PRAISE FOR
Amnesia and Wings

"Sometimes things just / end," writes Larry Colker, "but we name it/change." In his new collecton of poems, Amnesia and Wings, the poet has reinvented the ode, the ballad, & the lament. It turns out we never leave this world; it leaves us, touch by touch and thing by thing. But there are enchantments in the empty spaces if we would only look for them. We will never be made whole again but, "That's not the point: enchantment, even for a day, / can make a whole life bearable."
—Brendan Constantine

Linguistically playful, unabashedly romantic, combining wit and irony and unrelenting longing, Larry Colker's poems remind us that it's never too late to lose everything, never too late to risk everything again. In Amnesia and Wings, the world is seen through the eyes of a speaker who seems to be both a kind of spy in his own house of love and a kind of film noir anti-hero of his own life. He looks back and looks forward and wants, after all, the caterpillar's gift to the butterfly—Amnesia and Wings—and he makes us want that, too.
—Cecilia Woloch

Larry Colker's Amnesia and Wings speaks insightfully. passionately, and poignantly of love: old and new, experienced and innocent, agonized, ecstatic, lost, found, and rescued. A master of the apt and unexpected metaphor, Colker spikes emotion with wit to keep readers engaged and on their toes. This book won't give you amnesia; it will refresh your memory. It will give your imagination wings.
—Charles Harper Webb

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House of Mirrors

Stephen McDonald reveals the sacred that's in everything around us. He finds God in a sowbug, in a blue-belly lizard whose eyes are "deep as every unanswered question", and in his hands, even starting up a lawn mower is a kind of prayer, a recognition that "the grass is long,/your time is short". In the title poem, when the boy steps out of the House of Mirrors, the faces of the people at the carnival "waver and shimmer". This is what these poems do—they show us the shimmering world.
—Ellen Bass

House of Mirrors is about people: fatherhood, family, strangers and friends, notable for its attention to language and empathy for its subject matter, the human in all their many guises.
—Dorianne Laux

I'm drawn to the poems of Steve McDonald, the way they move so easily from the sacred to the profane and back again. Their language is both lyrical and specific. Their subject is the human heart.
—Joseph Millar

Steve McDonald makes the ordinary extraordinary as he examines nature and ourselves in unflinching detail. In House of Mirrors, we move from the wonder of a spider and its intricate web to the machinations of the human heart. The beauty of McDonald's imagery opens us to his and our own vulnerability and struggles ("mud nests hang . . . like forgotten laundry") – language that views the natural with reverence. In this book the startling and raw turn into a state of grace. These are elegant poems – moving and redemptive.
—Judith Pacht

Steve McDonald's poetry has appeared in numerous journals, including RATTLE, The Crab Creek Review, The Paterson Literary Review, Spillway, Blue Unicorn, The Sow's Ear Poetry Review, and The Cresset. His chapbook Where There Was No Pattern was published by Finishing Line Press in 2007. In 2008 he was a finalist in the Sow's Ear Poetry Awards, and in 2010 his work appeared in Best New Poets 2010. Steve is Professor Emeritus of English and former Dean of Languages and Literature at Palomar College in San Marcos, California. He lives with his wife, Marlyle, in Murrieta, California. Steve can be contacted through his website at stevemcdonaldpoetry.com.

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52 Views: The Haibun Variations

52 Views: The Haibun Variations by Jim Natal is the journal of a metaphoric year, fifty-two poems in contemporary haibun form inspired by Matsuo Basho’s Narrow Road to the Interior and Hokusai’s ukeyoe series, 36 Views of Mt. Fuji, Natal is the author of three previous poetry collections: Memory and Rain; Talking Back to the Rocks; and In the Bee Trees. A multi-year Pushcart Prize nominee, his poetry has appeared in many journals and anthologies, including New Poets of the American West and Beyond Forgetting: Poetry and Prose About Alzheimer’s Disease. After a 25-year career as a creative executive with the National Football League’s NFL Properties, he received an MFA from Antioch University Los Angeles in 2005. He teaches creative writing, leads workshops, and curates literary events. The founder of Conflux Press, he lives in Los Angeles.

Jim Natal’s 52 Views: The Haibun Variations is a record of a year, mostly in Arizona and in an interconnected age, of the struggles of everyday life in the context of family, place, current events, and art. Interspersed with journal entries are short haiku-like poems that reflect and refract the light of the prose in surprising ways. Reading the pieces in succession, you can feel your mind shifting from prose-mode to poetry-mode. A successful venture into the form, it’s like reading three books at once, at the same time in the moment, in memory, and in reflection. With an informative 'Afterword,' it is a must-read for anyone who wants to understand or write contemporary haibun.
—Richard Garcia

In 52 Views, Jim Natal mines daily experience in these observant and insightful, contemporary haibun.
—Arthur Sze

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Altar for Escaped Voices

Dixie Salazar's Altar For Escaped Voices is a haunting collection of poems constructed as domestic altars and poetic retablos dedicated to who and what's been lost from, or what has 'escaped' beyond, the daily fabric of our lives—the objects, experiences, and individuals of our passage. These poems celebrate the ghosts of our pasts, the struggles of our present, and the uncertain hopes we recklessly claim for our futures.
—David St. John

The poems in Dixie Salazar's Altar For Escaped Voices are ambitious invitations to contemplate her deeply observed world. From Jimson weed to television remotes to lost ancestors, Salazar deftly frames a fast-streaming consciousness collected from the fleeting present and concrete past, aware of the challenge of apprehending this mortal life: 'These bones are not / obedient—laughing wildly, nicked on a doorknob white as the skeletall / moon and just as capture-less.'
—Dorianne Laux

This is where poetry meets art. In Dixie Salazar's groupings of altar items, the unholy pairings are often comical and dreadfully sad. These altars are worth a visit, with our hands not in prayer but touching both cheeks in astonishment.
—Gary Soto

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The Lives of Birds

Stanley Kunitz once said, "I dream of an art so transparent that you can look through and see the world." For thirty-five years or more, this is how I have read the poetry of C. G. Hanzlicek. His project has always been one of clarity, of specific and imaginative attention to the world. He presents—with a flawless ear for the rhythms of American speech—the essential light and understanding he gleans from that careful attention. The Lives of Birds takes up his important theme of mortality and at the same times reveals his great affection for life—the lives of his family, as well as the smaller examples of jays and mockers. The brilliance of this book, its importance, is that Hanzlicek’s eye and imagination cherish the tenuous connection of all our lives with the sustaining music of the soul.
—Christopher Buckley

What always characterizes C. G. Hanzlicek’s verse is the way he balances risk and control. His voice is never severe, despite his insistence on seeing, as Worsdworth would say, "into the life of things." From the transient redemption of "Aubade" to the existential gut-check of "Curse of the Starling," these poems orbit into surprising revelations that are always hard-earned, authentic, and deeply moving.
—Kevin Clark

Reading The Lives of Birds is like taking a walk with a clear-eyed and intent companion: you discover the "rarities of a small world" you hadn’t noticed before. Small wonder that birds frequently turn up in these poems: flash of color or shy recluse, local spirits full of song and distance. Hanzlicek is drawn to those occasions when the common and familiar give way to what is transcendent or redemptive, which is to say that he is essentially a poet of celebrations. On dark days—and many of the poems are about dark days—Hanzlicek reminds us that "Sometimes our eyes, or the memory / of the thing seen" restores us and makes us whole. Dark days or fair, these are poems I return to.
—Peter Everwine

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Crookedness

Tsvetanka Elenkova is an important figure in Bulgarian poetry. But her importance is much more than merely national. Her poems are still and controlled, yet are at the same time exercises in transcendence. They are both thought-experiments and insights. Elenkova is that rare thing in twenty-first century literature, a poet whose faith makes everything appear afresh. Tenderly, she offers the reader a world that is both familiar, and lightly transformed. Elenkova is surprising, necessary and unique.
—Fiona Sampson

Tsvetanka Elenkova’s devotion to dramatizing these quick shifts between mind and eye, eye and heart, help to give her poems a spiritual immediacy that bypasses the formalizing rituals and conventions of most religious poetry, whether those rituals and conventions be Christian, Buddhist, or what have you. It's as if she writes a devotional poem that’s stripped of any conscious designs on the reader—as if the intensity of her experience is overheard as opposed to broadcast, shared out unawares, rather than being pressed into our notice. The essence of these poems is a prayerful relation to the world, but without being directed to God, or asking for something in return for her belief. All the poet asks is that language, as it makes its way to the page, remain vital and alert, as it embraces human conundrums and paradoxes.
—from the Introduction by Tom Sleigh

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The Crucifix-Blocks

Todd Fredson's first collection of poems is a sometimes live run of cradle songs balanced with the falling catkin atmospheres of some of our more terrible vehicles of human salvation. I think of Rilke's pained-city, and Roethke's Far Field. What I celebrate here is the originality of this work and the simple fact that I cannot easily make it subordinate to other important first books of our period.
—Norman Dubie

The poems in The Crucifix-Blocks, Todd Fredson's mysterious and beautiful debut, spring from that most authentic of impulses: deep feeling. But walking, as he does, at the union of cloud and consequence, he's written a book that affects the ear as much as it does the heart. In exploring the rewards of undertaking treacherous travels— both of body (through West Africa) and the mind (romantic and familial love)— it wants to center the self on a great continuum of meaning. It looks back, it looks forward, but most importantly, it looks out. This is a passionate, gorgeous and satisfying book.
—Carolyn Guinzio

Again and again, these meditations expose their quiet wisdoms with an admirable sleight-of-hand. Against the meditative flow of any given passage, unexpected and exquisitely honed images appear with the force of lightning strikes. The precise and surprising architectures of these poems help expose the heart's – and the mind's – inevitable emergencies. Todd Fredson brings a delicate, incisive, and lyrical social realism to American poetry, and with this single book has emerged as one of our most powerful younger voices.
—David St. John

Prior to receiving his Master of Fine Arts from Arizona State University, Todd Fredson served in the Peace Corps, living in a village in the Ivory Coast during a period of revolution. He is currently pursuing his doctorate in Creative Writing and Literature at the University of Southern California. He lives with his partner and their two sons in Santa Monica, California.

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Dusting on Sunday

Sam Pereira's poems are built to last. The expertly turned sentences and lines show exquisite craftsmanship. But Pereira's poems reach way beyond craftsmanship. With a tonal range that includes hilarity and wonder, righteous indignation and whispered affection, Pereira accounts for experience—the poet's own and all of ours—with the fidelity and big-heartedness of a first rate artist. Like the horse who appears in one poem, this book waits generously for you, and then it "takes you on the ride of your life."
—Peter Campion

Sam Pereira, a self-described "great disappointment / Of the universe," infuses his poems with sadness and humor and something more… something ineffable. In poems that are "Sexy, mysterious, in pain," Pereira allows desire to diminish until it falls, at last, within our grasp: "I / Crave the small things / In America, which grows / Predictably quieter, trying / To find its soul." His deeply felt lyrics channel the voices of wise deadbeats and casual sophisticates. Like a night of sipping single malt Scotch and listening to Chet Baker while recalling ex-lovers, these poems provide those exquisite sensual pleasures that "make [our] lives remarkable again."
—Michael Waters

Dusting on Sunday is a must-read. Sam Pereira's poetry creates an entire universe in which the possible and impossible seamlessly coexist. In a familiar world in which the wind picks up small leaves & garden insects, depositing them in the neighbor's yard—in which fathers die, and love is found and lost— the unfamiliar happens as well. God is a great rabbit, the screams of lobsters will never be heard, horses never learn to read, Tupac is rapping to the angels, and Sinatra would be singing the author's songs were it not for the fact that he's dead and shooting craps at the Sands Heaven. Dusting on Sunday is filled with intelligent wit that allows its deeper themes to be heartfelt by the reader. Don't miss out. Read this book!
—Marcia Southwick

Sam Pereira's previous books of poetry include: The Marriage of the Portuguese (L'Epervier Press, 1978), Brittle Water (Abattoir Editions/Penumbra Press, University of Nebraska at Omaha, 1987), A Café in Boca (Tebot Bach, 2007), and the expanded edition of his first book, which was published by Tagus Press at UMass Dartmouth in 2012. He has appeared in numerous anthologies, including Piecework: 19 Fresno Poets (Silver Skates Publishing, 1987), The Body Electric: Poems from the American Poetry Review (W. W. Norton, 2000), How Much Earth (Roundhouse Press, 2001), and Blue Arc West (Tebot Bach, 2007). He lives and teaches in the San Joaquin Valley of California and is married to the writer, Susan Graham.

