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"One of the best Environmentalism books of all time" - BookAuthority Best New Light eBooksThe late W. S. Merwin said Akers's nature poems are a "joy to discover" because they embody a "lost sense of the living world." In Swerve, Akers celebrates the wild while facing climate change, extinction, and loss. These poems confront us with the many threats to our world, eventually guiding us through stages of grief towards hope and action.The poems in Swerve give voice to the shock, fear, and desperation many feel about the environment. They meditate on the beauty of the non-human world. They champion women in the #MeToo movement who are empowering themselves and making vital changes.Powerful and compassionate, Swerve is ultimately a call to activism, inspiring readers to "swerve" and demand a better world. Ellery Akers is the author of three books of poetry. Her most recent collection is Swerve: Environmentalism, Feminism, and Resistance (Blue Light Press, 2020). She is also the author of Practicing the Truth (Autumn House, 2015), winner of the Autumn House Poetry Prize, the San Francisco Book Festival Poetry Award, and an Independent Publisher Book Award for Poetry; Knocking on the Earth (Wesleyan University Press, 1988), named a Best Book of the Year by the San Jose Mercury News; and Sarah's Waterfall (Safer Society Press, 2009), a children's novel.

Scott Caputo artfully explores the overarching metaphor of the bridges in our lives - to foreign destinations, new jobs, family homes, courtship and marriage, fatherhood, spiritual peace. Nestled within this engaging landscape are a number of ekphrastic and humorous poems that both illuminate and surprise. This collection is a love song to life.Originally from Salem, Oregon, Scott Caputo has had a life-long love affair with writing poetry and creating games. His first book of poetry, Holy Trinity of Chiles, was published by Blue Light Press in 2010. His work has appeared in Red Rock Review, Ruah, Haight Ashbury Literary Journal, and Saranac Review. He also has five published board games, including Völuspá, based on the Nordic epic poem of the same name. He currently resides in Newark, California, with his wife and two sons.

Dressed All Wrong for This is a splendid demonstration of the depth and range of the short-short story, an art form whose relevance and influence are rapidly growing in this digital age of compressed communication. Francine Witte brilliantly illuminates nuanced truths of the human condition in this collection, truths that could be expressed in no other way.Francine Witte's flash fiction has been published in numerous journals and the anthologies Flash Fiction Funny (Blue Light Press) and New Micro: Exceptionally Short Fiction (W.W. Norton.) She is the author of two flash fiction chapbooks, Cold June, (Ropewalk Press) winner of the 2010 Thomas Wilhelmus Award, and The Wind Twirls Everything (Musclehead Press.) Her novella-in-flash The Way of The Wind (Ad Hoc Press,) was cited as a highly recommended selection in the Bath Flash Fiction Award. Her poetry chapbooks include two first-prize winners, First Rain (Pecan Grove Press,) and Not All Fires Burn the Same (Slipstream Press.) She is the author of two full-length poetry collections, Café Crazy, and The Theory of Flesh, (both from Kelsay Press.) Her play Love is a Bad Neighborhood was produced off-Broadway by Miller Coffman Productions. She edits the column Flash Boulevard on George Wallace's Facebook blog poetrybay. She is an associate editor for the South Florida Poetry Journal. She is a former high school teacher. She lives in Manhattan, NYC with her husband, Mark Larsen.

The Emancipation of Emily Rosenbloom is 50-something's Bridget Jones Diary. Masterfully written in the archetype of the female antihero, this debut novel unfolds with a wicked sense of humor, even when you're shouting, "Emily, don't do it!" The pages of this novel are populated with unforgettable characters-Dr. Rothman, the invisible psychiatrist; Emily's intuitive and exasperating mother in Florida; and Raspberry, the wonder dog. Highly recommended when you want to forget about the world and just laugh.Elinor Gale has been a writer, observer of human nature, and lover of the English language since childhood. An inveterate eavesdropper, she has woven her curiosity about human behavior into her work as writing teacher, editor, and creator of humorous yet poignant fiction and poetry. Her essays, poetry, and articles have been published in print and online. Elinor moved to the Bay Area from New England 20 years ago. She lives in San Francisco with her partner and his chubby Burmese cat.

