Monkey Puzzle Press

After the Orange Glow by Mark Spitzer

DEBUTING IN SPRING!

Here’s what people are saying about After the Orange Glow:

“Mark Spitzer is a great writer… what he gets down on the page is his own vision, a vision filled with energy, movement, humor, and surprise.”

David Gessner
Author of Sick of Nature

“Spitzer is sui generis: you will not find another like him… he is the most dedicated writer I know.”

Luis Alberto Urrea
Author of Into the Beautiful North

“Spitzer has been more attentive than his predecessors to Genet’s gnarled syntax . . . he has carefully researched Genet’s use of prison argot . . . For instance, only someone privy to this dialect would know that ‘une biche dorée’  is not only ‘a gilded doe’ but also . . . a young boy who is sodomized for the first time.”

Edmund White
Author of Rimbaud: The Double Life of a Rebel and City Boy

Product Details
Paperback
Published: April 2010
ISBN-10: 09826613
ISBN-13: 978-0982664612

The Aftermath, etc. by Get in the car, Helen

DEBUTING IN SPRING!

Here’s what people are saying about The Aftermath, etc.:

“In The Aftermath, etc., poet Rob Geisen (writing as Get in the car, Helen) mounts an astoundingly affectionate all-out assault on heterosexual male grief and loss and does so in a way that draws upon an array of comedic surreal phanopoetic vernacular traditions. Amped up by accurate, lyric, mass media hysterics as well as a naked, private despair, this series of poems to/of ‘Helen’ simultaneously appear as glittery and vapid as an extended Geico commercial, yet as rich and transformative as the ‘idiot’ Trungpas of the Mishap Lineage.”

Jim Cohn
Author of The Ongoing Saga I Told My Daughter

“The Aftermath, etc. goes after the topic of romantic love with a meat clever and a machete. It takes no prisoners and allows no quarter. Get in the car, Helen is unabashedly honest and open with a life chiseled out from the pain of a broken heart and life. What’s left is raw, exposed flesh. Something true, real, and dangerous lurks within these poems in a time when it does not pay to show your rage or sorrow or to be dangerous. Get in the car, Helen even manages to squeeze blood from a stone in the form of laughter over broken bits of memories that used to be a heart. There is immense beauty within his use of language, complex nuance within his metaphors, and the hidden wisdom of the hurt locked inside the tragedy of the story. With pop culture in one holster and righteous rage in the other, Get in the car, Helen shoots for the reader’s hearts as well as guts, but even in the midst of all the thrashing and excrement, one thing remains absolutely clear—this book was written because of love, for love, and in remembrance of love.”

Olatundji Akpo-Sani
Baobob Tree Press

“A cacophony of analogy, pop-culture wit and illustrative word-craftery where the words ‘vagina,’ ‘cheeseburger’ and ‘gobble’ can exist in the same sentence. The Aftermath, etc. is a rare look at the broken man in his natural environment: a wasteland of pizza, shark flicks, porn and beer. Seemingly, his only escape is through the pen, and if it were not so, the fine art of handmade explosives. No one can make me chuckle-and-puke-a-little-in-my-mouth-at-the-same-time quite like Get in the car, Helen.”

Andi Todaro
Author of Why My Penis Is Bigger Than Yours

Product Details
Paperback
Published: April 2010
ISBN-10: 0982664621
ISBN-13: 978-0982664629

Cold Instant by Jack Collom

DEBUTING IN SPRING!

Here’s what people are saying about Cold Instant:

“For only a very few of us, making poems is as natural, as inborn, as breathing. Jack Collom is such a poet. In Cold Instant, Collom once again grabs his spirit lollipop, puts on his Captain Rainbow smile, and brings us to ‘poetry’s perch upon the moment’s ledge.’ Collom has told us before that ecology is ‘everything’ and his poetry never fails to partake of the ‘radiantly verdant ramifications’ of that everything to which he bears witness so keenly. These poems bring it all together–’profusion, extravagance/ ‘invisibility’/ holiness’– proving that ‘each tiny direction’s a universe.’ Collom capers with the joy and earnestness of a kid within his wild poetic traceries. His gift to us is to demonstrate that play is the form of wisdom we most urgently need.”

