Four Way Books

Unfathoming, along with our other Spring 2017 titles, is now available from Four Way Books!

Read "Isn't True Love Wonderful?" from Andrea Cohen's Unfathoming over at Verse 

Praise for Andrea Cohen

"The title of Andrea Cohen's collection Unfathoming is brilliantly concise: these poems train their attention on the elusive, perhaps insoluble mysteries of the heart--feelings, behaviors, and stories which cannot be not reconciled in tidy narrative closures or snap-shut truths. Cohen's dominant theme is the elusiveness of intimacy, but the intimacy to which we are repeatedly returned is that problematic one of the self with the self. I love the bafflement as well as the tough, intelligent persistence of the speaker in these interrogations. Terse, linguistically distilled, Cohen's craft is meticulous, as with her flashlight she prowls and probes, reporting on the emotional transactions of our lives that can only partially be seen. The poetic results are fiercely distinctive and moving."

 — Tony Hoagland

"Andrea Cohen’s poems have always been rigorously crafted and deft in their insight. Along comes Unfathoming, which marks a new depth in her work. While these poems are engaged in our ancient struggle to find meaning in the wake of loss, they also nod to the foolishness that makes finding meaning itself the struggle. Cohen refutes the idea that rescue comes via intellect alone. As the poems in Unfathoming demonstrate, any deliverance comes when loss, explored, makes its way toward wonder."

 — Alice Sebold

Click here to buy your copy of Unfathoming!

Upcoming Readings for Andrea Cohen

Saturday, May 6, 11 AM - Mass Poetry Festival with Tom Sleigh at 161 Essex St, Salem, MA 01970

Friday, June 16, 2 PM - Assorted Cameos of the Mysterious at the Nantucket Book Festival at Atheneum Great Hall, 1 India St, Nantucket, MA 02554

Sacrum, along with our other Spring 2017 titles, is now available from Four Way Books!

Read "Soliloquy of a Tornado in the Distance" from Bruce Bond's Sacrum over at Verse

Praise for Bruce Bond

“‘The poet writes the history of his body,’ Thoreau once noted, and nothing could be truer of the work undertaken by Bruce Bond in Sacrum. Exploring the tender vulnerabilities of the body and the complicated processes of consciousness, these poems keep arriving at elegy by meditating on the vivacities that make a life: love and pain, knowledge and time, wonder and reality. All the while, as one poem’s speaker intones, ‘be one part miracle, another / blunder.’ In what is now a considerable body of work, Bond has been exploring that terrain between miracle and blunder in poems that get richer with each book. Sacrum is a superb and necessary addition to our poetry.”

 — Rick Barot

Violent Blues, along with our other Fall 2016 titles, is now available from Four Way Books!

A poem from Bruce Willard's Violent Blues:

"Revision" Mid-February revealed in red: correction, cardinal, blister, rose, store-front heart, snow sunset, scarlet lingerie on white skin. Lone bonsai, indoors, ever- green edged in rust, its limbs overreaching its given space. Time for pruning. Here, close to the branches, the quick, turned joinery and excess. How seasoned these bloodless cuts, these short and blessed days. "Revision" from Violent Blues (c) 2016 by Bruce Willard. Appears with permission of Four Way Books. All rights reserved.

Praise for Bruce Willard

“Willard plays the notes in-between—the awakenings, loves and losses, the slippages between two blurred bodies of life, of sending and receiving—that is, the 'un-understandable,' perhaps like Thelonius Monk's fractured piano, the one that flames in the center of being, meaning and enlightenment. This is also a mouth-held blues harp of words, ultimately not made of words, it is more an 'alluring paleness,' a riff of life-death's 'impossible finishes,' a streaked-night asphalt. I am struck by the sincerity of the voice here, the relentless set of mind-heart puzzles, the tender, wisdom-lit aloneness in this collection. Each poem, in a way, is a deep breath koan that musics-in-out from sea depths, dream echoes—the 'pressure' of existence and non-being—yet all is alive as cherimoya, jacaranda, and jasmine. This is a rare gift, a magnificent wave of poems that will move with you forever.” 

 — Juan Felipe Herrera, United States Poet Laureate 

“Most readers will admire those poems in Bruce Willard's Violent Blues whose vanishing points lead back to the unabated joy of self-reflection and the endlessly beautiful sound of modern life suddenly cast in light. Yet, these blue notes are singular and honor the earned truths of marriage and fathering, and name one’s errors with a poignant dignity. To which I say, snap your fingers, close your eyes, and nod along to its exquisite and pitch perfect lyric moods.” 

 — Major Jackson

“I read Violent Blues with great pleasure. Then I read it again with even more. Its poems are vivid and surprising. A trampoline can become a metaphor for the rhythm of our lives. [Willard’s] poems have a fine haptic quality—made of things real and things imagined to make them even more real. They find their way in the course of their unfolding and make their own fine music as they go.” 

 — Dan Gerber

Click here to buy your copy of Violent Blues!

Upcoming Readings for Bruce Willard

Tuesday, Oct. 11, 6 PM - Bruce Willard with forthcoming Four Way Books authors Christina Pugh and Valerie Wallace at the Seminary Co-op Bookstore on 5751 S Woodlawn Ave., Chicago, IL.

god’s breath hovering across the waters, along with our other Fall 2016 titles, is now available from Four Way Books!

