Pitt Books

This is fantastic poetry with vivid imaginative phrases like "hoping penicillin still cures a vacation" and "pepper spray is how they [cops] argue economic theory." It's all creative. It's all good.

The book arrived in excellent condition within the scheduled delivery time.

Thank you,

Francine Keehnel

Another wonderful book by an amazing poet. Hicok's imagination is evident throughout. These poems move around a great deal and yet never lose their focus on people, real people. I've never read a poem about how it feels to lay someone off, and in "Dropping the euphemismth", as in other poems, Hicok inserts moments of surreal intensity within a narrative framework which give his work an unusal emotional depth. This book is a worhty follow up to "Animal Soul."

In Bob Hicok's fourth book, Insomnia Diary, Hicok takes the reader on a risque journey through the darker side of life as seen by the eyes of the narrator. While some of Hicok's poems speak simply of love and life's basic needs, other poems have a distinctively sexual undertone that some people might shy away from. All of this is foreshadowed through the choice of the painting used as the cover art: Luis Cruz Azaceta's "Time-Man" in which the central figure is nude and has his head severed from the rest of his body. The dark range of browns, blues, reds, and black in the painting add to a reader's overall impression that the poetry hidden between the covers will have a dark edge. A dark edge that Hicok does not fail to deliver.

In Insomnia Diary Hicok gives a reader tales of love toward another ("My life with a gardener"), sexual fantasies ("Another awkward stage of convalescence"), social criticisms ("Growing at the speed of fashion"), and even tales of being forced to lay off others in the work force ("Dropping the euphemism"). All these snapshots of life are wrapped neatly and hidden behind the "Time-Man" who practically begs the reader to open the book and see what tales the covers hold. Dark threads and themes run throughout Hicok's work, but beauty exists as well in Hicok's written words. Insomnia Diary is well worth a reader's time. Hicok's poems make a reader think, and those are the poems that will last.

This is easily one of the best books of poetry I've read in ages. There's lots of great writing out there, but every once in a while a book comes along that really knocks you out. Denis Johnson's "The Veil," Michael Burkard's "Secret Boat," Beckian Fritz Goldberg's "Never Be The Horse"...this book fits in that field for me...Just amazing--it makes you want to read more, and write more.

Far-reaching and eclectic, the poems of Rouge Pulp are sung through gritted teeth. A humor that hurts. Imagine a mother prone to miscarriage sluicing bad whiskey down her throat at the bar and telling dead baby jokes. That kind of ha-ha.

See the poem for the cat-killing coyote, aptly named:"For the Coyote Who Ate Spike: A Revenge in Two Parts" It's not laugh-out-loud funny, but I think you get the idea.

The brutality of the humor seems necessary if its target is a lack of heart, which it often is--Barresi's world is spiritually ill. (I hesitate to say America)

"Bad Joke"

Alright, alright,
what's really bothering me
is my mother.

Since she died,
people tell me, buck up,
she sees you,

as if that were a comfort.
I mean, what are we talking about here?
Omniscient J. Edgar

Mother like the worst
nightmare of childhood?
The one where you have your pinafore

hiked up to Maine
and little Johnny Kingston
with his hands somewhere down in Erie, PA

and it feels good
it feels good
and just then your mother clicks in on

high heels of aghast

But let's not make too big a deal of this spin. Barresi has other talents as well, including a great eye and the courage and talent to engage a cultural moment and indict it with enough clarity and honesty that this reader almost wants to be guilty. Luckily for me, I am. hurray!

Dorothy Barresi's wild wit infuses her book's central and ancient themes of motherhood and identity, which she explores in all their contemporary multiplicity (and occasional duplicity!), at times layered with the sheen of glamour and at times, as when pleading with the dead, painfully stripped of it. Motherhood, in these poems, includes not only the speaker's indefatigable love for her son "stand[ing] at the wooden baby gate... a raisin clamped in one wet fist... beating time in the other," but also the savage protective instinct we see in "Grendel's Mother" (the book's first poem), in which a mother (as monster) is driven to kill whatever would harm her child. Barresi writes from the perspective of both mother and daughter, considering both ends of the mirroring wish to be "good enough, good enough, good enough," though we are left finally (and necessarily) with the pathos of human failure and alienation, as in "Chronic," "Cuttings" (about the self-mutilating act of cutting), and "Poem for the 35th Anniversary of Valium" (written in memory of the poet's mother, and perhaps a few other deceased kindred spirits).

