Mark Saba
publications
All copies bought online will be signed by the author.
print books
Ghost Tracks: Stories of PIttsburgh Past
(fiction, Big Table Publishing, 2017)
The stories in Ghost Tracks are indeed haunted, but not by poltergeists or any other supernatural monsters. Instead, these beautifully-rendered works of short fiction are haunted by memory and missed opportunities. Mark Saba excavates a city of Pittsburgh where the factories are still producing steel and the men still have to speak in shards of blunt metallic language, where shades of meaning hover like ghosts between the words. —Craig Firshbane
In Ghost Tracks: Stories of Pittsburgh Past, Mark Saba writes about a Pittsburgh that is neither material, nor historical, but a place of memory. Beginning his collection with a quote from Tolstoy, “Everything is, everything exists, only because I love” he sketches in the “everything” with stories about professors, workmen, children, and nuns told in an amazing range of voices. Some of the narrators relate events as they are occurring; some talk about what happened after their deaths. In the last story in the book, a father who had died when his son was three wonders what his son would have been like had he been a part of his growing up. The father says that the only consolation he can find is that his son uses “his uncommon perspective to bring light to others who may have found themselves in the same circumstance.” Mark Saba has an uncommon perspective and he has used it to connect us to characters that exist for us because of his expert telling of their stories. —Chris Bullard
Mark Saba’s Ghost Tracks: Stories of Pittsburgh Past serves up twenty-three delightful vignettes arranged in three movements, chronicling the bittersweet lives of men, women, and children of Pittsburgh past. Among them: a chronic illness, seen and experienced by an innocent child (“Asthma”); a Lithuanian immigrant girl’s coming of age (“National Biscuit Company”); and a richly-lived (and told) life viewed through the diary of a blind maid, mother, and crone (“Eva”). In these and other poignant tales, Saba narrates the human condition at its most savory and delicious. —Phillip E. Temples
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Calling the Names
(poems, David Robert Books, Cincinnati, 2017)
In Calling the Names Mark Saba finds cues of the universal in anonymous encounters. He reconciles the “loose ends” of echoes from the past with the “painstakingly familiar.” During a five-hour train ride he prefers to read the lives that pass by on the other side of the window rather than a book. He finds himself in the balance between heaven and earth, the known and the unknown, in a book rich with the lyrical details of his observations about the human condition.
A windsock enclosing moments of life as elusive as the wind that cannot be contained, Mark Saba’s Calling the Names is anchored by lines with artfully knotted phrases that try to hold life, even if ultimately nothing but memory endures. The work is framed by consistent emphasis on these elusive moments, as he feels “a stammering heart, aware that it contains a finite number of beats.” Creating a lyrical kaleidoscope shifting with the rhythm of breathing and beating of the heart, Saba employs metaphor to form complex transformations. He uses lines and stanzas to juxtapose silence and language as he records the “lost voice” of lives relegated to the back pages of newspapers with “songs without words, muffled but for this pen.” Saba is not afraid to examine “the sting of life” but finds hard won joy even though he knows that he will swing from “love to solitude again.” This is an important collection, and a necessary one, because Saba ties disparate experiences together with his overarching vision in moving and compassionate poems that create the bridge between life and death we all will cross.. —Vivian Shipley
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Painting A Disappearing Canvas
(poems, Grayson Books, West Hartford, 2012)
A collection of poems spanning 30 years, centering on Polish and Italian family roots in Pittsburgh as well as more universal themes that reflect what it means to be alive.
By preserving the spirit that resides “with or without bodies,” poems in this impressive collection are infused with a deep understanding of what it is to be human because Saba had cored them from the heart. —Vivian Shipley
There are poets who exercise admirable restraint, yet somehow manage to squeeze in a lot of images between the lines. Former Pittsburgher Mark Saba falls into this category. His language is rich and imagistic, but nuanced; tender, yet suspicious of false sentiment. A few poems touch on Pittsburgh in this collection, but most are about other states of mind and being. "Painting a Disappearing Canvas" is sublimity guaranteed to linger. —
Pittsburgh Post -Gazette
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See Ten Poems, a reading of poems from this collection by Mark Saba on You Tube against haunting cinematography and an original musical score by Alphonse Izzo .
