The Alsop Review Press is the publishing branch of Alsop Review, Ltd a non-profit organization registered in the State of Delaware.
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Kim Addonizio &
Susan Browne, Swearing, Smoking, Drinking & Kissing (cd)
"These dark, sensual poems wrestle with love, death, politics and belief,
but those big themes never get the better of this tough-minded and
tender-hearted young writer who sometimes seems like an inspired mix of
Camille Paglia and Edna St. Vincent Millay."
--Washington Post Book World
"There's a ruthless authenticity, a deep cherishing, in [Susan Browne's]
splendidly mature first book of poems that is filled with moments of Proustian
recall, with the comedy and the anguish, the beauty and the burning of lived
experience.
Edward Hirsch
"A stark, sexy and surprisingly fresh voice."
--Washington Post Book World
"Sin-your-face poems that don¹t pull their punches."
--Poetry Flash
Karen Alkalay-Gut (and Liz Magnes, piano), The Paranormal in our
Daily Lives (cd)
"Karen Alkalay-Gut is the best English writing poet in Israel today, and also
one of the best Israeli poets in any language."
Moshe Ben Arroch
"Karen Alkalay-Gut (and Liz Magnes) One can not prepare for this immense talent
for expression through poetry
and music. The piano playing in these professionally recorded poems, is
unbelievable, and beyond description"
Pedro Sena
"Karen Alkalay-Gut's work is never less than a carnival of her (and our)
multiple selves. She is funny, tragic, sensual, powerful, poignant, sharply
intelligent, and above all, alive."
Alicia Ostriker
Alsop Review Press, Anthology One (book)
An anthology of some of the poets and writers who have appeared on the Review over the past
nine years. Seventy one authors, including Guggenheim and Pulitzer prizewinners, contributed
to this fund-raiser and all proceeds will go toward publishing more books by upcoming,
talented writers in the near future.
To all who participated, a sincere thank you. I hope to see you on The Poets, The Writers,
Octavo, The Gazebo and St. Agatha's for many years to come. -Jaimes Alsop, Editor
Jan Lee Ande,
Gathering Together (cd)
"Jan Ande's well-crafted poems are like a fresh mountain stream that springs
from ancient sources.They are animated by a deep reverence for the world, by a
sense of mystic awe, by a feeling of transcendental plenitude. They put us in
the presence of great msyteries."
Edward Hirsch
"Jan Lee Ande has
created a steady, contemplative, and sometimes playful voice, often melding
perfectly the factual and the fanciful, the hallowed and the
sensual."
Pattiann Rogers
"...a remarkable collection, a tonic for
mind and spirit. Jan Lee Ande's poems drench this familiar earth with fresh and
penetrating light. They wake us up to the fact that we're alive."
X.J.
Kennedy
David Anthony, Talking to Lord Newborough (book & cd)
"...full of all the right things that poetry ought to have: seriousness, moral weight, feeling, complexity, music, without any pretentiousness or self-consciousness or wrong notes. It's good to find among these poems several that are already familiar from some of the best sites on the internet; the unfamiliar ones are just as stunning and immediately inviting.
"
Rhina P Espaillat
"David Anthony's work shows that a poem doesn't have to raise its voice to get our attention, and that control is not the opposite of feeling
Alicia Stallings
"It's a wonderful book, truly. I've been picking it up and setting it down and picking it up again for the past two or three weeks. Every time I read it I find something I hadn't seen before.
" - Jaimes Alsop
Rachel Dacus,
Singing in the Pandaleshwar Caves (cd)
"Rachel Dacus's exceptional imagination extends to such subjects as foreign cities, the tenacity of the immigrant memory,
ethnic and religious loyalties and divisions, art and its echoes in consciousness, and the writer's life approached from
ingenious angles. The chief strength of these impressive poems lies in their unsentimental candor, their observant eye, and
their arresting and vivid imagery. --Rhina Espaillat
" I find myself wanting to pass these poems on to so many people -- immediately upon reading them."
-- Naomi Shihab Nye
"Her writings are sensitive; her skill of the highest order."
