Description
This sturdy box houses three winners of Slapering Hol Press’ Chapbook Contest: The Scottish Café, They Become Stars, Ubasute.
The 2002 Slapering Hol Press Chapbook Contest Winner’s collection is The Scottish Café by Susana H. Case.
“In the poems of THE SCOTTISH CAFÉ, Susan H. Case creates a metaphor for the persistence of the life of the mind and the imagination. There is no theme more important for poetry to address in our time, when that life is imperiled by barbarisms from within and without. By recalling with celebratory joy the vigor, the messiness, the courage of that life as it was once lived in a terrible time by the patrons of the Scottish Café in Lvov, these poems do us a very great service.”—Charles Martin
Susana H. Case’s eighth book of poetry, The Damage Done, will be published by Broadstone Books in 2022. Dead Shark on the N Train (Broadstone Books, 2020) won a Pinnacle Book Award for Best Poetry Book, a NYC Big Book Award Distinguished Favorite, and was a Finalist for the Eric Hoffer Book Award. She is also the author of five chapbooks. Her first collection, The Scottish Cafe, (Slapering Hol Press) was re-released in a dual-language English-Polish version, Kawiarnia Szkocka (Opole University Press). Her poetry is translated into Spanish, Italian, and Portuguese. Poems by Case have appeared in literary journals including CALYX, Catamaran, The Cortland Review, Portland Review, Rattle, RHINO, and upstreet. She is co-editor, with Margo Taft Stever, of I Wanna Be Loved by You: Poems on Marilyn Monroe (Milk and Cake Press, 2022). Case recently retired as Professor from the New York Institute of Technology in New York City where she taught for thirty-eight years. She is a co-editor of Slapering Hol Press.
The 2019 Slapering Hol Press Chapbook Winner’s collection is They Become Stars by Liz Marlow.
“Liz Marlow’s collection is a book of real life horrors revolving around the controversial World War II figure, Chaim Rumkowski, each one exquisitely rendered. The voices of the Holocaust—its victims, its perpetrators—rise wraithlike in these poems, singing clear notes against our collective impulse to turn away…With their arresting imagery and relentless precision, Marlow’s poems leave us, gasping and floodlit in history’s chambers, with nowhere to hide.”
—Francesca Bell
“Liz Marlow’s They Become Stars is a powerhouse of intellect, courage, and poetic dexterity.”
—William Page
Liz Marlow’s poems have appeared in The Carolina Quarterly, The Greensboro Review, The Rumpus, Tikkun, and elsewhere. Additionally, her work has been a finalist for Permafrost Magazine’s New Alchemy Contest and a semi-finalist for the Tomaž Šalamun Prize. She received her MFA from Western Michigan University. She currently lives in Memphis, Tennessee with her husband and two children.
The 2020 Slapering Hol Press Chapbook Contest Winner’s collection is Ubasute by Aaron Caycedo-Kimura.
At the lucid depths of loss, as elemental as the Greek tragedies but on a personal scale and in an even tone of voice, Aaron Caycedo- Kimura’s poems in Ubasute are detailed, elegiac meditations within a particular American family. This compact, artful book evokes the eternal rhythms of grief and memory, loss and gratitude, including the evil of internment camps and the dignity of a suburban garden. Here is the restorative clarity of art.
—Robert Pinsky
In Japanese folklore, ubasute is the act of carrying an elderly parent up a mountain and leaving the person there to die. In Aaron Caycedo- Kimura’s beautiful, moving debut collection, Ubasute, the poet carries his mother and father out of memory and onto the page, but he does not set them down or let them go. He holds his parents close so we can see and hear them—as a boy in an American concentration camp, as a girl surviving the firebombing of Tokyo, as newlyweds, suburban parents, and too soon a dying father, a widow slipping away. In these clear-eyed, open-hearted, unforgettable poems, Caycedo-Kimura invites us to join him as he walks once more behind his aging parents “with an outstretched arm / as if to give a blessing.”
—Matthew Thorburn
Aaron Caycedo-Kimura is a writer and visual artist. He is the author of two poetry collections: Ubasute, which won the 2020 Slapering Hol Press Chapbook Competition, and the full-length collection Common Grace, forthcoming from Beacon Press in Fall 2022. His honors include a Robert Pinsky Global Fellowship in Poetry, a St. Botolph Club Foundation Emerging Artist Award in Literature, and nominations for the Pushcart Prize, Best of the Net, and Best New Poets anthologies. His poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in Beloit Poetry Journal, RHINO, upstreet, Verse Daily, DMQ Review, Poet Lore, The Night Heron Barks, and elsewhere. Aaron earned his MFA in creative writing from Boston University and is also the author and illustrator of Text, Don’t Call: An Illustrated Guide to the Introverted Life (TarcherPerigee, 2017).
