With Death, an Orange Segment Between Our Teeth by Marie-Claire Bancquart
Translated from the French by Wendeline A. Hardenberg
Orison Books, November 2023

Marie-Claire Bancquart (1932–2019) was a prolific and prize-winning French poet, novelist, essayist, and critic. In her poetry, she combines an erudite vocabulary and references to classical literature with an earthy sensibility and a fascination with experiencing the smallest moments of everyday life fully. The deceptive simplicity of her poems lays bare the mysteries underlying the world we inhabit and our very existence. Wendeline A. Hardenberg’s careful and skillful translations are sure to broaden the audience for this significant poet as yet too little known outside of France.

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Prayershreds: Poems by Bruce Beasley
Orison Books, May 2023

Suppose the shreds of our prayers and of our faiths could themselves become a radical new form of devotion. Bruce Beasley confronts the apocalyptic zeitgeist of our time (political turmoil, societal division and isolation, spiritual despair, environmental catastrophe) and the crisis of faith in the human future. These poems make of the vocabulary of doubt a strange kind of sermon, summoning into chorus Heraclitus, Zeno, the Buddha, Roget’s Thesaurus, ancient prayers and hymns and scriptures, and an AI chatbot. In these fractured and ecstatic psalms, Beasley makes his ruptured way toward a faith that relies not on dogmas and creeds, but on a broken utterance for a torn and living faith.

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Between Paradise & Earth: Eve Poems edited by Nomi Stone & Luke Hankins
Orison Books, April 2023

The recent and contemporary poems about the biblical figure Eve gathered in this anthology refuse given narratives. Here, poets of diverse backgrounds and traditions conjure a heterogeneous concert of Eves to reckon with desire, blame, power, gender, the body, race, politics, religion, knowledge, violence, and time. She becomes a door for dreaming of origins, for considering naming and language, for challenging assumptions and structures of power, and for examining the human condition. In these poems, Eve loves, grieves, rages, and proves a perennially relevant figure in our contemporary mythos.

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Dream of Xibalba: A Poem by Stephanie Adams-Santos
Orison Books, May 2023

Dream of Xibalba, Stephanie Adams-Santos’s incantatory long poem, draws the reader into a dreamworld where the barrier between life and death grows porous, populated by ancestors and spirits. The influence of such poets as Cecilia Vicuña, Federico García Lorca, and Yvan Goll is evident here, yet Adams-Santos’s voice and vision are entirely her own. Dream of Xibalba is a unique, epic work of cultural and spiritual significance.

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Best Spiritual Literature, Vol. 7
Edited by Luke Hankin, Nathan Poole, Karen Tucker
Orison Books, December 2022

Best Spiritual Literature is the new name of The Orison Anthology, under the same editorship and publisher, and it continues the same mission to collect the finest spiritually engaged writing that appeared in periodicals in the preceding year. In addition to reprinted material, each year the anthology also includes new, previously unpublished works of fiction, nonfiction, and poetry by the winners of The Best Spiritual Literature Awards. The award judges for Vol. 7 were SJ Sindu (fiction), Molly McCully Brown (nonfiction), and Leila Chatti (poetry). Contributors to this volume include Ser Álida, Jai Hamid Bashir, Ellen Bass, Jack B. Bedell, Wendy Cheng, Broderick Eaton, B. Tyler Lee, Kenji C. Liu, Nancy Ludmerer, Joy Moore, David Naimon, Darius Simpson, and Gideon Young.

What’s Left to Us by Evening
Poetry by David Ebenbach
Orison Books, October 2022

How does one live in a world that is both beautiful and broken—a world of cherry blossoms and gun violence, fellowship and political enmity, plague and rebirth? What’s Left to Us by Evening, David Ebenbach’s unsparing and timely new poetry collection, examines the obligation—and privilege—of carrying it all. Ebenbach is the author of numerous books of fiction, poetry, and essays. He lives in Washington, DC, where he teaches creative writing at Georgetown University.

Anchor
Poetry by Rebecca Aronson
Orison Books, October 2022

Threaded with epistolary poems to Gravity—envisioned as a capricious god as the author’s father began to fall frequently at the outset of a progressive illness—Aronson’s latest poems contemplate and address what anchors us, literally and figuratively. These poems excavate grief during the process of losing parents, one to physical illness and the other to dementia. But even in the midst of grief, Aronson never loses sight of the larger world, ever present in all its danger and beauty.

The Distortions
Stories by Christopher Linforth
Orison Books, March 2022
ISBN: 978-1-949039-31-3
Paperback: 194pp; $18

Winner of the 2020 Orison Fiction Prize, selected by Samrat Upadhyay, The Distortions offers a glimpse of a pageant of characters struggling to understand their lives after the dissolution of Yugoslavia. Scarred by the last major war fought on European soil, the women and men of these stories question what such a violent past can mean in comfortable, capitalistic modern Europe. From London and Brooklyn and Norway, to the Blue Grotto of Biševo and the war-torn fields of Slavonia, this collection blends Yugoslavian and American stories of great emotional and geographical amplitude.