WRONG NUMBER explores how wrong numbers, telephone and other, can be worlds unto themselves and these poems reflect experiences that can redirect a life or simply add colour to a day. Getting on the wrong bus, prank calls, double-death fossils, the alarm of wrong mother calls from the school, the friend with a number one off from the Chicago FBI tip line-these are all fodder for unexpected journeys. Consequences of our distracted thoughts or our careless fingers' antics can pave or dial the way to a simple much-needed laugh, a bit of a shock, or, sometimes, unexpected joy.
These poems mediate the contradiction between our public and private personas, what we espouse, and how we actually live our lives. They explore the nature of long friendship-the moments of closeness and distance and finally its unraveling. This book is a dive into the depths of grief with an attempt to understand the complexities and complicities of relationships. It will not disappoint.-Terri DrakeWhere do friends go when they die? What if you cared more about a gone friend than she sometimes seemed to care about herself? What is a self, when all is, if not said, anyway done? Mortality is the gravitational field that gives these questions-gives elegies (and all poems, really)-their weight. Without death, there would be no poetry; prose, and its sequential logic, would be enough. Prose presumes a tomorrow that resembles today, but death puts the shatter to that complacency, leaving those still for the moment alive to pick up the pieces. Dion Farquhar has cultivated the habit of parsing the spectacle and adventure of life into significant details, accumulating quivers of synecdoches that lend themselves perfectly to her montage method of composition. Confronted with the detritus of a life, plethora is the easy way out, but grief abhors an indiscriminate- which is to say, a trivializing-abundance. In these poems chronicling a forty-plus-year friendship with a pioneering feminist, Farquhar refuses to eulogize, to indulge in obvious emotions and conventional lyricism, to dishonor the heady fervors of younger, fiercer days when youth could still feel like an accomplishment (not the gift it actually is) and an ameliorated future seemed eminently achievable, if only one thought-and fought-hard enough. Much of the pathos in this sequence comes from the (largely implied but never absent) contrast between the crystalline theoretical acuities of a deeply engaged professor and her later thralldom to the pervasive patriarchal subjugations she worked so passionately to dispel. In many of the poems, Farquhar, though talking to herself, is also addressing Mandy, the deceased friend, as if she were still alive-as if a life is never beyond revision, as if the chivvying and chiding and cheering on we lavish on those we care about might last for eternity.-Jeffrey Gustavson
Through the eyes of elephants, deer, human beings, turkeys, octopi, and other (perhaps unexpected) mortals, Affinity explores diverse, complex, and fragile interconnections that shape our lives on this delightful (and delicate) planet. In the process, poems carry readers from backyard wildflowers to forests filled with dripping trees, from local prairies to a remote borderland desert, all the while exploring the passing of time, the inevitability of change, and the mesh of forces that help shape what might otherwise seem a single life.
Watching Bees, the author's fourth collection, brings together thirty mostly short poems, many previously published in (e.g.) Scientific American, some already anthologized. Speaking in voices that move easily between different forms, these poems inhabit lives ranging from Noah's wife reluctantly boarding the Ark, through Trojan warriors on the eve of defeat or survivors of the Black Death or Stalin's Terror, to sharp-edged current political comment. Beneath them simmer resonant tensions between family members - and between past and present, memory and personal responsibility, despair and hope. As the speaker notes in "Kitchen Talk, "The recipes I'm bequeathed are meals / for fishes, splattered by spoons and sauces, / stained with secrets." That blend of ironic detachment and feeling is the beating heart of this book.
At times tenacious, other times genteel-notably sardonic and clever, sobering and keen-Rosanne Osborne's poems explore spiritual terrains via the objects, artifacts, and the natural landscapes of the physical world. Though faithful, Osborne is not a poet to rest in the ease of inherited beliefs, nor is she satisfied by an easy answer; though earthy, she is not a poet easily enticed into rote carnality, nor is she lured into the minutiae of corporeality. Balanced and clear, her poems sing with genuine simplicity-they hum with a robust intelligence and a spiritual grace as she names our ephemeral wholeness.-Dave Harrity, author of These IntricaciesWhen a snake appears in Tapestry of Counterpoint, it does so not as an emblem of evil, but whether as warning or Death's emissary or a second self is not clear. This suggests that Rosanne Osborne is no ordinary pastor; indeed, she's also a retired English professor and poet in the aftermath of Katrina, standing before "the mystery of being." Raised in rural Missouri, the poems' speaker has left for college in New Orleans during the sixties; a "fundamentalist zealot / from the heartland," she discovers "the freedom of doubt" while reading Paul Tillich. Now an aging woman, she is jolted physically while shoveling dirt to cover bulbs, an experience not unlike the one she experienced as a twelve-year-old bracing a ewe to help her mother with a breach birth, both incarnations of a sort. You'll find here not only a mind exerting a counter pull to the forces of gravity and also the earthy and sensual delight in figs and pomegranates, the mouth pleasure in saying "havarti" in anticipation of the first bite of a roast beef sub. Precisely because Tapestry of Counterpoint is shadowed by death and moments of doubt, reading it, I can't help but think of James Wright's "brilliant blue jay" that jumps up and down on a branch because it knows "that the branch will not break." Such faith is necessary to provide a "true account" of a long-life restlessness, an openness to change and uncertainty. Rosanne Osborne has brought to the page her whole self-body, mind, and spirit-to voice these earnest, wry, and wise poems.-Debra Kang Dean, author of Totem: AmericaRosanne Osborne's first poetry collection, Tapestry of Counterpoint, deftly weaves together the experiences of her fascinating life. These poems reflect her personal and philosophical journey, enriched by the literary influences and poignant lessons gleaned from her tenure as both an English professor and Methodist pastor. I particularly loved reading poems that capture scenes from a Missouri childhood that were so vivid that I felt myself pulled back in time. When colts and lambs are born, or hunted raccoons tremble in trees, the inseparable alchemy of hope and despair occurs. Yet, unlike her parishioners who gather at a funeral, nervously avoiding the deceased in the coffin, she does not flinch nor look away from death. When the poet experiences Zugunruhe, her own nocturnal restlessness, she retraces the paths she has chosen. There are poems of intense personal scrutiny, while others celebrate simple joys, such as Havarti cheese or the tart crunch of pomegranate seeds. The reflections in this exquisite collection bring us to "remain at daybreak / to pile its stones." proclaiming all the ordinary moments that allow us to recognize the holy ground over which we too travel.-bg Thurston, author of The Many Lives of Cathouse Farm-Tales of a Rural Brothel
The word quantum suggests dizzying equations and esoteric theory. The poetry in Quantum Ghosts is by no means scientific unless you can count the observations of the natural world and its profound influence on the individual. Instead, quantum serves as a metaphor for overlapping modes of being, experiences, and understanding. We are all living in multiple realities when we read a poem. Schrödinger's cat is both living and dead until someone peers into the box. Poetry, too, requires an observer and, until then, exists in multiple realities, forms, and meanings. How do we reconcile profound loss with the expanse of beauty all around us? How does love thrive while the world seems to be falling apart? Quantum Ghosts invites readers to consider the multiple realities that exist within and around us.
