ALICE JAMES BOOKS
has been publishing poetry since 1973. The press was founded in Boston, Massachusetts as a cooperative wherein authors performed the day-to-day undertakings of the press. This collaborative element remains viable even today, as authors who publish with the press are also invited to become members of the editorial board and participate in editorial decisions at the press. The editorial board selects manuscripts for publication via the press’s annual, national competition, the Alice James Award. Alice James Books seeks to support women writers and was named for Alice James, sister to William and Henry, whose extraordinary gift for writing went unrecognized during her lifetime.
SPRING 2016 CATALOG NEW TITLES
Driving Without a License Janine Joseph
“Janine Joseph writes with an open and easy intimacy. The language here is at once disruptive and familiar, political and sensual, and tinged by the melancholy of loss and the discomforting radiance of redemption. A strong debut.” —Chris Abani “We’ve never read a book like Janine Joseph’s Driving Without a License. By ‘We’ I mean all of us. With its ferocious formal range and deep compassion Joseph shows us the world we all live in but often choose to ignore. Here are the lives of mothers and fathers, teenagers and grandparents, all living under the threat of deportation. Here are people making a new home while holding onto the dignity and beauty of the place that they were once from. Joseph is that rare poet who makes a poem that devastates a reader while being entirely free from judgment. These are political poems because simply being alive in the United States is a political act. These are narrative poems because everyone has a story. At the heart of each poem is the lyric, that moment in which there is no separation between ourselves and the world Joseph lets bloom. This makes us citizens of these poems, which is a testament to Joseph’s staggering grace.” —Gabrielle Calvocoressi
May 2016 ISBN: 978-1-938584-18-3 paper • $15.95
“These poems create a disquieting narrative of American immigration. . . . Joseph’s sensibility is as psychological as it is political, reminding us that concealment is more than a physical act; it is also a profoundly disruptive emotional and psychological position, one that informs not just the speaker’s sense of the world, but her sense of her self. Brilliantly crafted and intimate, Driving Without a License complicates the narrative of American immigration, creating from it a poetry of beauty and empathy.” —Kevin Prufer