Just as the members of the band in "Glass Dress" are said to know the difference "between naked and undressed," Barresi's poetry recognizes the human need for both spiritual and material protective layers, whether in the form of clothing, entertainment, or the raw attitude of the "illimitable body." And this is precisely where glamour and materialism meet "to draw [the world] nearer" to console the interminable, mourning daughter. Tonally reminiscent of Frank O'Hara in its brash and unabashed celebration of glitz as glamour, "Poem to Some of My Recent Purchases" casts a devastating spotlight on a postmodern culture of euphoric materialism (admirably, without pretending to stand outside of it): "Bracelet, earrings, tanzanite toe ring/ (I liked peridot better/ but they didn't have my size),// if I never buy anything,/ how will I distract myself?" There's a fine line between a sequin dress and a disguise, between L'Oreal's "Goddess, with its hint of burnt toast and lilac" and a mask. Rouge Pulp reveals something about the power of glamour--its social and ritualistic importance extending even into the funereal realm ("Neither Moth nor Rust")--while at the same time poking fun of the exclusive money-making glamour industry ("At the Posh Salon Called Ultra").

With crystalline self-assurance (and a fine gloss of "lipstick/ just right"), Rouge Pulp speaks at the intersection of stately sophistication and the giddy adventurousness of the sexiest girl you know telling you secrets in the back seat of an old Chevy. Taking a hint from the book's title--if there's any blood shed here, it'll be both hers and yours. But don't worry, a little make-up will take care of that.

In order to confront the grand spiritual hollowness of American culture (and what it does to women, and to mothers), Dorothy Barresi has armed herself well with archness, wryness, and double-edged self-mockery. A jumpy style allows her to include, in a single poem, Michael Jordan, the illnesses flesh is prone to, sex, and psycholinguistics ("Body Says"), and in another, the Vietnam war, pirates, merciless conglomerates, and philosophy ("Waiting for the Hanged Pirate"). None of these poems has the detached, polished quality of a made voice, but instead clatter (beautifully and harshly, as the emotional moment demands) with the humor and subterranean desperation, overlaid with plentiful blood-bubbles, that mark Barresi's distinctive approach.

Barresi's struggles with motherhood - ranging from her attempts to articulate (but not reconcile; they are too imbricated for much peace, it seems) her complicated feelings for her own mother ("Neither Moth nor Rust"; "Mother, My Porous China, Gone"), to her newly acquired feelings as a mother herself ("For Dante at One"; "At Five Months"), to ruminations on motherhood itself (the line which opens the book, from "Grendel's Mother", is emblematic of the emotional intensity she often achieves: "Every mother is a monster.") - form a sharp focal point around which drift meditations on the anxieties American women suffer for what's sold to them as beauty ("At the Posh Salon Called Ultra"; "Without Panic"), aging ("Possibly I Have Misunderstood"), and family and death ("The Irish in Me"; "Bad Joke").

Each poem is a juggling of knives without handles; it takes a light but absolutely certain touch to dazzle the audience and walk away unscathed. When Barresi pulls this off ("Rouge Pulp"), her mastery of tone is incredible, and even when she doesn't ("Charity Begins"), there are salvageable moments of hilarity (about a vampire receiving roadside first-aid: "In rearview mirrors / we look absurd, like mimes / giving mouth-to-mouth / to the air.").

The tonal and thematic collages Barresi assembles are somewhere in between the confessional and the postmodern, yet this book bears no trace of postmodern pretension. Every page fosters an earnest but sophisticated sympathy behind razoring wit and extra-dry sarcasm.

