Kamal Parmar wields her soft satin words with the velvet sword of compassion and understanding in "Vanishing Into The Blue", her 3rd book of poetry. There is a quiet eloquence to the poetry within these pages. She gently places words on paper to paint images on the canvas of our mind and Kamal's vivid expressionism opens the doors of imagination to microcosmic and macrocosmic universes. This wonderful, soothing collection of poems is salve for the mind and sooth for the soul. - Candice James, Poet Laureate Emerita, City of New Westminster, BC and author of 'Behind the One-Way Mirror".
Airplane Earth' opens with a letter from the past and closes with a letter to the future. In the pages between, Mary Lee Bragg takes the reader on a high-altitude tour of a world in crisis, always bringing us back to earth with wit and compassion. These poems hurtle between cultural landmarks and apocalyptic ruins, accompanied by fictional heroes, historical villains, strong women, and a family's steady presence. In vibrant, inviting language, Bragg encourages us to look, to laugh and ... to think deeply.
Matt Thomas's first full-length collection of poetry, Disappearing By the Math, is an exploration of middle age depicted as a series of instants in which the future and past coexist, nature is a daily barrage of questions, the Walmart and post office become locations of existential revelation, and God peers from the details like a cat from the weeds. Thomas has a way of transporting you to other spaces and times: some of them achingly familiar; others novel yet starkly inviting. These poems draw you in and break you; they grip the shoulders of nostalgia in ways both comforting and haunting. Sit with them. You will be glad for their company. ~ -Jennifer Yeatts, Co-Editor, Dunes Review Disappearing by the Math is romantic in how it connects us to nature and seeks wisdom from it, through an abundance of animals and the questioning of human actions, inventions, and intentions ... Matt Thomas presents the idea that when we are disconnected from the natural world, we must struggle to find purpose, "Maybe the frogs call us sad as a noun // because our parasitic brains have walled us off..." This collection urges readers to see the beauty in animals, to perceive the animal within, and to reflect on what it means to be human, which all adds up to acknowledging the violent cost of comfort. ~ Aly Allen, author of Paying for Gas with Quarters
FOREWORD: Is there beauty in a grey sky? In an empty field or sewage plant? There might be beauty in these things, in the waste and bald tires, in the forgotten byproducts of our contemporary life. But beauty, like truth and meaning, is not waiting to be found, it must be created and fought for. Beauty requires effort- the perceivers and creators of beauty must put the work in. Sometimes, they might even have to die for it. But we, the creators and perceivers, are tired, we are exhausted, we are angry, bitter and resentful. It is easier to sit on the couch and forget infinity, easier to sleep. It is easier to hate than to love, easier to destroy than to create. I don't know if we as a civilization have what it takes to create the beauty we need to sustain us. We might just let the broken laptops and abandoned buildings overwhelm us, succumb to the progress and the oblivion and the chaos we helped engineer, let it slowly kill us because it is easier. The poems in this book, while not a definitive answer or philosophical statement, grapple with this idea, namely that we need to create beauty. I don't know how successful the poems are in this regard, and in some cases the poems may succumb to the couch, to the intoxicating nihilism. I'll let you, the reader, decide the fate of the poems; but in a wider sense, I will also ask you to decide if you want to create the beauty we so desperately need. If you do not, there is nothing wrong with that decision either. ~Angelo J. Letizia, PhD
