If technology means any set of skills, methods and processes that help humans carry out their goals, then it should also be possible for us to think of poetry as a form of technology. How else to explain how the words of those who lived and wrote hundreds of years ago still offer their potent magic and understanding to us today? An amazement: that we can enter into this bright chain of conversation, ranging back to when our "[a]ncient ancestors wondered who/ carried the sun" and "called it forth/ from the darkness of its hiding place." This is exactly what poets Flor Aguilera, Joyce Brinkman, Gabriele Glang, and Carolyn Kreiter-Foronda do in this international poetic collaboration called Catena Poetica. Following in the tradition of collaborative poetry such as renku or renga, they add their own distinctive shapes and sounds. Back and forth, between Mexico, the US Midwest and East Coast, and Germany- in these poems they circulate the warmth of color and spice, the mysteries of music, water, and clouds. What comes to us is more than the well-made thing: it's alchemy.-Luisa A. Igloria, author of Maps for Migrants and Ghosts and Ode to the Heart Smaller than a Pencil Eraser; Poet Laureate of the Commonwealth of Virginia, 2020-22Reading these poems we sense the cycles of seasons and natural sceneries. We see visual snapshots enlarged by subtle words and reflections. Still-life contemplations that narrate our own mindscape.-Dr. Helmut Haberkamm, author of Frankn lichd nedd am MeerIn Catena Poetica, four voices unite in a shared vision of form, theme, and music. Readers encounter folk artifacts from Andean charangos to guqins, or artists and composers ranging from Mondrian to Couperin, but the poetry's essence is firmly rooted in nature-a tribute to the poetic tradition that brought forth this original form. Traces of distinctive imaginations, geographies, and cultures course throughout, and yet the aggregate reflects one aesthetic light "in its irresistible wholeness." This compendium reminds us why collaboration is so essential in our multifaceted world.-Jessica Reed, Author of World Composed
Salvage, Cindy Milwe's intimate, moving new poetry collection, glitters with pleasure and pain. A girl delightedly examines "the spidery growth" of her first pubic hairs, "radiating out from my center." In the poem "What A Daughter Will Do," Milwe writes of a caesarean scar "that runs/from the mother's navel/to her pubic bone." It is this duality that gives Salvage its remarkable power. Keenly observed, Milwe's poems bring into clear focus not only "the yellow and white calico" of summer corn, but "the dark, rank bottom" of a childhood marked by an abusive father, a culture's misogyny. There are moments of tenderness too, deeply felt homages to students, to poets such as Wright, Roethke and Akhmatova. Salvage is treasure indeed, multifaceted, invaluable.-Ellen BassWhatever else she is, has been or is willing to become (creatively) in the lifelong act of wrestling (into poems) the central energy of voice and vibe from reality, Cindy Milwe is naturally and essentially a poet of the stages of human development (not a Narrative Poet) and a poet engaged in the transformative contemporary mythology of secrets. Nearly all of the poems in Salvage manage to grow from the roots of something, equally, public and private, into wide personal investigations of every institution of human exchange, including the act of reading, which Milwe exposes as an equal identity swamp-filled with the flowing currency of Idea DNA. Salvage is Milwe's barnyard of nuances and metaphors that matter as she explores many of the tender and tough human traffic jams that have since become forbidden zone violations. She writes as if communicating with all of the original Wesleyan University Press Poets at once, as if she can remember her life when it was (simply) substance in egg, packing a lot into small formal spaces. And Salvage proves that the breathing walk of a line, even after it breaks, has a memory. This collection is an on-time vision voice for now!-Thomas Sayers EllisCindy Milwe's poems are written from the body, full of blood and sharp as teeth. She writes out of memory and observation, but there is nothing abstract about her vision; it is deeply rooted in the concrete. Whether recalling her childhood on the east coast or her experience as a teacher on the west, she remains ever present, ever at the center, a human in the middle of her life. Read these poems if you want to know what it is to remember-but even more important, if you want to know what it is to feel.-David L. Ulin¿
A History of Place, by Mala Hoffman, is inspired by locations where the author lived prior to landing in New York's Hudson Valley. It is an exploration of personal history and an examination of where to place those reflections in present day life. We are a compilation of our experiences and while looking back might be unsettling, ultimately it enriches who we are.¿
Grand Mutation is a chapbook collection of poems by Karyn Peyton. Called poetry "of triumphant surrender" by National Poetry Series winner Nathan Hoks, Grand Mutation interrogates death and the cosmos with both incisive curiosity and cinematic imagery, as the author swings between argumentativeness and radical acceptance of the ways in which we cease to exist.
