Let’s Hear It for the Horses

Third Place Winner of The Poetry Box Chapbook Prize 2021

by Tricia Knoll

Scheduled Release Date: Feb 1, 2021

Horses and humans go back in time with each other thousands of years. A young girl’s love for horses or a particular horse is the stuff of legends, bestselling novels, and movies. In Let’s Hear It for the Horses, Tricia Knoll’s poetry explores her lifelong fascination with these strong and sometimes symbolic creatures and shares stories and memories of her best rides.

---

It’s a great pleasure to browse this collection, just as Tricia Knoll’s horses browse the field, looking for new, green blades of grass. She writes in the fine tradition of Maxine Kumin, and like that earlier poet, even has a poem for a horse named “Jack”. Full of the breathtaking observations of the horse lover, Knoll takes the reader close to real and imagined horses—close enough to feel the tickle of their whiskers or notice the green spit on their lips. She also shares stories of the father who died before she was grown, but who guided her into life by taking her as a child on trail rides, or to see the Lipizzaner horses. You don’t have to know horses to love these poems; they can serve as a generous introduction to the joy and sadness that canters in the air beside them.

—Judith Barrington, author of Long Love: New & Selected Poems, 1985–2017

For complete details, reviews and ordering information click here.

The Ninetieth Day

Poems about Love, Loss, & Leftovers for Breakfast

by Kristin J. Leonard

Scheduled Release Date: Dec 1, 2021

The Ninetieth Day: Poems about Love, Loss, & Leftovers for Breakfast is a collection of poetry that seeks to explore the everyday moments and musings in life that linger between love and loss, and more importantly, those that are forgotten as soon as they pass (in other words, leftovers for breakfast). Such moments include: waking up to sparkles of sunlight; finding a way to persist when life is not as ordinary as you’d like it to be; a frozen-in-time elevator ride to visit a loved one in the hospital; and more.

---

There is more life within these pages than many people endure in their own lifetimes. An abundance of unexpected moments is masterfully intermixed with the familiar, all of which comes from deeper than the heart, because it emanates from the vast experiences of a sagacious, ageless soul. And luckily this brilliant poet has a superb knack for verse, wordsmith ingenuity, cadence, and style. Those skills are coupled with a superior nuanced language that perfectly matches the content, topics, themes, and mood, thus delivering plenty of thrills that delight and poignant introspections that resonate.

—David E. Grubb, poet

I read poetry for its sonic appeal and impression of a story.  Leonard strikes notes of Gluck, Olds, and Piercey. In most of the pieces in this collection, the woman is indeed running screaming from the burning house, but she lets you up for air with a quiet one just when you need it. I have added Leonard to my favorites.

—Shellie Leger, author of Back Kingdom Road House

For complete details, reviews and ordering information click here.

Exchanging Wisdom

A Guide for Parents of the Autonomous

by Christopher & Angelo Luna

Scheduled Release Date: Dec 1, 2021

Exchanging Wisdom features poems for and about Christopher’s son Angelo Luna, as well as a few pieces Angelo wrote for Christopher. The earliest poem was written when Angelo was three, and the most recent at age 21. Christopher endeavored to encourage his son to be an autonomous, freethinking individual. Angelo grew to become that and so much more. Taken as a whole, the poems in this collection track the development of Angelo’s personality and the strong bond between father and son.

---

Christopher Luna is a true heir to the Beat and New York School traditions of candor and grandeur. This collaboration and celebration of life runs on impeccable timing and deep love. As Luna and his son Angelo exchange wisdom they also re-invent the meaning of open verse: these poems crack open the heart and spill the joy of parenthood into the world.

—Lisa Jarnot, author
Robert Duncan, the Ambassador from Venus

One day you’re gonna have to…remind me how to believe in the basic goodness of all beings, Christopher Luna tells his son, Angelo, in his latest book, Exchanging Wisdom. More than a collection of father-son poems, Exchanging Wisdom is a record of gratitude. Luna knows that to be a parent is to be both teacher and pupil, vulnerable and responsible. In every poem Luna’s love beams: Like Lone Wolf and Cub we traversed…and you reminded me that magic is real….  These poems contemplate our never-ending wars, sickness, apathy, and art-making through the lens of a deeply reverent father. For some, being a parent, being the adult, is synonymous with having the answers. Luna, a Buddhist poet, community-organizer, and activist, reminds us that questioning is the only way to truth. What are you afraid to find? he wonders. Are these the right questions to ask? In these mind- and heart-opening poems Luna invites us to experience pure joy and wonder again through memory and thankfulness. Once you’ve opened those doors/ you need never do so again, asserts Luna. Once father you cannot go back to your former life. Thankfully for us, Luna never did.

—Claudia F. Savage, author of Bruising Continents

For complete details, reviews and ordering information click here.

Dear John—

by Laura LeHew

Scheduled Release Date: Nov 15, 2021

Dear John— is a collection of poems that investigate explore the multi-facets of love by using diverse points of view to reveal romantic love, loving friendships, and love that is complicated. The namesake poem for which this book was conceived, the final poem, “Dear John—,” is an epistolary poem in multiple stanzas ultimately on which the theme of this book is derived. “what happens between the notes // is the living.”

---

Laura LeHew’s work addresses the sublimation of the human emotions and the trouble remembering them. The evocative language along with the monosyllabic words bring to life a collage of grief, desire, loss, sexuality, and repression. Line after line a new secret is revealed, just like peeling an onion down to the core revealing the enigma of how a human negotiates with the natural world, and how men and women define their conduct within, between them and society. I am mesmerized and surprised by the use of “personified punctuation” which become integral parts of the poem as well as the mystery of the black-out word. LeHew’s poetry is stunning, clear, and melodic. It makes me understand better women’s emotions.

