LIGHTNING FOREST, LAVA ROOT
The unsayable here is all music and its delayed inflections - a kind of anger, a kind of sobbing. Erica Litz is a marvelous poet who balances crushing cityscapes against an ancestral rural life in the American Southwest and in the country of her mother, Colombia. This is a brilliant first book by a wonderful and surprising young poet. Norman Dubie, poet, author of Ordinary Mornings of a Coliseum, The Mercy Seat: Collected & New Poems 1967-2001, and The Clouds of Magellan In her debut collection, Erica Maria Litz has written poems she has dug out of the deep volcanic underground of her ancestral history, her lightning-a blood out of the Andean sky. She takes us along with her as her main speaker dances the moon in dreams, witnesses the transformations of one ruana (woolen cape) to a landscape, a prayer, a place to lie down. One is all. There are dances and prayers for the living and for the dead. The God she speaks of is the Creator,Chiminanagua, and all is one. Erica gives us those people who listen to a music of honey, the claw of the "r" under the tongue. Her characters are family who dance to restore their connection to a mysterious, and richly textured reality. Their visions reveal an underlying wholeness, and though they are sometimes seemingly separated by war, accident, or borders, they will remain tied, have the knowledge of the hammock, the secret of emeralds in the rain, the recipes to crack the heart open to the rhythms of the earth and sky. This is a ravishing collection. Jeannine Savard, poet, author of Trumpeter and My Hand Upon Your Name
PRAYERS OF THE SHAMAN
Haunting, beautiful, mysterious, magnificent, terrible, and so moving. This poet-shaman's theme of myth and memory and violence and abuse and what's real and what isn't, is powerfully informative, is restorative. "Turning, you ask me to come/into your dream as a witness." This is what Karolyn Redoute's Prayers of the Shaman asks of us and the reward for doing so is the solace that all great poetry gives. I remember a number of these poems years after I first read them. "read my glass heart/unbury me." Sharon Doubiago Author of My Father's Love and Love on the Streets In Prayers of the Shaman, Karolyn Redoute forges her spell, and takes the reader deep into a world where myth and reality are united. Her imagination breaks down the invisible boundaries between the mundane and the extraordinary, and we see, through her sharp and compassionate eyes, how the world might be if it were made by poets and dreamers. There is a delicate balance here - love hinged with pain, sanity weighed against madness, magic mingling with the emptiness of the prairie. What Redoute gives us, finally, is a world where we might live, flaws and flourishes aside, just simply live, and uncover the beauty that surrounds us. William Reichard Author of Sin Eater "that is how the shaman sings / fragments first and then belief" Karolyn Redoute's poems are melancholy, born of woman, earth and sky. They look back, and forward with longing. A humble spirit, forming prayers. Redoute's words: cold, snow, grief, bone, blue, blackbird, hawk, raven, rock, desert, plains, fire, and wind, myth, and dream. Words that deliver us to other worlds. Sherry Quan Lee Author, Chinese Blackbird and How to Write a Suicide Note: serial essays that saved a woman's life
DECIDUOUS
Deciduous is an accumulation of experiences and expressions from the past three years. The ups and downs that many go through in life every day. This collection is in three parts: Love, Grief and Life. Each section holds the raw, passionate and honest expression as seen through the heart.
LOST IN THE FOREGROUND
‘Stephen Edgar is quietly building the Augustan garden of Australian poetry. Seldom have all the imaginable poetic qualities been combined into such a thoughtful poise, and with so easy seeming a lyrical impulse. His poems not only demand to be read: they insist on being memorised, point for point. In Edgar’s spare but steadily accumulating body of work, aesthetic appreciation and scientific rigour are conceived in terms of each other, as if the two main modes of knowing had never been separated. The result is an entire, and entirely unexpected, bewitchment.’ – Clive James ‘Even Edgar’s admirers cannot have been expecting such a tour de force as Lost in the Foreground. Virtuosity of technique is combined with original thinking and clarity of presentation. Simply put, this is brilliant poetry, the equal of anything in English today. Australia should welcome the coming of age of an important talent.’ – Peter Porter
CALLING ALL WOMEN
Calling All Women: From Bitches to Witches is a poetry book geared to young adolescents, but certainly can be read by all ages. It describes each of the eleven attributes needed to become empowered through fun poetry and will help incorporate these attributes into daily life.
CEL ESTÀTIC D’ELEVADORS
"Cel estàtic delevadors" és un llibre de poemes que situa el lector en unes coordenades despai i temps ben concretes però, tanmateix, ben obertes. El llibre vol agermanar avantguarda i classicisme, per mitjà dun vers rimat o no que pretén fer evident el que és permanent en el que és dinàmic, que muda, que es transforma irremeiablement en cada nova lectura. És una porta dentrada a limprevist.
PICNIC AT MOUNT DISAPPOINTMENT
In this wise, witty and moving story, fifteen-year-old Lucy arrives from inner-city Melbourne to live on a farm in the early 1980s. Wandong hosts the second largest truck and country music festival in the southern hemisphere…and nothing else. ‘It is rare to find a story that takes us into that liminal territory of adolescence with such force and such heart. Desire, disappointment, betrayal and forgiveness written in libretto, an ode to the tumult of coming of age.’ – Gabrielle Carey, co-author, Puberty Blues
LOS CIEN GRANDES POEMAS DE ESPAÑA Y AMÉRICA
El fin de siglo ha prodigado las revisiones del canon literario. Recogiendo el desafío de la fugacidad del juicio y el gusto literarios, Ortega se anima a proponer aquí no los mejores poemas, sino los grandes: aquellos que son o serán memorables, pero que sólo tienen sentido porque siguen construyendo, desde la lectura, este presente cuestionado, este futuro imaginable y quizá compartible.
