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Today is

   

Catalog of Out-of-Print Books

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Reamy Jansen:

Available Light
Memoir by Reamy Jansen

 

This is a soft spoken heartfelt book--one to be read slowly, akin to short sips from a glass of fine wine.
          — Robert Milo-Baldwin, Bloomsbury Review of Books

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American Book Review Praises Reamy Jansen's Available Light: "With the skill of a master craftsman, the self-admitted 'sentimental hoarder' gathers together the bits and pieces, material and memory, not yet lost to him and builds a cabinet he might pass on to his sons when they're curious about family origins, failed obligations, specific wounds, the possibilities and limitations of forgiveness, abut the ways in which a father remains a son for life, and the unresolved impetus behind his writing about it."
                        -- Steve Davenport, American Book Review, January/February 2011, Volume 32, Number 2

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When SUNY Rockland and Fordham professor Reamy Jansen was young, he made a  box to store family photos, adding a sprinkling of red and blue glitter over 'images that had already starrted to curl and roll up like rhododendron leaves in winter.' This graceful suite of personal essays should prove a more durable keepsake, with breathtaking phrases that glint and surprise. 
         -- Chronogram Arts and Literature Magazine of the Hudson Valley

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It's a book of stories that could be the stories of so many mean -- about hi many varied relationships: with his dad, his sons, hims mom, his wife, and even his belongings.
   —Mary Jane Pitt, News of the Highlands (Highland Falls, NY 10928) 7-30-10

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I finally got time to pick up Available Light this evening— and then I couldn’t put it down. I found the imagery absorbing and then there’s your ability to say what needs to be said and not go further. So very well done
           —Rochelle Ratner, Bobby’s Girl, The Lion’s Share, Ben Casey Days

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      It’s just great...the best descriptive work I’ve read by anyone. The way you so brilliantly weave the speaker’s past and present into a study of his father, while alluding to so much outside the immediate context. It’s all so beyond the usual essay that I think you must be redefining the genre.  
                         —John Allman, Loew’s Triboro, Lowcountry

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I found [Available Light] to be not only like poetry, but poetry itself. The language, the silences and the formal structures are all very beautiful. It seems to me to have a place across the borders of various genres, which I always love. I felt the reality of both your parents in the descriptions, both explicit and elliptical.    
                                                                   —Jane Lazarre

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I’m enjoying re-reading Available Light immensely. It is as engaging and splendid as I remember it being the first time through.
           —Dan Masterson, On Earth As It Is, Those Who Trespass, Enskyment.org

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Reamy Jansen’s Available Light: Recollections and Reflections of a Son  has just been published in a beautiful paperback.  Check out the soft blendings of the sepia cover photos as introduction to a collection of personal essays informed by Reamy’s vast reading and remarkable for their candor and benevolence.  Jack Allman finds the essays “so beyond the usual... you must be redefining the genre”.  Faculty in the humanities, when they get a great idea, can turn to Reamy as their walking bibliography and most enthusiastic listener. He is open and generous with his readers as well.
                                                              — Pamela Floy

 

 

 

 

Halvard Johnson:

Guide to the Tokyo Subway
Poems by Halvard Johnson

Many poets send me their books, but few I've received are as fine as Halvard Johnson'sGuide to the Tokyo Subway.  I have at least fourteen favorite poems, including "Morning Calm," "Paris in Old Photographs," "La Violencia," "How to Write Your Own Obituary" and "Take Me to the Water."  And for sheer delight, "Thirteen Variations on a Line by Robert Frost." In just about all of the poems there's something fascinating—an image, a tone, a total consciousness (often an achieved calm), an experiment with sound or phrasing.  I found myself re-reading many of the poems, so many are "locked" and provide complete satisfaction. It’s also the wide range of Guide to the Toyko Subway that I greatly admire, the complete interest Halvard Johnson brings to so many things, the expansiveness of these poems even while they're leading us to still moments. I've never seen another poet acknowledge the nuclear power plant, include it in solid lines, and then, in the same poem, move beyond it out to the Zen-like horizon in that unique "bomb and calm" style which is all Johnson's own. -- Dick Allen

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Organ Harvest With Entrance of Clones
Poems by Halvard Johnson

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...Halvard Johnson epitomizes today's underground poet.

              George Held, American Book Review, Volume 31, Number 5, July-August 2010, p.12

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I begin with Halvard Johnson's Organ Harvest with Entrance of Clones (Hamilton Stone Editions) because there is no other American poet who writes so thrillingly of the present and with such imagination and craft. This volume, his 13th, is a metrical vortex, dazzling in its constructions.

             Reamy Jansen in  The Bloomsbury Review, November/December 2007, p. 30.

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Halvard Johnson's book Organ Harvest with Entrance of Clones represents the work of a quiet pluralist who is by equal measure amazed by the world and dismayed & angered by those who would control it. The poems here range from abstract musings (or amusements) on relationships to ironic assaults on the hypocrisies that run through the current political landscape. Throughout, Johnson uses the fungibility of language to say at least two things at every opportunity, one of them literal and the other ironic or whimsical. There is an aspect of jesterism or merry prankster in each poem, though at the center of the book is an optimism that our "better natures" still reside in us somewhere and that eventually, perhaps through the application of poetry and intelligence, they will rise to the surface, if only just in time. A solid book recommended.

