Roxi Power's The Songs That Objects Would Sing is a poetic meditation on transience through the lens of objects people leave behind. C.S. Giscombe writes, "The first line of Roxi Power's incredible burst of poems lays down the law with one hand and sets things in motion with another-that is, she writes, as if to remark on the coming noise made by fire, death, love, 'A roll of presence infiltrated by scratch and origin.'" Power's elegies and ecopoems reconstruct new linguistic meeting grounds for ancestors, where impermanence elicits both grief and joy. Through call and response improvisations, Power invokes Miles Davis' "Saeta," Patti Smith's "strange music," and the impossibility of Cage's silence, as counterbalances to forgetting: "frottage rubbed back into likeness enough to help us see what is no longer there."
Starter Mothers courts the possibility of extinction and the tenacity of the life-force, both biologically and emotionally. The fullness of life-art, religion, nature, grief, fertility, and the resilience of the human spirit-is on display in these oftentimes spiritual poems that are written with humor, compassion, and moral outrage. Along the way, you will meet spiders, queen bees, rabbis, rabble-rousers-and yes, even starter mothers.The title poem received an award from Oberon Poetry Magazine.
Kris Whorton's Alchemy invites us into the world of stillness and movement, the personal and the physical, as she explores the body, family, and nature and the complex relationship between the elements. The body is scarred and needy, nature is a place of wonder and transformation and the speakers in these poems immerse themselves in wilderness and wildness again and again. There they discover the mystery that is this very physical world. Each poem is a part of the journey, ever-questioning, ever-evolving from family and lovers, from the loss of self to something more beautifully complete.
The Hatchet Sun is about leaving home, the darkness of Pittsburgh, and finding home in the light of Tampa, when...heat becomes the only lover to hold, the only weight that feels familiar (Sarah Kay). There is a clarity in exile, a chance for reincarnation. This is a collection of poems about rain and water, about lizards and alligators, about old love and new love, about time and grief, and death; about aging and climate change, about Cormants, Muscovy, mermaids and millepedes, about a wolf who has lost her pack.
In Its Own Time is a collection of poems that looks at how time is a critical element in the alignment of factors that determine when and how events occur. Whether in an ICU unit, at the entrance to a swimming pool, in the muddle at a yard sale, or on the banks of a river bed, these poems examine the nuances of events that could easily go unnoticed.
"For in our youth, we know everything...except what it is like to become aged, when no one cares what we knew in our youth." This self-evident truth - this "aha!" moment - is a sentiment illustrated throughout the pages of Grace Notes from a Bohemian in Wanderlust, where each poem embodies a quest for truths - in aging, in Nature, in life, and in death. From queen bees and martyrs who stare down the devil, to bird gods who drink from the land of milk and honey while flitting under the guise of a silver slipper of a moon, the thrill of the "aha!" moments in Grace Notes are sublimely transfigured onto the mind of the reader.
LOW-HANGING FRUIT is an archaeological dig deep into the realm of an aging woman's memory. At times, the narrators of these poems may embellish or be guilty of "retrospective distortion"-yet, they strive to tell her truth. Truth: nostalgia for a coming of age during a time of growing injustice and violence; the bullying of the defenseless and the different; the warping effects of religion. Artifacts of joy, loss and love are exhumed in poems on a range of topics: racism, suicide, obsessive (and unattainable) love and encroaching change on a farm community.Historical figures and a succession of animals also populate this collection. To renew their acquaintance, to learn their lessons, requires that once again, they be brought to life.
A thrift store, a blue heron, a deceased bobcat: the poems in New Lebanon subject the upstate New York town to microscopic, idiosyncratic scrutiny.Because its abundant cedars reminded them of the famed Biblical Lebanon, people who were steeped in Scripture gave the town its name more than 200 years ago, adding that "New" as a hope for, and acknowledgement of, the town's future.In the same way, many of the poems here attempt to locate the town within the meeting of its past with its possibilities, a confluence like the joining of State Routes 20 and 22, which flow as one road through the center of town.
