Quilting the Loose Edges

by Susan Woods Morse

Scheduled Release Date: June 15, 2023

Pre-order at a discount now thru May 15th
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“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

 

 

When All Else Fails

by Lana Hechtman Ayers

Scheduled Release Date: May 15, 2023

Pre-order at a discount now thru April 15th
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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

 

 

Break-Up Hair & Other Poems

by Grace Richards

Scheduled Release Date: May 15, 2023

Pre-order at a discount now thru April 15th
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Delicious. In Break Up Hair, Grace Richards gives us a scrumptious collection of verse that is at times sweet, savory, tangy, piquant, bitter, hearty and, oh my, even spicy. The 23 poems each offer unique reflections through many angles of light: reflective, refracted, prismed. A full cornucopia of emotive cuisine served warm on a literary salver. Bon Appétit.

—Theo Czuk, novelist & songsmith

What becomes of a woman unloved? In Grace Richards’ marvelous chapbook, Break-Up Hair, the woman blossoms. These poems, strewn with rose petals, orchids, lilies, and lavender, both delighted and inspired me. As the poet enjoins the reader in the powerful final poem, “The Poet’s Way” Lift your fledgling wings and give voice/ to the verses, billowing in airy, sinuous designs/ like starlings in murmuration.

—Alexis Rhone Fancher, poetry editor, Cultural Daily

 

Our Aching Bones, Our Breaking Hearts

Poems on Aging

by Joel Savishinsky

Scheduled Release Date: Apr 15, 2023

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We confront our own aging long before we ourselves become old. Through the roles we play as family, friends, or caregivers to our elders, we learn to anticipate our own later years. Drawing on the author’s half-century career in gerontology and anthropology, the poems of Our Aching Bones, Our Breaking Hearts explore the physical, emotional, and spiritual impact of the aging experience on the nurses and patients, parents and grandparents, retirees and volunteers, Holocaust survivors and roommates, and elderly spouses and mourners he has known.

The poet shares stories in a variety of settings, which include a summer camp, an orchard, a national park, a nursery and a nursing home, hospitals, an older couple’s marital bed, and the steps of a small-town front porch. At the core of these stories stand the aging body and mind, the well-worn heart, deep reservoirs of humor, love, and anger, and the longing, defiance, regret and gratitude of life’s concluding decades.

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“Infused with passion, resentment, frustration, and love, without undue gloom or false cheer, Joel Savishinsky’s poetry captures the essential conundrum of life: whether we rage or go gently, the light will die. Savishinsky inhabits characters immersed in their own, and others’ experiences. He captures the essential irony, that the body almost always fails the mind, that we need more than safe shelter to maintain our spirits, and that trading the pain of living for mindless security is a fool’s bargain. Whether speaking as the main character or an observer, these poems ring true and prescient.”

—D Ferrara, founder of San Fedele Press,
editor of Art in the Time of COVID-19

 

The Call Home

by Susan Johnson

Scheduled Release Date: Apr 15, 2023

For complete details, reviews and ordering information click here.

Finalist of The Poetry Box Chapbook Prize, 2022

The Call Home invites the reader to accompany the poet in natural world settings—lying alongside a caterpillar outside her childhood home on a military base in North Carolina, listening for the silence of salty tides of the Rappahannock River at her parents’ final home in Virginia, discovering salmon nests in the Cle Elum River near her home in the Cascade Mountains of Washington State. Grounded in these settings, this collections bind five generations of women, revealing an undeniable rhythm of love and suffering, a persistent pulse as they share and bear witness to patterns of beauty, connection, tragedy, loss, and continuity. These poems resonate with the tender relationships among members of all communities, all listening for the call home.

“Susan Johnson’s poems call us home in the best of ways, back to our rightful place in the natural world, back to the simple hopes and joys of life, like planting new carrots/ in the garden, one tiny/ seed at a time. With the wisdom of a sage, she crafts poems that showcase the saving grace of small moments, how they can redeem even our darkest hours, teaching us that an unguarded heart/ is the only way.”

—James Crews, author
of Kindness Will Save the World: Stories of Compassion & Connection