                                                                 Jorn Ake

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Harriet Rzetelny:

Graveyard Blues
Novel by Harriet Rzetelny

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See video clips of Harriet Rzetelny on "Books and the World" cable show discussing the source of the title of Graveyard Blues. For more of the interview, click here.

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"Graveyard Blues is the story of Molly Lewin as she confronts the crushing environment around her. A homecare worker, she faces a client's murder, and the pending eviction of everyone at a low rent complex as big business wants to take over their land. Crushed between family issues, the murder, and the loss of home for people with few other options, "Graveyard Blues" is a fascinating and intriguing mystery not to be missed."

-- Midwest Book Reviews, July 2010 (5 star review)

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“Harriet Rzetelny is an inheritor of the great tradition of the social novel which mixes imaginative and documentary writing. Her wise and melancholy protagonist, Molly, is a walker in the city who bestows her gifted and caring vision on the sensuous details of the “inner city” neighborhoods through which she moves, and the marginalized people who inhabit them. This tragicomic novel is magnificent in its reach. Combining profound knowledge of the alleyways and corridors through which a soul can be lost and found, Graveyard Blues haunts the imagination of the reader long after the murder mystery has been resolved. Images of human differences and conflict, of attraction and repulsion, sanity and madness, love and destructiveness fill the pages of this book and embed themselves in memory. Ultimately, it is the quality of Rzetelny’s writing that distinguishes it most – the echoes of song, the cadence that takes one’s breath away, the musicality that saturates her storytelling.”
     --  Marc Kaminsky, author of What's Inside You It Shines Out and Shadow Traffic

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“Harriet Rzetelny mines the grit of the city and comes up with gold. Her indomitable social worker detective, Molly Lewin, relentlessly traces the twisty path that has lead to the murder of one of her clients. When the casual bureaucracy and corruption of city agencies threaten to topple the investigation, Molly’s determination leads her to confront her own personal demons. Thought-provoking and compassionate, Rzetelny’s first novel presents a deeply sympathetic female detective with a profound understanding of people and the complexity of their emotional lives.”
        -- Carole Rosenthal, author of It Doesn’t Have to Be Me

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"Graveyard Blues is a YOU CAN’T PUT IT DOWN book, and I share. . .with Marc Kaminsky the experience of having my imagination haunted by the book. Molly Lewin is a wonderful social worker – first rate practitioner, friend, social activist, and family member. Isn’t it wonderful to have a really good social worker as the central character of a terrific book? Enjoy and take pride!"

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-- Dr. Rose Dobrof, Professor Emeritus, Hunter College School of Social Work and Executive Director (Ret) of Brookdale Center for Healthy Aging & Longevity.

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"Graveyard Blues is not just a mystery. It crosses the boundaries between mystery – of which there is a good one – multi-layered literary fiction, and the great social novels of the 19th century. Molly, the heroine, is a complex character. She pours her heart into caring – for her older, vulnerable clients, some of whom are being forced out of their low-rent apartments by a group of upscale real estate developers, and for her brilliant but schizophrenic brother. But at the end of the day, she goes home alone and listens to old jazz and blues and wonders why she can’t connect with men. When a man finally does turn up that she can connect with, he’s an NYPD detective, a Viet Nam vet with PTSD who has a painful way of suddenly appearing and then disappearing from her life.

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"The novel is set in an imagined Brooklyn neighborhood a year and a half following the World Trade Center disaster. But when you are in Rzetelny’s neighborhood, you know exactly where you are because she perfectly depicts the little details that make up a place, and pulls you right into the hearts and minds of the people who inhabit it. Even the quirky, surprising characters unfold with the truth of who they are and make themselves real to you. Graveyard Blues stayed with me long after the mystery is solved and the story comes to an end."

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-- B.J Giges, Amazon.com Customer Review

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Set in Brooklyn, New York a little over a year after September 11th, 2001, this multi-layered mystery features social worker Molly Lewin, who first appeared in a series of short stories in Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine.

After one of Molly's elderly clients, Cal Buchman, is murdered and his 82-year old life-companion, Willie Cobb, a one time Delta bluesman, is threatened with eviction, Molly discovers a scheme by a group of developers who want to demolish the low-rent buildings occupied by mostly elderly tenants and replace them with an upscale shopping complex. To Molly, a neighborhood's older people are like the roots of a tree. “Without [this] strong root network, there is no continuity, no history, nothing to maintain the balance of life in a community.”

The murder, and then another one, reconnects her with NYPD Detective Steve Carmaggio, a troubled Viet Nam vet and recovering alcoholic last seen by Molly the night before the Twin Towers were destroyed. Another of the disappearing men in her life is Molly's dearly loved brother, Ben, whose once exceptional mind is relentlessly vanishing into the unfathomable world of his mental illness.

Still, Molly sees life's humor as well as its tragedies. She becomes friends with Da Mour, a cross-dresser known to her in another guise, who may or may not be trying to date her, but who definitely knows something about the murders. Da Mour is but one of several surprising, quirky but never cartoonish characters that provide Molly with information and support. But it is ultimately the music that supplies the inspiration she needs to unravel the mysteries in her life, including the solution to the murders.

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ISBN 9780980178630 $14.95

To order from Amazon.com, click here.
To order from Barnes & Noble, click here.

To order by mail, click here .

To read the first chapter of Graveyard Blues, click here for a .pdf.

Also see the book website at http://www.graveyardbluesmystery.com/

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