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Taking Pre-Orders for
Jump Straight Up

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Jump Straight Up

by Jarold Ramsey

—Rushing in as a welcome surprise, these “new late poems” were composed both late in the year and late in the author’s years. In Jump Straight Up, Jarold Ramsey versifies and pokes at an odd knot of themes:  encroaching age overtaking a long wonderful marriage; the delights of grandparenthood; awareness of our “interspecies” situation in the everyday natural order; the blessings and challenges of my ancestral “land of heart’s desire,” Central Oregon’s canyons, summits, and rangelands; and the intriguing ways the mostly horizontal left-to-right axis of our lives seems to shift in old age toward the vertical—“way down” (and out) but also “jump straight up” (in the imagination).

Pre-order thru Oct 15, 2023

For details, reviews, and placing orders: click here

 

Taking Pre-Orders for
The Hills Around Are Dust and Light

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CoverFront-The Hill Around are Dust and LIghtThe Hills Around Are Dust and Light

by Karen Gookin

—These poems sketch a portrait of the author’s growing-up years in Montana surrounded by her wheat-farming father, a busy at-home mother, two older siblings, and a lonely grandmother. Moments of strife and stress return, but here you will also find joy and a great deal of love and gratitude for each other, for hard work, for the mystery of faith, for the land, and for what the land has endured. Her poems become the embodiment of memories—from eating brown sugar sandwiches, to skipping rocks on a Glacier Park lake, to wandering through dreams and the afterlife—as they offer family stories, tragedies, speculation, and attempts to understand it all.

Pre-order thru Oct 15, 2023

For details, reviews, and placing orders: click here

 

Taking Pre-Orders for
The Poeming Pigeon, #13

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front cover of The Poeming Pigeon, issue #13, designed by Robert R. Sanders featuring cover art by Beverly Ash Gilbert

The “Superstition” issue of The Poeming Pigeon: A Journal of Poetry & Art (Issue #13) is 162 pages featuring poetry by Ellen Bass, James Crews, Andrea Hollander, and Paulann Petersen plus poetry and artwork by 76 poets & artists from around the globe.

Cover Design by Robert R. Sanders, featuring art “Prowling After Midnight” by artist Beverly Ash Gilbert of Gig Harbor, Washington.

Contributing Artists:

Beverly Ash Gilbert • Carella Keil • Dale Champlin • Elaine Franz Witten • Estelle Meadoff • Jan Baross • Jeanne Julian • Jone Rush MacCulloch • Judith Skillman • Linda Briskin • Pattie Palmer-Baker • Robert R. Sanders • Romana Tarlamis

Contributing Poets:

Jan Ball • K.S. Baron • Jan Baross • Ellen Bass • Jenny Blackford • Rose Mary Boehm • Katy Brown • Paul Bufis • Dale Champlin • Jennifer Clark • Daphne Clifton • James Crews • Steven Dieffenbacher • Susan Donnelly • Ann Farley • Laurel Feigenbaum • Linda Ferguson • Eric J. Forsbergh • Sylvia Freeman • Gabby Gilliam • Tony Gloeggler • Peter M. Gordon • Melanie Green • Jan Haag • Catherine Hamrick • Leslie Hodge • Andrea Hollander • Christopher J. Jarmick • DB Jonas • Tim Kahl • Casey Killingsworth • Tricia Knoll • Sigrun Susan Lane • Abigail Licad • Jone Rush MacCulloch • Carolyn Martin • Joy McDowell • Matt McGee • Hannah Mead • Jessica Mehta • James Merrill • Judith Montgomery • Susan Woods Morse • Charlene Stegman Moskal • Kathy Nelson • MaryJane Nordgren • Francis Opila • Paulann Petersen • Vivienne Popperl • Jeannie E. Roberts • John Rowe • Robert R. Sanders • Shawn Aveningo Sanders • Joel Savishinsky • JoAnna Scandiffio • Penelope Scambly Schott • Allegra Jostad Silberstein • Ona Siporin • Amy Smith • Doug Stone • Shawn Dallas Stradley • Colette Tennant • Michael Waterson • Julia Wendell • Ingrid Wendt • Melody Wilson • Sally Zakariya

 

Taking Pre-Orders for
Self Dissection

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front cover of book, Self Dissection, by Amelia Diaz Ettinger. Shows a embroidered skeleton torso with flowers inside, on a black background

Self Dissection

by Amelia Díaz Ettinger

— “Compelling, elegant, and remarkably honest, Self-Dissection is filled with stark, realistic poems that paint an intimate portrait of love, loss, family, identity, and the ever-present need for empathy. In these vibrant poems of nature and biography, Ettinger showcases a true talent for imbuing the smallest human details with authenticity and layered meanings. Each poem maps out the human heart, in all its internal conflicts, with precision and grace. Overflowing with vivid and accessible language, Self-Dissection is both intellectually stimulating and emotionally engaging.”

