Bücher der Reihe New Women's Voices

This collection could be called The Lives of Girls and Women if Alice Munro hadn't already taken the title. In funny, lyrical, poignant poems and prose poems, Herman conjures everyone from lonely teenage girls listening to records in their bedrooms to her own Depression-era seamstress mother to Betty Boop to the oldest daughter of the old woman who lives in a shoe.

Winner of the 2016 New Women's Voices Series Prize

Strange Roof is a bold collection that shines a light on women as immigrants, emigrants, mothers, daughters, wives and artists. The poems are fresh; searingly honest, sharp, poignant and accessible.

In her first poetry collection, a chapbook about motherhood and identity, L.J. Sysko investigates the paradox presented by love. Accountability masquerades as confinement, hope wears an anxious mask, and attachment feels like a heavy yoke. Beginning with a new volcanic island hissing to hardness in the distance, Battledore sails from one exotically familiar locale to the next. With "you" at the helm, the poems chart interior territory, mapping the cracks formed by seismic identity shifts like giving birth, encountering post-partum depression, and maintaining a self. At times lighthearted and humorous, Battledore pokes fun at its own predicament. Using references as diverse as Charles Darwin and Candies heels or Elizabeth Bishop and Preparation H, Sysko presents an imagination circumnavigating the wild freedom within. Battledore's poems have been published in Best New Poets, Ploughshares, and Amazon's Day One.

A finalist in Finishing Line Press's 2017 NEW WOMEN'S VOICES CHAPBOOKCOMPETITION, Slow Blooming Gratitudes is Vermont poet Sarah W. Bartlett's secondchapbook. Her poems invite readers into moments of transformation, healing and presence."These are no ordinary poems of love, loss, letting go, courage, and universality," writesCynthia Brackett-Vincent, publisher and editor of the Aurorean poetry journal. "Rather… they are extraordinary poems ... masterfully crafted … extending the hand of welcometo each reader."Ellaraine Lockie, award-winning poet, nonfiction author, contest judge, and educator saysthe language of this collection "seeps into the reader like a slow, soft massage" in itscapacity "to offer solace and acceptance in times of adversity."Sarah's poetry and prose appear in Adanna, the Aurorean, Minerva Rising, PoemMemoirStory,Mom Egg Review, Ars Medica; and highly-acclaimed anthologies, including the award-winningWomen on Poetry (McFarland & Co. Inc., 2012). Her first poetry chapbook was Into the GreatBlue: Meditations of Summer (Finishing Line Press, 2011).In 2010, she founded writing inside VT, a weekly writing group inside Vermont's sole women'sprison to encourage personal and social change within a supportive community. Now in itseighth year, the program hosts an active blog (www.writinginsideVT.com) and continues to holdreadings and book talks based on the 2013 publication of HEAR ME, SEE ME:INCARCERATED WOMEN WRITE (Orbis Books). Sarah co-edited this anthology of writingand art by 60 early program participants, and has published a number of pieces as well asdelivered two keynote speeches about the work.Sarah was greatly influenced by her father, a world-class chemist devoted to making the world abetter place. From him she learned the value of community and a love of words at play. Sarahspent the first 25 years of her professional life using language in service to planning, marketingand public relations for non profit organizations. Sarah's current work as change agent and poetdraws on the full range of her experience and prior training, including a doctorate in healtheducation from Harvard and certification as a mediator. Language remains the medium for herlife work creating communities that support individual transformation and healing throughwriting, as well as her own creative writing. Like the hummingbird who has taught her to seedeep into the heart of things, she seeks to awaken the soul to presence.Her reflections on both external and interior worlds draw from her life and homes in the Vermontmountains and Massachusetts shore, where she lives with her husband and pets.

Inspired by fado, Marina Carreira's debut chapbook, I Sing to That Bird Knowing He Won't Sing Back, conjures up and tangles with the mighty Fate as muse. From ruminations on such historical characters as Lizzie Borden, Sylvia Plath, and Inês de Castro, to its odes to mothers and sardines, rustic villages and gritty cities, I Sing to That Bird… is a poetry collection that blends myth with memory, highlighting and exploring geographical and spiritual space, sexuality and love in its inception stages, the bittersweet ties to immigrant family, culture and history and their relationship to the heart. Written both to the beat and viewpoint of this traditional Portuguese soul-folk music, I Sing to That Bird Knowing He Won't Sing Back which is as nihilistic as it is hopeful in its adoration and disturbance of life's abstractions.

Deborah Kahan Kolb was born and raised in an insular Hasidic community in Brooklyn, NY, and many of the poems featured in her debut chapbook Windows and a Looking Glass are reflective of her strict religious upbringing. Ultimately, she left the constraints of the community and has written poetry informed not only by her uniquely challenging past, but also by family and community, marriage and children, and shared histories and experiences. Windows and a Looking Glass is the poet's first offering - a gathering of anecdotes, snippets, and glimpses of characters and stories that populate the childhood and adulthood of this first-time author. The poems take the reader on a modern and edgy, autobiographical and biographical, observant and experiential excursion through childhood and community, relationships and marriage, and back to childhood and parenting on the other end.Poems included in this collection are winners of the Queens College James E. Tobin Poetry Award, "Zhou Ling," a finalist for the Anna Davidson Rosenberg Poetry Award, and "Eldest Daughter," a piece that highlights the oppression of women in Hasidic communities (in Veils, Halos & Shackles).