Dikter

Poet J. R. Solonche adds God to his impressive list of published poetry collections. Nominated for the National Book Award, the Eric Hoffer Book Award, and nominated three times for the Pulitzer Prize, J. R. Solonche is the author of thirty-six books of poetry and coauthor of another.

Between shadows and memory, one woman's diary elucidates relationships come and gone, those who helped shape who she is from the inside out. Turning the rain into something beautiful, the opening petals of a rose now blooming. Veteran poet Braeden Michaels crafts his seventh collection of poetry into a mold of vision. Like pages from a twisted fairy tale, he narrates using his unique poetic style and perspective, first dissecting emotion before reconstructing and re-imagining each one.

This book is presented as a unique means of tracing Biblical history, counsel, and life challenges, highlighting their spiritual significance for today. The reader is taken on a journey from Genesis to Revelation as the entire scope of the major themes of the Old and New Testaments are encountered. The poems introduce, in turn, the Bible's main characters and their stories, their messages, related events, and their impact on daily life.A brief commentary relating to textual information introduces each poem, so they can be used as a guide to Bible study, both personal or in small group settings.THE PSALMS relate to the original modes of Hebrew poetry but here transposed into the rhyme and rhythms of modern poetic genres.THE SONGS have been drawn from selected Scriptural prose which is of such depth, meaning, and current value, that its theme resonates in the soul. All the poems are supplied with a suggested traditional hymn tune so that they may be sung in a Church setting, for example, to support the Biblical theme of the day.

My name is LaDonna Akens-Elam. I am 64 years old and I had a stroke 7 years ago. At that time I could not read or write. I have what is called Aphasia. Through speech therapy, much practice, and great friends who taught me about poetry, I am learning to put my words back together.My dad, my family, and church really helped me keep going. I hope this book can help someone find their words as well.I live in Lubbock, Texas for two of my grown children and their families. The other two children live in other states with their families. I went to high school at Rantoul Illinois. Later in life, I went to South Plains College in Levelland, Texas. I began to learn about psychology and sociology. Then I got this wonderful job working for the Chapter 13 Trustee in Lubbock, and I stayed there until I had my stroke, and I was made to retire. I love reading poetry on zoom with friends; I do music on Zoom as well. I love to crochet and read my Bible.

Angels and demons. Heaven and Hell. Faith and doubt. Wolves in sheep's clothing. Cycles of abuse and control that cause us to deny our own intuition. HER EXODUS, a collection of dark poetry and prose, takes the reader through the four seasons of one woman's deconstruction journey. As a child, religion taught her to fear damnation and death. As an adolescent, religion taught her to be pure and perfect. As an adult, she recognized the corruption of the church and its leaders, and began asking questions. Follow along as she uncovers her truth. From hiding to healing. From faith to freedom. From needing a savior to saving herself. "... a bold, brave confessional of her journey from a childhood of Catholicism, to young adulthood in an evangelical church, to finally breaking free from the binds of a toxic faith and finding her voice." -Stephanie Parent, author of Every Poem a Potion, Every Song a Spell"A visceral journey out of the hells religion can bring...This is the only religious experience I care to have." -Jessica McHugh, 2x Bram Stoker Award-nominated author of The Quiet Ways I Destroy You"Visceral, haunting, and defiant, Her Exodus collection of deconstruction poetry is a light in the dark for anyone cast into the harrowing realm of religious trauma and uncertainty." -Grace R. Reynolds, author of The Lies We Weave and Lady of The House

"sun eater is a reminder from dre levant to bathe in sunlight like a cat on a porch. levant manages to weave light, love, hope, and the thread of darker times, into a blanket he wraps you in. sun eater is the optimistic voice of a resilient veteran of the past telling you that it's okay to go outside and play. levant's technical brilliance shines through in the tender verses, breathtakingly honest and heartbreakingly hopeful. levant asks if you can bottle the sun, and then offers you a drink of celestial forever. The warmth of levant's light is felt in every line, and it feels like summer." -Ozzy Welch, author of Toothache (Kith Books '24) and D.I.Y. BUTCH (Backroom Poetry, '23)

Kenneth Johnson's Molten Muse crackles with the electricity of nostalgia. In each poem you find yourself in places forgotten: seeing the ocean for the first time, under the gaze of your first crush, lounging in cool grass to look up at stars or clouds while identifying shapes, the pounding of your heart as your race through the sprinkler in your front yard, bathing suit plastered to skin. You find yourself wanting things: the smell of coffee in your childhood kitchen, the taste of your mom's pancakes, that very particular sense of time standing still. I'm warning you now, this is what will happen when you open Johnson's collection, you'll become feverish, begin desiring things you'd long forgotten.-Shilo Niziolek is the author of Fever and atrophy

