"Whether you're carousing in LA, New York, or Boise, Idaho, you'll recognize your
favorite watering hole in this glorious new book. Bar Stories has all the hook-ups,
fall downs, colorful characters, and laughs of a great night of the town."
-Chris Lukic, editor of NewYorkOnTap.com.

"I began Bar Stories at night with a glass of Merlot beside me and I continued the next morning with a cup of coffee. What an intoxicating collection Nan Byrne has given us: a variety of lengths and styles and attitudes, of voices and subjects--interspecies yearning, prostitution, strippers, airplane accidents, booze and beauties. Here's thanks and a toast: to insight, to vision, to divine madness, to smart choices and new voices."
-Cezarija Abartis, author of Nice Girls and Other Stories.

176 pages  978-1-933964-09-6   $14.00

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

"Make no mistake, Ray McNiece is a patriot in the truest sense of the word. He has America coursing through his veins, and his poems are an open highway with a cool Midwestern wind blowing through them. Our Way of Life is a cathartic journey, taking you from meditations on the atrocious war in Iraq to homages to the nation's great living poets, and ending in the nooks and crannies of a country that, despite the heartache found permeating everything, is still alive, vital and staggeringly beautiful
in ways that are breathtaking to behold."

– Victor D. Infante, editor in chief, The November 3rd Club

"Jim Daniels’ poems in conversation with Charlee Brodsky’s photographs make for a remarkable collective work.
By themselves the photographs give the commonplace encounters make uncommon by framing and cropping:
truncated faces, split bodies, ladies in house dresses, and most stunning, feet—personality at the very bottom
of human figures. The poems mirror the pictures’ cool balance. Sardonic, smart, wily, tough, they are stories
for each image, not necessarily the one and only true story, but a plausible story, what the eye of the poet
surmises from what the eye of the camera sets down. This is a street that goes nowhere in particular,
not a thoroughfare but a place to see and be seen, an invention that just might keep
this world from sliding into utter inconsequence."

- Alan Trachtenberg

Special Signed Copy by Daniels and Brodsky
with Photo Print by Charlee Brodsky
Send $50 to Bottom Dog Press.

Over forty fine photographs and forty pages of poems that get to the heart of working lives in the Midwest.

From tin and two-by-fours an elevator grows
and for a span of seasons flourishes,
then withers to dust and blows away.
That’s the sense of time I’m talking about here...-Jon  Volkmer

"With a focused and indefatigable passion, Bruce Selyem has been photographing the simple elegance of grain elevators within the context of austere rural landscapes for fifteen years. Grain elevators remain fascinating and treasured landmarks in many Western communities, arousing contemplation and even reverence as historic and aesthetic icons. These qualities are readily apparent in the quiet beauty and studied compositions of Selyem's photographs."

- Ellen Ornitz, Visual Arts Director, The Emerson & Beall Park, Bozeman, Montana

"These are poems that spring from the ground like fresh seed, but never without human references.  And it is the human references, in country circumstances, that make them familiar and understandable to everyone….Whether he is writing about giving his father a haircut or questioning him about the Great Depression, Jon Volkmer knows farm-people intimately and describes them with bedrock wisdom in a world of tarpaper, boxcars, corn, propane tanks, drill bits, wooden elevators, concrete silos, flour mills, rats, ferrets and barn ladders."  -Samuel Hazo

Working Lives Series
Bottom Dog Press
ISBN 0-933087-97-7  paper $14.00

Review: "The latest publication from Bottom Dog Press is The Art of Grain Elevators, a collection of poems by Jon Volkmer and photographs by Bruce Selyem. Together, they capture the look and feel of rural life, examining an aspect of working-class culture that often gets ignored. As Volkmer explains, the book 'is really about one working man, my father, but he was the real deal.'"
-Working-Class Notes, Center for Working-Class Studies,
Youngstown State University, Spring 2006

2004 Winner of
Appalachian Writers Association
Poetry Book of the Year

“Like those lives alluded to in the title,  
    Alive in Hard Country will survive.”       

                         — Maggie Anderson

To order a copy, send $14.00 Postpaid to Bottom Dog Press/ PO Box 425 / Huron, Ohio 44839
419-433-3573/ Lsmithdog@aol.com   http://members.aol.com/lsmithdog/bottomdog 
Or oder through PayPal...$12.00 plus shipping.