About the AuthorHeather Saunders Estes grew up in a small New England town and now lives in the Inner Sunset neighborhood of San Francisco. The blue jays look different, but crows are the same. Fog has replaced winter snow. She transitioned to poetry in 2017 from her long-term career as CEO of Planned Parenthood Northern California. Her writing is inspired by experiences as a social worker and activist, as well as early studies in ceramics and elementary art teaching. Poetry is laughter, reflection, appreciation, and a call to action. She lives with her professor-writer husband of 45 years, and their biologist-writer daughter lives nearby. Inner Sunset is her debut book of poetry. This book is full of lyricism, animist and mystical often, about the natural world of ocean, trees, fog, birds, insects, and yet, surprisingly and vividly anchored in the city, the house, through windows, walks and wide open eyes. It rewards reading and rereading, as its full context enriches and widens.

Sharon Lask Munson's poems travel through space, tunnel through time, and cross generations. Whether free verse, prose poem, haiku or haibun, they carry, lean on and converse with each other in this exquisite volume of poetry. Personal history, family traditions, food, the natural world, pop culture, all blend into a sumptuous word stew. Reality is often heightened. Snow becomes more than snow. A collection of watches becomes an emblem of time. A dessert pastry becomes more than a dessert, 'no two… cut from the same dough.' She shows us that life can be painted with marvelous colors, sensuous images, and at 'end of day' be 'strewn with possibilities.Sharon Lask Munson was born and raised in Detroit, Michigan. She taught school in England, Germany, Okinawa, and Puerto Rico before driving to Anchorage, Alaska and staying for the next twenty years. She is a retired teacher, poet, coffee addict, old movie enthusiast, lover of road trips - with many published poems, two chapbooks, and one full-length book of poetry. She now lives and writes in Eugene, Oregon.She says many things motivate her to write: a mood, a memory, the smell of cooking, burning leaves, a windy day, rain, fog, something observed or overheard - and of course, imagination. She has a pin that says, "I Make Things Up.

In Tarzan's Jungle Plane, Michael Malan interrogates the world, and exposes its wonders and absurdities with an elastic imagination, and a quizzical, mordant wit. These are prose poems of great tensile strength-they hold firm even against the most mind-bending jump-cuts, psychic jolts, and astonishing events. Malan recognizes that the miraculous and the humdrum are simply two sides of the same coin, and as he makes clear in the title poem, he's not afraid to "let the monkey fly the plane.Michael Malan is the author of Overland Park (Blue Light Press, 2017), a collection of poetry and flash fiction. His work has appeared in Epoch, Cincinnati Review, Tampa Review, Washington Square, Grist, Denver Quarterly, Poetry East, and many other journals. He is the editor of Cloudbank, a literary journal published in Corvallis,¿Oregon.

Sky, trees, water, birds: though nature appears everywhere in Ballentine's work, it rarely does so for its own sake. It is more symbolic of internal or external struggle, development, and thought rather than "pretty" detail. The poems in The Light Tears Loose move from illustrations of light into dark - then darker -territory before it morphs back to light. Past and present circumstances often feel overwhelming, but it is in seeking that "silver lining" that we find reason to move forward, to keep going when the way seems vague or threatening. Our fear in living does not keep us from experiencing love and beauty, friendship and brightness along the way. As witnesses in the world, by connecting with nature, we can indulge ourselves with rest and renewal because we see it happen day after day, season after season. Darkness and winter come to us all but so do sunshine and spring. This is what we hold on to, even when the shadows creep so close we can't breathe. Keep moving forward: on the other side is the light.