-- Jane Morris, Editor, Primeval Press
Ruth Daigon, The Slow Caress of Years (cd)
"work of maturity and full of energy... ripe and shapely as a perfect piece of fruit...
lush and precise without sentimentality"
Marge Piercy
"Daigon's poems, with her knowledge that no-one survives love, cause me to suck in my
breath, then she gives me reason for release"
Vivian Shipley
"Daigon is a survivor. She has come through fires of her own, and she has lived long
enough to be realistic about such matters. Her joy is tempered by a deep awareness of
"lacrimae rerum" - the tears of such things." - Jack Foley
Rhina P. Espaillat,
Selected Poems (cd)
"Rhina Espaillat does not strike grand and stylish literary gestures, she writes
poems--strong, individual, and often ingenious. One by one these suave and lyric
pieces add up into something both unforgettably personal and personable. Has any
Latina written more movingly of the rich and heavy inheritance of bilinguality?
(Her poetry) is a gift to the English language."
Dana Gioia
"Rhina P. Espaillat's seemingly effortless command of form--of her various
forms--is breathtaking... (She) has become an essential poet, and she is writing
at the top of her form."
--Bruce Bennett
""Within the discipline of traditional forms, Rhina P. Espaillat's lyric poems
transform the simplest events into moments of insight and epiphany with
sensibility, wit and perfect pitch. Each poem is as refreshing as a cup of clear
spring water."
--Carolyn Stoloff
Jack Foley,
Greatest Hits 1974- 2003 (cd)
"that rare commodity: genuinely avant-garde poetry...experimental poetry with depth and intelligence as well as intensity."
-Dana Gioia
"our firebrand experimentalist": "he holds his torch high so the reader can have more light."
-Michael McClure
"a brilliant critic and a unique poet whose work energetically records the disintegration of the patriarchy."
-Janine Canan
Suzanne Frischkorn,
A Shore Without Silence (cd)
"Suzanne Frischkorn's poems have a remarkable range of tone they can be witty, tender, abrasive, but are always lucid, and tirelessly push beyond the surface of their subject matter. What I admire in this book is how each detail carries its emotional accuracy--what I love in these poems is their drive and pulse."
--Laure-Anne Bosselaar
"In her best poems we are unaware of the superb craft bearing them up from beneath. Frischkorn is carving a place for herself in the territory mapped out by Anne Sexton and Adrienne Rich, more recently, Dorothy Allison
and Kim Addonizio."
--Douglas Goetsch
"A bit to the left of the detached and soulless female protagonist that slouches through most current American poetry, there's a new and incredibly compelling real woman emerging in Suzanne Frischkorn's powerful poems..."
--Angelo Verga
Neile Graham, She Says: Poems Selected and New (cd)
"In the pure exuberant joy of her words we find the "gathered magic" of the physical world. Her descriptions are startling... and at times their lilt is almost Shakespearean.... She uncovers the hidden world of the tentative yet inevitable, the passage of weather and seasons, which seem to echo the persistence of memory itself. ..."
Sandra Nicholls, Arc 36
"...the poet communicates her intense rapport with nature with insight and perception, and she gives us a sense of history, the "long slow motion of time" that we are all part of.
"
N.M. Drutz, Canadian Book Review Annual
"Her poems, exciting in their precision of diction and imagery, speak of silence.... Graham's power lies in her ability to trace language within the silence that permeates her world.
"
Smaro Kamboureli, Canadian Literature
Ryan Guth,
Home Truths (book)
Ryan Guth grew up in Dayton, Ohio and holds a PhD in Creative Writing from the Universioty of Cincinnati. Currently he teaches writing and literature at Lambuth University in Jackson, Tennessee. His poems have appeared in such journals as River City, Third Coast, Solo and Iron Horse Literary Review; he has also published scholarly articles on James Joyce's Ulysses and Finnegans Wake. Home Truths is his first book.
Frank Matagrano,
In the Unedited Version of a Certain Year (cd)
"Frank Matagrano’s poems are a homage to
rural America, a wild place of possibility that resists 'progress.' In
Fighting for a Place to Park, Matagrano's offbeat loopy narratives
travel from the rural into idiosyncratic urban life and back. He has more than
a gift for telling a good story, for getting the details just right - Frank
Matagrano is a poet of compassion, wit, and wisdom."
- Denise Duhamel
"Frank Matagrano graphs American obsessions in poems of marvelous turns and
twists. He creates voices that are uncommonly fresh, witty, and vital. People
ought to let him park wherever he wants."
- Lee Upton
"I would place Frank on the shelf between Albert Goldbarth and Richard
Hugo...the rambling imagination, Frank maybe sadder-funnier: I scanned a
list of wines as if combing a long row of gravestones for my name... For
the plain made strange, look here."