Elizabeth Robinson
Author of The Orphan and Its Relations

“With Cold Instant, Jack Collom offers a compendium of recent poetic proclivities and favored shapes, including the sonnet, the slice, the lune, the perfect daily account, and the acrostic, all with ubiquitous variation and permutation. Surprises here for everyone who loves and studies art: ‘particular things/ Begin to mouse-rush in the domestic box./ So thought’s a gardener, crazy like a fox.’

Reed Bye
Author of Join the Planets

Product Details
Paperback
Published: April 2010
ISBN-10: 0982664605
ISBN-13: 978-0982664605

Fotographs of Bones by Adam Perry

For a free preview, click here: Fotographs of Bones

Here’s what people are saying about Fotographs of Bones:

“Change as a constant state is given new dimension in these powerfully exciting works where spiritual and physical transmogrifications explode perception. Love is the undertow, verity its wave.”

Maureen Owen
Author of Erosion’s Pull; former director of the Poetry Project at St Mark’s-in-the-Bowery, New York City

“Fotographs of Bones: Three Seasons of Poetry understands ‘the common gender is obsolete.’ It is an explosion of language, rotating ‘tail-spinning scriptures’ with poetic space. Between the pages of cut-ups and exquisite corpses, Adam Perry reveals a vulnerability in this collision of experiment and exposed heart.”

Michelle Naka Pierce
Author of Beloved Integer

“Adam Perry, musician as well as poet, doesn’t exactly compose lyrics but what the notes of the music would say if they could speak. He has taken a seat at our ceremonies, ‘an empty chair in Count Basie’s Orchestra.’”

Charles Potts
Author of Valga Krusa and Kiot; founder of The Temple Bookstore & Temple School of Poetry

“Adam Perry has accomplished something marvelous. The language in these pages seems almost self-generated, like some prolific mutation. There’s no room here for the reader to hide; the effect is of being in an airplane when the windows blow out and the icy vacuum strips you naked on the way down. But when you finally hit the ground, the poet is there too, extending his hand, embracing you in tears.”

Steve Silberman
Wired Magazine

“Have you ever driven ‘naked’ down Highway 1, listening ‘to beautiful techno?’ Do you ‘respond to narration’ as to the ‘gradual burning of nerves?’ These poems gesture to the life in which a body is allowed to be vulnerable, to be its inside parts as much as its public flows. I read them while drinking coffee in a back garden filled with the first small flowers of Spring, and I suggest you read them in the snow. This is a book that belongs in the world.”

Bhanu Kapil
Author of The Vertical Interrogation of Strangers

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Product Details
Paperback: 71 pages
Published: April 20, 2009
ISBN-10: 0980165024
ISBN-13: 978-0980165029

Searching for Suzi by Nancy Stohlman

For a free preview, click here: Searching for Suzi

From the Publisher:

What happens when an ex-stripper in her mid-thirties, married with children, awakens one day questioning what brought her to a current life of complicated domesticity? Compelled to return to Omaha after seventeen years, the narrator we only know as Natalie begins a quest into her past, an adventure that takes the reader from childhood beauty pageants to the sex and glamour industries. Natalie’s search becomes an intrepid journey through her own sexuality, a woman not only claiming herself but also accepting her contradictions. With inquisitive perception and agile use of perspective, Searching for Suzi is an investigation into the tragic shadows of a past preferred to be forgotten.

Here’s what people are saying about Searching for Suzi:

“The exploitation has to be turned around on itself at some point. Searching for Suzi tells the story of Natalie, an ex-stripper who reflects on her life as she returns to Omaha, Nebraska where she grew up. Discussing the obsession with appearance and the concept of sexy that ranges from the glamour and stripping industry down to childhood beauty pageants, Searching for Suzi is a fascinating and very highly recommended read.”

Midwest Book Review

“Sexy, gutsy, raw and mature. A literary strip tease, Nancy Stohlman lures us through the layers of her dark world with the promise of exposing the ultimate sparkle…and ends up revealing something profound.”