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Lifeboat

Catharine Clark-Sayles writes with a cool critical eye and yet, at the same time, with great grace and conviction. This a delicate balance—one not every poet can manage—but she does it extremely well. Her life experiences are broad and her compassion is unlimited. In Lifeboat, Clark-Sayles has many poems about seemingly ordinary miracles which happen "the way mashed and spoiling/grapes become wine, or flour and water / stirred can make bread…"
—Susan Terris

It's all there in the title poem, Lifeboats, and the poems that make up this collection enact what Catharine Clark-Sayles calls the "rules of lifeboats: Someone always goes mad; someone always dies; and someone will be eaten..." And the attentive reader will, like those who survive, be "forever changed, marked with the phosphorescence of their passage through deep water and deep night." I am at once stunned and moved by these gutsy, wise and unflinchingly honest poems, Lifeboats, but also To A Poet Lost To Alzheimer and The Cradles of St. Kilda. Dr. Clarke-Sayles is a truth-teller, and there's a certain quiet, a serenity to the work, well-observed and welcome in our mad, unsettled times. Seems, does it not, that we are all, one way and another, ready these days for the cry, "Man the lifeboats!" And here, friend, here, you hold one in your hands!
—Robert Sward

Catharine Clark-Sayles writes poetry between patients in her medical practice. Her family came from West Virginia and traveled over much of the United States with her military father. She completed medical school in Denver and moved to San Francisco. A childhood love of poetry resurfaced in her forties and she has been writing ever since. Dr Clark-Sayles has recently had poems published in Runes, Spillway and online journals Pirene’s Fountain and locuspoint.org. Anthologies including her work are: The Place That Inhabits Us, The Healing Art of Writing, The Squaw Valley Review, and Body Language. Her first book, One Breath, was published by Tebot Bach in 2008.

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A Map of Shadows

A Map of Shadows is an ambitious, enthusiastic sequence of lyrics and meditations that is unique yet has affinities with works as distinguished—and as "difficult," because of far-flung sources and innovative arrangements—as Ezra Pound's Cantos and David Jones's Anathemata. Its polymath author is devoted to the visual arts, and one might think of his own product as a kind of Kuntskammer of historical anecdotes and contemporary aperçus, arcane quotations and esoteric lists (18th century Chinese painters' brushstrokes, magical herbs, sacred stones), recipes and white spells and inkhorn terms, ingenious machinery devised by such out-of-the-way designers as Giacomo Torelli and Salomon de Caus ... Everywhere informed by a sensibility strongly inclined to synaestheia, this volume speaks to the collector of curiosities and the connoisseurs of chaos latent in the postmodern soul.
—Stephen Yenser Author of Blue Guide (2006), Distinguished Professor of English and Director of Creative Writing at the University of California at Los Angeles.

By turns effete, surreal, charming, and daring, but continually deft, this map of poetic shadows tells mysterious stories, tickled by the occasional flutter of rhyme over the steady wonder of the unfolding images. Gabriel Meyer has a light touch and a sure hand.
—Annie Finch Author of Among the Goddesses: An Epic Libretto in Seven Dreams (2009), Professor of English and Director of the Stonecoast MFA Program at the University of Southern Maine.

Gabriel Meyer's new collection A Map of Shadows is an ingenious and compelling sequence of meditations and reflections on the Tuileries garden in Paris, as both subject and backdrop. Charting a path from the garden's historical presence to its contemporary resonance, Gabe Meyer sketches the various fi gures of the Tuileries, from Louis XIV to the speaker/observer of these very poems. Gracious and elegant at every moment, A Map of Shadows recognizes the constant desire for an Eden—a paradise—that arises in artist, citizen, and lover alike.
—David St. John Author of The Auroras (2012)

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Every Seed of the Pomegranate

Through the hard lens of the recent war in Iraq, the poems in David Allen Sullivan's Every Seed of the Pomegranate span the wide landscapes of history, culture, and mythology. More importantly, Sullivan's gaze is steeped in compassion for all connected to the combat zone; these finely crafted poems investigate and interrogate that which is most deeply human. During a recent trip to Baghdad I was asked by an Iraqi poet, "When will the artists in America create work in conversation with us?" Every Seed of the Pomegranate is a necessary part of this neglected and difficult conversation.
—Brian Turner, Here, Bullet; Phantom Noise

David Allen Sullivan paints a visually nuanced and starkly realistic picture of the horrors and futility of war; he has crafted this picture not with brush and paint, but pen and ink. Watching a widow collapse on "Baghdad's scarred tarmac" he asks, "How is it we can carry / what cannot be borne?" His concise and candid language, married to his empathy for all involved, is the beginning of an answer.
—Adnan Al-Sayegh, Uruk's Anthem; Embracing Exile; Under a Strange Sky

These are poems not so much driven by the war in Iraq, as by a highly artful feel for the craft of poetry, and by the poet's distillation of others' experiences of that war. Like Brian Turner before him, David Allen Sullivan has allowed the war and its already lingering consequences to use him as a vessel to bring the war home. Still, what is most brilliant here is the depth and breadth of a lovely and never tired diction that the poet finds appropriate to tell— show really—illuminated moments from the war, a sense of the musical line that is eerily appropriate to its often grim contexts, and a luxurious clarity and sure-handedness that makes you feel glad for the power of language to endure even our most horrible human deeds. Here is a poet to be reckoned with.
—Bruce Weigl, Song of Napalm; Declension in the Village of Chung Luong; The Circle of Hanh

Through an almost trance-like conjuring of individuals' voices from the U.S., Guantanamo, and Iraq, these poems plead with us to eat Every Seed of the Pomegranate. These are poems which remind us how far back war reaches and how long it will take to recover. Like one of his characters, the porcelain factory worker in Ramadi recycling rejects, David Allen Sullivan takes the sacred dust that's left us and remakes it into poems that "earn back what's lost."
—Farnaz Fatemi, poet, Lecturer at UCSC

These gritty, lyrical poems about the invasion of Iraq, issue not from CNN, but from the voices David Allen Sullivan has listened to, and from his own empathetic and far-ranging research and study. It is the deep, real, considered response of a citizen who is paying for the war in more ways than one—as we all are. It is a moving and important book.
—Robert Fanning, The Seed Thieves; American Prophet

Listening to poetry is one of those imaginary vehicles we can ride in until we hit an honest IED of traumatic memory. The poems in this book contain many such explosions.
—Staff Sergeant Alex Lemons, United States Marine Corps

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The Ravelling Braid

The often praiseful, sometimes wrenching poems in Toni Hanner's The Ravelling Braid are stories of the well-worn earth, lost ancestors, of lovers and seekers, of 'bones and blood black with rain.' She speaks of the father with both great reverence and an unwavering eye. This bighearted poet calls us to a world where we are braided with loss and redemption.
—Dorianne Laux

The poems in Toni Hanner's The Ravelling Braid don't flinch, despite the hard content of the American century. The narrator remembers the forced assimilation of her father, aches with the pleasure of dance—"bones and blood black with rain"—and conjures up a world of tomatoes, cottonwoods, red clay, Lutheran potluck dishes, diner waitresses and old Fords. This is a necessary book for our times: a howl at "our sharp American edges", in all their deadliness and beauty.
—Jordan Hartt, Director of Programs, Centrum

As is common in first books, with The Ravelling Braid Toni Hanner erects a creation myth to introduce her voice to the contemporary poetry landscape. What is wonderfully uncommon here is the singularity, maturity and assuredness of that voice. As Hanner tells us in the title poem,"… I could not have designed this world,/ the Shanghai, the Costco of it, the diligence/ required to stay out of reach of the sharks' teeth…," but Hanner has absolutely captured its oppositional strangeness and peculiar beauties. These are musical, expertly wrought lyric narratives that remind us that storytelling and craft are alive and, more importantly, relevant, to readers in the 21st century.
—Erin Belieu

A very fine collection — brimming and sparkling. When readers reach the bottoms of these poems, the air will be different.
—Lawson Fusao Inada, Emeritus Professor of Writing , Southern Oregon University

Toni Hanner's poems appear in Yellow Medicine Review, MARGIE, Calyx, Gargoyle, and many others. Books include Moonmusic, 2000, Wellstone Press (with co-author Connie Beitler) and Gertrude, 2012, Traprock Books. She is a member of Eugene's Red Sofa Poets and Port Townsend's Madrona Writers. She is married to the poet Michael Hanner and lives in Eugene, Oregon.

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The Plain Above the River

If Carroll Kearly relied on mere reminiscence to propel the reader from poem to poem in The Plain Above the River, the collection might devolve to "fragments of memory keep[ing] family together". Instead, he evokes a sensuality and sensibility rapidly disappearing from the American cultural landscape. No matter how or where your personal history has been constructed, these simultaneously simple and complex poems will remind you of sensations you may have forgotten: the fragrance of "Bing cherries [with their] deep-red-to-black flesh", a song "signaling the falling away". Read this book slowly. Savor it.
—Lynne Thompson
Author of Beg No Pardon (Perugia Press) and Winner,Great Lakes New Writers Award

"I wish my river’s name/had syllables like Chattahouchee/instead of one-strike Snake/for that would be truer/to the syncopated beats/sounding freer and freer in my ears," writes Carroll Kearley in The Plain Above the River. Kearley explores the currents of his life—and ours—in these place-infused lines. We are rooted and uprooted by the "snow-born, spring-born" memories of family, burnt umber fields, jitterbug rapids and graveled roads that he evokes with love and attention. Rest awhile in the clapboard house of these thoughtful poems.
—Candace Pearson
Hour of Unfolding, 2010 Liam Rector First Book Prize for Poetry

Caroll Kearley’s collection of poems The Plain Above the River is about people and a place before Kearley’s people were, the curving Snake river and the snake river plain. Rimrock reddening above the exclamation points of leaping salmon, the bones of small, prehistoric horses, Indian villages reaping river’s gift. And later farmers close to a desert, spreading water on dry fields with a motion of shovels the author still feels in his arms, a father learning this hard place, small boys daring the river though they couldn’t swim, graves by the river, wars and those who didn’t return from wars, boys peeing out a window on a farm house roof, good land gambled away, lives drowned in alcohol. This collection of poems is memoir and celebration. The work is both plain as oatmeal and subtle as the flight of birds. Somewhere Wallace Stegner says that Europeans had to learn a whole new pallet to appreciate the American West. Kearley has his colors right Look at them.
—Bruce Williams
author of The Mojave Road and Other Journeys

In 1930 Carroll Kearley was born in a farmhouse his maternal grandfather built one mile from Buhl, Idaho, a town twenty-four years older than he. Carroll grew up on two small farms, one on each side of the river. He earned a Ph.D. in philosophy and became a college professor. After retirement at age sixty-five, he started the serious venture of writing poetry. Tebot Bach has published two books of his poems: Deity-Alphabets and The Armenian Watchmaker.

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Opaque Traveler

Brian Tracy’s Opaque Traveler takes us upon a journey across nocturnal landscapes that have been sculpted by myth and painted by dream. This album of dreams is also a book of mirrors, and in each refl ection we see ourselves reckoning both the desires and experiences of our lives. To follow this traveler’s path, we are given to understand, is to seek to be changed.
— David St. John

Opaque Traveler is a dreamscape painted in poetry. At once lyrical and mythical, the sequence’s recurring images are layered until the reader is fluent in the language of Tracy’s visions, “a collection of images that pass beneath my brush like fish inside water…” These poems, however, are no nighttide clouds that dissipate and are forgotten upon awaking. They have meaning beyond the fragmentary, coalescing into a palpable, vivid, and compelling whole.
— Jim Natal, author of Memory and Rain

Ancient traditions around the world respect the dreamer and the dream life as an important source of wisdom and vitality. Big dreams contain our essence and the longings of the soul, expressed in the metaphors of myth. Brian Tracy’s lyrical record reveals the poetry inherent in dreaming and can inspire us to tune our inner ear to the dialogue between heart and mind, and carefully listen to the characters that emerge from our own darkness.
— Dr. Catherine Svehla, mythologist and storyteller

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Autumn’s Only Blood

Willie James King “steadies the plow” with his compassionate poems in a world where no one is “safe from the chaos / of a world caving in on itself.” Writing from an Alabama where “somehow, those old Confederates don’t stay dead,” he celebrates unsung heroes like a teacher who sees her job as creating “the kind of kids willing / to die for the lives their ancestors lost.” The theme of continuance, of survival to see a more humane world, runs throughout these poems, beginning in the “ruin / on ruin” that is Haiti and ending by savoring a backwoods plum and longing to be where “leaves won't wither on the willow, / even when the earth seems fallow in snow.”
—Bryce Milligan Publisher, Wings Press. author of Lost and Certain of It and Alms for Oblivion.

