Alice Elizabeth Rogoff grew up in New Rochelle, New York. She has lived in San Francisco since 1971. She has a BA in Anthropology from Grinnell College, MAs in English: Concentration Creative Writing, and Drama from San Francisco State University and a Certificate in Labor Studies from City College, San Francisco. Her poetry book Mural won a Blue Light Book Award. From the San Francisco Arts Commission, she received a commission for a poetry project. She has been an Editor of the Haight Ashbury Literary Journal since 1984. Her poems and stories have been published in many literary magazines and anthologies including the Garland Court Review, Pudding Magazine, So to Speak, Caveat Lector, the Noe Valley Voice, Pandemic Puzzle Poems, Fog and Light - San Francisco Through the Eyes of the Poets Who Live Here, Giving Voice (LaborFest Writers), and songs in Alte by Jewish Currents. She volunteers for the San Francisco Living Wage Coalition. She is a member of PEN America, Senior & Disability Action, and Save the Manatee Club.ENDORSEMENTSGlowing jewel-like in this collection, Alice Elizabeth Rogoff's tautly written poems movingly convey diverse experiences, from the wonders of animals to highlights of San Francisco and its denizens, life in the labor movement,memories of dear friends, and much more. The poet emerges as a keen observer and chronicler of the moments of her life and the life of her mind - as she puts it, "A long trip with stops at/ The next oasis." - Dan Liberthson, PhD, author of Animal Songs Alice Elizabeth Rogoff's poetry gives us pause and leaves one hoping that we can make the world better.Her poetry takes us past moments of beauty, of hope as she leads us through journeys of tragedy in our world.Alice, thank you for these written images of insight and bravery.- Julienne Fisher - Renounce War Alice's poems from chaos to certainty to creative mystery lead us by the hand, ever so gently, through different countries, states, cities, landscapes. She starts us off with a poem "Turned Back." An immigrant woman with two children having to turn back, face life, find home. These poems are deep, questioning: they present us with things to reflect on, think about, dream of. "Dancing in the Street," charming and sad. A good ending, a hopeful poem. Another poem, "Synchronicity," a spot of loveliness, a fig tree leaf and rose bush flower reach out to each other, just as we humans do. The poet is helping us to be open to beauty, amidst despair. Her poems are thoughtful, they will get you wondering about your own canyons, basements, family, strangers on the street, your own wild and interesting life. Many are about San Francisco but include Chicago and other countries. The bluebirds, the snow, soup made out of cherries, a lonely white duck. What do we do with our dreams and impressions? This lovely book will inspire you to discover your own.- Ellen Levin,Writer. Published as part of an anthology How to Begin Poems, Prompts, tips and writing exercises from Fresh Ink Collective, edited by Robin Michel, Raven and Wren Press, San Francisco, CA.
Winner of the Blue Light Book AwardMark Tate is the author of three previous books of poetry Pommes de Terre (2001), Sur lie* (2002), and Rooms and Doorways (2003), and three novels, Beside the River, and its sequel River's End (McCaa Books, 2021), and Butterfly on the Wheel (McCaa Books, 2022). He served for ten years on the Sonoma County Poet Selection Committee for the poets laureate of that county. He is a long-time resident of Northern California where he lives with his wife, Lori.From the sanctuary of Pineshadow (both place name and poetic persona), Mark Tate composes moments of tender, meditative attention, reminding us of beauty and intimacy, as well as what is lost to addiction, dementia, death, and delusion in a fractured world bent on following darkness. "How do we lose our way with this much light?" the poet asks. How indeed! Alluding to the Tang poet Hanshan, Tate writes, "I use what remedy/Is at hand to save the world." Tate's depiction of a Zen tea ceremony midway through the collection offers a kind of ars poetica, simultaneously describing the ritual and his verses, "bowing to every honored thing." With empathy and deft lyricism, the poet blesses our times of darkness with light and transforms them into an experience of the sacred.