A widow and her white-muzzled dog, a coastal landscape filled with bully winds, characters who relieve the loneliness of being alone: Sue Fagalde Lick weaves these images throughout Dining al Fresco with My Dog in narratives both vulnerable and brave. Whether floating in her hot tub with memories of her husband or fixing a roof, she proclaims: "I am old, but... / warm dog at my fingertips, / I feel light as the alder tree, / rooted here for eternity". This is a touching celebration of life in poetry at its best.--Carolyn Martin, Ph.D., author of The Catalog of Small Continents Sue Fagalde Lick, in her collection, Dining Al Fresco with My Dog, walks us comfortably into her later life where she is "turning butch in [her] old age...now...wife and husband too." She imagines with humor how a cryptic observer would see her, guiding the reader through her daily routine of dog, pellet stove, writing, and reading, and concludes with, "Eats three times a day, keeps warm, still alive." She shares the richness of her solitude in nature (and the solitary nature of the writing life) but with many forays into the music, humor, and warmth she finds in her community. As a reader, I feel included and deeply satisfied.-Rachel Barton, editor of Willawaw Journal and author of This is the Lightness Grief. Brave attitude. Small triumphs. "Dear dead departed husband, / your being dead and departed / is a major pain in the ass." The widow senses her husband everywhere. Wears his shirts. Stacks the logs. Learns to change a spark plug. Sue Fagalde Lick may make you weep, make you smile. And then, of course, there's the dog. This is a strong book.-Penelope Scambly Schott, author of On Dufur Hill
Tangled in Vow & Beseech vows to remember what we lose and beseeches us to embrace every moment. Throughout, McCabe Johnson writes intimately about family, nature, and animals, while also protesting the violences of religion, patriarchy, and racism. The lyricism of these poems carries the speaker into the "clear slipstream of memory" to "river me home. River me home."-Craig Santos Perez, author of from incorporated territory [åmot], winner of the National Book Award for PoetryThrough an array of poetic forms, Jill McCabe Johnson explores a deep sense of interconnectedness. These lyric tangles help us grapple with a life where the ugliest abuses of person and planet occur alongside a mother's love for her son, the grace of childhood innocence, the anniversary of a first kiss, and the understanding that "in this land" of "dogwood blossom, swordfern and fen" is "everything" we need to "believe." -Derek Sheffield, author of Not for Luck, co-editor of Cascadia Field Guide: Art, Ecology, Poetry, and Poetry Editor of Terrain.org
With vulnerability and gorgeous, lush imagery, Sarah Stockton presents a portrait of a life not defined by illness but circumscribed by it; a hybrid life of hospital visits and encounters with crystal healers, coyotes, iguanas. Stockton's poems of simultaneous rage and grace illuminate the realities of the chronically ill. -Jeannine Hall Gailey, author of Flare, Corona (BOA Editions) and Field Guide to the End of the World (Moon City Press) Sarah Stockton's The Scarecrow of My Former Self is a quiet, delicate hymn of the bodymind that both aspires and persists; though the poet confesses she "can't really do much / for... the world," - and yet. This book is a reclamation of visibility not just for Stockton's speaker, but for all who have a chronic illness. These poems create a metaphorical scarecrow, a kind of spiritual scaffold on which to hang some hope. Like a conjurer, Stockton creates a world of desire crafted from "bloodied dancing shoes, a mask // and a sea green bathing suit...." -Jill Khoury, Editor-in-Chief of Rogue Agent, author of Suites for the Modern Dancer (Sundress Publications)
To Walk the North Direction by C.L. Downing is a narrative of a life fully lived, stories of deepening self-awareness and empathy toward the world with a voice free of artifice or self-pity. Downing's writing blooms with energy, wit, and honesty. Through each poem, her integrity as a creator is obvious. With a style all her own, she grants her subjects full reveal without sentimentality, but always through her kind heart which is why she can be trusted. Readers will feel their own life experience expand in Downing's recounting of her time spent paying concentrated attention to the world. -Caroline Boutard, author Each Leaf Singing