Fretwell uses indents, varied line lengths, and single line stanzas to emphasize her verse that reflect both poise and poignancy on the impact humans are having on the planet. Her earthy affection is delivered in a contemporary Canadian style that, put in a musical context, would compare to a soulful sax-jazz rhythm, combined with rapped alliteration and set in a classical theory of personal point of view. Fretwell breathes what she feels. At times, deadly serious, or seriously funny, she holds a beat to the world's telling problem, humanities careless activity, that mirrors a Burtynsky photo like an expenditure statement of accounts owing. ~ Keith Inman, author of "The War Poems -Screaming at Heaven" What might we say is ''the usefulness of poetry"? Might it give us hope for a rescuing from past and present harms, a restoration of nature's equilibrium, what the biologists call homeostasis, the balance within the ecology we have disturbed by our hubris, our greed to consume, our proclivity for destruction, and even the ironic taxonomy of Adam's role in naming the beasts and husbanding the flock betrays a kind of vanity. Perhaps we are simply intelligent parasites doomed to self-destruction. There seems to be a sufficiency of wildfire, flood, drought, hurricane, to warn us we're on a path to ruination. Katerina Fretwell in her book, Holy in My Nature, uses the word 'solastalgia' to help the reader begin to comprehend the individual and collective malaise we feel because of the deleterious impact we're having on our environment. Climate change, the loss of wilderness, mass extinction, the melting of the polar ice caps, and on and on we seem to go. She dedicates her book 'to nature lovers, everyone concerned about our planetary impact." Her poems make a compelling argument. Might the voice of the poet be called upon to awaken humanity to a kind and gentler stewardship? Fretwell writes in one poem, "Nature sings, listen " and reading these poems is a form of deeply attentive listening, and that's the doorway to the possibility of healing. ~John B. Lee, Poet Laureate of Brantford, Ontario, Canada
Splinter of the Moon is a book of introspection, soul searching, and understanding of the psyche and the snakes and ladders game played within it. Russell knows love, laughter, sorrow, rejection and all the emotions that run the gamut between. He imparts the fallout of his life-long education in the school of hard knocks with eloquent ease and great depth of persona.
Shards of Crystal is an eloguent, emotional, and moving book of poetry written straight from the soul. Creativity shines throughout, especially in the poems "Cool Jazz"; :Rx" and Death Wish. An undertow of grief and sorrow is eased with remembering the joy of moments past and the hope for moments to come. This is a book of hope and renewal and a lens on the resilience of the human spirit.
As the Garou's "Northern Den" and the Noctrailis' long history is slowly revealed, the war between them and within them has really only just begun. The story takes place in small town Ireland where a chilling case of grisly murders has shocked the Sapien community, baffled the police force and has kept local investigative newspaper journalist Cara-Marie McKenna on her toes. Excellent character development and sustained suspense prevail as the chilling tale unfolds.
Everything has changed, Tyler is now the Alpha of the Northern Dun and also a new mother. The pressure from the south is growing to a new height. Other clans and the Noctrailis from other countries are infiltrating Ireland and the Garou are under attack. A couple on a romantic weekend away are slaughtered on a beach. Over and above this crime scene, the police now have another problem on their hands. A 'Master Hunter' has arrived from England and the government Intelligence services are taking over. Enter a new player on the scene 'Jason'. Is he a friend or a foe???
Volume 2 of Moon Dancing picks up where Volume 1 left off. There is a New Year's beach party killing in the opening pages which leads to the discovery of a renegade Noctrailis wandering the Mourne Mountains and leaving a trail of grizzly killings in its path. And there is the missing body from the morgue that just seems to have resurrected itself and walked out. The ongoing battle between the An Rua and the Noctrailis is enough but now the Southern Dun of An Rua wolves is at odds with the Northern Dun. There is terror, grizzly murders, quests for power laced into the weave of characters from the lovely Cara-Marie, newspaper woman, and her photographer Mark, to the doubting Thomas editor of the paper Kevin who is always getting in their way of their quest to show the world that the werewolf clan in Northern Ireland is the REAL thing. A GREAT read indeed!
