relevant poems for today’s lover of poetry. With themes that span politics, family, culture, and a myriad of today’s complexities, Ruescher engages the thoughtful reader, shares his poetical voice, and resonates beyond the pages. His long lines create a full-throated experience for the reader. By employing the language of poetry, Ruescher is able to open a dialog that seeks to engage, not divide, making this book suited to poetry lovers from all walks of life. Enjoy the world of Scott Ruescher. About the poet: Scott Ruescher won the 2016 Write Prize from Able Muse, the 2015 Rebecca Lard Award from Poetry Quarterly, and, in both 2013 and 2014, the Erika Mumford Award for poetry about travel and international culture from the New England Poetry Club. His chapbooks include Sidewalk Tectonics (documenting a road-trip from Lincoln’s birthplace in Hodgenville, Kentucky, to the site of ML King’s assassination in Memphis) and Perfect Memory (documenting more of that same trip as well as adventures in such places as Central Ohio, Central America, and Central Square, Cambridge). For 15 years he has been administrating the Arts in Education program at the Harvard Graduate School of Education and teaching part-time in the Boston University Prison Education Program—all while feeling vaguely skeptical about such intimate participation in institutions of higher learning. Praise for Scott Ruescher "Scott Ruescher goes back into the past like a man walking through walls and there finds the things that signify. The details, the atmospheres so full of our younger wanting. Had we but known. His long lines deliver the most bittersweet tones, playing the now against the then, and letting the implicit sadness of bygone lives throw a shadowy depth behind every new moment." Sven Birkerts, author of The Gutenberg Elegies: The Fate of Reading in an Electronic Age "Scott Ruescher is an evangelist for reality, declaiming its glitzy multitudinosity in long cinematic sentences, with a mixture of love, wonder and disgust. Ruescher's linguistic resourcefulness breaks like a storm across the page and we are borne along with recognition, amazement and dismay. Beneath their effervescent verbal surfaces these poems are sad and tender. Ruescher has a beautiful talent." Tony Hoagland, author of Unincorporated Personas in the Late Honda Dynasty; What Narcissism Means to Me; Donkey Gospel; and Sweet Ruin "Scott Ruescher is a Baby Boom Whitman, a Rust Belt Ginsberg, whose long sentences echo “Alice’s Restaurant” as much as those of his poetic forebears. The poems are filled with wry parenthetical asides and delicious specifics, casual rhymes and witty ending couplets. The southern and midwestern towns that trigger many of these poems are populated by “unknown, unheralded, unimportant citizens” but Ruescher always manages to celebrate “the old happiness/Of fellowship with humanity.” This includes fellowship with the “motel Patels,” disenfranchised black men on street corners or an old abuela on the same Guatemalan chicken bus, all the while conscious and open about his own status as a white American man. His willingness to be so up front about race is remarkable. Sometimes the poems seem as if they could be illustrated by Dorothea Lange and other times by paintings on black velvet, showing the range of Ruescher’s sharp eye and poignant observations. Whether he is revisiting a youthful paradise of silken-tasseled cornfields now paved into a 40-acre parking lot of ticking meters, making a pilgrimage to the Lorraine Motel or visiting Graceland and Lincoln’s birthplace on days they turn out to be closed, the poet is always trying make sense of the trajectory of his own life, from the working-class Republican heartland of his childhood to the academic east coast where he now lives. Along the way, he also helps us better make sense of a country inhabited by icons as different as Abe Lincoln, Martin Luther King, Jr., and Elvis." Jennifer Rose, author of The Old Direction of Heaven and Hometown for an Hour