Kent State University Press: 593 books

“A clear, seemingly effortless voice and a special curiosity animate the world Liz Tilton gives us in Salt. And it is a world, ranging from domestic life—loose change, gardening, the intricacies of love—to manatees and the governor of Texas. Discoveries abound. Salt is smart, subtle, and essential.”—Don...

"These precise, plain-spoken poems are limned by a subtle music, not to mention a lyric grace that is never overplayed. For in a world as harsh as this one, a world delimited by war, beauty is as appalling as it is necessary. Hugh Martin's great achievement is to remind us of this necessity, and to assert the power of poetry as witness and as solace."-James Harms

Winner of the 2009 Stan and Tom Wick Poetry Prize "There are poems which carry us clean away, transporting us into worlds as specific as the pink purse the author of Visible Heavens helps a little boy buy for his teacher, Miss Stone. Melancholy and loss, the missing of a gone mother, passion...

The remote farming community of Murdock, Nebraska, seemed to be the least likely setting for one of the heartland’s most ruthless and bloody double murders in decades. In fact, the little town had gone more than a century without a single homicide. But on the night of Easter 2006, Wayne and Sharmon...

"Inspired by the story of Secundus the Silent Philospher and the twenty vital questions posed to him my Emperor Hadrian, J. Gabriel Scala’s Twenty Questions for Robbie Dunkle moves swiftly and deftly into the essence of human existence/memory. Imbued with that ancient consideration, Robbie...

“Seven Boxes for the Country After is a book about a way-making and way-finding. It is a journey, both internal and external, across a map, over borders, through a life, and in a body. It is passage and pilgrimage, odyssey and exile. Above all it is a book of questions. What do we carry with us...

Spanning oceans and continents, language and the imagination, the unfathomable distances between people and their desires, Allison Davis’s Poppy Seeds creates an “immaculate atlas.” Here language is “broken… against the margin of the sea,” and a word is a thing that can be “wash[ed]...

Much like author James T. Farrell, Mickey Donovan—the main character in *Dreaming Baseball—*grew up on the South Side of Chicago dreaming of becoming a star for the White Sox. Donovan’s childhood dream came true in 1919 when he made the team. Despite the fact that he spent most of his rookie...

Ambrose Bierce’s In the Midst of Life, the second volume of The Collected Works of Ambrose Bierce, is hailed by critics and scholars alike as his most important literary work. In Ambrose Bierce’s Civilians and Soldiers in Context: A Critical Study, Donald T. Blume refutes this and instead identifies...

“After reading Primer for Non-Native Speakers, I feel like I’ve just come back from a trip to Russia. Philip Metres’s brilliantly compressed lyrical narratives capture the grandeur and the bleakness of an almost mythological country, where a bronze statue of the great poet Pushkin now gazes...

“Maureen Passmore’s poetry I can only liken to cut-and-polished jewels: structurally simple, innately priceless, sharp-edged, and brilliant. . . . With the jeweler’s touch, she brings out just enough edge, elegant and lean, to intrigue us before offering the next edge, then the next. What makes...

"This book is a document of a particular world, real, wrenched from the poet's life, as if written with a gun to his head or a spike through his heart. Reading it is like opening a damp newspaper wrapped around a big fish just caught, fins glistening, scales shining, one rhymed eye open and looking...

“When the wire man in love with the boiled wool woman imagines himself making love with her under the emerald tree and then making her a mouth, is he desiring to make for her a mouth, or to make of her a mouth? Such questions charge Karen Schubert’s off-kilter worlds with a force less like gravity...

Unlike his fiction, which has been popular and often reprinted, Melville’s poetry remains obscure. The last “collected poems” appeared in 1947 and “selected poems” in the 1970s, and only two books dealing exclusively with Melville’s poetry have appeared, both published in the 1970s. In...