Rachel Landrum Crumble's hard-won collection of faith and doubt Sister Sorrow traces a lifetime of decoding a childhood with a beautiful, artistic, schizophrenic mom, experiencing otherness through international travel, becoming a Yankee transplant to the South, marriage as a white woman in 1981 to a Black man and raising biracial children in Chattanooga, TN in the 80's and 90's. It explores cycles of depression and grief over her mother's suicide, and how, although recursive, grief can also lead to wisdom, and a deepening capacity for joy. Sister Sorrow embraces the awkward and the ridiculous as essential aspects of our humanity.
"Dreaming in Grief" by Mary Strong Jackson is a collection of poems rife with urgency and clarity including images of red-wing blackbirds atop marshy cattails, baby toads the color of sand, and a wren's breath of silence illuminating the bounty we cannot lose. Her poems are a response to the climate crisis, and an urgent call for collective action by all citizens of this planet to come together and dream our way forward.Jackson invites the reader to remember what we already know-we are not separate from nature, we are nature. As poet, Barbara Rockman comments, " These poems are warning and reverence, ode and prayer, that yearn to unravel the meanings of home and harbor. Like the Inuit woman Jackson depicts, who checks to see who is coming, this riveting collection goes out to see how faraway tomorrow is."In this collection, Jackson asks the reader to consider how "progress" needs to be redefined in light of where we are today, and also to question what we genuinely want and require in our daily lives. How do our beliefs, and our accustomed ways of being affect our future and generations to come? What are we willing change and consider in our lives to protect animals, forests, oceans, deserts and prairies?These poems encourage readers to acknowledge and grieve, but also to imagine, dream and hope, with images such as ...not toad's job to fix this hot and burning world... /it is toad's job to grow and one day when his body temperature is just right, /he and his fellow toads will open their throats in song making music/ on beaches, in gardens, and deserts. /Day and night the toads sing/ until female toads with their own warty desires listen and arrive./ From song comes baby toads, tiny/exporters of charm...Jackson writes of pelicans described as skinny-necked professors wearing orange galoshes with misplaced eyeglasses to fracking near million year-old rock layers of the Permian Basin, and a poet of worms who put his tongue on the worm just to feel compare/ to taste with no harm/ the dear wiggly thing/ to music that weaves through hair/ creates tiny shivers up a baby bird's back/shakes snakes from winter skins..Dreaming in Grief asks readers to read, talk, and respond to this existential crisis.
In Blame It on the Serpent, Vespoli opens all the windows and doors to shed light on her experience of loving offspring captured by the terrorist known as an opioid epidemic. The poems invite readers in as companions on her journey through powerless and hope, darkness and light, all the while seeking to answer the question: How did she or he or I come to this? Contains poems such as "My Son No Longer Missing," one of Rattle's ten most read poems of 2019.
If you hear Etheridge Knight, Amiri Baraka, Langston Hughes singing through this tender howl of rage, it's because in 21st Century America Martin Wiley, the poet and paterfamilias, just wants to goof around with his kids, but there's a brutal war on Black bodies outside his door so he still has to wake up in the heavy morning not wanting "to know/how we died last night."-Jeff Conant, father, and author of A Poetics of Resistance: The Revolutionary Public Relations of the Zapatista InsurgencyIf "every word is a war" on the news, these poems are daisies in the guns pointed at us on the daily. Like a cousin to Baraka's suicidal preface in 1961, this long song meditates on how children fill the gaps in our broken hearts and light the way to our backstories.-Yolanda Wisher, author of Monk Eats an Afro, 3rd Poet Laureate of Philadelphia
The poems in the collection, "My People Redux," travel through time. We go back and forth between the present, "They Could Be Sisters," and the past, "Goose Eggs," not just the poet's past but that of her ancestors who came to the Midwest from Mexico in the late 1800s, as displayed in the piece, "My People Redux." The poet's voice is always female and strong, but also vulnerable as in the poem, "Child Pose Cannot Hold." These are poems of race, ethnicity, gender, and class. There are also mystical poems in this collection and things the poet cannot explain like in the piece, "Once in Seattle" and in "The Congregation." In Trudell Vasquez's fourth collection her concerns are the same as in all of her previous collections but her way of approaching the page varies. The poet travels in this collection: from Madison to Seattle, Santa Fe, Des Moines, Milwaukee, Washington D.C., Chicago, and outside of the country too, to the Caribbean to Isla Mujeres in Mexico. In the poem, "Everybody is Somebody's Child," we are given a glimpse of the poet's concern for all people across the globe. Ever present in all the work is nature, the poet's appreciation for the natural world and all its creatures, but especially the least fortunate among us.
