Powder: Writing by Women in the Ranks, from Vietnam to Iraq

Edited by Lisa Bowden and Shannon Cain

168 pages, 6 x 9" paper

Price: $17.95 ISBN 13: 978-1-888553-25-3

POWDER brings us poetry and personal essays from 19 women who have served in all branches of the United States military. Contributors to Powder have seen conflicts from Somalia to Vietnam to Desert Shield. Many are book authors and winners of writing awards and fellowships; several hold MFAs from some of the country’s finest programs. The essays and poems here are inspired by an attempted rape by a Navy SEAL; an album of photos of the enemy dead; heat exhaustion in Mosul; a first jump from an airplane; fending off advances from Iraqi men; interrogating suspected terrorists; the contemplation of suicide; and a poignant connection with women and children in Bosnia. Their writing exposes the frontline intersection of women and soldiering, describing from a steely-eyed female perspective the horror, the humor, the cultural clashes and the fear.

Read about the stage adaptation, Coming in Hot, a one-woman play with Jeanmarie Simpson and Vicki Brown that premiered in Tucson Sept 24-27, 2009.

Read excerpts and see the full list of contributors here.

See the Powder blog!

Read about Powder's news appearances here.

Available now!

Kore Press First Book Award Winner 2008

Souvenirs of a Shrunken World

Holly Iglesias

104 pages, 6 x 7" paper

Price: $13.95 ISBN 13: 978-1-888553-26-0

"This moving mosaic of the 1904 World's Fair carries the poignancy of an old family album, a presence at once here and gone. Through the poet's pitch-perfect ear and keen eye for the voices, vantages and scraps of the actual, come souvenirs of real lives transfixed in the glare of a triumphant technology's artificial light."

                                                               Eleanor Wilner

Read the feature and selections in the Missouri History Museum's online journal, Voices.

See full notes for this text.

Available now!

Kore Press First Book Award Winner 2007

Benjamin's Spectacles

Spring Ulmer

80 pages, 6.5 x 8.5 " paper

Price: $14 ISBN: 978-1-888553-22-7

"Walter Benjamin had the heart of a poet, and always served the imagination first. Spring Ulmer finds him there, in the imagination, and recognizes him as another being of language--of angels and demons. This is poetry from the world Benjamin left behind, with all its unspeakable delights and terrors, conspiracies and heartbreaks--'thimblefuls of relation' and 'inner conversations' among a host of 'disoriented survivors.' This is poetry 'unhanging itself,' unburying itself into being."

--David Levi Strauss

Study Guide for educators

Read a sample poem from the book

Kore Press First Book Award Winner 2006

Loveliest Grotesque

Sandra Lim

59 pages, 7.8 x 6.2" paper

Price: $13 ISBN: 978-1-888553-20-0

"Loveliest Grotesque is a darkly fascinating book. It’s a sweet, shape-shifting creature and a fun postmodern romp. Page after page fill with energetic surprises, keeping the reader intrigued--formal quatrains juxtaposed against prose vignettes...short-line riffs against skinny sonnets against a ballad that spreads across the page. Smartness and punnyness abound, casting vibrant spins on overused Asian-American tropes. Finally, the slippery slope of too much fun might stop for a nano moment to contemplate an important existential question: "Why were there manatees at all?" Obviously, the answer is this: after 9/11, in the new millennium, all formal discourses must explode, splinter and fragment and coalesce again into a new voice that rocks!"

--Marilyn Chin, judge of the 2006 Kore Press First Book Award Competition.

Kore Press First Book Award Winner 2005

The Errant Thread
Elline Lipkin
96 pages, 6 x 9" paper
Price: $14 ISBN 978-1-888553-19-2

"The Errant Thread is a volume of wonderful fits and starts: well-built narratives are suddenly interrupted by a cryptic epithalamion. Short lines ease into spacious distances and big, ambling-paced arguments. An epigram suddenly grows a long neck and becomes an elegy. A lyric shears off into a one-line ending . . . . There is real verve, real invention and, above all, true craft . . . showing what the reader most wants—a poet certain of the craft, a writer certain of what the craft is there to do."

—Eavan Boland, judge of the Kore Press First Book Award 2004

Kore Press First Book Award Winner 2004

Various Modes of Departure
Deborah Fries
56 pages, 6 x 9" paper
Price: $14 ISBN 1-888553-18-9

Deborah Fries’s marvelous debut collection, Various Modes of Departure, is mostly about women and the many good-byes they say – to a marriage, a long-lived in home and beloved locale, an elderly father, a threatened landscape. Fries’s lines are mother lodes of sensory images that incorporate regional descriptions, pop cultural images, brand names, references to singing stars, and expert knowledge of earth science and botany. Encyclopedic and smart, Fries’s poems both teach and delight.

Kore Press First Book Award Winner 2003

Rigging the Wind
Jennifer Barber
80 pages, 6 x 9" paper
Price: $14 ISBN 1-888553-15-4

"In subjects ranging from the expulsion of the Jews in the fifteenth century to intimacies between contemporary lovers, we are made to feel our own needs and terrors expressed, our own cities left behind. These poems are transparent, yet everywhere reflect things and people darkly, in emergency."

—Jane Miller, judge of the Kore Press First Book Award 2002

While Light Is Built
Tedi López Mills
translated by Wendy Burk
56 pages, 6 x 9" paper
Price: $14 ISBN- I-888553-16-2

Tedi López Mills is in the midst of an ongoing conversation. To read her poetry is to enter the river of philosophy in one of its clearer channels. López Mills’ poetry engages the ideas and furthers the inquiries of her sharpest contemporaries and brightest forebears. These poems hold in trembling balance the tension between space and time, time and being, being and been. They invoke and asymptotically extend the eternal questions: who am I? who am I in relation to this world? what is this world in relation to God, or the idea of God? While Light Is Built houses some of the most important poems being written today. We have been invited in to the contemplation and conversation of Tedi López Mills. It is for us to enter and respond.

SPECIAL DEAL: Purchase all five First Book Winners for the price of four.