Nothing Is Ever One Thing is a Master Class in flash fiction. These elegant stories shine a slanted light on the high wire act of human existence with a unique blend of pathos and grit. Robert Scotellaro's microfictions are breathtaking little epiphanies.Robert Scotellaro has published widely in national and international books, journals and anthologies, including W.W. Norton's Flash Fiction International, NANO Fiction, Gargoyle, New Flash Fiction Review, Matter Press, and many others. Two of his stories were included in Best Small Fictions (2016 and 2017). He is the author of seven literary chapbooks, several books for children, and three full-length story collections: Measuring the Distance, What We Know So Far (winner of The 2015 Blue Light Book Award), and Bad Motel.

The poems in Unhinged open wide the doors between love and loss, past and present, life and death. Charde teaches us that to study any subject is to reckon with its opposite: how she can choose the commitment of marriage, while wanting "to keep moving"; how she honors the loss of her son, a grief that still shouts "like the emperor peonies/ burning red in [her] garden," while also wanting "to lasso [her] life to a more merciful anchor"; how she faces her own mortality, thanking death for giving her "singularity, a kind of dignity" exactly when she is "learning to love the fire" of life. Charde's honesty is disarming: here, grief is not melodramatic but intimate-these poems teach us that to let grief open us we must let it lead us beyond what›s static, standard, or finite. Only then can we claim the hard-earned understanding that "the life [we] have is/ the one worth living in. Sharon Charde is not only a poet. A family therapist, a former shaman-in-training, a volunteer writing teacher to delinquent girls in a residential treatment facility, a minimally competent carpenter and devoted yoga practitioner, she is a veteran of fifty-five years of marriage to the same man. Her life as wife, mother and grandmother informs her poems as well as a memoir that will come out next year. She has been published widely in literary journals, including Poet Lore, Upstreet, Rattle, Calyx and Ping Pong, and has one full-length poetry collection, Branch In His Hand, as well as four prize-winning chapbooks and many award-winning poems. Four Trees From Ponte Sisto, an hour-long radio drama shaped from her poems was broadcast by the BBC in 2012. She currently continues to teach the women's writing retreats she developed twenty-five years ago and has been leading ever since. Charde has been awarded fellowships to The Corporation Of Yaddo, The MacDowell Colony, Virginia Center For The Creative Arts and Vermont Studio Center.

One senses that Kathleen Lynch - in her brilliant, sometimes devastating book - intends her title to be read un-ironically. As in Ingmar Bergman films, the poems cast a light on various darknesses that in their exposures, their witnessing, are the essential cries and whispers of poetry. In "Throes," she says, "The saint flung himself / into a thorn bush to incur / wounds worthy of his joy." Lynch's poems have that kind of complexity, and seem to know "We need a face / to express the hidden / face." When that face is found, as it often is in these poems, it contains a voice, which can make us smile as well as wince at life's absurdities.About the AuthorKathleen Lynch's first book, Hinge, won The Black Zinnias Poetry Book Award. Her chapbooks include How to Build and Owl and Alterations of Rising, both in the Select Poets Series from Small Poetry Press; No Spring Chicken, winner of the White Eagle Coffee Store Press Chapbook Prize; and Kathleen Lynch Greatest Hits: 1985-2001 in the Pudding House Press Greatest Hits Series. Her poem, "Abracadabra", won a 2018 Pushcart Prize. Lynch won the 2019 Genosko Flash Fiction Award first prize. Kathleen lives in Sacramento, California.

In this lovely collection of poems, one could almost refer to them as meditations or contemplations, Martin Willitts, Jr helps us to see time and our relation to it in fresh ways. Present, past, and future create a fresh music. We feel as if we're hearing it for the first time and yet it is also familiar. His work here reminds me of ancient Chinese poets, Tomas Transtromer, and Jean Valentine. A strong book of poems should leave us wanting to return to it again and again. Martin Willitts, Jr's book does that.Martin Willitts Jr. is a retired Librarian living in Syracuse, New York. He is a visual artist of Victorian and Chinese paper cutouts. He was nominated for 15 Pushcart and 13 Best of the Net awards. He provided his hands-on workshop "How to Make Origami Haiku Jumping Frogs" at the 2012 Massachusetts Poetry Festival and the 2015 Amherst Poetry Festival.Winner of the 2012 Big River Poetry Review's William K. Hathaway Award; 2013 Bill Holm Witness Poetry Contest; 2013 "Trees" Poetry Contest; 2014 Broadsided award; 2014 Dylan Thomas International Poetry Contest; Rattle Ekphrastic Challenge, June 2015, Editor's Choice; Rattle Ekphrastic Challenge, Artist's Choice, November 2016, Stephen A. DiBiase Poetry Prize, 2018. He won a Central New York Individual Artist Award and provided "Poetry on The Bus" which had 48 poems in local buses including 20 bi-lingual poems from 7 different languages.