Raymond Federman
Author of Double or Nothing

“Searching for Suzi offers syntax of desire itself – the complex, difficult, and beautiful ways we rupture into and beyond our own ghost-versions inside the mystery of hello and good-bye. Nancy Stohlman has written a spare, searing, and stunning book. It will wake you in the way that only necessary art can do.“

Selah Saterstrom
Author of The Meat and Spirit Plan

“In cheap pulp fiction, a stripper is either the helpless victim of sexual exploitation or the gutsy woman who makes the system work for her. Searching for Suzi is not pulp fiction. Nancy Stohlman smartly complicates the stereotypes with this story of a woman looking back on her life from a scrutinizing distance, separating the romantic images from the real and transforming the latter, through the art of storytelling, into something intimate and compelling.”

Danielle Dutton
Author of Attempts at a Life

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Product Details
Paperback: 96 pages
Published: November 2009
ISBN-10: 0980165067
ISBN-13: 978-0980165067

Shooting the Moon by Diane Klammer

For a free preview, click here: Shooting the Moon

Here’s what people are saying about Shooting the Moon:

“Poetry has never been the exclusive domain of professional poets. Shooting the Moon is a fine collection of poetry from biologist, psychologist, and mother who provides many insights through her works as well as entertainment. A work of the heart, Shooting the Moon is well worth considering. ‘On the Bus’: Don’t push on the doors./They can break/Then nobody goes anywhere.//Americans remain in a hurry to pile up, collect what they have no time for./Then they sell, recycle, throw away, ands burn.//’Only when the doors of perception are cleansed/can they be seen as they truly are, infinite.’//Don’t push on the planet./It can break./Then nobody goes anywhere.”

Midwest Book Review

“More than an exploration of the shadows and silences that surround us, this book probes them and then explodes with incandescent images highlighted by the cut-glass prism illuminating Diane Klammer’s transcendent vision. These poems heat to flashpoint the pills and palliatives we take that strike in the form of ‘venomous rattlers,’ thereby allowing ourselves to survive the daily news, and the comforts/horrors of domesticity in our ‘McDonald’s healthcare’ society while collecting bracelets and handcuffs of blood drawn from our lovers. Ultimately, though, Diane is herself a seer who, through craft and vision and raw power, pulls those around her to a vision of tranquility beyond both light and shadow.”

Jared Smith
Author of The Graves Grow Bigger Between Generations

“At one point in Shooting the Moon, Diane Klammer creates a kind of poetic Craig’s List, writing, ‘Help wanted: dedication / to sort out this deadly confusion.’ Klammer proceeds to answer her own call with passion, commitment, and humor. Her poems take the pulse of our planet’s troubled soul, lamenting everything from the legacy of slavery and nuclear armaments to pandemics and terrorism. Transparent about her own sorrows, Klammer is vigilant on behalf of all who are vulnerable or alone. She helps us to ’sneak back into sanctuary.’ Poetry is a worthy asylum and this poetry insists on allowing ‘entrance / to every seeker.’”

Elizabeth Robinson
Author of The Orphan & Its Relations and Apprehend (Fence Modern Poets Series)

“In Shooting the Moon, Diane Klammer observes – with the introspection of a wanderer and the insight of a wise woman – the effects of loss, love, apathy, activism, inertia, and inspiration on the synthesis of human imagination and experience. Like Wislaw Szymborska, Klammer’s poems remind us that there is humor in strife and wit in suffering. These are poems that are alive in the world of human understanding and assure us that ‘there is comfort in this passing of circular shapes through time.’”

Kristin Prevallet
Author of I, Afterlife: Essay In Mourning Time

“Diane has a vision like a soothsayer, she’s holding out the bones of life to see if you see it too. Shooting the Moon is a book of overcoming, a collection of an Ubermenche. She wonders if we can do the same, inviting you to try in Shooting the Moon. Get your pop-gun and come along, [but] hold on tight. Diane is a fine word-smith, willing all of us to go as far as we can to the border of intimacy in language, where to question is the entire point of being a poet.”

Jane Crown
Host of Jane Crown’s Poetry Radio

“From the blunt beauty of ‘Rehab Re-creation’ to the startling simplicity of ‘Audrey on a Swing,’ Klammer’s work articulates the emotions that are so often left untouched. Shooting the Moon dismantles the architecture of the everyday with lyrical wit. Her fearless approach to topics as diverse as love, aging, Darwinism and cigars makes her words speak loudly on the page.”

