Dead Shark On The N Train

Poetry. The middle section of this new poetry collection from Susana H. Case consists of ekphrastic poems inspired by the crime scene dioramas of Frances Glessner Lee, the "mother of forensic science." How appropriate, for this entire collection is an exercise in forensics, as Case deploys her poetic powers of detection to investigate and interrogate life in its minutest details; and all too often she too is depicting acts of violence, committed against women, against migrants, against the marginalized. Early on she questions the "puzzling utility" of her "street light eyes," but those eyes miss nothing, and it seems as well that she has missed no opportunity to learn from what they have seen, whether it is recognizing that "everything was happening" even while it seemed to her adolescent self that "nothing nothing nothing happened," or taking from an encounter with a baby skunk in a tent the lesson "Don't move. / Don't make a sound." Fortunately that silence yields profound words here, as in the title poem where a quintessentially quirky New York City experience of, quite literally, a dead shark in a subway car provides an occasion for meditation on death and destinations, what we see and what we don't, and how long we can journey to end up not so far from where we began. "Remind me none of this will kill me," she writes in one poem--except sometimes it can, and does, and she does not flinch from putting even the "shriveled flesh" of a dying friend into her poetry. If this sounds grim, it can be, but the sure touch and precision of Case's language elevates her work from any sense of morbid voyeurism. Nor does she spare herself from this examination, as in the closing poem where she grapples with her own physical fragility and the limits of language to express it. Recalling how she came to say "icebox" for refrigerator from her mother, she remembers a time she "did not have the vocabulary," and how since then she learned "Words deceive, the way love is often inarticulate." Case is certainly not the first poet to distrust language, the tools of her craft, nor the first to wonder about who is listening, "you people, / you whom I don't even write for." Those of us who are listening, for whom she is writing even when she is not sure herself, are fortunate indeed to receive these poems. It is perhaps an outrageous pun to call this a "Case report," but as an account of her poetic forensics it is an essential document of our time.

Laura Pedersen, author of bestseller Play Money and award-winning Buffalo Gal, serves up a hilarious memoir about three decades of city life. Originally from Buffalo, NY, friends thought the seventeen year old was suffering from blizzard delirious when she left Buffalo for Manhattan. Pedersen experiences her adopted city in the best and worst of times while becoming the youngest person to have a seat on the stock exchange, performing stand up comedy, and writing a column in the New York Times. Neighborhoods that feature chai bars, Pilates studios, and Gymboree were once drug dens, ganglands, and shantytowns. A trip to Central park often ended in central booking, identifying a perp in a lineup. New Yorkers are as diverse as the city they so colorfully inhabit, cautious but generous, brash but welcoming. Both are captured through the comedic eye of Pedersen. Enjoy an uproarious romp down memory lane as the city emerges as the modern metropolis we know today.

Mystery and mayhem, on a train. From the creators of Electromagnate and top industry titles. This comic one shot takes place before the events of the Sharks on a Train graphic novel. Hardcover.

A shark and a train compete in a series of contests on a seesaw, in hot air balloons, bowling, shooting baskets, playing hide-and-seek, and more, as two boys play.

The award-winning, #1 New York Times bestselling novel from Alan Gratz tells the timely--and timeless--story of three different kids seeking refuge. A New York Times bestseller! JOSEF is a Jewish boy living in 1930s Nazi Germany. With the threat of concentration camps looming, he and his family board a ship bound for the other side of the world... ISABEL is a Cuban girl in 1994. With riots and unrest plaguing her country, she and her family set out on a raft, hoping to find safety in America... MAHMOUD is a Syrian boy in 2015. With his homeland torn apart by violence and destruction, he and his family begin a long trek toward Europe... All three kids go on harrowing journeys in search of refuge. All will face unimaginable dangers -- from drownings to bombings to betrayals. But there is always the hope of tomorrow. And although Josef, Isabel, and Mahmoud are separated by continents and decades, shocking connections will tie their stories together in the end. As powerful and poignant as it is action-packed and page-turning, this highly acclaimed novel has been on the New York Times bestseller list for more than four years and continues to change readers' lives with its meaningful takes on survival, courage, and the quest for home.