In his collection Vacationland, Michael Bross takes the audience on a tour that spans decades, recalling memories such as his daughter mimicking animals or his father's physical decline. After all, seated in a "beached boat at world's end," what else is there to do but look back? Bross demonstrates the importance of this reflection, even when-perhaps, especially when-it hurts like hell. Having seen this book in several iterations, I'm excited to soon see it out in the world!-Michelle Greco, author of Field Guide to Fire"So let's pretend this all happened". Let's pretend our father had AIDS in Disneyland. Let's pretend our Rush mixtape is playing in the 90s while our child "needed to touch everything" in Liberty Science Center and "my autopsy's in the sand without witness". And maybe we don't need to pretend. Michael Bross brings us there, let's us into his memory and his family and his fantasies not hiding the hurt or the fear. Vacationland is a powerful work that opens up over and over seeking a way or a place to be a family the right way.-Fletch Fletcher, author of Existing ScienceMichael Bross's Vacationland collects memories of family vacations and excavates how these trips, swept "clean into picture frames," are evidence of vacated life. Vacationland maps mourning in multiple layers: mourning a father lost to AIDS and then to death, mourning that "dying ... is what we do / on vacation," mourning how "answers murder the boundaries / of ourselves inch by inch into smaller universes," mourning a boyhood lost to the apparent invulnerability of photographs. In some ways, Vacationland is an exploration of the lie of invulnerability and, by extension, the poison of toxic masculinity. But Bross also offers us a subtle counternarrative of hope, found in a deeply connected marriage to his spouse Adrienne, a profound and tender love for his daughter Ariadne, and a comfort, however hard won, that though "paradise is a race run in circles," as he writes in the book's opening poem, healing can be found in looking closely at the lies in our lives to find essential truths: even in snapshots, and definitely through poetry.-Darla Himeles, author of Cleave
The long poem VIEW-MASTER LAND is about the poet's struggle to come to terms with the loss of his wife Lenora and the profound changes to his life that her death has brought. It's also about celebrating companionship and hope with his new love, Mary. It's about how technology like the BlackBerry, which seemed so wondrous when it was first introduced, is now defunct, a relic of the past. It's about the act of seeing, and how that evolves and gains depth as we get older. Bialer shares his memories of the View-Master toy he grew up with and how magical it was to view his favorite childhood TV shows in three dimensions on a special-format stereoscope and corresponding "reels," which are thin cardboard disks. There was even an attempt to bring the View-Master back in cutting-edge VR technology, but that too failed, underscoring its obsolescence. VIEW-MASTER LAND is about how our perception is enhanced as we go through life, and how the most ordinary can become extraordinary.
M. G. Stephens considers our physical world and its health as portrayed by our own relationship to birds and their well-being. Here the birds are bellwethers of the Earth's and our own human survival. But mostly these poems are about that most human of emotions-love-in all its permutations. This poet is not afraid to be lyrical and to love; in fact, he sees the lyrical impulse as poetry's most natural expression, just as love is the most creative and expressive part of our very humanness. Nowhere is this writer more in love with the music of our natural world than when he is observing the birds which inhabit and share that space with us.
Juxtaposing elements, forms, and voices, the poems in Matrimonies offer vignettes and perspectives on what "wedded" can mean."wry, agile, and deeply felt poems" - "images flow, glow, and linger long after reading" - 'a new aural dimension that is not enjoyed in most current poetry"
Home is Not Lost could be considered a chronological description of a life. The author has arranged her poems to indicate the various stages and ways of dealing with or ways of experiencing life. Some poems are joyful, or playful, some are not. They are all as truthful as she could make them.
In Mike Dillon's Close Enough, luminous scenes from a lifetime unfold through poetry and prose in a pilgrim's progress toward an I-Thou relationship with the world. The introductory poem, Kyoto, echoing the Japanese haiku master Basho, sets the tone: to stand in the heart of Kyoto/longing for Kyoto. Born in 1950, Dillon grew up with his father's silent legacy of combat in World War II. In the prose passage, Vietnam, he waits for the school bus with the other kids when an older boy, doomed to die in Vietnam, pulls a prank that thrills them all. And then: The school bus neared. The brakes scritched. The yellow door buckled open. And we all boarded for the same destination. For a little while longer. Against the backdrop of history, comes the author's personal search for the crossroads of time and eternity, where the there's a light "that carries/an unbroken thread./As it was. And is.Close Enough carries forward the resonant themes from Dillon's 2021 chapbook, The Return, from Finishing Line Press. British reviewer Matthew Paul, writing of The Return in Sphinx, noted that Dillon "seems to be seeking a silence just out of reach, bearing the influences of haiku, tanka, Chinese poetry and the likes of Snyder and Rexroth. At his sparest, his poetry takes on a rare limpidity worthy of those influences.