MUD ON HER BOOTS
Reading Corene Johnston’s poetry is a bit like visiting her wooden clapboard home nestled in a hollow of the Pennsylvania mountains. With open arms she welcomes you to come inside, pull up a chair at the sturdy yellow farm table for some freshly baked bread hot from the oven, and to savor moments together pondering the imponderable. Corene’s poetry is intimate and stark. Her poems take us from joy to melancholy and back again — a tribute to the human experience in keenly observed detail and sometimes muddy facets. Corene’s words reflect her sojourn of celebrating, sauntering and slogging through her 67 years. They reveal her passion as a writer, artist, nurse and cancer warrior. Pause and allow the seconds to brush softly against your face while cradling each poem of which she has painstakingly given birth. House rules dictate: “Relax, kick back, put your feet up on the coffee table and — exhale.” Doing so, is the next best thing to being with Corene at Champagne Cork Farm.
REIGN DROPS
This book is a collection of sexy poems that has been uniquely described as “Pornetry”. Creative, erotic word play that is sure to make love to your mind and leave you wanting more.
THE GREAT HUNGER
"It's my job to remember things I never saw," Karen Douglass says in one poem, and she does - remember and see through the imagination's eye. In beautifully detailed poems, succinct and meditative at once, she shows us food as delight and weapon, necessity and art, gift and punishment. The many dynamics of hunger, both physical and spiritual, what we need to be nourished and to nourish, as individuals and global citizens - these are the crucial concerns of Douglass's clear and indeed nourishing poems. Betsy Sholl, Poet Laureate for the State of Maine The Great Hunger that worries, enrages, saddens, arouses, pleases, and inspires these poems by Karen Douglass shows itself in a feast of narrative poems, portraits like cameo lockets with all sorts of hidden spaces and seeds, political manifestoes, love songs, elegies to lost loves and lost dreams, paeans to food. She's a master of the line break that invites us to fill in the spaces with what we ourselves bring to the table. In the midst of something else, there's often a sweet little surprise. And there are last lines to die for. This collection is a treat! Melanie Tem, author, poet, and playwright, has fourteen published novels, winner of the Bram Stoker Award and the British Fantasy Award Here one pitches most of a sterling tea set down the front steps, so a beggar may have his fill. A painter perceives a rich man eating a cracker while a ship idles by. Here, an uncle dresses his cup of rice with motor oil strained through bread. We pat our black pot bellies wondering why we cannot eat under these strains: why not more eggs in the pie filling, why the fields scream corn, why salt married sugar, or what if we harvest all - warming and feeding around the clock? Here, we remember how coffee came to France, how chocolate bars were marketed, how a horse crunches grain and noses the food dish so he can see the horizon line, and like the prairie dogs on the horizon, wonder what ate us as well: coyote, crow, beetle? What made us lunch and how will we be again, molecule by molecule spreading into the next form? All the while feasting, delighting, and starving for more and more. A feast embracing the notion that Our Lady of Guadeloupe blessed the food and protected the farmers, so we could savor the last great bite. Allison Adelle Hedge Coke, American Book Award winner for her collection, Dog Road Woman
POEMS THAT EVERY CHILD SHOULD KNOW
EL CENTRE DEL TEMPS
DEEP WITHIN MY SOUL
Deep Within My Soul, a compilation of fourteen poems, thoughts, expressions and feelings based on the many experiences in the life of a woman. She looks deep within her soul and digs out that which matters most. She realises she has been 'just scratching the surface'. As she embarks on this soulsearching journey, she is amazed at what is unearthed. Deep within her soul she finds a sea of unspoken words; words of adoration and pride to the entire sisterhood. She affirms the strong woman; to penning words in praise of her own mother. She celebrates the gift of love extended by intriguing women who have opened their hearts and loved a child regardless of whether they are biologically linked or not. Deep within each of our souls lays the mystery of who we really are.
RED HAS NO REASON
A marvelous intelligence, mindful and clear-eyed, governs the inscape of these poems where "strangeness/is so usual nothing's strange" - nor does that commanding presence hesitate a moment before welcoming magicians, who "train as pole-vaulters do - tedious, lonely practice/ broken by a moment's flight." It is such flights we witness here, increasingly aware once again of a sum greater than its parts, of moments seemingly disparate that gradually become a mosaic catching the range of a whole life, richly lived and examined with meticulous candor. William Pitt Root, poetry editor of CutThroat: A Journal of the Arts, and author of eleven collections of poems JoAnne Growney is a mathematician and a poet - a striking combination. Her poems belie the old saws about the two cultures. Red Has No Reason shows us how we can be precise and intuitive, heady and heartful. Jan Heller Levi, poet, author of Skyspeak, editor of A Muriel Rukeyser Reader Red Has No Reason is a collection that takes the reader into a world with a kaleidoscope view - one that shifts, and dazzles and mystifies, despite best efforts to impose order. Her pairing of this red, raw stuff of life with mathematical precision creates a poetry collection to rival the mystical allure of the aurora. Jerry Wemple, poet, author of The Civil War in Baltimore and You Can See It from Here, co-editor of Common Wealth: Contemporary Poets on Pennsylvania, editor of Watershed: the Journal of the Susquehanna