Tavern recommends Sancta

Tavern friend Andrew Grace has just published his third full-length collection, Sancta (Ahsahta Press, 2012), and is it spectacular! This book-length collection offers up a lyrically powerful and dense meditation on self and place. Grace, whose other books include A Belonging Field (Salt) and Shadeland (Ohio State University Press), has a style and lyrical range that few can match.

Here's the first piece (all the poems in Sancta are untitled prose poems):

Grief is the never ender in the raucous pond reeds. Ursa Minor sets out its silver lice in the cypress. Take one season and turn through it like these fruit bats, following sent-back abyss-ticks, here, and further out, here...I wanted this to be an epigraph. I wanted to rain for forty days. I wanted a trigger. I have a lake with a crown of bats. I have intransience. Salt away.

Happy reading!

Tavern titles now at Powell's

Dear Tavernites, Powell's (downtown Portland location) is now stocking our titles. For those of you in Portland, swing on by the world's largest book store and enjoy the newest titles from our catalog. For those of you outside the borders of Portlandia, you can order through Powells.com and, of course, directly through the Tavern Books website.

Cheers!

Tavern Pick for 2012

Enough with the best of 2011 lists and all those New Year's resolutions you'll never keep! Why not bring in 2012 by looking back to Tavern author Adrian C. Louis's 2004 collection Evil Corn (Ellis Press). There's nothing we love more than a new Adrian C. Louis book. And there's nothing we love more than an old Adrian C. Louis book. The poems in Evil Corn are unflinching, unrelenting, uncompromising, and heartbreaking--and, they're tempered with a sense of humor that is uncomfortably scathing and self interrogating. What emerges is a collection of prose poems that are as deeply moving as they are fierce and didactic. Later this year Tavern Books will be reprinting two of Louis's poetry collections, Fire Water World and Among the Dog Eaters, in one volume.

"Wild, sometimes foolish, sometimes poignant, often cartoony and sporadically brilliant. There's nothing politically correct about Adrian C. Louis."  --The New York Times Book Review

Happy New Year!