Kent Press imprint: 601 books

“Seven Boxes for the Country After is a book about a way-making and way-finding. It is a journey, both internal and external, across a map, over borders, through a life, and in a body. It is passage and pilgrimage, odyssey and exile. Above all it is a book of questions. What do we carry with us...

Spanning oceans and continents, language and the imagination, the unfathomable distances between people and their desires, Allison Davis’s Poppy Seeds creates an “immaculate atlas.” Here language is “broken… against the margin of the sea,” and a word is a thing that can be “wash[ed]...

Much like author James T. Farrell, Mickey Donovan—the main character in *Dreaming Baseball—*grew up on the South Side of Chicago dreaming of becoming a star for the White Sox. Donovan’s childhood dream came true in 1919 when he made the team. Despite the fact that he spent most of his rookie...

Ambrose Bierce’s In the Midst of Life, the second volume of The Collected Works of Ambrose Bierce, is hailed by critics and scholars alike as his most important literary work. In Ambrose Bierce’s Civilians and Soldiers in Context: A Critical Study, Donald T. Blume refutes this and instead identifies...

“After reading Primer for Non-Native Speakers, I feel like I’ve just come back from a trip to Russia. Philip Metres’s brilliantly compressed lyrical narratives capture the grandeur and the bleakness of an almost mythological country, where a bronze statue of the great poet Pushkin now gazes...

“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...