Our Books
Delayed En Route
By Stephen J. Cribari
The station platform. worn by thousands down
To smooth wood by fidgeting in place
Or pacing to and fro, coming and going
Anxious under cloudless autumn skies.
They know that it will come when it will come,
That schedules are approximate at best.
- Impressions Waiting on the Station Platform
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So begins the first verse of Stephen Cribari's chronicle of life's journey, not just an individual journey but the journey we are all taking. Each of the 29 poems in this collection captures a particular snapshot along the way forward, rendered in focused attention to detail that often goes unnoticed. From the mysterious view across an isolated Irish cliff to the disconnected intimacy of a doctor's waiting room to a lesson on fingerprinting a corpse, you are invited to travel along an itinerary guided by the heart and what the heart knows. Step aboard and you will experience moments not your own but that evoke feelings deeply yours, that only you know so well.
About the Author
Stephen J. Cribari’s poetry and plays have found their way into print and onto the dramatic and operatic stage in the United States and abroad. In a parallel life, he has worked as an official with the professional golf tour, a criminal defense attorney, and a law professor. His coursework and commentary have ranged from evidence to cultural property law and the protection of art and artifacts. Born near New York City into an immigrant Italian family, he has traveled extensively in Italy and currently resides in Minneapolis.
About the Book Design
One Year, Yellow Trail, Landscape As Time, a painting by Debra Ramsay, provides the perfect image to reflect how the poems in this collection use details to illuminate our understanding of specific events of life over time. Beginning in 2013, Ramsay walked a particular trail in New Berlin, New York, photographing the surrounding landscape every hundred steps. She returned through the seasons in order to observe the changes time wrought on the journey. In the studio, extracting a significant color from each of the 72 photographs, she painted her series, Time Keeping With Color, shown in New York, New York in 2014. In designing the cover, Emilyann Craighead, felt that using french flaps best conveyed the idea of the continuous nature of time despite our desire to clearly demarcate a beginning, middle, and end.
Still Life
By Stephen J. Cribari
Still Life is a novella in iambic pentameter of artistic passion abandoned and the inherent risk of a life lived in full. Over several sun-saturated, color-fraught days in Capri and Rome, Anne struggles to confront herself and the life she accepted. The unexpected reappearance of her former lover and artistic foil calls that acceptance into question. But betrayal takes many forms. The demand of an enduring commitment to marriage, to art, even to perceived self-definition, can pose an existential threat to who one is and must be. In this deceptively simple story of a few days' travel, we are carried along in a gently rocking rhythm to find that love, no less than beauty, can stand so starkly before us that it defies perception.
About the Author
Stephen J. Cribari’s poetry and plays have found their way into print and onto the dramatic and operatic stage in the United States and abroad. In a parallel life, he has worked as an official with the professional golf tour, a criminal defense attorney, and a law professor. His coursework and commentary have ranged from evidence to cultural property law and the protection of art and artifacts. Born near New York City into an immigrant Italian family, he has traveled extensively in Italy and currently resides in Minneapolis.
Reviews for Still Life
"In Cribari’s hands, the commonplace, seen comprehensively, becomes almost unbearably rich in hue and texture. He not only sets his story in Capri and Rome, he takes us there. We feel the everywhere heat, the clamor, the atmospheric weight of two thousand years of cultural heritage. We taste the wine and olive oil and Penne alla Sorgente. We can almost hear the orange-marigold-red amaryllis and thick blue-greens of oleander hedge and umber brown of palms howl their defiance…” – Don Judges
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"…full of striking imagery, a unique vision of nature and the nature of people…full of beautifully crafted phrases, but deeper, more layered, more meaningful than just beautiful words." – Doni C.
About the Book Design
“A naked girl stands in a shallow pool
And from a terra cotta amphora on her shoulder
Pours out the future in an endless stream.” - Jonathan, Still Life
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This description of the painting, La Source, Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres (1856), by the art historian and curator, Jonathan, is the basis for the cover illustration. The color palette of that painting informs our design and choice of papers; we hope it sets the scene for the contemporary story which will unfold. The font forms another element that will carry the story forward. In this instance, Weiss Standard, created by Emil Rudolph Weiss in 1928, has an elegance and lyrical energy that aligns with this novella. Fittingly, Weiss himself was a painter, having studied alongside Toulouse-Lautrec, as well as a poet whose work was set to music by Sibelius. But, it was his graphic design and calligraphy that most caught attention and for which he is known today. Cover design created by Emilyann Craighead.