To the 4 a.m. Light is a collection of poetry that revels in the gifts of language and sound. Beautifully descriptive, these poems honor the simple splendor in observing the present moment. Adrienne S. Wallner's poetry conveys the celebrations and challenges of daily life; joy and grief, pleasure and pain, light and dark, connection and solitude. Poems also explore themes of the self, independence, reclaiming empowerment, and connecting to nature. While some poems, are wildly imaginative, even surreal, others are rooted in reality and reveal the poet's fears and reflections on potential blind spots. Other poems bare intimate moments with the self and ruminate on struggles with doubt, technology, and metaphorical darkness. Poems exhibit a bold sensuality, a female force unafraid to explore and celebrate desire. A few ekphrastic explorations demonstrate inspiration gleaned from art and music, while others celebrate National Parks and love of and in the out-of-doors. Many of the poems in this collection reveal a deep connection to the natural world and a reverence for the lessons it can teach. There is spirituality between the poet and place, between the voice and the landscape it inhabits. The poet invites the reader to be witness of this intimate relationship, revealing a fierce devotion to the energy of the Earth and the solace of wilderness. To the 4 a.m. Light contains portraits from a Midwest life, particularly northern Wisconsin. The poet's voice speaks with a strength of conviction and commitment to each moment observed and each insight discovered within these pages. There is a notion of seeking - not just for the sake of understanding, but to fully appreciate the unique moments of beauty and curiosity that exist around us every day. Enter the wilderness that is Wallner's mind and emerge on a path of daring imagination, passionate honesty, devotion to the natural world.
"Memory lives on the cusp between life and dream, seeing and saying, falling to pieces and finding form. Sleam's Hidden is a brilliant constellation of fragments, flashes, and waves that collect emotion, memory, desire, love, animals, land, and identities. This work is nothing short of breathtaking to me. Defiant in form, tender of heart, I took it into my body without hesitation. A heart triumph." -Lidia Yuknavitch, (Verge, Misfit Manifesto, Chronology of Water)"Humorous, sensual, and vulnerable. Sleam's narrative poems whisper the intricacies of relationship, appealing to the voyeur in all of us." -Jasminum McMullen, (By the Hour)"Tess Gallagher once said that 'The best love poems confirm something we secretly felt but never said'. I think this is true about Sarah Leamy's Hidden though the poems in this collection go even further: not just confirming something we never said but giving that secret thing a language that can hold it. In this beautifully narrative collection we are blessed by a poet whose central power is love. What a gift. Especially in a world that seems less and less interested in something so radically powerful. Hidden should not be hidden at all. It should be shared with everyone." -Matthew Dickman (Wonderland, 2018)
The deeply personal poems of A Statistical Study of Randomness tell stories of quarter-life crises, nation-sized injustices, and worlds of feeling, all through the lens of "random" statistics. From the loss of a loved one to cancer, to exploration of cultural identity, slices of life in a pandemic, and addressing America's laundry list of issues, A Statistical Study of Randomness doesn't shy away from experiences that cry out to be shared.
The Winds of Home Have Names is a debut selection of poems that deftly, musically maps with words a complex system of grief, weather and climate change, love and memory. Poet Diana Elser pays tribute to a beloved father through poetry that draws a parallel between the earth's weather phenomena and the emotional phenomena of human behavior. Exploring fog, wind, drought, thunderstorm, water cycle and the cycle of grief-how we come to terms with loss over time, and "crowd against what would still take us". Both unsentimental and full of feeling, Elser's poems sprawl across the western USA, from El Paso in the south to Great Falls, Montana; Salt Lake City, Boise, Seattle, and San Francisco. With the opening poem titled "Memory Buckled for Take-Off," she invokes the spirit of her father, a meteorologist, describing a "spelunk into the family boneyard." She introduces us to "bots sorting prophecies" and "debacles" of what she calls "human weather" that "rage and buckle," referring to memory, and to herself, as "deep-sea diver, trickster-conniver." The poems that follow launch a weather balloon into a night-time snowstorm; recall driving her father's ashes home, and remember him taking pictures of an advancing Chihuahua Desert haboob from the roof of their house, then seeing those pictures reproduced in a professional journal-and in the Weekly Reader that came to her third-grade classroom.In "Hard Weather, Dimming Hearts," Elser details human sins against the earth, "what we killed and ate, what we bought and sold, burned and threw away"-and consequences: "bodies built to save us turn against us, sabotaged...we never meant to love money more." She notes the limits and ironies of forecasting accuracy whether for the course of a human life, or prediction of a hurricane's path. Other poems involve a failed science project, an encounter with ghouls at a rest stop, the weather-responsive wardrobes humans collect, and the power of an old newspaper clipping which inspires the chapbook's title. It triggers a "brain-locked dust devil" which spins Elser into a conversation with her father's ghost-in which she uses the names of local winds to introduce the grandchildren and great children he did not live long enough to meet.