Willie James King is a truthseeker, a trustseeker. In this book he pursues his double quest first by examining the injustices to all humanity through the 2011 execution of Troy Davis, the murder of Martin Luther King and the forced uprooting of thousands of ancestor-souls from Africa. After our long history of “rubble and arms” King’s good-hearted emotional positivism still flickers: “the earth seems fallow”; there is still a promise, at least a possibility of fertility, rebirth.
—Kathleene West, author of Water Witching and The Summer of the Sub-Comandante

How a poet comes to his voice remains a mystery and so it should remain, for poetic lyricism and passion rise up in the darkest of times, as well as in the most beautiful. It sings those moments when the words in one's mouth taste of blood, as well as those when they taste of ripe plum, sweet, sweet, sweet, as Willie James King reminds us, closing out his powerful new book of poems. Dedicated to Troy Davis, executed by my native state of Georgia after denying an appeal that might have exonerated him, these poems speak honestly of the injustice inflicted by racism, the strength of resistence, and the sheer pleasure, inextricable from the pain, that being alive can bring, and doing so with what I call pure, unadulterated ‘wordlove.’ This poet has learned to trust his language, let it lead him where the poem needs to go. His poems sing, mourn, rage, celebrate, their language always remaining true to its source.
—Kathryn Stripling Byer, North Carolina Poet Laureate Emerita, Author of Wildwood Flower and Southern Fictions

There is nothing pedestrian about Willie James King's latest collection of poems, AUTUMN'S ONLY BLOOD. With the sure eye for details of a mystic who is conversant with the natural world, with the careful craft of one who has learned “to steady the plow” in a stony field, and with a profundity of spirit as inspired and original as Blake's, King is a seeker whose poems are, “blooming, as if/they ought to be this/autumn’s only blood.” Dedicated to Troy Davis, executed in fall 2011, this collection, unflinching in its candor and compassion, eloquently articulates the Black experience in Alabama. A student during the 60s Civil Rights Movement, King became a teacher whose charge was “to create the kind of kids willing/to die for the lives their ancestors lost” so that he “put down the chalk, took to walking/the hot highway with them.” His poems walk us down that highway, seeking healing and justice in an unjust world. There is much to be learned here, and I am grateful to be one of King's students.
—Pamela Uschuk, author of Crazy Love, winner of a 2010 American Book Award, and Editor-In-Chief of Cutthroat, A Journal of the Arts

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I Want To Thank My Eyes

Rosaly DeMaios Roffman’s poetry of discovery, courage, devotion and gratitude inspires the reader toward healing and wholeness. The poet is a teacher and a traveler: Yaninna, Jerusalem, Waikiki, Kyoto, Chimayo, the Hebrides and more. Along the way, many have told her their stories and secrets, and she shares these stories (and her own) with an engaging blend of deep reverence, compassionate vision, and quirky humor. Roffman’s long-awaited volume, I Want to Thank My Eyes, is food for the soul, and makes us hungry for more.
—Joan E. Bauer, Author of The Almost Sound of Drowning

Rosaly DeMaios Roffman has been writing her fine poems for many years, and it’s a cause for celebration to see so many of them here under one roof in this wonderful house. I Want to Thank My Eyes sings with tenderness and gentle wisdom, propelled by the quiet, intense urgency of a writer familiar with life’s complex physical and emotional landscapes. Imbued with an innate curiosity, a deeply felt empathy, Roffman’s work draws on the extensive resources of a life fully lived and on an extravagant richness of imagery. These poems are ambitious yet humble, intimate yet outward-looking, spiritual yet irreverent, and always, always sure-handed.
—Jim Daniels, Poet, Screenwriter and author of Having a Little Talk with Capital P Poetry

I actually opened Rosaly Roffman’s manuscript— randomly, mind you—to the poem “What I Learned in Scotland“ where she mentions her “friend Jerry Stern [who] says write about people not suitcases,” but I am interested in the poem because it’s about Scotland where I lived once, and Skye, where I was herded by a black and white Border Collie. What Rosaly does in this poem is write about people by writing about suitcases, so to speak, so to speak. A moving poem—and a moving book and a delight to see it all written down. “Two Country Girls at the Matisse Show” is gorgeous.
—Gerald Stern, National Book Award recipient, Author of Early Collected Poems, Lucky Life, Lovesick, Bread Without Sugar

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Spillway 17

Contributors

Ralph Angel
Joan Baranow
Suze Baron
Marjorie Becker
Nicky Beer
Margo Berdeshevsky
Toby Bielawski
Chana Bloch
Barbara Swift Brauer
Andrea Hollander Budy
Kara Candito
Alan Catlin
Lucia Cherciu
Catharine Clark-Sayles
Ginny Lowe Connors
Lucille Lang Day
Fred Dings
Norman Dubie
Gayle Eleanor
Nausheen Eusef
Alice B. Fogel
CB Follett
Todd Fredson
Naoko Fujimoto
Cristián Flores Garciá
Richard Garcia
Giang Van
Howard Giskin
Veronica Golos
Rafael Jesús González
Ian Haight
Lexa Hillyer
Dave Holt
Paul Hoover
Jodi Hottel
Hyesim
Janet Jennings
Saeed Jones
Anna Journey
Lisa Kang
Timothy Kercher
William Landis
Naomi Ruth Lowinsky
Katharyn Howd Machan
Gregory Mahrer
Joe Massingham
Beverly Matherne
Dennis Maulsby
John McKernan

Leslie McMurtry
Robert Aquinas McNally
Gerardo Mena
Myron Michael
Irene Mitchell
Beverly Acuff Momoi
Joy Moore
Mihaela Moscaliuc
Bern Mulvey
Jim Natal
Nguyen Do
Perry S. Nicholas
Lauren Nicole Nixon
James Norcliffe
Cyan Orr
Michelle Penn
Shawn Pittard
Ross Plovnick
Andrea Potos
Joshua Prestin
Gregory W. Randall
Tony Reevy
Katrina Roberts
Thaddeus Rutkowski
Terry Savoie
Melita Schaum
David Scronce
Jen Siraganian
David St. John
Vivienne St. John
Gretchen Stengel
Maggie Stern
Tae-young Ho
Tang Yao
Susan Terris
Judith Terzi
Amber Flora Thomas
Lynne Thompson
Sarah Vap
Marc Vincenz
Arthur Vogelsang
Andrea Watson
Mike White
Scott Wiggerman
Karin Wisiol
Yim Tan Wong
Diana Woodcock
Zhang Youfeng

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the eelgrass meadow

Robin Chapman is both a poet and a scientist and in her new collection, The Eelgrass Meadow, science and poetry meet and find shared meaning. In these beautiful and moving poems, Chapman's tone glides between elegy and rallying cry, between delight at discovery and sorrow at what is to come. This book will inform and transform your vision of our shared world.
—Jesse Lee Kercheval, author of Cinema Muto, the Dog Angel, and World as Dictionary

Robin Chapman brings to her poetry an acute attentiveness to the lives and features of the world around her. Her words are accurate, informative, imaginatively arranged, and often filled with passion as they focus on our human conflicts, concerns, and responsibilities toward the earth and our world. Chapman's tones of respect and gratitude for life are present in each and every poem of The Eelgrass Meadow.
—Pattiann Rogers, author of Firekeeper, Wayfare, and The Grand Array

Another unforgettable collection of poems from Robin Chapman with an eye for the riveting detail and an ear for the world's resonant music.
—Ron Wallace, author of For a Limited Time Only and Long for This World

About the Poet: Robin Chapman is author of six previous books, including the award-winning Images of a Complex World: The Art and Poetry of Chaos, The Dreamer Who Counted the Dead, and Abundance. She is recipient of Appalachia’s 2010 Poetry Prize. Professor Emerita of Communicative Disorders at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, she helps co-ordinate the UW Chaos and Complex Systems Seminar.

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PRAISE FOR
Standing In The River

Shawn Pittard’s new collection is awake—refreshing as cold, clear water—unflinching in its spiritual confrontations, its adoration of the quotidian world. As the speaker in the poem "Equinox" says: "This is the place astronomers call/ the circle of illumination—" Every poem strikes exactly the right balance between what is revealed and what is withheld, beginning with the amazing first poem, "Leviathan at Stinson Beach," which has all the enduring power of a classic.
—Susan Kelly-DeWitt, author of The Fortunate Islands

Shawn Pittard is a master of details. He describes the natural world with the precision of a scientist: hooves, scales, colors, the daily weather, the weight of an elk’s heart. A scientist who is all Eye. But he is just as precise about himself, his feelings, desires and regrets—and fully honest. That honesty, combined with that close eye, adds up to compassion, perhaps the worthiest virtue. Read Shawn Pittard’s poems; you will come to know more about yourself.
—James DenBoer, author of Stonework: Selected Poems and Day Moon

I love these poems—their wild heart and meditative grace, how they grapple with God and mystery. I’m thrilled that Shawn Pittard invites me to stand alongside him as he ponders his reckonings—sorrow and scripture, sex, the beauty of fish, constellations, and current—each poem pushing me deeper into the stream.
—Moira Magneson, author of He Drank Because

Shawn Pittard’s poems could not be more relevant or timely in this current climate of revolt— with the world’s youth clawing their way out of a bag full of religious doctrine and oppression. Hopefully, they’ll stand in a river next to Shawn, in the morning before I could see, and feel its inexorable pull. And as the fog begins to lift, swing for steelhead in a luminous blizzard of refracted light.
—Danyen Powell, author of Blue Sky Flies Out and Anvil

Shawn Pittard is the author of a previous chapbook collection, These Rivers, from Rattlesnake Press.His poems, essays, and book reviews have appeared in a wide variety of publications and he’s co-written a screenplay, Junk Sick, with his brother Trent. He lives with his wife Kathy in Sacramento, California, where he explores the river valley’s complex human and physical landscapes. Several times a year, he goes off the grid to his family’s cabin in the forest outside Flagstaff, Arizona.

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Absence Is Such a Transparent House

Aby Kaupang's poetry demonstrates the effects of passion and will as they collide with the brutalities of the world. In writing that is often startling and idiosyncratic, Kaupang surges to the core of the painful paradoxes that beset all of us; this poet doesn't so much work to resolve contradictions as to force new and courageous energy from their irresolvability. Speaking of loss, Simone Weil states that the presence of an absent or deceased person is "imaginary, but his presence is very real: henceforward it is his way of appearing." Absence is such a Transparent House is the poetic enactment of this hard won insight. Brave, uncanny, and deeply felt, this book balances the delicacies of attention with the fortitude of continuing exploration.
—Elizabeth Robinson

Absence is insatiable, its boundless appetite preys upon the imagination in ways that language can only hint at. Which is perhaps why poetry is a so apt a vessel for responding to absence: its bare branch lines, its chapel whispers, its embodied silences encapsulate loss in ways other forms of art cannot. Aby Kaupang's poems are inhabited by spirits; they literally speak in tongues; they are "a tender haunting in the glass beneath the waves.". Anyone who has borne grief will recognize its teethmarks here: grief not just as an idea in the mind, but gnawing at the body, the place where it is most keenly felt.
—D. A. Powell

This poetry is of spirit, sound, and naming. Its efforts are worthy, visible; inscribed with lit-up delicacy on the surface tension holding the subject and her subjects. Love, vision, god, death, surrender. . . surprise! "tragedy too might die/silent rim//silent Eye—"
—Rebecca Wolff

Aby Kaupang is the author of Absence is such a Transparent House (Tebot Bach, 2011) and Scenic Fences I Houses Innumerable (Scantily Clad Press, 2009). Her poems have appeared in VOLT, Verse, Denver Quarterly, Best New Poets, The Laurel Review, Parthenon West, Aufgabe, 14 Hills, Interim, Caket rain, lo-ball, PANK and others.She received her M FA in Poetry at Colorado State University, where she is now pursuing her MS in Occupational Therapy. She lives with the poet Matthew Cooperman and their two children in Fort Collins.

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Self-Portrait As Odysseus

With at-the-ready humor ("The bed at the Atlanta La Quinta/is softer tjem tje rocks in Troy"), Robert Wynne has artfully re-cast Odysseus as an alert but way businessman plagued by timetables, speeding tickets, and weather-delayed flights, in this pertinent and appealing update of Jomer's heroic wanderer. Enjoy!
—Cyrus Cassells, More Than Peace and Cypresses (Copper Canyon Press)

With each poem in Robert Wynne's new collection, details set us down somewhere both new and and recognizable. Details are only tools, though. What transforms them here, what surrounds us in the textures, the dimensions, of a world we want to inhabit—what makes Self-Portrait As Odysseus so engaging is Wynne's inimitable imagination. Another jetlagged poet might have the nerve to steal a scene or two from Homer. But Tobert Wynne has the courage, the audacity the vision for this stunning synthesis of the epic and the mundane. Public restroom grafitti, water spots on a hotel mirror, Graceland, the Alamo—Wynne's eye alights on all with curiosity and wonder. Let the journey begin.
—David Meischen, Managing Editor, Dos Gatos Press

Robert Wynne earned his MFA in Creative Writing from Antioch University. A former co-editor of Cider Press Review. He has published 6 chapbooks, and 3 full-length books of poetry. He's won numerous prizes, and his poetry has appeared in magazines and anthologies throughout North America. He lives in Burleson, TX, with his wife, daughter and 4 rambunctious dogs—but he travels quite a bit.

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Don't Blame the Ugly Mug

From the back cover:

What you’re holding in your hand is a collection of souvenirs from a 5.84 billion-mile journey. This number, give or take, is on the Earth's odometer after completing ten revolutions around the sun. For the last ten years, two self-proclaimed idiots have been hosting a weekly reading series, peddling poetry at The Ugly Mug Café in Orange—and forming what has become a juggernaut series in Southern California.

These hosts, Ben Trigg and Steve Ramirez, have gathered poems from a selection of poets who have, at some point in the past decade, made the trek from coordinates across the country to The Ugly Mug.

