The Slaughterhouse Poems, Dave Newman's first full-length poetry collection, is a series of narrative poems that tell the stories of people often kept behind the scenes in American literature - slaughterhouse workers, bowling-alley managers, strippers, prisoners dreaming of better lives. Written in the spirit of world poets like Nicanor Parra and Nazim Hikmet, coupled with American grittiness, Newman's poems hold a place of their own - real, heartfelt, true.

A Lesson in Smallness is an invitation that builds--word by shiveringly, perfectly placed word, cadence by subtle, breath-catching cadence-into shifting vignettes, vistas, vision. There's nothing small at all here, it turns out. Vastly imponderable, and also close, and cherished: nature and human nature and the nature of art, all at once in these moving poems. A book to read and read again. - Robin Behn Early in her new poetry collection, Lauren Goodwin Slaughter speaks of "the necessary oomph." Which is also an excellent way of describing the pizazz of this wonderful book. Though titled A Lesson in Smallness, Slaughter's language is large, attentive, loving, and dynamic, even while acknowledging that our connections to others-in this case, as wife, mother, daughter-sometimes require a steep mortgage on a woman's most intimate and individual desires. I love this book's truthfulness and clarity of vision, and I'm betting you will, too. - Erin Belieu A Lesson in Smallness is a book seized by hunger and the umbilical. It is at once a travelogue, a junk drawer, a menu, a romance, an anti-romance, a cultural inquiry, and a mystery, which is to say it is fascinating and not at all aimless but deft, meticulous, and at the same time lavish. It proceeds by pleasurable and painful tension and release to a Rilkean abundance. The sensational third section of the book is an eruption into Slaughter's full powers of language in the service of transport. The "smallness" is a modest way to say her acts of attention expand our sense of what is possible. It's a beautiful [and dangerous] debut. - Bruce Smith Lauren Goodwin Slaughter a lesson in smallness The National Poetry Review Press Lauren Goodwin Slaughter is the recipient of a 2012 Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers' Award. Her poetry has appeared in venues such as Blackbird, Blue Mesa Review, Hayden's Ferry, Hunger Mountain, Kenyon Review Online, and Verse Daily, among others. She is co-fiction editor at DIAGRAM and an assistant professor of English at The University of Alabama at Birmingham. Originally from Philadelphia, she now lives in Birmingham, Alabama with her husband and two young children.

In Spectacle, Lauren Goodwin Slaughter's second full-length collection, the poet deepens her commitment to the enduring and eternal subjects of womanhood, motherhood, and family, and deftly considers how those devotions intersect in ways joyful, mysterious, and cruel within personal and political landscapes. Slaughter’s poems seek out and explore authentic, raw humanity, at times employing the gaze of Dutch photographer and artist, Rineke Dijkstra—several of whose photographic portraits are included in the collection alongside ekphrastic poems—as a lens to view what Dijkstra calls the "uninhibited moment.” When artistic eye meets the fierceness of subject, the result is poetry deeply rooted in its lyricism and empathy, grounded in its depth of emotion, and unflinching in its alertness to the poet's beloveds and world.

Proper Etiquette in the Slaughterhouse Line, 17 poems that start out discussing modern day office life, the "rise and grind" corporate cog culture that decimates souls, and evolves into a story of that workaday world crumbling into an apocalyptic landscape of humanity's final gasp as Earth reboots itself, becoming a more peaceful world if only for the lack of us.James Duncan's new collection of poems punch me square in the teeth. Most of us work a job we hate just so we can survive in a world that would rather see us exhausted than in love, that would rather see us depressed than creative, that would have us put our heads down and live among the meaningless than to look up and discover awful truths. These are poems in the vein of Carver, Bukowski, and James Wright. Workers, fighters, and people with little hope, trapped in a system they cannot beat, but sometimes can beat late at night during the exhausted hours. These poems take the everyday mundane existence we are force fed eight hours a day and show us there is hope, but only if we are willing to open the doors of the slaughterhouse. -Frank Reardon, author of Loud Love on the Sevens and Elevens, Blood Music and othersWith Proper Etiquette in the Slaughterhouse Line, James H. Duncan does a superb job of showing us our humanity exactly as we are living it, the pain, the struggle, the sickness and all the manifestations of any joys we can find to keep ourselves grounded. Duncan's poems are both heartbreaking and equal parts exuberant within the expression of the simplest speck of human minutiae. This book of poetry exposes our very soul. -John Grochalski, author of Eating a Cheeseburger During the End Times and P-Town Forever

What sort of deviltry has J. Martin Strangeweather conjured up this time? Magister Strangeweather would have us believe this collection of diabolical poesy is an exorcism, a purgation. Humorous, startling, and painfully insightful, the incantations herein are sure to leave the reader transformed. Between these pages you will find Beelzebub, Mammon, Mephistopheles, zombie yogis, a stranger version of the Frankenstein monster, and all manner of demons bound upside down in the service of righteousness. Abandon all fear, ye who enter here.