On the textured, mutineer tongue of these poems, popular culture and personal culture inhabit the same supermarket, dreams, and phylum, where "stars like fine bone buttons" cabinet and amass our vision, where we tend vampires because "We, too, / are not yet fully dead." In Rouge Pulp, Barresi dares to stare into our contemporary coulee, to not look away when "they crochet lace with meat hooks," to seriously consider our materialist obsessions ("I tear open your clear wrappings with my teeth / in the front seat of my car. / I love you."), our inevitable disappearance--both the body & its body of events foreshadowing, our elaborate ruses, evasions...to map our history one celebrity plane crash after another--" It's for the best, Body says. / You be Buddy Holly, / I'll be the plane." This book crackles like oil, moves like the body in its own bag, and will eat the arrangement of blue icing flowers creeping over your cake.

The language in this book is literally boiling. I can't remember the last time I read a book of poems with such fizz, a currency I could easily confuse with the blood in my body. These poems somehow maintain an imperative center while attending to the caprice of events. The unexpected is paramount here, Barresi's brilliance partly the petite sequins of her images blinking like a strip club sign--a "broken strand of actresses / in kitten heel pumps / walking backwards underground." But in the strip club, the flash is folded over the horror of war, of its couched power play, soldiers at the edge of their own bodies, damned by "a terrible clarity."

This poetry is perforated along the body, which is, at every turn, circumscribed, ventriloquized, loaded--"Body says, meet the animal / who made you." The body is a receptacle for being and being unraveled--"Death takes a lifetime to get here." The book starts, "Every mother is a monster," at the juncture between two bodies, pregnancy, where our nature & our culture collide in birth, where "the water is already torn." Powerfully personal moments of motherhood are seamlessly connected to the outer space where we are "shading our public eyes against the private sunlight leaking / jet fuel and crushed diamonds / over everything." This book has buttered bones, emits carpet shocks. "I would not drown for thinking," Barresi writes. I would not light up if not for listening:

Unto the bowling alley of family love,
which is none-of-your-goddamned-business.
Unto red meat and milk.

Dorothy Barresi is something of an everywoman's poet- erudite yet down to earth, witty, funny and soulful all at once. The poems in Rouge Pulp range in topic from motherhood to the Kennedys, from cockfights to female beauty standards, and while they do not trade in complexity for accessibility, they also never leave the reader feeling stranded, lost or bored.

The collection is framed by a fateful symmetry stemming from events in the author's own life: the death of her mother and the birth of her son (a poem called Grendel's Mother begins the book and one called At Five Months ends it). Barresi mourns her mother's death in myriad ways, sometimes in the voice of plain sorrow as in Poem for the 35th Anniversary of Valium which concludes "When I miss her I know/I will never get enough to eat." Other times she is darkly comedic, as when, tired of well-meaning people telling her "she sees you", she imagines a "heaven full of mothers/at floaty, star-case cubicles/with earphones/and high-powered telescopes/pointed down, and wicked grins."

Barresi's quick, inventive ear keeps her poetry engaging throughout, (Lustre, sister, lustre! begins the poem At the Posh Salon called Ultra) and coupled with her imagination produces some wonderfully unexpected results (mishearing "van fire" as "vampire" on the car radio, the author sets off musing about the undead on a southbound freeway). There are also darker poems in the book, most notably The Rat Man, which begins with "if you hear meat forks/walking in the walls,/call me" and proceeds to create an otherworldly character with an eeriness reminiscent of Charles Simic's earlier poems. Barresi takes a non-delusional view of self and America, of the constructed, consumer American self, (the Poem to Some of My Recent Purchases is unashamed to admit taking pleasure in said purchases) but is also firmly self-critical, in a poem such as Without Panic, where she writes "Lately, the local wisdom has it/we're not selfish,/just honoring our worthiness/to receive." Rouge Pulp is the product of an authoritative voice that is also deeply ironic and playful, and as such, is a great pleasure to hear.

A perfect book of poems. Each poem makes me shake my head in wonder at such brilliance. His imagery is incredible. He can twist and turn any ordinary moment into a tornado humming with all aspects of life. Startling.

