Liane Ellison Norman's recent chapbooks, Driving Near the Old Federal Arsenal, published by Finishing Line Press, and Roundtrip, published by Yesterday's Parties Press, both appeared in 2012. Her first book of poetry, after many years of prose, was The Duration of Grief (2005) and her second, Keep, in 2008. Individual poems have appeared in 5 A.M., Kestrel, the North American Review, Grasslimb, Rune, Hot Metal Press, Voices From the Attic, and on newversenews.com. "What There'd Been" won the Wisteria Prize in 2006 from Paper Journey Press. She has also published Stitches in Air: A Novel About Mozart's Mother and a biography, Hammer of Justice: Molly Rush and the Plowshares Eight. Her most recent non-fiction prose book is an account of non-violent resistance to nuclear weapons, Mere Citizens: United, Civil and Disobedient.
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Mere Citizens
by Liane Ellison Norman
ISBN:978-0-9709590-5-8
$20.00US + $6.00s/h (US Orders) or $20.00US + $10.00s/h (Foreign Orders)
132 pgs. paperback
Mere Citizens: United, Civil and Disobedient tells the story of a group of perfectly ordinary Pittsburgh people who took on several giant locally based corporations that manufactured components of first strike nuclear weapons. These were Westinghouse, Rockwell International and the Software Engineering Institute of Carnegie Mellon University. Holding the highest offices in the United States of America - that of citizens - these people, regarded as "mere" by the corporate and local newspaper culture, challenged profitable policies for close to a decade. Their story adds to the growing tale of nonviolent social protest movements in the world.
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Keep
poems by Liane Ellison Norman
Art by Ruey Brodine Morelli
ISBN:978-0-9709590-4-1
$20.00US + $6.00s/h (US Orders) or $20.00US + $10.00s/h (Foreign Orders)
96 pgs. paperback with illustrations
"Keep by Liane Ellison Norman is a wonderful book of deep noticing, with its landscape of shadows and openings, of thickening and loosening. With tangible joy in language, Norman traverses the natural world, showing us our raging lust for life and our vulnerability to that lust, engaging with each burning movement: ... the shadow of one planet falls/across the light of the other. This is a mountain range of poetry, a continuum of crags and footpaths with fine moments of play and splendor as we climb.
The images of Ruey Brodine Morelli likewise support this feeling of presence: the presence of the speaker's daughter, who has died but still is here; the presence of the sublime, as we feel the light and air in Morelli's art, but also the sometimes gathering movement toward the solid image. This collaboration extends but doesn't comment, interacts but doesn't impede. These artists have created a fine rhythm of air and light, giving us a sense of reappearing that is grateful and alive."
- Jan Beatty, author of Red Sugar, Boneshaker, and Mad River
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Duration of Grief
by Liane Ellison Norman
ISBN:978-0-9709590-3-4
$12.00US + $6.00s/h (US Orders) or $12.00US + $10.00s/h (Foreign Orders)
64 pgs. paperback
Praise for Duration of Grief
"(These poems) have tuched me in the place where every grief I've ever known in my own life is stored ... she has spoken for each of us who grieves."
-George Zeidenstein
"Liane Norman's labor of mourning and love for her gifted, gallant daughter offers a measure of comfort to anyone who has suffered a wrenching and untimely loss."
- Elizabeth Segel
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Stitches in Air: A Novel About Mozart's Mother
by Liane Ellison Norman
ISBN:0-9709590-0-1
$15.00US + $6.00s/h (US Orders) or $15.000US + $10.00s/h (Foreign Orders)
432 pgs. paperback
Stitches in Air is the compelling story of Anna Pertl Mozart, mother of the inspired and heralded 18th-century composer. A gifted musician in her own right, Anna's talents and aspirations were denied during the Age of Enlightenment, which championed the Rights of Man but held that Nature had design Woman to cook, clean, knit and darn stockings.
When Anna is added to the well-documented life of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, a dynamic family emerges: Leopold, increasingly determined to fulfill his own ambitions through his son; Nannerl, frozen in disappointment as her own hopes are sacrificed for her brother; Wolfgang, whose growing desire for freedom puts him at odds with his domineering father; and Anna, who must find an outlet for her creativity in the service of others. It is a story full of domestic betrayal and heroism.
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Hammer of Justice: Molly Rush and the Plowshares Eight
by Liane Ellison Norman
ISBN:0-9622766-8-5
$6.00US + $6.00s/h (US Orders) or $6.00US + $10.00s/h (Foreign Orders)
238 pgs. paperback
On an apparently ordinary day in September 1980, an apparently ordinary woman carrying an apparently ordinary hammer did something extraordinary. This is the story of that woman and what she did, why she did it, and what happened as a result.
Molly Rush is a native of Pennsylvania. What she did occurred in Pennsylvania. The founder of Pennsylvania, William Penn, might have been pleased by the poetic justice - quite unintentional- of an attempt to begin nuclear disarmament in the state he had established three centuries earlier as a disarmed polity. That spiritually gifted, rebellious, adventurous Quaker man might have felt some kinship with the spiritually gifted, rebellious, adventurous Catholic woman who took a hammer to a nuclear warhead.
The tale told here links two acts of resistance to abuses of two kinds of power, two quite similar legal proceedings in two quite different courtrooms, two unrelated people in two widely divided times and places, two stories that ask the question "Why?"
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