Blue Chip Stamp Guitar is a love story-about Sue and her guitar It starts with a cheap guitar the poet's mother bought with Blue Chip stamps and continues through her life, outlasting jobs, marriages, and deaths. A guitar is just a wooden box with six strings strung from one end to another, but in the musician's hands, it becomes music and magic, companion and comfort. These backstage poems describe the teenager dreaming of fame, the young adult dealing with sex and stage fright, and the seasoned performer lugging gear and singing through bad weather, hecklers, sore throats and sore fingers. At the beginning and the end, she plays alone, feeling the calluses on her fingertips as she sends music into the air. These poems will appeal to all music lovers, especially the musicians who share that special bond with their instruments."There is no pretention or affectation in this work, just solid storytelling, and poetic craft at its best. Here is a rich life, bittersweet, at times vulnerable yet underneath is a quality of humility with fierce independence in the life and the poetry."--Dave Mehler, editor of Triggerfish Critical Review, author of Roadworthy"This collection takes the reader into the 'raw, unpolished edges, dust, and glue, /the underbelly of a cathedral, ' of a life lived in pursuit of music and love finally found in Fred, the husband/roadie to whom the book is dedicated. By the end of this intimate collection, you'll be singing, 'Let's play another memory.'"--Lacie Semenovich, author of Community, Not Market, and Legacies

Finalist in The Poetry Box Chapbook Prize, 2023The poems in The Further Adventures of Zen Patriarch Dōgen were inspired by the life and teachings of Dōgen Zenji, a thirteenth-century Japanese monk credited with bringing Chan Buddhism to Japan and founding the Sōto school of Zen. The writing is founded upon the presumed experience and perspective Dōgen would have if he were alive today. Essential Buddhist concepts of bare attention, full presence, impermanence, no-self, and the path to liberation from suffering play out through the "eyes of a river" - in a self-driving car, a dentist's chair, the water's edge, the contemplation of circularity. In a world of bare attention and full presence, there are no words; inherent in these poems is the paradox of attempting to express this experience through the medium of language."The Further Adventures of Zen Patriarch Dōgen elucidates the intricacies of Zen philosophy in poems spare as 'a winterbreath of silence' and lush as 'the rhythm/ of hands, / gullwing, / flutter/ of beachplum/ blossoms.' Reader, you will find here wisdom, and its sister, compassion." --Gillian Cummings, author of The Owl Was a Baker's Daughter "The poet holds moments of life in his open hands, sings them and lifts them beyond words, bringing me to deepest stillness. I treasure this unique book and shall keep it close to my meditation seat and my heart." --Judith S. Schmidt, Ph.D, author of In the Garden of Love and Loss"Nouns fall upon us like snowflakes and melt away. A slow and attentive reading of this spare collection offers a taste of the continuity of motion found in stillness-an endless becoming that moves inevitably like cormorants to chum." --Kathryn Weld, author of Waking Light "In poems both playful and profound, Zimmerman taps into the beauty, strangeness, difficulty, and promise of the meditative life. I thought about these poems long after reading them." --Lynn Schmeidler, author of History of Gone

These poems are a meditation on the myriad divisions and inequities we face, both personally and as a society. In Disconnects and Other Broken Threads, award-winning poet Emily-Sue Sloane pulls on many of the fraying threads that divide us and gently weaves them with striking imagery to inspire connections through hope and, at times, humor.------------------"Like a gardener cultivating a bonsai tree, Emily-Sue Sloane takes big, wild concepts like mortality, impotent rage, grief and regret and presents them to us as stark small snapshots of everyday life." -Rorie Kelly, singer/songwriter, Shadow Work "Sloane sees, feels, and speaks with an honesty that will not accept the glib comfort of pretense....[She] suggests again and again, with rage, regret, humor, irony and anger: This is what it takes to be alive." -Scudder Parker, poet and author of Safe as Lightning "Indignant of social injustices, she deconstructs the makeup of contemporary life, giving a thundering voice to the voiceless." -Tonia Leon, bilingual poet and translator, author of My Beloved Chaos

