Our American Authors...
As our catalogue of incredible literary talents grows so too does our American authors and poets!
Michael Adubato's Missing the Exit:
You can find or order Michael's books across many of your favourite online platforms and in paperback, available worldwide here.
Adubato, being a man of many talents and experiences, perceives the world through a compassionate and undeceived lens. Writing in vers libre, the common language of his work justifies more than a single reading. Adubato's free verse poems are mostly lighter and observatory in tone, but can range from harsh objectivity to darker humour. Having travelled extensively, a notebook his companion, he brings these experiences to his literary endeavours. Born and raised in New Jersey, this American poet now resides in Belgium.
“Michael Adubato’s poems are those of the intelligent, alert poet who experiences and perceives the world around him with a compassionate and undeceived sensibility. As a former soldier, engaged in enabling the armed forces of different countries to communicate with each other in a common language his poems can range from harsh observation to military black humour. However, most of the poems are lighter in tone. Stylistically in well-written free verse which bears reading more than once. They have been culled from Adubato’s notebooks kept during his travels and sometimes there are lines that remain in the mind through their disturbing originality.”
-- James Sutherland-Smith, poet and author of The River and the Black Cat
“In these poems, Adubato takes his readers on a journey around neighborhoods and across continents. Over meals with friends made throughout his travels, and through the sights and sounds he encounters as he explores destinations brand new and familiar, these poems stir all of our senses and encourage us to embark on our own excursions at home or abroad. This eclectic collection turns our negative response to "Missing the Exit" into one of the highlights of the trip.”
--Lynne McEniry, poet and author of some other wet landscape
“Very spoken, true-voice poems”
-- Robert Pinsky, Three Term United States Poet Laureate
Samantha Underhill's Sadness of the Siren:
You can find or order Samantha's books across many of your favourite online platforms and in paperback, available worldwide here.
Samantha Underhill is a poet, voice artist, educator, researcher, mother, and lover of all things dark but beautiful. Born in Appalachia, Samantha's connection to haunting, soul-touching scenery, music, and folklore, gives her a unique connection to deep meaningful melancholy. Samantha is influenced by writers of dark storytelling poetry and literature, such as H.P. Lovecraft, Edgar Allan Poe, and Jorge Luis Borges.
It can be said that Samantha lives in duality. Her bright bubbly uplifting personality often contrasts the unexpected storms within. Those who know her, love her unexpected storms within. Those who know her, love her for both.
The poetry of Samantha Underhill is haunting, darkly beautiful, and melancholic.
Follow her to the deep on an epic journey of honesty and vulnerability, where feelings and self-perceptions are artistically expressed in classic verse.
Naked truths of inward aching, reflect the muddled mixing of fear and anger within the role she has placed upon herself.
Hidden beneath the veneer of Greek mythology, lie the shapes and forms of loneliness, regret, ostracization, and longing desire for love and acceptance.
Painted images of injustice, misperceptions, and judgment in the Siren, she reveals a dichotic world, perched on the cusp betwixt isolation and inclusion.
Samantha Underhill's lyrical dark verses in Sadness of the Siren are a cautionary tale, plea, and warning, all in one breath.
Scott Cravens' Lost Americana: The End of the American Dream:
You can find and order Scott's books across many of our favourite online platforms as well as in paperback available worldwide here.
Scott Cravens is an American writer and humorist whose work captures the nuance and subtlety of the American South. Born in Arkansas in the mid 90’s, his work is reflective of the commonly held sentiment that he and his fellow millennials share: "There is no American Dream. There is only this drab American Reality."
As an undergraduate student, Scott became enamored with the writings of Kurt Vonnegut Jr., Cormac McCarthy, and Albert Camus.
Before graduating from Harding University (central Arkansas) in 2018, he worked as an editorial reader for the University's journal publication Tenor of Our Times. From 2021-2023 Scott attended Johns Hopkins University where he further tempered his craft, while completing his Masters in Writing.
As a once great culture flounders, Lost Americana: The End of the American Dream views, through the fictional lens of a quagmire of existential dread, crime, terrorism, poverty, the darkness of narcissism, and the spiritual delusion of a corrupted Christianity and perverted religiosity, navigating a landscape of Absurdism at its zeniths and Nihilism at its nadirs, American's search for purpose and meaning.
Cravens' collection of sixteen vignettes views a stumbling culture's path through suicide, abuse, neglect, escapism, infidelity, perversity, and existentialism. A prediction of the future? Social commentary? Or what has already come to pass? Whether its reader is American or World Citizen, this collection will leave one questioning the American way and its path forward.
"Scott possesses that incurable ability to see absurdity where real tragedy occurs, processing America's worst nightmares through a vivid imagination that leaves readers haunted by laughing ghosts they didn't know existed. With fast words and a faster wit, you'd be wise to strap in and enjoy the wild ride."
--Thomas Johnson, Reviews Editor, West Trade Review
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