Today I had the pleasure to hear Mark Cox, this year's Frost poet in residence at the Frost Place in Franconia, NH. He read from this lovely book of poems with such clarity, such honesty, that I was compelled to buy the book on the spot. He writes of the things that we all face, that we can all connect with, but still, with careful word choice and all the other fine things involved with the crafting of good poetry, he evokes our own experience as well. The poetry is accessible, careful, emotion-laden but not "sentimental". Build your own collection, using this one as a valued addition.

Cox is a poet whose work I admire and enjoy (and I'm a hard woman to please -- as I am both a poet and a literary critic). This collection is like a complicated American all -you can eat breakfast with surprises, freebies you never thought you'd get and a bottomless cup of thought provoking images to wash it down with.

See him "read" (aka, perform) these if you can, but in the meantime, buy the book and support the work!

Reviewed by Rustin Larson in The Iowa Source

An often heard praise for a poet these days is that he "takes the straw of the ordinary and spins it into gold." However, it may be said Mark Cox takes it one step further, that he gives his gold an unusual new texture and shine. Ever since the appearance of his chapbook Barbells of the Gods in 1988, Cox has been taking perfectly good poetic lines and spinning them into something even better. One line from that chapbook could well have read "Let's... throw our cigarettes from this car like ecstatic hearts, / and let the sparks lead us home." That would have been a good line for most of us. But Cox does a brilliant thing. He reverses the tenor and the vehicle of the simile so it reads "Let's throw our hearts from this car like ecstatic cigarettes..." and for my money the lyric and imagistic movement of the line is enhanced by this strategy. Something emotionally unexpected and vivid comes from it. This is just the sort of gold weaving Cox has practiced and improved over the past decade. His new book, Thirty-Seven Years from the Stone, exhibits a very high level of accomplishment.

Cox's great sense of the absurdity and communicative strength of similes, and his artistry with them, continues beautifully in poems like Like a Simile:

"Fell into bed like a tree/ Slept like boiling water/ Got from bed like a camel/ And showered like a tin roof./ Went downstairs like a slinky/ Drove to work like a water skier/ Entered the trailer like a bad smell/ Where I changed clothes like a burn victim/ Drank my coffee like a mosquito/ And waited like a bus stop./ A whistle blew./ Then I painted like I was in a knife fight for eight hours/ Drank like a burning building/ Drove home like a bank shot/ Unlocked the door like a jeweler/ And entered the house like an argument next door./ The dog smiled like a chain saw./ The wife pretended to be asleep/ I pretended to eat./ She lay on the bed like a matress/ I sat at the table like a chair./ Until I inched along the stair rail like a sprinkler/ Entered like smoke from a fire in the next room/ And apologized like a toaster./ The covers did not open like I was an envelope/ And she was a 24-hour teller/ So I undressed like an apprentice matador/ Discovering bullsh*t on his shoes."

Working with the concept on a larger scale, with extended metaphor and simile, Cox excels. Even a title might reflect a brilliant reversal of the expected, such as The Tunnel at the End of the Light, and then build upon it: "The summer my body began to fit,/ living seemed fluid/ as putting my arm through a sleeve--/ when I threw crusts of bread in the air,/ they became birds,/ when I held her,/ I held myself-" .

There is a great emotional investment in each poem of Thirty-Seven Years from the Stone, but Cox does not stray toward the sentimental and false. Do not mistake heart and courage for sentimentality. Whether reflecting on fatherhood in poems like Make the Cobra Talk, or on his future death in Grain, the uniquely rendered similes transmit a genuineness within the oddity: "...like a snapping turtle in a two-dollar butterfly net,/ I will refuse the new world" Cox says of the prospect of leaving the ones he loves behind when he dies. It's a tenacious spirit that inhabits these poems, that grabs on and holds us even as it turns the world upside-down. Thirty-Seven Years from the Stone is an accomplished, admirable collection of poems.