Have you ever experienced free fall and the full affect of gravity? This is what it must feel like to host a series. There are moments, as with any death-defying action, when time slows to nothing and certain images or ideas are stamped on the memory in a definition higher than any television in existence. These poems are those moments, those mementos.

Read them and you'll trace love’s orbit: blind dates to marriage to breaking up. Your travel guide could be a pilot, maybe an angel. There are cavemen and gravediggers. Examine everything from crayons to planets—this anniversary anthology covers great distances. Open to any page, surrender and let the earth spin. Let the words pass you at the incredible speed of life.

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All the Birds Awake

All the Birds Awake joyfully demonstrates how, like the salmon, all our lives "are swirling forward." Carefully negotiating the terrain between an "I" who inhabits an intensely felt present along with a keenly remembered past and a third-person "woman" whose distance allows for conscious reflection, Gayle Kaune moves from chronicle to insight. She takes us out far and in deep, striving for that state of mind where all "conclusions are gone" in favor of open-ended wonder.
— Judith Kitchen

Ms. Kaune has accomplished something with All the Birds Awake rarely seen in contemporary poetry—she has amplified, without altering, the voice of those events, objects, and creatures that are so quiet they're often overlooked. And in the process enriched us with the lessons they so modestly bear. These poems read like stories shared between friends around a common table—at other times like prayer whispered by soldiers under fire. This is an unbearably wise book filled with a holy reverence for the beauty and terrors of everyday life. I am reminded, reading these poems, of the moments when Nature out of everything known produces something brand new. All the Birds Awake is a book every pilgrim on the road to a better understanding of their humanity should carry in their pack.
— Gary Lemons

This mindful poet notices, as war begins, a bowl of white roses beside a bed. She writes: "In such small/gestures we state/our intentions to survive/on a planet that survives." Gayle Kaune faces mortality in the company of a friend who kayaks shortly after a surgeon stitches in her new kidney. Another friend lives deliberately and well, knowing cancer is taking over her bones. Thirty years of marriage—surprises, sorrows, delights.These vivid poems show us ways to live and ways to face the end of living.
—Peggy Shumaker

Gayle Kaune's poems are wise, sad, funny, exuberant, and compassionate. Their quick leaps and changes of camera angle tug at the mind, while her language—colloquial yet rich with metaphor— often moves us. She writes of children who are "hallelujah fruit pies," a father who "sank into the silky fathoms of his death." In grief, she reaches toward something larger than herself. These poems, balancing light and dark, offer us abundance. Kaune's faith is that life is "like that 14-headed fountain. . . Drink from all the faucets, the world brings you luck."This is a celebratory book that speaks to us intimately yet with tact, craft, and music. Kaune has done something special, writing a book that appeals both to poetry lovers and to a wider audience.
— Richard Widerkehr

Gayle Kaune is published widely in literary magazines. Her chapbooks include Concentric Circles and N-Sid-Sen Star. Her book, Still Life in the Physical World, was published by Blue Begonia press. She has worked as a teacher and psychotherapist and lives with her husband in Port Townsend.

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Chemical Tendencies

Paul Lieber's poems travel the urgent streets of Manhattan with a charged immediacy even as they look back with tenderness along the city's avenues of memory. These are poems of compelling intensity and clarity. Paul Lieber's poems about his son Sam form a magnificent and glorious sequence of poems in and of themselves, just as his elegiac cycle about the death of his sister brings the reader through the raw passages of grief. From first to last, this is a superb, deeply human, and heart-breaking collection of poems.
— David St. John

Paul Lieber's poems are streetwise yet deeply sensitive. Eminently readable, delivered with cut-to-the-chase frankness and humor born of suffering, Chemical Tendencies' telling anecdotes combine elements of autobiography, novel and poem. Life on New York's lower east side (where "the noodle pudding still bounces"), fatherhood, aging, the "off Broadway" acting life, family, and mortality are grappled with in this collection by a protagonist whose winning voice never shies away from self implication and always comes straight from the heart.
— Amy Gerstler

Paul Lieber's hot, hip, exhilarating poems whirl like small tornadic stories or conversations with people from the poet's life—his son, father, friends—all torqued up with the tough-love of gentle tough-talk, as well as lucid observation. Reading these poems I often felt I was watching short films in black and white, full of quick cuts—immediate, intense—where a "Bulky gray 49 Ford / with running boards" might deliver a father in "a brimmed hat,/ saying groovy and hep / with the thick sound / of an outsider." More than once I thought of John Cassavetes. Witty, colloquial, taciturn, and deeply human, I found the poems in Chemical Tendencies endlessly entertaining, and constantly surprising, even slightly shocking. In the end this is one of the best collections of love poems I've sat down with in a long time, poems that carry us toward acceptance and grace like a sock to the jaw.
— David Dodd Lee

With the precision of a well-shot cue ball angling across a table, setting into motion a sequence of equally precise reactions, these devoutly un-flowery, yet intricately crafted revelations evoke intimacies completely un-idealized, un-romanticized—and therefore trustworthy. Paul Lieber employs an urban imagery based in what could be called a behind-the-scenes realism, given not to harshness, but rather to a kind of mercy. It is as though, the poet is saying, this world is flawed and therefore beautiful. These plainspoken poems work like unfolding equations of compassion, sometimes funny, or aching with pain or desire or both at once: like math, they move inexorably toward their moments of implied epiphany, where the poet knows enough to let them go, and let them resonate.
— Sarah Maclay

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Spillway 16

Contributors

Tim Bascom
Aaron Bauer
Curtis Bauer
Francesca Bell
Naomi Benaron
Margo Berdeshevsky
Carol Berg
Rose Black
Christopher Buckley
Trent Busch
Patricia Caspers
Yu-Han Chao
Maureen Ann Connolly
Kat Crawford
Jennifer Dannenberg
Lauren Davis
celeste doaks
Sharon Dolin
Camille T. Dungy
Elon G. Eidenier
Gail Rudd Entrekin
CB Follett
Sheila Franschman
Fox Henry Frazier
Delaney Gibbons
Rafael Jesús González
Taylor Graham
Darla Himeles
Laura Horn
Paul Hostovsky
Peter Huggins
Una Nichols Hynum
David Jordan
Anna Journey
Kristen E. D. Kapfer
Pearl Karrer
Aviva Kasowski
Stephen Lackaye
Tingyu Liu
Bonnie Long
Luis D. Lopez-Maldonado
Moira Magneson
Tennae Maki

Gina Malara
Charles Manis
Shahé Mankerian
Louis Maraj
Roy Mash
Gerardo Pacheco Matus
Ed Meek
Andrew Merton
David Moffat
David A. Moody
Joy Moore
Tyler N. Moore
Lauren Nicole Nixon
Vincent Joseph Noto
Raily Orgeron
Carrie Osborne
Lauren Peck
Nicholas Pierce
Amelia Possanza
Ryan Ragan
Charles Rammelkamp
Oliver Rice
Jessika Rieck
Diane Rosenblum
Jay Rubin
Michael Schleider
David Scronce
Elizabeth Sharrock
Lee Sittler
Noel Sloboda
Paul Sohar
David St. John
Geo. Staley
J. J. Steinfeld
Joan Stepp Smith
Hema Surendranathan
Cole Swensen
Susan Terris
Lynne Thompson
G.C. Waldrep
Elizabeth Wilcox
Eleanor Wilner
Joseph Zaccardi

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PRAISE FOR
Mara's Shade

Anastassis Vistonitis occupies a unique position in Greek letters: equally acclaimed as a poet and a journalist, he switches from one medium to the other with seeming ease, now composing poems and literary essays, now turning out book reviews and articles, often on the same day. Both streams feed the sea of his imagination—he calls his prose a continuation of poetry by other means—and his Greek readers are fortunate to have his work available to them in so many forms…Indeed his work is a testament to the ancient Greek idea of the intimate connection between the body and the soul. What good luck to have a selection of his poems in English, in the splendid translation of David Connolly.
— From the Introduction by Christopher Merrill

Anastassis Vistonitis was born in Komotini, northern Greece, in 1952. He studied Political Sciences and Economics in Athens. From 1983 to 1988 he lived in the U.S.A. (New York and Chicago) and traveled extensively in Europe, North America, Africa, Australia and Asia. From 1996 to 2001 he was a member of the board of the E.W.C. (The Federation of European Writers) and from 2003 to 2007 he was its vice-president. In addition to poems, essays, book reviews and articles contributed to many leading quarterlies and news papers in Greece and abroad, Anastassis Vistonitis has published eleven books of poetry, three volumes of essays, four travelogues, a book of short stories and a book of translations of the Chinese poet Li Ho. He was the General Editor of the candidature file of Athens for the Olympic Games of 2004. Anastassis Vistonitis’s writings have been translated into 17 languages. He writes for the leading Greek newspaper To Vima and lives in Athens.

Translator David Connolly has lived and worked in Greece since 1979. He is currently Professor of Translation Studies at the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki. He has written extensively on the theory and practice of literary translation and has translated over thirty books by leading Greek authors. His translations have received numerous awards in the UK, the US and Greece.

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Moon Country

What Shankar Roy knows in Moon Country is that we are all aliens but for our poetry. This brilliant book takes the "world weary" and exchanges gravity for science, science fiction, and imagination in poems that are clear, strong and sweet. After all, poetry is an organic alteration in itself; and, it is only poetic intelligence that makes a book vibrate with originality. The landscapes, terrains and vistas in Moon Country are spiritual dimensions. The topics are man-made (poet-made) articulate accounts of imagined experience. But then why is there so much truth found here? Because poetry finds what is most human in the most highly wrought of fictive journeys. Perhaps poets with their spiritual inquiries are the brightest stars in our galaxies after all. Excellent craft makes for excellent poetry. These vivid poems are worlds in which poetry enters ethereal and enchanted places in the universe, and lands safely at home for the reader. In Moon Country, our material existences are transformed, and poetry’s best ambitions are satisfied.
— Grace Cavalieri

In Sankar Roy’s wildly original debut volume, the "moon country" of the title is America—particularly its strange, vacant suburbs where, in Roy’s book, it seems always to be night. The only constant feature of this landscape is the moon. No fixed landmass—no big trees—only a blackish sea…The inhabitants, always awake, stand on their front lawns and greet anyone who might be passing their way. Moon Country is part science fiction allegory, part social commentary, part loving evocation of American loneliness and alienation. Among the inhabitants of the suburbs the narrator is himself an alien, a vulnerable and acutely aware observer of his own otherness: "There is no landing station/ no ticket counter, no stationmaster. No one/will be there to receive you." I cannot remember another book, certainly not a first book, that evokes and inhabits our alien nation with such originality. "It bothers us to be ourselves," writes Roy. How exactly right that seems. If we are not bothered by ourselves before reading Moon Country, after reading this wise book, we certainly will be.
— Lynn Emanuel

The poems of Moon Country occupy a larger future, the territory mapped out by the poetic prose of Ray Bradbury and Arthur C. Clarke. We, the reader, feel both exhilaration and uneasiness. Sankar Roy is a lyric poet not bound by the earth, a poet of cosmic imagination. What does it mean to be an alien?
Michael Wurster

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My Kidney Just Arrived

As we get older, many of us will develop diseases and conditions that will menace not only our bodies, but also the spiritual nature of our humanity, and our most personal definitions of who we are. How do we value our lives when we are faced with onerous interventions of the body to staunch dwindling expectations of the soul? In his dry-eyed journey through 12 years of life with and despite polycystic kidney disease, G. Murray Thomas offers no easy answers, not even when he is presented with the boon of a new kidney, and a revolutionary extension of his life. Instead, he chronicles the simple and personal truths—all seen through a refreshingly unsentimental lens. He allows his typewriter to do the thinking for him without digressions into self-pity, and he nixes unwieldy wrestling sessions with grandiosity in favor of pinpointing the truth, which sometimes pops up in the damnedest places. That Thomas doesn't mine his experience to forge poetry. He merely adds to the record, and the poetry arrives. This collection is an account of what happened, and it bristles with the gentle intelligence and humor of a poet of great maturity. His is precisely the kind of voice you want recounting the experience just in case it happens to you.
— Amélie Frank, Sacred Beverage Press

My Kidney Just Arrived just might be the most upbeat story of illness, dialysis, and organ transplant you could hope to read. G. Murray Thomas writes with a sense of openness and accessibility that invites all readers to join in the humor, discomfort, uncertainty, and hope of the journey that led him to a second chance at life.
— Ben Trigg, Two Idiots Peddling Poetry

If there is anything to be said when first listening to, or reading G. Murray Thomas, it is that he is a poet whose voice is honest. In his cadence and in his tone, there is a subtle vibration that allows the listener to relax. Whether they are aware of it or not, they are suddenly at ease.
Yvonne de la Vega, Los Angeles Poetry Examiner

Thomas' great gift as a poet is his unusual ability to see and be bewildered by the thoroughly weird things that most of us take for granted.
— Victor Infante, OC Weekly

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The Sanctuary Of Artemis

The bringing together of history, myth and poetry makes a truly satisfying whole. I thought I’d be more intrigued with the poems than the context, but, in fact, I found them equally compelling.
— Holly Prado, author of From One to the Next

In this gorgeous collection, Thea Iberall creates a shimmering bridge between matter and spirit, heart and head, poet and world. She has opened my eyes to the possibilities of contextual poetry—I am eager to share this book with my students, my poet friends, and with any reader hungry to explore life’s mysteries.
— Gayle Brandeis, author of Fruitflesh: Seeds of Inspiration for Women Who Write, The Book of DeadBirds, and Delta Girls

She tells narrative stories using…simple words that mask hidden layers of meaning and emotion.
— OC Weekly

This collection of contextual poems explores the roots and origins of Western patriarchal culture through evolution, religion, neuroscience, history, mythology, symbolism, and linguistics. While the collection is broad in its exploration, the poems are intensely focused on a very personal journey through life.