These delightful and conversational poems explore the concept of gOD, with a sense of humor, a childlike wonder, a reverence for the natural world, and an honest look in the mirror."Penelope Scambly Schott has captured a marvelously witty glimpse of the divinity that resides within us all: a self-awareness creating universes and loving every tiniest bit, laughing and crying over our human foibles and destructive tendencies. With brilliant use of poetic form and license, the author invites us to really examine our understanding of the Source of all and the consequences of our own actions. This is a must-read for anyone who is at one of those points of asking, "What's it all about, anyway?"-Reverend Dr. Ruth L. Miller, author of Unveiling your Hidden Power and Uncommon Prayer"Penelope Scambly Schott spins out a powerful picture of the Deity in gOD: A Respectfully Divergent Testament. The "whole other" mystery who creates the universe turns out to be totally relatable, showing up in a series of conversational poems, revealing a deep caring about all of creation and its creatures. Schott's testimony is indeed respectful and not so divergent that I can't give it my own respectful 'Amen!'"-Karl Vercouteren, United Church of Christ pastor, retired

While the poems in this collection are inspired by the story of Fievel Mousekewitz, the cartoon mouse of the author's childhood, they are gut-wrenching in their examination of the American dream. Fievel's family history-and the author's-is one of a Jewish family immigrating from the Old World to the New and eventually being pulled across the plains: "When migrant boys looked west in leather hats, their slang pierced with Polish accents." Even though "tomorrow is made of rocks and time; is the draft that sweeps sleepily through the fallen branches," it is also where immigrants "watch their dreams decompose on plywood" as they search "for whatever it is that makes men free."Using the story of Fievel, Burt plays masterfully with the ambivalence of hope and cynicism, as if he had traversed the ocean and the continent westwards himself: "I am the hope that has not been forgotten, because I declare myself welcome here, as if there is nothing in history I will not make mine."

The Heartbeat of the Universe collects poems from the top writers in the science fiction and literary genres, including voices such as Jane Yolen, Bruce Boston, Robert Frazier, Jessy Randall, and many others. These poems, selected by editor Emily Hockaday from the pages of Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine and Analog Science Fiction and Fact over the past decade, examine the Universe's smallest particles and largest astral phenomena. These poems travel through time, speak to and from the dead, explore the body and quantum physics, all depicting the human condition and allowing readers to learn more about their universe and themselves.

Every 4 years we will leap into 29 pomes with punk jazz poet Paul Grimsley. Written in that strange interstice that is the 29th, this is the first of many volumes of lyrical and instant pomes that reflect the writer's thoughts and his place in the world.

PROVOCATIONS explores arguments about literary and spiritual Creations, through definitions of selves and others, and the self with others. Questions of resistance and transcendence, both internal and interpersonal, and to the "facts" of our existence are addressed throughout. Questions about mortality are the convergent points, ultimately, of the 'provocations' in the self-questioning that is the central thrust of the text.

CONTINUED CASES is a collection of poems satirical, social, and political. A sequel to Hague's Public Hearings (Word Press, 2009) it was written partly in response to the 45th presidency of the United States. It addresses practices, policies, and personalities as well as opines on education, the arts, and the fate of the environment. One of the book's epigraphs is from the 2017 prayer card at the funeral of Wayne Barret, author of Trump: The Greatest Show on Earth: The Deals, the Downfall, the Reinvention. "Our credo must be the exposure of the plunderers, the steerers, the wirepullers, the bosses, the brokers, the campaign givers and takers ... So I say: Stew, percolate, pester, track, burrow, besiege, confront, damage, level, care." In CONTINUED CASES, Hague does his best to offer opposition to the outlandish, the illegal, the inhumane. At the same time, as a native Appalachian from the Ohio Valley steel town declared in the 1970s to have the worst air in the country, he recollects the personal damages of industrial extractive industry. Aware of the agrarian traditions of Jefferson, the democratic, populist appetites of Whitman, and the counter-cultural politics of the Sixties, Hague offers seasoned witness to our times.

is book of poetry deals with grief, growing older, and everyday challenges, while exploring kindness and hope as antidotes for dicult times. e poet uses resonant images to create beauty and evoke determination, perseverance, and moving forward. is honest exploration of both hope and loss provides solace and inspiration for the reader

The Sky's the Limit is George Hole's second book of poems, after Buffalo Dust, published by Buffalo Arts Publishing in 2017. Hole's poetry publications include poems in Cimmaron Review, Rapport, Stone Drum, Earth's Daughters, and Sugar Mule, as well as several in the Buffalo News.

