Catalogue

We are in the process of updating this on-line catalogue. If you do not find a title you are looking for here, please e-mail us at bkmk@umkc.edu, phone us at 816-235-2558*, or fax us at 816-235-2611.

Poetry Fiction Nonfiction and Drama Chapbooks Forthcoming Titles Ordering Information		New Releases Nonfiction New American Essays Selected by Conger Beasley Jr. & Robert Stewart Twenty essays, originally published in New Letters, the international magazine of writing and art—selected from the past two decades of that journal—now in book form. "An excellent exploration of family and culture."                    — Library Journal      [ more... ] Fiction Love Letters from a Fat Man by Naomi Benaron Each voice rings true.  Each new world created in the compressed length of the short story form is vivid and real. This is a book that is rich in character, detail and unified by a vibrant prose style and an empathy for it subjects.  What's more, it is fun to read.  —Stuart Dybek     [ more... ]   Dream Lives of Butterflies: Stories  by Jaimee Wriston Colbert Jaimee Wriston Colbert’s new episodic novel-in-stories is a jewel in both its form and its feeling, with layers of image and meaning as intricately patterned as the dust on a butterfly’s wing. —Madison Smartt Bell     [ more... ]   Who Taught Me to Swim: New and Selected Stories by James McKinley Jim McKinley’s stories are honest and seductively uncomplicated, yet laced with a quiet eloquence. —Speer Morgan These are stories that Hemingway himself would envy.   —Cary C. Holladay     [ more... ]   A Garden Amid Fires by Gladys Swan Nine stories...skillfully track time's toll on the ability to live and love fully.                          --Publishers Weekly Such precision of observation, such fineness of intonation! Uncannily good.   --Fred Chappell           [ more... ]   Necessary Lies by Kerry Neville Bakken Bakken's quiet exploration of life's bookends makes for an auspicious first outing. --Publishers Weekly ...Her stories are simple, straightforward American fiction that works--making Necessary Lies a delight and something of a rare bird.                         --Los Angeles Times     [ more... ]   The Logic of a Rose: Chicago Stories by Billy Lombardo Billy Lombardo's world is the Italian neighborhood of Bridgeport in Chicago, and his imaginative recreation of it is wonderfully evocative, convincing and appealing. --Gladys Swan, 2003 Judge, Chandra Prize     [ more... ] I'll Never Leave You by H. E. Francis I like the solid stories of H. E. Francis and the more experimental, “turned loose” writing that marbles the collection. There are haunting characters caught in the web of tight prose. There is a frequency of memorable lines....Yes, these are stories that don’t leave. --Diane Glancy, 2003 Judge, Chandra Prize     [ more... ] A Bed of Nails by Ron Tanner [Ron Tanner] is fabulously imaginative, experimental, witty, often breathtaking...both male and female voices are handled beautifully, although the prose is what we've come to call "muscular." At first I felt that this was actually two collections, one concerned with life as we know it and one as we fear it will be--but came to believe that the worlds are perfectly married through their askew inventiveness and their witty contemporary language. It's very assured and audacious work. --Janet Burroway, 2002 Judge, Chandra Prize     [ more... ] The Alibi Café and Other Stories by Mary Troy What virtually all the characters share is a profound sense of ironic detachment that keeps the world at a protective remove. Although Mary Troy could portray them merely as hapless losers, she wisely chooses to let us glimpse the resignation behind their struggles. --New York Times Book Review     [ more... ] Poetry Airs & Voices by Paula Bonnell This is an enchanting book.—Richard Wilbur Paula Bonnell has a magic touch. —X. J. Kennedy Low-key but full of quirky insights that keep Bonnell's poems fresh and interesting. —Maxine Kumin     [ more... ]   Wayne's College of Beauty David Swanger "Wayne's College of Beauty evokes neighborhoods and well-traveled paths....These poems are hard-edged and beautiful, an exciting collection." --Colleen J. McElroy     [ more... ] Cleaning a Rainbow by Gary Gildner [Gildner] reminds me of Randall Jarrell’s praise for a language that even cats and dogs can read, the hardest thing in the world to write well. Gildner is as good as a clear night for seeing things.—Dave Smith     [ more... ]   The Book of the Rotten Daughter Alice Friman "These are astonishing poems which fearlessly jump into hell and out again, that resent or forgive, poems which wryly, exactly, and so richly honor the world of the living." --Marianne Boruch     [ more... ]   The Portable Famine by Rane Arroyo Proudly Puerto Rican and gay, well-traveled in the U.S. and Europe, and devoted to the modernist projects begun by Wallace Stevens and Hart Crane, Arroyo (Home Movies of Narcissus, etc.) makes all those identities and commitments evident in his compact, intelligent and sometimes sexy seventh book. --Publishers Weekly     [ more... ]   Streetfighting Daniel Donaghy Streetfighting is a racy, sobering book about the vicissitudes of an urban childhood. Every poem has the ring of authenticity--the observed, the suffered, the mourned--but only because the language of every poem is wound tight as a fist.