Dr. Thea Iberall has been published in Rattle, Spillway, Southern California Anthology, Hummingbird Review, Sunspinner, poetrydiversity, Peregrine, and ONTHEBUS. She is in Blood to Remember: American Poets on the Holocaust (Time Being Books). Not only a published poet, Thea represented LA at the 1998 National Poetry Slams and is featured in the documentary GV6 THE ODYSSEY: Poets, Passion & Poetry. She has a Ph.D. in Computational Neuroscience and is also a playwright and novelist.

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PRAISE FOR
Monsoon Blues

The poet goes to war in Vietnam as a clarinetist in the Army band, and returns from hell to tell about it. It is vital that we read and hear Elijah Imlay — for our sense of history, for the truth of war, and for the "solace in stories."
— Maxine Hong Kingston

The gutsy satire in Elijah Imlay’s Monsoon Blues is balanced by his experience of war. These plainly spoken moments chronicle deep feelings and astute observations shaped by a vertical music that captures the speed of dangerous encounters. Imlay’s one-man ensemble knows how to gauge the blues, how to get close to the bone.
— Yusef Komunyakaa

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Houses

A house made of doors? A house sewn from pockets? A house constructed out of watches? To read this book is to take a delightful, wildly imaginative tour through a series of improbably desirable homes. I, for one want to live in CB Follett's house of straw where cows are spoked and nibbling. Or the hedgehog house where I can stick all my notes on the ends of their spines. Or the house of lemons with its "changing cinema of light". Or….
— Susan Terris

CB Follett has six collections of poems and several chapbooks. Her book At the Turning of the Light won the 2001 National Poetry Book Award from Salmon Run Press. And Freddie Was My Darling (Many Voices Press) is her most recent book, with her next book One Bird Falling forthcoming in 2011 from Time Being Books. She has been widely published and received numerous awards. She is the current Poet Laureate of Marin County, CA.

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PRAISE FOR
Steady, My Gaze

Steady, My Gaze is a metaphysical page-turner. Marie-Elizabeth Mali is not fooling around—she means to find her way to the real—each poem makes possible the next—a breath-taking debut.
— Marie Howe

Marie-Elizabeth Mali wants "the honeyed sizzle beyond all language," wants to be a vulnerable and conscious participant in the life of things as they are, awake to love and the struggle to live freely and compassionately. "How to hold the ocean," she asks, "when the vessel leaks? Rise your wild, / dear animal …"
— Mark Doty

Wherever her well-versed gaze lands, whatever chords she seizes and sings, however she chooses to tango across the floor of your imagination, you are assured to be embraced and hypnotically swept up by Marie-Elizabeth Mali’s stylish rotations of thought and pivoting reflections. What she executes in language, "all flit and hover," is no mere feat and goes beyond our standard fare of dramatic recall and gestural redemption.
— Major Jackson

Attuned to the sensual and the sacred, Marie-Elizabeth Mali is engaged in "the pursuit of some ground to call home." A restless traveler of the landscapes of self and the self’s origins, Mali is always a seeker reminding us to "Praise this beautiful, terrible world where we are opened / and crushed."
— Kim Addonizio

Marie-Elizabeth Mali is a poet of extraordinary sensitivity who picks up the signals of joy and suffering and puts that music out into the world. She is utterly honest and unafraid, capable of wonder yet grounded in compassion. This is a steady gaze indeed.
— Martín Espada

Steady, My Gaze is a book we can open anywhere—go ahead, do it now—and discover how young poetry still is, how much still remains to be savored. You’ll want to read it more than once. "Forgetfulness is ecstasy’s cousin."
— Brendan Constantine

What a perfect title for this book. Its gaze is steady and more: tender (there are marvelous and unabashed love poems here), illuminating, and bursting with a life force so strong and so rare that it should be almost illegal!
— Thomas Lux

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Spillway 15

Contributors

Muriel Wasch Alexander
John M. Anderson
June Frankland Baker
Aliki Barnstone
Tony Barnstone
Willis Barnstone
Suze Baron
Barbara Joan Tiger Bass
Ellen Bass
Keven Bellows
Christopher Buckley
Andrea Hollander Budy
Brooke Sparrow Budy
Todd Budy
Maxine Chernoff
Nicole Cooley
Peter Cooley
Glover Davis
Rafaella Del Bourgo
Mary Christine Delea
donnarkevic
Keith Ekiss
Robin Ekiss
David Allan Evans
Katie Farris
Marta Ferguson
CB Follett
Jeff Friedman
Cheryl Gilbert
Barbara Hamby
Gary Hanna
Barbara Harris
Jonathan Harris
Bill Hickok
Jean Barrett Holloway
Ruth Holzer
Paul Hoover
Paul Hostovsky
Ann Howells
Ilya Kaminsky
David Kirby
Christine Kitano

Linda Lancione
Karen Loeb
Alexander Long
Sandy Longhorn
Tony Magistrale
Fran Markover
Rochelle Mass
Mihaela Moscaliuc
Kirsten Jones Neff
Lalita Noronha
Oriana
Anika Paris
Simon Perchik
Penny Perry
Robert M. Randolph
Elisavietta Ritchie
Zack Rogow
Terry Savoie
Steven Schreiner
Elaine Dugas Shea
Rick Smith
Laurence Snydal
Gary Soto
David St. John
Viviann St. John
Chad Sweeney
Jennifer K. Sweeney
Lynne Thompson
Jari Thymian
Madeline Tiger
Helle 
 Tzalopoulou-Barnstone
Gloria Vando
Marci Vogel
Margaret Walther
Michael Waters
Mike White
Austin Wilson
Changming Yuan
Joseph Zaccardi
Javier Zamora
Kristin Camitta Zimet

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Spillway 14

Contributors

Tony Barnstone
Janée J. Baugher
Jean Berrett
Michelle Bitting
Anselm Brocki
Louis Daniel Brodsky
Elizabeth Burk
Hélène Cardona
Robin Chapman
Arfah Daud
Diane Shipley DeCillis
Richard Dinges, Jr.
Megan Doherty
Jim Douglas
Jane Downs
Trish Dugger
Molly Fisk
John Flynn
William Freedman
Robert Funge
Jessica Goodheart
Susan Gubernat
Jessica Harman
Robert Harris
Susan Heyd
George Higgins
Erich Hintze
Cynthia Marie Hoffman
Jean Barrett Holloway
Jean C. Howard
Tim Hunt
Donald Illich
E.C. Jarvis
Richard Jones
Laurie Junkins
Maxima Kahn
Bill Kemmett
Elizabeth Kerlikowske
Hari Bhajan Khalsa

Michael Kramer
David Lawrence
Marie Lecrivain
Richard Lehnert
Lyn Lifshin
Gerald Locklin
George Looney
Amy MacLennan
Consuelo Marshall
Stephen McDonald
Jason Mitchell
Naomi Neal
Patricia Nelson
Wendy Ortiz
Judith Pacht
Sherman Pearl
Candace Pearson
Alice Pero
Daniel Polikoff
Andrea Potos
Mary Bass Poulin
Donna Pucciani
Danny Romero
Dennis Ross
Daniel Saalfeld
Cathie Sandstrom
Deborah Stambler
Jeffrey Talmadge
Susan Terris
Simon A. Thalmann
Lynne Thompson
Charles Harper Webb
Florence Weinberger
Toni L. Wilkes
Laura Madeline
Wiseman
Brenda Yates
Fredrick Zydek

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PRAISE FOR
The Edge

On the edge, Lily totters. She knows there are "mysteries to uncover" in her future, yet she is equally enthralled with her familial, though unfamiliar, past. Her imagination inhabits mermaids and moon people. She confides that "my Lily is too fast for me." For those of us on the other side of the edge, we can only delight.
— Rabbi Shai Cherry, Ph.D.Director, Abraham Ratner Torah School, Tifereth Israel Synagogue, San Diego, CA

Lily Greenberg Call is already exhibiting remarkable literary talents at a very young age. She has won several poetry contests sponsored by the Laguna Beach Library and was also one of the featured poets for National Poetry Month in Orange County, CA. She has a lively imagination and a very bright future.
— John Gardiner, Poet and Gifted Students Academy, U. of CA, Irvine, Instructor

Lily Greenberg Call is twelve years old. She placed first in the Laguna Beach Library Poetry Contest for eight consecutive years. In first grade, Lily won first place in the Capistrano district-wide Reflections contest for her poem and multi-media artwork entitled: "If the Statue of Liberty were a Person." In 2007, she received an award for Excellence in Reading in the 4th grade accelerated APAAS program through the Irvine Unified School District. Other writing awards and honors include: the Moontide Press August 2008 Poet of the Month, the MENSA 2009 first place award for Poetry, and finalist in the Barnes & Noble 2006 Poetry Contest. She has been a featured poet at various readings in Orange County during National Poetry Month. Other publications include: The Magee Park Poets 2010 Anthology. Her art has been featured at the Orange County Imagination Celebration and at the MENSA 2009 Creative Urge Festival, where she won third place. Also a classical and jazz pianist, she has performed solo in many recitals and festivals and has received the California Music Teacher’s Association Certificate of Merit in 2009 and 2010. In 2007, Lily was awarded High Honors from the Johns Hopkins Center for Talented Youth, and was the youngest student to be admitted into the UCI Gifted Academy. A merit scholar at her current school, she is a philanthropist at heart, and dedicates her spare time to world hunger, child trafficking and disappearing honeybees.

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PRAISE FOR
The Time Before Mint Peppers

These are the poems of a kaleidoscope kid, shuffling through tastes, rhymes and moods. Avalon allows us to peek through her "cage of dreams" into the playful pageantry of her maturing mind.She alternates between airy and arresting, between marshmallow clouds and poetic pirouettes, between a child and an adolescent.
— Rabbi Shai Cherry, Ph.D.Director, Abraham Ratner Torah School, Tifereth Israel Synagogue, San Diego, CA

Avalon Greenberg Call has won awards for her poetry through the Laguna Beach Library and already demonstrates excellent writing skills. I look forward to her future with great anticipation,and I have confidence that she will continue to grow as an artist.
— John Gardiner, Poet and Gifted Students Academy, U. of CA, Irvine, Instructor

Avalon Greenberg Call is nine years old, and for six consecutive years, placed first in the annual Laguna Beach Library Poetry Contest. In 2007, Avalon received an award for Excellence in Creative Writing and Art in first grade at Eastshore Elementary, Irvine Unified School District. She has been a featured poet at various readings in Orange County during National Poetry Month, and was a finalist in the Barnes & Noble 2006 Poetry Contest. Her paintings have appeared at the Del Mar Fair.She plays original piano jazz compositions for various recitals and festivals, and received the California Music Teacher’s Association Certificate of Merit in 2010.

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mail to:
Tebot Bach
PO Box 7887
Huntington Beach, CA
92615-7887

PRAISE FOR
Sacred Graffiti

Whether we are in the company of artists, writers, musicians, family, friends, the Bronx or the floral life of California, these poems offer us their beauty and guide us through Florence Weinberger’s deliberate meanderings. We, as readers, become part of her poetic tapestry, gasping with wonder and asking for more. Her appetite for art goes hand in hand with her probe into the essence of what life offers us, into expression itself. Sacred Graffiti is a life-affirming miracle that rises above technique into artistic bursts of both emotion and intellect. I simply love this book.
— Paul Lieber

Like Philip Levine, Florence Weinberger’s poems evolve masterfully from the ordinary into the extraordinary. Consider marrowbones, lovingly boiled down to their essence so her husband can spread sustenance onto bread and eat, his stomach forever flattened by concentration camp hunger no matter how much he tries to fill himself up. Her persistent introspection scrutinizes everyday events such as going to the supermarket and takes them into another realm of meaning. In Weinberger’s world, what we wake up to is the first step towards insight and illumination.
— Jeanette Clough

In Sacred Graffiti, Florence Weinberger has deciphered the vivid mantra that lives behind our painted world. One of LA’s most visible poets, she bears witness to the rendering and re-rendering of a psychic landscape we cannot help but recognize as our own. This collection portrays a poet at the peak of her powers, a guide to help us "take on the heat and grief of love / with our empty hands."
— Brendan Constantine

Florence Weinberger has published three books of poetry, The Invisible Telling Its Shape (Fithian Press, 1997), Breathing Like a Jew (Chicory Blue Press, 1997) and Carnal Fragrance (Red Hen Press, 2004). Twice nominated for a Pushcart Prize, her poetry has been published in numerous literary magazines, including Another Chicago Magazine, Antietam Review, The Comstock Review, The Pedestal, Solo, Rattle, Spillway, and anthologies such as Family Reunion: Poems About Parenting Grown Children, So Luminous the Wildflowers, Images From the Holocaust, and Lifecycles: Jewish Women on Biblical Themes in Contemporary Life. Among awards are first prizes in the Poetry/LA Bicentennial, Sculpture Gardens Review, Mississippi Valley, Red Dancefloor and the dA Center for the Arts poetry contests.