- Terry Ehret, author of Lost Body and Night Sky Journey Mark Tate's new volume of poems, Walking Scarecrow, is a microcosm of large-scale wisdom and beauty. Generously including bits of conversation with the ancients - Bash¿, Li Po, and others - Tate interweaves deep questions about how to live richly and well with homespun scenes of his simple, rural life. Cold Mountain runs like a gold vein through the quartz of these poems. "Philosopher and Perch" and "Tea" stand out. Replete with the doings of birds and local flora and fauna, Tate's keenly observant eye, philosophical heart, and skillful use of surreal images invite us into the kitchens and backrooms of his world.- Sandra Anfang, author of Finishing School and Looking Glass Heart
Robert Scotellaro is the author of 7 flash fiction collections including most recently: Ways to Read the World (Scantic Books, 2022) and God in a Can (Bamboo Dart Press, 2022), as well as 5 collections of poetry, and several books for children. He has, along with James Thomas, co-edited New Micro: Exceptionally Short Fiction, published by W.W. Norton & Co. His work has appeared widely, nationally and internationally, and is included in the W. W. Norton anthologies, Flash Fiction International (2015) and Flash Fiction America (2023), and in 4 Best Small Fictions and 2 Best Microfiction award anthologies. He is the winner of Zone 3's Rainmaker Prize in Poetry and the Blue Light Book Award for his fiction. Robert is one of the founding donors to The Ransom Flash Fiction Collection at the University of Texas, Austin. He currently lives in San Francisco with his wife, artist and art historian, Diana Scott.
"In Catalogue of Surprises, Dorothy Wall compares words to 'a suspension bridge // a rope we've tied ourselves to / above the chasm.' Her wise poems look clear-eyed deep into the chasm - at illness, family history, despoliation, and mortality. At the same time, she finds beauty in the most unexpected places: pebbles, snail-trails, or the animals of Chernobyl thriving without us. You will find beauty, too, in Dorothy Wall's exquisitely crafted poetry."- Susan Cohen, author of Throat Singing, A Different Wakeful Animal, and Democracy of Fire "The poems in Dorothy Wall's Catalogue of Surprises acknowledge impermanence, mortality, and such existential dilemmas as climate change and the Covid-19 pandemic, but Wall does not cave under the weight of these realities. She says, '...we are furiously holding out our hands / with their stone of hope / we won't let go,' and shows us that life itself is a catalogue of surprises where, holding our fury and hope, we can look at clouds and relish 'something bright or illuminated / above us.' The poems are elegantly crafted and radiate a light of their own."- Lucille Lang Day, author of Birds of San Pancho and Other Poems of Place, and Becoming an Ancestor: Poems¿"Dorothy Wall's poems are like flagstones we step upon to travel forward and backward in time; she casts a wide-ranging eye on life above ground and '...life now underground and shaken.' Her poetry is precise and musical, it leaps and turns and grounds us to place. Dorothy Wall offers us refuge and renewal when she says, 'beauty... is everywhere the sky is.' This poetry possesses the skill of an engraver, and the broad brush strokes of a fine artist."- Joseph Zaccardi, Marin County, California poet laureate (2013-15) ¿¿Dorothy Wall is author of Catalogue of Surprises: Poems (Blue Light Press), Identity Theory: New and Selected Poems (Blue Light Press) and Encounters with the Invisible: Unseen Illness, Controversy, and Chronic Fatigue Syndrome (Southern Methodist University Press), and coauthor of Finding Your Writer's Voice: A Guide to Creative Fiction (St. Martin's Press). Her poetry has been nominated for Best of the Net, and her poems and essays have appeared in magazines and anthologies, including Prairie Schooner, Witness, Bellevue Literary Review, Sonora Review, Cimarron Review, AMA Journal of Ethics, California Magazine, The Writer, Dos Passos Review, Nimrod, Puerto del Sol, San Francisco Chronicle and others. She has taught poetry and fiction writing at Napa Valley College, San Francisco State University, and U.C. Berkeley Extension, and works as a writing coach in Oakland.
Prartho Sereno has made her home in a bamboo hut in India, a 150-year-old farmhouse in Maine, a spiritual community in Oregon, an uptown apartment in Southern California, and for the past 23 years, a funky upstairs duplex north of the Golden Gate Bridge, which she shares with her boat-rowing sweetheart. Along with painting & poetry Prartho has dabbled in such art forms as taxi driver, family therapist, Phys Ed instructor at Cornell University, housecleaner, single parent, head cook, amateur singer/song-writer, illustrator, and palm-reading psychic in various Catskill resorts.Author of the award-winning collections Indian Rope Trick, Elephant Raga, and Call from Paris, and author/illustrator of the IPPY-winning gift book, Causing a Stir: The Secret Lives and Loves of Kitchen Utensils, Prartho's other published works include a poetry chapbook, Garden Sutra, a song/music/poetry CD, Salt, and a book of essays, Everyday Miracles: An A to Z Guide to the Simple Wonders of Life.Poet Laureate Emerita of Marin County, California (2015-17), Prartho was awarded a 2005 Radio Disney Super Teacher award for her 22 years work as a Poet in the Schools, the Marin Poetry Center's inaugural Rilke Award (2023) for nurturing the poets, a Marin Arts Council Individual Artist Grant in Poetry (2003), and an MFA in Creative Writing from Syracuse University (2013). She is founder of the ongoing poetry writing series: The Poetic Pilgrimage: Poem-Making as Spiritual Practice, now online. The most dependable remark on Prartho's early report cards was "Easily distracted and distracts others."-a comment she has done her best to live up to.
Patricia Barone lives along the Mississippi River in Minnesota and feels very lucky to have been a part of the thriving Twin Cities writing community for over four decades. With Future Rounds the Curve, Barone is publishing her sixth book. Your Funny, Funny Face and The Scent of Water were also published by Blue Light Press. Her recent collection, The Music of this Ruin, came from Taj Mahal Review/ Cyberwit. New Rivers Press published Handmade Paper, a collection of poetry, and The Wind, a novella. Barone's New Rivers Press books were given Minnesota Voices Awards. She has received a Loft-McKnight Award of Distinction in poetry, a Minnesota State Arts Board Opportunity Grant for a workshop with the Irish poet, Eavan Boland, and a Lake Superior Contemporary Writers Award for a short story. Barone has published short stories in magazines and anthologies, from such presses as Wising Up Press, Peter Lang, Prentice/Merrill, and Plume-Penguin. She is working on a novel as well as another collection of poetry.
Judy Bebelaar has a fat folder labeled with a red heart. It is full of notes - heartfelt, sweet and sometimes funny - from her students in San Francisco public high schools where she taught for 37 years. She and her students won many writing awards, both local and national. Her prize-winning poetry has been published widely in magazines and anthologies including The Widows' Handbook, River of Earth and Sky, and the Squaw Valley Review. Sky Holding Fall began as a chapbook called Walking Across the Pacific. Her non-fiction book, And Then They Were Gone: Teenagers of Peoples Temple from High School to Jonestown (co-authored with Ron Cabral), has won ten awards and honors.
Wild weaves through each of us, but the spirit of wild doesn't always rage. Sometimes it is the gentle, quiet moments alone in our souls that show us who and what we are. The spirit of strength, the spirit of wonder, the spirit of curiosity, the spirit of fury, the spirit of peace are all part of us. But we bottle or ignore them, questioning our anxiety and depression. These poems speak to that spark in each of us that we might remember even through our sorrows, tragedies, joys, and silent seasons that the spirit of wild doesn't call us - it is us. Don't ignore it. Don't let it go. Hold it tight as you dream, when you wake, and as you live your day. Yes, live. Live and embrace wild."What did you want to be, when you thought you could / be anything?" asks poet KB Ballentine. The poems in this luminous collection emerge as beacons, offering guidance in brief moments bound in rich imagery. Ballentine's unmistakable voice and skill with language shine throughout, balancing the natural world with the natural interiors of the human heart. What is the "spirit of wild" if not that pairing, that step into our truest selves as "the restless wind whispers courage." Find your courage in these poems. -Sandy Coomer, author of The Broken Places As KB Ballentine delves without fear from windowed rooms into a wilderness of forest and ocean, it soon becomes clear that even the darkness in her collection Spirit of Wild is one that teems with life, wing, and song. Ballentine shows us that there is "a shelter for the sacred in each of us." Spirit of Wild is a balm, and I didn't know how much I needed it. -Chera Hammons, author of Maps of Injury Spirit of Wild confirms that "each day waits with sudden mysteries, / offerings, / like dreams half-remembered / from the night." In lyrical, precise language that throbs and pulses with the rhythms of the natural world, Ballentine celebrates the spirit of all manner of life's organic wonders, from the fox and wren to the bee and seahorse, to lavender fog and "stones cloaked in mossy silence." I can't think of a better time for this exuberant collection to come to light, nor a better time to heed Ballentine's call to "cast off the rooms where we've boxed ourselves tight / step into the den of the forest's deep heart." -- Hayley Mitchell Haugen, Sheila-Na-Gig Editions
Winner, 2023 Blue Light Book Award"Anna Kodama is a gifted poet whose gaze penetrates Life to its bones. With masterful crafting of language, she gives shape to the Mystery, often in the voice of the shaman or wise woman. To read Anna's work is like being in a gentle rain of blessing."- Jennifer Read Hawthorne, coauthor of Chicken Soup for the Woman's Soul andauthor of Life As a Prayer: Poems "In vivid, intimate language Anna Kodama speaks directly to the heart in poems that convey the stratigraphy of a life layered with joy, wonder, and bereavement. This excellent and deeply personal collection weaves aspects of the natural world, memory, place, and time to evoke a sense of love and loss."- Kate Brandes, author of The Promise of Pierson's Orchard"According to the Sufi Proverb, "If words come from the heart, they will enter the heart. If they come from the tongue, they will not pass beyond the ears." Anna Kodama's wise words come directly from her generous heart. Whether Anna is telling a story or sharing a lyric moment, her poems move us in a way that we will not soon forget. Her skillful use of vivid details allows us to fully enter her world. Anna is both a poet and a painter and her exquisite use of color and attention to nature's smallest details, as well as her sensitivity to the largest issues of life and death, bring her poetry alive in the most moving way."- Angie Minkin, author of Balm for the Living¿¿¿About the AuthorAnna Kodama writes and paints in eastern Pennsylvania, a few miles from the Delaware River. She has raised children, chickens, and vegetables, and taught adult and family literacy. As "Anna Carr," she authored several books about organic gardening. She is a coauthor of Dreams and Blessings: Six Visionary Poets, also published by Blue Light Press.
All in Measure, Heather Saunders Estes' gorgeous Book of Hours, is a delight for the senses and for the soul. Grounded in sensitive and sensual rhythms of earth and sea, All in Measure is truly a paean to gratitude and joy. Like the medieval Books of Hours, these poems are songs of praise, songs of ritual, songs of hope - but with a thoroughly modern twist. Heather has a keen eye and ear for nature and for her own inner workings. The poems in All in Measure are letters tapped into prayers; it is a book to read and reread, a book to treasure. - Angie Minkin, author of Balm for the Living and coauthor of Dreams and Blessings Heather Saunders Estes's writing exudes a vibrant and rich observation of the stillness of life during the pandemic. Her poems are an enchanting reminder to fully embrace the beauty available in the smallest moments of the day.-Steph Catella, PsyD licensed psychologist, author of forthcoming The Emotional Intelligence Skills Workbook: Building Better Communication and Stronger Relationships All in Measure: A Book of Hours is a profound vision of, and commitment to, daily life - a passionate celebration of family life, the world of birds, the weather, the movement of the sun from morning to night, with a ceremonial sense of time. Heather Saunders Estes is a woman living completely in an expansive view of her time and her place. I recommend All in Measure to any reader who wants to enlarge their view of poetry. I dog-eared the poems I liked best and found that there were so many that I ignored my dog's ears.- Barry Goldensohn, Author of The Hundred Yard Dash Man and Visitor's Entrance¿¿About the Author When Heather left her long-term career as Chief Executive Officer for Planned Parenthood Northern California after 37 years, she transitioned to writing poetry. Her third book intimately chronicles the gratitude, fears and contemplations in the life of one person during the three pandemic years, using an ancient cadence of days. Her beliefs about the importance of appreciation, while more pagan and idiosyncratic than the original spiritual history and guidance of the Books of Hours, share a common core of praise and valuing the diversity of life and the universe.
Praise for Shy Lands There is a subtle and proficient music in Diane Jarvenpa's poems. They derive their power from how deeply she sees and listens to herself and to the earth. In Shy Lands she welcomes us into a world quite similar to her description of her mother's garden, its "precision of beauty, intricate storytelling, a knowledge of what blends, what harmonizes, what stands alone." And we become aware that despite the sorrow and anguish we might feel about the hell that humans have made of much of our natural world, we can still immerse ourselves in what has not been lost. Her poems remind us that we can find solace and belonging in that "light" and "articulate wonder" which can "fit so completely into the grooves of all our shadows." We can both celebrate and grieve earth's wonders, those which are extinct and those which are gloriously still with us - if we immerse ourselves in the natural world and "let it enter and grow in our bodies." - Freya Manfred, author of Loon in Late November Water While Diane Jarvenpa is a self-described shy person from a shy family in a shy land, she is a fierce poet. Jarvenpa's new book, Shy Lands, describes an imaginatively-animated world, a quiet family in the background, all the elements of nature which the poet has observed, consumed, and returned to the reader in another form through some exercise of magical alchemy. As I was reading her manuscript, I made notes in the margin - "Beautiful!" - "Beautiful! - until I figured I should come up with a word other than - "Beautiful." So here's the word - "Transformational". I have been transformed by these poems which is what great poetry does. Praise and Transform. Jarvenpa praises everything within her considerable range - "stamps, maps, lily pads, " "a comet or a wild fire." The old dog - "She is your teacher now./Scholar with tail,/Athena with canines." Shy Lands, the country Diane Jarvenpa inhabits, the country we all inhabit, is ravaged and threatened, but still, with her power to convert the observed into a "cold wild song," she finds for all of us some kind of inspired redemption. - Tim Nolan, author of Lines Diane Jarvenpa's latest collection, Shy Lands, teaches us how to engage the natural world with the careful listening of an introvert, "pushed by the wind...hearing the drops of dew." Her attention draws us to the tiny things that make up a whole landscape, and that, she tells us, "is where the village of [her] mind has brought [her]." She uses words the way an impressionist painter deploys color, "know[ing] how all this works, the close and the distant, / the heap and faded, / the swoop and the click." This new beauty is only possible in a shy and quiet land, the one she creates for us here. - Joyce Sutphen, author of Carrying Water to the Field
WINNER OF THE 2021 BLUE LIGHT BOOK AWARD. "THIS IS THE BOOK I HAVE BEEN WAITING FOR. For years. Emilie Lygren writes essential, elegant poems that help us live our lives and apprehend with deepest gratitude all the gifts surrounding us."-Naomi Shihab Nye "This voice is a wild spirit disguised as human, schooling in us advantages of feral thought, wilderness virtues, the intuitive aptitude that lives within us. Read these poems and feel it awaken in you, in a realm where bees "speak the names of next year's seeds," and "the place you shine is inside." Again and again, you will be taken to the peak, to see why you are here."-Kim Stafford, author of Singer Come from Afar (Red Hen Press, 2021) "In What You Were Born For, Emilie Lygren's poems ask us to look closely then shift our perception wider -- from termites flying out of a tree stump to one's own birth, from tools to our inevitable mortality, from sea glass to islands engulfed by sea level rise. As the poems bring us into communion with each other and with the natural world, they also interrogate the constructed world of patriarchal power, perfectionism, and profit. With wonder and play, the poems call us into the wildness of our bodies and call our bodies into the earth to be reborn as seeds. As we reckon with racial violence and global pandemic, these poems offer us a window into our own renewal." -Tehmina Khan, poet and teacher, City College of San Francisco Emilie Lygren is a writer, outdoor educator, and facilitator who believes that poetry can change the world. She holds a Bachelor's degree in Geology-Biology from Brown University and has over a decade of experience as a writer and as an outdoor science educator. Emilie has developed dozens of publications and curricula focused on outdoor science education and social-emotional learning through her work at the award-winning BEETLES Project at the Lawrence Hall of Science. She's also done stints as a kitchen manager, life coach, barista, mentor for teens, and event organizer. Emilie's poems have been published in Thimble Literary Magazine, The English Leadership Quarterly, and Solo Novo, among others. In writing and teaching, Emilie centers awareness and curiosity as tools to bring people into deeper relationship with themselves, their communities, and the places they inhabit.