Water Bearer's Song is a collection of poetry and prose that sings of days of quarantine, of threads of loneliness, isolation and nostalgia knitting the existence of human lives in all the ages and times, whether a pandemic or not. The song might appear to be of notes of grief, but in the meditative depths of the water of empty spaces, it transcends loss and emerges to be the echoing sound of human resilience and its beauty.
At times somber, but brutally honest, Nomads on a Barren Plain: Poems on Life and Loss examines dying and grief through the lens of individual moments, both illusory and real. In this collection, Michelle Spaw draws on historical events and personal experience to ponder what happens after we die, and the journey taken by both the soul and those left behind after the passing of a loved one.Vivid descriptions include otherworldly imagery: a Viking ship set ablaze, the cave of a shaman, hieroglyphs in a pharaoh's tomb. Selections such as "History" and "Tending Grief" discuss memories and mourning in the more down to earth settings of a garden and a field of playing children.An artist and designer by trade, Kansas City native Spaw never intended to write a collection of poetry. Shortly after the sudden death of her husband, she turned to painting as therapy to work through her loss, but when a friend suggested she try writing poetry in addition to her artwork, she discovered an unexpected creative outlet and a new expression for her grief emerged.During what she calls a session of "meditative mark making," a type of channeling occurred; thoughts and phrases came forward in unforeseen ways, an alternative emotional vocabulary, as if the layering of paint prompted the layering of words and with it, an understanding that grief (while new to her) is as ancient as time itself. Consider "Pompeii," where two lovers share a final glance, and "The Mariner's Widow," written from the perspective of a woman standing on the deck of a ship, trying to comfort the ghosts of sailors, men who perished in a naval disaster.Other offerings are more personal in nature, as in "Forget Me Not," a bittersweet homage in remembrance of her husband, with a subtle nod to his fondness for novels, and "Reunion," where she imagines the spirits of her parents meeting again on the other side after many years apart.However dark some of the subject matter appears, Spaw recognizes a certain light within the pain, as in "Forgiveness," where she shares her belief that no event, however traumatic, is completely one-sided. Strength can come from suffering, an almost-magical power lurking beneath the surface, waiting to be discovered and used like a talisman. "Transition" and "Hourglass" provide the reader with Spaw's reflections on her own passing and eventual resting place, where she conveys acceptance of life's journey and the natural course of events.Influenced by a variety of writing styles, including Daniel Ladinsky's translations of the works by 14th century Persian poet Hafiz, Spaw employs a minimalist approach with storytelling, using short verses and contained language that often reveals a spiritual and impressionistic tone.Ultimately, Nomads on a Barren Plain: Poems on Life and Loss encompasses more than observations about loss. It is about letting go of the past, not only of those we have loved, but those who have hurt us, and finding a way to honor and appreciate the lessons we have learned, the paths we have walked, and the things that make us who we are.
This nurse bears witness to tremendous suffering, yet she shares how wilderness and the innocent trust of children renew her spirit. Her poem: "Re-designing the practice of medicine" was read to the graduates of Albert Einstein College of Medicine.
