Italian Lesson

by Dianalee Velie

Scheduled Release Date: Apr 15, 2021

While Dianalee Velie was teaching poetry in Italy, she composed these poems to reflect her love of the country and for her cousins in Santa Croce di Camerina, Sicily. Italian Lesson celebrates the sights and sounds of Italy—explorations of the local food & drink, sightseeing expeditions, and the lively spirit of the Italian people as they welcomed and shared their way of life. Come along on her Italian journey and you too will fall in love.

Inside the book, readers will also enjoy seeing photos from the journey, taken by the author’s husband, Robert J. Popp. Here are just a few samples:

---

Dianalee Velie is a poet of exceptional vision and creativity.  In Italian Lesson, like a master crafter of Vino Nobile, she picks her poetic grapes, her words, with care and insight, and creates sensual, evocative and multilayer images filled with love and nostalgia not just for Italy, but humanity, nature, earth, in poems that must be savored verse by verse. Che vino perfetto! Cin cin!

—Ala Khaki, poet, author of Return

For complete details, reviews and ordering information click here.

Sophia and Mister Walter Whitman

by Penelope Scambly Schott

Scheduled Release Date: April 15, 2021

Penelope’s goldendoodle, Sophia is quite the free spirit—so much so that she reminds the poet of Walt Whitman. In this jeu d’esprit, consisting of 30 poems, we enjoy a delightful peek inside the mind of a dog through her often entertaining & insightful “conversations” and adopted philosophies of her favorite poet (after her poet-owner, of course).

---

Penelope Scambly Schott’s playful poetry collection, Sophia and Mister Walter Whitman, is a delight, especially for admirers of both our companionable canine citizens and Whitman’s poetry. Poems expressed in the voice of Schott’s goldendoodle, Sophia, draw us into the illusion that somehow Sophia is not only well-versed in Whitman, but she has also adapted many of his views to her own world. Sophia’s dog world is one of joy but, perhaps unlike Whitman, she occasionally experiences guilt or self-doubt, as when she suspects there was once another beloved dog before her time, or when she gives in to her worst instincts by attacking a neighbor’s chickens. In the search for her better self, Sophia adapts some of Whitman’s lines and views. One of the pleasures of these poems is recognizing the actual words of Whitman re-purposed here to Sophia’s doggy world view.

—Barbara Drake, author of The Road to Lilac Hill

For complete details, reviews and ordering information click here.

Synapse Flies into Startle

by Sally Naylor

Scheduled Release Date: Mar 15, 2021

With each section bookended by a poetic query in this non-linear poetic exploration, Sally Naylor leads us through an unabashed journey on the nature of orgasm. Prepare for your synapses to be startled. And delighted.

---

An honest, uninhibited, brave exploration of those intimate moments when we are most vulnerable, most powerful, most bestial, most human, most alone, most united, most selfish, most generous, most profane, most sacred…told with wit, deep insight, delightful quirkiness, and profound sensitivity. It speaks to our most mysterious and unexplored common denominator. A book to savor!

—Lynda Pinto Torres

For complete details, reviews and ordering information click here.

Sylvan Grove

by Barbara A. Meier

Scheduled Release Date: Mar 15, 2021

Barbara Meier may have been born in Oregon, but she grew up in Kansas, and can’t seem to get the prairie out of her system. This collection of poems is an homage her family homestead near Sylvan Grove, Kansas, and the magical times she enjoyed growing up on a farm, enjoying the kinship of cousins and grandparents.

---

When I visited Kansas to share the poetry of my father, someone told me “Kansas is a state unaccustomed to literary affection; but your father loved who we are.” In that tradition of prairie patriotism, Sylvan Grove leaves no doubt this place can be loved with honest lyric skill. The poems in this book return to iconic moments of perception in a landscape where miracles yield their bounty to the steady gaze. A guide to weather describes certain effects of light as not rare, but rarely seen, and this book brings to light myriad Edenic pleasures of Kansas ground. In the work of mending, turning sod, tornado watch, windmill, firefly, wheat turning green to gold, and other magic moments, Holtz performs alchemy, turning the ordinary unseen to resonant glimpses that remain.

