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NEW AHSAHTA PRESS BOOK EXPLORES COMING OF AGE THEME A lush and oppressive Florida is the setting for Drinking Girls and Their Dresses, a first book of poetry by Heather Sellers, recently published by Ahsahta Press at Boise State University. The poems tell a coming-of-age story where similar paradoxes confront the child who would be both open to everything and permanently safe. The girl-body’s relationship to otherness (the masculine, but also the overpowering natural world) as it is distracted by desire is a key theme in the work. "Heather has captured a girlhood spent in a tropical place," said Janet Holmes, director of Ahsahta Press. "‘We are frantic families here. We are all bitten up,’ the book begins, and that sense of a life rushing forward, frantically, thrillingly, makes the poems fairly pulse." Poet Barbara Hamby writes of Drinking Girls and Their Dresses, "If you love poetry you can see, smell, taste, hear, and feel, then you will love the luscious poems in this collection. Heather Sellers’s lines have the cadence of a chant, and there is some serious voodoo going on here, some magic incantations about being a girl, a woman, a human being in a scary, beautiful world." Heather Sellers, of Holland, Mich., received her Ph.D. from Florida State University in 1992. Recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts grant for fiction writing in 2001, she is also the author of Georgia Underwater, a collection of short stories, which won the Barnes and Noble Discover Award. Her first children’s book, Spike and Cubby: Ice Cream Island Adventure!, is forthcoming from Henry Holt and Company Publishers.   Ahsahta, Mandan Indian for "Rocky Mountain bighorn sheep," has produced 61 volumes over its 27 years of publishing, including books by such poets as Sandra Alcosser, David Baker, Linda Bierds, Katharine Coles, Wyn Cooper, Linda Dyer and Leo Romero. The Sawtooth Poetry Prize, inaugurated last year, awards $1,500 for the best manuscript submitted to Ahsahta Press between Jan. 1 and March 1 each year. The press is directed by Janet Holmes, who also teaches poetry in Boise State’s MFA program in creative writing. Drinking Girls and Their Dresses is available at the BSU Bookstore, 1910 University Drive, Boise, ID 83725; from Small Press Distribution (http://www.spdbooks.org); or from Ahsahta Press at http://ahsahtapress.boisestate.edu/books/sellers.htm . -30- Drinking Girls and Their Dresses, by Heather Sellers ISBN 0-916272-74-5 paper 6" x 8" 58 pages price: $12.95   Contact: Janet Holmes, director, Ahsahta Press English 208-426-2195 / jholmes@boisestate.edu Media contact: Janelle Brown communications and marketing 208-426-1790 jbrown2@boisestate.edu

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