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AUXARCZENBOOKS
pronounced: OZARK ZEN
OUR LATEST THING...
PAUL L. MAGNUSON
After a forty year career of teaching and data solution development, lifelong midwesterner Paul L. Magnuson has taken his creative writing to the next level with short stories and novels. Paul hones his skill by telling his dogs bedtime stories.
PLANET MARQ
A Work of Behavioral Science-Fiction
Novel
199 Pages
September 17, 2026
Jann Press, Auxarczen Press
6 x 9
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While fulfilling his wife’s last wish, a grieving widower discovers a planet on the other side of the sun.
DAVE ASHMORE
Dave Ashmore/Dasho bides his time as a multi-dimensional multi-media artist & poet living in southwestern Missouri. He has an obsessive habit of sync-cruising endless backroads with his buddy Steve, dreams in 24 frames per second & hears a full cast of strange voices in perfect harmony. He thinks it's all for the birds.
DASHION SHOW
Poetry
52 Pages
October 19, 2019
Auxarczen Press
6.7 x 9.6
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This book is the result of years without deep therapy, stacks of old fashion magazines and an investment in X-Acto. Filters were removed for synchronicity purposes and to promote Burroughsian cut-up voices.
BOB IN THE BASEMENT
Poetry, Paintings
52 Pages
July 4, 2020
Auxarczen Press
8 x 13
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The art in this book was created in the Fall of 2012 in a basement while blasting Guided by Voices. The poems were written in the spring and summer of 2020 while blasting Guided by Voices
WRITE DRUNK / EDIT SOBER
Poetry
48 Pages
August 8, 2020
Auxarczen Press
5 x 6
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Poems from several GO sessions
JASON BROWN
Albuquerque, New Mexico poet
PROCTOR OF SPARROW
Poetry
90 Pages
February 1, 2021
Auxarczen Press
5.5 x 8.5
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Jason Brown throws down long lines, weaving tales of Southwestern daily lifeon and off the job.
MICHAEL CARTRIGHT
Michael Cartright lives in the Ozark Highlands of Southwest Missouri. He has devoted forty plus years to the study of poetry and music. He once described his poems as frames of film, momentary photographs. The odd rhythms and beats in the poems are driven by his interest in jazz music. American language, as it is spoken by the natives, is a feature of his poems with a focus on the accuracy of the frames clicking by.
STARTING IN OCTOBER
Collected Poems 1986-2018
Poetry
183 Pages
April 28, 2019
Auxarczen Press
5.5 x 8.5
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The first publication by Auxarczen.
THE [SIC] MUSICIAN
Poetry
32 Pages
October 4, 2019
Auxarczen Press
5 x 6
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The [sic] Musician is one continuous poem, pieced together from the last twenty-three pages of a journal.
NATURAL ANTHEMS
Poetry
111 Pages
March 21, 2020
Auxarczen Press
6 x 9
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The bulk of these poems were written in the first half of 2005 and originally titled National Anthems. Once I revisited the 152 poems for editing, it became clear that the poems that remained untouched and came naturally were the strongest, so the title evolved into its present state. Writing from the same kitchen table each night, in 3-4 hour sessions, the music of Robert Pollard and Guided By Voices served as the nightly soundtrack. The band has just reached the end of the line in 2004 and had broken up. I got the news late and was sort of stunned, so I dove back into Bob’s music and tried to play catch up as I had trailed off of their path somewhere around 2000. The music kicked me into gear and after a long period of low productivity the thing just took over as it usually does, I managed to get most of it down in a large sketchbook. I would type them up at work the next day and proceed to edit them, curse them, them me and then sat on them for fifteen years.They are now ready and beyond ripe.
WORKING OBSERVERS
Photographs by Jennifer Cartright
Poetry
147 Pages
April 1, 2024
Auxarczen Press
5.5 x 8.5
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The fifteenth release from Auxarczen Press is a collaboration between the editors of the press. Jennifer Cartright (who carries the largest load with all editions) curated the poems of her husband, Michael Cartright, and complimented them with her amazing photographic images that document their life on the road. The result is a stunning collection of images and words that work in unison, at times, while letting the mind find its own message at others. So, pick up a copy and hop in the car with them to relive their meanderings through the American Southwest.