Thaddeus Olsen
(novella in Desperate Remedies, Apis Books, London, 2008)
Thaddeus Olsen explores issues of identity, privilege, and the state of higher education in the US. Thaddeus has family roots in Poland and native Americans of the central plains. He struggles to understand what these bloodlines mean to him, and whether or not they supercede his identity as purely American. Eventually he must assert himself in the midst of a conflict at the ivy-league university that employs him as an Information Technology service provider.
Read an excerpt.
The Landscapes of Pater
(novel, The Vineyard Press, NY, 2004)
A poetic, soul-searching story in which the main character (Nick Pater) has recurring dreams of a father who died when he was a toddler. Nick's quest for a father figure involves fraternity brothers, a chancellor at the university, an intellectual soul-mate, and a crazed uncle. Finally Nick takes a trip to Sardinia, the birthplace of his ancestors, where he finds answers to many questions he has about himself.
Read an excerpt.
"Judith of the Lights"
(epic poem) in Three Women: Touching The Boundaries of Life
(Mellen Poetry Press, Lewiston, 1996) Mellen Poetry Award
ebooks
Letters from Novosibirsk (FREE!)
In Letters from Novosibirsk an international group of iconoclastic colonists living in New Siberia (of the late 21st century) communicate to the rest of the world via a journal in which they offer advice for saving human civilization. Trouble is, a group of ghosts in their town, previously known as Vydrino, does not welcome them, nor their attitudes. In the end no one’s life is what it used to be—including the ghosts’.
The Shoemaker
The Shoemaker follows the lives of Pietro, an Italian who emigrates to America with his family in the 1920’s, and Manny, his great-grandson, who moves to California from Pittsburgh in the 1990’s. Pietro is a shoemaker, and Manny is obsessed with finding the perfect pair of shoes. Both adventurous, they are uncertain of changing societal roles. Their lives intersect when Manny discovers an old photograph of Pietro and restores it back to life.
Signs
Signs is a magical story in which two young adults who had known one another in childhood are reunited, accidentally, during their sojourns in Italy and Poland. It follows their separate journeys and the extent to which their lives are unfulfilling, then their accidental reunion and how imagination and creativity play into their sudden feelings. Throughout the book both characters notice objects around them that communicate their own thoughts and feelings back to them.
Tippint Points
Tipping Points focuses on issues of attraction versus love, the familiar versus the evolving, and safety versus commitment. Jared, divorced, is attracted to virtually the whole human race. But Eena, a scientist of singular beauty, intrigues him like no one else. Deirdre, Jared's office mate, finds the relationship between Jared and Eena troublesome. Eena discovers a biological reason for uncanny powers of perception, and must come to terms with Jared in light of it.
anthologies
(poems)
"Freedom" in di-vêrsé-city Anthology, Austin International Poetry Festival, 2017
"The Year I Didn't Write" in Contemporary Poetry: An Anthology of Present Day Best Poems (Chaswal & Chaswal, 2014)
Italian translations of three poems from Painting a Disappearing Canvas:
"Fire Burned Through the Sacred Heart of Jesus," "A Garden of Refuse," and
" The Immensity of Being," in Almanacco (Raffaelli Editore, Rimini, 2013)
"Poets Are Bad for the Economy" and "Lost Voice" in Poetic Voices Without Borders 2
(Gival Press, 2009)
"He Was a Poet And When He Died" in Poetic Voices Without Borders (Gival Press, 2006)
"These Are The Boys We Send to War" in Poetry for Peace (Sandstar Publications, 2002)
"Steinbeck in Nantucket" in Nantucket: An Anthology (Whitefish Press, 2001)
"Days of Love" in Essential Love (Grayson Books, 2000)
"Enrichetta Is Singing" in Elvis in Oz: New Stories and Poems from the Hollins Creative Writing Program (University of Virginia Press, 1992)
(nonfiction)
"The Mindful House" in Roll: A Collection of Personal Narratives
(Telling Our Stories Press, 2012)
literary magazines
(stories)
Dowload the FREE Folio Club Sampler.