These clever and thoughtful poems weave science, history, and personal narrative into a rich and lyrical fabric. There's humor to be found, too, as Stephan plays with the found names of these little co-inhabitants of our world. What's most remarkable is how many of these fungal poems set up a resonance with our own patterns of living and dying, a resonance that has me re-seeing everyday life as if I were an alien in a new world. Such accomplishment is worthy of the highest praise. -Marc Harshman, Poet Laureate of West Virginia, author of Woman in Red Anorak, winner of the Lynx House Prize for PoetryThe first collection of its kind, Mycopoetry: A Synthesis of Mycology and Poetry is a vibrant celebration of mushrooms, molds, lichens, yeasts and the wide-ranging places where these unique organisms live and thrive, in natural settings but also fully amongst us all. Stephan is a poet-scientist with a deep passion and a truly artful ability to dramatize how the realm of mycology "is boundless." As such, he guides us to see, for instance, how mycelium spread as delicate networks under forest floors. But his vision also widens out in expanding arcs, where mushrooms and lichens connect human experiences across vast landscapes, from the Alaskan prairies to Brooklyn, from the backwoods to every person's body. For Stephan, science and poetry coexist in richly overlapping worlds whose bonds are best expressed as revelations about how we make life meaningful. An accomplished poet and natural storyteller, Stephan brings into focus a dynamic world of wonder in this vital and unique collection of poems. -Donald J. McNutt, Editor, Blueline MagazineMycopoetry: A Synthesis of Mycology and Poetry is an example of how mushrooms can inspire not just scientists and mycophagists, but artists as well. -Eugenia Bone, author of six books, including the critically acclaimed MycophiliaStephan has taken me into the heart of a living thing that I had no heart. -Christine Woodside, Editor, Appalachia¿
Skaidrite Stelzer's chapbook, Digging a Moose from the Snow is an engaging collection of poems that explores our natural environment in a compelling way. All of nature teaches us lessons if we are observant enough. Some lessons are startling, such as when Stelzer takes us to the Copenhagen Zoo where Marius the giraffe is "shot through his head" and "the children's faces, expressionless, watch the autopsy...." Some lessons are insightful as "Buzzing is the sound of pleasure and dreams," after the poet points out that "there are no king bees, and we never wonder why." Then there are Stelzer's explorations of human nature mixed in with all other animals: "He tells me I walk like an elephant in the rain. Later he will cook tandoori chicken in my grandmother's oven..." and then we discover later in the poem her poetic meditation, "I've always been a seeker of warm rains...." These poems are meant to be "an implanted memory." In a feat that reminds me of Mary Oliver mixed with Annie Dillard, Stelzer's chapbook is a vibrant, deep dive into nature revealing all its beauty and blemishes. -Lylanne Musselman, author of Weathering Under the Cat and It's Not Love UnfortunatelyThese wondrous poems present a bestiary of dream animals: startling, haunting, heartbreaking poems. The poet mediates between human and creaturely realms, conjuring the complexities of "white bone" sea coral, the "opposite world" of bats, a lonely dolphin who swims "from room to room." The collection is grounded in real-life wildlife and environmental concerns, while at the same time an essential strangeness permeates these poems, which verge on allegory. Stelzer has created a unique and necessary breed of nature poem, one which opens into an enchanted, liminal space between the world of dream bears and "this office life we flicker into." -Barbara Sabol, author of Imagine a Town"The stars are just used-up light. / Believe in something new." With one foot firmly in the natural world and the other treading more philosophical waters, Skaidrite Stelzer gifts us poems sticky with bee pollen and shiny with seafoam, a deft mix of sting and affirmation. Digging a Moose from the Snow offers "a world that will kill us" but also reveals "...starfish glitter there, / growing new limbs." -Dianne Borsenik, author of Raga for What Comes Next (Stubborn Mule Press, 2019)
In her debut poetry collection, spare change, Irene Cooper speaks to the dead and the living through sideways sonnets and fragmented form. This is a book, says TC Tolbert, "...that holds at its center the multiplicities of grief ("permission to speak/to the open wound" of a dead brother, a family fractured by alcoholism, abuses of power, even the routine wonder of raising children) inside language that refuses sentimentality and is, instead, experiential. In a world where honesty is surprising (and figuratively, and sometimes literally, death-defying), here is a writer who insists on the truth, demanding that we attend to the turns, the edges, the possible slippages of individual words. It is work and it is worth it. Take heart in this daring. When I read these poems I feel I am in the presence of presence ("to believe/to loiter") - which is to say the muck of it: love." Boyer Rickel adds, "Fearless in their desire to arrive at difficult truths, these poems are bracing, generous-and beautiful. You will not forget them."
