Logan House announces the second annual Holland Prize for unpublished poetry manuscripts (48-80 pages). The winning manuscript will be published in 2007, and the winner will receive $500. Submit manuscript, $25 reading fee, and SASE to Logan House, Rte. 1, Box 154, Winside, NE 68790, before August 1.

Everyone that submits to the Holland Prize will receive a copy of Disciples of an Uncertain Season by Larry Holland and will also receive the winning manuscript.

Friends and close associates of the press are not eligible for the contest. We are interested in publishing the best manuscript that comes across our desks. We are not looking for anything regional, Midwest, Great Plains or Western related. We will award the Holland Prize to the best manuscript we read no matter what region you write from. Manuscripts will be recycled unless otherwise noted and proper return postage is supplied. Thanks for submitting to the Holland Prize and helping support Logan House Press.

To purchase any of the books below, click on the "How to buy" link or send a check or money order to Logan House Press, Route 1 Box 154, Winside Nebraska 68790,or call 402-286-4891

Gutter Flowers by Don Welch US Price: $12 (paperback) Publication Date: 2005 To order, send $12 +$2 (shipping) to Logan House, Route 1 Box 154, Winside, NE 68790. Don Welch moves among the poor like a modern day Whitman who has mastered the fine art of pruning. The poor, he says, "need the dump and truck of love / to walk on too." With a minimum of words he evokes a maximum of feelings and sympathies. The rest of us need the poet's words to bring us those places we have neither the time nor the courage to explore. — Bill Kloefkorn

Alvin Turner as Farmer by Willliam Kloefkorn Foreword by Don Welch US Price: $12 (paperback) ISBN 0-9674123-9-0 Publication Date: 2005 How to Buy It was 1972 when Alvin Turner first ambled onto the page and charmed his way into the hearts of readers. The voice behind the mask belonged to William Kloefkorn, first-book poet and assistant professor at a small Methodist university on the Plains. Alvin Turner as Farmer was an instant success — the initial printing sold out in weeks — and decades later is a classic of American poetry. In the meantime, Alvin Turner's creator — now Nebraska State Poet — has gone on to write more than twenty books, mostly poetry, charming readers the whole long and wonderful way. Is there a more complete man in poetry than Alvin Turner? Strong, tender, witty, and wise, the man himself is as rich as the poetry which presents him. For every step Turner's head takes in one direction, his heart takes an equal and opposite step. This is the blanace of the anicents, as if Classical Greece had dropped in on Attica Kansas. Is that so strange? — Don Welch, author of The Alley Poems

The Great American Road Show Edited by JV Brummels & Jim Reese US Price: $12.00 (paperback) ISBN 0-9674123-6-6 Publication Date: 2003 How to Buy No one poet travels the entirety of the road that is American poetry. We stop for gas or pie or a flat tire or because we can't keep our eyes open any longer. We pause to fork up the crumbs from our plate, or we're distracted in the midst of looking for all the pieces of the jack. While we sleep on some hard motel bed, other travelers pass us in the night. This is a community unto itself, but the members survive in a larger culture. We get off the road for a while or forever. A poem begins and that poem ends. What goes on forever is the road. What never ends — can't end as long as one voice speaks out its vision — is poetry. — JV Brummels Poetry eases the emotional battle of comprehending the sometimes meaningless, inexplicable, messy cycle of life. For those who can perceive it, for those who "listen," poetry exists everywhere, in the mundane, in the grace of loving gestures, in death. The poems of The Great American Road Show reflect the struggles encountered in the inevitable process of living. — The Reader (click to read more)

Shadowboxing By William Kloefkorn US Price: $12.00 (paperback) ISBN 0-9674123-4-X Publication Date: 2003 How to Buy In this new collection of five stories, one of America's master poets delves again into the lives of idiosyncratic and diverse characters of the Plains. William Kloefkorn introduces us to a teen-aged babysitter shadowboxing his way to adulthood, a waitress and the hero who rescues her from her grief, a young couple just finding love, an old man desperately trying to locate the threads that tie his life together, and a professor fumbling to make a connection to real life. The voice that tells of these people and their place is filled with compassion and good humor.

Frankenstein Was a Negro By Charles Fort US Price: $12.00 (paperback) ISBN 0-9674123-1-5 How to Buy Frankenstein Was a Negro is lyrical psalm — it sings the blues and has the scat and soul of the Cotton Club. It's a testament to the true working class — hands tattered and torn; eye squinting bright. Reminiscent of Baudelaire, father of the prose poem, this collection mesmerizes and haunts and becomes terrifying to its own creator. Charles Fort holds the Paul W and Clarice Kingston Reynolds Chair in Poetry at the University of Nebraska — Kearney. A MacDowell Fellow and Randall Jarrell Poetry Prize winner, Fort has been recognized by Poetry Society of America and Writer's Voice. His poems have appeared in Prairie Schooner, Nebraska Review, Mississippi Review, The American Poetry Review, Georgia Review, Colorado Review, and elsewhere, and have been anthologized in Best American Poetry 2000, Best of Prose Poem International, and The Carnegie Mellon Anthology of Poetry. Order your copy today.

