The Crossroads Poetry Series is a line of books that showcases established and emerging poetic voices from across North America. The books in this series represent what the editors at UFP believe to be some of the strongest voices in both American and Canadian poetics.
Counterglow
by Patricia Killelea
ISBN: 978-1-988214-24-5 (paperback)
82 pages
Borrowing its title from astronomy, the "counterglow" is a faint light in the night sky that appears directly opposite the sun. Made up of interplanetary dust, this glow is difficult to detect unless one observes from a place without light. Patricia Killelea's lyric poems speak from this darkness as she seeks a language of redemption— some kind of brightness to cling to, however faint. Spanning terrains of spiritual and literal hunger, where ecological and personal crisis intertwine, this collection is an unwavering affirmation of the power of words in the face of wordlessness.
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goodwill galaxy hunting
by LeRoy Gorman
ISBN: 978-1-988214-2-52 (paperback)
78 pages
In Gorman’s collection of haiku, tanka, and visual poems we recognize the new, the familiar, the unsaid. His work delivers an engaging visual and lyric pathway across our shared universe. Each turn, each line, each image a homage to the places we’ve been and the places we shall go. Here is our universe in clear images, lines, and voice. One that we recall playfully and in reverent awe. Hunting the universe through poetics we are brought through a voyage of self that leads us meditating over lyric turns and images, and left with a reverence for the wonders of the universe and our place in it.
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Civilian
by Deonte Osayande
ISBN: 978-1-988214-26-9 (paperback)
182 pages
In a look at what makes a black man in today's society, Osayande brings us through central questions of belonging, love, and happiness in his native home of Detroit. In his largest collection of poetic pieces yet, the renowned Detroit performance poet, writer, and educator answers how one responds to a world seemingly stacked against. Whether with love, with the law, finances and even with ones own mental health, these are poems that illustrate the battles against the cold-heartedness of contemporary American and that ever looming demon in the back of his own mind.
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Plimsoll Lines
by Donia Mounsef
ISBN:978-1-988214-2-14 (paperback)
100 pages
Plimsoll Lines are the marks on the side of a ship’s hull to which vessels can be safely loaded. These words become lyric and capture the “unbearable lightness” of the poetic word coupled with the playful metaphor of floating. Mounsef’s utilizes both these individual poems and the overall collection to drift the reader around themes of wandering, water, and wanting. The collection argues in favor of a return to the word and cultural meditations of language, politics, and the body in a world dominated by the visual and the mediated. Mounsef pushes past borders and combines the abstraction of French, the symbolism of Arabic, and the immediacy of English in a grand tour of the places that poetry can bring the reader.
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Ho Chi Minh: A Speculative Life in Verse and Other Poems
by Ben Goluboff
ISBN:978-1-988214-17-75 (paperback)
98 pages
Almost fifty years after his death, Ho Chi Minh remains a deeply divisive figure - heroic revolutionary, or brutal dictator, depending on your perspective on the Vietnam wars. Not overtly political, the poems in this collection interrogate Ho's life and wars with a lyricism that is both dark and inventive. Many versions of the man inhabit these poems: Ho as trickster and tyrant, lover and ghost. Goluboff's imagination travels from fact to fancy with disarming grace. This debut collection also includes a suite of poems about photographs of and by Allen Ginsberg, and another group whose subjects range from classic photographs to Chicago graffiti and the battle of Fredericksburg. Entertaining and deftly voiced, these are poems that will stay with you.
Read Unbroken Journal's Review of Ho Chi Mihn: A Speculative Life in Verse here
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Said the Cannibal
by Laurie Smith
ISBN:978-1-988214-18-4 (paperback)
100 pages
In a collection that is part dark humour, part history, part meditation on the darker portions of simple existence, Smith dazzles and entertains with her newest collection of poems. Here we play witness to starving settlers, unsettling mass murders, and television visions. Questions about what makes a meal and what makes murder illustrate the fine line that even the basic tenents of Christianity and the very basic aspects of civilized societies are approached in a fashion that are uniquely Smith’s style, leaving the reader with both laughter, occasional shutters, and lasting questions that come when a sharp poetic voice enlightens us to the nuances of our shared everyday lives.