"In You Can Call It Beautiful by Debra Elisa, readers encounter a unique style as idiosyncratic as Emily Dickinson's with poems flaunting 'breath and tiptoe glory and Clover.' Elisa celebrates a world of simple pleasures, kind acts, and fertile moments, moments when 'deadheads/take their own sweet time to fall and reseed the garden.' In this hefty array of resonant poems examining nature, travel, technology, pop culture, or social justice, the result is the same: quiet experiences lead to wisdom."-Allen Braden, author of A Wreath of Down and Drops of Blood"Debra Elisa moves joyfully, with gratitude, respect, and generosity in the vast world she creates in You Can Call It Beautiful. She welcomes us into 'the circle of friends 'who gather/in praise of poetry.' In this collection, Elisa travels mindfully through the natural world where she lives, and where she sojourns, to bear witness to 'the 'young/roaming streets of blood,' and to the creatures whose names we praise with her-'Yellow-Billed Cuckoo,' 'Malone Jumping Slug.'"-Willa Schneberg, Oregon Book Award recipient; author of The Naked Room
"The fundamental forces in our lives might include parents, siblings, husbands and wives, lovers, the rain and the sun. As Guns & Roses once sang every rose has its thorn. In this stunning new book, Pattie Palmer-Baker delves deep into these forces with a narrative and lyric force of her own. The poems here are generous, vulnerable, grown-up, and a joy to read. Palmer-Baker is a poet of witness, and this book is a balm for any prick of a thorn you may have suffered in your life."-Matthew Dickman, author of Husbandry"There's something elemental about this collection and its concerns woven through with the colors of mountains and motels. Here's a reckoning with the past told in sparkling imagery, always heartfelt yet never sentimental, 'My husband writes me love notes/on the shells of hardboiled eggs.' Pattie Palmer-Baker plays with space, reflecting the ways in which memory can be fractured and re-made on the page so as to create an alchemy which makes this collection one that remains in the mind long after the first reading."-Samantha Wynne-Rhydderch, author of Banjo
"David Hecker's Dream World is a magic carpet ride with poets and artists. Through illuminating landscapes, enjoy Whirling Dervishes dancing to drums and string instruments, along with his tribute to Pablo Neruda's La Chascona, 'The sections of his home were like the stanzas of a poem.' Of Denise Levertov, he writes 'We both laughed when I told her I was a "retired" catholic, a faith she had just joined.'"-Sue Hylen"David Hecker's Dream World transports readers to landscapes both far away and close to home, across the borders of territory, time, and the heart. Images illuminate and reflect the poet's experiences and those of the characters who inhabit these poems, leaving us homesick for places we may have never been."-Kristen Gard Hotchkiss
"The poems in this award-winning collection reveal a bold voice that brings us on a tour through emotional and literal landscapes as fluid as the tides."-Rena Priest, Washington State Poet Laureate and American Book Award Winner for Patriarchy Blues (MoonPath Press)"Rhythms, images, and juxtapositions in these poems flow like waves filling and emptying, from past to present to what might be-all while glorying in occlusions. Sati Mookherjee's lively word play questions our definitions, boundaries around spaces, and leads to fresh and original epiphanies...With extraordinary detail, this poet illustrates myriad 'ways of being.'"-Sharon Hashimoto, 2022 Washington State Book Award Winner for More American"A wonderful evocation of the sea, fresh and experimental use of language...the poems breathe."-Alice Derry, author of Asking and Sally Albiso Award Judge"Ways of Being exposes the spaces in which we 'wait for something to begin or for something to end' and evokes the hours, yearning and 'stuttered rain' that fill them. These are visceral, wonderful poems."-Susan Landgraf, author of What We Bury Changes the Ground
