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Cover ArtCalifornia (on the Someș) by Ruxandra Cesereanu. Translated by Adam Sorkin
Ruxandra Cesereanu has been acclaimed as one of the most important and prolific Romanian literary figures of today. She is particularly recognized for her achievements as a poet and novelist, especially the lyrical evocations of femininity and eroticism. She began her literary career as a new expressionist poet, then grew under the influence of surrealism and the Romanian movement that developed out of it, termed onirism, which Cesereanu thought of as becoming more of a dreamlike or psychedelic experience, in the term she coined a style delirionism.
 
 
 
 
Author on BicycleAuthor’s Introduction
In the spring of 2013, I bought a bicycle. I’d wanted a bicycle since I was a little girl, but for all sorts of reasons I’d never gotten one. My first bicycle rides along the bank of the Someș River were always with a hand on the brake, because I knew I risked hitting little kids, strollers and tricycles. In a short while I became used to taking out my bicycle every evening to ride on the rough, unweeded path near my apartment building, then in the Rose Park and finally along the asphalt road near the river as far as the Garibaldi Bridge in my home city of Cluj. I had become a habitué of the twilight and the Someș when something else took place. Coming home on my bicycle, I heard the low drone of guitars and isolated voices: a group of boys and girls strummed and sang the Eagles’ song “Hotel California.” The sound of the guitars and those teenage voices, some thin and high, others hoarse, made me slip back in time to when I was a teenager myself and sang to a guitar with my high school and later my university friends the very same song I heard now, improvised once upon a time with great frenzy, on the bank of the Someș, on the island called Dog Island or at the parties of graduates or students who thought themselves the center of the universe. From this moment of my going back in time, everything here began: it triggered an entire book made of a single long poem about childhood, adolescence, young womanhood and maturity. And about my faith in poetry.  So like the river swollen after a rain, my California on the Someș kept on growing. It hasn’t reached its end and, in fact, never will.
ISBN: 9781737160342
82 pages $15.00


Cover ArtShift Gristle by Heller Levinson

Shift Gristle is under-girded by Hinge’s tireless capacity to Seek. Shift Gristle crackles with high aspiration. Contouring the unknown, fleshing-out the Linguistically Undocumented, the under-acknowledged, the hidden, the digitally stifled, this latest Hinge production summons a mind rebellion, a torch toward primordial utterance.

Mist production as poetic matter expulses the cliché ridden subjective “I.” Atmosphere, not narrative, becomes keystone.

Whether conversing with artists such as Matisse, Edward Hopper, Linda Lynch, the philosopher Heidegger, or exploring new modules like “crossfelling encounter,” “shadow,” “grammatical intimate,” Heller persists in his mission to free us from vapid automatisms, to enrapture our residencies on earth.
 
"Ever thrusting forward, like a dark horse pushing through the currents of complacency so omnipresent in contemporary poetry, Heller Levinson’s work proves revolutionary in its truest meaning: as much as his work matches the experimentation and demanding wildness of some of our best contemporaries,  and looks ahead, testing the resiliency and boundaries of his Hinge Theory, Heller Levinson’s poetry also revolves back to the earliest kernels of the verb, to incantation, the steady-pounding feet of the Muses atop Helicon, pure, radiant glossolalia of one regarding the horror and the splendor through smoke, shamanistic and ancient, he remains a universal prophet.   In LinguaQuake, words gather on the page like erupting genetic codes in swarms of color, chunks of clay, along with great blazes.  He makes more of this brief flash for which we are here—like Bede’s allegory of the sparrow’s flight through a hall, having entered from one darkness, and out through the window into another—than anyone writing today.  Heller Levinson is the mystery, incantation, and the golden babble.  Read this book.  Brace yourself, and spread open for this concupiscence, this arrival.”

-- Anthony Seidman

 
Heller Levinson lives in NYC where he studies animal behavior. He has published in over a hundred journals and magazines including Sulfur, Jacket, Hunger, Talisman, First Intensity, Laurel Review, Omega, The Wandering Hermit, Fire (U.K), Alligatorzine, The Jivin' Ladybug, Moria, Woodcoin, etc. His last publications, Jus Saying and Lure were also published by Black Widow Press. He is the originator of Hinge Theory.
ISBN: 979-8-9880852-0-1
270 pages $19.95


Cover ArtA Possible Epic of Care A collaborative poem by Andrei Codrescu & Vincent Katz

I was washing an eggplant at the end of the world on February 4 2020 when I heard from Vincent. It was Mozart's birthday, a momentous event that the melophiliac Vincent Katz would never have let pass without a celebratory panegyric. There it was in the email, beginning "It's Mozart's birthday. He's only 264." Mozart died young but kept on living. Vincent and I were older already than Mozart was when he died, but if we had any chance at living as long as he did we had better get to work. We are poets but our immortality is far from ensured. Our contributions to the archive of the aptly named The Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics at Naropa University in Boulder Colorado are so far our only bid for a mozartian afterlife.

