Excoriation

by Rebecca Smolen

Scheduled Release Date: Dec 1, 2020

Excoriation is an honest, thought-provoking exploration via poetry, into motherhood, relationships, heartache, love, and the cosmos. Rebecca Smolen shares her experiences in a way that’s meant to dig a little deeper, delving into each wound until nothing but truth remains. Through evocative metaphor and verse, Smolen challenges her readers to let these poems get under their skin, even if it hurts a little, for this is where healing begins.

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“In Rebecca Smolen’s Excoriation, you experience alchemy, the transformation of a woman’s raw loss into a dance, a music, a clear vision, ‘how the stars/are brightest in the northeast in winter.’ In poems addressed to her lost love, she remembers the first goodbye after the first kiss, how it ‘became the new snow smell/ mixed with the smoke from each chimney,’ and you feel that relationship char in words, ‘raw and still bloody.’ Smolen’s poems are ‘heavy with the life [she knows she has] needed to release.’ In rich language and provocative shapes, her poems are generous acts, each a form of healing, ‘to fall first,/ to shine… to know how to rain,’ their ‘purpose to ease another’s’ pain. Read these brave poems to understand that the world ‘is merely attempting to find its own way back’ through the mystery and science of this writer’s voice.”

—Kate Gray, author of Carry the Sky
and For Every Girl: New & Selected Poems

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My Mind’s Eye

by Marshall Witten

with illustrations by Elaine Franz Witten

Scheduled Release Date: Dec 1, 2020

Drawn from episodes over a long life, the poems of My Mind’s Eye survey the joys and sorrows, the affirmations and contractions of the world. The natural world becomes a mirror for human actions. And if simplicity is sometimes trampled by our greed and recklessness, knowing our true place restores at least a corner of the world.

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“I’ve long thought that important poetry’s basis is human maturity, a clear-eyed awareness, which some never attain, of the human condition in its full actuality. By this measure, Marshall Witten’s My Mind’s Eye—by turns wry, deeply loving, empathetic, and soberly realistic—is a signal achievement, a monument to a long life well and attentively lived. At one point, the poet writes, “The real risks and tests of life/ are learning how to trust and love.” My Mind’s Eye is testimony to one man’s having triumphantly met such challenges, its salutary conclusion being that “We have this moment; do not let it slip/ away unnoticed; keep it in your grip.” The world feels a safer and saner place for the lessons in this stirring volume.”

—Sydney Lea, Vermont Poet Laureate (2011-2015)

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Before the Distance

by Pasquale Trozzolo

Scheduled Release Date: Dec 1, 2020

Pasquale Trozzolo’s Before the Distance is an invitation. Here, we enter the life of a fully lived man in a time of social and global upheaval. But unlike today’s social media or news feeds, this is not a rant, and it is not a call for anything. Rather, it’s an introspective dialogue between peace and chaos, love and instability, joy and fear. Like a conversation, the poet casually speaks to us, sharing his innermost self as if we’re gathered around the table, each truth spoken in the shape of a stanza. They’re measured words that carry tenderness and purpose, and they examine the state of our place in the world, the doubts we all carry, the rites of passage we must go through, and the social norms we must now question more than ever in response to COVID. Ultimately, Trozzolo reminds us that we are not in control, and that we are simply navigating our circumstances as best we can. The poet writes, “Everything seems so big and hard and dangerous/ that we often forget the scale—the one that measures us like a pebble of sand.” In this gorgeous debut chapbook, we are reminded to look at our catastrophes and celebrations not as good or bad, but simply, as reality.

—Alan Chazaro, author of Piñata Theory and This Is Not a Frank Ocean Cover Album

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Mouth Quill:

Poems with Ancestral Roots

by Kaja Weeks

Scheduled Release Date: Sept 30, 2020

“I am a refugee’s child . . . I long for the resting sigh she was ripped from . . .” writes Kaja Weeks in her poem “Coastal Meadows” from her collection, Mouth Quill: Poems with Ancestral Roots. Weeks’s exploration of her Estonian heritage in twenty-one riveting poems swept me with her back to “those runic tunes of lost silver beads,” then forward to her mother’s escape as one of “a motley crew of the dispossessed/stitched into a patchwork of America.” Rich with birds and melody, these pages sing, but her incredible “The Dolomite Heel Print” makes sure we understand not all songs are merry. Mouth Quill, a dark crystal studded with light, amazes.

