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Rick & Rosemary Ardinger, Editors
 17 Canyon Trail, Boise, Idaho 83716
(208) 344-2120 editors@limberlostpress.com

What's New

New Books:
 

Ghost in the Bloody Show

by Martin Vest

Ghost in the Bloody Show is a starkly honest and often startling collection of poems about surviving on the edge of poverty and society. Vest is a tough survivor who has endured the deaths of friends by suicide, the impulse of alcohol, relationships gone awry, and memories of other "outsider" writers, yet his poems explore the beautiful depths of those experiences with a lyric and poignant clarity.

Over the years, Vest has worked the odd jobs few people want to do, and he's managed a low rent existence that both inspires and enflames his literary work. For years at readings at Pocatello's Walrus and Carpenter Bookstore, he's stunned audiences with his stark and unembellished stories that weave into poetic lines. Two years ago, after hearing him read publicly a few times, Idaho State University Speech Instructors Leslie Leek and Steven Puglisi brought Vest's work to the attention of Limberlost Press editors Rick and Rosemary Ardinger.

Vest was raised in Idaho and Tennessee. He says his earliest memories are of his father, a Nashville songwriter, typing out songs at an old Underwood typewriter. Vest currently works for Pocatello's St. Vincent de Paul. His poems have appeared across the nation in such journals as The New York Quarterly, Slipstream, Rattle, The Chiron Review, and Pearl. He has received four Pushcart Prize nominations from various literary magazines.

A painting by his wife Anne graces the cover of his new book of poems.

Despite the attention he is receiving for his work, Vest says he likes obscurity and prefers to avoid talking too much about his work.

"I've always been fascinated by the idea of anonymity. People are always striving to become noticed, Vest says of his new book. "To actively pursue your own anonymity makes you either a saint, a criminal, or Sasquatch, Writers are a little bit of all three. Bob Dylan says, 'To live outside the law, you must be honest.' These poems are an attempt toward honesty."

Ghost in the Bloody Show is printed by hand, using archival papers and traditional methods of pre-computer-age printing, employing lead type and a 19th century printing press. Each book is sewn by hand.

Limberlost has published limited editions by such nationally known writers as Pulitzer Prize-winning writer John Updike, Beat Generation poets Allen Ginsberg, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, and Gary Snyder, Native American writer Sherman Alexie, as well as works by writers from the Intermountain West, including Pocatello poets Margaret Aho, Ray Obermayr, Bruce Embree, and Ford Swetnam.

Twenty Years after
the Death of Richard Brautigan
Limberlost Press Publishes

 Waltzing with the Captain:
Remembering Richard Brautigan

 by Greg Keeler

            Teaching English at Montana State University, Greg Keeler met Trout Fishing in America author Richard Brautigan in 1978, and opened a wildly memorable chapter in his own life. Having secluded himself on a 40-acre ranch in Paradise Valley, Montana, in the mid-1970s, Brautigan needed a friend with whom to talk and carouse. Attracted like a moth to the flame, Keeler became that friend and confidant, driver and clumsy co-conspirator in a number of escapades on the trout streams and rivers, at bars and cafes, and along the back roads of Montana. Together they waltzed through many late nights, until Brautigan took his own life in Bolinas, California, in 1984.

            Twenty years after Brautigan’s death, Greg Keeler recalls those times with haunting clarity. Waltzing with the Captain is darkly funny and poignant in its revealing portrait of an important contemporary American writer, and in its candid story of an often-tested and bumbling friendship between two poets.

            Illustrated with photographs and the author’s cartoon-like drawings at the head of every chapter, the book contains excerpts from some of Brautigan’s letters to Keeler. The book captures in a series of episodic remembrances the last years of a poet whose work embodied an era of the 1960s, when poetry exploded from the pages of the mimeographed journals of San Francisco’s Haight-Ashbury.   

            Greg Keeler has taught English literature and Creative Writing at Montana State University since 1975. A prolific painter and musician, he’s written several musicals and published seven books of poetry, including American Falls (Confluence Press, 1987), and Epiphany at Goofy’s Gas (Clark City Press, 1991). He’s recorded 14 CDs and tapes of his satiric and flat-out funny collections of songs and poems, including Live from Nowhere (Troutball Productions). Winner of a number of awards for teaching and writing, he was awarded the Governor’s Award for Outstanding Achievement in the Humanities from the Montana Committee for the Humanities in 2001.

            Limberlost Press is a small independent publisher that has published works by  such nationally known and regionally significant writers as Allen Ginsberg, Sherman Alexie, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Gary Gildner, William Studebaker, Margaret Aho,  John Updike, Gino Sky, and others.    

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