WELCOME
The consortium of friends dedicated to this website, join in welcoming you to peruse and enjoy our offerings here.
Young in spirit, we are old in association, and our aspirations likely mirror your own: we hope to provide inspiration for all your dreams, just as we have provided inspiration for each other in this publishing endeavor.
We have made music and prints and built mansions and retreat centers and books in our minds. Some of these dreams have come true! We wish the same kind of amazing fruition on you!
NOW AVAILABLE
Bewilderness
Told with curiosity and a deep concern for reciprocity, Brown’s unique stories reveal mysteries that are colorful and complex. Some things you didn’t want to know about working in an animal shelter. Many things you ought to know. More than a few things you need to know. Human Animals Carry Deep Ambivalence Toward Other Animals One major thing: We eat them. We also hunt them, ride them, stuff them, wear their fur, walk on their skin, live with them, train them and display them; we dominate them for our benefit, humanize and demonize them. And many of us, through all of this, say we love them. When framed by love and awe, animals and humans can thrive in our unique entanglements. Our corporeal teachers, animal beings open our senses of sight, smell and touch, offering gifts of mutual recognition, regard and empathy. Making connections in jumps and starts, we humans are just beginning to consider the valuable perspectives, intelligence and agency of more-than-human beings. From gangster to opera star, Vietnam veteran to Nob Hill lady, academic to meth addict, our lives intersect with animals’ lives in cities, towns and rural areas. The encounters in this collage of tales highlight the vulnerability of being present with and for animals at intersections where there are few traffic signals.
Bewilderness by Kathleen Brown ISBN: 978-1-7354615-8-8
The Roses
THE ROSES, a series of poems by Rainier Maria Rilke, is a gift of solace offered in a new book by poet, N. M. Hoffman, and painter, Gloria Matuszewski. The book is comprised of Rilke's original French, a new English translation, and visual images that heighten the beauty of the text. The many French poems of famed German-language poet Rainer Maria Rilke have been underserved both in French and in translation. This new book, THE ROSES, endeavors to address that for 27 of the poet’s poems originally written in French, here with a new English translation by the poet, N.M. Hoffman. In an age requiring so much of it, Solace is the force that exudes from these poems. It is a kind of Solace that replicates the Solace enforced by Time, but by means of a cinematographic intimacy with the life of the Rose that startles us from our instant grief. The Rose is, after all, close to us at every turn, in every season. The poet takes us by the hand into his garden and there we are mesmerized by the personal life of the Rose, its extraordinary elegance, reticence, exoticism. In contemplating the Being of the Rose, the reader endures a grief subsumed into a process that is primordial, even shamanistic, but which is always the provenance of the poet. It is also the provenance of the visual artist who is able to render this intimacy in psychological terms for the mind to grasp through the eyes. In the images supplied for this book by the painter, Gloria Matuszewski, the eerie singularity of the Rose is vivified, a melding of what is spiritual, gestural, and contextual. In Matuszewski’s work, the figure of the Rose lives tangentially with everyday life. In this complicity, the images embrace the complexities of Rilke’s Roses and give them a solidity that, with the text, provides a grounding for the exorcism of grief. These images have provided the way forward in understanding the poems and, without them, this book — a tribute and a memorial to those unique individuals we have lost — would never have come into being.
The Roses by Rainer Maria Rilke, translation by N. M. Hoffman, paintings by Gloria Matuszewski, designed by Élie Colistro, Paris (NYC) ISBN: 978-1-7354615-0-2
The Chairs
N. M. Hoffman and Gloria Matuszewski continue their collaborations in tandem in this book of poetry and artwork from Kearns, Howard & Walker to be released in early 2023. The Chairs, like their impressive interpretation of Rainer Maria Rilke’s, The Roses, will be designed by Élie Colistro in France. The Chairs are a departure in spirit and format for Hoffman, who generally writes in a longer idiom. They are a workmanlike visitation of Rilke’s controlled forms in The Roses that simultaneously lean for inspiration into Matuszewski’s commanding paintings devoted to the chair. The new book manifests their exhibitions in the course of 25 years, among these in California at The Commonwealth Club and Marin Museum of Contemporary Art and in NYC at The Cornelia Street Café and Jadite Galleries.
The Chairs, poetry by N. M. Hoffman, paintings by Gloria Matuszewski, designed by Élie Colistro, Paris (NYC)
ISBN: 978-1-7354615-1-9
Choral Booklet
Choral Booklet: N. M. Hoffman wrote the poems used in the choral work entitled Requiem Before the Times of Peace composed by Jeffrey Schanzer. The Requiem was performed at St. Peter's Lutheran Church (1999) and, in part, at Merkin Hall (2005) by the New York Virtuoso Singers under the direction of Harold Rosenbaum. Notes on the Requiem: In memory of Walter Winika, Sculptor Three of the five movements of the Requiem memorialize specific catastrophes of the 20th century. The first movement mourns the life, times and brutal murder of Steven Biko, the South African leader of the Black Consciousness Movement. Movement II addresses the unspeakable losses of the Holocaust. Movement IV mourns the loss of our many friends to AIDS. In the manner of liturgical requiems, this secular requiem also sounds notes of hope. The third movement, based on an observation in the I Ching that no storm can last all day, indicates that healing is possible, in spite of the recurrence of evil. The final movement memorializes the heroic gesture of the cellist, Vedran Smailovic, who played for 22 days at the killing site of 22 civilians in Sarajevo; his name is silently embedded in the first letter of each line of the poem on which the movement is based. About the Composer: Jeffrey Schanzer is a composer and guitarist involved in a wide variety of music, ranging from fully notated to fully improvised. He has studied composition with Morton Feldman and Anthony Davis and guitar with Oswald Rantucci. No More In Thrall, commemorating the 50th anniversary of the liberation of the Nazi concentration camp at Buchenwald, where his father was a prisoner, performed by the Sirius String Quartet with percussionist Kevin Norton, has been released on the CRI label. The Schanzer/Speach Duo, in which he performs with his wife, composer/pianist Bernadette Speach, has performed across the U.S., as well as in Puerto Rico and Europe. About the Conductor: Recognized among the premier interpreters of choral music, Dr. Harold Rosenbaum is the founder of The New York Virtuoso Singers (“New York’s outstanding concert choir” - NY Times), and The Canticum Novum Singers (an elite choir” – NY Times). He is the recipient of many awards including Columbia University’s Ditson Conductor’s Award. Through his wide range of conducting activities, Harold Rosenbaum continues to be a vital and influential force on the American choral music scene.
Requiem Before the Times of Peace
ISBN: 978-1-7354615-4-0 2nd Edition
ISMN: 979-0-800271-00-7 2nd Edition