New Book by Frank Reardon from NeoPoiesis Press

Nirvana Haymaker
ISBN 978-0-9855577-7-5
180 pages
$16.95
5.5"x8.5" perfect bound, paper

Buy it at the publisher NeoPoiesisPress.com,Amazon.com,
Barnes & noble.com (pretty soon) & other book sellers
they make great New Years gifts, Christmas gifts,
or just plain old gifts.PICK ONE UP,we are a hungry bunch!

Here are what others are saying about the book:

"Read Frank Reardon at your own risk. He'll open your heart with a corkscrew and leave you wide-eyed and longing for more...these are goddamed excellent poems."

- Dan Fante, author of Chump Change, Kissed By a Fat Waitress and Mooch

"If you have any feelings left then the poems in The Nirvana Haymaker will disturb you. Not because there's something wrong with them but because what of they reveal about Mr. Reardon's depth of personal examination. There are precious few who are writing with such honesty these days."

- RD Armstrong, editor & founder of Lummox Press


"Frank's poems are honest and moving documents from one human to any other with the ear and heart to receive them. They do much to remind me it is important to try and be truly alive in this, our time upon the earth."

-William Taylor Jr., author of An Age of Monsters


"You're sitting in a dark room, alone, washing down Valium with coffee, wishing you could see the stars through the dirty window; instead, you see a reflection of yourself, the lines on your face heavier, the life in your eyes drained. You hope for something better: a better girl, a better place, a better you. Cigarette smoke cuts the bitterness for a second. You squint, through the haze, trying so hard to see something in yourself. The heater brightens the room when you take a drag. There's nothing left. May as well write about it and hope to hell someone comes along to share your coffee and your life, making those damn lines mean something more than just empty scars."

- R L Raymond, editor, Pigeon Bike Press


"Frank Reardon presents the self, suspended, stepping away from moments to observe their context, attentive to unusual details, emerging changed in the face of them. He remains the poet in the “pause” of his earlier collection, Interstate Chokehold, but readers will find that his world has changed: his influences more accessible, his connection inextricable, less transcendent.

His is now a quieter agitation- a processing, toward more stable ground. The Nirvana Haymaker reveals an evolving poetic, candid and confessional as before, but tapping into new psychic territories where his imagination is given a more confident liberty."

- Lynn Alexander, editor, Full of Crow Press

Frank Reardon's poetry is high-voltage! It's like when my brother stuck a screwdriver in an outlet to see what it would do and it did. Reardon's words change who you are and your perception of the world as you know it forever. Get ready!

- Meg Tuite, fiction editor of The Santa Fe Literary Review

New Book by April Michelle Bratten

It Broke Anyway
by April Michelle Bratten

NeoPoiesis Press
ISBN 978-0-9855577-6-8
182 pages
$16.95
5.5”x8.5” perfect bound, paper

order online at NeoPoiesis Press (http://www.neopoiesispress.com/) or amazon.com

April Michelle Bratten blasts in with her potent, no-holds barred tongue and obliterates the marrow of the insulated inertia, uncorks the rabid subterfuge of day-to-day existence and lures us like a river into deep rapids. Bratten’s collection is fearless, captivating, drops us down into those parts of ourselves we are terrified and yet excited to penetrate.

--Meg Tuite, author of Domestic Apparition and Disparate Pathos

(excerpt)

She Moves As I Move

When I saw her hair move,
I was reminded of how I can move,
we can move,
because she does move like
brown pumping splitting heart.

There is a walking bridge.
I have seen it move over the city.
We were there together once.
I saw her on it,
moving inside that great cage.
She moved her head,
she moved her mouth, she moved.

She asked if the walls were built,
if that cage was built,
to prevent the movements,
to stop the movers from moving,
jumping, steaming, toppling off the bridge.

I said, I guess so, then I just
watched her move, felt my own move,
then felt sad
that all of our movements are only temporary,
that we must one day stop moving.

Then we moved away, we moved away.
I saw her moving as she left,
a walking, moving, brown,
carousing, galloping, steering heart
that just moved as I was moving
and left anyway.

April Michelle Bratten writes out demarcations and maps of inner journeys turned outward with a velocity of truth that sears the reader with a flame of love at the center of it all. It is an eternal fire that will free the spirit from any wreckage encountered along the route that her words will guide you on from beginning to end.

--A. Razor, editor/publisher, Punk Hostage Press

April Michelle Bratten’s poetry explores, with a ferocious skill and immediacy, just about every layer of human experiences of our time. She internalizes the places she visits, physical or mental, transforming herself to enable a deeper empathetic connection with that place. She is thus, not a passive observer but moves beyond the state of being a witness to becoming a participant, engaging her readers too to share and partake in the same. Her work is addictive, insightful, exotically crafted, often with vignettes of humor and most of all, positively sensual.

--June Nandy, author of The lines must die

It Broke Anyway, which pays homage to the trials and tribulations of women, reminds me of the Bob Dylan Song, “Just Like a Woman,” except that Bratten's characters never break just like little girls. Instead she creates multidimensional characters who will remind you of your sister, mother, grandmothers, aunts, girl friends and most notably yourself. Bratten's cunning parallels, chilling narratives, and haunting endings remind us what breaks is often more epochal than what remains intact.

--Rebecca Schumejda, author of Cadillac Men (New York Quarterly Books)

From the wells of narrative emotion comes a different April Michelle Bratten from the one I was first introduced to years ago. This April has decided to dive into the dark places we go when we need to see how far material light reaches. This is a compilation of raw emotion wrapped around form, like a collection of her memories, but those of others too.

She talks to us and herself all at once in a primal way only decoded through the simple act of reading the pieces. A sexual anxiety turns the screws on each poem like rivets being stripped, the details the closest we get to clothing, but in the end, we enjoy the naked trip.

--Jason Neese, screenwriter, author, and co-editor of Kill Poet

April Michelle Bratten's poetry does not pretend. It does not put on airs; it is exquisite. Her relationship to the word is careful and creative but she leaves room for the reader to interpret, to draw their own conclusions, to have a moment to themselves inside the thoughts of another. It is so rare to find this in a poet---willing to stand aside from any platform and simply bear witness.

--Michele McDannold, founding editor and publisher at Citizens for Decent Literature

With this book, April Michelle Bratten has let her truest colors burn bright, both a vulnerable glimpse into her day to day emotional grind and a sensual coming of age, her poems take no prisoners and offer no apologies for the beautiful awkward moments that make us who we are.

--John Dorsey, author of White Girl Problems: Poems & Stories