The Tenant of Fire is about Queens, NY—its history, public and personal, real and imagined. Many of the people who populate this book—Irish Catholics, Italian-Americans—were once considered ethnic but now fall wholly under the banner of white. And from their anxieties a man like Donald Trump emerges. Born and raised in Queens, Trump is both the product and purveyor of a localized nativist politic. The young white speaker of these poems works to record his parents’ and neighbors’, both white and of color, and his own attempts at navigating a shifting landscape. In poems on the homecoming of Vietnam vets, or the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy, or the firebombing of Malcolm X’s house, The Tenant of Fire explores how and why the plurality of a place like Queens, where now nearly two hundred languages are spoken, is viewed as a threat to national security.

Poems of death, loss, and memory rendered in startling, and startlingly engaging, language and imagery. The closing poem in Myra Malkin's collection SUSNSET GRAND COUTURIER plays with the tale that Sir Walter Raleigh's widow kept his embalmed head as a literal memento mori, and this is a perfect coda for a work dealing with death, loss, and memory in startling, and often startlingly engaging, fashion. To say that many of her poems are inspired by wide array of authors, artists, historical figures, and intellectuals (including her title, taken from Pound's Cantos) is true and evidence of her deep immersion in culture, but these are merely points of departure for her own very original poetic excursions. Penetrating but never ponderous, serious but never self-serious, these are poems of sensitivity, intellectual heft and aesthetic wonder. Poetry.

Poetry. 4 RMS W VU, Susana H. Case's latest collection, consists of poems focused on human connections in their various manifestations, including: romantic relationships, both whole and broken, parent-child relationships, and our relationship to death and loss. The work uses the metaphorical floor plan of a New York City apartment, though the rooms are somewhat of a departure from the conventional kitchen and living room, to organize mind and memory. The view alluded to in the abbreviated parlance of a real estate listing is outward, but especially inward, where sometimes it's necessary to struggle with true understanding, to try to blast through the bricked-up barriers to insight regarding motivation and action. Organized into four sections or rooms, Susana H. Case's poems examine a bedroom where a woman's current husband is situated, the family room in which her parents, as well as herself as a child, reside, the storage room of memories of a first husband and various lovers, and a dying room for those others already lost, as well as the author's intimations of her own mortality. Loss is part of the past, as well as the future, and this collection contains the constant recognition of how vulnerable are the things we hold dear. Still, Case is defiant in the face of the mistakes of the past, which she looks at unblinkingly. As she moves from room to room, she discourses on love, sex, dogs, music, travel, movies, and everything that she believes makes a good life possible, the life she wants and intends to live. She is walking through the rooms of her memory in order to find answers to the question of how to live life fully, without regret at the end. "The poems in 4 RMS W VU, like most of Susana H. Case's work, demand full participation no watching here that we live in their apartments, wear their clothes, down to the 'denier nylon.' At the end we're a little shaken, but a lot wiser. Susana is a daring poet, not so much for the sake of issuing challenges, but more to the cause of poetry itself; she defies one to bring the whole body and soul, and deny no part of this experience called living." Mervyn Taylor "4 RMS W VU is a poetic open house in which Susana H. Case guides us through the rooms of the heart. In poems addressed to husbands, lovers and parents, Case shows how the past, the curious details of daily life and wonderings about the future all weave together endlessly, how nothing is ever really lost not a loved one, not a hurt if you can remember. In her moving new collection, we see how this poet's art is an act of holding on in language that is sure-footed." Matthew Thorburn "Susana H. Case's 4 RMS W VU superimposes an intricate map of a lover's mind on the floorplan of a New York City apartment in poems that never shrink from the 'weep and stink of everyday brutality.' Moving from room to room and year to year, 4 RMS W VU passes through meditations on life with dogs, the metaphysics of lipstick, and the peculiarly American primal scene of the isolating, moving, colliding car, in square footage inhabited by a woman with the brio to ask, as final prayer 'Let me blow a lot of fuses.'" B.K. Fischer "In these poems, Susana H. Case captures a vision of New York that can no longer be seen but in memory. Filled with characters frenzied by love, desire & hope, 4 Rm w Vu reminds us not only where we're from but also who we are." Gerry LaFemina"