Welcome to Negative Capability Press, an independent publisher in Alabama.
“At once it struck me what quality went to form a Man of Achievement, especially in Literature, and which Shakespeare possessed so enormously - I mean Negative Capability, that is, when a man is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason. ”
– John Keats
What’s New at Negative Capability Press?
FORTHCOMING OCTOBER 14
The Book of Fools: An Essay in Memoir and Verse
At once poem, essay, memoir fragment, and art object, The Book of Fools is a sweeping elegy for our earth—and our plastic-choked ocean—and it is visually, conceptually, and thematically unlike perhaps any book before it. The Book of Fools invents new formal structures to marry global, ecological themes of loss—focused around the Great Pacific Garbage Patch—to personal, confessional ones, centered around a mother's early death to cancer.
"A masterwork..." —David Keplinger
"[a] ravishing text..." —Donald Revell
"Taylor brilliantly creates 'a composite canvas' to capture what it means to make art in our precarious times..." —Craig Santos Perez
Recently Published Books
“Carey Scott Wilkerson's Cruel Fever of the Sky is like a magic carpet that sails easily between classical myth and popular culture. With touches of Symbolism, Magical Realism, and Post-Modernism, the poems are seductive. Their language is astonishingly beautiful. Whether under faerie lights strung in pepper trees or atop a Ferris wheel on the Santa Monica pier, magic and myth abound. With characters as unexpected as Norman Mailer, Jacques Cousteau's pastry chef, Mayhaley Lancaster, we watch Icarus plunge time after time--into the Hudson Bay, the Potomac, the Chattahoochee River, even onto the dark side of the Moon. In spite of the miracles of salted tomatoes, fireflies, and the scent of gardenias "trilling the air with their white perfume," we come to recognize our own "cycles of cataclysm." We realize that for us, as for Icarus, those wings we've been told to spread will eventually fail us and gravity will bring us down.”
Marian Carcache, Author of The Moon and the Stars and The Tongues of Men and Angels
Click on image to purchase from Amazon
"Lindsey Hannahan has covered the entire spectrum of everyday life with her beautiful poetry. Whether writing about nature, cleaning house, sitting in the garden or spending time with loved ones, each line is alive with imagery in a colorful display of her love of family, love of nature, and of her deep spirituality. All these things combine to describe the beauty of life and of a life well lived. Anyone who loves the beautiful images of poetry will love this book."
- Rita Aiken Moritz, author Precious Poems and So, You Love a Prodigal and 2017 Alabama State Poetry Society "Poet of the Year"
by Pat schneider Now available on amazon
Pat Schneider was born in the Ozark Mountains of Missouri where she became intimate with fossils, creek bed grasshoppers and box turtles. After a search for work took her single mother to St. Louis, from age ten Pat lived in tenements and in an orphanage until she was given a scholarship to college. Those early experiences deeply influenced her writing, and fueled her passion for those who have been denied voice through poverty and other misfortunes.
Pat’s books, poetry, plays and libretti have been praised by the most prestigious publications and authors in America: The New York Times, the Library Journal, the Atlanta Journal, Small Press Magazine, St. Louis Dispatch, the North Dakota Review, Oprah Magazine, Vanity Fair, the North Dakota Quarterly, the Kentucky Monthly, the Bellingham Review, the Louisville Times, and many others.
Peter Elbow said that Pat Schneider is “the wisest teacher of writing I know.” Julia Cameron, author of The Right to Write and The Artist’s Way, noted that Pat is “a fuse lighter. Her work is gentle, playful, brilliant, and revolutionary” and Janet Burroway, author of Writing Fiction, notes that Pat’s work is “heartening and practical, a rich variety…that celebrates both difference and difficulty as the gifts they are.
Now Available on amazon
An Archaeology of Days contains new poetry from Vivian Shipley. Connecticut State University Distinguished Professor, Vivian Shipley teaches at Southern Connecticut State University where she was named Faculty Scholar in 2000, 2005 and 2008. Her eleventh book, Perennial, was published in 2015 by Negative Capability Press and was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize and named the Paterson Poetry Prize Finalist. The Poet, her tenth book, was published in 2015 by Louisiana Literature Press, Southeastern Louisiana University. All of Your Messages Have Been Erased (Louisiana Literature Press, SLU, 2010) was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize, won the Sheila Motton Book Prize from the New England Poetry Club, the Paterson Award for Sustained Literary Achievement and the CT Press Club Award for Best Creative Writing. Her sixth chapbook is Greatest Hits: 1974-2010 (Pudding House Press, Youngstown, Ohio, 2010). She has received the Library of Congress’s Connecticut Lifetime Achievement Award for Service to the Literary Community and a Connecticut Book Award for Poetry two times. Most recently, she won the 2017-18 Steve Kowit Prize for Poetry for “Cargo” from San Diego Arts & Entertainment Guild. In 2015, she won the Hackney Literary Award for Poetry for “Foxfire.”
See Vivian read from An Archaeology of Days by watching the videos below:
Vivian Shipley "Pagurus bernhardus, the Hermit Crab"
Vivian Shipley "Cargo"
Vivian Shipley "Sourdough"
Vivian Shipley Teachers Make a Difference - Dr. Sue Walker