Bücher veröffentlicht von Sheila-Na-Gig Editions

Women Speak is a publication of the Women of Appalachia Project, containing poetry, fiction, essays, and songs. The Women of Appalachia Project¿ encourages participation from women of diverse backgrounds, ages and experiences to come together, inviting submissions of spoken word and fine art, shared in public forums and annual anthologies. Artists share culture and experiences at arranged venues, embrace issues of marginalization and stereotype; creating a force, unified and non-violently confrontational, to show the whole women, beyond superficial factors often used to judge her.

The poems in If You Keep Making that Shameface... explore how shame shapes women. These poems, by a WV poet, travel the backroads of female identity to unearth the social, cultural, geographic, and personal landscapes where women lose themselves. With brash, heartache, and hunger, this debut collection unearths a time capsule that lays bare the tangled roots and deep rot shame breeds, while discovering some of the vulnerability, savvy, and resilience needed to reclaim the self by dropping the weight of shame.

NEEDS UPDATE Barbara Marie Minney is a transgender woman, award winning poet, writer, speaker, teaching artist, and quiet activist. Her poetry and essays have appeared in numerous publications, including Politico, The Buckeye Flame, The Gasconade Review, Gargoyle Magazine, The Pine Cone Review, Women Speak: Women of Appalachia Project, Woman Scream: The International Poetry Anthology of Female Voices, The New Wasteland, new words (issue one): a trans and gender-expansive journal, and I Thought I Heard A Cardinal Sing, Ohio's Appalachian Voices. Barbara's poetry has also been translated into Spanish. She is the author of If There's No Heaven, the winner of the 2020 Poetry Is Life Book Award and an Akron Beacon Journal Best Northeast Ohio Book in 2020; the Poetic Memoir Chapbook Challenge; and Dance Naked With God. Barbara is a retired attorney and a seventh-generation Appalachian and lives in Tallmadge, Ohio, with her wife of over 42 years and a menagerie of stuffed animals. You can follow Barbara at https://www.barbaramarieminneypoetry.com.

An anthology of short stories: Editor's PrizeJennifer Schomburg KankeA String of BeadsSarah KontopolousHappiness on the BeachEd DavisCeremonyYvette FlatenBlackberry HarvestWilliam BainFiresoleMary LannonThey Teased Me About HimJames CallanPhantomsAlexa DinuEarl GreyClint MargraveTrashRobert PopeThe Freezer

In The Way Land Breaks, award-winning poet Rebecca Brock uses time-human and geological-as both anchor and engine. These poems are revelation and love song to a faltering world. The Way Land Breaks travels the Idaho foothills of Brock's childhood, the sky she takes to as a flight attendant, her relationship with her mother and her sons and the distances between. From diabetes to earthquakes, mushrooms to Mars Rovers, Robin Hood to Vera Bradley-Brock asks questions about the landscape of home, the landscapes we seek within one other. Using tangible imagery and honest language, Brock shows us how love takes hold in the modern blur of disorder and constant change. The Way Land Breaks features several award-winning poems: "Raising Glaciers" won the 2022 Women's Poetry Contest at Kelsay Books,in partnership with the IWWG. Judge Katie Manning wrote, "I love this poem's insistence on hope in the face of environmental loss." "Sometime in the Late Age of a Long Marriage" won The Comstock Review's 2022 Muriel Craft Bailey Memorial Award. Judge Ellen Bass wrote: "This poem has such genuine tenderness...from the daughter who is able to look at them so clearly, a true poet's eye."

What happens when four poets, friends for years, gather in a beautiful place to sit on a porch to talk, live, breathe, create poetry for days at a time? These friends all have led workshops and presented poetry and stories to audiences for many years. All are well-known and well respected practitioners and teachers of their craft. But these poetry days were different. These days offered the poets a chance to take a deep, reflective dive into their own approach to the art, at their own pace, with sharp, insightful input from each other. Not only were their skills examined, but also their relationships to the work, to the landscape around them, to the poems that seemed to spring from the mountain air as they laughed, cooked, mused on the porch swing, and absorbed the creative juices surrounding them in that special place. The result is this remarkable chapbook containing some of the output of those sessions over a period of several years. The poems each have distinctive voices, but they are not attributed in the text to the individuals, emphasizing the exceptional bond these poets established with each other and with their surroundings. A lovely and intriguing book.

The Arcane Mechanics of Constant Lift explores the invisible dynamic by which we and the rest of life tend to persist through the perennial threats, hardships, oppressions, and traumas that would, and eventually do, take us down. The poet's own family's immigrant refugee history is both resource and backdrop for such illuminations. These poems draw as well on childhood memories, observations of nature in its cycles of emergence and breakdown, experiences of love, present-day social struggle, and the all-too-current realities of barbarous invasion and warfare. The collection's title phrase and central image is found in its penultimate poem, "A Prayer," in which we witness a creature's exquisitely embodied knowing of how to navigate the forces of the surround. These poems suggest that the "lift" is indeed in the intimate attunement, a kind of communion, with what surrounds us, immediately and at any distance.

George Franklin is the author of Noise of the World (Sheila-Na-Gig Editions), Traveling for No Good Reason (winner of the Sheila-Na-Gig Editions competition in 2018), a dual-language collection, Among the Ruins / Entre las ruinas (Katakana Editores), and a chapbook, Travels of the Angel of Sorrow (Blue Cedar Press). He practices law in Miami and is the co-translator, along with the author, of Ximena Gómez's Último día/Last Day (Katakana Editores).

Grounded in a deep love of Earth and all its creatures, Arrival gathers Cynthia Anderson's lyrical poetry of place into a deeply satisfying volume. Her closely observed experiences of oceans, forests, and deserts reach the transcendent level of myth. Imaginary landscapes are here also, evoking a mysticism that travels backwards and forwards in time. The poet's words sing off the page, inviting readers to take refuge in a realm where grief and loss are acknowledged, but where beauty cannot help but prevail. Poetry lovers will find life-affirming words to inspire and uplift them in Arrival--an invitation to see our extraordinary world through new eyes.

Dick Westheimer's debut, A Sword in Both Hands: Poems Responding to Russia's war on Ukraine, is an achievement of profound empathy, reaching across the water to those suffering while reminding us of our distance from them as participatory spectators. The collection spans histories, languages, and forms, at once ambitious in scope and willing to pause with the particular, from the grocery sack of a refugee to the sunflower seed passing from the hands of an old woman to an invading soldier. "The witness will not forget," Westheimer writes, acknowledging the poet's distance from the very role of witness, and aware of his privileged position, far from the violence, that permits a painful forgetting. These poems however, do not let us forget. They push us to remember past atrocity, recognize the precarity of the present moment, and grapple with its implications on the future. "I've no more poems about this war," Westheimer concludes in a lyrical, unrelenting ghazal closing the collection. And yet, the poem paradoxically continues to sing, and insists on song, on the poems yet to be written in the face of destruction. War, Westheimer shows us, is powerless against our impulse to fight through language and voice: "Now, again, is the time for The Forest Song to be sung to the trees." --Julia Kolchinsky Dasbach, PhD, author of The Many Names for Mother (Kent State University Press, 2019