CHASING YOUR TAIL is both humorous and sobering. It's the story of a young man getting nowhere fast in life, who is growing more disillusioned by the minute and has become so fed up with the situation he's about ready to explode. Jim works in a cubicle all day long. Sometimes it comes close to driving him mad. He's a writer on the side and is just as frustrated in that department. His best friend Will lives just down the road in Philly and he goes there as often as he can, just to get his mind off of things; the two of them go endlessly barhopping all night long and wile away the daytime hours in equally fruitless and unproductive ways. Jim's parents are money-obsessed and his little brother is a thoroughly depressed kid who can't seem to get his act together either. Jim goes to his parents' house for dinner and fends them off any way he can, goes out for drinks with the weirdos from work, goes to the bars by himself in ill-fated attempts to pick up girls, obsesses over his manager, the severe-looking woman with the bossy streak he loves so much, dreams about his girlfriend from back in school, the one who got away. He takes road trips to Canada and sits in parks and goes on long aimless walks at night and all the while he's going nowhere and knows it, but is determined to continue on his quest to find an alternative no matter what. CHASING YOUR TAIL is lively and high-spirited, and written in an irreverent off-the-cuff style.
Kathy Ashby's poems are fresh, lively and full of energy. They have a down-to-earth, grass-roots quality, with genuine charm and an appealing bounce to them. There is also much artfulness and flair to her writing, which has the versatility to tackle a wide variety of subjects and ranges of moods. Kathy plays with her sounds and rhythms, and they always make sense, giving the reader a feeling of inspiration. This book is sectioned into the following themes: EARTH / YOUNG WOMEN / SNOW / LOVE AND OTHER THINGS / ELDERS / CREATIVE JOURNEY.
'If I Were a River' not only explores personal and universal themes of illness, death, grief and forgiveness, it also transports the reader into a surrealistic dreamscape where deceased family members appear, disappear and often offer comic relief and spiritual guidance. These poems reflect on significant childhood memories that shaped the author's life coupled with her urgency to piece together these fragmentary remembrances before they shift and vanish. 'If I Were a River' is a testament to the author's resilience during a period of uncertainty and her innate yearning for human connection and joy.
Short Shots 2 is a poetry book of SHORT poems for poetry lovers and NON poetry lovers. This is a book for everyone. Love, inspiration, passion and sorrow permeate the pages.- The poems are short, sweet and to the point yet thought provoking, and comforting. This book is perfect for quick reading. Easy to lay down and pick up again and again and again.
Iced tea, like poetry, looks deceptively easy to make. The ingredients are simple, but there is a fine balance between bitterness and sweetness. And that simplicity and balance takes time, patience, and care. The same holds true for Greg Stidham's refreshing, full-bodied poetic debut. Like the poet Ted Kooser, Stidham's poems are straightforward and direct, praising common objects, and ordinary experiences. Here is a poet who trusts and celebrates the world, with all of its surprises and predictability, its sorrow, its joy. The clarity and precision of his remarkable poems help reveal, and deepen, the mysteries of the everyday. Jason Heroux, third poet laureate of Kingston, Ontario; author of 'Survivors of the Hive.' Some poets convey great warmth and tenderness in their poems, while others present a steely, hard-bitten assessment of the world, but it is rare to find both these qualities in one voice, as readers encounter in the poetry of Greg Stidham. Iced Tea Poetry offers images distilled and crafted in the forge of lived experience, from a life spent doctoring critically ill children, and the same life enriched by embracing even the smallest moments of joy with gratitude and recognition. As in the work of his direct predecessors, Ted Kooser and Wendell Berry, Stidham takes in the landscapes and people around him with care but without sentimentality, as in the unforgettable "Crossing the Plains," where a family's long ago loss of child is remembered against the backdrop of an image, "And ahead, the vast goldness of wheat/ radiates endlessly toward the sun/ poised on the horizon's lip." Late in his career, our most eminent literary critic Harold Bloom asked an enduring question: "Where shall wisdom be found?" I feel certain in responding that one place where wisdom still can be found is in the poetry of Greg Stidham. - Jesse Graves, Professor and Poet-in-Residence at East Tennessee State University, author of 'Merciful Days and Said-Songs: Essays on Poetry and Place'.
Spiritual Whispers is a glimpse into the ethereal and esoteric landscape of the mind; a walk through the borderlands of eternity and a guide to self-realization, parallelism, and soulmates. It is a salve for the soul.
