"Brownwood is full of angst, wry humor, and sarcasm; he's a lost twin, doppelganger, living in a melancholy place [and] this book's poetic plot . . . arrives with cinematographic aplomb." - Elena Karina Byrne
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Using Hollywood screenplay structure to illustrate a life in three acts, eighteen scenes, each with two poems as mirrors to action, filmmaker/poet Lawrence Bridges sequences through tragicomic plot twists and subplots to create a character-driven, novel-like book of lyric poems.
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“This stunning first collection of funny, strange, aphoristic , indissoluble poems reveals Larry Bridges to be as talented a poet as he is a filmmaker. Full of verve and revelation, these poems are a storehouse of sadness and awakened consciousness.”
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“Reading the subtle lyrics of this book, we can hope to be thus drenched-and with acceptance.” - David Landrey
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“Through the streets of Buffalo, Olmsted’s parks, Forest Lawn, Soho, and Crescent Street, Montreal, Jennifer Campbell’s word images never cease to accost the reader with their freshness and vulnerability. In fact, perhaps this is the main thread that weaves her poems together: what fragile creatures we are in our search for comfort and self-expression. A true lover of language, Campbell seeks to discover, by softening “everything mundane into beauty,” phrases that help us rise above it. And while the ghosts, dreams, and demons in her work are not “easily deleted,” Jennifer Campbell, the woman and poet, never shies away from confronting conflicts and loss, creating fresh images like her “custard moon,” and peeling away more layers of language, like the pages in this complex volume of remarkable poems.” - Perry S. Nicholas, author of What the World Sees
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A chapbook of reconstituted fairytale poems.
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“In BALEEN, a Poem in Twelve Days, Greek-American poet, Cea, and Portuguese artist, Vincent Sampaio, reflect on queer yearning, illness, and place as a locus of escape, not unlike Thomas Mann's Death in Venice. However, unlike Mann's novella, tragedy is not so certain. Illness doesn't mean death. Yearning doesn't mean loss. Cea's yearning is amorphous and undulant like the water they find respite in. There seems to be no component of the poem that is not also of the sea as they move, reflectively, in and out of one another. "I crush my poem to seashells," Day Five goes, "ocean it out examine the water's wares / & I will get this wrong all rust & ruins / bobbing up from the foam". Art from Sampaio responds to these crushing moments—a broken ionic column, a slippery body melding with water, a clam with teeth tonguing a pearl, one feels as uncannily in a distant memory as much as a ruin. In Cea's world, what is fragmentary is also whole, like synecdoche made literal, the parts not representative of something complete but complete in and of themselves, as if what we fail to recapture in memory makes it any less of one. What's the difference anyway between a memory and a ruin?”
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You, the scapegoat, incarnation of the ghosts of bad relationships past. I was yelled at for tripping on your human-tripping butt, left in a corner while you were cuddled. Your sleep murmurs, purr-snores, loose bits jangling all fan my fury. That cat spring roll story may not have been about you but may as well have been. You drew blood from my brother with your claws, and hissed at every catsitter until even the neighbor’s barely-speaking toddler called you Mean Kitty.
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My body is not a textbook but you are my mango. Red and wrinkly, finally proportional, a perfect pound. Little green one as pancreas, two large halves for lungs, 30 types in Hawaii alone, blossoming red, yellow, green and purple. But even on a romantic Big Island vacation, at the risk of appearing a loose woman, please remove the rings, before the doctor cuts them off between the fast, the treacly soda, and the glucose screen.
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In developing his foundational Theory of Power, Choi Hong Hi stressed the importance of reaction force and concentration of impact in the maintenance of a taekwondo student's equilibrium and the severity of their strikes to an opponent. Bringing as much mass to a blow as possible increases its effectiveness, but the swiftness in which it is delivered factors even more so. For this reason, one's speed and agility may outmatch a larger rival's potential.