These poems, like those of William Matthews, will endure to tell the future what it was like to live in the 1990's--these are poems that absorb and transform the objects and everyday incidents around our lives. The eschew the false intellectual pretense of so many fashionable poets today, they discard the acceptable poses for the heart, they ignore the cute little moves that fill magazines and books, and they deal with a complex inner emotional life. The poems are complex in the way interesting people are and so take the same effort to get to know. A reviewer in a recent KIRKUS REVIEW, who hasn't taken this effort, coming against a unique poetry he cannot understand or which lies beyond his comprehension, relies on a few cliche ridden, generalizing comments ("Cox at his sentimental worst... stretches to find significance in everyday things"). Better such reviewers should educate themselves by reading more poems, more variety. The test is to read one of Cox's poems: they take you through a structure of feeling and thinking, they structure an experience rather than bottom line it, discover it rather than report upon it. Their music reminds me of Pachabel or Gorecki -- a steady background that rises to a crescendo, but upon which are played numerous variations. I'd recommend it to anyone who loves poetry-- or lives.

Smith does what few modern poets accomplish: touching stories within a crafted frame. These poems are layered and poignant. His energy comes off the page.
The poem "Keep Him There" is gorgeous and his odes to Brad Pitt and Matt Damon are funny and startling at the same time.
Smith is another poet who reassures me that poetry is not dying.

Brilliant. Aaron Smith has written beautifully brutal, wildly funny poetry with the rawness and tenacity of a self performed autopsy; poetry has never been so gorgeously unfearing.

I never thought I could be a fan of poetry but his work is accessible, witty and moving. I highly recommend it. I can't wait for the next one.

Reading any of Aarons work is like watching something that you arent supposed to but coming away knowing even more about yourself and humanity...

Voisine's book of poems deserves much attention. It is, by my reckoning, among the top twenty collections of American poetry published in the last five years. Though her forms and contents are unlike the following poets, Voisine brings to mind the power and scope of Alan Shapiro, Louise Gluck, and perhaps Edward Hirsch from an earlier era. Everyone should read books like this; failing that, anyone interested in reading or writing poems should pick this one up.

I have had the pleasure of studying under Connie Voisine and have found her to be, both in her work and in her life, one of the most insightful people I have ever met. Her poetry grabs the reader with strong images, varied techniques, and a voice that sets her above most poets today. She hasn't received nearly enough credit for such an amazing piece of work. Her art is transcendant and powerful while maintaining a voice that the reader can grab hold of and understand. Whether you're an avid poetry reader or just beginning to start a collection of works, I would highly recommend this book.

Cathedral of the North is a stunning book. The imagery is haunting, and the language is precise. I turn to it often. Everyone who cares about poetry should read it.

Voisine has created a moving sequence of poems that draw the reader into her story of family, history and home. Her vivid imagery turned what is the recounting of stories and histories into an experience of the pain and hardship associated with growing up poor in rural America. She brings understanding to the fine line between pride and shame and leaves her readers stuttering with one woman's sense of home. A must read.

Emplumada is amongst the greatest pieces that i have endulged in. the piece is taintinizing with it's emotionally deep twists and extreme display of emotions. the uniquely devised reflections devour my every thought and spand of atttention....

Cervantes's collection is spectacular and has risen above all Chicano poetry collectionsl. Along with Gary Soto's "Elements of San Joaquin," Cervantes gives of some of the best poetry Chicano Literature has to offer.

I had to reluctantly read this book of poetry for class and ended up loving it! The poems are beautiful! I definitely recommend it.

A few years after the time I talk about here, I met Lorna, she was a high school student, realizing that she was more than "gifted" student, realizing she was connected to the fires and fiths of her people. I can remember LDC telling me how she strained to hear Corky Gonzales on the radio from Denver, and remebers names like Jorge Angel Guiterrez before they got bought out. That flame still burns in her poetry even if she is a big time poet and a department head at a gavacho university. Read these poems, read them outloud, listen and u will hear yourself
I can remember in 1970 flying from Cairo Illinois where white cops and racist Klansman had intimidated and shot and murdered and embattled Black workers and farmers into a state of terror to Crystal City Texas, where La Raza Unida, a Chicano political party based on working class and farming Chicanos, and white and black workers drawn to the same needs ran Zavalla County.
The Chicano militancy of the 60s and the 1970s road on the backs of the Black and Puerto Rican struggles, rode on the backs on the open ears it had for Che and Fidel, for what was happening then in Chile, and from the fights in Mexico. It exploded across Texas, across California, across New Mexico, and Colorado, even in places like Minneapolis and Chicago, long before the millions of Mexicans who have come since then arrived.
This volcano erupted then, not as some freak occurrence, but because a people oppressed, denied their nationality will rise and fight until they gain their justice.
. Yet, the volcano of another Chicano revolt is simmering. Like all volcanoes, like the volcanoes under Blacks, and Puerto Ricans, under workers in and out of unions, under women, the longer the volcano does not explode, the bigger the explosion, the more it can blow the top off the mountain and let the lava flow, hot and burning, sweeping away the oppression of capitalism, remaking the world, making us free. Que Viva La Raza