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Piano Glass/Glass Piano

Marjorie Becker's second collection of poems, Piano Glass/Glass Piano, is a truly remarkable achievement. Novelistic in its narrative conception and operatic in its dramatic sweep, this sequence of poems charts the oscillations of identity and sexuality, following the story of its speaker/narrator, Marnie, who is first seamstress then shopkeeper, and whore then Madam. Unspoken racial anxiety, the construction of Southern Jewish identity, the potential transformation of the self by use of the body-all of these are at stake and under discussion in Marnie's brilliantly interwoven stories…Marnie is an extraordinary character, one of the most provocative and compelling female speakers in recent fiction or poetry… Though the velvet sexual hammers within keep threatening to shatter the glass piano that is Marnie, the power of her endurance is that she remains held to its music, and to the songs of her own body and her own defiant dreams.
— David St. John

In Marjorie Becker's Piano Glass/Glass Piano, we are immersed in a world of sensual tutelage, of aromas, of characters so true and rich, so lush and inviting that their seductions become our seductions. These poems reach a depth of feeling and music and just when we think they can go no further they probe deeper into mythic layers of eroticism and loss. These are fantastic and compelling poems, an amalgamation of poetic flight and earth tones. This is simply an exquisite book that satisfies the mind and all the senses.
— Paul Lieber

Marjorie Becker's Piano Glass/Glass Piano is a buoyant Southern epic of desire, a medley of silk and fruit and sexuality rising up from Macon to New Orleans and back. Her narrations are fierce, authentic, and far-ranging: family loyalties, powerful sex, and fiery cultural history. Becker's chiastic title reminds us that what sings must be transparent, and what is laid bare must sing.
— Martha Serpas

Marjorie Becker has created something startling from "this flesh world" in Piano Glass/Glass Piano. Urgent chords and ground notes, kaleidoscopic images couple and re-couple in this book-length fugue, lines dense with ravishment, on the dream of our bodies …
— Marsha de la O

Marjorie Becker is the author of the poetry collection Body Bach and of the historical monograph, Setting the Virgin on Fire: Lázaro Cárdenas, Michoacán Peasants and the Redemption of the Mexican Revolution. A fifth-generation Macon, Georgia Jewish native, she was trained in Spanish beginning in childhood. She studied in Spain and served in the Peace Corps in rural Paraguay. As a professional journalist, she wrote about race relations in the Deep South. A Yale trained historian of Latin American cultural history, much of her historical writing focuses on the Mexican revolution, Frida Kahlo, the power of dance, the worlds of longing. She is an associate professor of Latin American History at the University of Southern California. She lives in Santa Monica.

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PRAISE FOR
Spring Drive

Conversational eloquence is always a given in Glover Davis’s poetry. Ordinary men and women are lifted by the clarity and intimacy of their observations to something resembling a state of grace. From the carnal meat—both animal and human—that he considers in his sequence of poems based on paintings by Chaim Soutine to his vision of deliverance in the collection’s concluding poem, Burial Dream, Glover Davis has placed the question mark of mortality, inverted like a hook, hanging before our eyes. Maturity and experience are said to breed wisdom. You are holding a book of profound wisdoms in your hands.
— from the Foreward by David St. John

In Spring Drive, the detailed attention paid to the world—the landscape that enfolds us, the events that mark us—is a springboard for the imagination, and that imagination is in turn a platform for engaging the deep themes of Time, mortality, and the soul. Davis’s is a natural voice, and despite the meaning it tries to wrestle from experience, a reader is always initially taken with the drama, music, and imagery line to line. These poems recognize the beauty and inherent frailty of our place on earth, even in the language we use to praise it. Davis importantly examines the classic myths and great histories— Plato, Orpheus, WWII—and in lines that are gritty, experiential, accessible, and personal in the best sense, he recovers the meaning of our lives, and holds it up shining.
— Christopher Buckley

A "traditionalist" and a "formalist," Glover Davis is among the most original voices in all of American poetry. The plodding grace of his verses is in the service of a moral intelligence that is essential to our time. Anyone who believes that poetry is necessary must absorb this good man’s beautiful life and beautiful verses, which are the same.
— Richard Katrovas

Glover Davis is Professor Emeritus of Creative Writing at San Diego State University, where he taught for almost forty years. His books of poetry are Bandaging Bread, August Fires, Legend, and, most recently, Separate Lives, which appeared in 2007. Davis was born in San Luis Obispo and spent four years of his early childhood in Catholic orphanages run by Irish nuns. He attended parochial schools throughout his youth. After graduating high school, he served in the Navy and then attended Fresno State College where he was influenced by teachers Phillip Levine and Robert Mezey and by fellow student Ollie Simpson (later Ollie Mezey) to take up poetry writing. While at Fresno State, he also played tackle on the football team until financial constraints forced him to go to work. He went on to attend the University of Iowa Writers Workshop and then began his long career at San Diego State University. Davis and his late wife Sandra had one son, Michael, who is an accomplished fiction writer. After retiring from San Diego State, Davis returned to the Fresno area and now lives in the foothills near Coarsegold, California. In addition to his four collections of poetry, Davis has published his work in many journals, including The Southern Review, Poetry, The New England Review, and The Journal.

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PRAISE FOR
Summer Hunger

Judith Pacht's Summer Hunger is nothing less than a superb collection of poems. Summer Hunger encompasses wry daily reflections as well as sobering and profound historical meditations. With enormous composure and poise, Judith Pacht is able to move her reader deftly between her elegant wit and calm wisdoms. This collection is an exceptional and memorable achievement.
— David St. John

Beneath the quiet, polished surfaces of these poems churns a tumult of life experience that is both lyric and public, personal and political. The poems in Summer Hunger dazzle with a formality that barely contains chaos, with humor and wit; and like all good poems, they leave us with intriguing questions as well as answers.
— Richard Garcia

Judith Pacht is the author of User's Guide (Finishing Line Press), St. Louis Suite (Finishing Line Press), and Falcon (Conflux Press). A two-time Pushcart nominee, her work includes poems published in Cider Press Review, Phoebe, Ploughshares and Runes as well as in numerous anthologies. She lives in Los Angeles

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made out to Tebot Bach

mail to:
Tebot Bach
PO Box 7887
Huntington Beach, CA
92615-7887

PRAISE FOR
The Wave That Did Not Break

Jonathan Harris's poems are lovely and musical. This dialogue between son-poet and deceased mother-poet has the poignancy of a medieval ballad or an American song, maybe one of those Sixties songs with a refrain like "Meet You in the Falling Rain, Mama". One also thinks of a love unrequited, Tennessee Williams and Emily Bronte, Edgar Poe or Virginia Wolfe walking into the river.
— Joseph Millar

No sequence of poems can matter more than this first book by Jonathan Harris in which he and his mother, who was a poet and suicide, converse through time in their respective poems. Two poets born of a shared narrative and sensibility, brought together, extend both their story and their art. A writer who faces his deepest feelings, and who has also the skill, heart and generosity of spirit and imagination for such work, Mr. Harris has compiled a book of emotional, as well as verbal, originality. The Wave That Did Not Break reminds us that writing poetry is a survival skill.
— Marvin Bell

Jonathan Harris is a remarkable poet, and he has allowed his imagination to construct a conversation in poetry in which we see both the brilliance and the struggles of his mother alongside the resilient yet wounded reflections of the son. As The Wave That Did Not Break weaves together Jonathan Harris's own poems with those of his mother, herself a quite stunning poet, we discover the many ways that their voices call out and respond across time. This dialogue in poetry is at times interrogatory and sorrowful, yet it culmulates in a collection that feels supremely redemptive for both poets.
— David St. John

Jonathan Harris received an MFA in Creative Writing from Pacific University and a Bachelor's degree in Liberal Arts from St. John's College. A finalist for Cutthroat's Joy Harjo Poetry Contest, his work has appeared in many magazines and journals. Along with being head of development for the entertainment agency, Atoll Productions, he serves as a judge for the Page International Screenwriting Contest. A former Peace Corps volunteer, Jonathan lives in Los Angeles with his wife and kids.

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PRAISE FOR
The Mojave Road and Other Journeys

Here is tough metaphor. Bruce Williams' jeep on fire grips you with an image of self-awareness that shifts and adapts, tethered to the poet's experience of love and loss and coupled with the deep vulnerability of self-recovery. He travels to the center of his heart's dry lake and unfolds for us the road map of his journey and return.
— Jeanette Clough

The poetry of Bruce Williams is always a journey of inner and outer discovery for both the poet and the reader. Many of these poems would be emotionally devastating were they not so finely crafted and the voice so assured—and assuring—as the poet confronts mutability, mortality, and redemption. This is a collection of serious intent and profound impact.
— Jim Natal

Three centuries ago the Japanese poet Basho created his masterpiece 'Narrow Road to the Interior' out of a pilgrimage on foot through the backcountry of northern Honshu. The Japanese character for the word 'interior' implies both an actual location and a spiritual interior. His book is a chronicle of his journey as well as an examination of his own spiritual life. In The Mojave Road and Other Journeys Bruce Williams has created a masterpiece out of two journeys, one literal, the other his struggle with the loss of a loved one and his own mortality. Basho said: 'The journey itself is my home' and in his profoundly moving procession of poems Bruce Williams mourns the end of one journey while attempting to redefine the meaning of 'home' in his life.
— John Harris

Bruce Williams' The Mojave Road and Other Journeys is simply one of the most breathtaking and heartbreaking collections of poetry I've read in many years. These poems constitute a sequence of elegies and a folio of meditations upon illness, death and transcendence, and also upon the nature of late, redeeming love. As in Theodore Roethke's psychologically dense, timeless, and powerful poem, "Journey to the Interior," Bruce Williams spiritual self-confrontation charts a dangerous, often precarious landscape of intimate loss and the consequent potential for the wreckage of the self.
— David St. John

Bruce Williams was born in Oklahoma and grew up in Colorado. He was educated at Grinnell College, U.C.L.A., and Claremont Graduate School, where he received an M.A. and PhD. He has taught English and creative writing for many years at Mt. San Antonio College, east of Los Angeles. He has published four chapbooks, including The Mojave Road at Last and Stratification, and his work has appeared in O'Brien Literary Speculator as well as numerous scholarly and literary journals and anthologies. The Mojave Road and Other Journeys is his first full-length collection. He lives in San Dimas, California, from where he explores the desert in one of his two Jeeps every chance he gets.