—John Sibley Williams
author of Skyscrape and The Drowning House

Pre-order thru Sept 20, 2023
For details, reviews, and placing orders: click here

Taking Pre-Orders for
Uprooting: Leaving the Abuse Cycle

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UPROOTING

Leaving the Abuse Cycle

Edited by Jade Rosina McCutcheon & Kristin Thomas

Scheduled Release Date: Sept 15, 2023

Pre-order thru Aug 24, 2023
For details, reviews, and placing orders: click here

This book is for any woman who has experienced domestic or sexual abuse, for the people that love them, and those who are still seeking a way to escape from an unhealthy relationship or abusive environment. 

The anthology, Uprooting, contains the record of over 21 women who bear witness to the wretched destruction caused by emotional and physical abuse. But—most significantly—the collection also offers proven ways to escape and transcend such devastation. Daughter, mother, wife, these writers and visual artists—many published for the first time—reach out to other women, providing a tested path toward an abuse-free life. This sisterhood extends a lifeline to other sisters.

—Paulann Petersen, Oregon Poetry Laureate Emerita

 

Taking Pre-Orders for
Metal Used for Beauty Alone

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front cover of metal used for beauty alone

Metal Used for Beauty Alone

by Claudia Saleeby Savage

Scheduled Release Date: Aug 15, 2023

Pre-order discount thru July 24, 2023
For details, reviews, and placing orders: click here

 

“Claudia Saleeby Savage’s provocative, transcendent poetry brilliantly captures the energy of live music, providing a perspective that can only come from inside the band onstage. This book is for those who find the systemless system of free jazz relaxing. Those who, like our fearless narrator, have had their hearts ‘savaged by grief’ and ‘hate boxes.’ Along with Pharoah Sanders, John and Alice Coltrane, and the author’s husband and musical partner John Savage, metal used for beauty alone ‘blows a horn to heaven.'”

—Christopher Luna, Inaugural Poet Laureate of Clark County, WA
and founder of Ghost Town Poetry Open Mic

 

“metal used for beauty alone proposes and enacts a world where instruments prevail in production and resonance over guns. Through careful visual composition and an experimental spirit that even the legends of jazz would admire, this chapbook pops off with flushed language and jolting creativity. Lively scores (not deadly shots) fire as we read, led by Savage as our witch observer who can ‘stun the moon,’ ‘hush the sirens,’ and ‘refold our brains’ to sort out systemic violence. The poet is a proxy to musicians, together disarming a trigger-happy death grip in favor of the power of clapping sax keys, markings for breath, and collapsing wordplay. Society in metal used for beauty alone is populated by healing dissonance, spiritual jazzers, and live shows, all pistoling a post-military-industrial complex through poetry… inviting us to tarab instead of annihilate.”

—Katherine Factor, author of A Sybil Society: Poems

 

Taking Pre-Orders for
Quilting the Loose Edges

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Book Cover Front-Quilting the Loose Edges

Quilting the Loose Edges

by Susan Woods Morse

Scheduled Release Date: June 15, 2023

Pre-order at a discount now thru May 15th
For details, reviews, and placing orders: click here

“This collection of poems vividly evokes the widely separated places the poet has lived—California’s San Joaquin Valley, rural Maine, and Western Oregon—and the tensions within and between generations of an American family. We feel the heat of Southern California summers, the piercing chill of Maine winters, and the lushness of a Willamette Valley spring. We feel also the strains of physical and emotional distances as successive generations leave home, return, establish new homes, or range restlessly. Besides conjuring up entire physical and social landscapes, these poems adumbrate the nuances and complexities of relations between child and parent, and among siblings. The poet’s relocations and family relationships are necessarily individual, but they connect with a larger story of Americans’ migrations over the past century, and their particulars will reverberate with those of many readers’ lives.”

—Eleanor Berry, author of Works of Wildfire

 

 

Taking Pre-Orders for
When All Else Fails

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CoverFront-WhenAllElseFails

When All Else Fails

by Lana Hechtman Ayers

Scheduled Release Date: May 15, 2023

Pre-order at a discount now thru April 15th
For details, reviews, and placing orders: click here

Lana Hechtman Ayers’ unflinchingly honest and sensual poetry traces her journey from a difficult childhood in Queens spent in the dark house of my mother’s anger where the poet grew scrupulous as an owl, to a wildly luxuriant maturity in the Pacific Northwest where she revels in intimacy with sky and water, trees, birds, and a loving partner. The shadows of New York give way to a wide open spaciousness and a vibrant appreciation of simple gifts: eggs from the Farmer’s Market, the sound of rain, a beloved dog, and the window in the poet’s study where One windy day I became a kite. Ayers generously takes us along on her journey from violence and decay to a hard-earned rebirth into nature, love, and art. In the end, we too are redeemed.

—Alison Luterman, author of In the Time of the Great Fires

When All Else Fails reminds us that poetry can arise from even the most difficult circumstances. Lana Hechtman Ayers takes the raw material of extreme childhood poverty and abuse and turns it into one arresting poem after another. Even more remarkable is that the poet emerges from this crucible not just alive but fully alive, willing to embrace everything, knowing that she’s here to touch/ the blank page with reverent ink. Ayers’ good humor and generosity of spirit are hard-won and all the more authentic for that. When All Else Fails is a powerful book about the redemptive power of poetry.

—John Brehm, author of No Day at the Beach and The Dharma of Poetry