GenPop Books

Alan Semerdjian’s In the Architecture of Bone is reviewed in Long Island Pulse, thanks to reviewer George Wallace:

For those of us who are prepared to “Go Deep” into the architecture of the individual human experience rather than skim its surfaces, there’s good news. As revealed by Armenian-American poet and musician Alan Semerdjian, there is much that is “bone deep” in his book The Architecture Of Bone (GenPop Books, 2009).

Click here to read the full review.

ISBN: 9780982359419 Poetry, 6″x8″, 68 pages, perfectbound Publication date: 15 October 2010 Click here for excerpts and more information For review copies, please contact: editors [at] genpopbooks [dot] com Also available for pre-order (ships Fall 2010) $14 includes shipping in the US ($15 in stores). Pre-order via PayPal: Add to Cart Or click here to pre-order by check.

Advance Praise for then, we were still living

In these roughly whispered poems, Klein somehow—miraculously—manages to evoke a past of empty suitcases, of ghosts, while being fully present in the moment, in the now. In this way each phrase, each utterance, is completely weighted-their music enters us deeply, even as they seemingly drift past.
—Nick Flynn

Every once in a great while, someone writes a book that changes the way I read poems. Michael Klein’s then, we were still living is one of those books. Its language is so close to the bone, there’s nothing to interfere with or soften the intimate transactions between reader and poem. When the subject is death, or love, or the great metaphysical questions asked by the soul—and every poem in the book is on that scale—we see that meaning and language are one and the same. I’m going to give copies to everyone I know.
—Chase Twichell

Several years ago I heard Michael Klein read a four line poem from what was to become this remarkable new collection, then, we were still living, and thinking that he had gotten to the heart of the new, changed world. Now, I am sure of it. Everything in this book is terrifying and beautiful and necessary and there isn’t one syllable that isn’t absolutely required by the times we live in. This is a wholly original and essential book.
—Lynn Emanuel

then, we were still living begins with the gorgeous short poem, “Bread,” and moves on with precision and concision from one glory to the next. I think “The Ranges” is one of the most searing poems of fathers and sons in our time, and the poem “The Twin” is the best poem ever written on the subject of twinship. Michael Klein sees the world broadly, deeply and clearly, and uses each word with ultimate care. This is an important and essential book of poems.
—Liz Rosenberg

Dear Reader, you feel “more in the world” after Michael Klein has flooded you with light in these poems. You blink. There’s the page, sure, as a membrane between the living and the dead, the (sexy) body and the soul, but you’re less sure of the divisions as you feel your way around the old, modern, American, excruciating, “always movie” of the real. In this condition, dear Reader, you’re vulnerable to something like awe.
—Bruce Smith

About the Author

Michael Klein’s books are: Track Conditions, a memoir, The End of Being Known, a memoir, and 1990, a book of poems which tied with James Schuyler to win a Lambda Literary Award in 1993. He teaches in the MFA Program at Goddard College and is on the summer faculty at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown. He is currently working on a book version of his blog to be called States of Independence. He divides his time between Provincetown and New York City.

Nancy Stohlman
Searching for Suzi

ISBN: 0980165067
Fiction, 5″ x 7.75″, 96 pages, perfectbound
Publication date: 2009
Monkey Puzzle Press

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What happens when an ex-stripper in her mid-thirties, married with children, awakens one day questioning what brought her to a current life of complicated domesticity? Compelled to return to Omaha after seventeen years, the narrator we only know as Natalie begins a quest into her past, an adventure that takes the reader from childhood beauty pageants to the sex and glamour industries. Natalie’s search becomes an intrepid journey through her own sexuality, a woman not only claiming herself but also accepting her contradictions. With inquisitive perception and agile use of perspective, Searching for Suzi is an investigation into the tragic shadows of a past preferred to be forgotten.

Praise for Searching for Suzi

The exploitation has to be turned around on itself at some point. Searching for Suzi tells the story of Natalie, an ex-stripper who reflects on her life as she returns to Omaha, Nebraska where she grew up. Discussing the obsession with appearance and the concept of sexy that ranges from the glamour and stripping industry down to childhood beauty pageants, Searching for Suzi is a fascinating and very highly recommended read.
—Midwest Book Review

Sexy, gutsy, raw and mature. A literary strip tease, Nancy Stohlman lures us through the layers of her dark world with the promise of exposing the ultimate sparkle . . . and ends up revealing something profound.
—Raymond Federman

Searching for Suzi offers syntax of desire itself—the complex, difficult, and beautiful ways we rupture into and beyond our own ghost-versions inside the mystery of hello and good-bye. Nancy Stohlman has written a spare, searing, and stunning book. It will wake you in the way that only necessary art can do.
—Selah Saterstrom

In cheap pulp fiction, a stripper is either the helpless victim of sexual exploitation or the gutsy woman who makes the system work for her. Searching for Suzi is not pulp fiction. Nancy Stohlman smartly complicates the stereotypes with this story of a woman looking back on her life from a scrutinizing distance, separating the romantic images from the real and transforming the latter, through the art of storytelling, into something intimate and compelling.
—Danielle Dutton

About Nancy Stohlman

Nancy Stohlman is a writer and professor living in Denver, Colorado. Her first book, Live from Palestine, was nominated for a Colorado Book Award in 2004. She has an MFA in Creative Writing from the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics. Searching for Suzi is her first novel. For more information, please visit www.nancystohlman.net.