Mitch and Jessy Taylor are on the Moon, fully suited, collecting mineral specimens, when they find oxidised minerals from an ore deposit in Mendeleev Crater on the Lunar Farside and incredibly, they are spectacularly crystallised. It totally shatters Earthly thinking; plentiful oxygen, water and pressure on the grey, dead Moon! Then there is the bizarre object they find sitting within the oxidised zone. God knows how long that had been there. As to how it got there, well, that was a whole other question. Someone or something had clearly placed it there. As they space hop and time travel through the Cosmos, they are made aware there are only a few truly Earth-like planets in the Universe and they must be looked after no matter what. Enter the Bantha that have taken it upon themselves to be the guardians of those worlds and ensure that they are preserved at all costs. Humanity attempts to achieve the 'no carbon atmosphere' deadline imposed by the Bantha to eliminate carbon energy and implement fusion energy for preservation of planet Earth; but can they?
"ININ CONVERSATION Vol. IV is a further collection of haiku poetry conversations between two like-minded people. Although the subject matter does not strictly adhere to conventional haiku, the form does adhere to the 5/7/5 structure of conventional haiku. These intimate and heartfelt conversations take the reader on a special and emotional journey weaving through the heart and soul patterns created by these two poets. It is a close-up look at the inner feelings of those sometimes marginalized by an unempathetic public. ¿¿
Of great interest throughout are the quotes by well known famous personages. The title of this literary offering by Charles D. Tarlton, Miscellanea, is a word that means assorted or miscellaneous items, especially literary ones. This is a gathering of poems from various places and moods. It is set in three sections: Verses; Collaborations; Longer Poems. The reader will be pleased with the eloquent weave of the words and will not be disappointed in the content.
Matthew Jose and Candice James are known as one entity, "CAMA JOJA", on their home planet Evidaris. When transporting to the Earth realm they automatically split into two entities which allows them to have separate and unusual, quirky and far out imaginings which they funnel into their collaborative poetry stories which serve to meld together the thoughts and short visualizations of Evidarian/Earthling potential and probable happenstances. This collection of poems is the 5th offering from DOUBLE TROUBLE. series-a new kind of experimental, off-kilter, off-key but oh so very in tune poetry. It's in your face, slap your mind alive, quick-take happenings of everyday abnormal life on Earth as experienced by an alien entity possessed by two minds. This collaboration of the psyches will titillate, charm, disarm, shock and totally absorb the reader from beginning to end. In this volume, "mind benders", - and this time, the flash po-e-stories from the Evidarian Cama Joja are more about their separate "down to earth" yet still "strange as hell" experiences relating to humans and the human issue as they mix ever so surreptitiously into the unsuspecting population.
A Silence of Echoes plumbs the depths of love and desire and walks the devastating tides of emotional turmoil and sorrow. It moves through the fields of relationships and merges into the realms of destiny, fantasy and otherworldly overlaps and imaginings. We are in this world to experience the highs and lows of living. Although we may not see the merit in the lows we are handed, they can be the greatest gifts bestowed upon us. We are the students, and the universe and the beings in it are our lessons to be learned. Poetry is one of the vehicles to make the roads we travel on our journey through this life less tedious It is the ethereal salve that soothes the weary soul.