"In a dark time the eye begins to see," wrote Theodore Roethke. The poets of this remarkable collection are the eyes by which we begin to see not only the darkness of our harrowing COVID year but also the strength, the necessary strength, to write and create in the midst of it all. In that way, this collection is both a document and a promise of what we can all summon in order to persevere.-Richard Deming, Director of Creative Writing, Winner of the Berlin prize, Yale University"Despite the darkness responsible for the origin of these poems, Melanie Simms has brightened the world by compiling a small, but compelling anthology. I, for one, am happy to have work included among such a varied, engaging collection."-Gary Fincke, author of The Infinity Room and The Mussolini Diaries. Founding Director of the Writer's Institute, Susquehanna University
This beautiful collection illuminates the poet's journey from girlhood to widowhood. "Still, Papa, somehow you conveyed to me/quiet is where you go to get soul things out" she writes in "Tough Guy," a childhood memory poem. In "Catbird," the title poem of the book, humor interrupts grieving..."I loved her once/when I saw her lipstick hidden under the pillow./Like Marlene Dietrich in "Dishonored,"/applying lipstick before the firing squad,/no pale mouth would greet eternity."/Barbara Alfaro's poems have appeared in various journals including The Blue Mountain Review, Variant Literature and Poet Lore.¿
Michele Riedel has a way of filtering her observations and words through a cinematic lens that beautifully moves readers in, between, and among the sights, sounds, and scents of the messy and the marvelous; the euphoria of ascent and the tumult of descent; the comfort of connection and the angst of disconnection; of pivotal and everyday moments. These poems question the saltiness of life while also hope for the sweetness of an encore riding the ebb and flow of the tides. It's clear that the poet is in the director's chair. Sit back and enjoy page after page of her skillfully crafted poems.-Dawn Leas, author of I Know When to Keep Quiet, Take Something When You Go, and A Person Worth KnowingIn Tumbling Lessons, Michele Riedel's first poetry collection, we are swept up in a journey of family and faith, lofted on soft breezes of memory, grief, and hope. The ocean is never far away, its salt air a sky that heals all wounds. Brush a thin film over the slit on your papered skin- feel the throbbing start to numb, we are told, encouraged to find the faces of lost loved ones in our selfies, to clean out the bad juju of our junk drawers, and-wings or no wings-to tuck and roll on the way back down.-Joanna Lee, author of Dissections; founder, River City Poets
Poems by Bruce Parker examine parallel themes of climate change and a life in its final stage, in which a second love has entered. Their tone is by turns elegiac, romantic, humorous, resigned and hopeful.