Not enough. Beginning with Mozart we began our search for the aqua vita of the long poem that would be sung by the melomanes of the future. Covid was our last chance to make embodied poetry that would keep living in the future, as long as we washed our vegetables, masked our faces, disinfected the doorknobs, stayed six feet away from all human beings -- and wrote to each other via the as-yet uncontaminated internet. And if we kept celebrating our immortal predecessors while noting the daily routines to preserve our bodies, we might make it into that future via our (regularly disinfected) keyboards.

Our common bonds at that curious time of the planet- engulfing Plague were various: we were friends, we were poets, we took poetry seriously enough to believe in its superpowers, but above all, we both had mothers who at ages past Ninety needed the care and attention that we could provide them. Our exchanges quickly became an ongoing epic of care. It became also a store of reminiscences, activities and ideas that paid homage to the women we cared for, communiques and confessions that we would have liked them to appreciate. Happily, at least for me, my mother was past appreciating our fabulous antics though she smiled, sometimes appropriately, when I hit Send. She passed away on September 20, 2022, and is now in my room, listening without recourse. Happily, Vincent's mother is, as of this date, still listening in her body to this epic of care.

Also available: One of 26 hardbound/lettered/signed copies, only 16 available for sale.   $95.00

ISBN: 9798988085225
144 pages $18.95


Cover ArtQuery Caboodle by Heller Levinson
Query Caboodle slams a lightning rod into the Hinge panoply by magnifying the centrality of query to investigation. Devoting an entire volume to questions demonstrates not only how much material invites investigation, but also how much of the unexamined life we smugly settle for. Query Caboodle employs the query as modular accelerator. Querying everything from love to tremolo, we find our deep-rooted convictions up-rooted, challenged, & amp; endangered. All is up for grabs.

After our world derails, after our initial wobbling from uncertainty, we find ourselves refreshed rather than depleted, liberated from stale incarcerations, re-invigored, eager to re-imagine our lives.

The Query is the fiery root exfoliating Hinge Production.  Query Caboodle will be the first in a series of volumes devoted to the Vitalistically Inquisitive.
"Heller Levinson's Hinge Theory has shaken the foundation of what literature is/can/will become. I've anticipated each of his books ever since I was turned onto his brilliant Hinge Theory. Heller Levinson is one of the few contemporary poets whose work will be spoken of long after we have shuffled off this mortal coil. I consider Heller Levinson to be, without a doubt, one the best poets of his generation and a poet whose work will be looked upon as one of the major chapters in American literature."
-- Heath Brougher, author, editor, reviewer.
Heller Levinson lives in NYC where he studies animal behavior. He has published in over a hundred journals and magazines including Sulfur, Jacket, Hunger, Talisman, First Intensity, Laurel Review, Omega, The Wandering Hermit, Fire (U.K), Alligatorzine, The Jivin' Ladybug, Moria, Woodcoin, etc. His last publications, Jus Saying and Lure were also published by Black Widow Press. He is the originator of Hinge Theory.
ISBN: 979-8-9880852-1-8
166 pages $17.95


New Titles from Second Line Press
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Cover ArtThe Goodness of Saint Roch by Alice Dubar-Nelson

Alice Dunbar-Nelson was born in 1875 as Alice Ruth Moore in New Orleans, LA. She resided in New Orleans through her teachers training program at Straight University and began teaching in New Orleans.

Her first book, Violets and Other Tales, was published in 1897. She moved to Brooklyn in 1897 and ended up meeting and then marrying the poet Paul Laurence Dunbar in 1898. They were divorced in 1902 and she then moved to

Wilmington, Delaware. In 1916 she married Robert J. Nelson, a civil rights activist, journalist, and politician. In the early 1920's they both edited and published the WIlmington Advocate, a progressive Black newspaper.

From the 1920's through the 1930's she was prominent as a political and social activist and in demand as a public speaker.  She dies in 1935 at the age of 60.

These short stories beautifully capture the time and place of the New Orleans of Dunbar-Nelson's youth and young adulthood.

 

ISBN: 9780988962781
120 pages $15.00


New Titles from Crescent City Books Press
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Cover ArtThe Breathtaking Christa P by P. Curran

Welcome to New Orleans in 1995, a great town for an escaped lunatic with a knack for saying whatever you need to hear. No one spots the holes in his alibi as he creeps through the clip joints and posh restaurants, meeting addicts and crooked cops, grifters and bitter drunks. None of them suspects what kind of danger they're in until it is too late.

ISBN: 9781733892490
221 pages $18.00


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Our "mission" is twofold: to bring back into print (and keep in print) at an accessible price point those authors/titles that have had an impact on the cultural, literary, and/or artistic thought of the 20th (and 21st) century and to publish those poets who are still contributing today in a meaningful way to the same. (Read our full mission statement here.)

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