Two More For 2009

The Cleveland State University Poetry Center is pleased to announce the publication of two new collections of poetry: Destruction Myth by Mathias Svalina and Sum of Every Lost Ship by Allison Titus.

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Destruction Myth
poems by Mathias Svalina
7 x 8.5 x .202", 83 pp.
$15.95 paper
ISBN 978-1-880834-87-9

"If I feel physically as if the top of my head is taken off and replaced with a soft serve ice cream machine, I am pretty sure it is poetry. Svalina's book does no less, and also so much more. Read but also believe this book of fantastic lies. It's like how you see a cat sitting there and you think 'that is just a cat' and then you realize that cat is God. Mathias Svalina has reinvented Yahweh as an Animorph. When this book is taught in college classrooms, students will curl up on the air conditioning vents and ask for salt."
- Anne Boyer

"In the beginning, we were children and we had beautiful imaginations, but we had no home for them. Then up sprouted Mathias Svalina's Destruction Myth and we did. It too was beautiful, bloody, silly, haunted. At first we thought it was godly, and then we discovered it was human. We feared it; we loved it; we slept with it under our pillows."
- Eleni Sikelianos

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Sum of Every Lost Ship
poems by Allison Titus
5.5 x 8.5 x .202", 78 pp.
$15.95 paper
ISBN 978-1-880834-88-6

"Sum of Every Lost Ship navigates what is haunting, strange, and unknowable-grief and disappearances, fragments and histories. Reading, we are deftly balanced on the shores of mystery, a mystery fathomed by a keen instinct for metaphor. Allison Titus is a writer exquisitely attuned to compassion, isolation, and the sometimes overlooked details of this sturdy and tenuous world-goats' hearts, schooners, cabinets, arctic realities. This is a startling and moving collection."
- Talvikki Ansel

"The pilgrim heart," as one of Allison Titus's exquisite phrasings has it, requires an unmooring, a letting go, into a world marked by passing journeys, passing architectures, almost-lost motels for intimates to get lost in-a hardscrabble world rich with leavings. An internality emerges, sets out, to congress with the obstinate, the creaturely. This poetry's experiment takes us to the fact that the everyday is also experimental, in that, familiar as it is, it can never, if it is seen intensely enough to be durably writ, be wholly predicted. So fine a lyric sensibility as the reader will find in these poems is all the more compelling for acknowledging the human limits of the lyric, for making hard choices, even refusals, and for never romanticizing omission-i.e., obliteration-but testing it at every step with earthly perceptions. Allison Titus's Sum of Every Lost Ship presents readers with a striking new poetry, and a beautiful and truly original voice."
- William Olsen

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Ordering Information

Destruction Myth and Sum of Every Lost Ship can be ordered through SPD, Small Press Distribution, at 800-869-7553, or spdbooks.org, and is also available through many corporate and independent bookstores, as well as Amazon.com, and BarnesAndNoble.com. Orders can also be placed directly at the phone numbers below.

Please submit requests for media review copies and printed catalogs to Rita Grabowski at poetrycenter@csuohio.edu or call 216-687-3986.

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For more information on individual books or for submission guidelines for our upcoming First Book (Judge: Rae Armantrout) and Open Book (Jury: Kazim Ali, Mary Biddinger, Michael Dumanis, and Sarah Gridley) contests (Postmark Deadline: February 15th), please visit our website: www.csuohio.edu/poetrycenter
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I just got Mathias' book in the mail today & can't wait to read it! Titus has poems up on Real Poetik