Set in Cape Cod’s National Seashore, LONGNOOKBOOKS is an independent publisher located in Truro specializing in poetry, literature and the visual arts. We draw inspiration from the remarkable cultural history of the Outer Cape as well as its current art and literary scene. We continue to be motivated by the art community’s tradition of progressive politics, its active commitment to gender self-identification, and its ongoing concern with social and environmental justice. LONGNOOKBOOKS is proud to partner with Writers for Democratic Action.
Recommendations
CULTURAL TOURISM
Mary Maxwell
From Provincetown Arts magazine: “The book’s central section is a series of verbal portraits of Outer Cape residents past and present (Millay, Lazzell, Breuer, Mailer, Motherwell, Resika, et al.). ‘As in certain special European locales,’ [Maxwell] writes of the area’s remarkable roster of artists and writers, ‘those who’ve committed themselves to a life of the imagination seem to have remained here as its perpetual inhabitants.’ … Given her view that art exists ‘outside of mortal time,’ it’s no surprise that poems in Cultural Tourism address Catullus and Virgil as though they were contemporaries and actual contemporaries such as performance artist John Kelly as though they were already immortal.”
NINE OVER SIXES
Mary Maxwell
“The impetus for Nine Over Sixes,” notes the poet in the postscript of her most recent collection, ”was a certain affection for traditional received forms, but also a dissatisfaction with them.” The unconventional prosody of Maxwell’s poems, inspired by the shape of New England’s “nine over sixes” windows, pays homage to the elegiac stanzas of Vergil’s Georgics. Though in their subject matter her lyrics relate the poet’s daily encounter with Vergil’s “country gods,” their concerns, as she writes, “also overlap with contemporary issues of near-universal surveillance; true solitude, in all its painful yet pungent delicacy, is in terrible peril. What is heard, of course, is often limited by what has been listened for: Nature provides the increasingly rare luxury of quiet, the ability to hear oneself think.”