- DC Berry
Shann Palmer,
Under the Scrimshaw Moon (cd)
"Shann Palmer's poems are fearless. She aims her language at the gorgoeous (and
terrifying) center of the ordinary, convinced of poetry's divine purpose: to
help us face our fears, our sadness and our loss, to help us face ourselves. And
to sing with joy at the strangess of the world."
-James Harms
"Shann Palmer's poetry is theatrical, autobiographical, and just plain good.
Every line is a surprise and the surprises stay with you. She can work an
audience in cold print or under hot lights, and that's nothing like as easy as
it sounds. She constantly discovers what we are all supposed to know, but have a
lot of trouble finding: ourselves. She's a life-changer you want to hear from
again, and what a way with words!"
- James Rawley
"In today's poetry, it can be difficult to find a voice that's clearly American.
Shann Palmer's work speaks with this voice - Texas mellowed by Virginia and
seasoned with all the miles in between."
-John Boddie
"Shann Palmer's work connects the mundane with the elusive, and daily grit with
poetic grace. Her recitations, rooted as they are in vital currency, are an
invitation to silence, that we might sense the lyricism of our own lives.
Indeed, her voice invites us to return to her verses once more, and then again,
with the assurance that Life is indeed there."
-Sofia M. Starnes
Jennifer Reeser,
An Alabaster Flask / Winterproof (cd)
"The collection is the winner of the Word Press First Book Prize...but it ought
to have been a candidate for a Pulitzer."
X.J. Kennedy
"...poetry of seamless craft and unmistakable quality."
R.S. Gwynn
" Jennifer Reeser's 'Winterproof' (is) ... a veritable garden of verses,
cultivated with confident forms from sapphics to sonnets and a few wilder
varieties. This is a measured voice gaining new authority, and, as she writes in
her lovely 'Nocturne Over Water,' 'Nothing illumines longing more."
David
Mason
Miriam Sagan,
Buying Honey (cd)
""Sagan dazzles so with her risk-taking that you are willing to follow her
anywhere."
VILLAGE VOICE
"Work of quiet compassion and great heart."
Robert Creeley
""Sagan is a fantastic writer, compassionate and mischevious in her search for
truth"
Demetria Martinez
Robert Lavett Smith, Everything Moves With A Disfigured
Grace (book and cd)
Robert Lavett Smith’s poems are passionate and clear. He is a gifted writer.
Thomas Lux
An intimate poetry of precision and grace
Dorianne Laux
Typified by imagery so compelling that these verses seem to belong to a realm
midway between poetry and the visual arts. -Leland Stoney
Robert Sward,
Rosicrucian in the Basement (cd)
"I like the wide sweep of it. There are many
mysteries between father and son that people don’t talk about... There's much
leaping, but each line, so to speak, steps firmly on something solid. The father
figure comes through consistently, there's a lot of buoyancy, and the son is
consistent and fine too."
--Robert Bly
"The CD is terrific… 'Rosicrucian in the Basement' unfolds perfectly at its own
pace and never loses the listener.”
--Dana Gioia
"The ability to present highly complex concerns and insights in a
straightforward, accessible manner--to create poems that grow increasingly
'baroque' in their very economy... is a gift that Robert Sward is willing to
share with us in his new work--
['Rosicrucian in the Basement'] along with a nearly miraculous ability to blend
straight narration and lyricism: to create a genre all his own..."
--William Minor
Amy Unsworth,
In the Breaking Light (cd)
"The world Amy Unsworth portrays in these carefully-made poems is a shifting world where "some things are certain" but the "news is never good enough." Against this uncertainty, what the poet offers us is a "world cut down to size." These are strong yet delicate poems built to contain the uncertainties. They offer as antidote: the "breaking light", that "thin sunlight on the wetdark branches," the care people show for each other. And isn't that, after all, enough?"
--Patricia Fargnoli
"Amy Unsworth "writes a life" in her work, at times as sparely as Glück at times as lyrical as Lux. There is poignancy in her art, and
complexity in the way her images play against one another. Her stories are compelling and her pacing perfect." - Jeff Bahr
David Wright,
Selections from Lines from the Provinces & A Liturgy for Stones (cd)
"David Wright has come upon a rich and enriching vein whereby our daily narratives may be seen to partake
of the greater story, our many comedies and tragedies to partake of the One
--Scott Cairns, author of Philokalia: New & Selected Poems
"David Wright's poems are alive with music and motion. His voice finds daring pitches
and a force of rhythm, disrupting our comfort zones. . . These beautiful and lucid poems call us to unlock our
own tongues and to sing what is true" --Jean Janzen, author of Tasting the Dust