Mute 6 Feb 2010, 6:30 pm

Do not be afraid of your face.
Move into a beam of light
in the bar.  Smile openly.
Watch his hands move
quicker than strobe lights
as he surveys the crowd with his friends.
Do not think of how hard
it might be to have a casual
conversation.

From “How to Fall for a Deaf Man”

Silence is always a powerful statement, but even more so in the hands of Raymond Luczak, who demonstrates in his third collection what it’s like to navigate between the warring languages of confusion and clarity. 

As a deaf gay man in the hearing world, he lends an unforgettable voice to his reality of ache and loss beyond the inadequate translation of sound.

Raymond Luczak is the author or editor of more than ten books, including Assembly Required: Notes from a Deaf Gay Life (RID Press) and Eyes of Desire 2: A Deaf GLBT Reader (Handtype Press).  His novel Men with Their Hands won first place in the Project: QueerLit 2006 Contest.  A playwright and filmmaker, he lives in Minneapolis, Minnesota.

MUTE
by Raymond Luczak

Body Language 06

ISBN-13: 978-0-9794208-6-3
ISBN-10: 0-9794208-6-5

Poetry/Deaf Studies/Gay Studies

64 pages/perfect bound
Pub Date: 1 April 2010

US: $11.95

FREE SHIPPING ON U.S. ORDERS!

Handmade Love 6 Feb 2010, 6:12 pm

I believe that there are two kinds of love in this world:

inherited and handmade. Yes, we inherit love
but my people, my people make love by hand.

                  From “Handmade Love”

In her first collection, Julie R. Enszer offers poems that are as unabashedly erotic as they are unabashedly feminist. Whether responding to queer cultural icons, fantasizing about sex, or mourning illness and loss, these poems are sweet and sultry, fierce and tender.

From demonstrations on the streets to bedroom romps, these smart and sexy poems interweave narrative and lyrical moments with the political and the sensuous.

Handmade Love renders a world that delights in the lives of gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender people and tells queer life stories sublimely and generously.

Julie R. Enszer has published poems in Room of One’s Own, Long Shot, Feminist Studies, Bridges, So to Speak, Suspect Thoughts, Windy City Times, and many other journals. She has a MFA in poetry from the University of Maryland and is working on her PhD in Women’s Studies.

HANDMADE LOVE
by Julie R. Enszer

Body Language 05

ISBN-13: 978-0-9794208-5-6
ISBN-10: 0-9794208-5-7

Poetry/Lesbian Studies
64 pages/perfect bound
Pub Date: 1 April 2010

$11.95

FREE SHIPPING ON U.S. ORDERS!

Fortune's Lover: A Book of Tarot Poems 28 Jan 2009, 9:21 am

 Sometimes she imagines she's somewhere else,
on a camel, traveling by pricks of light--
or regurgitating webs from a swollen belly--
or hanging from a hook
in her sister's meat locker,
on the other side of seven doors.
        From "High Priestess"

The Early Renaissance game of Tarot inspired poetry centuries before it was used for fortune telling. The poems in Fortune's Lover do not explain the Tarot so much as spin off from it.

From accounts of a master class on the Fool that led to the author inadvertently putting into practice the grace they'd just learned about to an insane Merlin predicting three forms of death for the same boy, from a princess who learns never to look to any man to protect or fight for her to a High Priestess locked in her temple of silence, these poems are infused with a wisdom based not so much in finding the right answers as in asking the right questions.

Rachel Pollack is the author of thirty books of fiction and non-fiction, which have been published in fourteen languages, including: 78 Degrees of Wisdom, The Body of the Goddess, and Tarot Of Perfection.  Her books have won the World Fantasy Award, the Arthur C. Clarke Award, and the COVR Award. She is also a visual artist, the creator of The Shining Tribe Tarot. She teaches in the MFA program at Goddard College.

FORTUNE'S LOVER: A BOOK OF TAROT POEMS
by Rachel Pollack

Fabula Rasa 02

48 pages

Pub date: May 2009.

ISBN-13: 978-0-9794208-4-9
ISBN-10: 0-9794208-4-9

US: $9.95
Europe: €7
UK: £6

Banalities 11 Nov 2008, 12:47 am

Fifty powerful and unsettling untitled poems make up this mesmerizing collection by distinguished Slovenian writer Brane Mozetic. In these poems, Mozetic confronts meaninglessness and pleasure, melancholy and excitement, often focusing on the pain we inflict on one another and especially on the pain we inflict on ourselves.

