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.

 

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“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.

 

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“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.

 

 

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“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.

 

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“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

A Short Supply of Viability

by Annette Gagliardi

Scheduled Release Date: July 15, 2022

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Merriam-Webster dictionary defines “compassion fatigue” as the physical and mental exhaustion and emotional withdrawal experienced by those who care for sick or traumatized people over an extended period of time. Annette Gagliardi’s poetry offers compassion for the compassionate. Her poems are informed by the shift of comfort that occurs with caregivers, from the decision to provide care, to the fatigue and grace of caring for others, then to the grief and relief of saying goodbye. A Short Supply of Viability provides insight, thoughtful consideration of issues, glimpses of those being cared for, and relief from grief. It is a must read and a welcoming balm for anyone faced with becoming a caregiver, whether it be in a professional capacity or taking care of a loved one whose health is declining.

 

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“Annette Gagliardi’s dazzling poetry collection, A Short Supply of Viability, confronts mortality—our decline, our need for care, our love for life. Her preface defines viability as the ability to work, to survive, to live, to flourish, variations that thematically resound in her elegiac work, touching on the spiritual, the natural, the grief and consolation that accompany our journey on this earth. She mourns lost youth, lost parents even as she buoys our spirits, reminding us, as William Cullen Bryant does, to live: If food is what you want, eat now (“The Sea Shifts”). Her poems thrum with rich images of the natural world: Small glimpses of who you/ used to be emerge—recede/ like dolphins in the sea (“Grief in the Sail”) or the diminishing light/ pinpricks that bright vanishing/ into the landscape of stunned darkness (“Mirage”). Ultimately, she embraces death as a lover, part of the natural order, reminding us in her beautiful poems that vita brevis est.”

—Donna Isaac, author of Persistence of Vision; Footfalls; Holy Comforter; and Tommy

Fencelines

by Angela Hansen

Scheduled Release Date: June 15, 2022

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Angela Hansen’s Fencelines, written during a time of deep hurt, explores how she found healing in the countryside surrounding her Nebraska acreage. Her imagery captures the strength and tenacity of the prairie and how it affects her own soul. Grounded in the passing of the seasons, both physically and mentally, these poems chronicle her journey along, over, and around the fencelines of the past decade.

 

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“Fencelines is a body of work encapsulating Hansen’s personal journey of self-preservation and growth, “where all the Nebraska seasons meet for coffee and gossip.” Hansen exhibits the resilience of womanhood among the prairie. Her poems read like Polaroids; she carries her readers through colorful snapshots of her personal love, loss, pain, and acceptance, all nestled between vivid, organic imagery of an unforgiving, yet fruitful countryside existence. Every poem in Hansen’s collection embodies cathartic release.”

—Sharon Nicole Carr, Adult Services librarian, Wayne Public Library

This Conversation

by Christopher Bogart

Scheduled Release Date: June 15, 2022

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In his new book of poetry, Christopher Bogart follows the lead of Emanuel Acho (author of Uncomfortable Conversations with a Black Man) who encourages white people to be courageous, informed, and empathetic to the treatment of their Black brothers and sisters. Bogart is stepping up “to do his part.” Employing the paradigm of an accidental meeting between two white strangers at a local bar and the conversation that ensues, he encourages the reader to explore the problem of systemic racism and to start this conversation with others.

This Conversation is divided into two forms of poetry: poetic dialogue written in free verse to present the dialogue at the bar between the two strangers, and a variety of traditional & non-traditional forms of poetry to expand upon the issues that are brought up and discussed in this conversation.

 

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“Chris Bogart’s book is a lightning rod of discomfort and relevance. It is indeed an allegorical conversation that honestly takes place between the reader and the reader’s societal subconscious. This Conversation is to be read with an open heart in chest and mirror in hand as it will force readers to re-examine themselves, as Bogart demands, with more compassion, critical thinking, and candor as they pertain to mending and rectifying the evils of generational racism from all who dare to read this crucial work from a true ally.”

—Ras Heru Stewart, CEO of Rebel Ink Publishing,
executive producer of Rhythm & Words: Creative Writing

Olympic

by John L. Miller

Scheduled Release Date: June 15, 2022

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Olympic is collection of personal, persona, and pandemic poems inspired by various Greek mythological tales, guided by Robert Graves’ The Greek Myths. Throughout the book, John Miller masterfully employs this mythology as a creative vehicle to both witness and contemplate the current realities of life against a backdrop of history and legend.

 

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“Olympic offers a vision of the past enfolded into our burgeoning future, in the form of the intimate whisper of a secret witness to the inner lives of the gods who happens to have a time machine, allowing the poet and his readers to slip through a portal to Ancient Greece and back again, sometimes before we’ve reached the end of a single line of poetry.”

—Christopher Luna, Clark County, WA Poet Laureate 2013-2017
and author of Exchanging Wisdom: A Guide for Parents of the Autonomous