Fall 2000 Titles:
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Glory Goes and Gets Some How is a woman in her thirties, HIV-positive and fresh out of rehab, supposed to find love and work in contemporary urban America, steering clear of self-pity and doctrinaire "happy-talk"? This linked short story collection shows how Glory goes and gets some.

dem Originally published in 1967, dem is a classic of the Black Arts Movement. This surrealistic satire lays bare the convoluted and symbiotic relationship between whites and blacks. Coffee House Press is pleased to bring back into print this widely unavailable work.  Upper middle-class Manhattanite Mitchell Pierce is convinced he has it made. With advancement at work, an attractive wife, and a comfortable apartment, he has achieved the 1960s version of the white man's American dream. Slowly but surely that dream becomes a nightmare, and Mitchell can't seem to wake up. Did he really find his boss's wife and children dead in an upstairs bedroom of their suburban home? Did his wife really become pregnant after a brief fling with their black maid's boyfriend?

Write Letter to Billy United with a long-lost teenage daughter, a retired Navy underwater repair specialist investigates a mysterious list his father had written just before his death. Some of the items are crossed off, but one of the unfinished tasks haunts him: "Write letter to Billy." What had his father planned to tell him? What he learns changes his life forever.

Hand of Buddha "Everything changed the day the Buddha's hand arrived in the mail." The stories in The Hand of Buddha are about women of various ethnic backgrounds, from various regions of the U.S., who find themselves in situations that spin wildly out of control or silently disintegrate. Somehow McFerrin's characters maintain their sense of humor, if not their equilibrium.

Madame Deluxe Madame Deluxe is all things loud and leopard-print. Inspired by years of watching drag shows, Darlington evokes a persona who wanders the periphery of femininity, catcalling paradigms from Venus to Victoria's Secret. Striking out against artifice, staging her own myth, Madame Deluxe is a she-male Vesuvius. Expect scat, expect 350 lb. poems, expect a guide to the pleasures of leather and a manual for modern marriage. All categories relinquish their boundaries -even prose poems become "discount sonnets."

Shiny Pencils at the Edge of Things Simultaneously elegant and goofy, the poems in Shiny Pencils at the Edge of Things depict the quiet moments of life with sophisticated wit and a child's sense of wonder. Gallup's poems often begin with household objects, or a walk down the street, but his lines leap across continents and ideas with ease.

Revenants This first book-length collection of poetry by the editor of the journal XCP: Cross-Cultural Poetics explores the Polish American neighborhoods in and around Buffalo, New York, finding collective truths in the particularity of a unique culture.