An excerpt from Henry Israeli's god’s breath hovering across the waters:

from "Depraved Cognition" "...The boys in the movie get their comeuppance in a dazzling display of gore and carnage. Gavrilo Princip died in prison, a painful death by tuberculosis. The boy in my first grade class grew up to be a certified public accountant. And I, even after becoming an orphan at forty-two— got off easy. Easy as pie. True enough. But everyone has a zombie tied up in the basement. And one day it will bite someone you love, and then she will be a zombie, slowly rotting as you bring her gifts, brush her hair, rub cream on her dry, brittle skin, and make sweet, sweet love to her." "Depraved Cognition" from god’s breath hovering across the waters (c) 2016 by Henry Israeli. Appears with permission of Four Way Books. All rights reserved.

Praise for Henry Israeli

“With the earnestness of an Old Testament prophet, Henry Israeli traverses personal and historical tragedy… I urge anyone who loves to read to get god's breath hovering across the waters.” 

 — Noelle Kocot 

“Henry Israeli’s titular god—lower case g—is a being who must be addressed, supplicated, and scolded; also a being who has been stripped of his capital letter as an army officer is stripped of his insignia and demoted. The poems in god’s breath hovering across the waters themselves hover, and also dart, full of the world, and full of alert, sometimes pugnacious private sorrow. Israeli’s vision is slant, arresting, and at times, almost out of nowhere, celebratory.” 

 — Daisy Fried

Watch the Book Trailer

Click here to buy your copy of god’s breath hovering across the waters!

Upcoming Readings for Henry Israeli

Thursday, Sept. 29, 7 PM - Four Way Launch Reading with Henry Israeli, Karen Brennan, Grace Bonner, and Jen Levitt at KGB on 85 E 4th St, NYC.

Wednesday, Oct. 5, 7 PM -  Four Way Books Fall Launch with Henry Israeli, Karen Brennan, Joel Brouwer, and Jen Levitt at Berl’s Brooklyn Poetry Shop on 141 Front St, Brooklyn.

Thursday, Oct. 6, 6 PM - Four Way Books Fall Launch with Henry Israeli, Joel Brouwer, and Megan Staffel at the NYU Book Store on 726 Broadway, NYC.

Thursday, Oct. 20, 7 PM - Henry Israeli and Sarah Blake reading at Main Point Books, 116 N Wayne Ave, Wayne, PA.

Tuesday, Oct. 25, 6 PM - Henry Israeli Reading with Wayne Miller at Villanova University, 800 Lancaster Ave, Villanova, PA. 

Wednesday, Oct. 26, 7 PM - Henry Israeli Reading with Wayne Miller at Moonstone Poetry, Fergie's Pub, 1214 Sansom St, Philadelphia, PA. 

Off Message, along with our other Fall 2016 titles, is now available from Four Way Books!

An excerpt from Joel Brouwer's Off Message:

from "Observations in a Port City" "...Of bodies changed to other forms I sing. The palazzos of the oligarchs are now the palazzos of the oligarchs: Paribas, DB, Credit Suisse. Marco Polo dictated his travels in the prison of the Casa delle Compere di San Giorgio, Europe’s oldest bank, so both interest and China were invented there. It’s the port authority now, of course. A young woman helped a blind man navigate the piazza. It was either kindness or her job. Everything is changed; nothing ceases. The dead woman who ran for it. The dead woman who got too old. The dead woman weeping at the gangplank to the Tunis ferry with a dirty peony of Euros but no passport. I cannot recommend the tour of Columbus’s house. The price of admission is extortionate and also he never lived there. He’s crossing borders drawn in the air. He speaks every language. Everything is translated; nothing signifies. ..." "Observations in a Port City" from Off Message (c) 2016 by Joel Brouwer. Appears with permission of Four Way Books. All rights reserved.

Praise for Joel Brouwer

“Joel Brouwer’s itinerant and moral mind is always online, seeking to aggregate our surfeit store of information into some kind of meaningful ore, and to measure the distance between civilian and collective, between action’s rhetoric and action itself. Off Message’s disquieting prognosis for our era of surveillance should make us all more alert, more aware. It’s a thrilling and masterful book.” 

— Cathy Park Hong

“Lacerating. Skewering. Anything you can do with a blade Joel Brouwer does in Off Message, in poems attuned to hypocrisies large and small, where ‘after intense / lobbying the transparency committee / approves a series of closed door hearings,’ where seabirds ‘cloaked in oil’ can be considered rich. ‘They must have marveled at distance's power / to deceive and to wake deception's twin, oblivion,’ he writes in ‘Lines on Distance,’ a poem that opens up the book with a bang. We need a book like this, to sound through all the fiddling in burning Rome; they should hand it out to every voter at the polls.”

 — Dana Levin

“Off Message beautifully disproves the reductive cliché that politics makes bad poetry. Instead of proclamation, Joel Brouwer pursues complication, distressing a quiet free verse tradition. Nothing in these poems is easy. It’s a vexed world, and Brouwer is writing equally vexed, yet stunning poems about and for it.”

 — Juliana Spahr

Click here to buy your copy of Off Message!

Upcoming Readings for Joel Brouwer

Wednesday, Oct. 5, 7 PM -  Four Way Books Fall Launch with Joel Brouwer, Karen Brennan, Henry Israeli, and Jen Levitt at Berl’s Brooklyn Poetry Shop on 141 Front St.

Thursday, Oct. 6th, 6 PM - Four Way Books Fall Launch with Joel Brouwer, Henry Israeli, and Megan Staffel at the NYU Book Store on 726 Broadway, NYC