Best of the Small Press 2011: Day 9.2

Poet Kris Collins reads at Awesome Books, Pittsburgh.

September 2011.

More small press recommendations today come from Kris Collins, one of Pittsburgh's small press movers and shakers. I think of Kris as "the bard of Pittsburgh" because I love the tavern's-eye view of the city found in his poems about his artist and writer friends gathered around beer, hope, smoke, frustration, and transition. Not only does he write richly moody scenes evoking the ghosts of Pittsburgh's past peeking through as the former "Steel City" aggressively remakes it present, but he chronicles the last few decades of the city's bohemians as well as anyone I've heard or read. His most serious competition may be the authors he's started publishing on his small press of limited edition poetry books: Low Ghost Press features two of Pittsburgh's most keen-eyed poets, John Grochalski (now a 'Burgh ex-pat living in New York) and Bob Pajich. Kris doesn't care about competition. He'll even read poems by other people at his own readings.

Kris manages one of my favorite bookstores in town, Caliban Books, and runs Desolation Row Records out of that store. He has been an active member of The New Yinzer litmag for several years and co-hosted their reading series with writer Savannah Schroll Guz for its first few seasons.

*****

1. Past All Traps, Don Wentworth (Six Gallery Press)

2. Spared, Angele Ellis (Main Street Rag)

3. Six Stories, David Lewis (The National Folk Art Foundation)

Kris Collins
Editor of Low Ghost Press
http://lowghostpress.blogspot.com/

Recommended reading: John Grochalski on Low Ghost Press.

Book Review: STORIES by Scott McClanahan

S. McClanahan, Stories. Pittsburgh: Six Gallery Press, 2009. Fiction. 146 pages. ISBN: 978-0981009124.

Scott McClanahan is one of the most refreshing writers of fiction I've read in a long time. I love his debut collection, STORIES, which revives the pleasures of the age-old art of storytelling. McClanahan's narrator is funny and profane, at least a little bit self-depricating but somehow always compassionate to his subjects. As a writer, McClanahan is smart and hilarious, evoking layers of pathos from the twists and turns his stories and narration take. His tales revisit familiar Appalachian characters, small-town disasters, and gothic themes that Flannery O'Connor, Breece D'J Pancake, or Tom Waits could love (lost limbs, jailtime, disfigured strippers, hit-and-runs, the small-town down-and-out), but the tone of the narrator makes them something I've never heard before, immediate and contemporary. With many more stories up his sleeve, McClanahan is going places. Highly recommended for collections of: contemporary fiction, short stories, young authors of fiction, Appalachian fiction, small press fiction, first-person fiction, rural fiction, or West Virginia fiction.