"A magic carpet ride, not like anything else around." -Grace Cavalieri, The Washington Independent Review of Books
"A vivid self-portrait as scholar, seer and muse." -John Ashbery
"In this bilingual edition of her poems Hélène Cardona is our contemporary ecstatic, time-traveler, and shape-shifter. Behind the dreamlike atmosphere of her poems lies a fierce will to discover beauty, to resurrect ancient enchantments, and to defend enigmas of the spirit. "I like transforming into an animal, / devouring who I was," she writes. Her luminous poems celebrate the imagination's power to dignify and exalt our highest yearnings."-Lee Upton
"A tour de force of language and phonetics; a deeply felt and deeply spiritual collection which explores the universal human experience from a very personal point of view. This is intimate poetry, and yet it transcends the mundane through its lyricism and its glory in language. Hélène Cardona's pen moves from the human to the divine and back in a single sentence, and the result is uplifting and magical." -Joanne Harris
Scattered Cranes is a bit of an elegy to time spent rodeoing, roughnecking and construction work on bridges across bodies of water large and small in those areas of America that the coastal bound fly over, barely registering the beauty of the farmland patterns and jungles below. Then clouds form a protective layer. There is no protective layer in Scattered Cranes. Some of it is down and dirty, while other passages are dreamlike and aspirational, with a thread of humor. And where there is humor, there is optimism. As the foreword says, it's like rodeo, you're out there with your try. Scattered Cranes is a bustling, dusty arena for Wise's try. Enjoy it.
Persona Non Grata is the first full length collection of poetry and spoken word performance pieces from nationally recognized slam poet Christopher Michael. Christopher has been on a great many national slam teams over the years, successfully competing on several national, state and city finals stages, and winning such achievements such as 2nd individual in the nation at the National Poetry Slam (NPS), multiple top three finishes in NPS team and group categories, placing 2nd individually at the state-level in the 2014 Texas Grand Slam as well as being the 2011 Arkansas Grand Slam Champ. This collection includes poems on a variety of topics, with a special emphasis on persona poems. This work includes such well known pieces as Adam, Job, Gone, Seeds, mystery, Dear Beard, 3 Straws, Mr. Bullet Takes a Holiday, Crackhead Poet and many many more.
Poems "funny, stark, spot-on and utterly beautiful" comprise her collection, OUR FOREIGNER, "a brilliant and dark comedy." This is Betsy Sholl's apt description for the poetry of Nance Van Winckel, one of the Northwest's foremost poets and writers, and her latest release—from The Pacific Coast Poetry Series/Beyond Baroque Books. Van Winckel's own relatives traveled west enduring the hardship and tests of character that confronted those who made such treks in the 1800's. OUR FOREIGNER explores, among other conditions and anomalies, ideas of journey, progress and regress, travel both physical and psychological. A variety of voices populate this collection, speakers from the past, or bright, sassy, contemporary folks talking as if all they have to do is open their mouths and out flies poetry. They manage, these poems, to be at once plain-speaking and brainy, lucid and deeply mysterious.
Gallery includes fiction, essay, poetry, original and vintage photography. Gallery is an exhibition to explore life's journey and its encounters of all kinds along the way. The intention is to echo the energy of life and living in its myriad manifestations and the book consciously uses a bold literary architecture in the attempt. For much more insight and inside information about the book and its content visit the author's website howarddebs.com/
What they're saying about his work...
"as always seems to be the case with your poems, I learned something in reading this that I hadn't known about." --Tim Green, Editor Rattle
"You really captured the essence of the blues in this poem. It made me want to run to my mother's house and play the records she kept on the bookshelf in her living room"--Nortina Simmons, Editor Sediments Literary-Arts Journal
"a powerful lesson about the poetry of bearing witness." -- Greenwood Writer's Guild
" 'Terezin' is terrific." --Daniel Menaker, writer and editor, former Executive Editor-in-Chief, Random House
Lee Pennington has published 20 books, most of them poetry, as he is a Poet Laureate of Kentucky. This new book, with new poems written since 2011, is filled with the wonder of love and admiration for his lover. His words shine with light and drip with eroticism. The illustrations by Jill Baker bring out the visual in his words, adding to and complementing the overall intimacy of this small treasure of a book.
Dates and Dreams is a collection of over a hundred prose poems, all originally published in literary magazines and quarterlies from England, Austria, Canada, Germany, China, Australia, India, and America; from Oxford Poetry, Poetry Salzburg Review, The North American Review, to Envoi, The Outrider and the University of Windsor Review, among many others. Dates and Dreams also includes a generous selection of Schorb's unique drawings and an introduction by X.J. Kennedy.
As soldiers who have just returned from war, we fight a separate war daily in an attempt to leave the war behind. Many soldiers, just like myself, come home from war only to fight a separate internal battle, with debilitating illnesses such as post traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and depression. It was important for me to share my story not only for myself but for those who have fought, for those who have fallen, and for those who continue to wage war in order for the United States of America to continue to remain free. The price of freedom is not free. War is chaos, and many soldiers bear the scars from it for the rest of our lives.
Have you ever loved, been loved, been confused about love, or suffered from loss of love? All these feelings have been captured and shared in the words of heartfelt poems, compiled over many years by a former teacher and award-winning author.
