Falling into the River

by Debbie Hall

The Poetry Box Chapbook Prize, 2019
3rd Place Winner

Scheduled Release Date: Jan 21, 2020

“How many close calls before we become ghosts?” wonders the author of this collection, where she reflects upon her experiences—emotional, relational and spiritual–during her partner’s yearlong battle with a life-threatening illness. Threaded throughout these poems is the presence of the natural world—always a source of solace, but now more acutely and deeply felt.

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Language formed from ache, perseverance and enlightenment construct Hall’s poems: a cancer survivor’s grateful soul mate who comes back from a despairing precipice—love’s shared journey—to discover in these intimate poems that even a long life is short. We learn, too, how the residential soul survives for illumination, to know endurance is born from restoration and hope. Poems to remind us that we fall to get up and go on, mostly, a little more stooped, but thankfully keen to the transient world, each day sanctified with “…the calculus of near misses / allotted each of us.”

—Jeff Walt, Leave Smoke

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Notes from a Caregiver

by Meg Lindsay

Scheduled Release Date: Jan 21, 2020

Inspired by the doctor and poet, William Carlos Williams, who wrote poetry on his prescription pad when on house calls, the poems in Notes from a Caregiver originated in waiting rooms and doctors’ offices when Meg Lindsay’s husband collapsed with multiple myeloma, a cancer, causing bone fractures. Lindsay writes of her personal journey as a caregiver, not clichés and ‘feel good’ sayings, which can be isolating and make one feel inadequate. Instead, she uses poetry to reveal authentic emotions, often odd and unpredictable, ranging from compassion to despair to anger and even to humor.

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Meg Lindsay’s poems are deeply moving and sometimes even humorous. Each verse guides us through the twists and turns of a bone cancer diagnosis too late to avert injury, treatment, repair. Her words gently illuminate the arduous road she and her husband are traveling and the continuous dialog between caregiver and patient. Their unrelenting partnership and love offer us a way forward.

—Jen Walker, Attorney, Literacy Advocate and Multiple Myeloma Caregiver

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Shadow Man

by Margaret Chula

Tentative Release Date: November 5, 2019

In Shadow Man, Margaret Chula brings her father out of the shadows where he had been since 1957, the day her mother packed their five children—all under the age of ten—into the car and drove away. Over the years, Margaret comes to accept the differences between a mother who wants China cups with saucers and a father who’s content with a Budweiser. Through writing about these awkward, often heartbreaking, interactions with her estranged father, she discovers that there’s more than one truth and that each of us must find our own.

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“Shadow Man is a deeply touching portrayal of love, loss, and forgiveness.”

—Penelope Scambly Schott, Oregon Book Award for Poetry

 

“Through Chula’s insights, we as readers can understand our own fraught relationships with parents.  As adults facing honest memory, we can arrive at the grace of reconciliation that she shows is possible and essential for our own serenity.”

—Bill Siverly, author of Nightfall

 

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What She Was Wearing

by Shawn Aveningo Sanders

Tentative Release Date: November 12, 2019

In What She Was Wearing, Shawn Aveningo Sanders uses poetry to tell her #MeToo story—one that has been over 30 years in the making. Inspired, by the courage of so many women who have bravely opened up, Aveningo Sanders decided it was time to join the conversation and share her story. It is her hope this work can help women of all ages face and cope with their own experiences, while letting them know they can indeed heal and go on to enjoy loving, trusting relationships.

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“Shawn Aveningo Sanders’s story of living with the aftermath of violence emerges like a geode that’s been cracked open after years underground. Each image has been remembered and re-remembered, stored, pressurized, and slowly shaped into a single facet of the experience. From the earrings she was wearing to explaining the assault to her college-age children years later, Aveningo Sanders spares no detail and lets no one off the hook. Starkly honest and memorably graceful, these poems are a virtuoso performance of feminism and survival, as well as a wholly human story that far too many women will understand.”

—Amy Miller, author of The Trouble with New England Girls

 

“Dedicated ‘to those who have suffered in silence,’ this book is a testimony to Shawn Aveningo Sanders’ courage. For thirty years, she kept a secret that verged on unraveling her, a secret so devastating she once attempted suicide. But here she transcends the traps of shame and self-reproach to confront—in a sequence of poems and epistolary prose—the four men who, as college fraternity brothers, raped her. Forced into silence for too long, women all over this world are now speaking out, saying #MeToo. What She Was Wearing is Sanders’ brave voice joining this transforming chorus.”

—Paulann Petersen, Oregon Poet Laureate Emerita

 

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A Long, Wide Stretch of Calm

by Melanie Green

Tentative Release Date: November 5, 2019

The poems in A Long, Wide Stretch of Calm are an invitation to slow down, to rest deep into quiet and the contemplative. Melanie Green’s poetry explores the connection with the numinous—as well as speaking to the difficulty of living with a chronic illness.