Because he is an exceptionally alive human being, David Allan Cates is a one-of-a-kind poet. The pieces of his Valentine's Day in the Mummy Museum are smart, witty, wise, candid, original, brave, affectionate, imaginative, bold, knowledgeable about the world, and utterly unpretentious. The best love poems I've read in years are in this book-"On a Cliff with You" and "The Purpose of Kissing." -David Huddle, author of My Surly Heart, Dream Sender, and Blacksnake at the Family ReunionEven at his most smart-allecky, Tony Hoagland always held the world open to the messy certitude of his love. David Allan Cates, with VALENTINE'S DAY IN THE MUMMY MUSEUM, is the new bearer of that deeply American affection. Cates' rough and aching poems are sometimes funny, never smug, and always capable of breaking your heart. Whether bright missives constructed in the beautiful unease of Latin America, or raised in view of the back door of his home in Montana, Cates' understated poems want so dearly to connect to the ineffable, even when they know it's impossible, yet go on singing anyway. "Have you written/the lives you love?" Cates asks. Thankfully for us, the answer is yes. -Christopher Locke, author of WAITING FOR GRACE & OTHER POEMS and TRESPASSERSThe poems in David Cates' book are valentines, in truth, to the liminal state of being alive. "We invent so we don't fall off the lobe of now," he writes. And "There's a moment when it could go either way." Every single poem in this collection lives in that dream-like place where the heart must go when it's grappling with loss, sorrow, and the complexities of love. Every poem remains poised in that iridescent moment. These are rich and sometimes funny poems from a skillful writer who refuses to be embittered, whose mind is forever climbing the ladder of the imagination, never knowing what might happen next. -Fleda Brown, author of FLYING THROUGH A HOLE IN THE STORM and THE WOODS ARE ON FIRE
A Chair Keeps the Floor Down, celebrates and honors the art of teaching through image-filled love songs to her students, who often spin rather than speak. Through her poetry, Susan chronicles her rich career as a special education teacher, where she engaged in shared fields of discovery with children and families. Her craft of teaching began in adolescence when she tutored a young neighbor with a developmental disability, and grew from there. Susan poemsare grounded in detail and rhythm, giving language to the memory of her students, many of whom could not speak for themselves. The collection is divided into two sections. In the first, Lately, Susan takes the reader on a journey into the classroom, where the children come alive in vivid details :"Nathan/ who loves the sound of milk cartons," Sebastian /who finds the shape of a lamp in everything." Throughout this section she weaves in images from her dreams: "In a dream/my father is alive with open arms/ mute little Henry/ suddenly has the word for run". In her poem "Lockdown", shebrings the reader into the very real day to day world of a teacher: "two teachers/ huddled in a closet", and in "Without Regrets" she poignantly describes the difficult job of trying to keep herstudents safe after a rash of school shootings: "I want to make promises /I can't keep/about saving these tiny children/who after the miraculous downpour /jump into puddles/ and watch their footprints /follow behind them." In the second section, Tell Me More, delves into Susan's passage into retirement.In "Imprint of Small Hands, she explores the way the rhythm of her life has changed:"I move/from the staccato routines/ of a job to do/to a cat body/ fluidly rounding/into all the layers/yet to bloom." In "At the Public Swimming Pool," she reflects on joining a new community of peers, "We are writers and pagans/ lawyers and carpenters/ secretaries and healers...we are teachers/ who still teach/ and retired ones /who remember/ the beat of the classroom/with its adrenaline magic/and fatigue. As she discovers new routines, she finds herself on buses and on streets still noticing the children," girl with an eager mouth/puckering around/the sweet globe/ of a lollipop." A Chair Keeps the Floor Down, is a poignant and crafted collection of poetry, which not only honors children and teachers, but also gives tribute to the unfolding process of aging: "I am 65/ still whirling/through air/and water/bare feet/curving around rocks/ to praise the ground."
