Heather McNaugher leads a "Double Life"!

NightBallet Press is enormously pleased to announce the third of five Pittsburgh poets to be published this week:  Heather McNaugher, with her new chapbook Double Life!

In Double Life, which is (aptly) divided into two sections, "Seattle" and "Pittsburgh", McNaugher writes about  relationships and  recollections with wry humor and honesty.  In "Second-order Desire", she writes (excerpt)

So I said, "But I want to want
to marry you.  I want to want
kids, a dog, to trip over their toys in the yard,
to mow the lawn on Saturday, to learn to garden;
I want to want—"
And she pulled the car over on Woodlawn.
And not until she had come to a complete stop
did she turn her torso to look me directly in the eye
which I averted and she said, "Heather.
Will you listen to yourself?"  Then she put the Civic into drive
and drove.


And in "New Dumpling House, 2000", she writes (excerpt)

 

It was the Christmas I walked to the Chinese restaurant for beer. 
The snowy, then snowier, haul to the bottom of Murray.  Inside, my
glasses steam with Dim Sum and the secular body heat of
nonbelievers in blue jeans.  It was the Christmas I believed only in
beer. In the Chinese restaurant on Christmas there is one kind of
beer, Tsingtao, and the tidy man behind the bar is required by the
State of Pennsylvania to sell it to me by the bottle, 3 bucks apiece.  It
would be easier to purchase a grenade launcher.

.

Heather McNaugher received a BA in English from Pittsburgh's Chatham University in 1995, after which she followed a redhead to Seattle and became a housecleaner and barista.  She received her PhD in English from The State University of New York at Binghamton, and now teaches English back at her alma mater.  She is the author of two previous poetry collections, System of Hidouts (Main Street Rag, 2012) and Panic & Joy (Finishing Line, 2008).  Her work has appeared in The Fourth Genre, New Ohio Review, 5 A.M., and on the radio show Prosody.  She is poetry editor of The Fourth River.  She's tried living elsewhere, but keeps coming back to Pittsburgh.

Double Life is 32 pages with 17 poems.  The cover, which is thick white cardstock with a textured charcoal gray cardstock insert,  features a stunning photograph taken by New York poet Matthew Hupert.  The text is printed on creamy white paper.  This book is available for only $5 plus $3 shipping/handling beginning today, June 11, 2014 (orders will be mailed Saturday June 14, 2014, the day of the book release at Words Dance in the NightBallet.)  You may order by clicking on the PayPal button in the right side column, or find us on Amazon.  Of course, if you live near Pittsburgh, you can get a signed copy and hear the poet read from her book this coming Saturday June 14, 2014 (see the link in this paragraph for details)! 

You can order her book TODAY: