Bücher veröffentlicht von Concrete Wolf

Kathleen Fagley's Switchboard Shift grapples with urgent demands of time in health crises. Headsets and lines render her "a reader of voices" speaking "another language/driven by machines." The job requires efficiency, calm, and separation from primary human emotions. The speaker says, "the mother is in shock/and I am losing my voice." The operator questions her visual and aural abilities, wants nothing more than to fly above rivers, upturned trees. But the wolverine stalks hospital hallways. -Susan Roney-O'Brien, author of Bone Circle and Thira¿¿Equivocal, the voices in Switchboard Shift: Kathleen Fagley has braided a tenuous tapestry of hospital codes, calls, and responses between "an operator tethered to her station" and anxious speakers on the line. Hoping to "convey seriousness without panic," she is "pressed into [her]seat by the weight of emergencies." When "a small voice answers back...distant as the earth from the moon," she has learned that "it is not a choice that [she] listen." So should you. -Christina Lovin, author of Echo: Poems and A Stirring in the Dark

“This is a poet of importance, a poet who knows this western American landscape and renders its hidden stories and details—ranch life, work, horses, trails, red-tail hawks—in absolutely gorgeous language, weaving acomplex portrait of place that is by turns elegiac and starkly realistic. Poem after poem consists of rich, beautiful language, unerringly sophisticated and surprising at every turn. It would be a disservice to say this poet has arrived;judging from the brilliance of this book, Michael Bowden arrived a long time ago, and we are only now catching up.”~ Amy Miller, Final judge & previous Louis Award Winner for The Trouble with New England Girls“Common Uproar is an exquisitely crafted collection. Bowden gathers many seasons of careful, empathetic observations into poems polished like Bisbee turquoise. Often on the borderlands, he navigates the flow of truth through a lifetime, examining places where memories become dreams and bodies vanish into the desert. The reader is left with the glorious sensation of ‘understanding almost’ everyday moments of haunting beauty before they disappear, quick on the wing.”~ Megan Baxter, author of The Coolest Monsters“Bowden’s poems regard memory, family, the natural world—classic poetic subjects—but handle them with such quiet authority, such vivid delicacy, they shine.”~ Jefferson Carter, author of Birkenstock Blues

"The consciousness that reigns in these poems is hurricane-proof, bulletproof, heartache-proof. And, lucky for us, this is the consciousness of our tour guide throughout this often heart-breaking volume. Again and again, with a grace and acceptance that reminds us of the strength of human beings, these poems examine the often-blurred line between what will happen in our lives-and what we can make happen. Carey's poetic breath becomes the reader's life-breath-a parity that only the best of poems can offer." -M.B. McLatchey, author of The Lame God "Sarah Carey makes many gracious accommodations to family, to the inevitable losses in an ordinary life, and to the idea of home in all its human dimensions in this intelligent, sensitive, and generous collection. She meditates on 'the long valediction' of a fully lived life and comes to artful terms with the repercussions of love and mortality in poems that ring true and resonate. Breathe the slow wind, she writes, another storm is always coming. We know it in our bones, and we see it again and again in these lovely measures." -Sidney Wade, author of Bird Book and Straits & Narrows "This collection starts off with an ache that pulls a reader in uncontrollably with sorrow and beauty. It is a tremendous manuscript that begs to be read over and over. Organic in the purest sense. Anyone encountering these poems will be stunned." -Amy MacLennan, Chapbook Award Judge, author of The Body, A Tree

"Rumors of Wisdom impressed me throughout with poems about very specific things, or memories, or details; specifics that often metaphorically stand for bigger things. The details are interesting and fresh, as in 'Barometer.' The poet uses a good deal of artistic language and viewpoint, as if seeing the world through a painter's eyes. From time to time the odd technical term may pose a challenge, but it also serves as an opportunity for readers to broaden their vocabulary. This collection stands out for its breadth of scope."-Timons Esaias, Louis Award Judge, author of Why Elephants No Longer Communicate in Greek "One finds in this collection poems of the rare sort that come quietly, like a cat prowling about in the midnight hour, looking hard into the darkness for what stirs. Luminous, lyric, sparkling with wit and the kind of subtle wisdom that comes from a long, slow, generous looking at life… these poems are simply irresistible in their appeal."-Mark S. Burrows, Ph.D., Poetry Editor of Spiritus, author of Meister Eckhart's Book of the Heart: Meditations for the Restless Soul, with Jon M. Sweeney "Remorse and redemption permeate these poems the way 'a mist touches everything.' Spaces are spare, remote, yet welcome with 'a wink of paradise.' What surrounds us is not separable from our being, with 'each of us taking on something of the other.'"-Lana Hechtman Ayers, Managing Editor of Concrete Wolf Press, author of Red Riding Hood's Real Life

‘‘‘Hope,’ said Dickinson, ‘is the thing with feathers.’ Patty Crane’s sequence seeks to embody this assertion, and  follows in the tradition of grandly inquisitive lyric explorations such as Ammons’ ‘Corson’s Inlet’ and Williams’  Spring and All.’ Crane fixes a steady gaze on the shifting and too-often inscrutable patterns of the natural world—and always with the goal of transforming description into revelation. This is lyric poetry of the highest order, work of inscape and insight, work that dazzles and instructs.’’—David Wojahn, author of For the Scribe“‘The project,’ writes Patty Crane in something flown, ‘is to look/ at the bird/ not there anymore:/ the after-bird.’ These spare, open lines crosshatch into a vision of bird, bird so wholly translated that it escapes its names, and revises us. Amazing! And all right there at the bird feeder! Such good humor and deep love and giving way. Everything about it rings true.”—Jody Gladding, author of Translations from Bark BeetleEnter something flown to witness the poetics of transformation, how bird becomes X, daughter—a world, where “the invisible rides on the back of the visible.” Suspend what you know about origins. Lean into what can or cannot be captured, while you fall completely for Patty Crane’s exquisite debut lyric of profound and controlled grace.      —Natasha Kochicheril Moni, Final Judge for Concrete Wolf’s 2017 Chapbook Contest and author of Nearly (dancing girl press, 2018), Lay Down Your Fleece (Shirt Pocket Press, 2017), and The Cardiologist’s Daughter (Two Sylvias Press, 2014).

"In Amy Miller's The Trouble with New England Girls, love can make you leave, a kiss can make you stay, and floral apologies are so endangered they're illegal but offered anyway. These poems track a wolf through Oregon and track grief across its shifting portraits, but whatever the metaphors pursued here, you never see the end coming. Miller knows what one line can do to another and how an image can make a poem open. Beauty is found in laundromats and pictures of food and from the perspective of drones, in all the places we never expected to find ourselves, and every shadow between ourselves and home." -Traci Brimhall, author of Saudade and Our Lady of the Ruins "These poems brim with keen metaphors and spotlight observations. Intimate descriptions are conveyed like speaking to a friend, and with a humor that animates wide-ranging experiences from lovers to laundromats, even grief. Amy writes with tenderness while wielding metaphors like signal flags. This is assured writing. You will want more. I do." -Allan Peterson, author of Fragile Acts and Precarious

“The Physics of Love is all about connection, the starstuff that intertwines mother and child, soul and stone, and the living and the dead–‘all of us spinning against each other in the dark’ and ‘bumping into God’ while we’re at it. With surprising imagery and fearless spirituality, Kirchner blurs the border between heaven and earth, delighting us with its gorgeous heartaches and mysteries. A dazzling debut worthy of savoring again and again.”— Tania Runyan, author of What Will Soon Take Place: Poems and How to Write a Poem***“There is a seamless blend of images, metaphors and personal insights in many of the poems that reveal a poet with a unique and distinctive voice. The poems are well crafted, balanced, interesting, revealing, and relate-able. Some have humor, others embrace an accepted sadness (and a few offer a combination of both).”—Christopher J. Jarmick, author of Not Aloud 

Susan Gordon’s extraordinary language conveys us through death to dissolution and transfiguration, as she bears careful, caring witness to the body of a belly-shot doe day after day, week after week, month after month, through all seasons of the weather and the soul.  Time and again precise description breaks open into transcendent vision; beauty entwines with horror, both driving towards the “unraveling / of what comes / after everything has been undone.”  This is a masterpiece, a poem I will cherish and revisit for many years.--Jo Radner, author of Yankee Ingenuity on CD, Professor of Literature Emerita, American University, and Storyteller