Born in Ljubljana, Mozetic has published twelve volumes of poetry, two novels, and a short story collection. He has also edited three anthologies, and has translated numerous authors from the French including Rimbaud, Genet, Foucault, Guibert, Dustan, Cliff, and Brossard. For many years he has been active in civil social movements and leader of the gay movement in Slovenia; he directs two literary collections (Aleph and Lambda) and is director of the Center for Slovenian Literature.  His books in English include Butterflies (Spuyten Duyvil) and Passion (Talisman House) and the forthcoming novel Lost Story (Talisman House). English translations of his poems have been published in Poetry International, Another Chicago Magazine, Transcript, Verse, Prague Literary Revue, Chroma, and elsewhere.

BANALITIES
by Brane Mozetic
translated by Elizabeta Zargi and Timothy Liu

ISBN-13: 978-0-979208-3-2  
ISBN-10: 0-9794208-3-0

Poetry/Eastern Europe/Gay & Lesbian

32 pages/perfect bound
Pub Date: 1 December 2008

Price: $10.95

This Is What Happened in Our Other Life 8 Oct 2007, 9:10 am

The first time I was inside a woman,
I was confused.
I didn't recognize her, or myself.
I thought I was swimming, but in air.
Maybe flying, underwater.

    From "Legacies"

At last, the first collection of poems from the Pulitzer Prize and Lambda Literary Award winning Cuban-American author Achy Obejas! 

The poems in This Is What Happened In Our Other Life form a handbook of desire, navigating a course through the often-rocky landscapes of loving and living, while also charting the complexities of identity as the author explores her relationship to her lovers, her roots, her history, herself. 

As in her novels, Obejas' poems are often concerned with memory--the physical memories of the body, the ache of wanting--and of finding a way home again.

Achy Obejas is the author of the novels Days of Awe (Ballantine) and Memory Mambo (Cleis) and the short story collection We Came All the Way From Cuba So You Could Dress Like This? (Cleis.).  She is also the editor and translator of Havana Noir (Akashic).  She received an NEA Fellowship in Poetry in 1986.

This Is What Happened in Our Other Life
Achy Obejas
ISBN-13: 978-0-9794208-2-5
ISBN-10: 0-9794208-2-2

Poetry/Latina Studies/Lesbian Studies

32 pages, perfect bound
Pub Date: November 2007

U.S.: $6.95
Canada: $7.95
Europe: €4.95
UK: £3.50
Aus: $8.50

The Good-Neighbor Policy 21 May 2007, 11:19 am

Higgledy-Piggledy,
Murder and innocence,
Edgar Award-winner
    Ardai disturbs
Readers of mysteries
Double-dactylicly
With this new story of
    Death in the 'burbs.

Charles Ardai, author of Little Girl Lost and Songs of Innocence and founder of the celebrated Hard Case Crime imprint, brings new meaning to "poetic justice" in his latest foray into crime writing.

For crippled octogenarian Perseus Algernon, his binoculars let him escape from his own home--and thrust him into a deadly game of lust and greed.

When a violent murder takes place next door, only Algernon's word can confirm the innocence of a beautiful young woman. Reliable authorities corroborate the details, but Deputy Hennessy has his doubts about the story this Good Samaritan tells. Does being neighborly extend to covering up the truth about murder?

The Good-Neighbor Policy:
A Double-Cross in Double Dactyls
by Charles Ardai
ISBN-13: 978-0-9794208-1-1
ISBN-10: 0-9794208-1-4

Mystery/Poetry/Humor

32 pages, perfect bound
Pub Date: September 2007

U.S.: $6.95
Canada: $7.95
Europe: €4.95
UK: £3.50
Aus: $8.50

A Midsummer Night's Press offers free shipping for U.S. customers on pre-orders!

Fairy Tales for Writers 9 Mar 2007, 10:58 am

Fairy Tales for Writers holds up a magic mirror to the joys and struggles of the creative process and the writing life, reflecting them through the lens of the powerful archetypes of these formative stories.

In these pages the reader will find:

   •the new writer who encounters a wolf along the path to publication;

   •that member of a writing workshop who always needs to be the fairest of them all;

   •a writer who gives up her voice for love;

•and even that shy, anonymous author who slips away before the end of the reading, but is nonetheless tracked down at last by an editor who wishes to publish her work.

Because sometimes there is a happy ending, even in publishing.

Everyone who has ever felt lost in the deep, dark forest of the publishing world will find resonance in these cautionary tales.

Fairy Tales for Writers
by Lawrence Schimel
ISBN-13: 978-0-9794308-0-1
ISBN-10: 0-9794208-0-6

Poetry/Writing/Folklore

32 Pages, perfect bound
Pub date: June 2007

US: $6.50
Canada: $7.50
Europe: €4,95
UK: £3.50
Australia: $7.95

Read some samples from Fairy Tales for Writers:

Fairy Tales for Writers: The Little Mermaid
Fairy Tales for Writers: Sleeping Beauty