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PRAISE FOR
The Habit of Buenos Aires

Lorraine Healy has written poems of ferocity—and because there is no true love without terror, she has written a book-length love poem to Buenos Aires that carries us to the brink of grief and back again. In these poems all the "territories of last" leave their deep and burning imprint upon us. Healy’s language doesn’t let go—how can it when in the world of the disappeared there is no innocence, no undoing. It is not often that a voice of such authenticity and passion makes such a stunning debut.
— Anne Marie Macari

Her painful evocations of Argentina during the dirty war (she grew up in Buenos Aires), her re-creations of Irish history (where her maternal ancestors lived and died), her tender poems of love and family, her acute eye for detail and her mind for clarity, her powerful, sensuous and humane imagination, her language full of surprises, make Lorraine Healy one of the finest emerging poets I know. Yes, the personal is the political—and the political is the personal. When I read The Habit of Buenos Aires I feel this deep in my bones, and with deep gratitude.
— Alicia Ostriker

Lorraine Healy has drawn the title of her always powerful and consistently stunning collection of poems, The Habit of Buenos Aires, from an epigraph by Eavan Boland: "What I had lost/ was not land/ but the habit of land." Many of the poems in this collection echo the Peron years, and the long years of anguish—under the military junta—that held Argentina in their grip (Healy was born in Buenos Aires and lived there into her late twenties). This volume is both a personal record and a poetic autobiography fixed in time and place, and yet these poems gather to form a spiritual and political accounting as well. They also chart the cartography of a land slowly being lost to violence and lies and corruption; the poet, in the act of writing these poems, seeks to make her claim—a new claim, a poetic claim—on the land that was once her home. Muscular and immediate, these poems are resonant with superb details that allow, even at their darkest moments, an exceptional intimacy between the poet and her readers.
— David St. John

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PRAISE FOR
College Town

Every poem in College Town seems conceived in a climate of generosity and wonder. Poems such as "Soprano," "Birth" or "The Chief" embody that most elusive of experiences in art, the "replaying" of innocence. Others, such as "Host," "The Artist" or the title piece, somehow manage to invoke dark wisdom and irony without a hint of cynicism. So thankful is Miller for his thankless town, he asks only, "Let the band play ragged when they lay me to rest." This book not only entertains, it forgives.
— Brendan Constantine

In his extraordinary first collection, Michael Miller wrings a spare and astonishing beauty from the most ordinary of settings. His finely crafted poems pull us into a dreamlike kaleidoscope, bombard us with image and nuance. We travel his "city awake on tea and subtitles," walk his frayed neighborhoods and back streets, wander his desert, are captured by intense glimpses of his characters. In College Town, the soundtrack is blues, playing faintly in the background as we read on: loneliness etched with love, the tenderness of ashes.
— Ricki Mandeville

Poetry needs Michael Miller. Indeed, anyone able to write a powerfully spare pair of lines like "He tells himself, Nothing but a woman, / tells himself, We scavenge together" rewards the reader and honors the craft. The power of Miller's writing is in his imagery, syntactical skills, and ability to capture the now of the experiential terrain. And although the image, the bright, focused instant, is never more than a line or two away, such moments of sound and sense, for ear and eye — "ocean breeze and the crash of the fountain" — are certain to surprise and excite.
— Lee Mallory

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PRAISE FOR
If In Darkness

Sallie Bingham's poems forge the light and darkness to shape a body of work that engages and shines. The past and the present, the inner and the outer, are all drawn precisely with small wisdom lines throughout. The poetry leaves us with "the serene best our lives can offer" and "the small whir of your lively heart." A fine distillation from a life well savored.
— Joan Logghe, President of New Mexico Literary Arts

Bingham's poems give us a look into another lifetime—hers, ours, but, more importantly, the one we all share. We are all one, say the mystics, and these poems prove that through the author's memory and imagination. There is so much here: apricots, buttons, parrots, coal, Oakland, KY, moss, a reticule, and Rebecca Boone, to name only a few. Bingham weaves them in and out of her world and into ours with heart + mind + soul. If in darkness, Sallie Bingham writes the light.
— Elizabeth Oakes, author of The Luminescence of All Things Emily and The Farmgirl Poems (Pearl Prize 2004)

As the publisher of three of Sallie Bingham's novels, I was delighted to find her poems read as persuasively as her fiction. Sallie takes on tough subjects with an undeniable wisdom and clear-eyed vision that is a gift to all readers. If In Darkness is tinged both with melancholy and an ever-present generosity of spirit that compels me to come back to these poems again and again.
— Roland Pease, editor, Zoland Poetry

I have long enjoyed Sallie Bingham's poems for their sharp edges and their subtle magic. She is imbued in the American spirit, even as she has been steeped in its feminist wisdom. Her literary forebears are Carl Sandburg and Kay Boyle; her inheritors, let us hope, are everywhere.
— Frederick Smock, Chairman, Department of English, Director, Creative Writing Program, Bellarmine University

These clear, honest poems come from a centered voice. Sallie is a clear-sighted witness. The people who walk through these pages—family members, friends, ex-lovers and husbands, artists, and women, especially the women invisible no matter what they do?are in pain. Comfort doesn't work and is distrusted. Yet If In Darkness is not a grim book. Its grace notes lie in its groundedness, its dry wit, and most especially in those very, very lucky conjunctions of words the poet achieves only after working hard enough to gain transparency of language.
— Peg Steele, former editor, Plainsong, 1979-1994, and co-author of a book of poetry named Singing Into That Fresh Light

As someone who's followed Sallie Bingham's writing from the beginning, I can feel only gratitude for this second collection of her poems—and a thirst for more! It's not surprising that several complex poems seem to be asking questions of their author, but the answers often come with breathtaking surprises. A number of other poems seem to have read a recent novel of Sallie's and have learned how to dance. The book as a whole proves it's possible to grow into mellow fulfillment without losing one's edge (or edginess). Angles for viewing the past—I'm stunned to realize this—are motives behind much of the book as it treats personal, social and cultural, and literal, eventful history, "with its iron repetitions." Sallie Bingham can see in the dark.
— Frank Steele, former editor, Plainsong, 1979-1994, and co-author of a book of poetry named Singing Into That Fresh Light

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PRAISE FOR
The Armenian Watchmaker

In this collection of deeply felt poems—fine tuned and beautifully rendered—Carroll Kearley constructs watches of great intricacy and accuracy whose hands point to the temper of the tragic times we call the twentieth century… At the beginning of The Armenian Watchmaker the poet promises to set no more fires. He spends the rest of the book setting fires. His fires leave no ashes, only insight and illumination. With the discordant sounds of the century in the background, images enter our consciousness and exit like fragments of a dream just as they coalesce into a nightmare that gives way itself to the recurring appearances of noble-spirited survivors who will continue to inhabit the reader’s mind… This archeology of "blackened souls" plows new fields and yields treasures of the ever ascending human spirit.
—Demetrios Liappas, Director of Modern Greek Studies, Loyola Marymount University

I cannot adequately say how much I am moved by the collection of poems The Armenian Watchmaker. Carroll Kearley’s sense of character, dramatic situation, place, command of language and syntax are marvelous beyond marvelous.
—Katharine Free, Professor of Theatre Arts, Loyola Marymount University.

The Armenian Watchmaker is a rich journey through treasures of art and heart-wringing history, seamlessly woven into a compelling love story. Kearley magically takes on the voice of the Armenian, as a boy, as a young man whose legs are crushed by a train and finally as a sightless, aging watchmaker. Some poems are meditations, celebrations. Others are plaintive, prayer-like, painterly. Flawless transition from poem to poem seduces with ripe and illuminating lyricism.
—Ellen Reich, The Gynecic Papers

Carroll C. Kearley, retired professor of philosophy, lives with his wife Tacui in Los Angeles. He was born in 1930 in a farmhouse on the SnakeRiver Plain. His early education, grades 1-12 took place in two small towns, and in a oneroom country school just up the road from his parents' poverty-line farm. He was awarded a B.A. in English Literature from Santa Clara University, an M.A. in English Literature from Loyola University in Los Angeles, and the Ph.D. in philosophy from the University of Notre Dame. His first collection of poetry, Deity-Alphabets (Tebot Bach, 2009) is followed by his second, The Armenian Watchmaker (Tebot Bach, 2010).

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PRAISE FOR
God, Seed

God, Seed, a beautiful mix of words and images…light and deep. Good for the eye, mind and heart
— William Wiley, artist

God, Seed is lyrical, intense, and concerned with issues of our planet’s survival. Foust has a fierce yet loving attitude towards nature and human nature. Many of her luminous, insightful poems are paired with paintings by gifted artist Lorna Stevens. This is a book to read and treasure. — Susan Terris, poet

Rebecca Foust knows what goes on in "the cricket-sung, grass-sweet dark," and she isn’t afraid to sing it. If there are moments of anxiety, intimations of mortality—if, as she writes, "ours is the curse of the blighted touch"—they cannot, in the end, overwhelm the exuberant, muscular joy that emanates both from Foust's poems, and from Lorna Stevens' charming and evocative illustrations. Together, the words and pictures of God, Seed make a beguiling duet, a fine romance, a garden of earthly and, at times, unearthly delights.
— Troy Jollimore, poet

Rebecca Foust's work is beginning to garner attention. I find the poems astonishingly strong and beautiful.
— Susan Griffin, poet, writer and Pulitzer Prize finalist for her book, A Chorus of Stones

God, Seed, is the product of true collaboration where the images speak to the text. Both create a beautiful and insightful view into seasons and cycles of the natural world.
— Deirdre Lawrence, Curator of Artists' Books, Brooklyn Museum

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PRAISE FOR
In A Pasture With Palominos

Joan Stepp Smith's poems renew our faith in the Word Made Flesh at the deepest level. Syncopated, mangled, phosphorescent, squirmy, elegantly and profoundly eccentric—these are the creations of a truly individual mind. A lover of language, an artful channeler of but partially glimpsed emotions and psychologies, this is a continuously surprising writer who truly deserves the title Poet. How many people open up whole new worlds? As a very famous old black man who played a mean guitar would say to me, "Right here." And that's what I feel about this poet. Right here.
— Kris Saknussemm

Joan Stepp Smith is a gifted poet. Her work reels with word play, musical language, allusion, and illusion. It is sensual and sexual. It provokes with startlingly original (often playful) language and leads the reader again and again into dark, intimate, dangerous territory. Beware, all who enter here: this book is riveting and unforgettable.
— Susan Terris

Joan Stepp Smith's In A Pasture With Palominos is a one of the most exciting and original collections of poetry in recent years. Conceptually brilliant, verbally breathtaking and stylistically innovative, Joan Stepp Smith's poetry invigorates and recalibrates all of the complex issues of art and experience. The pleasures of these poems are many, including the discovery of the poet's complex narrative architectures and high-wire verbal antics [calisthenics?] that both surprise us and are able to alter a poem at moment's notice.
— David St. John

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PRAISE FOR
Beyond Waking

Beyond Waking is a stunning book that transcends time in its movement: stripping it down, puncturing the layers of formality of presentation/while at the same time honoring them… It lives brilliantly amid the collecting and dispersing/the intimate and the public, where madness and joy spiral and swirl away — delivering us to the pivot of belief.
— Jan Beatty, author of Red Sugar, Boneshaker, Mad River, and Ravenous

In Beyond Waking, the flower once seen remains on the inner eye, the note once heard diminishes but never disappears. Spend time in Joseph Karasek's world… you'll return with a clearer eye, a deeper heart, for your own.
— Richard St. John, author of The Pure Inconstancy of Grace

Joseph Karasek grew up in New York City. He created school orchestras on the elementary and secondary levels, and taught music composition and music theory at Long Island University. He has lived in Pittsburgh, PA since 1991, and now spends his winters in California. His poetry has been published in Blue Arc West: An Anthology of California Poets (Tebot Bach, 2006) and Along These Rivers: Poetry and Photography from Pittsburgh (Quadrant, 2009).

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PRAISE FOR
Love and the Ten Thousand Things

Love and the Ten Thousand Things is a book full of edges and urgency, the poems slipping gracefully among their many modes of discourse: cautionary wisdom, intimate muttering, incantation, and awe. Things are some things half-said but never half-felt in these poems which bring to mind both the fullness of John Ashbery's world and the simplicity of Li Po's.
— Gail Wronsky, author of Poems for Infidels, Dying for Beauty and The Love-talkers

In his seminal anthology, The New American Poetry 1945-1960, Donald Allen issued a challenge to poets of the future. Joseph Karasek accepts that challenge. Writing in the tradition of Olson and Duncan, he manifests a lyric consciousness poised on the edge between beauty and terror. Love and the Ten Thousand Things is a masterpiece.
— Michael Wurster, author of The British Detective, The Cruelty of the Desert and The Snake Charmer's Daughter

Joseph Karasek grew up in New York City. He created school orchestras on the elementary and secondary levels, and taught music composition and music theory at Long Island University. He has lived in Pittsburgh, PA since 1991, and now spends his winters in California. His poetry has been published in Blue Arc West: An Anthology of California Poets (Tebot Bach, 2006) and Along These Rivers: Poetry and Photography from Pittsburgh (Quadrant, 2009).

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PRAISE FOR
By All Lights

Bruce Boston often places his poems at a balance point between what is and what's left. The tenses here are purposeful: the measure is not nostalgia but a carefully nuanced reckoning of the view. "I gather what I can," he says, beginning with "the lesson of the seed," and this immediacy, this urgency to name and hold against the slippage of Time is characteristic of his work. By All Lights is simply a pleasure to read and to savor.
— Peter Everwine

The Art lies in hiding the art, Horace teaches us, and B.H. Boston is a master of such concealment in poems that are spare and tight, that speak to us without patronizing of things that matter most in this life. I love the delicacy, tenderness and intimacy of pieces such as "I am Reading," the faith and incantation of poems like "Processional," and the mystical realism of "Apiary". This book is about remembering and paying attention and healing and praising. Ultimately, it is about the human spirit—and it soars.
— Ilya Kaminsky

In Boston's poetry we hear "the train / that bluffs its way through snow / in the night Sierra" and with a subtlety beyond measure, "the fronds of podocarpus stirring / their cups of wind". In the spiritual urgency of these poems, a world is brought forth in its fecundity, the indissoluble blue world, radiant and fragile. Boston is a visionary naturalist, rescuing moments that will not recur with a lyric force harnessed only by the wisest of poets.
— Carolyn Forché

Equally at ease in describing the natural world or the freeways of San Diego, Bruce Boston brings to both his exquisite love poems for his wife Marsha and his profound poems of cultural lament an unerring sense of music. With his lyric grace and rapier vision, Bruce Boston is a troubadour for our time.
— David St. John

B.H.Boston received his BA in English from Cal State University, Fresno, and his MFA in Creative Writing from the University of California at Irvine. Nominated for a Pushcart Prize in 2006, Boston’s work has appeared in numerous magazines and anthologies over the years. A book of his poems, Only the Living, was published by Helix House Press. He is currently Poetry Editor and Consulting Managing Editor for Poetry International at San Diego State University and Curator of the Master Author’s Residency Program at La Jolla Country Day School. He lives in San Diego with his wife, Marsha.

