Cristin O'Keefe Aptowicz

A portrait of the brilliant and eccentric medical innovator who revolutionized American surgery and founded the country's famous medical oddities museum describes his advocacy for clean and compassionate patient care in spite of his numerous detractors. By the award-winning author of Words in Your Face. 40,000 first printing.

A True Tale of Intrigue and Innovation at the Dawn of Modern Medicine

Dr. Mütter's Marvels

Intimate, observant, and unflinchingly honest, The Year of No Mistakes is Cristin O'Keefe Aptowicz's tribute to the broken heart. Aptowicz's sixth poetry collection chronicles the author's story as she leaves New York City, her home of fourteen years, and bears witness to the unravelling of Aptowicz's decade-long relationship. Along the way, Aptowicz explores love, nostalgia, grief, desire, envy and hope in poems that showcase her emblematic funny and heartbreaking style. Stripped down, open, and intimate, this collection continues Aptowicz's tradition of engaging and auto-biographical work with new favorites like "Op-Ed for the Sad Sack Review," "Not Doing Something Wrong isn't the Same as Doing Something Right," and "December." For a poet already known for her honesty, The Year of No Mistakes shines with brave vulnerability. It is a triumph that will push even the most stubbornly busted heart back into the light.

The Year of No Mistakes

How to Love the Empty Air

A mesmerizing biography of the brilliant and eccentric medical innovator who revolutionized American surgery and founded the country’s most famous museum of medical oddities Imagine undergoing an operation without anesthesia performed by a surgeon who refuses to sterilize his tools—or even wash his hands. This was the world of medicine when Thomas Dent Mütter began his trailblazing career as a plastic surgeon in Philadelphia during the middle of the nineteenth century. Although he died at just forty-eight, Mütter was an audacious medical innovator who pioneered the use of ether as anesthesia, the sterilization of surgical tools, and a compassion-based vision for helping the severely deformed, which clashed spectacularly with the sentiments of his time. Brilliant, outspoken, and brazenly handsome, Mütter was flamboyant in every aspect of his life. He wore pink silk suits to perform surgery, added an umlaut to his last name just because he could, and amassed an immense collection of medical oddities that would later form the basis of Philadelphia’s Mütter Museum. Award-winning writer Cristin O’Keefe Aptowicz vividly chronicles how Mütter’s efforts helped establish Philadelphia as a global mecca for medical innovation—despite intense resistance from his numerous rivals. (Foremost among them: Charles D. Meigs, an influential obstetrician who loathed Mütter’s "overly" modern medical opinions.) In the narrative spirit of The Devil in the White City, Dr. Mütter’s Marvels interweaves an eye-opening portrait of nineteenth-century medicine with the riveting biography of a man once described as the "P. T. Barnum of the surgery room."

Dr. Mutter's Marvels

Andrea Gibson

Anis Mojgani

Derrick Brown

Roger Bonair-Agard

Tour Anthology of poets, teaming up for a tour of the US in a small van. Heart charging, socially active verse.

The Elephant Engine High Dive Revival

Dear Future Boyfriend

A Guided Tour Through Twenty Years of the New York City Poetry Slam

Words in Your Face

Poems

Working Class Represent

Yevgeny Yevtushenko

Kenneth Radu

Róbert Gál

Bill Mayer

James Ragan

Mark Vincenz

Tomás Ó Cárthaigh

A. H. C. Erdely-Siebenburgen

Goulash (Gulyás in the original Hungarian) is primarily a soup, or stew, comprised of various and sundry ingredients, both hearty and well-spiced. In both Czech and Slovak, gulás means "mishmash". GOULASH, the new anthology from Danse Macabre, celebrates well-spiced letters brimming in colorful tastes, tones, styles, and voices, an international literary stew to satisfy bookish hungers for characters we have never met, images we have not yet dreamt, voices from afar - and within - we may never have otherwise heard. Drawn from the locked coolers of issues lost to time, GOULASH is gourmet DM distilled, featuring a global buffet of tasty fictions and artisanal poetry...not to mention more than a few surprise ingredients readers worldwide have come to expect from DM for over a decade. GOULASH will not only satiate your imaginative appetites but slake your thirst for colour and zest in an increasingly deflavourised cultural landscape.

A Danse Macabre Anthology

Goulash

A mesmerizing biography of the brilliant and eccentric medical innovator who revolutionized American surgery and founded the country’s most famous museum of medical oddities Imagine undergoing an operation without anesthesia, performed by a surgeon who refuses to sterilize his tools—or even wash his hands. This was the world of medicine when Thomas Dent Mütter began his trailblazing career as a plastic surgeon in Philadelphia during the mid-nineteenth century. Although he died at just forty-eight, Mütter was an audacious medical innovator who pioneered the use of ether as anesthesia, the sterilization of surgical tools, and a compassion-based vision for helping the severely deformed, which clashed spectacularly with the sentiments of his time. Brilliant, outspoken, and brazenly handsome, Mütter was flamboyant in every aspect of his life. He wore pink silk suits to perform surgery, added an umlaut to his last name just because he could, and amassed an immense collection of medical oddities that would later form the basis of Philadelphia’s renowned Mütter Museum. Award-winning writer Cristin O’Keefe Aptowicz vividly chronicles how Mütter’s efforts helped establish Philadelphia as a global mecca for medical innovation—despite intense resistance from his numerous rivals. (Foremost among them: Charles D. Meigs, an influential obstetrician who loathed Mütter’s “overly modern” medical opinions.) In the narrative spirit of The Devil in the White City, Dr. Mütter’s Marvels interweaves an eye-opening portrait of nineteenth-century medicine with the riveting biography of a man once described as the “[P. T.] Barnum of the surgery room.”