Finalist, 2021 Blue Light Poetry PrizePaula Camacho is the President of the Nassau County Poet Laureate Society which selects and supports a Nassau County Poet Laureate every two years. She is a breast cancer survivor and participated in various poetry organizations over the years. She moderated the Farmingdale Poetry Group for 20 years. She taught a poetry class, You Can Write Poetry, in the Adult Education program at the Farmingdale High School. She served on the Nassau Council for the Arts for three years. Her poetry has won various awards, including the Alice Abel National Literary Contest and her haiku poems won first place for five consecutive years in the Performance Poets Association Haiku contests. Her published books include Hidden Between Branches, Choice, and More Than Clouds. She holds degrees in Nursing and Theology. While the world outside knows "famine, pestilence,/ wars and rumors of wars," Paula Camacho, with eloquent grace, invites us into her private sphere of transformation.From inside her cottage, her garden, nature's bountiful beauty is a catalytic transformer - "birdsfoot violet, red trillium, pink bleeding heart" - so even if just for "a few tender moments," she knows tranquility, while "heaven and [she] connect."She transforms in the grand peacefulness of a meditative state, where "mortality is an illusion," in "small wonders" of "simple moments," when her wakened eyes can find sunlight through shadows, and her "mind empties" with focused attention, as at a sparrow's "little leaps/ from shrub to magnolia tree." She even translates herself into a beach painting's "lone memory."- Gayl Teller, Nassau County Poet Laureate 2009-11, Walt Whitman Birthplace 2016 Poet of the Year, Author of Flashlight: New and Selected Poems (WordTech/ Cherry Grove, 2019) Paula Camacho's chapbook, Transmutation gives a fascinating glimpse of self-examination and insight through reflections and observations of nature. Her precise language paints vivid images bringing the reader into her observations and introspections portrayed in snapshots of flora, fauna, and landscape. Her words evoke an awareness from the reader felt by the perceptiveness of the writer. Read Paula Camacho's poems, feel the spirituality and experience Transmutation written on paper as well as your soul.- Peter V. Dugan, Nassau County Poet Laureate 2017-19 Paula Camacho's poems present moments of quiet observation as the seasons change. Her lyrical descriptions of "begonias blooming around the house like a necklace" and " I see one lone magnolia blooming and rejoice" are original and emotional. Throughout her celebration of nature, she is acutely aware of the ending of things. This beautiful, sensitive collection was a pleasure to read.- Evelyn Kandel, Nassau County Poet Laureate The poems in Paula Camacho's book, Transmutation, invites the reader to share how the delicate balance of nature and the seasons of time interact and shape our everyday lives even to the moments of the extraordinary. Every poem is a delight to your senses in its own unique way.- Maria Manobianco - Art Teacher, Artist, Poet
Winner of the 2021 Blue Light Poetry PrizeGary Young's most recent books are That's What I Thought, winner of the Lexi Rudnitsky Editor's Choice Award from Persea Books, and Precious Mirror, translations from the Japanese. His books include Even So: New and Selected Poems; Pleasure; No Other Life, winner of the William Carlos Williams Award; Braver Deeds, winner of the Peregrine Smith Poetry Prize; The Dream of a Moral Life, which won the James D. Phelan Award; and Hands. He has received grants from the NEH, NEA, and the California Arts Council, among others. In 2009 he received the Shelley Memorial Award from the Poetry Society of America. He teaches creative writing and directs the Cowell Press at UC Santa Cruz.ENDORSEMENTS"Since the 1970s, Young has been publishing almost unbelievably intimate and precise poems. . . Young writes with a unique combination of wisdom and terror, engendering a kind of sad calm, a hard-earned acceptance of life's difficulty and openness to its beauty."- Publishers Weekly"There's glow, wonder, in all his writing, even the poems of terrible pain, where wonder bathes the strangeness of the circumstances themselves, bathes the strength of spirit that allows those circumstances to be survived. . . He's become one of our most piercing, luminous prose poets."- Richard Silberg, Poetry Flash
