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ISBN: 9781893670808 Buy From Tebot Bach 9.00 + Shipping |
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ISBN: 9781893670792 Buy From Tebot Bach 15.00 |
PRAISE FOR 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. 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. 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. 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. 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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ISBN: 9781893670716 Buy From Tebot Bach 13.00 |
PRAISE FOR 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. "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. 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. 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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ISBN: 9781893670785 Buy From Tebot Bach 15.00 |
PRAISE FOR 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. 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. 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—" 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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ISBN: 9781893670693 Buy From Tebot Bach 15.00 |
PRAISE FOR 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. 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! 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. 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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ISBN: 9781893670754 Buy From Tebot Bach 15.00 |
PRAISE FOR 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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ISBN: 9781893670730 Buy From Tebot Bach 25.00 |
PRAISE FOR 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. 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. 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. 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. 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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ISBN: 9781893670778 Buy From Tebot Bach 13.50 |
PRAISE FOR 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. 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. 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. 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. |
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ISBN: 9781893670655 Buy From Tebot Bach 15.00 |
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ISBN: 9781893670761 Buy From Tebot Bach 9.00 |
PRAISE FOR 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. 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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ISBN: 9781893670723 Buy From Tebot Bach 15.00 |
PRAISE FOR 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. 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. 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? |
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ISBN: 9781893670495 Buy From Tebot Bach 15.00 |
PRAISE FOR 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. 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. 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. 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. |
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ISBN: 9781893670747 Buy From Tebot Bach 15.00 |
PRAISE FOR 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. 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. She tells narrative stories using…simple words that mask hidden layers of meaning and emotion. 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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ISBN: 9781893670266 Buy From Tebot Bach 15.00 |
PRAISE FOR 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." 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. |
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ISBN: 9781893670679 Buy From Tebot Bach 15.00 |
PRAISE FOR 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.... 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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ISBN: 9781893670709 Buy From Tebot Bach 12.00 |
PRAISE FOR 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-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 …" 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. 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." 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. 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." 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! |
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ISBN: 9781893670662 Buy From Tebot Bach 15.00 |
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ISBN: 9781893670617 Buy From Tebot Bach 9.00 |
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PRAISE FOR 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. 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. 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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ISBN: 9781893670594 Buy From Tebot Bach 14.00 |
PRAISE FOR 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. 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. 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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ISBN: 9781893670587 Buy From Tebot Bach 12.00 |
PRAISE FOR 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. 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. 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." 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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ISBN: 9781893670600 Buy From Tebot Bach 15.00 |
PRAISE FOR 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. 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. 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. 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 … 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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ISBN: 9781893670563 Buy From Tebot Bach 15.00 |
PRAISE FOR 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. 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. 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. 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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ISBN: 9781893670556 Buy From Tebot Bach 15.00 |
PRAISE FOR 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. 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. 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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ISBN: 9781893670549 Buy From Tebot Bach 15.00 |
PRAISE FOR 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. 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. 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. 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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ISBN: 9781893670532 Buy From Tebot Bach 15.00 |
PRAISE FOR 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. 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. 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. 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. 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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ISBN: 9781893670501 Buy From Tebot Bach 15.00 |
PRAISE FOR 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. 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. 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. |
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ISBN: 9781893670518 Buy From Tebot Bach 15.00 |
PRAISE FOR 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. 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. 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. |
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ISBN: 9781893670464 Buy From Tebot Bach 15.00 |
PRAISE FOR 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. |
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ISBN: 1893670430 Buy From Tebot Bach 15.00 |
PRAISE FOR 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. 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. 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. 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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ISBN: 1893670481 Buy From Tebot Bach 15.00 |
PRAISE FOR God, Seed, a beautiful mix of words and images...light and deep. Good for the eye, mind and heart
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.
Rebecca Foust's work is beginning to garner attention. I find the poems astonishingly strong and beautiful.
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.
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ISBN: 1893670473 Buy From Tebot Bach 20.00 |
PRAISE FOR 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.
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.
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.
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ISBN: 9781893670372 Buy From Tebot Bach 15.00 |
PRAISE FOR 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.
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.
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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ISBN: 1893670406 Buy From Tebot Bach $15.00 |
PRAISE FOR 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.
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.
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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ISBN: 1893670392 Buy From Tebot Bach $15.00 |
PRAISE FOR 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. 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. 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. 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. 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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ISBN: 9781893670457 Buy From Tebot Bach $15.00 |
PRAISE FOR 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. 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. 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. |
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ISBN: 9781893670419 Buy From Tebot Bach $15.00 |
PRAISE FOR "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." "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." 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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ISBN: 9781893670389 Buy From Tebot Bach $15.00 |
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. 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. 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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ISBN: 9781893670426 Buy From Tebot Bach $15.00 |
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. 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". 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. 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. 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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ISBN: 1-893670-34-1 Buy From Tebot Bach $15.00 |
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An Urgent Request
A Fortunate Daughter Book "Sharp, dramatic, funny and shocking poetry." "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." "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." |
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ISBN: 978-1-893670-36-5 Buy From Tebot Bach $10.00 |
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. 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. 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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ISBN: 1-893670-32-7 Buy From Tebot Bach $14.00 |
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. 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." 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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ISBN: 1-893670-33-3 Buy From Tebot Bach $15.00 |
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. 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. 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. |
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ISBN: 1-893670-23-6 Buy From Tebot Bach $12.00 |