This is the first book the inventor should purchase! This book is easy to understand and follow, it provides you with a wealth of information from starting your invention process to receiving a patent, legal aspects, protecting your invention right through marketing and so much more! I highly recommend this book to anyone that wants to be an inventor.

This is a great book, very good for people want to find out more about patent application and patent marketing. I am new to the patent industry, after i read it i have a better understand in the patent operation, it is recommend to everyone who is new to patent. I am actually a client of the book's contributor--Russ Weinzimmer, and I bought this book after I filed my patent application with Mr. Weinzimmer, who is a very professional and knowledgeable patent attorney.

This book is great! It is very easy reading. Simple and easy to digest. Written for the every day person. It has real world scenarios, contact information, forms and everything you need to get your idea started, and more importantly PROTECETED! I love the green highlights. It is like having cliff notes! You remember cliffs notes...the books we had in college when you didn't have all the time in the world dedicated to reading!

This is the best book on inventions and patents I have read. I have read two previous books on this subject and this book is easy to follow and still covers a broad range of topics from the invention process to patenting to actually making money on your invention. I am a first time independent inventor and this was just perfect for me to understand how I get started and how to protect my invention. It also provides a lot of resources you can access to help you with your invention: books, web sites, patent services, marketing services, forms, etc.

Ted Kooser, Flying at Night (University of Pittsburgh, 2005)

For the first quarter of this book, it seemed to me something was missing. I'm still not entirely sure what it was, but then things smoothed out a bit, presumably as Kooser got older (I'm assuming rough chronological order here). From that point on, it's the same sort of stuff Ted Kooser has written for the past thirty-odd years, and it's all quite good:

"Behind each garage a ladder
sleeps in the leaves, its hands
folded across its lean belly.
There are hundreds of them
in each town, and more
sleeping by the haystacks and barns
out in the country-- tough old
day laborers, seasoned and wheezy,
drunk on the weather,
sleeping outside with the crickets."
("Late September")

Kooser has a sense of the simple in language matched by very few living American poets-- Simic, Sadoff, Allbery, a few others. He's pretty much the embodiment of Williams' "no ideas but in things" charge here. An excellent book (for most of its length), and highly recommended. ****

Ted Kooser is the poet for the rest of us. Mr. Kooser shuns intellectual poetry, the kind that makes you feel you need an interpreter to understand it. His poems are down-to-earth, rooted in an intense love for the simple pleasures of life. He lives on a farm in Nebraska and his work resonates with images from this rural lifestyle. This was the first book of poetry I willfully sought out and bought since college; reading it has been pure delight.

As I have read poetry in the last six years I have gotten in the habit (not always the best) of either marking the corner of or 'dog-earing' a page with a poem that I like. I've found that I've marked alot of corners in Mr. Kooser's book. I have especially liked his poems that contemplate the somber side of life. I've gone back to "After My Grandmother's Funeral" multiple times to wrestle again, as Kooser does, with the tension between youth and aging...and the realities of death. You'll find yourself doing the same when you read these poems.

My daughter's high school has an acronym for certain literature assignments: DHM, deep hidden meaning. If you are weary of DHM, then read Mr. Kooser. DM, no H. He uses Saxon-rooted vocabulary for metaphors so apt, yet stunning, that they stop you short. I will give this book as presents to my best friends.