Winner of the 2018 Blue Light Poetry Prize"Christine Vovakes' I Didn't Mean to Forget is homage to love's spectrum of emotions and impact; it is cinema of the heart. At times raw, 'to open your mouth and share, tongue to tongue.' Beautiful, 'for us to smooth the love rumpled-bed.' Tender, 'then, gently cradling me in your strong arms.' Unwavering, 'loving fiercely through the distance.' Transparent, 'a lover as vivid as this fuchsia.' This collection is a transcript for those who have loved, do love, and will want to love again after reading this book. I Didn't Mean to Forget makes 'the heart flutter."'Christine Vovakes, winner of the 2018 Blue Light Poetry Prize, lives in northern California. The Cape Rock, San Pedro River Review, Carrying the Branch: Poets in Search of Peace, Poetry Breakfast, Aethlon Journal of Sports Literature, California Quarterly, JAMA, Eclectica, Boston Literary Magazine, Watershed, Apple Valley Review, Shamrock Haiku Journal and the Marin Poetry Center Anthology are among the publications where her poems have appeared. Her articles and photos have been published in The Washington Post, Christian Science Monitor, Sacramento Bee and San Francisco Chronicle. Her short story won a Patricia Painton Scholarship at the 2005 Paris Writers Workshop.

Green Mountain Zen renders the cycles of the human spirit as it surrenders to the shortest, most shut-down days of winter, keeping the coals of itself aglow, and then opens to celebration as the earth softens, greens, and again offers its abundance. This is a wise book, attentive to the nuances of inner and outer weather in a way that might best be called devotional - patient and deeply respectful. Image by image -Romaine seeds 'the size of a baby's eyelash,' the raindrop 'that lingers/like a diamond in the cup of the lupine's fan-shape leaf'- Demers renders the feel of seasons, much as Chinese painters did through spare, careful brush strokes. This is the perfect book to dream with beside a warm fire, or overlooking a harvest-ready garden while morning sun is still fresh and cool.Michelle Demers holds an MFA in writing from the Vermont College of Fine Arts and teaches poetry and writing at the Community College of Vermont. She also leads her own workshops, First Thoughts Writing Workshops, regionally. Her chapbook Epicenter won the 2006 Blue Light Poetry Prize. Michelle lives and writes in Williston, Vermont, with her brilliant husband and exceptional cat. She is inspired by Vermont's spectacular countryside as well as the deep spiritual questions of life.

Rosalind Brenner, in her fine and brave debut collection, Every Glittering Chimera, takes on the difficulties of loving when the models for such are dysfunctional. These are the poems of a survivor of family life, someone who wishes to 'return memory to its grave,' and in so doing presents the struggles of becoming oneself, a cathartic journey forged by honesty and made beautiful by art.Rosalind Brenner, poet, painter and glass artist, explores the mysterious energies of imagination and memory in her art and in her poems. She expresses her vision through sound, symbol, color, and the wisdom that comes from her deep concern for this planet and other human beings. In her figurative abstract paintings, she often starts with words. They are an invitation into the artwork that emerges as she creates layers of imagery. She is a lover of nature and a fierce supporter of women. Her poetry is lyric and narrative. It is rich with stories and sensory portrayals of her world. She gives clarity to strong feelings about the issues we tackle as we live and grow. The work evolves into strength of statement as well as a field in which to journey. Rosalind grew up in New York City and lived in Heidelberg, Germany for three years. She received her MFA in Creative Writing from Sarah Lawrence College and lives with her artist husband in East Hampton, New York, where they run Art House, their much loved Bed and Breakfast. Rosalind is the mother of two sons, grandmother of three grandsons. She loves to travel and draws inspiration from her visits to the Far East and as much of the world as she can get to. Her previous publications include Omega's Garden, a chapbook; All That's Left, a book of her poems and paintings; and poems in many journals. Rosalind exhibits her paintings in various gallery shows and has glass installations in private, commercial and ecclesiastical venues.

