The Poeming Pigeon

A Journal of Poetry & Art

Issue #12

Scheduled Release Date: Oct 25, 2022

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Our new, re-designed issue of The Poeming Pigeon: A Journal of Poetry & Art (Issue #12) is 180 pages and includes poetry and artwork on a variety of topics by 92 poets/artists from around the globe.

Cover Design by Robert R. Sanders, featuring art “Bear and Peacock” by artist Jennifer Lommers of Corvalis, Oregon.

Contributing Artists:

Kathleen Caprario • Dale Champlin • Terry Cox-Joseph • Leanne Grabel • Nitza M. Hernández López • Kay M. Levine • Jennifer Lommers • Paula J. Maloney • Janet Manalo • Carolyn Martin • Bruce McClain • David Memmott • Liz Nakazawa • Jennifer Pratt-Walter • Jeannie E. Roberts • Dawn Sanford • Barbara Hageman Sarvis • Judith Skillman • Romana Tarlamis • Brigit Truex • Louise Wynn • Cynthia Yatchman

Contributing Poets:

Pamela Ahlen • Hugh Anderson • Pamela R. Anderson-Bartholet • Lana Hechtman Ayers • KB Ballentine • Sam Barbee • Rachel Barton • Christopher Bogart • Joann Renee Boswell • Katy Brown • Suzanne Bruce • Paul Bufis • Dale Champlin • Margaret Chula • Brittney Corrigan • Susan Coultrap-McQuin • Amelia Díaz Ettinger • Susan Donnelly • Johanna Ely • Ann Farley • Beatriz F. Fernandez • Eric Forsbergh • Bill Frayer • Nathan Fryback • Leanne Grabel • Melanie Green • Cleo Griffith • Quinton Hallett • Mark Hammerschick • Suzy Harris • Nancy Haskett • David James • Marilyn Johnston • Terry Cox-Joseph • Dan Kaufman • Candice Kelsey • Tricia Knoll • Bethany Lee • Sue Fagalde Lick • Ronald Okuaki Lieber • Annie Lighthart • Cynthia Linville • Jone Rush MacCulloch • M. F. McAuliffe • Eileen McGurn • Carter McKenzie • David Memmott • Karla Linn Merrifield • Angie Minkin • Juan Pablo Mobili • Heidi Morrell • Sandra Salinas Newton • Nancy Nowak • Francis Opila • Jennifer Pratt-Walter • M. Ann Reed • Anne Richardson • Joseph J. Ridgway • M.S. Rooney • John Rowe • JoAnna Scandiffio • Penelope Scambly Schott • Judith Skillman • Rebecca Smolen • Connie Soper • Trina Sotira • Matthew J. Spireng • Doug Stone • Romana Tarlamis • Mark Thalman • Allison Thorpe • Brigit Truex • Jean Varda • Julene Tripp Weaver • Kaja Weeks • Emmett Wheatfall • Marshall Witten • Claire Zoghb

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My Husband’s Eyebrows

by Leanne Grabel

Scheduled Release Date: Oct 25, 2022

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My Husband’s Eyebrows is a humorous examination and honest celebration of Grabel’s long marriage—its good, its bad, its ugly—told through a collection of prose poems and poetry, punctuated by the author’s richly colored, exuberant, exaggerated illustrations.

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If you want to know what life feels like when someone’s being honest and funny and insightful and daring—and I mean beyond what you might imagine to be daring and brave and real—here’s your book with words and explosively jazzy a-ha moment drawings to match. And if you don’t want to experience honesty and reality, all the more reason to read the words and dive into the pictures, because this book will open your heart, your mind, and your emotions in ways that you might not expect. Leanne Grabel writes that “candy is absolutely necessary.” I would add, this book is absolutely necessary.

—Christopher Beaver, film producer/director

Soundings

by David Gonzalez

Scheduled Release Date: Oct 15, 2022

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Soundings, the debut book of poetry by famed storyteller and musician David Gonzalez, is an eclectic collection that dives into five facets of his experience, each one adding a new layer of meaning and color: Nuyorican explores contemporary Latinx life; Rings of Fire, Ice and Jazz focuses on music and myth; Entanglement centers on science and wonder; Above, Below, In Between looks into the natural world; Back to the Beginning moves through birth, death, and redemption.

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Soundings—alarms and the radiating out of a new consciousness, an earth and cosmos in totality, a notebook of lives, ancestors, praise, familia and their reverberations and intrinsic pathways into and for each other. A book of chants and enlightenments, home spirit and space particles as One. As Gonzalez says in one of his poems, recognitions and transmissions—this is at the core of this collection. That is, to recognize all things and to live in the constant exchange of each. This is a most necessary voice and text, concerned with a profound, inspiring view of humanity—an investigation into our expansiveness, our magnificent reach into incredible songs of Being never imagined, yet to be lived. Here are the maps for a self of earth and cosmos interconnections, breath, existence and thought—for the new thinker, traveler, philosopher. Bravo, brava!

