Purchase An Introduction to the Prose Poem

New from Firewheel Editions

Sinéad O'Conor and Her Coat of a Thousand Colors

This book is not about Sinéad O’Connor or the gathering impulse of blue birds or the rotten plans of serge-robed men or Aunt Foxy’s potted peppers. Even we, its progenitors, will see this book on a shelf somewhere someday and think: Now we will learn all there is to learn about Sinéad O’Connor and her coat of a thousand bluebirds, having forgotten the way human beings forget the importance of remembering. But Sinéad will always remain the ethereal Sinéad, and the path to the shorn woman with the songbird’s throat will remain (un)regrettably undetectable.

Sinead is a Sentence Book Award winner.

The Book of Willie

"Willie" is Kesler's undisguised alter ego—a Vietnam combat vet whose deck is stacked with rabid trick-or-treaters, nuclear terrorists, and grumpy VA hospital volunteers. Funny, touching, and uncannily relevant in light of current events, these poems remind us that the soldiers we send to fight our wars may go on fighting them for the rest of their lives.

Purchase The Book of Willie by Charlese Kesler

The Important Thing Is...Card Game

Winner of the 2009 Firewheel Chapbook Award. This chapbook is signed and numbered and part of a limited edition of 150.

Marjorie Tesser's first book is a riot, a concept, a poem you can play and play with. Beginning from comments solicited at a Suggestion Box at the Bowery Poetry Club, using those metapoems to conceive both the book-as-card-game motif (roll over, Surrealism!) and the fill-in-the-blanks of the cards themselves, she slowly builds a breathing inner life through the cards' seemingly implacable random chance operations. How she does this is how a poem works: machinations of language funneling to sorrow and joy, thrills, offhanded and wacky happiness. Deal me in. Y'all play along. Shuffle and shuffle and read read read.

- Bob Holman

 

The Important Thing Is...Card Game by Marjorie Tesser is:

- Kristin Prevallet

Had Slaves is the winner of the inaugural Sentence Book Award, which goes annually to a manuscript consisting entirely or substantially of prose poems or other hard-to-define work situated in the grey areas between poetry and other genres - work that promotes the mission of Sentence: A Journal of Prose Poetics to extend the conception of what the prose poem is or can be.

"Sasanov demonstrates here, as she has in the past, that it is possible to tell a story in verse that takes advantage of what makes poetry so powerful, its magnificent potential for restraint, economy, and a kind of emotional precision that nearly defies comprehension."

- Sima Rabinowitz, reviewer for Newpages.com

"After research and soul search, Catherine Sasanov leaves us with a distillation of thought on the brink of extinction. Poems that breathe with the urgency of last resort, as though every other means of expression had been exhausted."

- Ruth Maleczech, Mabou Mines Theater Company

NEW! The poem "Tara" from Had Slaves was chosen for inclusion in the Verse Daily website on July 31. Read it here.

Purchase Had Slaves by
Catherine Sasanov

Sentence 8 is now available, including:

Prose poems by Joel Allegretti, Dennis Barone, Michael Bazzett, Simeon Berry, Tia Black, Craig Blais, Sarah Blake, Stefanie Botelho, Cory Brown, Benjamin Cartwright, Georges-Olivier Chateaureynaud, Eric Darby, Jon Davis, Neil de la Flor and Maureen Seaton, Oliver de la Paz, Alexis Fedorjaczenko, Valerie Fox, Jeremy Halinen, Joshua Harmon, Chris Haven, Megin Jimenez, Ann Killough, Gian Lombardo, Morton Marcus, Mary Meriam, Brad Modlin, Sima Rabinowitz, Daniel Asa Rose, Renee Rossi, Kristin Ryling, Patty Seyburn, David Shumate, John A. Ward, Tom Whalen, Max Winter, and John Yau.

A Forum on the Prose Poem with commentary by Robert Alexander, Nin Andrews, Sally Ashton, Steven Bradbury, Susan Briante, Christopher Buckley, Jeffrey Davis, Michel Delville, Paul Dickey, Ann Fisher-Wirth, Elisabeth Frost, Gloria Frym, Jeff Harrison, Bob Heman, Brooke Horvath, George Kalamaras, Janet Kaplan, David Lazar, Rachel Loden, Gian Lombardo, Robert Hill Long, Amy Newman, Renee Rossi, Nikki Santilli, Catherine Sasanov, Daryl Scroggins, Terese Svoboda, Eileen Tabios, G. C. Waldrep, Charles Harper Webb, and Gary Young.

An interview with Peter Johnson (by Jamey Dunham).

Reviews and essays by Claire Barbetti, Deborah Bogen, Sten Carlson, Robin Clarke, Carol Dorf, Lea Graham, Paul Hoover, Brooke Horvath, Priscilla Kinter, Virginia Konchan, Kate Litterer, Sharon Fagan McDermott, Linda Rodriguez, Justin Vicari, and Connie Voisine.