Thirty-two poems recall this native New Yorker's childhood relocation with her family to sunny California (The San Fernando Valley); growing up on the West Coast in the 1960s-as a preteen, teen, and young adult; and her responses to her new surroundings and the times. Several poems explore the interracial tension of the times (Watts Riots, Civil Rights Amendment) from the viewpoint of a young person whose older sister created an interracial family. From the perspectives of both family and race, the poet explores her relationships with her nephew, niece, and brother-in-law. If you like the work of Diane Wakoski or James Broughton, you will enjoy the whim and wit this book.

Poetry. Asian American Studies. Berkshire Prize for First or Second Book, chosen by D. A. Powell. Entranced by time and location and the body's longings, this is a book of self-translation. Each poem has gone through a transmigration process, as the poet negotiates between her native Chinese and her adopted English, attempting to condense, distill, and expand seeing and understanding.

A collection of poetry inspired by growing up in Australia, quite a long time ago. Yet it is all relative and to me, this was my yesterday, my beginnings, the start of who I was to become. This was When I Was a Kid.... Including: The Day the Dunny Burned, Bluey Bursts Out, A Billyful of Milk and All's Fair in Love and Cricket. 50% of all royalties will go to Dementia Australia.

The Diwan of Nawid is like nothing else in Australian poetry-a spiritual text of sublime beauty in which we follow the struggles, questionings, and exhortations of Nawid, a character you will come to love for the way in which he lays before us his intense search for inviolable truths. Nawid is an 'everyman' but with one remarkable difference-he is a first-rate poet whose work contains the devotion and open-minded sagacity of a modern-day Kabir.-Judith BeveridgeSometimes a new voice springs from a poet. It's not quite the poet's own (although it is), and it's not quite another's voice (although it is). The Diwan of Nawid is a memorable collection of poems in such a voice: tender, witty, puzzled, consoling. It is unique in Australian poetry.-Kevin Hart

TREASURE WITHIN - A MEMOIR takes the reader on a pleasant ramble through scenes of nature, architecture and human endeavour. There is poetry to beguile, ease pain, comfort and entertain with some that was written to commission. Individuals are celebrated in addition to poetry that was inspired by great cities. The memoir pays tribute to scenes from the past while focusing on here and now issues, current affairs, the force of imagination, the countryside, and finally the recovery of mind, body and spirit. Let your fancy take flight for an all seasons road trip from your armchair or deckchair...

Darren Freebury-Jones's Rambling is a book of fragments exploring the topographies of love, grief, friendship, family, youth, and age in Wales. Ranging from anecdotal to linguistically complex and hauntingly intertextual, the poems in this collection chart a life from childhood to adulthood, its scenes bursting with light humour and heavy darkness. In Rambling we journey through the minutiae of everyday life, discovering the extraordinary potential for both the big and small dramas of living; love and loss, the familiar, the uncanny, and the in-between.

Stu Watson's latest collection spans the personal and the global. Fersehturm Berlin is as much a record of the author's experience as it is a cultural document, in which the poems both enact and record the processes of history, memory and technology. With deft use of form and language, Watson's poetry captures our current moment with subtlety, compassion and acuity. This is a timely and essential book which address the world, its stories, its language, and its conflicts, both micro and macro, real and imagined. But it is also an extended act of witness, a record of how things have been and what they are now, an extraordinary testament to how we process the past and are haunted by the stories we tell ourselves and others.

Annunciation Sonnets climbs out of the frame of the sonnet and through speculative encounters with artworks depicting the annunciation, probes form and rupture. What can be done with and to form, out of suspicion of the form, concerns form, and in re-encountering the annunciation tableaux Linda Kemp steers a poetic encounter into a querying of propositions subtending a language of art.

