Spring 2003 Titles
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Acts of Love on Indigo Road
No one is better than Jonis Agee at capturing the bone-deep desire and big-eyed longing of a hardscrabble, small-town life. This major collection, highlighting Agee's astonishing literary achievements, includes powerful new stories and a comprehensive selection from her critically acclaimed books Pretend We've Never Met, Bend This Heart, A .38 Special and a Broken Heart, and Taking the Wall.

The Grasshopper King
In this debut novel about treachery, death, academia, marriage, mythology, history, and truly horrible poetry, Jordan Ellenberg creates a world complete with its own geography, obscene folklore, endless games of checkers, and wonderfully endearing characters. Welcome to Chandler State University. Now that its basketball program has fallen apart, CSU's only claim to fame is its Gravinics Department, dedicated to the study of the most obscure and difficult language on earth and the unlucky writers who had to use it. Chief among these is the bizarre and infamous poet Henderson, who is either a no-talent hack or the secret key to world history.

Twelve Branches: Stories from St. Paul
What happens when a city gets together, not to read a book, but to write one? Twelve Branches: Stories from St.Paul began as an innovative, artistic project meant to bring together city residents from all ages and backgrounds to collaborate on writing a book. Over many months, four accomplished writers visited twelve St. Paul branch libraries to meet with citizens and community groups who shared captivating stories from their lives and their neighborhoods. Each of the twelve fictional chapters, grown from the moving stories told at the libraries and combined with historical research, is as diverse in style and content as the communities from which they sprang-from war to friendship and fire to fertility, these stories are tied together by the city itself.

The Cloud of Knowable Things
Nuanced, rich in meaning, and innately accessible, these poems revel in Elaine Equi's maturity of technique and vision. In this collection, we find her deftly exploring her surroundings and taking a close look at the way we inhabit things and the way they inhabit us. Clear yet complex, these poems animate the things closest to us-objects, fantasies, culture high and low.

A Handmade Museum
Brenda Coultas's prose poems take us on a well-documented tour from the Bowery,
pre-1900 and post-9/11, to Southern Indiana, pre-automobile and post-genetic engineering. Her poems are sculptures, pieced together from bits of memory and a montage of American detritus. This cinematic and wildly original collection asks the big questions as it documents our private selves, playing out our lives in public.

"The Bowery Project" is the longest poem in this collection and captures New York's past and present in the visceral and visual way usually associated with photographs and documentaries. Later poems are set in rural, southern Indiana and the contrast between city and country dramatically illuminates the American culture and landscape-these poems are a millennial roadmap of American life.

The Lakestown Rebellion
Originally founded by runaway slaves, Lakestown, New Jersey is a black community that finds itself on the precarious edge of progress. When plans for a new highway threaten the heart of Lakestown but spare its wealthy white neighbors, its citizens draw upon the tradition of the trickster to thwart the construction and preserve their town.

This is the fifth title in Coffee House Press's acclaimed Black Arts Movement Series.