Monday, November 30, 2020

Our 2020 Pushcart Prize Nominations

This year, we nominated:

1968 through 1971, a selection from Alex Gildzen's Alex in Movieland (1943-1973), which we published in February.

"PTSD Hushabye" by Carolyn Srygley-Moore, a poem from her Ode to Horatio and Other Saviors, which we published in October.

Congratulations and good luck!


Buy both together for $24 US and we'll ship them free: paypal.me/crisischronicles

Thursday, October 29, 2020

Ode to Horatio and Other Saviors - by Carolyn Srygley-Moore (CC#112)


Crisis Chronicles Press
is pleased to present our long-awaited latest title, Ode to Horatio and Other Saviors, a compelling collection of poetry by Carolyn Srygley-Moore

U.S. or Elsewhere?
 
Ode to Horatio and Other Saviors is 92 pages, perfect bound, 6x6" and illustrated. ISBN: 978-1-64092-948-7. Front and back cover photos provided by the author. Available now for only $12 from Crisis Chronicles Press, 535 Parkside Boulevard, Cleveland, Ohio 44143 USA. A percentage of proceeds from the sale of this book went to support Rescue Dogs Rescue Soldiers, an organization that pairs shelter dogs with veterans and provides pet therapy programs.


"Carolyn Srygley-Moore’s poetry always enhances its relevance through specificity of coordinates in time and place. The poet has been a consistent fighter for animal rights and animal rescue services, tying them to imagery of human atrocities. In this collection, we go back to a specific era in 2012, and a specific friend named Evy, discovering the poems that illuminated the euthanasia of that dear friend. Her afterword essay is sure to bring tears. But that is Carolyn Srygley-Moore’s power."
—Loring Wirbel, writer and social justice activist

"A book of poems that takes you through meeting and instantly connecting with a beautiful pup, a snow white pit bull named Evy, coming to the awareness that this loving dog has issues that will be to its own demise, through no one’s fault. A book of poems on learning what it’s like to have that love and deep connection, yet coming to awareness and understanding that the ultimate choice had to be made — and the realization of actually having no choice, in reality, of having to surrender your animal to euthanasia. Walking down the road of having to come to terms with the fact that this loving dog could be/was a danger, especially towards children. Sweet Evy could be triggered at any moment in time, without warning, without any rhyme or reason, to become aggressive and dangerous and do severe harm to another body. This book is a roller coaster ride of emotions and mental anguish of having to euthanize this beautiful animal who you love so dearly."
—Judy Lynn Lustgarten Goldstein, activist

"Carolyn Srygley-Moore is a poet of enormous sensibility who combines confessional elements with a capacity to do what Heidegger said poets were for, which is to reveal the Being behind beings. Description of a whole array of things, however “poetic”, does not a poem make. Following a set of rules, merely emulating the constituents of a “canon of taste” will, almost infallibly, make “poets” crashing bores.

"We write, Heidegger reminds us, in “a destitute time” & “in default of God”. As an atheist, I am OK with this. Carolyn, however, does not like that “no god any longer gathers men & things unto himself.” Nothing shines any longer, it is night. The task of the poet is to find the wholesome. & the holy that relates to it, in the unholy that s/he depicts. This book deals with the subject of “euthanasia” of animals, in particular the “euthanasia” of one of the writer's dogs for alleged aggression. “Euthanasia” is far too frequently resorted to as part of the morally dubious treatment of pets in the USA, & it is remarkable that Carolyn deals with the subject with great restraint.

"Wherever Carolyn writes of that which is bad, the fact of her shows us what Hölderlin points out, that wherever there is danger there is also the seed of that which can save us. Because Carolyn is a great poet, the solution is not just hers, it is for Everyman. Although humans, or liars, as they are also known, work to destroy innocence, the poet in his or her poem points to where the future divinity will be found, or the future focus of being. It will not be in people, or anything anthropomorphic.
—David McLean, author of Flesh & Resurrection.


Carolyn Srygley-Moore
(C Leigh Moore) is a writer who has encountered a variety of issues in her career. She has been published in Red Fez, I Am Not a Silent Poet, and other venues. Ode to Horatio parallels the plight of humanity with the plight of dogs randomly placed on death row. Carolyn's falling in love with the pit bull was ostensibly the beginning of years advocating for victims of breed specific legislation, including all breeds deemed dangerous by landlords and insurance pitfalls. She found the greatest meaning in her endeavors as transporter from shelter to adopter to foster etc. from winter 2019 to 20. Carolyn has had two emergency craniotomies leaving her with the current inability to drive. As well as caring for her own rescued pets, this elegy is the writer’s current contribution to the cause. Carolyn is a graduate of Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, where she recalls the night she fell passionately in love with language. Forty years later, that passion has lasted.

Friday, February 14, 2020

Alex in Movieland (1943-1973) - by Alex Gildzen (CC#111)

[April 2023 update: To celebrate Alex's 80th birthday this month,
Alex in Movieland is now in its second printing!]


Crisis Chronicles Press was honored and ecstatic to celebrate Valentine's Day 2020 with the publication of Alex in Movieland (1943-1973), a major work by one of our favorite writers and artists, Alex Gildzen.

Alex in Movieland is a monumental work defying easy categorization. It is memoir, list, poetry, history and more, all in one, reading like a movie of the author's life in book form, replete with juicy detail. This new volume is 150 pages, perfect bound, 5.5 x 8.5". ISBN: 978-1-64092-947-0. Front cover art by the author. Available now for only $12 from Crisis Chronicles Press, 535 Parkside Boulevard, Cleveland, Ohio 44143 USA.

US or Elsewhere?

Click here to read a 2009 Otoliths interview with Gildzen wherein he talks about the origins and evolution of Alex in Movieland, which he began writing in
1996 and is still writing. Our new Crisis Chronicles volume is the first time the entire first thirty years of it have appeared in print. 

Alex Gildzen
lives in Palm Springs where he writes every day. In the past year his poems have appeared in the anthologies "Love Jets" and "The End of the World Project." He also makes art from collages to conceptual pieces such as "The Century Dimes" and "Box of Little Bags." In addition he's become a model with and without clothes for artists and photographers.