To occupy means to be present, to be available emotionally, to stand up for oneself, and sometimes to protest. The opposite is absence. To be rendered silent, useless, vacant because of fear or confusion or despair. Each of the stories presents a challenge, not only to an individual character but to a relationship. This short story collection from award-winning California author Daniel Coshnear includes 12 stories about occupation, featuring ordinary heroes. A thoughtful mood is reinforced with 16 full color images from Oakland artist, and UC Berkeley Professor Emeritus Squeak Carnwath.

Poses: An Essay Drawn from the Model is the work of Genine Lentine, and features 12 images from the Richard Diebenkorn Foundation, of Diebenkorn’s live model drawings.

On the sesquicentennial of the Civil War, we proudly present a selection of Ambrose Bierce’s Civil War Stories, widely considered to be the finest fiction to come out of that war. Bierce’s stories pull no punches. Their objective realism is so effective that some commentators have described these tales as antiwar stories. In addition to a selection of Bierce’s fiction, we have included the author’s nonfiction masterpiece, “What I Saw at Shiloh.”

Bierce’s satirical masterpiece, The Devil’s Dictionary, began as entries in his various San Francisco newspaper columns of the 1870s and 1880s. The definitions were first published in book form as The Cynic’s Word Book in 1908. An expanded version was published in 1911 as The Devil’s Dictionary, a title Bierce much preferred.

Kelly’s Cove Press, which focuses on California literature and art, is proud to present our inaugural list of books. We kick off with Kenneth Patchen: A Centennial Selection, a rich collection of poems and full-color art by the legendary poet, pacifist, populist, and pioneer of handmade books. Visit our Patchen Cove for poems, art, photos and tributes to Patchen as we celebrate his 100th birthday.

Night Sky Journey begins with an invocation to the voices of creation, lodged inside ancient carved stones, and ends with a sequence of sonnets inspired by Colorado’s San Juan Mountains. Framed by these landscapes, the poems move through many worlds: real, remembered, and imagined. In the garden, the dead step easily into the autumn air, a brass doorknob in Paris opens to a parallel world, the letters of the alphabet turn back into cryptic images, and the Time Lady goes on “shaving the edge off eternity in ten second increments.” At yet, these poems are very much of this world, rich in memory and sensual pleasures, rooted in personal history and the vastness of geological time.

In his new volume of poems, What Lures the Foxes, Mike Tuggle writes about summer and winter, the sun and the rain, owl, deer, dogs, wood rats, and rac- coons. He sees the human connections to both the animal and the plant worlds and at times sees the world through the eyes of a fox or a crow. After reading these poems you know they’ve been handcrafted, then held like a rock or a flower before being released into the world. This book is for lovers of Tuggle’s poetry and for those who love nature.”
—Jonah Raskin

“Morning Opera is a book of desires lost, desires found, equal parts ode and elegy. There is a lightness of touch here reflected in the short lines which ring like pings on crystal, but beneath the lightness, a darkness presides. Ancestry has its say, but so, too, does the sharp tang of the present moment. There is a mystery at the heart of things, this book whispers to us over and over in many different ways. And at the heart of the mystery there is a music which Bart Schneider has found a way to make a home for in these poems.” —Jim Moore