On entering this Museum of a Life, feel free to wander at will. However, don't miss a single gallery, as every exhibit invokes a small part of the life of Sue Finch. By the time you leave the museum for the Gift Shop to buy a blue apple for a loved one, you will know her well..'Sue Finch's voice is both steady and questioning as she sets down the archive of her life museum and invites you to lean in for a closer look. Each exhibit feels like a very personal and off-kilter chronicle of a collective memory where wolves and silence stand with their backs to the corners of the theatrical space of a museum cabinet in which Smurfs and giraffes have walk-on parts. And it's well worth imagining the gift shop - that unsettling pelican's disco moves stencilled on a tea towel; a postcard steeped in the metal taste of the narrator's own blood.' - Helen Ivory..'Ponds, pitfalls, pandemics, peacocks, pelicans and funeral preparations. On view in Sue Finch's second collection is a kaleidoscope of memory, moments, fears and desires, curated in a lyrical museum with spotlights on circus tents, taxidermy tables, distant dreams and swirling nightmares. The recollections are residues on the tip of the tongue, the names of each already faded, fallen or pulled like the pelt from the flesh with only a metallic tang left in its wake and the future is a disco very deep in the woods with tunes yet to be identified. This is a Daliesque ramble through the gardens of life, an asymmetrical, syncopated joyride. Welcome to the Museum of a Life is triumphant with its directions, distractions and dancing Deathwatch Beetles. Buy a ticket in advance to spare yourself the disappointment of this museum being sold out!' - Damien B Donnelly..'At once mindful and surreal, these poems take us on a journey through the Museum of a Life, passing from childhood, through vivid everyday events, to love and dreams, and to considerations of mortality. The intriguing exhibits include the small but profound miracle of a tortoise waking from hibernation, the revelation of night skies in the armpits of a lover, a poet rescuing a giraffe after an earthquake, a dancing pelican and other such wonders. Like all the best museums, this one does not have too many rules, and we can walk amongst and interact with the poems at will. Sue Finch welcomes us into a world of multisensory surround sound. Unsentimental yet tender, this collection is an original and imaginative celebration of the temporary treasures of life, and of the human condition.' - Ivor Daniel.

The 20th edition of Kingston University's annual celebration of student work. Written and visual pieces created and curated by Kingston students. With a foreword by international bestselling author, Oyinkan Braithwaite, a Kingston Creative Writing graduate whose writing appeared in an earlier edition.

"Intense questioning marks the poems of this deeply engaging collection as it addresses the separations between aspects of the self, between past and present, between one's ideals and the actual world: 'the struggle to find words for what's happened to the country that grows more unfamiliar with time.' Death, war, loss, and confusion run through complex poems that also evoke the contrary in mountains and trees and flowers - the in-betweenness of experience is very much a motif here. The strength of these poems is their clarity and surety while addressing complex issues and the often painful nature of current life. The poems are also deeply aware that all we have to think with is language and the book captures both the slipperiness and beauty of language: 'sentences running together the vowels in a wet shimmer.' With sharp intelligence, The Distances calibrates the distances that separate and haunt us." -Martha Ronk

"Indelible and deeply resonant, Linda Black's Interior demonstrates a poet at the peak of their powers. This collection constitutes a wondrous neo-Cartesian studio evoking an ars poetica that emphasizes language as both trace and palimpsest. Here, Black explores the intersections of writing, desire and creativity in marvellously fragmented and Frankensteinian ways. In haunting poems, the poet-artist is resur-rected as defamiliarizing and uncanny: 'I rest / my hand outside / myself & draw'. Interior gives priority to improvisation and bricolage, and a questioning semiotics, as it lightly and powerfully sketches the body's relationship to the world. Black employs compelling dualisms to engage with both the breakdown and articulacy of an utterly contemporary language fully attuned to the ineffable: 'In my heart my two loves merge. This is all I can tell you.'"-Cassandra AthertonComments on Then"'Time is of the effervescence', the opening poem of Then, reads like a surreal poetic credo with its oblique imperatives: 'Tolerate the unknown, the intimation'. It reminds me of Kenneth Koch's credo 'Fresh Air' and his insistence that we should 'glance inside a bottle of sparkling pop'. Like Koch, Black also celebrates the 'new poem of the twentieth century', now made fit for the twenty-first. Then is a wow." -Frances Presley, Stride"I simply love this book and could quote from it endlessly. Split into nine sections it's playful yet serious and seriously playful at the same time. These are poems which sing and suggest, slip from idea to idea, confuse your thought processes yet delight the eye and the brain with an abundance of energy, skill and sheer brilliance. There is rhyme and assonance in abundance, all the traditional tricks of the trade yet done in such a way as not to overstate the case and even when this is the case to do it with such bravado and gusto that the reader is helplessly in thrall." -Steve Spence, Tears in the Fence"Then is a collection which speaks to the past, present, and future... Then is multi-faceted in its pictorial, tightly constructed, and lyrical manipulations of language. Black's writing asks its reader not to overthink or attempt to untangle the tricksy language it engages with, but rather to immerse oneself in words and 'Browse for/the time being'. Then offers honest insights into the joyful and traumatic moments of life, emphasising the emotional depth, creativity, and skilfulness of Black's writing." -Eilidh Henderson, Dundee University Review of the Arts