Sherrie Fernandez-Williams's starkly honest Goddess of the Whole Self is a defiant and raw portrait of the woman's experience from body image to insomnia to middle age. Lyrical and intelligent, the poems in this collection serve as a fiercely feminist tribute to the women who came before and the women we were before. Fernandez-Williams mines history-both personal and political-to represent a life lived and living.-Anika Fajardo Author of Magical Realism for Non-Believers: A Memoir of Finding FamilyLiberation Theology: The Remembrance of Sister June (June Jordan) reignited my love for her! Having been reduced like soup stock, I know Juanita. Paying homage to black woman sisterhood derived from Ancestral inspiration is like food for the soul and now I know that tea is an answer! Poet, Sherrie Fernandez-Williams, thank you for the freedom to recognize and honor the Goddess of my Whole Self!. -Lissa Jones, Culture Coach. Podcaster. Public Speaker. Host of Black Market Reads, podcast and Urban Agenda, KMOJ MinneapolisGoddess of the Whole Self is a celebration of a divine feminine that bridges the wonders and the wounds of womanhood. Here, Sherrie Fernandez-Williams explores embodied geographies with fertile Black grounds where ancestral stories, stories that survey "the ground where they once stood" share space and time with poems that measure "the distance between selves." At once deeply relational and autobiographical, her writing is salted with the sweat of real being and layered with homegrown love.-Arleta Little, Poet and writer, Executive Director of the Loft Literary Center in Minneapolis, co-author of Hope in the Struggle, a memoir written about the life of Josie Johnson in collaboration with the Minnesots civil rights leader, and writer, Carolyn Holbrook
Turbulence in Small Spaces is a collection written for and about women. The poems explore love, loss, heartbreak, healing, and getting older. Dealing with toxic relationships, violence against women, and family dynamics, they confront the expectations placed on women and examine the challenges that aging brings. Ultimately, these poems offer the hope that wherever you experience turbulence-whether it be in a supermarket, at home, or in your mental health-you can grow, heal, and gain wisdom from having survived.
Nathalie E. Amazan's first chapbook "Still" is an intimate poetry collection that explores themes of spirituality, liberation, and resilience in the struggles of justice. It is a manifesto of perseverance through personal and societal adversities for the pursuit of peace. As such, this body of work is not only a declaration of faith in the attainment of peace and justice, but also a means for others to find inspiration and empowerment within it for their own life journey. While in peace we embrace stillness and for peace, we embrace it the same. May this body of work lead you to the stillness within for the benefit of ourselves and this world.
The poems of Julie Taylor burn indelibly on the retina of the soul-you can't but see and feel their fire long after the page has been turned, the book put down. From the wonders of the natural world, it's rhythms, beauties, deaths; to the heat of bodies in desire and the death of her partner by fire; and the shards of grief held in fragments of the body, Taylor shows us, poem after poem, in rich spare language (like the loam of earth) how what breaks regenerates and "how flesh and fire are human."-Alison GranucciIn What We Keep Within The Living, Julie Taylor brings us a clear poetic voice that speaks a ravishingly lush language of precise emotion. We enter her story "Remembering Roses" in which she momentarily dwells on a tattoo on her deceased lover's shoulder. In a deft turn, now in a rose garden, reaching for the transcendent, she sees "how ants decorate the dead." Or later, in a poem that makes clear her lover died in a fire, she ends with, "burns these words and this song,/ the rooster crowing another dawn." Such turns of hope and optimism populate this book that breathes with life, breathes life into mourning, and language into life.-Owen LewisTrauma and beauty, love and horror have been the subject of great poetry since the early Greeks. Julie Taylor raises it out of myth into reality transforming the line, the image and the general thrust of this book into great art. Who is this poet and why haven't we heard from her before? A useless question, if there ever was one. She's here now and it's not going to stop. This well is deep; this art is fully mature. Expect more!-Fran Quinn
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