—Raúl Sánchez, author of All Our Brown-Skinned Angels and 2019-2021 City of Redmond Poet Laureate

For complete details, reviews and ordering information click here.

What We Bring Home

by Susan Coultrap-McQuin

Scheduled Release Date: Oct 15, 2021

In What We Bring Home, Susan Coultrap-McQuin reflects on what she has learned about herself and the world by venturing beyond American shores, first as a young Peace Corps Volunteer in the Philippines during the Vietnam War and years later as a tourist in Thailand, Cambodia, Laos and Vietnam. Her elegantly crafted poems invite the reader to travel with her, to see anew the sights of Southeast Asia, and to confront the ambiguous truths of cross-cultural interactions. In image-rich poetry, Coultrap-McQuin ponders how history and culture have shaped her views and experiences. Like the souvenirs we bring home, these poems speak to the heart of who we are and why we venture to distant shores.

---

In What We Bring Home, Susan Coultrap-McQuin examines in precise, elegant verse, what it means to be an American traveler. Her poems are compassionate, intelligent witnesses asking us, what can we learn from the past? Some poems speak to the beauty of finding oneself at home in a foreign landscape, dust coating my shoes/ like everyone else’s. Other poems demonstrate the difficulty of visiting places such as Vietnam where the wounds of American warfare still fester, and Cambodia where ghosts haunt the field of bone fragments,/ the pieces of blue cloth,/ poking from bare ground. In this collection, we can trust our speaker to not look away from harsh reality or her own complicity. These poems are as beautiful as they are fierce. A wonderful debut.

—Amie Whittemore, author of Glass Harvest

For complete details, reviews and ordering information click here.

Songs from the Back-in-the-Back

by Marcia B. Loughran

Scheduled Release Date: Oct 15, 2021

If you grew up in America in the seventies, you grew up in the back of the car, squabbling with your siblings, fighting for the best seat, singing car songs. The littlest kids were thrown in the back-in-the-back, a private cockpit with a view of where you’ve been. Now we have iPhones and TVs in the car, but back then you had to entertain yourself: staring out the window, torturing your parents with endless knock-knock jokes, the occasional screaming contest. It wasn’t pretty but it was fun, at least in this poet-passenger’s rearview memory.

This collection begins with poems inspired by her father, the family driver/chief storyteller. They capture aspects of the father-daughter relationship as well as the role reversal that takes place as child becomes adult and parent becomes “old.” The second half of the chapbook takes to the open road: memories of family trips, a scrapbook of stories from a storytelling family. Unapologetically narrative in form, these poems pay homage to grandparents, cousins, aunts, uncles, and the ancestors. The chapbook concludes with three mini-essays (messays) about car rides, family, and the possibilities of discovery when you’re trapped next to a window with an ever-changing view.

---

With her generous and accessible words and images, she touches those places in me that spark both memory and imagination. Songs from the Back-in-the Back is a gorgeous collection of Marcia’s best family tidbits.

—Franny Forsman, Las Vegas lawyer and author

For complete details, reviews and ordering information click here.

Gaslight Opera

by Gary Percesepe

Scheduled Release Date: Oct 15, 2021

Gary Percesepe’s new collection of poetry, Gaslight Opera, is anchored by a long pantoum composed in honor of the poet Mark Strand, to whom the work is dedicated. “Waltz du Temps Perdu” is the dance of death, the wreck of the ship of state and the entrance into what Mark Strand called “The Grand Ballroom of the New Eternity.”

Percesepe deftly deploys prose poems and other traditional poetic forms to observe and comment on the current unreality. These poems disturb, distort and ultimately delight. Although most of the poems in Gaslight Opera were written prior to the global pandemic that began in 2020, they seem to anticipate what is coming: loss, grief, despair, and anguished death alongside comic gestures of resistance tilting at the absurdity of our shared situation.  These somewhat manic, even zany prose poems soon give way to a middle section of a grief observed–the quiet “eye” of the storm. Three villanelles help mark the transition to a return to the thunder and plunge off the cliff, a sliding logic of surrealistic elliptical montage with reflections on time and memory– a time permanently out of joint, as seen in Gaslight Opera by such poems as “The New Year” and “Captain Ahab Surveys the Damage Done at the Press Conference,” deliberately omitting cues and introducing oblique connections (asparagus and encyclopedias, Moby Dick and the president).

Baudelaire said that the prose poem is essentially lyric and expressive of inner states, reflecting “the lyrical impulses of the soul, the undulations of reverie, the jibes of conscience.” This is a pretty fair description of what is going on in Gaslight Opera.  

Life affirming acts of invention… A romp through a world we mostly recognize, made brilliant and startling through language well chosen. The poems create a belief system we want to embrace and cause the reader to applaud a spirited writer reworking the universe for our delight. ~Maxine Chernoff

---

Gaslight Opera, Gary Percesepe’s latest collection of poetry, brilliantly captures the existential mood of the times, delivering sharply observant slices of life comic and tragic against a backdrop of literature, love, and dreams intertwined. Somewhere moonflowers shimmer in street dust, a long-lost father works late at night alone in a parallel world, and we may wake up one day and find ourselves covered in covfefe, searching for the last fallen ice cube in the fridge. Percesepe, with joyful resistance, reassures: “Whatever happens today, we are here.”

—Morgan Harlowe, author of Midwest Ritual Burning

For complete details, reviews and ordering information click here.