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PRAISE FOR
Beauty's Tattoo

Here's a book you will not put down. Like climbing "a fiery stairway," or finding the unlikely "encounter between a piano and a Rothko" in a garden, like entering "Kafka's garage" or "floating down the highway/ in a snowstorm" Cathy Colman's stunning second poetry collection, Beauty's Tattoo enters a place of fearlessness. Her contemporary range of topics excites the gallery of possibility, and there, emerging from a "fugitive kind" of exile, the body's wild card is played against the mind in a kind of self-reflecting dissonance and philosophical insight that can only belong to beauty and its many incarnations. Edgy and simultaneously elegant, Colman's language is always musically and imagistically alive like a snake at both ends: it works like consciousness overhearing itself. Beauty's Tattoo is moving and funny. One thinks of Andre Breton's concept of passion (Colman's "passion like water" floods these poems and carries them far into our memory), with its wild magnificent eyes having to "mix in the human struggle" in order to be authentic, to be troubled by beauty, to be known and known again.
— Elena Karina Byrne

I've been an admirer of Cathy Colman's work for over 15 years now: her intoxicating blend of stop-in-your-tracks imagery, her lettuce-crisp diction, the mixture of Eros, imagination, and longing. These new poems courageously step into the darkness and emerge with beads of light.
— Jeffrey McDaniel

Although the realms of dream and desire permeate the poems in Cathy Colman's ravishing new collection, Beauty's Tattoo, it is the way experience itself marks us that this book so powerfully envisions. Cathy Colman shows us how living leaves the evidence of its passage along the lengths of our bodies, both without, and within. The many poems cast as letters in this collection are emblematic of one of the book's central ambitions—to establish a potent, rock-solid bridge of intimacy between the poet and her readers. Cathy Colman's exquisite poems are epistles to the past, reflections upon the future, and heart-breaking meditations upon the metaphysics of daily transcendence. This is a book to treasure.
— David St. John

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PRAISE FOR
Follow Me Down

"15th century painter Cennini spoke of the art of 'unseen things hidden in the shadow of natural ones Like 'a sea turning in on itself' Kate Buckley’s poems speak to this, moving together, folding and unfolding the echoes of a voice in place, a voice out of place, 'salt licking salt—/coming home.' Follow Me Down maps out the geography of longing where sometimes 'you walk the yellow fields,' sometimes 'the moon sets itself on fire,' lighting up the distances between the past and the future. Buckley’s parenthetical considerations, her ache and intellect coincide in a sensuous, revelatory motioning toward that inspired sanctuary of who we are."
—Elena Karina Byrne

"Vivid, passionate, pulsing with life in the face of loss and pain, these incantations bravely seek to void The Void. They are poems to conjure with."
— Charles Harper Webb

Kate Buckley, a ninth-generation Kentuckian, was educated at Transylvania University and the University of Kentucky, and is currently an MFA candidate at Spalding University in Louisville. She is also the author of A Wild Region (Moon Tide Press, 2008). Her poems have appeared in such publications as Bellingham Review, North American Review, and Shenandoah. She is the recipient of the James Hearst Poetry Prize, the Gabehart Prize for Imaginative Writing, and was a 2008 Pushcart Prize nominee. She lives in Laguna Beach, California.

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Deity-Alphabets

Deity-Alphabets,Carroll Kearley’s luminous first book of poems, gives testimony to Keat’s knowledge that humanity’s certainty resides in "the holiness of the Heart’s affections." Plain-spoken yet naturally resonant, Kearley’s poems of witness "unravel threads of tortured talk" inherent in the lives of the homeless. He reminds us that language, our common bond, offers the vivid grammar of the spirit, the "fractured syntax" of seeing ourselves in others, and that "each bearer of a name/ has an irreplaceable impress." The poet, "his voice, a second violin" brings the beauty of these "common flowers" to our attention, and we are so very grateful for it.
—Elena Karina Byrne

Carroll Kearley has spent years stopping by an outdoor market in Santa Monica where homeless men and women gather to beg, sell, or entertain. He does not go there to understand or report on their "plight."His aim is not that of a sociologist or journalist or documentarian. He is just interested in them as people, each with distinctive tastes and a personal story. It is a labor of love and admiration. The poems voice not only dreams deferred or hopes broken, but tiny victories, affordable vanities, and survival strategies.
—Garry Wills

Carroll C.Kearley was born in a farmhouse near Buhl, Idaho July 6, 1930. In 1948, three years after the end of World War II, he entered the University of Santa Clara. He graduated with a degree in English Literature. In 1963 he was awarded the Ph.D. in Philosophy by the University of Notre Dame. He followed the profession of university teacher. He completed that career by teaching at Loyola Marymount University from 1966 until 1995. Deity-Alphabets is his first collection.

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Story

"Keep your feet moving/and surely/the music will follow." Surely it is the music that sustains master poet Marcia Cohee. In her long-awaited collection, Story, Cohee gives us luminous lyricism and brilliant, unsparing vision. Passionate and tightly woven, the poems make their way cautiously and with abandon, in bitter winds.
—Joan Bauer

Marcia Cohee’s Story is an elegant examination of loss, the shape-shifting a person endures over a lifetime: the things we lose, the knowledge we gain. These poems carry us with the speaker on her journey to make sense of illness and suffering—even unto confronting death and the inevitable orphaning of us all: "When the seed splits the world/ and it falls like a feather".
—Kate Buckley

When writing "is an act of worship," when "the sentence ends with a comma and will not let go," a terrible courage finds its way in the dark of Marcia Cohee’s book of poems, Story. We come here to Rilke’s notion that "beauty is the beginning of terror," where the ignited, often unexpected awe inside of reverence takes hold. "Seeking magnetic north" her poems are unflinching and target their subjects at point-blank range. "Believe what you will," she instructs, knowing we do. So, there’s also a sudden, inarguable beauty we discover in each poem’s truth, especially the one which wakes us from sleep: "You are not/who you are." We have never been so alive, even in the face of death. Former Poet Laureate Stanley Kunitz’s phrase, "The thing that eats the heart is mostly heart," seems to haunt Cohee’s language, line for line, beauty for terrible beauty.
—Elena Karina Byrne

With consistent dignity, Marcia Cohee explores several worlds in her new book Story: nature, mythology, and personal experience—especially the realm of serious illness, which elicits from this poet a large and ferocious maturity. Cohee’s beautifully observed imagery, her highly-polished craft, her emotional depth belong to a seasoned poet who earns our respect on every page. This new book is a remarkable effort, worthy of reading—and re-reading—for a long time to come.
—Holly Prado

Marcia Cohee received her MFA from the University of Massachusetts, where she studied under James Tate. She is the author of six chapbooks as well as three previous collections: "Sexual Terrain" (1986), "Laguna Canyon Was Once a River" (1991), and "Bonefire" (1996). More than 250 of her poems have appeared in various literary magazines and anthologies. Active in the Southern California poetry community for many years, Marcia has taught workshops in both poetry and fiction, has read at numerous veunes throughout California. With her husband Pat, Marcia co-hosted the Laguna Poets readings and edited the Laguna Poets chapbook series, known for nurturing the careers of many talented Southern California poets.

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An Urgent Request
by Sarah Luczaj

A Fortunate Daughter Book
An Imprint of Tebot Bach

"Sharp, dramatic, funny and shocking poetry."
—Yuri Andrukhovych, Ukrainian poet, novelist and essayist. Co—founder of the popular literary performance group "Bu–Ba–Bu" (Burlesque—Bluster—Buffoonery).

"I read An Urgent Request with enormous appreciation. The mix of emotion and imagination, the near side of the domestic juxtaposed with the wrenching human questions, without the scaffolding of overt autobiographical narrative, immediately brings to mind some of my very favorite poets: Akhmatova, Radnoti, and Rosario Castellanos. Beautiful poetry."
—Jeffrey Greene, poet, memoirist and nature writer. His latest book, The Golden Bristled Boar, is forthcoming from University of Virginia Press, 2010.

"From the tenderness and breathlessness of "oh my girl" to the irony and humor of "How to Take Control of Your Own Life," Luczaj’s sensitive and daring poems invite the reader to follow her and to heed her urgent request — no, no, let’s swim a little further."
—Heather Hartley, Paris editor of Tin House; author of the poetry collection Knock Knock, forthcoming from Carnegie Mellon in 2010.

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Polaroids

In Polaroids, Steven Paschall develops his meditation on vision, building from snapshots of the second-sighted to a serial narrative of an artist, the poet's alter-ego, as he stitches the singular moments of perception into a totalizing vision of the world seen so purposefully it may become a kind of blindness. Like the photographs that provide the title, here are so many moments of light or enlightenment that will never come again. So here is a new voice, a young poet who evidences his own uniqueness again and again.
— Jake Adam York, author of A Murmuration of Starlings, editor of Copper Nickel

Polaroids is a collection that both questions and undermines all of our assumptions about how we choose to "see" our world. This is always the highest ambition of art. As we question the stability of what moves in and out of vision in our material world, how can we help but to look ever more deeply within? The poems of Steven Paschall’s Polaroids are like images from a deck of blackened Tarot cards, a sequence of which begins foretelling our futures now hanging in the deepest of mists, futures we can only viscerally sense but never completely apprehend, never entirely bring into focus, never in our lifetimes finally—truly—see.
— David St. John

Steven Paschall holds a bachelor’s degree in English Literature/Creative Writing from the University of Colorado-Denver. He lives in France, working or not as a translator/teacher/volunteer counselor,, and is currently writing new books, recording a fourth album of music and working on a second photography collection.

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Scenes From a Good Life

These big-hearted, all-embracing poems are a celebration of life—of Paul Tayyar's deeply felt connection to the world around him and his sense of kinship with all humanity—from family and friends to the homeless and downtrodden. In Scenes from a Good Life, Tayyar gives voice to a generation that grew up in Orange County—where buildings are torn down and rebuilt every ten years, "The strawberry fields…buried like old Indian/ Gravesites…" He is not, however, speaking of privilege and wealth—"the good life" promulgated by the media and popularized by The O.C.—but of a better life, filled with intelligence, humor, and insight, and an enduring sense of wonder.
- Marilyn Johnson, editor of Pearl Magazine and author of A Necessary Fire

Paul Tayyar's poems fulfill all my poetry needs: as a publisher, I want to publish them; as a poet, they make me want to be a better poet; and finally, as poetry lover, they place me dear reader on a fabulous ferris wheel to spin over rivers of love that honor belief and affirmation of a Good Life of family, baseball, art, music and a hopeful humanity that includes mermaids and Bigfoot while "we live in the marrow of the colors we create."
- Joan Jobe Smith, founding editor of Pearl Magazine and Bukowski Review, author of The Pow Wow Cafe and Jehovah Jukebox

Paul Kareem Tayyar’s first book of poems, Everyday Magic (West-Coast Bias Press) was released in 2007, and he is a two-time nominee for the Pushcart Prize. His forthcoming book, Postmark Atlantis (Level 4 Press), will be released in 2009. He is also the Founder and Editor of World Parade Books, an independent press located in Southern California that has published books by Gerald Locklin, Edward Field, and Donna Hilbert.

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Monkey Journal

If Holly Prado didn't exist, the Muses would have to invent her to fulfill the imperatives of the imagination. Monkey Journal, her chronicle of small and large events over the course of a year, reveals a very important and often neglected truth. In order to live a creative and ethical life, one must do it rather deliberately. Prado has worked tirelessly, as she says, "to tell what can't be told." Focus is the fact and font of all creativity and it has always been Prado's gift as a writer--absolute focus and attention to where she is and who she's with. She is also patient enough to wait for the absolute defining moment. Like the moon, her guardian spirit, Prado never forces anything. Her work is, simply, all the forms of light.
- Eloise Klein-Healy

In this exquisite and lyrical journal, acclaimed poet Holly Prado, long responsible for some of our most searching, deeply felt, and beautifully articulated explorations of the soul, plumbs the mysteries of the ordinary, seeking to "tell what can't be told," looking for the "the ineffable, the truth under the truth." Alive with vividly rendered details of daily life in Los Angeles, filled with a sense of inexhaustible wonder and curiosity, illuminated by a deep reverence for the natural world, brimming with compassion and generosity, Monkey Journal is nothing less than a contemporary book of hours a twenty-first century Book of Changes, a daybook of the modern soul in conversation with the world. Reading it, we are both replenished and reminded how enter each day -- and our own lives -- more deeply, more attentively, and with more passionate engagement.
- Alison Townsend

After Holly Prado’s majestic selected poems, These Mirrors Prove It, it’s an added delight to encounter her in the more casual and playful setting of Monkey Journal. In this intimate chronicle of her days and nights, Prado keeps her own rock-solid, good-humored and frequently musical counsel. She’s a treasure.
- Aram Saroyan

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