What more could you ask for from this slim volume? The radiance of JP Di Blasi's poetry artfully illuminates new paths through our cares and our human, ongoing struggle with demons to grace. This is the respite of poetry. In a few, a delectable humor reverberates deep within perception. Quietly redemptive.JP DiBlasi is a native New Yorker currently living and writingin the Hudson River town of Ossining. "Au Nom de Pere" was published in Carrying The Branch: Poets in Search of Peace, (Glass Lyre Press, 2017). Her poems have also been published in Chronogram, Poetry Breakfast, and RiverRiver. She is interested in traditional Irish music, attends local music sessions and teaches the bodhrán, the Irish goat skin drum. Friends love her sense of humor.

Reading How to Disappear, I have the sense of someone tearing the past apart and rebuilding with naked raw hands. Claudia Reder is a storyteller and this book is her lyrical gift to us, poems of growing up in the teeming city with the complex women who shaped her-immigrant grandmother and mother whose rich mix of languages turned the struggling young girl into a poet who survives to tell their stories. "The list of ghosts / who, no matter where I wonder, / who I marry, / who as mother, wife and sister, / haunt me still." These full to bursting poems recreate large, unavoidable terrors and the seemingly small but necessary moments of joy that make art an act of love. They constantly go farther, go deeper with language that is wildly alive, informed by erudite and whimsical exuberance. How to Disappear is a splendid book, serious, poetically authentic, spiritually discerning. As I read it, I keep thinking, "This is why I love poetry.Claudia M. Reder is the author of Uncertain Earth (Finishing Line Press) and My Father & Miro (Bright Hill Press). She has received the Charlotte Newberger Poetry Prize from Lilith Magazine, selected by Alicia Ostriker. She has a passion for helping other people tell their stories. She has an M.F.A. from the Iowa Workshop and a Ph.D. in Storytelling from New York University. For many years she was a poet in the Schools on the east coast and has offered many workshops for all ages in creativity. She teaches at California State University at Channel Islands.

The poems that make up Matthew Monte's collection, The Case of the Six-Sided Dream, are a study in love and nature, the temporal world and razor-sharp longings and regrets. The imagery and language makes the reader "greet the fact of this body: bones and sinew in delicious revolt." We have the pleasure of standing with the poet and experiencing his vivid narration, "a crystal palace crowded with flora craning for light." The poems explore subjects of journeys and longing, and finding comfort in the rituals of modern life, all the while showing us the tiny details that make us alive, "litter the ground with spare change, silvery bread crumbs leading to…hope." I was especially entranced by Hitchhiking in Waiatarua, its reflexive form, and smattering on the page, "silt settled puddle-cupped and clean." I'm so excited for his readers to hold such a beauty in their hands.Matthew M. Monte grew up near San Francisco, California and went to the University of Hawaii-Manoa, where he studied botany. His fiction, poetry, book reviews, and essays have appeared in Sidestream, Creosote Journal, Transfer, Ashcan Magazine, The Snackbar Collective, and the Poets 11 Anthologies (2014 and 2016). He lives in San Francisco with his wife and son.His debut collection, The Case of the Six-Sided Dream, won the 2017 Blue Light Poetry Prize.

