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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World Gone Zoom

Notes from the American Epicenter

by David Belmont

Scheduled Release Date: May 18, 2021

Acclaimed essayist and musician, David Belmont takes us on a poetic journey through life under lockdown in New York City during the first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic and the few months following, replete with political commentary, philosophical musings and musical references.

Who would have thought that Dylan, Lennon, Marley, Morrison, Ochs, Byrne and Donovan could have presaged a world gone zoom?  That’s the lyrical genius of New York City artist, David Belmont, who riffs off these legendary poets to conjure up a “New York tough” pandemic life—sequestered and blandly hunkered down. With simple, stark—and often very funny—imagery, David invites you into a NYC “struggling in place,” with no way home. Enjoy, savor, and smile at our human predicament.

—Janet Wootten, SVP, Rubenstein Communications

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Bayna Bayna: In-Between

by Zeina Azzam

Scheduled Release Date: May 18, 2021

Using the Arabic words bayna bayna as a nod to her Palestinian Arab heritage, Zeina Azzam’s poetry reflects on the feeling of being in-between home and exile, childhood and adulthood, wholeness and loss, and living and dying.  Her poems express a bicultural and bilingual view of the world which is at once enriching, bewildering, and beautiful.

To be an immigrant is to come with a box of memories and expectations, tiny possessions, all that one can carry. If that person is a poet and lifts the lid, she gives us the ability to be with her as she paves her road. Zeina Azzam, through her stories, and through the integrity of language, creates a world of beauty and patience, even when ideals are shattered. Because this poet knows who she is and is secure in that, the poems are true. Each page encounters a moment where the facts are prevalent; and where passion and technique lift an unforgettable story.

—Grace Cavalieri, Maryland Poet Laureate

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