Ahsahta Press . Poetry . 2007-2008 Season!

Ahsahta Press will publish six books in its 2007-2008 season.
You can pre-order the season by getting a subscription, or order the books individually.

SEPTEMBER 2007

Dog Girl, by Heidi Lynn Staples. $17.50. Order now!
Heidi Lynn Staples reinvents the English language with her skewed ear during one skewed year. She draws her explicit subject matter from her own passionate and tumultuous marriage, her profound engagement with the nonhuman world, and a core-deep grief from a late-term pregnancy loss. “Of the language-powered poets on the poetic landscape, Heidi Lynn Staples is one of the only ones whose heart powers the machine. To quote Franz Wright, she’s more fun than a topless rodeo....” —Mary Karr

Sign, by David Mutschlecner. $17.50. Order now!
Mediating the interplay between sacred and secular, Mutschlecner’s poems radiate philosophically from religion to reckoning. “The good and gladsome news in Mutschlecner’s Sign is that the ceremonies of innocence are not drowned. Rather they enjoy a continuous, lucent transformation in poems such as these. Sign is a kinetic missal of new faith and new perfections.” —Donald Revell

JANUARY 2008

Realm Sixty-four, by Kristi Maxwell. $17.50. Order now!
Kristi Maxwell’s debut illuminates a history of human strategy through the implications of a complex game. “There is an unspeakable intimacy in opposition—well, not wholly unspeakable, as Kristi Maxwell’s extraordinary debut proves. Opponents sit facing each other, a board constructed of 64 squares between them, a realm of possibilities circumscribed by Law and Chance, each person attempting to read the thoughts of the other. So a book sits between a poet and reader. So a bed looms between lovers. . . .Beyond the intricacy Maxwell reveals, beyond the enchantment in which she revels, is her insistent demonstration that poetry, like chess, is an art of thinking, and an art of risk, at whose final move, at the last blank page, one hears in echo a voice say Check, and pays closer attention to the before unseen threat.”—Dan Beachy-Quick

the true keeps calm biding its story, by Rusty Morrison. $17.50. Order now!
Winner of the 2007 Sawtooth Prize, these poems follow a grief-stricken speaker’s reawakening into the world. “Rusty Morrison’s the true keeps calm biding its story brilliantly restores the energy of telegraphic communication, launching line after line toward a potentially infinite horizon of meaning. Her careful handling of form allows knowing to remain both openly discrete and discretely open. This is a joyous read and a remarkable book.” —Peter Gizzi, judge of the 2007 Sawtooth Poetry Prize

MARCH 2008

To and From, by G.E. Patterson. $17.50. Order now!
Quilting, quoting, and sampling, Patterson sets a flux of impression, emotion, and articulation into vertiginous blank-verse sonnets. “The intention of these fine poems is to be found in the title To and From. Each poem is surrounded by an arcana of words (mostly commonplace) gleaned from other poets’ poems, words that when strung together slide into the poem by Patterson himself. His poems are addressed to a mercurial, form-changing You. The result is paradoxically impersonal, transcending individual and place. One line captures the whole process: ‘That loss you know might become anyone.’” —Fanny Howe

Irresponsibility, by Chris Vitiello. $17.50. Order now!
“Put this book down and go be with other people,” urges Chris Vitiello in his playful and grave second book. Where music, science, and poetry discover the grounding necessity of measurement in this work, Vitiello is just as likely to destabilize, boldly, all manner of life, repeatedly undercutting urgent concrete statements and smashing them into granular moments. “The great pleasure of Chris Vitiello’s Irresponsibility comes from its outrageous conceit: to write ambitiously while refusing to render the act of writing in any of its normative or nostalgic guises. ‘All you have to do is pay attention,’ Vitiello writes, ‘and it’s not that simple.’ Each page of this absolutely essential book is a testimony to the thrills and difficulties of such unceasing attention.” —Tony Tost

Ahsahta Press
MFA Program in Creative Writing
Department of English
Boise State University
1910 University Drive, Boise, ID 83725-1525