In Danny Rivera's Ancestral Throat, the death of a father becomes the occasion for a series of powerful meditations on mortality, parenting, magic, spirituality, and diaspora. Rich in metaphor, the writing draws on the resonance of two languages, Spanish and English, for its music. More than simply remembering the past, Rivera's work seeks to actively engage it in order to "reclaim our bloodborne history." These urgent, often fragmented, lyrics make a place for uncomfortable silences, unexplainable gaps, the unspeakable, the unspoken, yet also for the explosive imperative "your mouth is a flare shot at dusk" commanding us to listen. And we want to keep listening. This stunning collection reminds us that the world is a strangely brutal and beautiful place.-Elaine Equi, author of Sentences and Rain and The IntangiblesAt one point in this brilliant collection, Danny Rivera writes: "Words loosen themselves/from meaning." With an unerring eye, Rivera stitches and sutures meaning back into a language, following it down the mysterious and painful paths it takes through the body and through memory. Out of family history, ancient and recent, these poems braid the many voices of our ancestors into one powerful, haunting, indelible voice that revivifies the most human voice of all: the voice of blood.-Gregory Crosby, author of Said No One Ever¿
Sarah D'Stair's One Year of Desire is both celebration and testament to the journey, not the destination. Her exploration of landscapes, both interior and exterior, comes from a place of curiosity and healing. D'Stair's use of rich, vivid language and gorgeous detail pierces the heart with such accuracy. Her poems bear witness to the fragility of time, to family, to new and familiar landscapes, and the desires that reside in all of us.-January Gill O'Neil, author of Rewilding (2018), Misery Islands (2014), and Underlife (2009)Sarah D'Stair's One Year of Desire is a tender, mortal engine of want, a "vibrato of a body at seeming rest." Here is a rare attention to how we encounter (and re-encounter) memories, the monument of the human body, small moments that punctuate daily life as "onlookers pass without / glance." I love this book for how it composes the universe in a cat's meow, in a piece of music, in the fullest embrace of one's belly. As D'Stair suggests, "this place is full of wonders" we could take by the mouthful if we'd just open. Open for this vivid account of finite time. Open for its rushing tide of living, dying things that arrange this brief world.-Jessica Q. Stark, author of Savage Pageant (2020)
A rich and intriguing array of poems in which joy and abundance coexist with abduction and loss, both human and divine. The beauty and light of the natural world and the challenge and darkness of the Underworld come alive through the eyes of the author and of the great goddess Persephone, as she "Journeys in the arc of season, / the circle of time."
With a steady, approachable voice, Ellen Gerneaux Woods' debut chapbook The Watchful Heart Recedes explores both the tenderness and the tension woven into the mother/daughter bond. She roots her poems in the natural world, beginning this graceful collection with primordial jellyfish and ending with a backyard's damp grass. As she meditates on the pleasures and paradoxes of single parenting she embraces walnuts, redwoods, racoons at dawn, crows, wild iris, weeping willows, a beloved dog leaving for a new home. In these quietly profound poems Ellen Gerneaux Woods engages with the beauty and wisdom of our earth and our hearts.-Kathleen McClung, author of A Juror Must Fold in on Herself and Temporary KinAnyone who has participated in raising/nurturing a child, and finding the way to continue to nurture even when that child has reached adulthood, will appreciate "The Watchful Heart Recedes" by Ellen Gerneaux Woods. In spare language that respects the intensity and reserve that will safeguard the mother/daughter bond, Ms. Woods guides us gently, movingly, through the stages of parenting through the mystery of Nature's great gift of life, to the recognition/adoration of one child's special gifts, to the urgent call to protect and hold close, then to release and wait. Finally, to welcome back the bond and all it may cost. And in the end, to return to her original family bond, which taught her how to be a good mother.-Grace Marie Grafton, Lens, Jester, Whimsey Reticence and Laud, Other CluesEllen Gerneaux Woods' The Watchful Heart Recedes explores the tension implicit in maternity, the mother keeping her gaze on her child while still holding awareness of her own "watchful heart." In these courageous poems we accompany the poet in exploring the connections motherhood brings, "a silver ribbon [that] pulls us to claim it," a ribbon stretching from herself to her daughter and looping around memories of her own mother, "this woman who loved me / in her own way." The poet claims and celebrates these relationships, of love mixed with pain "shooting upward / almost to my heart," of misunderstandings and struggles, and the ache of her child growing beyond her care. We share the poet's journey as she returns again and again to the solace of nature, claiming her true self "engaged with earth."-Lisa Rizzo, author of Always a Blue House and In the Poem an Ocean