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“Haiku-like in their intensity of language, Zen-like in their meditative quality, these lyrical poems invite us to pause, catch our breaths, and marvel at a poet who invites us to Feel/ the psalm/ of lingering/ calm/ in afternoon’s/ echo of light.”

—Carolyn Martin, author of The Way a Woman Knows and A Penchant for Masquerades

 

“A Long, Wide Stretch of Calm is a wise, generous, expertly crafted volume of poems that reminds us how even in the deep/ arabesque/ of night, in the bearable/ dark, we might yet walk/ out of the house of worry into a place where solitude is cherished and heaven is within.”

—Tim Applegate, author of Blueprints and At the End of Day

 

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Most Beautiful

by Elizabeth S.E. McBride
with artwork by Connie Cronenwett

Tentative Release Date: November 5, 2019

A collection of poems, prose, and paintings inspired by the village of Glen Arbor, Michigan and the Sleeping Bear National Lakeshore, voted “Most Beautiful Place in America” in 2011.

It’s not always easy to slow down, unplug, and take notice of the gifts nature offers. Elizabeth McBride’s poetry and prose invites you to bear witness to the wonder of that which surrounds us. Whether you enjoy this book right where you are, or bring it with you to take your own poetic tour of the Sleeping Bear National Lakeshore and  its surrounding regions, you can match the cited locations to the poems and prose they  inspired, and experience what is here, what was here before you, and what is changing right beneath your feet and overhead. Let the artwork and verse herein, whet your appetite for discovery, as you venture into this place “Most Beautiful!”

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“McBride takes us on a glorious tour of the area: to the farms of Port Oneida, to the little town of Empire, to the vistas of Pierce Stocking Drive and the thrill of Pyramid Point and its shipwrecks.”

~ Betsy Wagner, Glen Arbor Arts Center Artist-in-Residence Program

 

“In her luminous work, Elizabeth McBride’s elegant and earthbound writing creates that uncommon experience only a fine artist can give us.”

~ Jack Ridl, author of Practicing to Walk Like a Heron and Saint Peter and the Goldfinch

 

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The Very Rich Hours

by Gregory Loselle

Tentative Release Date: October 22, 2019

In The Very Rich Hours, Gregory Loselle recounts experiences, in childhood and later, in and around his grandparents’ house on Grosse Ile, Michigan, an island in the Detroit River near the mouth of Lake Erie. Loselle’s mastery of various poetic forms parallels the way in which memory is a formal reconstruction of events.

Take a walk down memory lane and open the door to a houseful of stories, from watching Grandpa shave to sifting through a crateful of old photographs that “call us to forgotten places” and remind us “what we were and meant to do” in the very rich hours of our lives.

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With a haunting and contemplative voice, Loselle employs rhythm, word-play, and richness of language line after line. Through rhyme, narrative constructs, and repetition, he crafts poems that are admirably controlled and precise, and reminds us that what William Carlos Williams writes is true: “A poem is a… machine made out of words.” Loselle’s beautifully spun poems continue to reverberate long after the last light’s been switched off.

— Janée J. Baugher, author of The Body’s Physics and Coördinates of Yes

 

Gregory Loselle’s poems offer memory illuminated by a remarkable astuteness and strong craft. In his hand, the quotidian becomes extraordinary, uncommon, and wonderful. The poet investigates with an unrelenting intelligence and an astonishing clarity.

 —James Najarian, author of The Goat Songs

 

 

 

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Mary Dyer’s Hymn and Other Quaker Poems

by Stanford Searl

Tentative Release Date: October 22, 2019

Mary Dyer’s Hymn and other Quaker Poems, constructs poetic songs which open-up multiple dimensions of an embodied sensibility of the conflicts between Puritans and Quakers in 17^th century Massachusetts.

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“Stanford Searl at his strongest, blending the themes of space, place, and memory, with the theme of Mary Dyer’s martyrdom, part of his faith heritage. This is a collection that for all the Quaker silent prayer is musical and melodic.”

~ Ben Pink Dandelion, Professor of Quaker Studies, Woodbrooke

 

“The compelling narrative contained in this delicate collection leaves me buoyed up and inspired by the joy and certitude to which these early Friends gave witness. I am already in Paradise.”

~ Deborah L. Shaw, Recorded Minister, Director Emeritus: Guilford College’s Quaker Leadership Scholars Program

 

“Are we willing, like Dyer, Leddra, Stephenson, and Robinson, to face the ultimate sacrifice for a good greater than ourselves? Or are we fated, as poet James Russell Lowell once penned, to see Truth forever on the scaffold, / Wrong forever on the throne? Searl not only asks the important question; he provides inspiring words for those who would learn from history.”

~ Max L. Carter, William R. Rogers Director of Friends Center and Quaker Studies at Guilford College (emeritus)

 

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