Narrative poems about working class life in a small prairie town. A protest book about the damages and sorrow poverty causes on humans interweaved with tragedy and personal loss.**********************In Railman's Son, LeRoy Sorenson returns to some of his driving obsessions: the brutal worlds of the rail yards and meat plants, the bars, the legacy of addiction and poverty, and the struggles of those caught up in the generational trauma of family silences and violence. This is a moving and insightful collection that follows a tormented, compassionate speaker as he seeks to understand the world he has inherited, who refuses to make excuses or find easy redemption; a speaker who can reach the end of his journey through these poems and claim, with heartbreaking honesty and longing: "How I, now,/listen to the silence that has never/left me, aching for a life/other than the one I had.//How little there was." -Jude Nutter, author of I Wish I Had a Heart Like Yours, Walt Whitman, Dead Reckoning, and two other collections.These poems made of hard prairie light keep faith with the past by refusing to look away. In spare, lean lyrics, Sorenson's work scours the meat plants, rotgut bars and railroad yards of small Dakota towns. Fearless, precise, missing nothing, Mr. Sorenson insists on saying what happened, however difficult that might be. In looking so clearly at ourselves, Railman's Son illuminates the lives we lead, which in itself is a kind of revelation. -Mark ConwayLeRoy Sorenson's gritty, visceral poems in The Railman's Son are deeply informed by the wounding of class. In this, Sorenson is brother to poets like Philip Levine and James Wright, daring to break the silence on an "ism" kept by many otherwise progressive peers. Rarely in recent poetry do we encounter so many vivid details of the traditional working class life. "There is nothing so pure as work," Sorenson says without apparent irony, yet work is also what chews up and spits out so many lives. Thus this book becomes a kind of ambivalent elegy to an older way of being in the world. In harnessing such tensions, Sorenson frighteningly reads "the shorthand of American rage," of which we should all take heed. -Thomas R. Smith, author of Storm Island
A Forest in His Pocket by Ray Cicetti is a brilliant debut book from an outstanding poet. Through the poems in this collection, Cicetti invites readers to join him as he shares a narrative of spiritual discernment and growth. Informed by Zen teachings, filled with love, and focused on ultimate happiness, these poems are verified by personal experience and passed from poet to reader just as Zen teachings are passed from master to disciple. These are poems of people, place, and self-realization, powered by elegance and touches of humor. Each poem is rich in imagery, skillfully compressed, and superbly crafted. Buddha is quoted as saying," It is better to conquer yourself than to win a thousand battles. Then the victory is yours. It can not be taken from you." In these poems, the victory belongs to Ray Cicetti, but victory is not only his. It is a shared gift that the poet offers to anyone who joins him in seeing deeply. -Adele Kenny, Founding Director, Carriage House Poetry SeriesRay Cicetti's poetry is a revelation that will smack you in the head. It takes me back to talking with him in New Jersey diners nearly forty years ago, except that the paisan Catholic schoolboy from North Newark now tells the truth with even more blunt power, and his Zen teaching has grown from an instruction into a habitation. These poems integrate Cicetti's twin personae with style and grace, frequently peppered with hilarity. Read him! -Daniel Born, author of The Birth of Liberal Guilt in the English Novel, and former vice president at the Great Books FoundationThe poems in A Forest in His Pocket offer what I need to keep moving forward: the comfort of intimacy, the dexterity of grace, and that special light of unknowing that gives us all both pause and courage. Cicetti's narratives encompass what is both deeply rooted in the physical world and in our shimmering percepts of unknowing-and it's the brilliant flickering between those two that give these poems their humor, their gravitas, their delicious tensions and resonance. Cicetti's prose poem, "How the Universe Began," is the creation story I choose to believe above all others: "It did not begin with the Big Bang or random molecules connecting in primordial ooze, but with six Italian men playing bocce ball in a park on a cool summer evening." Ray Cicetti does, indeed, have "a forest in his pocket"-a forest of marvel and recognition. He's shown it to us so that we can share in its fresh, animated place of sustenance, community, and the possibility of recalling "our own original shining." -Renée Ashley, Author of Ruined Traveler, a book of prose poems, and Creative Writing teacher at Farleigh Dickinson University
Carey Link's most recent poetry sequence, I Walk a Frayed Tightrope Without a Safety Net, a finalist in the 2019 Blue Light Press chapbook contest, is a personal, introspective exploration of the experience of living and coping with metastatic cancer. In the book, Link reflects themes of love, perseverance, and coping with mortality. In these poems Link expresses an appreciation for life, communicating to readers that they are not alone in facing adversity.The epigraph for "My Time," final piece in I Walk a Frayed Tightrope without a Safety Net pays tribute to Walt Whitman's Song of Myself. Poems from this collection have appeared in Birmingham Poetry Review, Hospital Drive, and Poets Speaking to Poets: Echoes and Tributes.
