Surreal Expulsion

by D. R. James

Tentative Release Date: Mar 15, 2019

Surreal Expulsion’s title poem responds not only bluntly to the 2018 mass shooting that left seventeen dead at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School but ultimately to the socio-political negligence and indifference behind violence and injustice worldwide. In assorted other blasts D. R. James confronts contemporary issues and personal skirmishes against “sapient insufficiency” through free verse and hijacked forms (prose poem, cento, sonnet, villanelle), arresting images and twisted wit, exposé and surreality. In toto, the collection wrestles, now soberly, now sardonically, with strains of “barbarity, barrels of it” as well as of “the calm shadowy fraud.”

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The Unknowable Mystery of Other People

by Sally Zakariya

Tentative Release Date: Mar 15, 2019

Take a peek into the mystery of other people as Sally Zakariya shares stories of those she knows, those she remembers from childhood, and the ones she’s merely observed throughout her daily walk in life. Each poem serves as an introduction where the poet invites us to meet this man, this woman, these folks. Not only are we invited to bear witness to their lives, but we come to realize our common ground—our humanity—rather than focusing on the differences.

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The Secret Land

by Patrick Sheils

Tentative Release Date: Feb 20, 2019

The Secret Land examines the tension between individual purpose that propels us to live our day-to-day lives, contrasted against the backdrop of a seemingly purposeless universe governed by indifferent laws. Through this conflict, Sheils strives to find moments we can celebrate while questioning their authenticity. He ponders the effect of a purposeless world on love, sorrow and beauty. Is there any truth to these abstract concepts? How might other individuals at different stages of their life deal with such a schism, and how do those realities dictate the story arc of ones life? Is it possible for one to create a new world by sacrificing the old?

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The Poet’s Curse: A Miscellany

by Michael Estabrook

Tentative Release Date: Jan 15, 2019

A delightful miscellany of poems on a multitude of subjects in various forms and genres including: ancestral portraits, bestiary, commonplace, complaints, catalogs, concrete, dialog, dreams, ekphrastic, erotica, experimental, found poems, free verse, light poems, imagistic, list poems, lyrical, military, monolog, narrative, nostalgia, object poems, odes, pentastichs, persona poems, philias, phobias, philosophies, portraits, prose poems, romantic, satire, sonnets, stream-of-consciousness, triptychs, work . . .

“The Poet’s Curse”

Everything the poet sees
or hears, thinks, feels or imagines
gets captured, interpreted and shoe-horned
into a damn poem
whether they like it or not.

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Epicurean Ecstasy:

More Poems about Food, Drink, Herbs & Spices

by Cynthia Gallaher

Tentative Release Date: Dec 15, 2018

In Epicurean Ecstasy: More Poems About Food, Drink, Herbs and Spices, Cynthia Gallaher celebrates not only historical and modern pleasures of the kitchen and the table, but also the seasonal evolutions that take place in the cultivated fields and wild terrains, and of those who harvest these foods and bring nourishment to our homes.

Epicurean Ecstasy is the larger sequel to Omnivore Odes, a chapbook of 22 poems which appeared a handful of years ago from Finishing Line Press. Thus, the “More” in Epicurean Ecstasy, with all new and a greater number of poems not found in the first volume.

 

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Many Sparrows

by donnarkevic

Tentative Release Date: Dec 15, 2018

A young boy grows up in a small steel town along the Ohio River between 1963 and 1968, while another boy’s suicide overshadows the community. These poems tell their story.

 

“Do not be afraid. You are worth more than many sparrows.” —Matthew 10:31

excerpt:
“To know what it feels like
to be suspended between a steel town
and a steel blue sky, I climb.
Perched on the gallows’ branch,
I reach out, touching the remains
of the frayed knot
woven into an abandoned bird’s nest.”

 

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