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“Yu-Han Chao writes with delicacy and power. Her poems speak on many levels about life, relationships and personal nightmares. Her work flows from a mix of traditional Chinese culture, contemporary Taiwan and post-modern America. The resulting poems contain beauty and often wisdom. Many are worth reading over and over again.” —Joe Farley
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Poetry and the immediate: A collection of sensed spaces collates poetry written in notebooks, journals, computer documents, and on postcards over the span of two transformational years of the writer's life. There are several pages within this book that offer space for you to contemplate, play, explore, and create. There is also space for personal contemplation at the end of the book as you engage directly with the concepts and imagery you perceive.
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“Erika Eckart’s The Tyranny of Heirlooms is itself ‘magical material,’ a meditation on the necessity for escape, the impossibility of escape, and maybe, ultimately, ‘the illusion of escape’ that salves and saves us all. Equal parts a ‘hope chest’ and a list of regrets, the book burgeons with the accumulations of lives which are always ‘much more than…could ever fit inside.’ Eckart, then, brings those accretions outside in all their poverty and persistence. Her narrators know we ‘can’t start fresh all the way from scratch,’ so they are offered the next best thing: brute sequences of sustenance, always a day late, a dollar short, but somehow complete.” - Nicole Matos
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“Many poets write about the natural world - few poets write while acting directly to defend the natural world like environmental activist and attorney Will Falk does in When I Set the Sweetgrass Down. The natural world speaks, Falk insists, in these biophilic poems written from the frontlines of land defense campaigns. These poems are a record of what Falk heard from the natural world in places like Thacker Pass, Nevada where Falk set up a protest occupation in a beautiful mountain pass set for destruction by an open pit mine and Hawaii's Mauna Kea where Falk helped to blockade telescope construction from desecrating the sacred mountain. At a time when the destruction of the natural world is intensifying, When I Set the Sweetgrass Down will help readers find the courage they need to - and remind them why they must - act to defend the source of all life: the natural world.”
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“A collection that says maps are as mutable as minds, and that you can deepen the question and deepen the answer and still come up with double zero. In fine textures, this book suggests the act of expression is still an act of hope and that’s about all you can hope for I think.” - Nikki-Lee Birdsey, author of Night As Day
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In this collectable edition of six accordion-fold postcard-style books, Craig Foltz’s poems traverse the cultural landscape of the United States. The poems are accompanied by a photograph of each state’s sky—as diverse as the states which make up this giant country. The pages are perforated so that the poems can be sent, like balloons, through the mail. The photographs were contributed by 51 amateur and professional photographers from around the country.
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"Richard Fox weaves lyrical magic in his SWAGGER & REMORSE, a book-length series of poems at once intimate ('I'd rather be a river than anything else') and richly metaphysical ('Trees look inside the houses, see all the wood & cannot look away'). They help us to consider grief -'I'll always / think of you as I pretend to eat the living air or pull / an origami swan out of nowhere / or out of someone's ear'—with humor and mystery and an elegant humanity. I recommend these distilled and powerful poems, with their birds and trees and houses and fires and rivers and hands and salt and blood to anyone who would like a fresh pair of eyes—'Once a year the flowers on this very porch take wing / as if they just remembered something'—and a whole new landscape to marvel over." - Maureen Seaton
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“In Pentimento, Joshua Garcia fuses the sacred with the secular, moving from churches to karaoke, from Jesus at the gastroenterologist to John the Baptist cruising in a state park, all the while revealing a self and world riven by loss and the remnants of a broken faith. A master of radiant detail, he takes us beyond what we think we see, returning, again and again, to his deft layering of art and myth, to the grace of heartbreak, to the body as first wound and source of all desire. This is a beautiful book and an exciting debut.” —Bruce Snider
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“Each poet’s journey entails risks that a reader is spared. With an abundance of selfless generosity, Ash Good lets us savor her hard-won knowledge, etched in succinct rhythms and luscious detail. Her poems constitute an invigorating addition to the canon-yet-to-be of West Coast poets that has been shaped by Eloise Klein Healy, Sharon Doubiago, Judy Grahn and Philip Whalen. She is well on her way to joining these comrades with poems that joyfully offer you the pleasure of their company.” —Bill Mohr, author of Hidden Proofs & Vehemence
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