Blake pays attention. He brings a sense of exploration into the natural world and you see the beaches, the landscapes, the oceans, and especially the stars in the sky. There is tension and weight but, as you proceed through this collection, you can feel it lift. Blake shows us something behind the veil by quietly assessing his physical environment, whatever it may be. In the tales of constellations and fog and flying across the Equator and the streets of Haiti he gives us this, as in his poem "Balloon": Beauty not searched for but floated to and found. -Eric Chandler, Author of Hugging This Rock: Poems of Earth and Sky, Love and War (Middle West Press, 2017) and 3-time winner of the Colonel Darron L. Wright Memorial Writing Award for PoetryF.S. Blake says, "beauty is all around, or wherever you look for it" and the subjects in his poems explore the cosmos, economics, and agriculture to fulfill their desire to understand it; while the speaker in Blake's work "float[s] in the silence known only to angels / Above cell phones and sales reports" to find that our "one dimensional mission" is replaced with "stars we'll never plot." His search leaves him and all of us finding amazement in the world that pulls us in every direction toward the splendor of being alive even if we stand in, as the epigraph to the collections states, the "ocean of the unknown." -Robert Evory, managing editor of The Poet's Billow
The fourth full-length poetry collection from award-winning poet and novelist Diane Wald. Poet Sandra Doller says "This book is fantastic and just what I needed-rich and full and a reminder of everything important," and poet John Gallaher calls it a "marvelous new collection" where "we're presented with the most trustworthy of voices, one simmering a long time in its experience. I'm reading this book wanting to underline every word, answering, yes, yes, it's just like this..."
Maintenance is the expense no one ever estimates correctly, and that margin of error, of uncertainty is the real cost, the one Matthew Burns assesses with such precision in Imagine the Glacier. None of the losses (a chicken named Ginger gone to a hawk's dinner, the absence at the heart of a John Prine song) are too small to record; none of the gains (a wife's new dress considered in light of what in the world it can't solve, the relief of a late matinee with The Royal Tenenbaums diminishing into dusk) sufficient to offset the atrophy of old towns, the calamity of wildfire, the darkness surrounding a train's headlight on a curve. But to see this all clearly (the perennially unsold vans in a used car lot, the bright slivers of metal left in a hand from sharpening a shovel) is to experience what these poems offer so generously and scrupulously, a world as immediately present as it is imperiled. -Jordan Smith, author of Little Black TrainSteeped in the everyday violence of the wild that is and is not human, Imagine the Glacier argues that even the devastations of our age can yield to intimacies with the lover and the other, including the non-human, such as animals and the elements, weather patterns and the seasons. In an age of rapid urbanization when one place seems interchangeable with another, Burns casts a compassionate, granular gaze on human-built and natural environments, capturing their interconnections and textures in gorgeous, vividly rendered poems. Embracing the warp and weft of deep time and personal memory, Imagine the Glacier teaches us how to live-"how to go home"- in the Anthropocene: "Look/ at the rivers in their swell; they have nothing/ against you; they do not care; not about the time/ in '89, in January, when you almost drowned,/ setting old tires on fire and sliding them/ across the ice like cheap comets..." -Sarah Giragosian, author of The Death SpiralAn expertly crafted first collection, Imagine the Glacier roves through landscapes domestic and natural to recover precisely what's there: "high pines and flowers, / the leg of an elk / some vulture left / dangling in a tree," or "a coyote running / from one culvert to another / in the black of a desert unlit / by streetlight or any moon." Contained within Burns's exacting language are expressions of profound generosity and praise, but also a grave and, at times, frightening quietude. The effect is a kind of gothic pastoral. As the poems breathe and carve their path, their relics start to twitch and knock against the cabinets. -James Capozzi, author of Country Album and Devious Sentiments
As a student of biology at the University of Puerto Rico in the 1970's, the author worked for the Department of Natural Resources. She was sent to survey the nesting sites of several species of birds at a lagoon in Culebra, a municipality of the island of Puerto Rico. During the two years she worked as a biologist on that island, she discovered a world that was previously unknown to her. The US Navy used the island as a bombing range. She learned to look for a red flag before swimming in the turquoise waters. The flag signaled bombings would occur that day. The signal failed on some occasions. While she swam in the coral reefs with a friend, she met on the island, the author saw the devastation of coral reefs and undetonated bombs. She watched and listened to horrifying stories of despair. But during that time, she also learned about the resilience of the people of Culebra. They stood like David against the Goliath of the US Navy to end the use of their home as a target range. In the end, it was a humble turtle that brought the attention of the outside world to their plight and the end of a horrifying practice.
