This Is the Lightness

by Rachel Barton

Scheduled Release Date: Sept 15, 2022

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The poems in This Is the Lightness are fired with imagination and the fragility of the human experience. Rachel Barton has created a collection of poetry that takes the reader on a journey through the natural world; explores the concept of identity and belonging; honors our sacred connections with family and friends through aging, death, and loss; and tackles the present-day with all its perils and possibilities.

If poems had skin, I’d say Rachel Barton’s were comfortable in theirs. This Is the Lightness welcomes the reader into its poem-world through intriguing and often surprising narrative, lush natural imagery, close attention to sound and flow, quirky humor—and most strikingly, a tonal tendency that’s simultaneously serious and light-hearted. Sadness, pain, acute awareness, even trauma and its lasting ramifications do not lead to cynicism or despair for Barton. Always clear-eyed, she remains hospitable. This seems to me a daring stance for a contemporary poet. It’s at least unusual. As a reader I appreciate feeling essential to the full existence of this work in the way that an audience completes a play. Reading helps these poems happen. The last section, “The Sky is Falling”, expresses a sense of freedom and delight that leaves me hungry for Barton’s next book.

—Marjorie Power, author of Sufficient Emptiness

Blood Moon

by Elaine S. Nussbaum

Scheduled Release Date: Aug 16, 2022

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The poems in Blood Moon recount the first eighteen months of the Covid-19 pandemic. Elaine Nussbaum’s personal narrative is interwoven with social issues, climate change, and astronomical events, such as the blood moon that occurred simultaneously with a blue moon on Oct 31, 2020. The titular poem from the collection pays tribute to Marvin Bell and his “Dead Man” poems—

All the dead people can’t live without you Marvin, and the live people cannot die
We are a country washed up on a beach after a shipwreck.
The tide is coming in, and the waves are getting closer
It is raining and we are naked…
Help will be coming in eighty days, but how do we get through this without eating each other?

The poems in Blood Moon are shards of light wrested from a dark and chaotic time in our history. Nussbaum journeys deep into our collective experience of the pandemic and emerges with poems of remarkable beauty and resonance. As the Covid death toll climbs, wildfires rage, and protestors clash in the streets, the poet struggles to make sense of the madness and draws strength and solace from the natural world: the changing seasons, cycles of the moon, and resiliency of wild creatures.

Nussbaum is a master of closely observed, finely rendered images: the feeling of a pinky finger grazing the back of a stranger’s hand; ivory-colored butterflies with two charcoal dots on each wing.

Though firmly rooted in a specific moment time, these poems are about more than living through the pandemic. They are about how to keep our hearts open and our spirits intact even when the world is burning down around us. This is a nightmare/ we will wake up from, she writes. The Rufus Hummingbird/ still searches for sugar water/ in the red-based feeder.

—Gwen McNeir, author of An Animal with Wings

The Weight of Clouds

by Cathy Cain

Scheduled Release Date: Aug 16, 2022

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maybe…let the clouds be in charge / since they are

The Weight of Clouds is an intimate celebration of how our spirit is surprised and enlarged at the moment of perception, when the weight of reality is balanced by that of our imagination.

Cathy Cain’s words, phrases, and images dissipate, then reemerge like shifting cloud formations. She observes the openings where mystery flows through us like a luminous current. Even as Cain quietly addresses the impermanence of our bodies, she focuses on the amazement, the near impossibility, of our existence and the wonder of love. Her poems are a reflection on how we create the beauty that we need to survive.

“Though heavy with memories, Cathy Cain’s poems are informed by the emissaries of weightlessness, especially angels. She has spent a lot of time looking up. Flight, sky, dreams, and clouds, of course, are all described with her painter’s eye. Dedicated to a sister and their shared families, this book is both a passionate and compassionate experience. As her inquiries and intimacies suggest, she has also spent a lot of time looking in, revealing, as she says a tenderness about our mortality.”

—Allan Peterson, author of This Luminous, Precarious, and Fragile Acts

Earthwork

by Kristin Berger

Scheduled Release Date: Aug 16, 2022

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The poetry of Earthwork is centered around, sprung from, and located in the landscape of mothering during the increasingly mapless territory of climate change and the pandemic. These are poems that take careful care of the small wonders of childhood and parenthood against such large and looming realities; poems that never stray away from wide-eyed honesty, taking in grief, joy, memory, and the strangeness of life, equally. Poems that stay put on the earth, show us with their small mappings a few ways of doing the necessary work.

“Kristin Berger’s Earthwork creates a topography inhabited by complex sorrows and joys. In a seamless braiding of the domestic and the natural world, the body and the celestial, Berger’s poems explore grief, divorce, motherhood, and mortality in language that is part lullaby, part anthem. Some poems face the pandemic, our political climate, and the state of our planet head on, reminding us that Loss is accumulating faster than we had planned.  Other poems buttress our worries and fears with the knowledge that We are here to keep each other up. Throughout this extraordinary collection, Berger’s lyrical, meditative voice buoys readers through the wild wrack lines of our existence, making us ask, Dear world, where would I be without you?”

—Brittney Corrigan, author of Daughters and Breaking

Breath So Hungry

by Joann Renee Boswell

Scheduled Release Date: July 15, 2022

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You know that one crush you just couldn’t shake? How that person lingers in your memories for years, or even decades? breath so hungry is a love story. The author was friend-zoned so deeply by her crush that he forgot about her over the summer, while she spent her lumber mill lunch breaks pining for him. These poems tell a tale spanning twenty years—from the forgettable day that they met, up to their shared life in the present. With exquisite detail and captivating narratives, breath so hungry highlights the universal experience of the many facets of a deep, abiding affection.

“Oh, the tale this will be, says the poet and what a tale indeed—one of the fluttering connections of early love, the yearning of a long-distance dance, the slow weaving of two lives by two hearts and four hands. We did not anticipate eternity, Boswell claims but these pages will lead you up to right here/ the eternal now, immersing you in a love story that is funny, authentic, sexy, and satisfying. Far more than a happy ending, this love is ongoing, ever deepening, pleasantly unfinished.”

—Bethany Lee, author of Etude for Belonging

Late Fall Bucolics

by Anne Coray

Scheduled Release Date: July 15, 2022

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Anne Coray, as a lifelong Alaskan, is keenly aware of the climate change. The 24 sonnets of Late Fall Bucolics explore global warming and examine the aftermath of fire through Greek myth as well as the history of match making, with its devastating effects on factory workers. With nods to DaVinci and Matisse, she weaves in themes of art with her idea that humans are painting (or remaking) our earthly landscape. Many of these poems were not only inspired by poets such as Blake, Neruda, and Plath, but also pay homage to today’s young activists, such as Greta Thunberg.

“I’ve been an admirer of Anne Coray’s tough, lively nature poems for many years. In Late Fall Bucolics the natural world again takes center stage, a planet especially raw, turbulent, and angry, as if lashing out in its own last defense. These poems chart an elemental storm of fire and ice, of seasons out of whack, a terrain under siege by human ignorance. “All will burn, but how magnificent the color.” Woven throughout is a complementary examination of landscape painting (by amateur and master alike)—the inadequacy of art’s mimicry offset by the compulsion to witness, to fix on canvas some testimony to the terrible beauty that is quickly and forever passing. Ms. Coray seems energized by the parameters and possibilities of the sonnet in this linked sequence, and despite her contention that it is “too late/ For remedy,” the consistent flashes of play here, the continual linguistic energy, and most centrally the poet’s enduring gaze—even at her own culpability—create a voice urgent and desirous, perhaps even hopeful, that “something remains of place.””

—Gaylord Brewer, author of Worship the Pig