Her Name is Juanita

by Sally Ashton

44 pages, 5.5 x 8.5" paper, hand-bound

Price: $12.00

"A beautiful tribute to the fecundity of obsession." 

--Amy Gerstler

"Sensual & luminous, mystical & comic."--Nin Andrews

Excerpt from "Her Name is Juanita:"

The Donkey’s Role in Spiritual Awakenings

My friends want me to see Juanita. Soon. If you hear a donkey, find the damn donkey. My house a stall in desperate need of a shovel. I barely sleep, books piled on the dining room table, sheaves of computer print-outs. The donkey in myth. The donkey as “other.” I compose, too, or will, a libretto based on Juanita already suggesting itself, sung across a loop of her bray or a computer generated facsimile. And snapshots, donkey-shaped clouds, clouds that looked like they would turn into donkeys before an ear blew off, a muzzle moved left. Images not easy to catch. Here’s a picture of my cat, smiling, after I whispered Juanita three times. I should put the photos in an album or shoebox but I like seeing them when I walk by, Juanita in the sky.

Available now!

Kore Press First Book Award Winner 2009

Something in the Potato Room

by Heather Cousins

Judged by Patrica Smith

80 pages, 6 x 9" paper

Price: $14.95 ISBN 13: 978-1-888553-39-0

In the dark alcove of the potato room, the unexpected blooms. The surrealistic imagery in this strange little book takes the reader on an otherworldly descent where pores open like baby mouths, bones flower, and even the Real is eerily surrealized when the narrator confronts death in the mundane of the supermarket.

This poet’s forceful, startling syntax lends to the kind of Japanese-horror film aesthetic where things just “are:” unexamined, unexplained and we must simply accept them in all their dreadful wonder. The random fascination in antique medical apparati, a Foucauldian rigor, the occasional Absolute, combined with an unfussy flow of bare, vertebral prose and a bizarrely twisted narrative make for an engaging read.

Available now!

Kore Press Short Fiction Chapbook Winner 2009

Frost Heaves

by Teresa Stores

Available February 2010

"Frost Heaves is powerful mediation on grief and reclamation. This is the story of Katherine Crossly, as she assesses her life after a half century of marriage. What happens when a woman realizes that her dreams were not deferred, but stifled before they are even fully imagined? Set against the beautifully drawn landscapes of a small town in Maine, this is the story of a thaw, both literal and metaphorical.

Teresa Stores writes with compassion and insight, finding the inescapable truths hiding in the plain sight--layered over an ordinary life.With vivid details and an original and convincing voice, "Frost Heaves" manages to be both uncompromising and triumphant. Teresa Stores is a beautiful writer and I look forward to seeing her work for years to come."

--Tayari Jones