In the compelling voice of a debut nurse-poet, Cardinal Marks explores how we navigate the turbulent waters of loss and pain, and the unexpected guideposts that chart a path towards clarity and solid ground."Cardinal," as an adjective, derives from the early 14th-century Latin cardinalis, "principal, chief, essential," literally "pertaining to a hinge," from cardo (genitive cardinis) "that on which something turns or depends; originally, "door hinge." As much as this chapbook is about maps, geography, borders, and compass points-the marks (including tattoos) by which we find our way-Virginia LeBaron's Cardinal Marks also attends to all manner of hinges, to whatever permits two separate entities or experiences to connect: to doorways, for example, that open and close-in the heart or in relationships. These poems explore the territory between guilt and forgiveness, childhood and adulthood, and perhaps especially between life to death: "the tender, liminal place," LeBaron writes in "Where I need my mother to stand," "that is neither light, nor dark / but the dusky in-between / the snow / before footsteps / fall." Heir to Elizabeth Bishop's Geography III, Cardinal Marks travels unflinchingly through the coordinates and connective tissue of loss and love, with a sensibility that is both bodily and mysterious. -Lisa Russ Spaar, Professor and Director of Creative Writing, University of Virginia, award-winning poet and author of 12 books including Orexia (Persea Books, 2017), Satin Cash (Persea Books, 2008) and Glass Town (Red Hen Press, 1999).It's hard to believe Cardinal Marks is a debut collection, its poems are so finely wrought, so mature and fully realized. It's all here-a sure command of form, of language and tone, a skillful blending of high lyric and harrowing truth-all here, and then some. These are real poems-adult life in all its complexity-beauty and loss met with a frank and deeply intelligent gaze, with insight grown from lived experience. Virginia LeBaron has been places and done things, and it's our great good fortune that her thoughtful, deeply moving poems are here to tell us the news from far flung lands, the house next door, and the frontier country between this life and the next. -Jon Loomis, Professor of Creative Writing, University of Wisconsin Eau Claire, award-winning writer and author of 3 books of poetry, including Vanitas Motel (Oberlin College Press, 1998), The Pleasure Principle (Oberlin College Press, 2001) and The Mansion of Happiness (Oberlin College Press, 2016).
"Everything abandoned comes alive" Pamela Yenser writes in CLOSE ENCOUNTERS Down Home, which becomes an invocation for resilience in a world filled with disaster at every turn: whether it's the wreckage of flying saucers in Roswell, or a brother and a mother who are irrevocably changed after a complicated birth, or an abusive father who is always in the driver's seat-whether it's by plane or car. Yenser does the difficult work of reckoning with trauma and the "family / history slamming the lid on truth." And though there's comfort in escape, and beauty to be found in the landscapes these poems traverse in a wide range of traditional and open poetic forms, Yenser reminds us "As long as you live / you won't forget," and there's danger everywhere. Lucky for us, we have a wonderful guide who knows her way around language and line, and is cunning enough to "have razor blades sewn / into the hem of every poem." -Gary JacksonPamela Yenser is a learned poet who knows the context, history, and texts of literature. Here she uses her supple and strict prosody to tell a family story about an abusive, daredevil father, a denying-praying mother, her "little retarded brother" ("She is her brother's keeper") and more. In airplanes and Airstream trailers "one catastrophe after another" happens to mark a childhood where "Visions of the devil / made you tithe, trade in the family silver." This astonishing chapbook delivers one revelation after another in poems exquisitely structured: "The past is a trap the Jaws of Life / can't break," she writes, "... but isn't this the work a poet is meant to do?" One poem in exact rhyming couplets is called "In the Garden of Demented Parents." Another, also in couplets, ends: "Look! I have razor blades sewn / into the hem of every poem." Read this brilliant and triumphant chapbook by a poet who limns the tragedy and triumph of her life. -Hilda RazPamela Yenser's brave and tender poems spin together family history, personal resilience, and imaginative perseverance "sharp as that wreckage/ strewn like tinsel on glitter-/fields of tumbled rock" (as she writes in the title poem). Encompassing everything from a "bad weather balloon made of Kryptonite" to "a pineapple/ ruffled doily," Yenser juxtaposes the images and dreams of the otherworldly and the day-to-day life while also writing deeply of love and survival, monsters and angels, magic tricks and memories. This is a captivating and sparkling collection. -Caryn Mirriam-GoldbergPamela Yenser's CLOSE ENCOUNTERS refers to, yes, the Roswell UFO, as well as family relationships that are a parallel encounter. The poems' narrator sees the flying saucer wreckage as a four-year-old. She writes about this iconic disruption of the skies as a way to reveal the workings of memory itself. This is an exciting personal fable that blends journalism, verse, and narration. -Denise Lowe
A debut book of poetry, Where I Live Some of the Time, is a collection of poems about friendship, nature, fantasy, love, travel, politics and the memories of youth and growing older written shortly after Barry Vitcov turned seventy. There are meditations from his home in Ashland, Oregon and summer vacations in Carmel, California, where he fell under the influence of poet Robinson Jeffers and the Pacific Coastline. The range of topics includes a fantasy about a talking guitar in "Takamine Guitar Love Song," the political commentaries of "Semicolons and Politicians" and "Counting Florets After an Election," and structured villanelles such as "Portraits of Angels in the Sky." Not to be ignored are poems inspired by his standard poodles. Barry Vitcov is a retired educator having spent 45 years as a middle school English teacher, school administrator, leadership coach, and adjunct university professor. He lives in Ashland, Oregon with his wife and two standard poodles. As a teenager, he fondly remembers his father carrying a small collection of his poems in his billfold and showing them off to friends and customers. Barry was raised in the San Francisco Bay Area where he was privileged to experience the 1960's energy, diversity and music as a high school and college student. While attending San Fernando Valley State College (now California State University, Northridge), he was mentored by Newdigate Prize winning poet David Posner and professor and poet Benjamin Saltman. During his educational career, he wrote very little fiction and poetry, as he was immersed in his work. After retirement, he began writing again and continues to hone his literary voice. He has had fiction and poetry published in EAP: The Magazine, Literary Yard, Scarlet Leaf Review, Vita Brevis, Finding the Birds, and The Drabble.
