Kent Press: 598 books

“Maureen Passmore’s poetry I can only liken to cut-and-polished jewels: structurally simple, innately priceless, sharp-edged, and brilliant. . . . With the jeweler’s touch, she brings out just enough edge, elegant and lean, to intrigue us before offering the next edge, then the next. What makes...

"This book is a document of a particular world, real, wrenched from the poet's life, as if written with a gun to his head or a spike through his heart. Reading it is like opening a damp newspaper wrapped around a big fish just caught, fins glistening, scales shining, one rhymed eye open and looking...

“When the wire man in love with the boiled wool woman imagines himself making love with her under the emerald tree and then making her a mouth, is he desiring to make for her a mouth, or to make of her a mouth? Such questions charge Karen Schubert’s off-kilter worlds with a force less like gravity...

Unlike his fiction, which has been popular and often reprinted, Melville’s poetry remains obscure. The last “collected poems” appeared in 1947 and “selected poems” in the 1970s, and only two books dealing exclusively with Melville’s poetry have appeared, both published in the 1970s. In...

Few are familiar with one of the Holocaust’s most monstrous acts, the systematic murder of 5,000 Jewish residents in a Nazi-occupied Polish town, Trochenbrod, on August 11, 1942. Of the 33 who escaped death, only one person remains to describe these events—Betty Gold. Twelve-year-old Betty and...

A sampling of Elinor Wylie's most representative work In the 1920s Elinor Wylie’s poetry and novels were critically acclaimed and enjoyed popularity in both the United States and England. Her poems were published in the New Yorker, the Century, the New Republic, and the Saturday Review of...

“In ‘Love Poem to the Phrase Let’s Get Coffee,’ Catherine Pierce writes ‘I adore  your elegant manner,  one hand on the car door, the other on the ass.’ She writes with her own tricky elegance, one that acknowledges yet adores language’s self-serving grace. Pierce deftly blends repetition...

“Like Cole Porter, Sarah Perrier turns a world-weary and tender gaze toward the unruly carnival we call love. Perrier shrugs off the post-modern shrugs. In these elegant, wise-cracking, and subversive poems, the inherent estrangement, deception, and screwball comedy of romance is revealed and savored....

“Mindi Kirchner possesses an unblinking honesty and wit that is at once enchanting and heartbreaking. Her agile, beautifully crafted poems address the disappointments and sorrows of our uncrafted, ordinary lives and the painful distance between reality and imagination. She celebrates the joy in...

This collection represents an engagement with American history, technology, and cultures. Murphy’s poetry ranges from fairly straightforward narrations of events to experimental pieces using a variety of American-speaking subjects and several angles of vision on cultural creations—Elvis Presley,...

The thrilling memoir of a light-aircraft pilot during World War II During World War II the ability of American ground forces to advance in the face of fierce resistance was largely dependent on the precision of artillery barrages. Aerial observation was frequently the only effective means to...

A collection of essays tracing seven decades of literary interaction between Hemingway and notable French authors In a 1946 Atlantic Monthly essay, Jean-Paul Sartre writes: “The greatest literary development in France between 1929 and 1939 was the discovery of Faulkner, Dos Passos, Hemingway,...

Crime has formed the basis of countless plots in music theater and opera. Several famous composers were murder victims or believed to be murdered, and one of the greatest Renaissance composers slaughtered his wife and her lover. In Musical Mysteries, renowned true crime historian Albert Borowitz turns...

“Heather Lanier’s The Story You Tell Yourself may be a first book, but Lanier’s firm intelligence and lyrical artistry make poems that are clearly the confident work of an extraordinarily accomplished, even thrilling, poet. Lanier isn’t kidding when she says, auda-ciously, ‘I found a shape...