Alan Michael Parker

In light of her impending death, thirteen-year-old Beatrice Danzig has changed her name to Christmas. She's at the center of Christmas in July, a novel in ten stories told by ten residents of suburban Saxon Hills: the bored wife of a senior softball slugger, a socialite with a glitter fixation, a beekeeping hermit, a young runaway who can't outrun her past. The novel explores each of these people's lives before and after meeting Christmas--as well as Mr. Ramirez's mustache, The Wizard of Oz, cults and terrorists, Brown v. Board of Education, a band named Wagawagawaga, and the mystery of Aunt Nikki, Christmas's guardian, who sleeps in a closet to keep her demons, real and imagined, at bay. Through ten unique voices, veteran author Alan Michael Parker charts the wreckage of a troubled teen in a small town, exposing the residents' secrets and their all-too-human hearts.

Christmas in July

A debut novel about small-town politics, racism, revenge, redemption, and love chronicles the soul-searching story of a man who learns what really matters in his life.

Cry Uncle

Fiction. Avi Heyer's rollicking adventure begins when he returns to Elsbeth, North Carolina, to settle his mother's affairs. A student chef with the wrong girlfriend and a mud-loving dog, Avi soon finds himself dragged into a criminal conspiracy. His world is churned up, down and sideways by the diabolical Camel and her hired henchwomen; an unknown phone caller who somehow tracks his every move; an enticing hippie who may be trying to steal something from Avi; a plainspoken building contractor with a suspicious hearing aid; and a news reporter desperate for love. And then there's Avi's whale, with its graceful bulk and keening song, a whale that becomes more than an obsession.

A Novel

Whale Man

Poetry. In his seventh poetry collection, Alan Michael Parker aims to surprise. Recombining lists, fables, and mathematical equations, LONG DIVISION is formally playful, wielding irony as a lever of political resistance. Here is a writer fascinated by comedy, by sadness, and by the unexpected ways that poetry makes both possible at once. When was the last time you laughed out loud reading poems? Parker's new work is truly funny, exposing the impossibility of realism in a world where imagination is more trustworthy than experience.

Poems

Long Division

This newest collection showcases Parker's ability to wed fiction elements to his own distinct poetics.

Love Song with Motor Vehicles

In a tale satirizing bureaucracy told through ninety-nine connected stories, townsfolk disappear and hot air balloons are launched to search for the missing.

The Committee on Town Happiness

"The challenge: Translate a poem into English, offer a biography of the poet, and then write a short essay in which the poem, the poet, and the corpus are considered--and make all of it up, without once indicating you have done so"--P. [4] of cover.

The Imaginary Poets

Just for fun, the vandals toss monkey wrenches into the machinery of life, wreaking poetic havoc.

The Vandals

In Love Song with Motor Vehicles, Alan Michael Parker marshals a penetrating wit and sharp irony that mirrors that of Charles Simic and John Berryman. Parker’s robust imagination explores the music in places poetry doesn’t usually travel. His poems find their epiphanies early on, and, most strikingly, do not close at their endings but, rather, open. Alan Michael Parker is the author of two books of poetry, and co-editor of two scholarly works, The Routledge Anthology of Cross-Gendered Verse and Who’s Who in 20th Century World Poetry (Routledge Books). In 2000, his poems were included in all three major volumes of "younger American poets" (Carnegie Mellon University Press, University of Southern Illinois Press, and University of New England Press).

Mark Willhardt

Contains profiles and critical analysis of the works for over nine hundred twentieth century poets.

Alan Michael Parker

Books

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