"What a beautiful, tender collection of poems Victoria Wyttenberg has written. Commingling longing, desire, and wonder, she creates an aura of comfort in the face of existence's beauties and miseries. With an eye for the upsurges of emotion that come from looking closely at daily life, and with an ear for poetry's affirmation of the music of experience, she affirms in her poems something profound about humanity: we endure because we love. Throughout A Bird Watching, I find a fresh joy in what poetry can accomplish-from a poet who has devoted her lifetime to the hooks that enter the heart."-David Biespiel, author of Republic Café"What happens to the life of the boy hunting frogs, the father off at war, the mother alone in her kitchen cooking a French dish for the first or hundredth time? And what happens when one's own mother, father, sister, brother, husband, daughter and son are all, as the poet writes, lying tucked in the dark, alone in their graves? Victoria Wyttenberg gives us a Master Class on how to live and how to grieve in these beautiful narrative poems. Nature is present, family and the death of family, trauma and love, all! Life is hard. What a privilege to be guided through it, at least within these pages, by such a thoughtful, talented, and dynamic poet."-Matthew Dickman, author of Husbandry
The Arborists studies paper ephemera-the notes, letters, and artwork that particular lives leave behind; and also the sensory ephemera of a life-the taste of pie, the depths of flowers. The book visits with family and friends, "our chairs blipping their white seats / like tabs on a chart," and wants to know what "map we would make / if you attached a flame to us and filmed us in the dark." In The Arborists, hornets eat the wood of the house while the people in the house continue making themselves as best as they can into mattering. Moments and memories collage into an elusive definition of love."Rilke wrote, 'The things of this world... seem to need us.' Molly Tenenbaum, better than any poet I know, hears the call of things-banjos, clematis, paintings of chickens-and translates for us their happiness and pathos. She brings this genius to The Arborists, set in a time of great personal loss and romantic discovery. This is that rare and wondrous collection that takes my breath-deeply moving, effervescent, utterly original and alive."-Kathleen Flenniken, Poet Laureate Emerita of Washington State, author of Post Romantic¿¿"Tenenbaum's poems are lyrical, tightly woven, at times whimsical. They are powerful poems of a mother's passing, of a brother's face, of a dad's collapse. The natural world of vines, trees, flowers, pawed creatures is strongly present, as is domestic life, and the poet's life as a banjo playerand teacher. In this work images are stacked, stitched, and intertwined, making each poem a mesmerizing read, a piece of music."-Priscilla Long, author of Holy Magic and Crossing Over: Poems"With a deep, underlying music, the poems in The Arborists reflect the world's detail. Tenenbaum calls hornets 'little cartographers,' writes a biography in banjo, and remembers 'how we used to lose our nozzles.' This is a world to be richly lost in-where a friend says, 'Can I quit my job yesterday?' and the cat is a 'weather report.' The Arborists asks what to do with the artifacts of a life, and answers: Craft them into poems."-Kelli Russell Agodon, author of Dialogues with Rising Tides
"In Chaos Theory for Beginners, Ronda Piszk Broatch turns quantum physics into a surprisingly accessible lens through which we can better grasp not only our relation to the larger universe but to ancestry, interpersonal relations, and the unconscious. Characterized by an affective echoing of sounds throughout myriad associative insights, the poems in this book confirm Broatch as an inimitable no-nonsense romantic who intuits the dialectical advantage in examining doubt and secular revelation...Whether rendering the implications of the night sky, the love of partner, the history of a discovery, the absurdity of contemporary politics, or the blood-links to our past, Broatch is in fact that affirming observer."-Kevin Clark, author of The Consecrations"Smart and spirited, playful and intimate, Ronda Piszk Broatch's Chaos Theory for Beginners probes the patterns and uncertainties of our daily lives for the vast solar systems within us, inviting, into our human relationships of grief, wonder, and desire, the cosmos, 'tumbling/ its spent fireworks, blowing confetti/ under our door.' Reading these poems, I am re-ignited with possibility, reminded how the matter and movements of our lives, small as they are, are as exquisite as the complex galaxies, as brilliant and limitless as the stars."-Jennifer Elise Foerster, author of The Maybe-Bird
