home poetry fiction the challenge literary reviews book shelf back issues submissions editors legal statement
Up the Staircase, The Book Shelf
| Title & Author: | Synopsis: | Where to Purchase: |
 by William Taylor, Jr |
- Epic Rites Press, 2011, William Taylor Jr. lives and writes in the Tenderloin neighborhood of San Francisco. His poems and stories have been widely published in the independent press in publications including Poesy, The Chiron Review and The New York Quarterly. He is the author of the poetry collections Words for Songs Never Written (Centennial Press, 2007) and The Hunger Season (Sunnyoutside, 2009). An Age of Monsters is William's first collection of prose. |
An Age of Monsters |
 by Samantha Ledger |
- NeoPoiesis Press, 2010, "Ledger's approach to abuse and the patriarchal oppression of the feminine is never treated with pseudo-heroism or self-victimisation; rather her poems are strikingly honest and core-cutting, depicting love-hate relationships and painful ties. With effective, emotive accuracy, Ledger bravely explores the scope of rage, injustice, damage and sacrifice to appease and expiate the need of the perpetrator as well as the masochism of the abused - something not many have the courage to approach so openly." |
Bells for Her |
 by Wanda Morrow Clevenger |
-Edgar and Lenore' s Publishing House, 2011, Author Wanda Morrow Clevenger reveals her innermost thoughts, emotion and experience with tender honesty and a humoristic approach to memoir, poetry and short fiction in this contemporary account of small town life. With a character driven narrative and journalistic eye, Wanda Morrow Clevenger leaves no poetic stone unturned, no keen detail unrevealed. |
This Same Small Town |
 by June Nandy |
- Cyberwit Press 2011, June is a published poet, short story writer, reviewer, ghazal singer, teacher and a translator from Calcutta, India. A post graduate in English Literature and Hindi, Bachelors in Education, post graduate diploma in Translation Science (Gold Medalist) and a diploma in Public Relations. Her writings has been published world wide in reputed international and national journals like Taj Mahal Review, Sein und Werden, Femina, Frontier, Poetry Super Highway and other corporate journals. She can be accessed at her blog: through my striped shirt |
The Lines Must Die |
 by Michelle Reale |
- Thunderclap Press, 2011, Michelle Reale's latest collection of short stores' Like Lungfish Getting Through the Dry Season, holds a lot of universal significance. We all look to identify with most everything in life, including pieces of literature we read. If we understand it, if we can shake our heads and say "I've been there before", there's a comfort in reading it. Reale's book is certainly comforting. The words are like macaroni and cheese, roast beef and potatoes or tomato soup. It's a taste of the familiar that Lungfish offers the reader, and it tastes pretty good. Amanda Deo, Thunderclap Press |
Like Lungfish Getting Through the Dry Season |
 by Meg Tuite |
- San Francisco Bay Press, 2011, Meg Tuite's incendiary Domestic Apparition, an anti-bildungsroman, reads as if Jean Cocteau's Les Enfants Terribles, Joyce's Dubliners and a hallucinatory draught of green absinthe all combined to create a secret, rule-less world of precocious siblings punking the piteous yet unrelenting hypocrisies of American family, school and church even as they are swept by childhood's inexorable current into a compromised, haunted, fragile adulthood. With incisive wit, a poet's flair for innovative revolt, precisely rendered characters wild for truth and trespass, Tuite's Domestic Apparition is savage, arch, deeply tender - a triumphant debut novel. Melissa Pritchard, author of eight novels and four short story collections, including "The Odditorium" |
Domestic Apparition |
 by Faith Mingus |
SHEsureHAD is at times, autobiographical (who can purely leave oneself out of something like this?), but mostly fictional or lies, pure pure fiction. hand-written then copied. hand-stitched with red thread. | Email the author at seahighseaside@gmail.com if you would like to purchase a copy. $4 via paypal, check, or coffee beans |
 by Renata Emther |
-The Bulldog Publishing Co., Inc. 2006, Rimbaud’s Echo is Renata McCormish’s first collection of poetry, published under her pseudonym Renata Emther. Many of her poems pay homage to great historical figures as well as little known men and women around the world. With calm ferocity, Emther explores the best and the worst in human nature, and aims to transmute pain and despair into a visionary sun. Her metaphors take readers from darkness into a symbolic dawn. The entire collection of 111 poems, written in her pre-MFA voice, addresses the world both the way it is and should be. | Rimbaud's Echo |
