Middle-America's most engaging authors since 1998.
Middle-America's most engaging authors since 1998.
Backstories might be called a short story collection in verse. These unforgettable poems pack the power of the best short fiction, and as a whole they tell the story of today’s American high school classrooms: the keen intelligence nestled in the most disadvantaged students, the circumstances that cause students to prefer detention so they might find a quiet place to do homework rather than the family motel room of 6 siblings. This is a book of courage.
—Trish Reeves
A dispatch from halfway houses and sober living facilities. Here are feverish fractals of elaborate blues in cascading Kerouac long lines. Ridgeway white knuckles through these bleak times.
—Westley Heine
Kintsugi, the Japanese art wherein broken pottery is repaired with gold, strengthening the breaks but also transforms imperfections into features of stunning beauty. Kevin’s spare, translucent poems are veined in gold and speak that truth in every line.
—Kristofer Collins writes about books in Pittsburgh, PA
If you live the poem, do yourself a favor, crack this book and hang your heartbreaks together.
—Jason Baldinger
William Trowbridge is one of America’s best and wittiest poets: funny, tender, wry, compassionate, full of insight and rueful understanding. Trowbridge tells it like it was, and like it is: occasionally grim, but replete with humor.
~ Charles Harper Webb
Sharp, funny, and unflinching, William Trowbridge writes with clear-eyed wit and deep compassion. A wise, wry, and humane collection, Trowbridge remains one of America’s most engaging and generous poetic voices.
~Elizabeth Powell
Maintenance, grapples with the Sisyphean tasks of upkeep and repair against the inevitable vicissitudes of entropy, decay, complacency, and despair. With trademark wit, Trowbridge peels back the histories we collectively seem doomed to repeat—familial, national, global... confirming the enduring power of art in the midst of absurdity.
~ Lee Horikoshi Roripaugh
Moonshine Ethics blesses in its confessions, informs in its reflections, warms in its satire, and disarms in its sincerity. A collage of aphorism, micro-dialogues, epistles, pleadings, lyrical flights. I’ll keep this book close and remember always it sits alongside Porchia’s Voices and Aurelias’s Meditations.
—Jose Faus, Artist
Like a long coffee-fueled confab with a friend after a night of moonshine, this is a love poem to an "odd, odd, odd world.” A cure for the hangover of our times.
—Eric Rensberger
A neon-lit odyssey from a poet who values the overlooked and mourns the dwindling rarity of unfiltered authenticity. broad sensibility that carries on the legacy of Bill Knott. And the world is better for it.
—Jordan Stempleman
