Showing results by publisher "Four Way Books" in All Categories

A. H. Jerriod Avant’s debut collection, Muscadine, cultivates the vine of familial memory, eulogizing our collective losses while exalting the succor of this human life, how the native grape’s “thick skin [that] teeth / pierce breaks to pour // sweetly across the tongue.” Throughout, a deeply Southern sensibility balances an environmental awareness of deficit and bounty—appetite pains the stomach and delights the palette.

Peter Coyote’s first collection of poetry takes us on a whirlwind tour of an eclectic and exciting life as an actor and Zen Buddhist priest, meandering from love affairs to marriage to divorce to the '60s to psychedelic spirituality and beyond. Written over several decades, these poems sound like a collage, each piece distinct and contributing to a cohesive lyric narrative.

The energies animating Saints of Little Faith, Megan Pinto’s electrifying debut in poetry, are a forceful quiet, a loud stillness, the caesura between a lightning strike and the sound of thunder. Everywhere, the speaker sees the numinous power of language, the incipience of things to come, even a kind of catastrophic grace in desolation and destruction—as if within the terrain of her own obsession, she recognizes the familiar, ever-changing seasons.

Rewriting Eden, Victoria Redel interrogates the idea of paradise within the historical context of borders, exile, and diaspora that brought us to the present global migration crisis. Drawing from a long family history of flight and refuge, the poems in Paradise interweave religion and myth, personal lore and nation-building, borders actual and imagined. They ask: What if what we fell from was never, actually, grace? What is a boundary, really?