--James Longenbach     [ more... ] Circe, After Hours Marilyn Kallet Marilyn Kallet's Circe, After Hours shines with a high-intensity light into the underworld of ordinary lives, creating bridges between the brain's left and right hemispheres--reason and passion. In this marvelous collection, the process of art illuminates life's path.--Yusef Komunyakaa     [ more... ] Fence Line by Curtis Bauer Winner of the John Ciardi Prize for Poetry, Selected by Christopher Buckley These poems vivify the landscapes that remain with the one who leaves--and returns, changed. --Robin Becker Fence Line is a terrific book by a young poet with a unique voice and burgeoning powers. --Thomas Lux     [ more... ] Lake Erie Blue by Susan Grimm In Lake Erie Blue, Susan Grimm has created a vibrant and haunted city of desire lying along a great lake that ripples with mystery. She sings of the one place we know more and less about than any other: home.--David Citino     [ more... ] Prayer Against Famine and Other Irish Poems by John Knoepfle In this moving book of poems, John Knoepfle transforms a search for his Irish roots into a meditation on human suffering and survival. The whole book is a prayer against famine and the gratuitous cruelty inflicted on the innocent, both the Irish of the last century and the Central Americans of today.--Kathleen Norris     [ more... ] The Feast by Walter Bargen In The Feast, Walter Bargen has generated a cosmology that ricochets between eschatology and creation, and he's fostered a world that simultaneously dies and is reborn out of the chaos of consciousness.--Gary Young     [ more... ] The Dissolving Island by David Rigsbee The Dissolving Island, a wonderful collection of new poems by David Rigsbee, is the work of a raconteur of the spirit, a splendid storyteller with just enough jaunty language to make you feel you’d want to hear almost anything he had to say. He is elegiac and disciplined, rapturous and suspicious, but more than anything else these are the sort of poems that James Wright once called “the poetry of a grown man.” I’d add the poems of a remarkable, felicitous intelligence. --Dave Smith     [ more... ] Escape Artist by Terry Blackhawk Winner of the John Ciardi Poetry Prize, selected by Molly Peacock Terry Blackhawk's poems, crisp as the first apples of autumn, are tart, knowing, and full of the growth of summer. Poems like these can sustain you. You can read and re-read them, marveling at their construction and arrested by insights you missed the first time which then sneak up on you. Blackhawk's poems make you know, with a touch so light you hardly realize you are being tapped on the shoulder, that you are in the presence of the best poetry: multi-leveled, passionate, varied, thoughtful, intense, and beautiful. Escape Artist always conveys the sense that limits and boundaries free us as they define us. It is a harvest of a book, mature work, and its voice carries the zesty suggestion of more poems to come. --Molly Peacock, 2002 Judge, John Ciardi Prize     [ more... ] Blue Beat Syncopation by Stanley E. Banks Along with his mentor Langston Hughes, Banks is one of the few poets who can claim a true fusion of the spoken word with the blues-music form. --John Mark Eberhart, The Kansas City Star     [ more... ] Beyond the Reach: Poems by Deborah Cummins In her exhilarating debut collection Deborah Cummins captures "this luminosity, this voracious charity" that suffuses her keenly observed and richly imagined universe. With equal and abiding affection for the human and natural worlds, these poems confront regret, loss, and difficult revision, with blessing, grace, mercy, praise, and the promise of redemption. --Ronald Wallace     [ more... ]
Ordering Information To order any title, please add $2 shipping and handling for first volume and $.50 for each additional volume. We offer a 40% discount to recognized wholesalers and retailers. Our books are available from Baker & Taylor. Recent books are available from SPD Books (Small Press Distribution), www.spdbooks.org. Please remit in U.S. funds. BkMk Press also accepts Mastercard and Visa. BkMk Press University of Missouri-Kansas City 5101 Rockhill Road Kansas City, Missouri 64110 (816) 235-2558* (816) 235-2611 Fax bkmk@umkc.edu   * Answered 9-5 CST or leave message on voice mail. Individuals with speech or hearing impairments may call Relay Missouri at (800) 735-2966 (TT) or (800) 735-2466 (voice).

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