Sherrill S. Cannon now shares her thoughts in this book of feelings. "As a teacher, I used poetry to help counsel many troubled teens and friends, and have continued this pattern throughout the years."
There are three sections in her book: Heads, Spinning, and Tails ... (Love & Loss: Coin Toss?). The variety of lyrical poetry forms include free verse, blank verse, haiku, and sonnets. Some poems are simply plays on words.
"Here, Margo Berdeshevsky offers us vast interiorities—sensuous, erotic, complexly feminine. These poems may be distinguished for their musical intricacy and formal variation, but they are also profoundly moving, their speakers subsumed in memory, the constant presence of their bodies, the certainty mortality, and the intrusive violence of the worlds they inhabit. This is a marvelous, deeply humane collection—one I will return to with pleasure." —Kevin Prufer
"Before the Drought is a lyric meditation on corporeal existence, suffused with atavistic spirit and set in historical as well as cosmic time , a work of radical suffering and human indifference but also sensual transport. The tutelary spirits of these poems are the feminine principle, and a flock of messengers that include blue heron, ibis, phoenix, egret, and blood’s hummingbird. In the surround we find ourselves in the magical world of a floating balcony, and a field of cellos, but it is a world in peril, now and in the time to come, on the night of the Paris massacres and in a poisoned future. In the City of Light, Berdeshevsky writes poems commensurate with her vision, poems that know to ask How close is death, how near is God? Hers is a book to read at the precipice on which we stand." —Carolyn Forché
Poetry. "A brandishment of insouciant play, Jeanette Marie Clough's FLOURISH is a 'bold or extravagant gesture or action' from start to finish. Luring us with the name of a 'thing' we think we know and a slant first line, even the table of contents is refreshing. And yes, there is narrative—an explosive, subterranean one—but what is so distinctive is the wholly unusual method by which it is deployed: like hot post-modern pancakes on a platter. You can eat in any order, pile on several at a time—you can even shuffle them. Think of them as thing poems, part definition / riddle / koan. That dictionary you didn't know you needed: it's this one. With sly humor and casual self- mockery, line by playful/deadly line, Clough redefines the upended world as it has redefined her. Even within the sprawl of a sometimes-harrowing emotional arc, the poems pop with wild originality and bracing joy. I cannot get enough of them."—Sarah Maclay
Recently nominated for a Pushcart Prize, "Laura Mazza-Dixon's Forged by Joy is a test of light against time, from innocence to loss, a spiritual autobiography seen first through a girl's eyes that behold wonder in everything, including stones - 'sea-polished ovals, green trapezoids laced with gold' - and forged through a life of art and love and loss, arriving at the question, 'Can joy weigh more than grief?' These are graceful, softly cadenced poems of belief carried against the final darkness we all face." Doug Anderson, poet and author of Blues for Unemployed Secret Police
Because Sarah Glaz sees "a streak of mathematics in almost everything," this book of poems is a work of alchemy. Light rays in the sky, lines of gold, become x and y axes. The square root of 2 becomes a symbol of the irrationality that drove her family from Romania to Israel. Small stones stand for the calculus (in Latin) and the integral sign is a snake (in Leibnizian). The transcendental number e covers three pages laced with equations, first appearing as a pirate, then Euler's namesake, then a peacock's tail and finally a poetic star. Logic proves its own inability to prove with cymbals and umlauts. The precious fruit of labor is both a baby and a theorem, depending. The fabric of the universe is algebraic; lemmas are blue, corollaries orange, theorems purple. The poet's backpack is full of theorems, and commutative rings grow in her garden instead of weeds. A ghazal utters a gazelle, water becomes wavelets, and sunshine weaves the Golden Ratio into everything it covers. Train tracks converge at infinity, defying Euclid's Fifth Postulate. Don't miss these transformations! -Emily Grosholz, Edwin Erle Sparks Professor of Philosophy, Pennsylvania State University; author of The Stars of Earth, New and Selected Poems.
Poems and drawings from our shared human experience that will make you laugh and cry and wonder. You’ll meet messy children, distracted soccer moms, condescending doctors and turbulent teens, while exploring themes of love and loss, teeth whitening, flatulence, hopeless clutter, the perfect recliner, and the annoying habits of other people. You’ll also enjoy the funky punctuation, sarcasm, hyperbole and rhyme—complete with humorous twists, tender moments and surprise endings.
Warning: Do not upset the author, or you may end up as the subject of her next poem!
Poetry. ANGLE OF REFLECTION features the work of ten award–winning Los Angeles poets with a remarkable 20–year history of working together. This luminous collection is both a sampler and a reservoir, capturing poems that serve as an entrée and retrospective as well as a showcase of current work. Perhaps the only umbrella term to categorize the poems here is lyric, though each poet's section offers an individual interpretation and definition. However, there is nothing fragmented about the way this anthology flows. Because of, and despite, the differences in these poets' singular voices, their poems carry on complex conversations across sections—correspondences that invite the reader to engage with the contrasts and similarities, themes and images. With an Introduction by esteemed poet David St. John, with whom some in the group worked weekly for many years, ANGLE OF REFLECTION is a celebration of community, collaboration, and the joy of poetic diversity.
Contributors include Marjorie Becker, Jeanette Clough, Dina Hardy, Paul Lieber, Sarah Maclay, Holaday Mason, Jim Natal, Jan Wesley, Brenda Yates, and Mariano Zaro.