—Deirdre Callanan, author of Water~Dreaming and Fish Camp: North Jetty Tales

Mouth Quill—Poems with Ancestral Roots is a touching, gorgeously written collection—such patient, meditative themes, such lushly imagined writing. “The Dolomite Heel Print,” in particular, is a breathtaking exploration of history and life and identity … a stunning piece! The collection feels like a deep dive into identity—what binds us, what tears us apart, the ways that family can become home.

—Hala Alyan, author of The Twenty-Ninth Year and Salt Houses

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The Kingdom of Birds

by Joan Colby

Scheduled Release Date: Sept 8, 2020

I wake to wings crashing into my window, Joan Colby informs us in this congregation of bird poems, as casually as if we’d just sat down with her morning coffee and toast. There is, however, nothing casual about her poetry, nor is the subject birds alone. Colby knows and employs the language of ornithology to riveting effect, but always with a human implication circling and circling. We’re not supposed to anthropomorphize, Colby admits, but the more we learn, the more we ponder. And doesn’t the power of strong poetry lie in its ability to make us ponder? In these poems, see how Colby selects the delectable morsel, knowing exactly what [we] want. Try just one poem. You’ll follow like a soar of larks.

—Dana Wildsmith, author, One Light

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Just the Girls:

A Kaleidoscope of Butterflies; A Drift of Honeybees

by Pamela R. Anderson-Bartholet

Scheduled Release Date: Aug 15, 2020

Pamela Anderson’s Just the Girls is a poetic celebration of female friendship. In brilliantly created portraits of a family of sisters, aunts, mothers, and daughters, Anderson gives us a close look at the many ways in which women matter to each other. The imagery is precise and unexpected including stitchery, bread baking, yoga postures, and a pink shoe discovered beside a highway. “We try to keep safe what cannot be saved,” Anderson writes. “Here you will find the space to be./ Here your heart will pry itself open.”

—Maggie Anderson, author of Dear All,

“Hold/ each word to the last word./ Then begin again.” So concludes Pam Anderson’s poem “How to Read a Poem,” and it serves as the perfect guide for reading the poems in this wonderful book. And when we devote that kind of attention to her words, we find ourselves amply rewarded—the tell-tale sign that we’re in the presence of a poet with an ear for how language shapes our worlds, and an eye alert to the details that make those worlds real to us. What a splendid, moving collection of lyrics!

—Dr. Steven Reese, author of Excentrica: Notes on the Text

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Songs of an Indomitable Spirit

by Michael B. Carroll Jr.

Scheduled Release Date: Aug 15, 2020

Songs of an Indomitable Spirit opens with a proclamation: I swear there’s a vision on the tip/ of my tongue…/ sitting, standing, tap-dancing on/ the edge, daring to be savored (“Visions”). What readers will savor in Michael B. Carroll, Jr.’s second book is the inspiring journey the poet takes them on as he chases delight in the streets…and danc[es], rough through the pain (“Interlude: Reminiscing about the days”).

The tension between delight and pain permeates poems that feature a young black man striving to live in a world where, on one hand, the screaming voices of our African American mothers,/ [are] enough to make a love song cry (“I’m not mad, I’m angry”); where, on the other, fifty shades of God (“Hootin’ ‘n’ Hollerin’ (reprise)”) strengthen his faith.

It’s a world in which the poet challenges himself to discard the limiting labels history has imposed on him. When he asks himself, What if you decided to forsake all others and chose only to love you? (“Choices”), we cheer for that indomitable spirit daring to define itself. Along the way, we grow to admire the poet who wishes to be remembered as a strong man who wrote poems that helped him gather the strength to finally break free (“Victory”).

—Carolyn Martin, Ph.D., poetry editor
Kosmos Quarterly: journal of global transformation

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Picking Scabs from the Body History

by Joanne Godley

Scheduled Release Date: July 15, 2020

From the opening scene in a child’s library through historical and personal locations that remind, inform, and gut punch with stark imagery and pared-down language, Joanne Godley’s Picking Scabs from the Body History tracks the movement of racialized bodies through American history. A fiercely attuned chronicle of the violence and collective trauma of these United States, its “indelible truths” enact corporeality and rage through the thrum of rhythm and repetition and the lush compounding of sounds. It digs down, mapping through language the “surly root formations” of our very foundation. Through these poems we are shown back to ourselves and beseeched to “erase the disaster that has been America” to “run run fly while there is time still.” A masterful chapbook and absolute necessary read.

—Elizabeth J. Colen, author of What Weaponry and The Green Condition

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