—Juan Felipe Herrera, Poet Laureate of the United States, Emeritus

Poems of the Point

by Lauri Cruver Cherian

Scheduled Release Date: Oct 15, 2022

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Imagine growing up on beachfront property in the Puget Sound where the waves crash a hundred feet from your front door, the seagulls provide the morning wakeup call, and sea lions pop up their heads each day to check on you. Poems of the Point is a collection of poetry about growing up on the beach in Gig Harbor, Washington. The poems feature a walk down the beach in the company of the spirits of those who purchased the property, finding an eagle’s nest, childhood memories of boating and fishing for cod, searching for Lewis moon shells, picking cherries and raspberries, digging for clams and geoducks, spying orca in the Sound, and even a chance viewing of the illusive Mt. Rainier on a clear day. If a piece of your heart already lies in the Pacific Northwest or you are open to having your heart captured by it, this book of poetry is for you.

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I’ve long wanted to visit places in the Northwest like Gig Harbor, Washington. Now, via Lauri Cherian’s beautiful poems, I can. Poems of the Point is brimming with beautiful descriptions of a special place and great truths about the power of family, loyalties and traditions. When Lauri tells me in the first poem how certain landmarks and memories bring her home to Gig Harbor it brings me home as well, to the very distant and different little East Texas town that raised me many years ago. Lauri is a gifted poet and storyteller; I will come back to this collection occasionally.

—Ron Rozelle, author of Into That Good Night, The Windows of Heaven, and Touching Winter

Cosmology of Heaven & Hell

by Michael Waterson

Scheduled Release Date: Sept 15, 2022

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The poems in Cosmology of Heaven & Hell were written over a span of four decades and set in locations from the Maritime Provinces of Canada to California and beyond. Subjects range the from the deeply personal to political and cultural figures and events employing both traditional forms, sonnets and villanelles, as well as free verse. Throughout the collection there exists an overarching theme that hell exists in different manifestations—all of which is tempered by the author’s deliciously dark humor. In the latter half of the twentieth century, celebrities like Elvis Presley and Marilyn Monroe proved that in modern day America fame can be a hell. On the political front, President Richard Nixon’s Machiavellian Madman Theory flirted with a hell-on-earth scenario. Today wildfires and melting icecaps brought about by climate change present the prospect of a hellish future for the planet. Beyond public manifestations of perdition, the book explores the private hell of a dysfunctional family and failed relationships, our woeful ignorance about the nature of our existence, the darkness and tormenting doubts that lie below the surface of everyday living.

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Cosmology of Heaven & Hell perfectly captures Waterson’s fiery chthonic leitmotif and dark humor, as does the brilliant, “Stooges Apotheosis,” a universe where brutal slap-/ stick chaos calls the tune,/ and laughter is the thunderclap/ of the gods applauding ruin. Reckoning with a steel-working, hard-drinking, domestically violent, Irish Catholic upbringing, he swaps a hell with the lid off Pittsburgh for hellish California wild fires, plumbing the hells we make for ourselves and the heaven we can have, if we agree to savor this breaker-breaking, cloud-scudding,/ sand-in-the-eye now.

—April Ossmann, author of Event Boundaries

After Pyre

by P.M. Draper

Scheduled Release Date: Sept 15, 2022

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P.M. Draper’s poems in After Pyre explore change, loss, and unfathomable heartache, while offering the reader respite with her skillful verse that is not only refreshing, but achingly funny when you least expect it. From the tragic tale of suicide by fire to poems about squirrel sex and the Kung Fu Nuns of Kathmandu, After Pyre will take the reader on quite a ride.

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In After Pyre, her second collection of poetry, P.M. Draper skillfully and piercingly explores what it means to experience both personal and collective trauma. Written in radiant, unfancy language, her poems speak of family dysfunction and tragedy, the pandemic, illness, and ageing—all with bracing clear-sightedness and compassion, defiance, abundant humor, and above all, an abiding sense of hope. Draper’s poetry asks difficult questions: how does one move through the world while haunted by memories of violent sibling deaths, mental illness, addiction? How does one find beauty and joy amidst enormous suffering and loss? These galvanizing poems implore and inspire the reader to embrace possibility in the face of heartache. They are a stunning testament that, out of chaos and ruin, we humans are endlessly capable of discovering the power to live fully to touch the bones of every dream.

 —Skipwith Coale

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.

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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?

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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