—Kim Stafford, author
Early Morning: Remembering My Father: William Stafford

For complete details, reviews and ordering information click here.

Building a Woman

by Deborah Meltvedt

Scheduled Release Date: Feb 16, 2021

The collection of poems Building a Woman is a trajectory of one life from girlhood to womanhood with all the complications of family, the joy of friends, grief and loss and ultimately finding lasting love. It weaves in experiences of growing up as a doctor’s doctor in California in the 1960s and 70s and the cultural expectations of women (and their reproductive lives) in the past and still today. Building a Woman also gives tribute to how we often find worth within prescribed family lives, but maybe more so through long lasting women friendships.

---

Her words ring out like bells and call to us like a friend, urging us to come visit; stay a while; enjoy. —Anara Guard, author of Hand on My Heart

For complete details, reviews and ordering information click here.

Shoebox

by Donovan Hufnagle

Scheduled Release Date: Feb 16, 2021

Based on true events, Shoebox is an epistolary, poetic narrative, blending actuality with fiction, about Juliana who was adopted from Russia as an infant and who now struggles with depression, has abandonment issues, and deals with her physical hip dysplasia as well as her “familial dysplasia.” When she stumbles on a shoebox in her sister’s closet that is filled with documents concerning her adoption and letters from her family, she reminisces about the past and dreams of the future. She begins to write letters to her sister, adding to the collection of documents hidden away in the shoebox and the shoebox of her belly.

---

An absorbing read that juxtaposes past and present, love and lack, in language that startles.” —Rebecca Balcarcel, author of The Other Half of Happy

For complete details, reviews and ordering information click here.

Stronger Than the Current

by Mark Thalman

Scheduled Release Date: Feb 16, 2021

In Stronger Than the Current, Mark Thalman describes the dangerous work of logging in the early 1900’s, and the hardships these Oregonians faced. Thalman then continues the historic journey with poems depicting important historical events: the drowning of Celilo Falls, the hurricane known as the Columbus Day Storm, and the Tillamook Forest Fire—powerful as a hydrogen bomb. Many of the poems reveal how residents are resilient to the weather. Helen McCready keeps a rowboat tied to her front porch because of winter floods. Another person watches goats and uses them as a barometer to predict the daily forecast. The Tillamook feast in their lodges while telling stories of the widow who cannot stop crying. These lyrical poems paint memorable landscapes, Sage grows low so wind can go where it wants—whistling through wire fences.

---

These sturdy, brief, plainspoken poems have a distinctive Made-in-Oregon stamp to them. There are logging poems and landscape poems—weather and landscape figure prominently in them—and poems of Oregon history. The Tillamook Burn and Celilo Falls . . . and “Finley’s Pasture” where “Four Belgians, ebony titans, long retired,/ graze the green pasture.” Modest, quiet poems, unassuming, but rich in substance and detail, like a good meal they stick with you.

—Clemens Starck, Oregon Book Award Winner and author of Cathedrals & Parking Lots

For complete details, reviews and ordering information click here.

The Day of My First Driving Lesson

by Tiel Aisha Ansari

Scheduled Release Date: Jan 21, 2021

A Poetry Box Chapbook Prize Winner – 1st Place

The Day of My First Driving Lesson was written in the wake of the author’s parents’ deaths. It is a deeply moving poetic memoir celebrating her parents and the tremendous impact they had on her life. Ansari explores themes of growing up as an expatriate, bereavement, grief, and celebration in this non-traditional collection inspired by a workshop taught by Penelope Scambly Schott.

---

“I was learning to be the hero of my own story. This line from the poem “1975” could be the anthem for this powerful chapbook that traces the story of the poet’s family, an odyssey ranging from coast to coast in the United States, to Tanzania, and beyond. Alternating plainspoken narrative with vivid imagery, the poems also range through time, building a kaleidoscopic view of this interracial family’s life, challenges, inevitable aging, and the strong bonds that hold them together even beyond grief. The Day of My First Driving Lesson is a rare love letter to good parents and the legacy of compassion they leave behind.”

—Amy Miller, Contest Judge, 2020
and author of The Trouble with New England Girls

For complete details, reviews and ordering information click here.