 by John Swain |
-Calliope Nerve Media, 2010, John Swain lives in Louisville, Kentucky. His chapbooks, Prominences and Sinking of the Cloth appeared from Flutter Press and Set Apart Before the World Was Made appeared from Calliope Nerve Media. Full of Crow published his e-book, The Feathered Masks and a forthcoming chapbook, Burnt Palmistry. | Set Apart Before the World Was Made |
 by William Crawford |
-NeoPoiesis Press, William Crawford has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize in poetry. His work has appeared in numerous magazines and anthologies, most recently including, Counterexample Poetics, The Criterion, Danse Macabre, Differentia Press: Corporeal Manifestations, Leaf Garden, Luciole Press, Unlikely Stories of the Third Kind, and Up the Staircase Quarterly. Fire in the Marrow is his first poetry collection. William lives in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, and is an animal rights activist. | Fire in the Marrow |
 by Sophia Argyris |
-Erbacce Press, Sophia's poetry contains fresh metaphors, ideas and language that challenge the reader to take part in her vision. Each poem is masterfully executed with the skills of a true poet, bringing a wide range of complex emotions. -editors, Up the Staircase | Strange Longing For A Monday |
 by Jason Hardung |
-Epic Rites Press, "Hardung’s the broken and the damned is an autobiographical masterpiece insofar as these poems extend beyond the author to create a universal, collective experience. Hardung, in this sense, becomes more than just the subject of these poems, he becomes our tour guide through these monstrous vignettes, leading us deeper and deeper into the shattered heart of a wounded America." - Wolfgang Carstens | The Broken and the Damned |
 by Jennifer LeBlanc |
-Červená Barva Press, Jennifer LeBlanc's chapbook, Unrestrained shows off her refinement as a poet and as a woman with great intuition. The best word to describe LeBlanc's writing is classy. I for one grow tired with some of the oddities of contemporary poetry, but Jennifer LeBlanc puts poetry back in the heart with this collection of poems. She is a hint of the modern Eastern European woman writers that I love, along with a dash of the keen innocense of some American female writers. | Unrestrained |
 by June Nandy |
Cyberwit.net, Calcutta was different then. Just five years back even, it didn’t race to collide, but walked to guide. Romi chuckled out softly. ‘Ma’s habit of thinking in poetry is catching up with me. Ma would’ve definitely made a face and replaced the word guide with abide. I still remember the day when she and father were watching a television show, where a man was smoking a cheroot and Ma had cried out: Look…how he starts by making one soul of a thousand hungry stomachs…unemployed thinking stomachs. Look, he wants to now extend their hunger to that dank theatre called Academy, where the first three rows are of leather, and the rest are wooden chairs infested with bugs. Hah, land of equals. Equality when there’d be road processions with inquilaab zindabad slogans; locked out factories with inquilaab zindabad calls; obstructing traffic by sitting on the roads for hours with inquilaab zindabad; boycotting of classes in the university campuses with inquilaab zindabad.’ Romi remembered, how she always thought inquilaab zindabad was a call to throw normal life into mayhem and disorder; to interfere in other’s activities. | Ideospheres of Pain |
 by Gillian Prew |
-Lulu.com, Gillian Prew is a contemporary Scottish poet. She explores what it is to be human through introspection and this, her third poetry collection, resonates to the universal. | the idea of wings |
 by Frank Reardon |
-NeoPoiesis Press, Frank Reardon has published several poetry collections including Cancer Face, Exorcism Of The Con-Artist and Rival Tongues. His work has appeared in such magazines and webzines as New York Quarterly, Quillbillies, Black Listed, Epic Rites, Denver Syntax and Kill Poet. Interstate Chokehold is his first major collection. Frank currently lives in North Dakota and is working on his first novel. | Interstate Chokehold |
 by Nanette Rayman Rivera |
-Scattered Light Publications, The new memoir by Nanette Rayman Rivera is a memoir about deepest loss - of a mother's love; of desire that can be swindled and circumvented in such Machiavellian style, one can only wonder if the Fates are behind it. A gripping first hand observation of homelessness and poverty, this story of thwarted promise and grim determination will pull your heart right out of your chest. | to live on the wind |