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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Sitting in Powell’s Watching Burnside Dissolve in Rain

by Doug Stone

Updated Release Date: Aug 11, 2020

“Here the rain tells the truth about everything it touches.” Combine elegiac Oregon rain with the spareness of Tang dynasty poets, and you get the honest lyricism of Doug Stone where the joy of swallows can write in the sky that “poetry may not save the world/ but reminds me/ the world is worth saving.” And please don’t miss the magnificent tribute to artist Rick Bartow.

—Penelope Scambly Schott, author
A Is for Anne: Mistress Hutchinson Disturbs the Commonwealth
(Oregon Book Award) and Lovesong for Dufur

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Catching Narcissus

by Rheanna Haaland

Scheduled Release Date: June 23, 2020

From broken to passing, Catching Narcissus begins fragmented and broken and ends with an idea of composure that invokes hope for a future. Haaland climbs out of a hole, carrying all the baggage that came out, and finds a way to survive. Mechanically thoughtful and brutally honest, Catching Narcissus doesn’t pull punches, even when those punches are directed inward.

—Tim Nunes, Senior Editor at PlayStation Universe

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The Winter of J

by Gary Percesepe

Scheduled Release Date: May 15, 2020

In The Winter of J, Gary Percesepe writes compellingly about the commingled passion, loneliness, and surprising bliss of a doomed relationship with “J,” a woman who moves fleetingly and luminously through his life one winter season. It is a scorching exploration of both transience and intimacy, transcending the personal to touch a universal connection with all that is.

~ Joelle Fraser, author of The Territory of Men

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