-"Dave Newman is an immense talent!" - Donald Ray Pollock, author of THE DEVIL ALL THE TIME
DAVE NEWMAN
THE BOOKS
The Poem Factory
Publication: October 2015
Trade Paperback 176 pages
ISBN: 098844593X; 978-0988445932
Rust Belt Media Tour
THE POEM FACTORY is where you end up when the world no longer wants you.
These are poems set in the corners of America seldom mentioned in poetry. Waitresses and strippers, truck drivers and store managers, outsider poets and welders fill the pages with their lyrical insights, their midnight desires, their miseries and their hope. Here are the good times against the bad times. In THE POEM FACTORY, Frank O'Hara is the world's laziest mover and Walt Whitman is a guiding light. Wal-Mart looms and the student loan people want their money back. Temp work is a career choice. Getting your teeth cleaned is a luxury.
Written in the spirit of world poems like Nicanor Parra and Nazim Hikmet, coupled with pure American grit, Newman's poems start where most poems stop. He tells truths we're all embarrassed to know.
What Others Are Saying About THE POEM FACTORY:
“Dave Newman is the truth about America. He is lyrical and outrageous and tells the saddest stories I know. In The Poem Factory, he shows our great decline and how we don’t know how to fall. This is a beautiful, powerful book.”—Mohammed Pouchek
Two Small Birds
Publication: January 24, 2014
Trade Paperback 296 pgs.
ISBN: 1-937746-17-8 / ISBN-13:978-1-937746-17-9
10-City Rustbelt author tour
$16.95
Dan Charles reads Whitman the way some people read the Bible. He works three jobs. He attends college. Dan’s older brother sells industrial parts and wants out. Dan wants something. In Two Small Birds, the brothers take flight in the worst possible way. This is the story of what it means to be family, to be working class, and to dream of being a poet in a world that refuses books. Set in tiny apartments and roadside diners, truckstops and warehouses, dive bars and worse hotels, Two Small Birds is a story of misdemeanors and perseverance, the jobs we take and the lives we lose. It’s the story of love, and whoever is in charge of that.
What Others Are Saying About TWO SMALL BIRDS:
There are writers who understand America and there are writers who understand an America most writers don't write about. This short-money, low-end, no expectations, working class just-skating-by America is the one Dave Newman lays bare in his achingly beautiful, badass and authentic novel, Two Small Birds. Call it Truck Driving America. What Newman has created in this big-hearted, gritty book is a kind of road novel, where the road is one you and everybody you know just want to get the hell off of, before it kills you or works you to death. Readers will hear echoes of Raymond Carver, Daniel Woodrell and Denis Johnson, but in the end Two Small Birds earns Newman a place of his own in the pantheon. Two Small Birds is really a book to love.
- Jerry Stahl, Permanent Midnight, Perv: A Love Story, and more
Funny, outrageous, and somehow tender in a world of bad jobs and worse relationships, Two Small Birds is a road novel about what it means to lose control of everything you love and desire. This is art. This is a writer telling the truth about the world. This is a book about what literature has forgotten: truckdrivers and salesmen, waitresses and prostitutes, the fallen and the hanging on. Dave Newman is an enormous talent who drops insights like a jeweler sets diamonds. Two Small Birds dazzles. It’s a novel to light the way at the beginning of the 21st century.
-Alicia Erian, Towelhead
The Slaughterhouse Poems
Publication: August 23, 2013
Trade Paperback 166 pages
Publisher: White Gorilla Press
ISBN-10: 0988445913
ISBN-13: 978-0988445918
Named one of L-Magazine's best books of 2013, THE SLAUGHTERHOUSE POEMS is a series of narrative poems that tell the stories of people often kept behind the scenes in American literature – slaughterhouse workers, bowling-alley managers, strippers, prisoners dreaming of better lives.
Written in the spirit of world poets like Nicanor Parra and Nazim Hikmet, coupled with American grittiness, Newman’s poems hold a place of their own – real, heartfelt, true.
Bestselling author Don Ray Pollock (THE DEVIL ALL THE TIME and more) calls Newman “an immense talent.” Legendary poet Gerald Locklin says Newman is “the best writer of his generation.”
Poet Michael Casey, author of CHECK POINTS calls THE SLAUGHTERHOUSE POEMS “a great read. It is funny and grim. It is also meaningful, having a historical setting where even Volkswagen America is letting workers go and where an underemployed teenager is the richest man in the bar…. dramatic and truly memorable.”
Raymond Carver
Will Not Raise Our Children
Publication: May 18, 2012
Trade Paperback 316 pages
Publisher: Writers Tribe Books
ISBN-10: 1937746038
ISBN-13: 978-1937746032
Dan Charles has a wife, two kids, one published novel, and almost no money. He teaches writing at a university in Pittsburgh, and his contract expires at the end of this year. Dan wants—needs—to keep his job. He doesn’t have any other skills and he’s getting too old to learn. It doesn’t matter that he makes less money than an assistant manager at McDonalds. It doesn’t matter that his students, whose tuition keeps going up, think he’s an elitist millionaire. RAYMOND CARVER WILL NOT RAISE OUR CHILDREN narrates the work and dreams of Dan Charles and his family, but it’s also the story of James Longo who, after eleven years sober, is drunk again. It’s the story of Kentucky Jim, legendary fiction writer, author of exactly one book published 30-odd years ago, who once taught a class naked, drunk on moonshine, and packing a gun. RAYMOND CARVER WILL NOT RAISE OUR CHILDREN tells the story of readers and writers, stoned college students and underpaid factory workers, bartenders and musicians everywhere. It is the story of anyone who has ever paid tuition, everyone in debt, and all of us trying to make a living in an economy that does not care if we survive.
What Others Are Saying About RAYMOND CARVER WILL NOT RAISE OUR CHILDREN:
“Dave Newman is an immense talent, and he has proven it again with this beautiful, hilarious, sometimes sad page-turner about Dan Charles, a writer in Pittsburgh who likes a drink and loves his family, struggling to get by as a lowly, underpaid adjunct professor in today's cut-throat economy. Believe me, Raymond Carver Will Not Raise Our Children will grab you and not let go.”
--Donald Ray Pollock, author of the New York Times Bestselling books THE DEVIL ALL THE TIME and KNOCKEMSTIFF
"Finally, a book about the writing life that tells the stark truth: most scribes make the same wages as busboys, curse like truckers, and drink like – well – writers. RAYMOND CARVER WILL NOT RAISE OUR CHILDREN is a smart, funny, class-conscious novel about the blue collar existence that 99% of all writers face.Dave Newman’s characters are real people, not ideas with arms and legs as in most fiction about fiction.The book is a genuine gem!"
-Larry Fondation, author of ANGRY NIGHTS, UNINTENDED CONSEQUENCES, and more