New York Times bestselling nonfiction writer and poet Cristin O’Keefe Aptowicz’s How to Love the Empty Air reaches new heights in her revelatory seventh collection of poetry. Continuing in her tradition of engaging autobiographical work, How to Love the Empty Air explores what happens when the impossible becomes real?for better and for worse. Aptowicz’s journey to find happiness and home in her ever-shifting world sees her struggling in cities throughout America. When her luck changes?in love and in life?she can’t help but “tell the sun / tell the fields / tell the huge Texas sky.... / tell myself again and again until I believe it.” However, the upward trajectory of this new life is rocked by the sudden death of the poet’s mother. In the year that follows, Aptowicz battles the silencing power of grief with intimate poems burnished by loss and a hard-won humor, capturing the dance that all newly grieving must do between everyday living and the desire “to elope with this grief, / who is not your enemy, / this grief who maybe now is your best friend. / This grief, who is your husband, / the thing you curl into every night, / falling asleep in its arms...” As in her award-winning The Year of No Mistakes, Aptowicz counts her losses and her blessings, knowing how despite it all, life “ripples boundless, like electricity, like joy / like... laughter, irresistible and bright, / an impossible thing to contain.”

In her third collection of poetry, Cristin O'Keefe Aptowicz celebrates the ups and downs of being a poet with a day job. Whether exulting the mundaneness of office life ("Rules of Slack"), musing about hidden perks of college poetry gigs ("Ode to College Cafeterias") or hilariously defending the use of humor in poetry ("To the Guy Who Said that Funny Poetry Ain't Poetry"), this book continues Aptowicz's tradition of witty, honest and idiosyncratic work. Cristin O’Keefe Aptowicz's poems about her working class roots are so entertaining, so poignant, so perfectly incisive, that I almost wish I didn't have a trust fund! - Taylor Mali, The Last Time As We Are ...Cristin's voice is authentically hers. Cristin is better than any robot that vacuums your floor, better than any natural or artificial sweetener. She is better than most tables, which tend to wobble after a while. -John S. Hall, author/musician King Missile

Dry, offbeat, and mostly profane, How to Be Inappropriate glorifies all things TMI. Arguments, lists, barstool rants, queries, pedantic footnotes, play scripts, commonplace miscellany, profiles, and overly revealing memoir-ettes, How to Be Inappropriate adds up to the portrait of a 20-something-become-30-something, bachelor-become-husband, boy-man-about-town who bumbles through life obsessed with one thing; extreme impropriety. In How to Be Inappropriate, Daniel Nester determines the boundary of acceptable behavior - mostly by disregarding it. As a here-to-cut-a-hipster-swathe-through-the-city man he looks for love with a Williamsburg abstract painter who has had her feet licked for money. As a teacher, he tries out curse words with Chinese students in ESL classes. Along the way, Nester provides a short cultural history on mooning and attempts to cast a spell on a neighbor who fails to curb his dog. He fields middle fingers from bratty NYU film students, explores the world of Christian parody bands, befriends exiled video game king Todd Rogers, re-imagines a conversation with NPR's Terry Gross, and invents a robot version of Kiss bassist Gene Simmons. For Daniel Nester, also known as Captain Embarrassment, to be inappropriate is a matter of worldview, a code of behavior. Every moment skews to the profane, inappropriate, and just plain wrong. No matter which misadventure catches your eye, How to Be Inappropriate will make you appreciate that someone else has experienced these embarrassing sides of life, so you won't have to.

How to Be Inappropriate

In her fifth collection of poetry, Cristin O'Keefe Aptowicz polishes her obsessions until they gleam. Whether she is exhuming the bizarre ("Cryptozoology" and "A Short History of Unusual Fish"), exorcising her demons, ("Hog Butcher of Workshop Table" and "On Why I Shouldn't Read Books") or celebrating the uncelebrated oddballs of the world ("Little Heard True Stories of Benjamin Franklin" and "Crack Squirrels"), Aptowicz's poetry sings and singes. Everything is Everything illuminates the dark corners of the curiosity cabinet, shining the light on everything that is utterly strange, wonderfully absurd and 100% true.

Everything is Everything

In her celebrated debut volume, Cristin O'Keefe Aptowicz tackles, among other idiosyncratic topics, love ("Science"), heartbreak ("Lit"), and thieving suburban punks ("Ode to the Person Who Stole My Family's Lawn Gnome"). Quirky and funny with a subtext of social commentary, Aptowicz's writing lets the reader ride shotgun in a hilarious sprawling road trip through America’s youth culture. Cristin O'Keefe Aptowicz is a dizzying dervish of a poet, an astounding talent, a deft lyricist whose patented take on this dopey world is dazzling in its originality. Everything she encounters is fair game, and she jolts us into unexpected, delightful recognition. -Patricia Smith, "Blood Dazzler" Cristin O'Keefe Aptowicz is a flash flood of uppercut quotes. Reading her work tempts me to lean over to the people next to me, and say, “Hey, you gotta see this.” Do not miss the opportunity to absorb this woman's work, page or stage." - Buddy Wakefield, "Live for a Living"

A history of slam poetry culture in the Big Apple and beyond places an emphasis on three major twentieth-century arts movements, including the Harlem Renaissance, the Beats, and hip hop, in a chronicle that traces the origins of slam at the Nuyorican Poets' Café and its monumental popularity as supported through such venues as Lollapalooza and MTV's Unplugged. Original.

Cristin O'Keefe Aptowicz

Books

Your next favorite book is out there