How to Download DB Titles
File Type
-Doubleback Books are PDF files and are compatible with most electronic devices.
Downloading to Mac or PC
-Go to the “Titles” page of our website
-Click the desired title (for this explanation we’ll use “Treason”). The title will be underlined as pictured below.
-Once you click the title, it should open in a new window
-If you want to download, then you can click the downward arrow as pictured below
-From here you’ll be asked where you want to save the PDF
-Once you have the PDF saved you can double-click the file to open whenever you want to read
Downloading to Smart Phone
-Open the Doubleback Books website on your web browser
-Go to the “Titles” page
-Similarly to downloading on a computer, touch to click the book’s title or the book’s image
-This should open the book in a new window
-To download to a different location on your Smart Phone use the action bar at the bottom of the page and click the “share” button to open in another app
Full List of Titles
Sidewalk Dancing by Letitia L. Moffitt.
Sidewalk Dancing is an elegant, nuanced exploration of a diverse family’s dynamics, skillfully told with the subtle wrist bends and brush strokes of a perpetual outsider. Multiple narratives told in stories by a gifted multi-ethnic artist create a beautifully crooked mosaic.
Miranda McGee, the daughter of shy, pragmatic Grace Chao and globetrotting dreamer George McGee, feels like a social pariah. She is a factory original, not bound to one land, nor one people. Miranda knows she doesn’t entirely belong anywhere.
She doesn’t understand how her parents ever married, how they picked up and moved to Oahu. How, despite their cultural differences, they could start a new life, build a house, raise a child, and run a popular local diner.
Miranda may feel like an outcast in Hawaii and New York, but it is her sense of alienation from her family and her own identity that makes her realize that some people feel like outsiders no matter where they are, and this alone may be the one thing her family members have in common.
Roxane Gay says, “Letitia is a great writer, one of those people you think, ‘Why don’t I know more about her?’… I love how her stories really build and build and draw you further into the worlds she creates” while The Missouri Review writes “Moffitt’s power lies in her ability to weave together two generations by telling the stories of first one and then the other and allowing the reader to see the connections between them. Ultimately, these ties unravel, and the generations become separate, the younger finally, painfully, severing itself from the older generation as we watch, as we are unable and unwilling to look away.”
Ghost in Girl Costume by Manuela Williams
Ghost in Girl Costume presents the outward and inward gaze of the female body and soul. Delving into womanhood and vulnerability, these poems peel back the layers to reveal the ghost within the girl costume. A short but indulgent read, Ghost in Girl Costume is full of painful truths and beautiful descriptions.
Excerpt from “I Like Things a Little Off”
“wish I could draw your mouth
after I fill it with
piping hot nothingness
know when I ask you about
//////
I mean
are you in love with
my dramatic line breaks
in the same way
sky has become all at once restricting
but also without period
or precision”
Our Small Faces by Jamie Moore
Selma and Zeke are two teenagers living in small town California. Feeling trapped by their community, the persistence of racism and responsibility to family define their imagined possibilities. Navigating friendship and loss, they consider who or what their way out is and what they may sacrifice with those choices. Our Small Faces explores how young people learn the limits of love, lead foolishly with heart, and often grow up too fast.
Our Small Faces is a lyrical, heartbreaking trip back to the moment childhood ends for all of us, when we leave our families and neighborhoods and begin to venture out in the wider world. For this group of children, when the protections of childhood dissolve, they discover that all along they’ve been living in a world of casual hatred, of cruelty, and loss, and longing. Jamie Moore’s writing is precise, evocative, poetic, and tantalizing—she leaves you longing for more, and yet deeply aware that what she has given you is perfectly enough.
– From Christina Lynch, author of The Italian Party.
“In the tradition of Sandra Cisneros and Jamaica Kincaid, Moore has written a poignant coming of age tale with sparse and elegant prose. A beautiful novella about the persistence of love in the face of unsettling violence and loss, Our Small Faces is an enchanting debut by a talented writer of the next generation.”
From Heidi Durrow, author of The Girl Who Fell From the Sky
Discount Fireworks by Wendy T. Carlisle
The poems in Discount Fireworks are grounded in the specific and personal, in order to show universal truth of emotion that goes beyond the speaker and the situation of the poem. In other words, they’re great poetry.
“With startling elegance and grit, the poems in Discount Fireworks skewer our follies and triumphs and the everydays in between. In a voice uniquely American, Carlisle reworks the mundane icons of our lives, from Dairy Queens to barbecue to Keds, with relentless imagery “a ferment of skirts,” “a life as real as paint” underscored by Gospel, rock and roll, and the blues. Passionate, controlled, and tinged with awe, these are poems you’ll want to take home in the palm of your hand.”