"Circling what is and is not home," the girls and women in Anne Dyer Stuart's chapbook of poems, What Girls Learn, lead lives of damage, struggle, and self-formation. "There is a girl at the window of the burned house," says one poem. "Girls' ruin lies in others' hands" says another. This poet is not inclined to let it lie. She narrates a life in the body, "with its bright optimism and its slow decay"; she tells stories of pleasures and terrors, the indelicate paradox of "wanting to be wanted, to disappear, to blaze up/like a prom dress thrown on a campfire." Even the old metaphors sound new in Stuart's hands: a sixteen year old girl asked a trick question is "mute as cheese." Summer is described as "a slow dream turning/away, rotting on the sills . . . but you will take her anyway/all the bruises mush inside your mouth/all the sweet juice sticky on your chin." What Girls Learn is an accurate, painstaking, and tender exploration of girlhood and growing up into a woman who still holds the unspoiled girl she was: "Inside: sleek, unblemished./Inside: the same you God/ stitched together-hastily, in Heaven,/ then threw down like a stone."-Lisa Williams, winner of the Rome Prize in Literature and author of The Gazelle in the House, Woman Reading to the Sea (Barnard Women Poets Prize), and The Hammered Dulcimer (May Swenson Poetry Award)
Mike Wahl is a farmer-philosopher who takes on subjects as small as what kind of plant Japanese beetles like best (Smart-weed) and as large as the fall of the Roman empire. His true subject, however, is the human heart, and how often we fail in our relationships with others, our environment, and our society. Still, there are moments, in "the temporary camaraderie of exuberance," when we can envision a better world. In Wahl's poems, second chances abound, even in the sounds of our words, as when we move from "razing" to "raising."-Jennifer Horne is the Poet Laureate of Alabama and the author of three books of poetry, Bottle Tree, Little Wanderer, and Borrowed LightIn Harmony with Homophones represents a daunting undertaking of building bridges of meaning between words that sound alike. But for this clever poet managing the mating game of homophones such as I'll/aisle/isle seems to come naturally. Part of the joy of reading the poems is anticipating just how he is going to harmonize each set. And between the inaugural word of a poem such as "one" and the final word "won" come the observations and wisdom of a farmer, thinker, poet.-Jeanette Willert, it was never Eden & Appalachia, AmourMike Wahl's In Harmony with Homophones is a clever and entertaining scamper through some of the ironies and unexpected associations to be found in English. His well-controlled lines keep steady pace with the natural rhythm and music of the language as we relish its unexpected treasures and absurdities, all the while ranging over a broad panorama of subject matter and theme where Philosophy, Linguistics, Agriculture, and even some Theology come tied together by a durable strand of humor.-James Miller Robinson, author of The Caterpillars at Saint Bernard, Boca del Río in the Afternoon, and The Empty Chair¿
The title of Esther Lim Palmer's second chapbook, Stellar, is a fitting one, as these poems call out brightly from the darkness that surrounds us and guide us like navigational stars. In a voice that is always urgent and intimate, Palmer writes beautifully of longing and mystery, be it the longing for migratory birds to return to a beloved body of water, or the mystery of our relationship to our own childhoods. In this disorienting time, it is so wonderful to read a poet who helps us understand better where we stand. Palmer never shies away from the truth, but nor does she leave us alone. "Yes," she writes, "there is sand here. But water too." It is in this nexus, between challenge and consolation, that the poems in Stellar do their vital work.-Austin SmithThere is a dreamlike quality in the way the poems of Stellar summon reverie from the natural world. Esther Lim Palmer's language is rhythmic and reverential, engaging the reader with a quiet but profound sense of wonder. We witness "egret wings forging through the fog-languid, lowering, lifting" and "the hum of bees in the hive of bliss." Each work is a portal to discovery, self-declaration, and renewal. The familiar is animated through desire and longing: "broken streetlights flicker/with quivering lips" for an orange moon; an innocent pleasure allows her "[t]o let the sea [s]well/up and up, and bluff a lullaby." Hovering between the real and imagined landscape, Palmer's skill is like a sleight-of-hand, her poetry a subtle and lyrical vehicle for unexpected rewards. Her magic comes in as "the wind leaves words outside the window/cracked open; words like invisible gifts."-Mindy Kronenberg
From start to finish, this first book of poems shines with brilliance, poignancy, and the power of visceral memory. Part elegy, and part recollection, Lia Patricia James's poems ring with strength, cleareyed vision, and the joy of language. The collection takes the readers on a healing journey from the depths of loss to the embrace of the comfort words can bring. In this first chapbook, the writer demonstrates her versatility with language. She brings her readers right to where she is with the sharpness and clarity of her images. As she "grasp [s] at ginger-flavored memory," she draws us all into a universe she creates, a universe filled with sorrow, beauty, and the extraordinary gifts her words can bring.-Heather Corbally Bryant, PhD Lecturer, Writing Program, Wellesley College
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