Reading Lois Rosen's Diving and Rising, immediately I feel the warm presence of the person who has made the poetry. This poet has grown from a self-assertive child to a generous-spirited woman. She has ejected herself from the constricting environment of her parents' one-bedroom Yonkers apartment but, even from across the continent in Oregon, vividly evokes both its dreariness and the delights that burst open its walls. People whom the poet has admired, students she fondly remembers, friends dear to her, and her mother, whose resisted admonishments she now recalls with understanding-all come alive on the page. So, wonderfully, does the poet herself. She is a kindergarten ballerina wearing her tutu all day, a young diver with no need of a springboard, a South Bronx middle school teacher taking her class to a Park Avenue avian specialist to get care for an injured duck. She stays at the hospital for a friend's surgery and giggles with her afterward as they share a cherry popsicle treat. Stroking a Japanese anemone's velvety stems, she remembers that her mother's only garden was a sweet potato rooted in a glass. She thrills at the taste of fresh pizza in Rome. Cuddling with her husband on the couch as they watch "Dancing with the Stars," she "give[s] us a 9."She is full of spunk. She is all tenderness. -Eleanor Berry, Past President, National Federation of State Poetry Societies, Author of No Constant Hues and Only So Far"Even the sweetest berries leave stains." Such is the feast of Lois Rosen's poetry. In a lifetime-spanning leap, this collection dives deep into heartbreaks, losses, and injustices and surfaces buoyant with grace. Diving and Rising will stain your fingers with the delicate complexity of witness and wonder. It will stoke your appetite for life. -Sage Cohen, author of Writing the Life Poetic
Free Papers: poems. In this poem sequence Eliza, the enslaved, speaks to the poet Mary Moore Easter who answers her in the voices of her own ancestors, grandmothers and great-grandmothers, captives of the slave period. And often responses come from contemporary women. Sometimes the poet seems to channel Eliza's voice in love song or defiance. Easter was inspired by Eliza's archival court testimony to flesh out a whole woman and her fears, courage and determination to be free. This impassioned work does not only interrogate the past, but also leaps forward to offer a model for women of today. Mary Moore Easter, a Cave Canem Fellow, is a strong and flexible writer. She brings her tremendous powers of vision and of poetic technique to this book incorporating forms such as narrative, lyrical free verse, sonnet, pantoum, and dramatic dialogue.
Durable Goods, poem by poem, finds lasting value in ordinary daily acts and objects -- shaving with an inherited safety razor, packing a backpack for a wilderness trek, listening to Neal Young on a cassette worn to the brink of uselessness, answering a toddler daughter's questions about air. There are letter poems to writer friends composed along trails in the Rockies, appreciations of the crooked, eternally unraveling beauties of river rapids and of the canoes that cooperate with them. By turns boyish and battle-scarred -- "For forty years," one poems says, "I have been fifteen" -- the voice is this collection is that of a man listening to his life, leaning toward whatever durable good he can come across next.
In the new chapbook Scenes and Speculations, the poet declares "What a marvel is this allocated // life on earth," and the reader is captivated by the wondrous and the surreal. T.P. Bird's poems are grounded in rich language. Throughout, we glean wisdom from a life fully lived. -Leah Huete de Maines¿
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