The poems within A Certain Slant of Light are expertly tuned, perfectly pitched meditations about nature, time, and the seasons - radiant windows of keen observation that rise up from their surface glimmering, and reveal the talents of a disciplined and skilled artist. I was struck by the ease of her voice, the lush use of sonics, and her compassionate wisdom. This is a marvelous book that reveals a sense of wonder, as though the inspired moment has never been before; its illuminations are bright and timeless.Barbara Novack is Writer-in-Residence and member of the English Department at Molloy College. She founded and hosts Poetry Events and Author Afternoons there and, off-campus, presents creative writing programs and workshops. Her recent books include the novel J.W. Valentine, nominated for a Pulitzer Prize and finalist for Pushcart Press Editor's Book Award, full-length poetry collection Something Like Life, and the chapbook Do Houses Dream?, finalist for the Blue Light Press Poetry Prize (2015). She is listed in the Directory of American Poets and Fiction Writers and Who's Who of American Women.

"Who is this Indigo? I read this fine collection of poetry by Indigo Joanne Hotchkiss with excitement. Little did I know that I would be flung into a world full of singing oceans of trees, dark muddy rivers, sunlight on children running down a summer street, listening to piano music in dusty sunlit hallway and hunkered down in a cozy van on a rainy day entwined with a lover. Indigo's poetry moves you on journeys full of singing trees, alders, aspens, redwoods, magnolias. Her poetry is populated with complex lovers, parents, siblings, the suicidal grandfather whose name she bears. She is gentle and kindly in her estimation of these people and of her own frailties. Her journey winds from the sunny lakeside porch of 10 Kendall Avenue along the Susquehanna River, through the wilds of Montana, sturdy Seattle farmers' market, down to majestic Yosemite and urbane Golden Gate Park. She is Indigo, sister to the trees, breathing in the moonlight and exhaling the pure poetry of her soul. Come prepared, gentle reader, the journey begins . . ."Indigo Joanne Hotchkiss was born in Binghamton, New York in 1933. She graduated from Dana Hall School for Girls in 1950. She received a BA in English and minors in art and music from Skidmore College in 1954 and took graduate courses at the University of Washington and San Francisco State University. Her first poem was published in the only Chinese-English newspaper in San Francisco in 1968. A series of poems was published in the same year in the Greek Issue of Hanging Loose. She has had her poems published in San Francisco Magazine, Plexus, Cries of the Spirit - A Celebration of Women's Spirituality (Beacon Press), and The Other Side Of The Postcard (City Lights Foundation). She and Cliff McIntire were the Founding Editors of the Haight Ashbury Literary Journal. She helped launch the Haight Ashbury Soup Kitchen and has been a volunteer for the Bound Together Collective's Prison Literacy Project. She has organized and hosted poetry reading series including ones at the Sleeping Lady Café in Marin County and Café International on Haight Street. She has taught yoga and worked with runaways as a policewoman in Seattle.

Pat Barone's new book of poetry, Your Funny, Funny Face, illuminates the passages of a marriage and its many revelations of desire and mortality. In stunning language, Barone reflects on all the transformations we make as women, partners and mothers. Poignant and wise in the telling of her loss, we see sorrow as one more way to find tenderness and newly recognized wonder. There is a luminous harmony in this couples' voices, but also honesty in their 'backward forward dream'. This is a testament about how one makes a map together with a loved one. A truly beautiful book.Patricia Barone's latest book, Your Funny, Funny Face, Blue Light Press, is her fourth book, third collection of poetry. A previous collection, The Scent of Water is from the same press. New Rivers Press published her first book of poetry, Handmade Paper, and a novella, The Wind. Her poetry and short stories have appeared in anthologies such as Bless Me Father, by Plume/Penguin, and Inspired by Tagore, Birmingham, England, as well as others from Peter Lang, Prentice Merrill, and Wising Up Press. Periodicals include The American Poetry Journal, The Shop (Ireland), Great River Review, Pleiades, Commonweal, The Seattle Review, Visions International, and the Widener Review. She has received a Loft-McKnight Award of Distinction in poetry, a Lake Superior Contemporary Writers Award for a short story, and a Minnesota State Arts Board Career Opportunity Grant for a workshop with the Irish poet Eavan Boland.

