The Day of My First Driving Lesson

by Tiel Aisha Ansari

Scheduled Release Date: Jan 21, 2021

A Poetry Box Chapbook Prize Winner – 1st Place

The Day of My First Driving Lesson was written in the wake of the author’s parents’ deaths. It is a deeply moving poetic memoir celebrating her parents and the tremendous impact they had on her life. Ansari explores themes of growing up as an expatriate, bereavement, grief, and celebration in this non-traditional collection inspired by a workshop taught by Penelope Scambly Schott.

“I was learning to be the hero of my own story. This line from the poem “1975” could be the anthem for this powerful chapbook that traces the story of the poet’s family, an odyssey ranging from coast to coast in the United States, to Tanzania, and beyond. Alternating plainspoken narrative with vivid imagery, the poems also range through time, building a kaleidoscopic view of this interracial family’s life, challenges, inevitable aging, and the strong bonds that hold them together even beyond grief. The Day of My First Driving Lesson is a rare love letter to good parents and the legacy of compassion they leave behind.”

—Amy Miller, Contest Judge, 2020
and author of The Trouble with New England Girls

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My Mother Never Died Before & Other Poems

by Marcia B. Loughran

Scheduled Release Date: Jan 21, 2021

A Poetry Box Chapbook Prize Winner – 2nd Place

Because everybody has a mother. And everybody’s going to lose her.

A collection of poems inspired by one woman’s relationship with her mother, the chapbook My Mother Never Died Before and Other Poems sounds heavy, but lands light. The first half includes poems written after the mother’s death. The poet focuses on the everyday, mundane details—what the funeral home visit was like, how birds felt like messages, the unexpected realities of life without one’s mother. The second half pulls back the camera to include poems written before the death, which capture the ups and downs of the mother-child relationship. Wry humor and a companionable narrative style invite the reader in to one particular take on a universal story.

“My Mother Never Died Before is a joyful read, full of surprises. Marcia B. Loughran shows her versatility and variety while bringing a welcome dose of humor to this collection, which is hard to pull off in poems about death. The many familiar scenes here—shopping for caskets, cleaning out papers after a parent has died, touching their intimate objects like breath mints and combs—are all painted with such clarity and reality. Loughran takes a risk by beginning with the “after” poems and ending with the “before,” but the gamble pays off beautifully—the innocence of “before” makes the “after” all the more poignant in retrospect.”

—Amy Miller, Contest Judge, 2020
and author of The Trouble with New England Girls

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A Shape of Sky

by Cathy Cain

Scheduled Release Date: Jan 12, 2021

Like prism light, Cathy Cain’s poems in A Shape of Sky reveal, in distinct colors, the predicament and magic of living in our bodies. Cain, a visual artist as well as a writer, illuminates complexity, beauty, and exuberant sensuousness wherever she directs her gaze. Whether she focuses on the work of artists like David Hockney, James Turrell, Kiki Smith, the process of making art, or merely the everyday, her poetry reminds us that an aesthetic view can sustain us with energy and hope.

“Cathy Cain’s poems are balanced between the light and darkness of what is said and unsaid, of what decays and what blossoms. Her wonderful book tends to the margins of existence with a steady eye. Time and again, the poems in A Shape of Sky are like maps to guide us through the transformations that can come from perspective, resilience, and wonder.”

—David Biespiel, author of A Place of Exodus

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Nothing More to Lose

by Carolyn Martin

Scheduled Release Date: Jan 12, 2021

Nothing More to Lose is an intense, hair-raising, and hopeful account of one family’s resilience and faith. With poems based on Therese Kolbert Dieringer’s autobiography (My Life – Lived and Remembered: A journey across Hungary, Germany, and America), Carolyn Martin tracks the Kolbert family as they escape from Hungary in 1944, endure seven years of starvation and sickness in Germany, and arrive to a new life in America in 1952. Refugees who know neither the language nor landscape, they finally find some semblance of peace in their new home.

Martin knows her subject well. Dieringer is a family friend whose autobiography she edited in 2008. This intimate connection flows through powerful free verse poems that are filled with immediacy, insight, and compassion. Nothing More to Lose will open readers’ hearts and minds to the challenges that refugees in every era experience. It will also affirm the power poetry has to bear witness to that suffering and to the strength lying deep within the human spirit.

“In her introduction to Nothing More to Lose, Carolyn Martin says, ‘… even in the worst of times, people can be kind.’ That idea buoys these poems that share a truly horrific tale of survival beginning in WWII Hungary. Through Martin’s deftly crafted images, we see into the life of Therese Kolbert Dieringer as she and her family flee Nazis, bombs, starvation, and more. The long journey that concludes in America brings Therese to a safer, but not necessarily less cruel, place. I had to take little breaks as I read these poems; that human beings are capable of causing so much pain is nearly unbearable. But Dieringer’s voice comes through each of Martin’s poems showing how kindness and cruelty co-exist in us all, and how true strength and resilience cannot be extinguished. Most importantly, kindness wins.”

~ Kathleen Cassen Mickelson, cofounder of Gyroscope Review
and blogger at One Minnesota Writer

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Excoriation

by Rebecca Smolen

Scheduled Release Date: Dec 1, 2020

Excoriation is an honest, thought-provoking exploration via poetry, into motherhood, relationships, heartache, love, and the cosmos. Rebecca Smolen shares her experiences in a way that’s meant to dig a little deeper, delving into each wound until nothing but truth remains. Through evocative metaphor and verse, Smolen challenges her readers to let these poems get under their skin, even if it hurts a little, for this is where healing begins.

“In Rebecca Smolen’s Excoriation, you experience alchemy, the transformation of a woman’s raw loss into a dance, a music, a clear vision, ‘how the stars/are brightest in the northeast in winter.’ In poems addressed to her lost love, she remembers the first goodbye after the first kiss, how it ‘became the new snow smell/ mixed with the smoke from each chimney,’ and you feel that relationship char in words, ‘raw and still bloody.’ Smolen’s poems are ‘heavy with the life [she knows she has] needed to release.’ In rich language and provocative shapes, her poems are generous acts, each a form of healing, ‘to fall first,/ to shine… to know how to rain,’ their ‘purpose to ease another’s’ pain. Read these brave poems to understand that the world ‘is merely attempting to find its own way back’ through the mystery and science of this writer’s voice.”

—Kate Gray, author of Carry the Sky
and For Every Girl: New & Selected Poems

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My Mind’s Eye

by Marshall Witten

with illustrations by Elaine Franz Witten

Scheduled Release Date: Dec 1, 2020

Drawn from episodes over a long life, the poems of My Mind’s Eye survey the joys and sorrows, the affirmations and contractions of the world. The natural world becomes a mirror for human actions. And if simplicity is sometimes trampled by our greed and recklessness, knowing our true place restores at least a corner of the world.

“I’ve long thought that important poetry’s basis is human maturity, a clear-eyed awareness, which some never attain, of the human condition in its full actuality. By this measure, Marshall Witten’s My Mind’s Eye—by turns wry, deeply loving, empathetic, and soberly realistic—is a signal achievement, a monument to a long life well and attentively lived. At one point, the poet writes, “The real risks and tests of life/ are learning how to trust and love.” My Mind’s Eye is testimony to one man’s having triumphantly met such challenges, its salutary conclusion being that “We have this moment; do not let it slip/ away unnoticed; keep it in your grip.” The world feels a safer and saner place for the lessons in this stirring volume.”

—Sydney Lea, Vermont Poet Laureate (2011-2015)

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