-Jo McDougall, author of five books of poetry, most recently Satisfied With Havoc. Recipient of DeWitt Wallace/Reader’s Digest Award and Arkansas’s Porter Fund Literary Prize
“Wendy Taylor Carlisle is a reader’s dream. Her music is funny, sexy, surprising, taking the sorrow out of the everyday world. Her poems illuminate the words in our language. They dish out a wide range of emotions which become nearer and dearer each page. Sensual and literate, Discount Fireworks will turn poetry into a brisk tirade.”
-Grace Cavalieri, radio host for “The Poet and the Poem” from the Library of Congress
Wendy Taylor Carlisle’s poems come out wearing their red shoes and ready to dance. The lives she sketches flame underfoot so the soles of your feet are “burned like little suns,” and when we read this book of grace and empathy “we are assured there will be sparks, then/blasts and blowups, offerings of flame and dust/ and riots of colored stars dropped across/ summer and winter skies, a heavenly display/ to bring us joy beyond the ordinary.”
-Tony Barnstone, author of three books of poetry and one chapbook. Poet, translator and editor of The Anchor Book of Chinese Poetry
Treason by Terese Svoboda
Treason is a book centered on betrayals, unflinchingly and with a wry and feminist eye. The poems are sometimes funny, sometimes strange, always hard-hitting. Svoboda’s topics are timeless, the poems themselves worthy of mythology.
From “Eurydice Abandoned in the Caves of Hades”:
You light cigarettes, unnerved, defenseless
in the blue of that smoke. You see the roots
of trees, your sisters’ hair unpinned, you see
it leads out, The sky! Then the guide rapes you,
steals your purse, and disappears. You really seethe
The Opposite of Work by Hugh Behm-Steinberg
The Opposite of Work is a breathless, staccato, meandering path through a mind. It’s delightful and surprising, like a fast-growing vine. It’s what good poetry should be. The poems are paired perfectly by the equally delightful and surprising drawings of Mary Behm-Steinberg. The book will snatch you, and leave you on the other side, bewildered and alive.
Watch a video of Hugh and Mary Behm-Steinberg’s visual poetry collaboration conceived for the book The Opposite of Work. The illustrated poem created in this flip-book is entitled “On Dreams.”
The Opposite of Work’s original press, JackLeg Press, has recently re-opened.
These Terrible Sacraments by Colleen S. Harris
These Terrible Sacraments tells a story of military deployment and its aftermath, on the soldier, the family left at home, and the family created on return. Told with frankness and told beautifully, these poems speak truth in its many facets. It is true that war is horrible. Even so, it is true that beauty remains in the world. And it is true that we must bear witness to what humanity endures and creates. Harris guides us through the journey.
What Brings You to Del Amo by Virginia Chase Sutton
“Virginia Chase Sutton’s poems—many set in mental hospitals and/or dealing with psychiatric problems—delight with their fresh imagery, vivid perceptions, unusual perspectives, and general liveliness, even when their subject is suffering.”
-Charles Harper Webb, Judge for the Samuel French Morse Prize, 2007
“Face it: as much as we love to glorify and extol the powers of imagination, there are some things you have to see up close and personal in order to be able to bring them into the rarified circumstance of a poem. These would include death, and even worse, all manner of human degradation and suffering possible. Still, bearing witness, no matter how intimate, is no guarantee of good art either. Virginia Chase Sutton manages, no, she illuminates a seamlessness between what is real, and what is barely imaginable in our lives with such precision that you are compelled to bear witness beside her. The poems of What Brings You to Del Amo are relentless in their pursuit of us, and relentless too in their pursuit of the highest level of craft and care.”
-Bruce Weigl, author of The Abundance of Nothing
“‘Never construct narrative,’ says a hospital shrink in Virginia Chase Sutton’s riveting suite of poems, ‘all you get are scraps.’ But the marvel of Sutton’s book is her ability to order a flashing series of scenes in order to tell, almost recklessly, not without hope, not without tenderness in the face of desolation, a life. A shattered life—but the irony of that doctor’s advice is that these fragments shored up against their speaker’s ruin make, indeed, a coherent, vital testament, tenaciously alive.”
-Mark Doty, author of Fire to Fire: New and Selected Poems, National Book Award
In the Voice of a Minor Saint by Sarah J. Sloat
Sarah J. Sloat’s chapbook, In the Voice of a Minor Saint, showcases small moments that belie great significance and trumpet the author’s ear for the specific. This collection is rich with metaphor, and Sloat uses form in a way that emphasizes the lyric. Broad in scope, while still giving the reader intimate insight into the speaker’s psyche, these pieces are touched with the divine.
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