Honestly ... out of all the computer books I've purchased (and I've purchased a lot) this is by far the most useful ... I know my way around HTML pretty well and I still use it constantly. This book is great for those starting out and advanced users as well. Excellent!

I use this book quite a bit. In fact, I'm on my second copy (my first having fallen apart). My brother, who is also an HTML programmer, is on his fifth copy. This book never fails to teach me something new just by browsing through it. I love the fact that it is just a straight reference, and not a how-to book.

Outstanding reference guide. Everything in one place, and easy to find.

I use this book constantly while I'm working on HTML. I recommend it for all HTML users from beginners to experts. I'm a self-taught HTML author and I've learned as much from this reference as from actual tutorials. I particularly like that it has an "index" of HTML tags printed on the inside covers, because usually I just need to check the syntax for a specific tag and this list makes it very convenient to find what I'm looking for. For each tag, the book provides a definition of how it's used, a list of the attributes with brief descriptions, context (other tags within which the tag can be used), suggested usage, and -- best of all -- examples.

For those of you who love the New Jerusalem Bible, but would like a compact edition, this is it. There's only one problem. It's not supposed to be sold to the US which I discovered after receiving it, but I ordered it and it was shipped without a problem. We have the NAB compact edition and the RSV-CE compact zippered, but I really and truly prefer the NJB, and this is exactly what I was looking for. There is not an American publisher promoting this compact version.

I just received this and I am very happy with the purchase. I needed a Bible for an overseas study abroad trip that includes the apocryphal/deuterocanonical books. The NJB is a very good translation that often captures intricate nuances of the text especially in the Hebrew Bible that other english translations do not communicate as effectively. The Bible is very compact, which is what I wanted. My only complaint is that it lacks scholarly notes such as those that are available in the larger NJB, in the JPS Jewish Study Bible, or in the NOAB version of the NRSV, but I wanted a small Bible and it can't be expected to have those kinds of notes if it is compact, so it works out perfect. The zipper is a bit awkward, but not to the point of being overly bothersome. Overall a very good product. I wish they carried them in the U.S.

The other review gave us a wonderful history of the New Jerusalem Bible (NJB), but this book happens to be the King James Version (KJV) which is a standard for many people.

Even though I do not particularly find the KJV very helpful in reading scripture, many are attached to it and it is still one of the most widely used translations. I use the King James Version as a backup only when I need to compare different translation passages.

*This edition of the NJB can fit in your pocket. It is tiny zipper bible designed for carrying around. The print is tiny.

