All our titles are available on Apple Books.

 

The Kalifornsky Project

Peter Kalifornsky (1911-1993) was a member of the Kenaitze Indian Tribe, a Dena’ina Athabaskan who lived in Kenai, Alaska. He was the first speaker of his oral language—a variation of Dena’ina— to bring it into written literature. He became the writer and scholar of his language. Among his ancient tales was Ggugguyni Sukt’a, Crow Story, which tells how Crow (the Raven) gave songs and their first story to the Campfire People. Long time ago, it begins, the Dena’ina did not have songs and stories. Then came the time that Crow sang for them. Till then, as they worked together and traveled, di ya du hu kept them in time . . . .

From the First Beginning, When the Animals Were Talking, The Animal Stories is the first of four projected volumes. It includes Peter Kalifornsky’s animal stories in their English versions, matched with his conversations with Katherine McNamara, so that the tales and their “back stories” speak to each other. This multi-touch edition, available on Apple Books without cost, allows the reader to follow Kalifornsky’s stories and his thoughts and teachings about them. Most of his stories include audio files of the author reading and scans of his Dena’ina manuscript pages. From the First Beginning is available without charge on Apple Books.

 

 From the Believing Time, When They Tested for the Truth, the second volume in the Kalifornsky Project series, is rich in knowledge and pleasure. Kalifornsky’s  remarkable Dena’ina stories are the English versions he made with Katherine McNamara. They tell of how the old Dena’ina tested themselves against the great powers, visible and invisible, of their land and water. The writer and his “secretary,” Katherine McNamara, herself then a younger writer, speak about their complex spiritual, intellectual, and cultural heritage. The volume contains audio recordings of Kalifornsky his Dena’ina texts, and scans of those texts, from his typed manuscript. The volume is illustrated.

“They lived life through Imagination,” Peter Kalifornsky said, “the power of the mind.” The reader, exploring all he meant by this, finds a new world opened. From the Believing Time is available without charge on Apple Books.

 

Poetry and Art

The Heart Is A Drowning Object. A collaboration in poems and paintings by the novelist Katherine Vaz and the multi-media painter Isabel Pavão..

These internationally-known artists have found inspiration in a female solitude that living through grief might bring. Katherine Vaz’s melodic poems begin with an actual damaged heart in a love story—a husband with a sudden affliction, a wife who tends to him. Isabel Pavão’s vibrant pictures share and explore her colorations of grief. Their words and images grow together, in an unexpected bloom of joy, into a way of recognizing late love amid the real possibility of loss.

This artist’s book contains audio files, images in detail, and a video poem. It is available on Apple Books.

Georgic Fantasy reveals a timeless, yet ravaged landscape and the ravaged humans who toil in it, culminating in a mysterious, legendary act of violence, and falling away into a moral tale which echoes faintly the Appalachian folktale that helped inspire the poem. Ben Jasnow, a Classical scholar, has written a narrative sequence of lyrics into which is woven a visual response, a series of thirteen paintings by the artist John Woodman, whose brilliant colors and gestural marks made upon photographic imagery illuminate — even seem to express — the desperate emotions which erupt underneath the poem’s Classical restraint.

Ben Jasnow is an American poet and Classicist currently based in Saratoga Springs, N. Y. John Woodman is an English painter who lives and works in London. Georgic Fantasy is available on Apple Books.

Some years ago, Robert Schultz, a poet, witnessed an exhibition of photographs printed in the flesh of leaves of trees and plants, portraits of war-worn Vietnamese and of Cambodians documented in  the killing fields of the Khmer Rouge.

These chlorophyll prints, as they were called, were made by Binh Danh, a Vietnamese-born American photographer. About his method, Binh Danh wrote, “This process deals with the idea of elemental transmigration: the decomposition and composition of matter into other forms. The images of war are part of the leaves, and live inside and outside of them. The leaves express the continuum of war. . .  As matter is neither created nor destroyed, but only transformed, the remnants of the Vietnam and American War live on forever in the Vietnamese landscape.”

Our multi-touch book of their collaboration, Ancestral Altars, is available on Apple Books.

Caveboy, A Poem, by Mary-Sherman Willis. Art by Collin Willis. We enter the Paleolithic, at the dawn of art-making. Humans have evolved into adept hunters who know the  world with their senses and their dreams.  The poet envisions a Boy, a teen-ager, who is being prepared by his mother for his first hunt. He is successful and kills a doe. That night, a girl comes to him for the first time. In a dream, once again he tracks a doe and finds himself in a cave occupied by his mother’s totem, the bear.https://itunes.apple.com/us/book/caveboy/id559566859?mt=11&ign-mpt=uo%3D4

Caveboy, A Poem is a multi-touch book for the iPad and Mac, available on Apple Books.

With I Went into the Large Space, by Lyndia Terre, a reader holds in her hands a digital book of contemplation. She may look at a drawing, then touch and expand it to observe a fine line, a curve, a space evoked. He may then swipe gently to see the photograph that was its model, perhaps virtually entering the scene it reveals. She may wish to view only drawings, then only photographs. He may look, pause, turn to a poem.

Lyndia Terre writes, “memory is a strange part of sight. . . ” In the calm succession of these closely-observed images drawn and photographed while Terre was the first Artist in Residence at the Horticulture Centre of the Pacific, Victoria, B.C., I Went into the Large Space offers readers an intimate exploration of gardens and wild lands. Just as Lyndia Terre looked around, then looked closely, then moved the camera shutter, then examined the digital print. Then, putting aside everything mechanical and digital, took a No. 2 pencil and a sheet of Stonehenge paper and began to draw.

I Went into the Large Space is available on Apple Books.

The American poet and translator Katherine E. Young has selected two poems by the Russian poet Inna Kabysh, whom we believe should become as well-known here as she is to her countrymen. Our edition of Two Poems by Inna Kabysh, translated from the Russian by Katherine E. Young, is available on the Apple Book Store.