Earth Resonance

Poems for a Viable Future

by Sam Love

Scheduled Release Date: Mar 15, 2022

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Resonance—A small vibration at the right frequency that creates a larger vibration.

Earth Resonance is a collection of Sam Love’s environmental poetry. These accessible poems do not simply bemoan the state of melting glaciers, stranded polar bears, or sizzling summer temperatures, but instead give the reader an in-depth autopsy of our culture’s footprint on the natural world, with humility and a dash of humor.

The subjects range from meditations on Mother Earth to the changes in migratory patterns caused by climate change. Far from a doom and gloom portrait of the contemporary environmental crisis, Earth Resonance has some fun with everything from imagining the craziness of shipping bottled water 6,000 miles to how bacteria evolving for a counterattack must be laughing at us—the humans who think we hold dominion over them.

As you read this celebration of holistic thinking and planetary consciousness, you will never look the same way at a plastic bag bouncing across the urban landscape. Who knows, you might even be compelled to ride your bike to work or at least remember to turn of the water while you’re brushing those pearly whites.

 

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“Sam Love is a profoundly engaged environmentalist and, it turns out, he is also a good poet. This collection of his poetry is an inspiration even to an old enviro warhorse like me. His observations are keen and informed by good science and searing honesty. The reader keeps engaged because Love is a very witty guy. You will likely rage and laugh and cry at the utter folly of our ways.”

—Gus Speth, author of America the Possible,
Dean emeritus, Yale School of the Environment,
former Chair of the President’s Council on Environmental Quality

 

Erasures of My Coming Out (Letter)

by Mary Warren Foulk

First Place Winner of The Poetry Box Chapbook Prize, 2021

Scheduled Release Date: Feb 1, 2021

In this hybrid erasure collection, Mary Warren Foulk is attempting a redaction, flipping the meaning of her “coming out” letter (and the act itself) on its head. What if she never had to “come out?” Never had to write such a letter? What if the process was rendered unnecessary—erased? What might she’d have done with that energy if it hadn’t been wasted on hiding, on passing, on fear, on denial? A few of the questions asked/answered in this powerful poetry.

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To uncover the human heart that quietly waits inside every life and every poem is no small feat and yet is what Erasures of My Coming Out (Letter) does with deftness and hope. Shaped by both the weight of secrecy and the release of recovery, the poems draw our eyes and minds into the page and the careful search taking place in, around, and beneath each word. “Erasure poetry” may sound like it is the rubbing out of meaning, but the poems within this beautiful volume show that it has the very opposite effect, allowing love and truth to surface and catch the light that is their birthright.

—Annie Lighthart, Contest Judge, 2021 and author of PAX and Iron String

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Of the Forest

by Linda Ferguson

Second Place Winner of The Poetry Box Chapbook Prize, 2021

Scheduled Release Date: Feb 1, 2021

A story of three siblings, a spouse and a surname, Of the Forest is threaded with poems that hint of danger while also celebrating love…and the sumptuous pleasures of language itself.

The collection reimagines childhood as a journey through a forest where two brothers are, respectively, a wolf and a bear, and their younger sister (their sometimes prey), is someone who society wants to be a “pink balloon,/ a party decoration.” By living in a “womb of imagination,” she transforms herself into a fox whose “topaz eyes glow through fronds/of metaphor and ink.”

When the fox leaves the forest of childhood she revels in her new terrain. Now, with “words unsheathed,” she wonders if she’ll ever “howl in the presence of bears and wolves,” while she still dreams of a world where all creatures can astonish themselves “with unimagined flowering.”

Along the way, the poems ask where does memory end and imagination begin, what power does a name hold over us, and how can we use language to find understanding, humor and grace.

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From DeForest, her family name, Linda Ferguson provides the ground on which she weaves magic from the ordinary into the extraordinary: her birth where she is already a child of the forest, unfurling, two brothers of different dispositions, one a wolf, the other a bear cub, the love of her husband who made the outside world bloom, and creation of their two children spun from the straw of our genes.

Demonstrating her mastery of metaphor, a cinnamon tree stump becomes a small bear becomes a brother she calls Hansel, the other, more troublesome brother, Johann, becomes a blue-eyed wolf—slinking bones and a cold, faded coat, while she emerges as a fox with topaz eyes [that] glow through fronds of metaphor and ink.

Though she tells us this is a simple suburban story, every poem in this collection is a jewel, obscured by a diaphanous curtain of imagination, beckoning us to look behind. Her word play imagines her name “to be the petal of a red, red rose” or to remain nameless “ready to plunge … into new wet worlds. The chapbook is a delight to read; one can almost hear the forest sing.

—Judith Armatta, author of Twilight of Impunity

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Let’s Hear It for the Horses

Third Place Winner of The Poetry Box Chapbook Prize 2021

by Tricia Knoll

Scheduled Release Date: Feb 1, 2021

Horses and humans go back in time with each other thousands of years. A young girl’s love for horses or a particular horse is the stuff of legends, bestselling novels, and movies. In Let’s Hear It for the Horses, Tricia Knoll’s poetry explores her lifelong fascination with these strong and sometimes symbolic creatures and shares stories and memories of her best rides.