To understand the NJB you need to learn about the JB first. No other bible can be compared to the quality and accuracy of The Jerusalem Bible (1966). It is approved for liturgical use in Europe by the Vatican. That makes it an official Catholic bible. With relaxations of the official church position on bible translations, Alexander Jones of Christ's College, Liverpool took the opportunity as an editor to guide a team of translators in an English language translation of the Holy Bible using a method already accomplished by the Dominican Biblical School in Jerusalem with their production of La Bible de Jérusalem (1956) in French, by means of Hebrew and Greek sources while bypassing the Latin Vulgate (the key reason why the Catholic Church thought long and hard about approving this process). Thus the English version of the JB is not French to English translation as some have erroneously suggested. Along with creating the JB the editors also historically researched each book of the bible, and prepared an introduction for most books along with creating sets of footnotes that would cross-reference the entire bible. The Old Testament sources are the Masoretic texts, with a critical inspection comparison using the Greek Septuagint (the LXX). Since the Dead Sea Scrolls mostly matched the LXX, the JB happens to be the most accurate rendition of the OT. It is even better than the Jewish Tanakh and the Masoretic texts themselves that are not always in line with the Dead Sea Scrolls. The critical combination of the LXX and the Masoretic texts produce a version of the Old Testament of the quality used by Jews and certainly the apostles, at the time of Christ. The inclusion of all the books of the OT, including the `controversial' books erroneously labelled the `apocrypha' by Martin Luther during the reformation, is made on the bases that they are in the LXX (200 BC), the Vulgate (400 AD) and that the removal of them from the OT is a post-crucifixion event by Jews at Jamnia (Council of Jamnia) in 90 AD, again by Martin Luther in the Luther's bible of 1534 before finally being removed altogether by Protestant book publishers between 1825-27 after the Edinburgh Committee of the British and Foreign Bible Society decided simply not to print them anymore. Only the Catholic Church has regarded them as Old Testament with the Dead Sea Scrolls confirming this position (and it is not as if anyone had the right to canonize any other version of the bible after the Catholic Church did it at the Third Council of Carthage in 397 AD). Here they are again, and yes they do include the Books of Maccabees with `prayers for the dead' in tact. The English writer J.R.R. Tolkien has his hand in the style of writing and we even have the insertion of the name "Yahweh" (I AM WHO I AM) for God in reading the Old Testament. The JB (1966) was written before the advent of inclusive language (something that the church believes alters the word of God) so we also have the added bonus of having this fantastic translation without the use of inclusive language. Since it is modern (note, not modernism) you can read it without having to study Shakespeare (as readers of the King James Bible would have to do, resulting in many doctrinal errors also) and come away with a fresh and accurate understanding of the Sacred Scriptures by only reading it once (slowly though I might add), still there is nothing like it in terms of quality, ease of use and correctness. Alexander Jones, who obviously had a firm understanding of what went wrong with other bible translations, has done what all others have failed to do. There are some very minor quibbles about its use of short text in some passages of the NT and so the JB was revised in 1985 by Henry Wansbrough and the new version was called The New Jerusalem Bible (NJB) but was rejected by the Holy See for its use of inclusive language (still the NJB is an amazing bible, but not for liturgical use). Even though the publication of the NJB was not approved, the NJB was widely circulated and had an impact on the JB to the point of putting it out of print. However recent demand for the originally approved JB has brought it back into circulation again, only not without what might be considered a shortcoming. Unlike the perfect print and typeset of the NJB all versions of the JB are photocopies of the 1966 version and have not been typeset again. Don't be disappointed to find the odd photocopied hair appearing across the page of a JB. However this is only cribbing, the text still looks as good as most bibles, just not as perfect as the NJB, and the fact that the JB has never been typeset means that you can not get a digital version of the JB, unlike the NJB that has been reproduced for bible study software packages. You can only own the JB on the printed page. The fact that the JB is not in digital has its disadvantages for serious bible scholars who like to run word searches, so in this case a digital NJB is highly recommended, but at the same time this means that the JB can only be read in the way it was presented, on the printed page, in a bound hardcover book, and this is precisely how the JB should be read, and precisely how sacred scripture should be presented. You can read the NJB in the same way by choosing the hardback version. The numbering system seems to disappear at times within the text, but this is in fact a method used by the JB to keep the original flow of sacred scripture. Sometimes the chapter number system actually broke the text in places where it should not have been, a bad tradition continued today because of this numbering system. Thus you will be reading chapters only to discover a small 5 instead of a big 5 like the 4 before it and the 6 after it. This method keeps the original chapter breaks of the books of bible that have long been lost to the numbering system. You have never read a bible like this one before. Quite simply I would deeply consider shelving all other bibles that you have and also getting a JB as your core official bible and using this NJB for any quick double-checks that need to be made. Citing from the JB shows that you have (1) Understood the acumen involved in its translation, (2) a desire to ensure that everyone who doesn't speak Shakespeare can comprehend you and the Word of God and (3) want to keep the Canon of books that Christ and the Apostles used that was canonized at the Third Council of Carthage, (4) want to use an officially approved bible (something that the NJB is not, but it is still very high quality all the same.) Reading the JB or the NJB is a miracle in itself. Never has our Justification through Faith in Jesus Christ because his forgiveness for our Sins by way of the Cross and Resurrection of the Body been made so absolute in print.

*Note: Personally I own a full size JB hardback and this mini zipper bible version of the NJB. This means I can take the NJB with me to church or places in my pocket. The JB is kept as a full size bible and is certainly the more authoritative of the two because of its liturgical usage. I know this does have an impact on those who came here to buy a NJB, but the JB is the one officially approved by the Holy See, not the NJB. However that does not mean that the NJB is not a good bible, it is, extremely so.)