Now Available from
Final Thursday Press
Kyrie
Poetry by Jonathan Stull
For poet Jonathan Stull, observing the natural world can be a means toward understanding, and that is both the beauty and terror of nature. “My poems come from actual places and events in time, and they explore what meaning the moment is revealing. To me poetry reflects the underlying music and absolute inner connectedness of all things.”
Marvin Bell, the Poet Laureate of Iowa, has praised Stull’s work as “central to the midwestern circumstance, in touch with what awake people feel deep within, and bearing vigilance and compassion.” Bell finds that Stull’s poems “embody the beauty and dynamism of the natural world.”
Kyrie is a signed and numbered edition limited to 500 copies.
$6.00 32 pgs. 8 1/2 by 5 1/2.
ISBN 0-9742764-1-3
Ghost Wars
Poetry by Vince Gotera
In Ghost Wars, Vince Gotera, Editor at the North American Review, brings together a career of poetic considerations about the experience of war and its aftermath in this timely chapbook. Denise Duhamel writes "The poems in Ghost Wars are the tickers off the bottom of CNN's screen pushing out of the TV and flourishing like vines in our living rooms." Allison Joseph notes "Lively, compassionate, and intelligent, the poems of Ghost Wars are a necessary balm for our uncertain national psyche."
Ghost Wars is a signed and numbered edition limited to 500 copies.
$5.00 32 pgs. 8 1/2 by 5 1/2
ISBN 0-9742764-0-5
Laugh. Damnit.
Poetry by Ahkos
Feeling pretentious? Walk away now. The poems in this collection target poetic self-importance with humor and a bit of an edge. Formed in (and in response to) Boston's open mic scene, "Laugh. Damnit." will make you smile, or else.
$1.00 16 pgs.
Bad Men
Microfiction by Jim O'Loughlin
Four short short stories that made their debut at the Final Thursday Reading Series. They weren't originally intended to be part of a collection; it just happened that way. Find out what happens to the lounge lizard, the ex-con, the slacker student, and the serial monogamist.
$2.00 18 pgs.
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Persons needing access accommodation should call 266-7115 by the
day before the event. For more information, contact
Jim O'Loughlin.
from "The Onely Shake-scene in a Countrey"
by Dave Hoing
You live in a world without Shakespeare. Come, and see how.
The boy William is born as history surmises on April 23, 1564, and baptized on April 26. Indeed, he survives into his teenage years. But in 1580 he and a Stratford girl, whose name (honest) is Kathleen Hamlet, decide to go swimming in the Avon, he for the pleasure of it but she with a plan; for her family is steeped in the old faith of Rome and she has found herself in an unfortunate situation, not of William's doing, and can't face the shame. She's going where shame won't touch her, though she knows it will devastate her loved ones no matter what she does. There's no impropriety in the swimming; both are clothed, though less modestly, perhaps, than their parents would like.
William isn't a strong swimmer and so Kathleen's intentions should meet little resistance. "Will," she says, "I am with child."
There are ways to prevent conception, even in these strange times, and ways, afterwards, to end it. Removing the unborn is not enough for her. She tries to explain what she means to do, to ask forgiveness, in advance, from the only person who's likely to give it; but in the year of our Lord MDLXXX William — yes, a genius with wild potential and only a few rough scribblings to show for it — is still an awkward fumbling boy, tinged by jealousy and incensed by the unnamed father's unchivalric behavior. He promises, bravely, to "thrash the lout."
And so, the boy who will be — who would have been — such a remarkable man at reading and expressing the soul of humanity, misses her point because he's caught up in his own feelings.
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