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It’s a great pleasure to browse this collection, just as Tricia Knoll’s horses browse the field, looking for new, green blades of grass. She writes in the fine tradition of Maxine Kumin, and like that earlier poet, even has a poem for a horse named “Jack”. Full of the breathtaking observations of the horse lover, Knoll takes the reader close to real and imagined horses—close enough to feel the tickle of their whiskers or notice the green spit on their lips. She also shares stories of the father who died before she was grown, but who guided her into life by taking her as a child on trail rides, or to see the Lipizzaner horses. You don’t have to know horses to love these poems; they can serve as a generous introduction to the joy and sadness that canters in the air beside them.

—Judith Barrington, author of Long Love: New & Selected Poems, 1985–2017

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The Ninetieth Day

Poems about Love, Loss, & Leftovers for Breakfast

by Kristin J. Leonard

Scheduled Release Date: Dec 1, 2021

The Ninetieth Day: Poems about Love, Loss, & Leftovers for Breakfast is a collection of poetry that seeks to explore the everyday moments and musings in life that linger between love and loss, and more importantly, those that are forgotten as soon as they pass (in other words, leftovers for breakfast). Such moments include: waking up to sparkles of sunlight; finding a way to persist when life is not as ordinary as you’d like it to be; a frozen-in-time elevator ride to visit a loved one in the hospital; and more.

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There is more life within these pages than many people endure in their own lifetimes. An abundance of unexpected moments is masterfully intermixed with the familiar, all of which comes from deeper than the heart, because it emanates from the vast experiences of a sagacious, ageless soul. And luckily this brilliant poet has a superb knack for verse, wordsmith ingenuity, cadence, and style. Those skills are coupled with a superior nuanced language that perfectly matches the content, topics, themes, and mood, thus delivering plenty of thrills that delight and poignant introspections that resonate.

—David E. Grubb, poet

I read poetry for its sonic appeal and impression of a story.  Leonard strikes notes of Gluck, Olds, and Piercey. In most of the pieces in this collection, the woman is indeed running screaming from the burning house, but she lets you up for air with a quiet one just when you need it. I have added Leonard to my favorites.

—Shellie Leger, author of Back Kingdom Road House

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Exchanging Wisdom

A Guide for Parents of the Autonomous

by Christopher & Angelo Luna

Scheduled Release Date: Dec 1, 2021

Exchanging Wisdom features poems for and about Christopher’s son Angelo Luna, as well as a few pieces Angelo wrote for Christopher. The earliest poem was written when Angelo was three, and the most recent at age 21. Christopher endeavored to encourage his son to be an autonomous, freethinking individual. Angelo grew to become that and so much more. Taken as a whole, the poems in this collection track the development of Angelo’s personality and the strong bond between father and son.

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Christopher Luna is a true heir to the Beat and New York School traditions of candor and grandeur. This collaboration and celebration of life runs on impeccable timing and deep love. As Luna and his son Angelo exchange wisdom they also re-invent the meaning of open verse: these poems crack open the heart and spill the joy of parenthood into the world.

—Lisa Jarnot, author
Robert Duncan, the Ambassador from Venus

One day you’re gonna have to…remind me how to believe in the basic goodness of all beings, Christopher Luna tells his son, Angelo, in his latest book, Exchanging Wisdom. More than a collection of father-son poems, Exchanging Wisdom is a record of gratitude. Luna knows that to be a parent is to be both teacher and pupil, vulnerable and responsible. In every poem Luna’s love beams: Like Lone Wolf and Cub we traversed…and you reminded me that magic is real….  These poems contemplate our never-ending wars, sickness, apathy, and art-making through the lens of a deeply reverent father. For some, being a parent, being the adult, is synonymous with having the answers. Luna, a Buddhist poet, community-organizer, and activist, reminds us that questioning is the only way to truth. What are you afraid to find? he wonders. Are these the right questions to ask? In these mind- and heart-opening poems Luna invites us to experience pure joy and wonder again through memory and thankfulness. Once you’ve opened those doors/ you need never do so again, asserts Luna. Once father you cannot go back to your former life. Thankfully for us, Luna never did.

—Claudia F. Savage, author of Bruising Continents

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Dear John—

by Laura LeHew

Scheduled Release Date: Nov 15, 2021

Dear John— is a collection of poems that investigate explore the multi-facets of love by using diverse points of view to reveal romantic love, loving friendships, and love that is complicated. The namesake poem for which this book was conceived, the final poem, “Dear John—,” is an epistolary poem in multiple stanzas ultimately on which the theme of this book is derived. “what happens between the notes // is the living.”

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Laura LeHew’s work addresses the sublimation of the human emotions and the trouble remembering them. The evocative language along with the monosyllabic words bring to life a collage of grief, desire, loss, sexuality, and repression. Line after line a new secret is revealed, just like peeling an onion down to the core revealing the enigma of how a human negotiates with the natural world, and how men and women define their conduct within, between them and society. I am mesmerized and surprised by the use of “personified punctuation” which become integral parts of the poem as well as the mystery of the black-out word. LeHew’s poetry is stunning, clear, and melodic. It makes me understand better women’s emotions.

—Raúl Sánchez, author of All Our Brown-Skinned Angels and 2019-2021 City of Redmond Poet Laureate

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