Bottom Dog Press, Inc. is a non-profit literary and educational organization
dedicated to publishing the best writing and art from the Midwest and beyond.

We believe in a sense of place and person, in writing that reveals through its directness an essential human story. We also support the history and development of Working Class Literature, and we work to provide outlets for that writing and information on that vital art.

We are founding members of
Independent Midwest Publishers and Authors Consortium

Our books man be ordered through PAYPAL. 

New Titles: Cleveland Poetry

"Poetry has a long and living history in Cleveland, Ohio, and this examination of its past through the lens of its vibrant present  is a treasure in and of itself. They're all here, the great ones who showed the way: Langston Hughes, d.a.levy, Alberta Turner, Robert Wallace, Daniel Thompson. They set the bar pretty high. But as the editors demonstrate, their sons and daughters carry on, bringing the word to the city's streets and universities, libraries and coffee houses."
-Ron Antonucci, Cleveland Public Library

Recent Gathering of some of Cleveland's Key Poets
at the Cleveland Public Library 4/27/2008
Link to this Michael Salinger's for identifications and more photos,

  Harmony Series Books Page 

Just Out

New book by Mary E. Weems

An Unmistakable Shade of Red &
The Obama Chronicles: Poems

An Unmistakable Shade of Red…is the bomb. I found so many moments, so many moods, so many insights. Yours is the voice of compassion, of elegant rage.
It is country but urban-wise.
-Lamont B. Steptoe
Yes, this writer is a woman, who knows that “every mouth’s its own love language, / lust’s first cousin.” And yes, she is a black woman, for whom the eyes of Barack Obama “are so deep brown / I see blue in them, / ocean water, / bones rising, / right fists raised.” And yes, like the rest of us, she’s getting older, “hair graying in places / I shouldn’t have hair.” But beyond all divisions, she is a poet, who knows that poetry is music, and music is “the first place Black and White / came together like unwritten notes / in a jazz composition.” In these poems Mary Weems both challenges and embraces America in all its turbulence and beauty.
We should be grateful. 
-George Bilgere, author of Haywire

978-1-933964-18-8   80 pages  $15.00

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New book by Russell Salamon
Ascent From Cleveland:
Wild Heart  Steel Phoenix: Poems
from Freedonia Books, an imprint of Bottom Dog Press
72 pages...ISBN 978-1-933964-19-5    $14

“Russell Salamon returned to Cleveland in the summer of 2007. Did you know that the city knew he was back? On a warm August night in Tremont, while he read, birds flew overhead, the ivy grew up the walls around him. You could tell he was from the heart; you could feel the poems this book would become.”  -Allen Frost

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   Big New Collection

Chronology of his life and work, Biographical essays, Photographs, Interviews, Profiles, Statements, Letters, Art Work, Collage, Poems and Critical appreciations of his writing and art levy's “Cleveland Prints” Eight pages in full color

Contributors: Ed Sanders, T.L. Kryss, rjs, Karl Young, Allen Frost, Joel Lipman, Kent Taylor, Mark Kuhar, Ingrid Swanberg, Larry Smith, Russell Salamon, John Jacob, Doug Manson, Michael Basinski, Jim Lang, and others

Book includes 2006 dvd of Kon Petrochuk’s film  

if i scratch, if i write
1-933964-07-3  276 pages $25

Our Way of Life

Poems

by Ray McNiece

132 pages, paper, ISBN 978-1-933964-14-0

$15.00
Our Working Lives Series  

 “It's not enough for an artist to be angry. He also has to be good. And Ray McNiece is good and angry in these poems that burn as hot and bright as the extinct blast furnaces of Ohio once did. Whitman, whose ghost is everywhere in these lines, called America "the greatest poem." And I am happy that Ray McNiece's passionate, relentless voice will not stop until he has made us understand how much we have lost.”

– George Bilgere, author of The Good Kiss

HARMONY SERIES OF BOOKS  (click to order titles in this series)

The River's Daughter
Poems
by Terry Hermsen

From luminous evocations of childhood and place, to riddles so beautifully, lucidly obscure that they crack my mind open like an egg, to explorations of ink-blots and loves old and new, Terry Hermsen’s The River’s Daughter is filled with pleasure, challenge, and nourishment. Hermsen is a subtle, bold lover of both words and the world; he confronts their perils bravely even as he sings their joys. “Where does the world lead / when it's so lightly woven?” the title poem asks. One answer is these deftly woven, deeply imagined poems. 

-Jeff Gundy, author of  Spoken among the Trees

112 pages, paper  978-1-933964-20-1,   $15

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Hunger Artist:
A Suburban Childhood
by Joanne Jacobson

“Magically, brilliantly, movingly, the particularity of Joanne Jacobson’s language captures the universal truths of childhood. I devoured Hunger Artist. It is a fresh and riveting memoir of the highest order.”   -Patricia Volk, author of My Dearest Friends

132 pages, paper   978-1933964-11-9, $16.00

“In her stunning debut memoir, Hunger Artist, Joanne Jacobson tells her story of growing up Jewish in a suburban world comprised not only of new houses and bright gardens and exuberant dreams for the future, but also of frustrated longings and unmet hungers. Her prose is at once gorgeous and meticulous…”  -Richard McCann, author of Mother of Sorrows