Graham Nunn
SpeedPoets

“Moving from shadows to light, Shooting the Moon explores the intersections between serenity and the raging torrent of human hormonal impulses present and alive within us all. It maps the balancing acts of outward impulses and pharmaceutical solutions. This is an honest book warranting and sometimes requesting an honest look at ourselves and where we truly fit into the lexicon of the happy and the healthy. Pick it up, flip through its pages, and you are sure to find language that makes old ideas fresh and entices you to look deeper into the book and hopefully yourself.”

Olatundji Akpo-Sani
Baobob Tree Press

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Product Details
Paperback: 181 pages
Published: October 9, 2009
ISBN-10: 0980165059
ISBN-13: 978-0980165050

Some Exits by Travis Cebula

For a free preview, click here: Some Exits

Here’s what people are saying about Some Exits:

“Travis Cebula’s poems are often as exquisitely spare as the landscapes they contain. More than an exit, these pieces are entrances. The poems follow a trajectory from a dirtied Eden to anywhere that is also a poignant and particular somewhere. His verse is a form of mimicry of the variegated contour where terrain and capitalism collide; these are small elegies to the land that preceded us and will remain, however wasted, after our exit.”

Sara Nolan
The Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics

“Some Exits takes the reader on a poetic road trip, a journey whose rhythms shift dynamically between movement and focus. The short, tightly made poems of this sequence speed the reader through an environment that is at once natural and unnatural, gorgeous and degraded. Cebula gives us a new Eden, but one that is riddled with such presences as Wal-Mart and Woody Woodpecker. Traveling the necessary byways of poetic thought, Some Exits functions as a Baedeker that leads us through the fragile terrain of contemporary life.”

Elizabeth Robinson
Author of The Orphan & Its Relations and Apprehend (Fence Modern Poets Series)

“Travis Cebula has put together an amazing and cohesive book, which is at once simple and emotionally resonant. The images and perspectives he uses are very clear and direct. They both explore the terrain of tension between man and land, between subjective and objective, between fragility and determinacy.”

Jenny Henry
The Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics

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Product Details
Paperback: 41 pages
Published: April 30, 2009
ISBN-10: 0980165032
ISBN-13: 978-0980165036

Taxis and Shit by Jonathan Montgomery

For a free preview, click here: Taxis and Shit

From the Publisher:

With raw honesty and brutal nakedness, Jonathan Montgomery gives us a window into the misadventures and exploits of driving a taxi. If Bukowski would have driven a cab, this is the book he would’ve written about it.

Here’s what people are saying about Some Exits:

“Taxis and Shit is an 83-page cab ride through the best parts of what poetry once was, mixed with multiple side trips into the future of what poetry is meant to be. Holden Caulfield-tinged tales of life, pop music, and the bone drenched search for honest strip clubs and true love, as witnessed from the front seat of a taxi cab. If you’re a fan of poetry, you’ll love this book. If you’re currently of the opinion that all poetry is bullshit, prepare to have those opinions modified at the bio-molecular level, because this book will change your mind. About poetry. About taxis. About shitting in gas station bathrooms and bikini wax. About Hannah Montana. About Phil Collins and the genitalia reclused effects of having a make-believe three-way with a post This Used To Be My Playground Madonna. About Life, the Universe, the Whole Thing.”

Rob Geisen
Author of Paper Thin

“Jonathan Montgomery’s Taxis and Shit quickly puts readers in a kind of inner space that’s rare for poetry lovers. You feel like you’re sitting in a dark room where great film, your own secret voyeurism, and a really deep, old friendship merge. The poems are microscopic slices of relationship, the brief, transparent, partly-formal, but terribly intimate relationship between a taxi driver and his diverse passengers. Montgomery has a sense of the dramatic in the everyday, but the magic of these poems is that he zeroes in on what can unfold between strangers who never get to look in each other’s eyes: the weirdness and sweetness, the insecurity behind the brashness, the body and its impulses, sex and shame and sorrow. You start reading these poems, and you can’t stop, and then you have to reread again and again, because you feel like the secret to the human race is probably in this book.”

Trebbe Johnson
Author of The World Is a Waiting Lover: Desire and the Quest for the Beloved

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Product Details
Paperback: 91 pages
Published: August 24, 2009
ISBN-10: 0980165075
ISBN-13: 978-0980165074