Gorilla
“Poetry. Women's Studies. Winner of the 2019 Tenth Gate Prize. This surreal series of prose poems, harmonic and jarring, pops the reader into a world where the animal is a danger-suit we might all don, or is a force of chaos that breaks families, or America's unconscious hatred of women. Perhaps it is our world, perhaps more real than surreal. One of the most unusual investigations of gender and family, this collection disorders and disturbs, knowing that upending the status quo makes the best manners of all.”
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Saints & Cannibals
“Hamm's world is female and Plathian, in fact, in its unflinching pronouncements of truth. Joyfully acrobatic is her language and the wonderful jumps she makes. Hers is a voice we have been waiting for.” - Cynthia Cruz, author of Ruin
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The Salt Daughter
“The Salt Daughter takes us on a journey through the secret kitchen of an American family. This daughter is no shrinking violet. Like Alice in the well, she swims through spoilt milk, soup, wine, rotten eggs and ice cream. She is the dark bud on a head of cabbage, the burnt patch in the pot of soup, the cotton candy under the nails of a fighter. In turning back to see mother, father and siblings, The Salt Daughter is sea water and chloride, cathartic and acid. Hamm's brilliant collection resounds with the force of a fairy tale.”
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The Transparent Dinner
“Christine Hamm's poetry brings the reader into a fairy tale world of dark and dangerous secrets, where a mother is a pile of sticks, a husband can be wished into a cat and a movie can be made from adolescent sexual experiences. Within the imaginative world of THE TRANSPARENT DINNER, Hamm reveals truths about a woman's intimacies and relationships.”
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A Glint of Light
“In [these} whisper moment[s],” Hildebrand brings readers poems of gentle clarity, uwords that are rich with intimate detail. Though fall and winter days and nights can be dark, Hildebrand offers color and sound—owl’s screech, flash of blackbird’s wings. Spring arrives with its trails of geese and a yellow dog. Nothing gets past this writer’s keen ears and eyes. These luminous poems glow like small blessings”. –Karla Huston, Wisconsin Poet Laureate 2017—2018, Author of Grief Bone and The Theory of Lipstick.
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Light from a Small Brown Bird
“Like some primitive craftsman, Rich Ives engages his medium with the care and patience of the woodcarver, the glassblower, the silversmith, to reveal the hidden lives of objects that pass through his hand and eye. His poems sometimes move in halflight, sometimes break into sudden clarities, restoring our kinship with remote ancestors, the possibilities of our buried selves.” - Madeline DeFrees
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Misplaced Vegetables
“These poems aptly show the poet's preference for spontaneous language and diversity of ideas.”
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Old Man Walking Home After Dark
“These poems are full of amazing and deep imagination. It is evident that in all these poems there is present a rich style and a variety of melodies to attract the readers. The poems are endowed with intense imagination, dreamy grace and subtle suggestion. All these poems become quite charming due to 'maturity, manifested in technique, of feeling in relation to thought'.”
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Square Blue Bucket Full of Trouble
“We are quite attracted by all these poems with their highly intense imaginative power and a never ending undercurrent of true and sincere feelings.”
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The Steam Of My Piss
“TSOMP is The Steam Of My Piss and is Camillus John’s second poembook kebab-full of modern life’s ups, downs and roundabouts with an all-singing-all-dancing cherry on top that looks a lot like Christmas.”
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Why The Privileged Need To Read Literature
“It’s not often that a working-class writer gets poetry published by such a prestigious and chimerical bookhouse as Ballyer Press. So while stocks last get your roller-skates and matching elbow-pads on and feed your mind, body and soul on such poems as…”
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Wiping My Milk Moustache Clean With My Sleeve
“Does life change forever when your Da starts hugging you in other people’s dreams? Yes, he’s back with his fifth book. In this instance, Kebab poembaggery of the highest order. A design for spice and contemplation. How far down Camillus John’s headbanger’s hole do you really want to go?”
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California Sijo
Bald Trickster Press, 2022.
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The Century of Travel
“The restless forms of Tim Kahl's The Century of Travel explore mortality and journeying--over land and through time--in a haunting fashion.”
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Omnishambles
“The fascinating poems of Tim Kahl's Omnishambles remind me of the surrealist belief that the universe always gives us exactly what we need. These gifts can come while browsing in a Paris flea market, strolling through a mysterious arcade, or by leaving the hotel room door open to chance, as Breton does in Nadja. In this case the generous universe that supplies the poet is The Sacramento Bee. As he moves through its pages, plumbing the universal unconscious for gifts that coalesce as metaphor and song, Tim Kahl amazes us again and again.” —Lawrence R. Smith, editor of Caliban
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Cage of Lit Glass
“In the Cage of Lit Glass, Charles Kell presents an unreal world and yet, these confines are not an imaginary. The cages are also not stable . . . We learn that if you wish to read a poem, you may as well carve the lines on your wrist. By creating such poems, the reader is separated from their comfort zone. And this is a marvelous feat. After all, awareness is powerful poetic.”
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Ishmael Mask
“These poems, shadowed by Melville and Kafka, are also a history of one poet’s encounters with the inscrutable relentlessness of fate and the inevitable privacy of suffering.” - Susan Stewart
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