"That Hill" in The Folio Club 7 (2013)
"Raquel and I" in The Folio Club 6 (2012)
"Tracings" in The Folio Club 5 (2011)
"
View" inLitro (UK) (July, 2011)
"National Biscuit Company" and "The Magnolia Branch" in The Folio Club 4 (2011)
"Censored" and "The Shoemaker (excerpt)" in The Folio Club 3 (2010)
"Dual" in The Folio Club 2 (2010)
"Asthma" in The Folio Club (2009)
"Ada" in Fiction (2003)
"Renewed" in The Midnight Mind (2003)
"Eva" in Phantasmagoria (2002)
"Pax Christi" in Confrontation (1988)
"Tracks" in South Dakota Review (1984)
(nonfiction)
"War" in Ginosko (Issue 12, online, 2012)
"Where Writers Live" in New Haven Review (2010)
"Inconspicuous Nonconsumption" in The Folio Club (2009)
"Living by Imagination" in Journal of Creative Work, SJI (online, 2007)
"The Music of Being" in Palo Alto Review (2006)
"Why Study Art?" in Under The Sun (2003)
(poems)
"God Lives in the Heart of a Tree" in Literature Today (Chaswal & Chaswal, 2014)
"Reverend Edith" at http://www.stevebloompoetry.net/
"Fair Enough" in Caduceus (2010)
"Saint Blaise" and "Operating on My Daughter's Heart" in The Yale Journal for Humanities in Medicine (online, 2009)
"Upon Rediscovering My Ancestors' Home in an Ancient Italian Town" in Feile-Festa (2009)
"Last Words" in Connecticut Review (2008)
"Tree Tectonics" in Steam Ticket (2007)
"Driving Away from New York City" in FutureCyle Poetry (online and print 2007)
"Gorky Park, 1986" in Poetry Repair (online, 2006)
"My Mother Straightens Her Babushka," "Creole Woman with a Black Parasol," and
"The Purple Heart" in Louisiana Literature (2005)
"Sam" in Palimpsest (2005)
"The Poem Altar" and "A Convocation" in ByLine (2005)
"A Pittsburgh Christmas" in Paper Street (2004)
"Gertrude Grace," Tuesday Morning," and "Heaven on The Apple" in Caduceus (2004)
"Heaven on The Beast" in Xanadu (2004)
"Polish Men" and "I Love Your Tears" in Caduceus (2003)
"Dreams" and "Dismembering The Swing Set" in Palimpsest (2003)
"At Medugorje" in Mars Hill Review (2003)
"What Stirs The Creation" in Voices in Italian Americana (2002)
"Doing Push-ups" in CPR International (2001)
"Prayer to Thomas Merton" in U.S. Catholic (1999)
"Lines" in The Larcom Review (1999)
"First Light" in Wings (1997)
"Maria Antonia Waits for Her Twin" in The MacGuffin (1995)
"Negli Abruzzi" in Connecticut River Review (1992)
"A Love Poem" and "The Magnolia Branch" in Mildred (1991)
"Lights from San Francisco Bay" in Kentucky Poetry Review (1991)
"On The Eve of My Mother's Liver Transplant" in Ledge (1991)
"Nan" in Permafrost (1986)
"To Buffy Who Cried at First Seeing Snow" in Artemis (1984)
"Lost Song" in Jeopardy (1984)
poetry video
Ten Poems
directed by Mark Saba
original musical score by Alphonse Izzo.
He Was a Poet And When He Died (2004)
directed by Mark Saba
videography by Mark Saba and Jerry Domian
edited by Doug Forbush
original musical score by Istvan Peter B'Racz
Shown at:
2nd Sadho Poetry Film Fest (New Delhi, India, 2009–10)
Ilumé: An Alchemy of Text and Image (Gene Siskel Film Center, Chicago, 2005, curated by Gerard Wozek and Mary Russell)
ArtsAHA! (Omaha, 2005)
Kehler Liddell Gallery (New Haven, 2005)
Finalist in USA Film Festival Short Film and Video Competition (Dallas, 2005)
HeSCA (Health & Sciences Communications Assoc.) annual meeting (Denver, 2004)
See stills from this video.
