Scott Ballew on Talking to Mountains & the Sublimity of Sad Songs
”Scott’s songs are stories that go rolling through your head like little movies. You watch them inside yourself as much as you hear them. And you carry away something of value you didn’t have before. As far as I’m concerned that’s exactly what a good song should do. That and tell the truth. Scott’s songs do all of this.”
— Terry Allen
Tending to the Spiritual Interior of Language with Lia Purpura
” Lia Purpura’s essays make the tethers between apparently separate things not only visible, but luminous. Frankly, I can think of no better―by which I mean, adamantly, more necessary―quality in art. We are connected to the guy across the way ashing his cigarette. We are connected to the hawk at the dump, the murdered student, the fire ant, each other. And to do it with so much goddamn music! Time and again I found myself re-reading sentences and paragraphs throughout these essays wondering how I arrived where I did. Astonished, and grateful for it. These are some of the best essays I’ve read in a long time.”
―Ross Gay, author The Book of Delights, Essays
Deadstock in the Storm with Jeffrey Foucault
“Immaculately tailored… Sometimes [Foucault’s] songs run right up to the edge of the grandiose and hold still, and that’s when he’s best… Close to perfection”
– New York Times
Being is Action with Andrew Krivak
“In spare and lovely prose, Andrew Krivak folds the deep past and the far future into a remarkable fable about our inheritance as humanity makes a harmonic return to the spirit and animal worlds. This book follows you, like a river under ice.”
– Adam Johnson, author of The Orphan Master’s Son and Fortune Smiles