Gold, we are told, is all that is precious, delicate, beautiful; the ultimate essence of worth and of luxury. See how it glimmers and glitters, how we worship. Then there is the gold brought to us by Angel Edwards. She has written a wonderfully compelling book of poetry reminiscent of the ultimate gold, real gold, the golden thread that runs through everything, links and creates who we are, weaves us alive in our potential to love
Amy Winston, age 75, decides to liberate her childhood friend Clara, who has Alzheimer's Disease, from the Daffodil ward of Spring Garden Manor. When Amy's plan for her friend somehow miraculously succeeds, the two old friends take off for the south with great and hopeful expectations of a better life once Clara is freed from her medicated stupor. Along the way Amy finds out how difficult it is to care for her friend; but when Clara finally remembers Amy's name for the first time in ages, it all seems worthwhile. Although there are plenty of laughs in this book, in truth there is nothing funny about this devastating disease; but, in the midst of the heartbreak, there is a message of hope and enduring love encompassed in these pages. The indomitable spirit of these two lively geriatric gypsies is a salve for the soul and a bouquet for the heart. 9249* is a tribute to the bonds of friendship that stand the tests of time throughout the ages, pages, and stages of life. It will pull at your heartstrings, tug at your smile, and wet your eyes with joy and sorrow.
Changelings is set in a future where whole species have died leaving man on the edge of extinction, in a world filled with day walkers and night stalkers. The Director of the Changeling Program is firmly committed to a quest for the reconstruction of the DNA of live creatures, which results in physical shape changing of the still living. into new creatures called changelings. The ability to shape shift plays a large part in the scientific efforts to enhance the human race, turning criminals and threats to society into socially viable changelings; but also some more sinister characteristics are developed at the same time. The changed and the unchanged; and then there is the mighty Cerberus to contend with along Keanos and the ancient one, Thanatos. Enter crypto-biologist, Mike Caldwell, gifted in writing the codes necessary to produce effective changes for enhanced changelings Suspicious of Mike's motives, the Director assigns a companion to watch over him, but when his companion suddenly vanishes, Mike begins to question everything around him, and the fragile balance of this dying world is tipped to its limit.
Take a walk on the "Dark Side"!!! Ghosts, ghouls, imps, demons and devils populate the themes presented in these poems that are sure to raise the hackles on your neck and turn up the fear-point volume in your mind. This is the perfect book for Hallowe'en lovers and the monster stories associated with the celebrated, party fright-night scenes and creepy, crawly happenings. Let your imagination run wild and enjoy the freaky, superlicious verses contained within this 'bible for the undead'.
"Short Shots" is a poetry book for poetry lovers and non-poetry lovers too. The poems in this book are very "short" poems. Easy reading with an emotional punch. With a wide diversity of subject matter there is something for everybody in the quaint yet compelling book.
About aging, Alzheimer's and the effects on the family. Dedicated to all those who travelled the winding road of life's journey and along the way, got lost; To all those who cannot find the missing pieces of the Puzzle; -To all those who say-'Please remember the real me, even though I cannot remember you.
The Phenomenalist is a work of metafiction in the avant-garde style of David Markson (Wittgenstein's Mistress), Jesse Ball (The Way Through Doors), Paul Auster (City of Glass), and others. And thematically, this book is much akin to Dostoyevsky's (The Double), Nabokov's (Despair), and Sarama[o's (The Double), with liberal doses of absurdism added for color. The central character, Karl, discovers through a series of encounters with body doubles, that true doubles share not only identical bodies, but also share a single consciousness as well. The story's unnamed narrator, who can read Karl's mind, but never reveals himself, secretly follows Karl and documents his movements and internal conflicts. Karl's discovery of doppelgangers leads him to question conventional notions of identity and continuity of self
These poems plumb the depths of human despair and softly illuminate the light at the end of hope's tunnel. We are all human, and Matthew Jose bares his heart and soul to show us his addictions, his muse, his monsters and his humanity in all its shining and stark nakedness. Dark and light dance in tandem throughout the text. These poems are a salve for the soul and a comfort for the lost and downtrodden. Jose is most definitely a rising star on poetry's ever waxing horizon.
S.R. Duncan has been in and around the poetry and communications scene in Vancouver for most of his life. He is a prolific poet writing about both the beautiful and the seedy side of life, work, acquaintances and family. Steven's poetry is evocative, cutting edge that cuts no corners. Of particular interest are the poems "Milltown Gunslinger"; "They Burn Dance Halls Don't They?"; "Party Like It's the End of the World" and of course many more.
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