2Leaf Press is pleased to announce the publication of the poetry collections, TARTESSOS AND OTHER CITIES by Claire Millikin and OFF COURSE: ROUNDABOUTS & DEVIATIONS by A. Robert Lee. Millikin and Lee have previously published poetry with 2Leaf Press, which demonstrates a continuity the press is establishing with its writers.
In TARTESSOS AND OTHER CITIES, Millikin continues to explore homelessness using poetry to express some of the emotions surrounded by homelessness and loss. Named for Tartessos, a lost city on the Guadalquivir, a river in Andalusia, Spain that was likely buried by a devastating tidal wave in BC, the poems in TARTESSSOS gather lost cities and places that were not myths, but were once real. Throughout the collection, Millikin addresses questions such as, “What happened to home” and “Where do I come from?” that examines American geographies of loss, with the poems serving as archeological elements that persist against these losses. From New York City to Muscogee Country, Georgia, from New Haven, to the Haw River, TARTESSOS charts a map of disappearances and resistances to vanishing that make up part of the ghostly American landscape. In the end, Millikin leads readers to discover that home is not just the place where you happen to live, it is the place where you become yourself.
In A. Robert Lee’s latest collection, OFF COURSE: ROUNDABOUTS & DEVIATIONS, Lee interleaves poetry with prose. Beneath the carefully crafted and accessible surface of Lee’s work lies a profound, complex voice that deliberately disrupts traditional literary boundaries and distinctions. Different takes on the odd, oftentimes the antic, at work in the daily round. Seamed in wit, dark but congenial humor, Lee’s work is aimed to amuse yet at the same time, stir recognitions. Fake correspondence might just be real. Foodways edge towards the gothic. Each composition comes over as slant, diagonal, oblique. Set phrases turn askew. Geographies un-map themselves, whether ostensibly Europe, England Japan, or America. Of course, it’s all OFF COURSE. Enchanting tales of travel and transformation, comedy and capitalism, and unforgettable stories that teach us about our present as well as our past, OFF COURSE uses irony to tickle the mind. It reminds us that contradictions in life are inescapable, and how precarious and unpredictable life really is. Acerbic, volatile and incisive. Life episodes take on the patina of waking slumber, not to say japery and the absurd. Read OFF COURSE without discretion, and take out some personal insurance before reading.
Available on Amazon.com, Barnes & Nobles, Chapters-Indigo, Waterstones, Angus & Robertson and other online outlets. Distribution is available from INGRAM or 2LP DISTRIBUTION DIRECT. Ebooks will be available May 16, 2016.