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Class
by Deonte Osayande
ISBN:978-1988214115 (paperback)
110 pages
One of the Midwest's finest slam poets, Osayande brings his work to the written page and delivers a lyric exploration of everyday life in Detroit in his debut full-length collection Class. In his voice you can hear and feel the lineage of some of Detroit's finest poetic voices, stretching back to David Blair, Murray Jackson, and Naomi Long Madgett. He captures the rhythms, images, and deepest meditations of life both hardscrabble and painfully beautiful in a fashion that calls us to know that survival is much more about living than cowering in fear. As a teacher Osayande brings us before his classrooms, let's us linger on the experiences and moments of growing up in a city that feels lost amidst the promises of America, and takes us through the high cost of being black in a place where the colour of one's skin can deliver a trauma that only the strongest can survive. His poems show us the Detroit that has always been here. Both heartbreaking and empowering the poems in this collection ask the reader to consider the America that is kept hidden from Prime Time television, that carries on because it must, and understands that the act of speaking is the best therapy and resistance that one can offer to a world given at best to indifference and at worst insidious violence..
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All Ember
by Kierstin Bridger
ISBN:978-1988214115 (paperback)
110 pages
In lyric work that spans the oil fields of Colorado to the hollers of Kentucky, Bridger's All Ember pulls us through the burning embers of life itself. In these poems forests and bodies sing the rhythms of creation and offer up the vistas life affords us all. It is a gritty and truthful ode from roots that dig deep into the earth itself.
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Home & Ghost
by Scott Weaver
ISBN:978-1-988214-05-4 (paperback)
88 pages
Weaver's collection acts a prolonged meditation on death and the ever-present role it has on living. In these pieces the living play among the dead, reveling in death at times, and perhaps most importantly they search for understanding and meaning in spite of it. From a profoundly personal vantage point of the ways one might come to deal with the presence of death, Weaver explores the sacred and the profane from the viewpoint of those left behind. From Death's laughable brother Certain Death to the construction of a Mausoleum to the quiet moments that we must spend when alone, these are the places and moments that brush against the inevitable and leave us with the sense that we can share both comfort and at times a laugh when we can feel the most alone.
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Booking Rooms in the Kuiper Belt
by Kenneth Pobo
ISBN: 978-0-993769-07-8 (paperback)
96 pages
Kenneth Pobo’s seventh collection of poetry, Booking Rooms in Kuiper Belt, brings the reader from the earth through the solar system and back with an uproarious lyric tour through otherworldly bodies and the everyday of life on earth. Bejeweled with homages to some of literature's greats and with the beauty of our everyday world, Pobo’s collection holds a consistent loving nod to our world and beyond.
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Roundabout Directions to Lincoln Center
by Renee K. Nicholson
ISBN: 978-0-9937690-0-9 (print)
ISBN: 978-0-9937690-9-2 (eBook)
In her debut collection and the first book in the Crossroads Poetry Series, Renee K. Nicholson brings you a profound lyric exploration of the everyday. Roundabout Directions to Lincoln Center unfolds like a ballet's grand adagio, moving across the physical, spiritual, and emotional places that make an American life. From the Carolina low-country boils to the sweet mountains Appalachia to the grand heights of New York City, this collection in parts playful and parts profound, traces the turns and chassés that a life in its freewheeling manner can cast.
Read Jake Maynard's Review of this title from the Los Angeles Review here
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Endless Building
by Marvin Shackelford
ISBN: 978-0-993769-01-6 (print)
ISBN: 978-0-9937690-8-5 (eBook)
86 pages
In his debut poetry collection, Marvin Shackelford brings you through the slow building that is life. From foundations hard laid during youth in Tennessee through expansive highway promises of the middle portions of America, the everyday is mingled with the profound. This is the steady and endless building of a lifetime from the underlying violence of youth to the vast spaces and promises that make up the physical body of America. Shackelford’s poems will bring you through the spiritual, the earthly, and the profoundly personal in the recognition that as with all things in this world, we are simply Endless Building. Endless Building is the second in our Crossroads Poetry Series.
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Upcoming Releases
Our Mother of Sorrows by Nina Clements (Fall 2019)
Lake Erie Blues by Nick Conrad (2020)
Postscript by Renee K. Nicholson (2020)
Postcard Poems by Stephen Craig Finley (2020)
Milky Way Stardust Aquarium by Lynn Pattison (2020)
Rituals for Calling Down Light by Amanda Rachelle Warren (Winter 2019)