Authors - The Porcupine Press

Author

Harvey Mudd

Harvey Mudd’s first published poem was written in 1960. In the intervening 55 years, he wrote four books of poetry, two of which were published by Black Sparrow Press of Santa Barbara. One of these, The Plain of Smokes, was shortlisted for the Los Angeles Times poetry book of 1983.

During that period, he was a farmer in northern New Mexico, the director of an environmental organization, and a painter. He has traveled extensively, was always active in politics, and raised three children. He has lived in Spain, New Mexico, old Mexico, Vermont, New York City, Massachusetts, and France.

You can read more about Harvey Mudd on his website and political blog, harvey-mudd.com.

Books by Harvey Mudd

Leaving My Self Behind

Leaving My Self Behind recounts the childhood of the scion of a distinguished Los Angeles family under the shadow of an abusive mother with unconscious agendas.

There Was a Peacock

An eccentric collection with commentary of the provocative, irreligious, and often dark drawings by the Mexican journalist, Juan Ezekiel Fontana.

Spinoza’s Dog

A third of this collection represents the poetic sensibility of Mudd’s previous books of poetry with the remainder written in the last ten years that he has lived in France.

A European Education

This a book-length poem is based on diaries author and poet Harvey Mudd kept during a six-month exploration of the places of the Holocaust in the winter of 1979-80.

The Plain of Smokes

The Plain of Smokes is a book-length poem about the city of Los Angeles similar to Hart Crane’s The Bridge. Includes drawings by California artist and ceramist, Ken Price.

Author

Jim Levy

Jim Levy has written poetry, essays, stories, novels, and memoirs. At the age of seventy-four, he began publishing his books, including The Poems of Caius Herrenius Felix, Corazón (and Merkle), and Cooler Than October Sunlight.

Books by Jim Levy

Joy to Come

These thirteen essays explore Chamfort’s aphorisms, Nobel Prize winner Orhan Pamuk, an obscure T’ang era cult, Malcolm Lowry, and the resurrection of Abd al Rahman III.

Poems of Caius Herennius Felix

Author Jim Levy has populated an authentic and historically accurate first century Roman port city with the fictitious Latin poet, Caius Herennius Felix.

Author

Alexis de Tocqueville

Alexis de Tocqueville is best known for having written a brilliant and prescient study of the emerging American democracy, its politics and form of government, its economics, demographics, and attitudes, in short, almost everything that could be known about this new country and the character of the new man, the “American.”

His book is, of course, Democracy in America, the first volume of which was published in France in 1835. Arguably, few have ever seen America and the Americans with quite so much insight. Tocqueville gained his understanding of the new country and its inhabitants through the experience of a nine-month trip to North America in 1831 when the American republic was about fifty years old. Tocqueville was just 25 when he made this trip, a fact that makes his great intellectual accomplishment, Democracy in America, all the more impressive.

Fifteen Days in the Wilderness is a journal that he kept during a two-week side trip to the Lower Michigan peninsula. It is a charming, ironic, and vivid picture of America before it was the country we know today: an America of virgin forests and of Native American culture, both at the point of being overwhelmed by the steady advance of European “civilization.” It was Tocqueville’s understanding of the precarious condition of both the wilderness and its native inhabitants that inspired him to undertake his journey to Saginaw.

Books by Alexis de Tocqueville

15 Days in the Wilderness

A translation of Alexis de Tocqueville’s trip to the Lower Michigan peninsula in 1831. With commentary and photos of destinations along his route.