I am undone, says the speaker in the first poem of Betsy Snider's lush and intimate journey View From the Other Side, and at once we are in the thrall of a remarkable energy. Snider's language is fueled by this energy, this force, defined by continual movement-probing wider, diving deeper, until nothing less than a complete metamorphosis is achieved. Richly threaded with themes, these poems probe and prod in search of god, of self. Water as the element of transformation holds all these threads together. The section titled Ars preces-the art of prayer-stops the heart. Compressed and untitled, these lyrics recall Hopkins' praise of his god, full of fury and passion for a divinity of human dimension. But instead of Hopkins finding god in dappled things, Snider laments the time she thought god would melt on my tongue, and now muses that perhaps god tastes of ash, smoke / born on the wind. While these poems honor and celebrate life fully lived, they also challenge the very idea of an inevitable end. In the true sense of metamorphosis, transformation by its nature continues on. She writes: The sheet is lifted over my slack face. / I dive deep into the lake, / touch the sandy bottom / and surge to the surface / aflame. Surely this is divinity in its most intense articulation.Betsy Snider is a retired attorney who lives on a lake in rural New Hampshire with the ghosts of her many cats and dogs. When she is not swimming or hiking, she writes poetry and has volunteered as a CASA Guardian ad Litem for abused and neglected children. She was first published in the ground-breaking anthology, Lesbian Nuns: Breaking Silence (Naiad Press, 1985). She is a winner of the 2015 Blue Light Book Award for her book of poems, Hope is a Muscle (Blue Light Press, 2015). Her poetry has been published in a variety of journals and anthologies, most recently in The Mud Chronicles (Monadnock Writers' Group, 2018); Carrying the Branch (Glass Lyre Press, 2017); The Lesbian Body (Sinister Wisdom, Fall 2017); Amore: Love Poems (Imagination Press, 2016); Our Last Walk (University Professors Press, 2016); River of Earth and Sky: Poems for the 21st Century (Blue Light Press, 2015); Poet Showcase (Hobblebush Press, 2015); and Love Over 60: an anthology of women's poems (Mayapple Press, 2010).
This book is a gathering of community. It chronicles our Pandemic Times through the eyes, hearts, and minds of poets. The pandemic took away many things - a bevy of customary comforts, delights, and celebrations - but it also gave us surprising gifts. We hope that what you read here will help you find meaning from your own Pandemic Times and bring a new vision of what it means to be human. On these pages, you will find poems by Jane Hirshfield, Ted Kooser, Dorianne Laux, Stephen Dunn, Naomi Shihab Nye, Thomas Centolella, Marsha de la O, Terry Lucas, Barbara Quick, Melissa Studdard, Loretta Diane Walker, Marge Piercy, and many more poets who will delight and amaze you - some well known and others who also deserve to be read. Every poem in this book has a gift for you. "Poems, like birds, are alive. Each one has a heart, wings, and their own song. Poems remind us, like Kokopelli and the birds, that we too are storytellers, teachers, healers, and that we too have the ability to sing a beautiful future into existence."- Nancy Lee Melmon "Life hasn't changed much for me during the pandemic. I read, I write, I binge watch. I've been gardening, cleaning out old files, closets, drawers, and tossing what I no longer need. I've been doing what I always do when I have time on my hands, puzzles. It reminds me that the broken can be reassembled, which is what we are in the process of doing right now as a people, as a country."- Dorianne Laux "To write a single poem is a selfless act and a minor miracle. In times of trouble people often turn to poems, and poems often turn into prayers."- Joseph Zaccardi
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