"Eschewing grandiloquence, Edstrom''s poems take a pensive stance towards the immediate, the ''ordinary,'' while quietly rooted in the rhythms of the natural world. A master of simplicity, her prosody carries a balanced, musical, clear stream of language with understated authority. ''Poetry pinned me to bliss,'' sums up the poet, in full possession of her craft."-Lorraine Healy, author of Mostly Luck (MoonPath Press)"In The Language of Tides, Lois Parker Edstrom has gathered over a decade of everyday poems, seasonal poems, ekphrastic poems, poems set in the real light of small-town life, and more. And most every one joyfully intimates how ordinary moments, which are also our moments, belong to the tide in which our particular forms rise and fall. Edstrom poses the poet''s wager-experience your timelessness for the price of embracing your fleetingness, as do, she suggests, the autumn leaves ''skittering along the road like brown-robed monks.''"-Jed Myers, author of The Marriage of Space and Time (MoonPath Press)
Praise for A House, Undone"In T. Clear''s exquisite debut collection, A House, Undone, we consider what home is. From ''a house of scant beginnings...raveling sweaters/and unpainted stairwells'' to the bodies we inhabit to ''roaming the frozen fields...small enough to enter a honeyed hive,'' these striking and precise poems lead us through the hallways of the temporary. Whether the ''wife/wanted out of the couplet'' or beneath a ''sky scrubbed-clean of mudsock grey,''Clear is a master of the image, the narrative arc, and the details of a story. Well-crafted, engaging, and constructed with meticulous care, A House, Undone becomes the beautiful architecture for poetry, where we live in a house of words on ''a bed littered with leaves,/starlight for a roof.''"-Kelli Russell Agodon, author of Dialogues with Rising Tides (Copper Canyon Press)"Not only is T. Clear''s A House, Undone the most downright enjoyable book of poetry I''ve read in a good while, it''s also got me seriously stirred about house and home. These poems turn personal loss and uprootedness into a highly contagious empathy for those whose dwellings we couldn''t call houses. This poet has me laughing out loud then achingly sad and outraged by quick turns through her pages. The book is so right for this American moment, but the truth is, it''s right for all history, everywhere."-Jed Myers, author of Watching the Perseids and The Marriage of Space and Time
"It''s refreshing to read a poet who seems to have missed the postmodern memo about serial randomness being the mind''s great roadtrip. Instead, what we get is a boots-on-the-ground empathy from a real wanderer who has Richard Hugo''s eye for out-of-the-way topics and towns, a sincerity that doesn''t take selfies, a heart that can brake for a blue dress or blueberry patch. With a disarming candor, Sherry''s poems examine small moments which can ramify into large questions, humor, self-scrutiny, guilt, love, or praise. In the end, what the reader gets to examine is the ''archaeology of a life dedicated to the world.'' This book will remind you why you love poetry." -Joseph Powell, author of The Slow Subtraction: ALS"In ''A David Hockney Landscape Poem,'' when Tim Sherry says, ''It is about the same, same thing-an effort to find a place to find meaning,'' he could as well be describing the rest of the poems in Pages of White Sky. Many of them are set in specific locations-the Chihuly Garden and Glass Collections Cafe, the Ephesus archaeological site, a farm truck hauling grain in in North Dakota, The Crescent City Lighthouse, a little britches rodeo in Halfway, Oregon-but the real terrain of this collection is always the landscape of the human spirit. These poems are windows left open to it, letting its meaning in." -Joe Green, founder of The Peasandcues Press and author of What Water Does at a Time Like This "Approaching like ponies fresh from summer fields, Tim Sherry''s poems, skittish and a little wild, transcend their domestication. His forte is deft renditions of the singular daily moments that make up a life. In a poem like ''I Am Not a Gary Soto,'' he redeems his admission of a strict religious upbringing by reminding us that the poetic moment is not necessarily dramatic, that sometimes the subtle implications of a father''s ''gray flannel suit'' is enough. Though they have fed on star shine and moon-brushed grasses, these works have been bred to carry us fast and far, and do so with grace." -Chris Dahl, author of Mrs. Dahl in the Season of Cub Scouts
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