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

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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

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The Catalog of Small Contentments

by Carolyn Martin

Scheduled Release Date: Aug 15, 2021

In her fifth collection, The Catalog of Small Contentments, Carolyn Martin celebrates the aesthetic she has embraced for decades. It is found in Sting’s comment, “All my life I have tried to find the truth and make it beautiful.”

These delightfully accessible poems sparkle with beauty as they revel in truths inspired by a host of poets, artists, and philosophers from Billy Collins and Mary Oliver to Teilhard de Chardin and Claude Monet; from Virginia Wolf and Maggie Smith to Henry James and Joan Miró.

They also draw beautiful truths from the natural world that surrounds the poet. Feral cats, squirrels, Steller’s jays, slugs, moles, and maple trees appear throughout the collection. Even an errant fly and spider earn lessons on how to survive in an unfriendly world.

Finally, Martin’s obsession with unique words inundates these poems. Words like anatidaephobia, hypnopedia, superannuation, blamestorming, and funemployed offer readers the opportunity to enjoy the poet’s wordplay while expanding their own vocabulary.

Whether she’s chatting with an antic ant or pondering Monet’s myopia, Martin is committed to the small contentments that fill her days and inhabit these poems.

Carolyn Martin’s The Catalog of Small Contentments suggests how we can find sanity in what we see in our gardens, poetry books, or the night school of sleeplessness and dreams. Whatever is close by, including feral cats. She notices the spider on her windshield and writes with a robust sense of humor which hits perfect notes in her laugh-out-loud proverbs. Her serious side pays homage to influences as diverse as Billy Collins, Basho, Marx, and Bette Davis. We witness her gentle compassion when she reads obituaries and shares the loss of loved ones. Martin’s fans might include other poets, mystics, birdwatchers, retired folks, and those open to learning a new word a day (she provides an addendum to explain.) Boiling it down, these poems are for people who wonder about the place of humans in the universe on days that begin with a look out the window.

—Tricia Knoll, author of Checkered Mates

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The Fog

by Mary C. Florio

Scheduled Release Date: Aug 15, 2021

Mary Florio is interested in the concept of transmission, of how so many things—virus, hate, despair, fear—all the willful seeds of undoing—follow us poor humans around in a cloud of unknowing. The pandemic has taught the world loneliness, but we have always been lonely, and wounded. We just can’t see it. We’re in the fog, always.

In Mary Florio’s remarkable debut, lushly musical poems of striking imagination and wit chronicle a world reduced by the Covid pandemic to one in which “All the party lights are out,” and creatures both human and animal approach being undone by isolation, loneliness and peril. But though grounded in an altered, wounded planet that “can’t stop/ whining about its pain as if pain were/ something new,” Florio’s tart, provocative, and gorgeously visual poems chronicle what no pandemic can distract us from—the fundamental necessity to connect, to understand, to love—or, at least, to arrive at what Robert Frost called “a momentary stay against confusion.” Mary Florio’s The Fog is a triumph, capturing truths so clear and elemental we might, in our justifiable fear, have failed to recognize them.

—Catherine Doty, author of Wonderama
and Momentum

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we’re not real anyways

by maddie mitchell

Scheduled Release Date: July 15, 2021

we’re not real anyways explores mental health struggles, highs, lows, LGBTQ+ love, and heartbreak. These poems contain the struggles of dealing with many mental illnesses including depression, anxiety, OCD, BPD, PTSD, and anorexia nervosa. The collection was written during the author’s time at a residential eating disorder recovery facility and while participating in the step-down programs.

she tried to disappear, so he could finally be happy.
she wanted to fade away until a girl asked her to stay.
maybe she won’t always hate herself.

Maddie Mitchell’s book is a clarion call from the war zone of anorectic suffering. Her poems unveil and call to account the forces and indignities that imperil young women by pressuring them to be perfect and small. This is an emotionally searing, impressively crafted sequence that intertwines its statement of truth with an ongoing search for hope. It is the work of a talented young poet whose voice is haunting, inspiring and indelible.

—Barbara Burch, PhD,
Professor of English, Georgetown College

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Protection

by Michelle Lerner

Scheduled Release Date: July 15, 2021

In Protection, Michelle Lerner explores the wonder and challenges of parenting from pregnancy through early childhood, taking on subjects rarely considered in poetry such as difficult labor, c-section, questions of gender identity and development in young children, and the experience of parenting while chronically ill. Throughout the chapbook, she comes back, over and over, to the eternal dilemma of how to balance the urge to protect one’s child with the acknowledgement of the child’s need for self-development and risk-taking, how to distinguish “the you from the me/ the definition from destruction/ the stumble from the fall.”

Michelle Lerner’s debut chapbook Protection is a breathtaking poetic journey of pregnancy and motherhood.  I love Lerner’s luminous imagery that fuses at times with an unexpected searing irony. There is an originality of subject matter and candor dealing with exploring gender identity of children that reinforces this author’s openness and intelligence. Her poem “House” may be the fiercest and most tender poem about pregnancy I’ve ever read.  Michelle Lerner is a new shimmering star on our poetry planet.

—Laura Boss, author of The Best Lover, editor of Lips

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What Is Not a Miracle

by Don Badgley

Scheduled Release Date: June 15, 2021

The poems in What Is Not a Miracle are centered on the spiritual realm or on the natural world—and for the author, these are often indistinguishable. The themes are deeply influenced by his life as a Friend, “Quaker.” Don Badgley offers these poems as a glimpse of one man’s corporeal and spiritual journey. It is his hope that “these small poetic offerings may kindle recognition of the Light within each of us and so affirm the infinite, eternal and unchangeable Ground of Being that is our universal Source.”

“Morning Hope”

I gaze into the infant day
With boundless trust
That the perfection
Of the dew-covered blossoms
Trembling beside me
Might order the path before me
And I am lifted anew
By the sparrow’s song
And nourished by the scent
Of mist filled and sparkling air.

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