Carol has been writing poetry since junior high school, and early adopted a simple use of image and minimalist language, though the sound of a poem and its space on the page is also a part of how she measures the form and flow of expression. She says:I typically write first drafts in pencil; probably because it was the tool I picked up when I learned to write. I was then (and still am) immediately impressed with the feel of the lead against the paper and how the words just seem to magically appear directly from my mind. If color and fragrance are the essence of a rose, a poem is like this. As what one remembers about a rose is the color and fragrance together, so what one remembers of a poem is its essence: the tone, the way sounds flow, the resolution as the idea comes into focus - the image(s) it conjures, the feeling(s) it evokes. Exactly how this happens is (or ought to be) so natural, almost imperceptible, that it is just accepted as being there, framing the message perhaps but not calling undue attention to itself; the form is left rather for after-the-act reflection - or a second reading. … I have begun thinking of my poems as a sort of stream-of-consciousness poetry - from my mind to yours (as Mr. Spock of Star Trek might say), a moment of shared image or insight which might then become your memory, as when breathing in a fragrance and seeing the form and color ignites the spontaneous response: ah! that rose! The author holds a Master of Arts in English (Linguistics), and had a few early haiku and one poem published (under pen names) in the 1970s. More recently her poems have appeared in Sugar Mule (online: #49, 2015) and as a finalist in the Jewish Currents Raynes Poetry Competition anthology Borders and Boundaries (2017). A couple of her poems were selected and translated by Hanyong Jeong and published in a Korean bilingual anthology PoemCafe (2009 and 2014), now sadly discontinued. Concurrent with this latest work, she began a study of Chinese and Korean calligraphy, with a view to understanding the written forms used by the classical poets of China and Korea. The mixing of Chinese and Korean scripts used by scholar-officials beginning in the Joseon dynasty, following the development of a written script linguistically matched to spoken Korean, has been of special interest. Her independent studies subsequently resulted her translating many of these poets, particularly of the Tang dynasty Chinese (c. 700-900), including favorites such as Li Bai, Du Fu, and Bai Juyi, which she has compiled in two 60-poem manuscripts (one bilingual). Her art name, SongLin [ ¿¿ / ¿¿ ] (pronounced Songlim in Korean), used on her latest calligraphy, is also used in her translation work, as appropriate. While a couple of her early collections were recorded with the Library of Congress, this is her first published work.

James Ralston, in his debut collection, delivers with an edgy honesty and complex humor the difficulties of loving and being loved. His poems explore sex and separation, the highs of intimacy with someone that devolve into something lesser, and yet he says, 'Don't think of us as failed or sad./As love drops down into its grave,/finally deep enough,/imagine us as brave at last.' There's a fierce precision like that evident throughout, a poetry that dares and distills, and is exquisitely heard, his ears providing a music that authenticates as it makes us wince with the pleasure of recognition. ABOUT THE AUTHORJames (Jim) Ralston lives on three and a half acres between Rocky Gap Creek and Evitts Creek outside of Cumberland, Maryland, a post-industrial town still trying to find its way forward. This land and this Appalachian town are the settings for most of the Lyrics for a Low Noon. Ralston teaches English and Theatre at Blue Ridge Technical and Community College, Martinsburg, West Virginia. He has also taught at Shepherd University (Shepherdstown, WV), Frostburg State University (Frostburg, MD), and Central Michigan University (Mt. Pleasant, Michigan), with a few other short stops along the way. His publications include The Choice of Emptiness, a series of essays that also works as a novel; The Appalachian Grammar Shop; and, over a span of 35 years, numerous essays and poems in The Sun: A Magazine of Ideas. As well, his work has appeared in various other journals and newspapers, including the Utne Reader and the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. For fifteen years, between 1990 and 2005, he was a regular columnist for the Charleston Gazette, West Virginia's state paper. He has written four plays, acted in some of them, directed some of them, most recently "35 Folds to the Moon" at the New Embassy Theatre in Cumberland and the Apollo Theatre in Martinsburg.