LOU CONTRERAS
Bellevue, Washington poet
LOOKING INWARD
Poetry, Stories, Lyrics, Haiku
89 Pages
May 30, 2024
Auxarczen Press
5 x 7.8
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Several years ago, Jerry Jeff Walker said to me, "Lou, sometimes you've just gotta run your shit up a pole and see if it flies!" Therein lies some of the impetus for this book. That, and meeting an amazing woman, Ms. Zhenya Zh. My mentor and muse. Enclosed you'll find a random collection of poems, vignettes and short stories. There are some moments that I'm not particularly proud of, primarily in "The Drinking Days" section of this book. The way I see it, one can spend his entire life running away from his past, or he can fully embrace it. I choose the latter, as collectively, it has made me who I am today.
AMY FAITH
Amy Faith resides in the Pacific Northwest. She enjoys playing in the park with the family dog, swimming at the gym, visiting museums, learning languages, traveling, and baking. People Like You is her first book.
PEOPLE LIKE YOU
Non-Fiction Personal Memoir
83 Pages
December 15, 2025
Pinwheel Press, Auxarczen Press
5 x 8
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People Like You is a powerful, deeply personal memoir about what it means to fight to be seen in a world that too often looks away.
Amy Faith takes readers inside the everyday reality of navigating the workplace with a disability, not just the physical challenges, but the emotional weight of being underestimated, dismissed, or defined only by what others think you can't do. Under a manager that refuses to look beyond her limitations, Amy finds herself pushed to the margins, struggling to hold onto her confidence, her dignity, and her belief in her own worth.
But this is not a story of defeat. It is a story of courage, persistence, and the quiet strength required to keep showing up when the world expects you to disappear.
Honest, heartfelt, and ultimately hopeful, People Like You is a reminder that everyone deserves to be seen for who they truly are.
MATT McGOWAN
Matt McGowan is now located the Pacific Northwest. He calls the Missouri Ozarks home.
Amy Faith resides in the Pacific Northwest. She enjoys playing in the park with the family dog, swimming at the gym, visiting museums, learning languages, traveling, and baking. People Like You is her first book.
JOHN MACKER
John Macker grew up in Colorado and studied journalism at the University of Missouri. He has published 8 full-length books of poetry, 2 audio recordings and several broadsides and chapbooks over 30 years. His most recent are Atlas of Wolves, The Blues Drink Your Dreams Away, Selected Poems 1983-2018, (a 2019 Arizona/New Mexico Book Awards finalist), Gorge Songs (with Denver woodblock artist Leon Loughridge), Blood in the Mix (with El Paso poet Lawrence Welsh) and part three of his “Badlands” trilogy, Disassembled Badlands published by Colorado’s Turkey Buzzard Press, 2014. In 2019, his poem “Happiness” won a Fischer Poetry Prize finalist citation, sponsored by the Telluride Institute. He was a recipient of the first Mad Blood Magazine Literary Arts Award and won the James Ryan Morris Memorial “Tombstone” Award in 2001. His recent prose and essays on poets and poetics have appeared in Albuquerque’s Malpais Review (where he was contributing editor), Cultural Weekly, as it ought to be magazine, Miriam’s Well, Mad Swirl, Manzano Mountain Review and Lummox Journal. For the last 25 years, he has lived in Northern New Mexico.
DESERT THRENODY
Stories, Essays, One-Act Play
147 Pages
November 11, 2020
Auxarczen Press
6 x 9
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These assembled pieces from New Mexico poet John Macker, represent about 8 years worth of work. The essays are for the most part, about poets with strong connections to the southwest, some unfairly infamous in their obscurity, a few not quite so obscure: his essays on Edward Dorn and Michael Ondaatje come to mind. In the others, Macker celebrates the much respected but unheralded poets that he’s come to know and admire. The author refers to them as "suspended essays" with no particular grounding except in his enthusiasm and admiration for the words and the ground itself. Maybe suspended just above the ground would be better. The second half of the book consists of a one-act play and several pieces of previously published short fiction, featuring a variety of characters whose passions and tensions are set against the raw, oftentimes uninhabitable beauty of the desert southwest. A totally originally book from the author of Disassembled Badlands and Atlas of Wolves.
ALCHEMY OF HEADWINDS
Poetry
131 Pages
November 11, 2020
Auxarczen Press
6 x 9
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