Field Guide to Forgiveness delves into a shifting landscape of memories that centers on loss, love, regret, and ultimately acceptance. With clarity of language and stark imagery, each poem provides a glimpse into the courage it takes to heal the past. Although rooted in the deeply personal, these poems also explore the timely topics of school shootings, police brutality, and the pandemic. Vacillating from tender longing to unvarnished realism, Watkins' new chapbook provides a map for anyone ready to tackle their own hidden terrain.
As with John Haines, Alaska's poet of the wild, or Gary Snyder, Alex Leavens is a poet of deep ecology. His posthumous collection, Horsethief Meadows, brings poems of reverence, wisdom and precision in observation of the natural world, as with these lines: "...the mountain lion had the same tint as the moon ...." With felt grief as wildfires burn out of control, Leavens observes that "flames climb into treetops to ferry substances, no longer bound to earth..."-Sandra L. Kleven, publisher/editor, CIRQUE: A Literary Journal, and Cirque PressIn the work of the late Alex Leavens, the reader finds compelling poetry of place with a poet who serves as guide and teacher to the backcountry Pacific Northwest. But also found in his poems is a student of witness: we experience the "behaviors and talents of the cold," see tracks of bears "that won't heal over," admire a "thin, wet brush" of a mink at "that lake nobody knows." With maturity and métier, Alex held a steady gaze over difficult landscapes of harsh seasons, centuries of human intervention, and increasingly, traumatically, fire.-John Miller, author of OlympicThe poems in Alex Leavens' collection, Horsethief Meadows, measure the human against the "circumference of the world." Leavens' narrator is a shapeshifter moving through that world, helping us to remember we are all one: "and the wind/ found its way down/ into the dry mouth of the badger's sett,/ down into the earth/ to remind the grove/ to stay joined/ at the root,/ to speak as one living thing." In poetry "equal to the horizon,/ equal to the morning sun," Leavens puts us there at the center of things-circling with the hawk overhead, wandering with the cougar down through a streambed, or sunning our wings with the butterfly. A lyric work of interconnectedness between the human and the natural worlds, Leavens' poems burn like a fire, showing us the way in "that small matter/ of living/ at the center/ of the dark."-Peter Grandbois, author of Last Night I Aged a Hundred Years
In Talmudic Verses, Steven Shankman reflects on his own experience, and on contemporary events, through the lens of the ancient Babylonian Talmud, the crown jewel of the oral tradition of Judaism. He in effect "translates" the Hebrew and Aramaic of several tractates of the Talmud into the universal language of a poetry that ranges from ecstatic free verse to rhymed and unrhymed verse composed in iambic pentameter. Shankman brings the searching and profound ethical dilemmas posed by the ancient rabbis to life in moving, meditative verse.
What are the familiar, vital connections that maintain community? What's at stake when those ties are strained to the breaking point by pandemic anxiety, climate disasters, and the politics of resentment? This collection offers a free-ranging chronicle of everyday life during the upheavals of the past few years. Shifting from rural to urban, angry to quizzical, lyrical to conversational, Lowery's poems look for answers in close observation of nearby nature (the honey bee and sandhill crane, "the oak leaf that still holds on"), or the shared rituals of family and personal sustenance. Against odds, these nuanced poems voice hope for the common good-for Mutual Life.
Spineless: Memoir in Invertebrates looks at life from the ground up, as well as from the curtain rod, and the window screen. This collection of poems explores the relationship between the hand and the small creature held in the hand, between the aquarium wall and the being on the other side. We know how our lives are touched by the creatures lying on the rug or the windowsill, but what about all those we can scarcely look at? Spineless: Memoir in Invertebrates attempts to do that.
The poems in this collection include some uplifting voices that readers may find very inspiring. The manuscript itself speaks about pain that many can relate to, but also it gives us hope to go on, no matter what happens and what we go through. It is a meditation on human sorrow and an attempt to find ways to heal the soul through nature.
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