Disciples of an Uncertain Season By Larry Holland US Price: $12.00 (paperback) ISBN 0-9674123-3-1 How to Buy At the time of Larry Holland's death in March of 1999, Disciples of an Uncertain Season, published just the fall before, had virtually sold out. This volume reprints Disciples in its entirety with the addition of a number of poems previously published available only in magazines and journals. An introduction and afterword by his friends and fellow poets Red Shuttleworth and Neil Harrison have been added as well. This enterprise has been a labor of love, and this collection is dedicated to the friends, family, and students of Larry Holland. ... takes the sort of chances that create poems that must be read and read again ... — Red Shuttleworth, Sawtooth Saloon He possesses the talent to make a poem's pulse thump against the silence of its own making. — Don Welch Order your copy today.

The Logan House Anthology of 21st Century American Poetry Edited by Trenton Muth, with an introduction by Susan Naramore Maher US Price: $16.00 (paperback) ISBN 0-9674123-2-3 How to Buy ... from the cadences of American dialect — idiosyncratic rhythm of region, these poems provide a braided stream of life's experiences ... — Susan Naramore Maher Order your copy today.

A Time to Sink Her Pretty Little Ship By William Kloefkorn US Price: $11.95 (paperback) ISBN 0-9674123-0-7 Publication Date: September 16, 1999 How to Buy Logan House Press is proud to announce the release of William Kloefkorn's first book of short stories, A Time to Sink Her Pretty Little Ship. Some things have gone awry in the sleepy burgs wherein William Kloefkorn's characters dwell. The unassuming title character of "Newberry's Boy" has been, for some time now, violating our most sacred taboo. "The Pisser Into Clear and Faraway Streams" refuses to die quietly. "In Baptizing the Shirt" a woman does what she can to bridge the irreconcilable difference in her marriage. A paper boy in "A Time to Sink Her Pretty Little Ship" plots a singular act of patriotism. William Kloefkorn was named the Nebraska State Poet in 1982. He has published more than twenty volumes of poetry. In 1978 he won the Nebraska Hog-Calling Championship. He recently retired from the faculty of Nebraska Wesleyan University after a long and distinguished career. A Time to Sink Her Pretty Little Ship is Kloefkorn's first book of fiction. This collection of short stories as expected, has raised quite a commotion in literary circles. Kloefkorn's prose is crisp and clear, drawing on his familiar poetic voicing, as if written in a language all his own. Don't miss out on this exciting opportunity. Order your copies today.

...all these bullets, separate as nuns, eager as Reynosa whores... by Red Shuttleworth US Price: $5.00 Publicaton Date: 1997 "Red Shuttleworth is a phenomenon among the literary figures of the American West. More outlaw than cowboy, he's authored umpteen chapbooks but never a book. Equal parts circuit-riding preacher and shootist, he's spread the Good News of the True Poets of the West while drawing a long-barreled critical bead on the montebanks, charlatans and sundry other long-winded peddlers of ineffectual patent medicnes. A modern-day itinerant journalist, he's found a running handful of poetry magazines from Texas to British Columbia. Poet, editor, story-teller, playwright, pilgrim to the grave of Wyatt Earp and prophet honor-bound to wander the Great American Desert and beyond the Divide ... More than anything else, his poems celebrate a domestic life on the frontier edge of the American Dream. It's precarious footing, to be sure, but preferable to the alternative. For three decades now, he's kept him and his — his family, his friends and readers — out of the boghole of the American Nightmare." — JV Brummels

Here from There Edited by Gretchen Ronnow US Price: $11.95 (sold out) Publicaton Date: Stories by Lisa Sandlin, Bruce Nelson, Larry Holland, Neil Harrison, Cheryl Meir, Jim Reese, Curtis Meyer, Pat Keating, Red Shuttleworth, Mary Raff, and JV Brummels "Here from There is a welcome addition to our growing collection of American literature. There is wit and grit, humor and nostalgia, awe and awfulness in the scope of these stories; we've seen nothing better to give us a sense of ordinary and extraordinary life in America. Reading Here from There helps us further understand Americans while showing us the ambiguities of American culture which can only further the cause of international cross-cultural understanding, world peace and harmony." — Edward Kurlyand, Dean, Faculty of Foreign Languages Barnaul State Pedagogical University, Barnaul, Russia

Story by Neil Harrison US Price: $5.00 (now in its second printing) "Neil Harrison has created some of the finest poems to come out of Nebraska. His voice is insistent, his images precise and the sensibility behind the poems is generous and smart. No one since Don Welch has done the short poem so perfectly. No other poet knows the various parts of the state — their topographies, their flora and fauna — so intimately. These are poems to mark the passage of time, to note change and to ask what remains constant." — JV Brummels

Nebraska Center for Writers