Finalist from The Poetry Box Chapbook Prize, 2021

Transition Thunderstorms

by Beth Bonness

Scheduled Release Date: Apr 15, 2022

For complete details, reviews and ordering information click here.

All her life Beth Bonness tingled with the sight of approaching thunderstorms—watching them over the wide expanse of a lake or far away mountains—the electrifying steel blue background with the sun on her back reflecting an eerie Tuscan yellow light of a childhood-giggled “storm’s a coming” cast on unsuspecting trees and anything else between you and the rain, the thunder and lighting, and unexpected life events that soak you to the bone. The poems in Transition Thunderstorms are about life’s soaking you to the bone.

Listen to Beth read a poem from the book, “Wrong Word Dinner”

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“Beth Bonness writes from the depths of her soul’s experience. With the finesse of a true poet, she invites the seeker to the pinch point of their pain, then, having walked the path herself, coaxes the reader through to greater understanding and self-acceptance. With extraordinary alchemy, and a shared sense of empathy and relief, Bonness leaves the reader transformed.

Transition Thunderstorms offers breathtaking insights into life events we find hard to talk about with the people we love most. The book is a tender and honest lifeline to reconnection. Her poetry articulates truths of recovery with gentleness and compassion and resonates hope.”

—Roxanne Colyer, award-winning artist, writer, and bio-energy healer

Finalist from The Poetry Box Chapbook Prize, 2021

Contraband

by Juan Pablo Mobili

Scheduled Release Date: Apr 15, 2022

For complete details, reviews and ordering information click here.

Juan Pablo Mobili’s poems are born from living life with eyes that wish to stop seeing but remained open, and bear the record of being a citizen of one family and two countries. In them you will meet the people he loved and deeply shaped what he must pay attention to, and a personal city that keeps establishing its presence and its mark —the cadence of Buenos Aires and the rhythm of New York— full of memories of beauty and the insistent tragedies that still take place, the injustices committed on people who have not deserved them.

In Contraband’s poems you will meet the poet’s mother and his father who visit long after they passed, accounts of the blessings and the curses of remembering what he has witnessed, watching the world struggling with itself and, sometimes, reaching redemption.

Ultimately, these are poems about a certain hard-earned joy, having managed some reconciliation with turning out the way he has, a human being—“the only animal that blushes, or needs to,” as Mark Twain wrote—still skeptical but rooting for kindness winning its fight against indifference. Molten material to shape into poems that may matter to the reader, or at least a way to make the world a more hospitable place.

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“I was struck immediately by its humanism, its lyrical command born of precision and restraint. Whether he is writing about the death of his parents, or the secrets that move within us like a second body, his poems are quiet chronicles of our mysterious journeys as living creatures.”

—Robert Hirschfield, poet and essayist, author of The Road to Canaan

POETRY for CHILDREN with FULL-COLOR PHOTOGRAPHS of THEIR FAVORITE ANIMALS

In the Jaguar’s House

by Debbie Hall

Scheduled Release Date: Mar 20, 2022

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In the Jaguar’s House is a celebration of the world’s wildlife through animal poetry and photographs taken in faraway places such as Africa, South America, and the Galapagos Islands. Poems written for young readers are infused with humor and delight, crafted by close observation, and convey a deep appreciation for wild animals and the natural world. Several of the poems represent endangered animals and encourage readers to take active part in protecting them. Included in the book are informative “fun facts,” resources for further reading and ideas on how kids can help wildlife survive and thrive.

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“These wonderful poems and stunning photographs are a feast for the ear and eye and will delight animal loving children both young and old.”

—Georgia Heard, author of Creatures of Earth, Sea, and Sky

“In the Jaguar’s House is a delightful book that will add interest, knowledge and enjoyment to children’s classrooms and homes. Immediately inviting with its stories in verse, stunning photos, and kid-friendly titles and formats, it masterfully combines science, language, and art. A great read for those who are already avid animal lovers, it is sure also to engage all readers to feel a personal connection to the animal kingdom.”

—Ellen Yaffa, Early literacy expert and reading tutor

Finalist from The Poetry Box Chapbook Prize, 2021

Beneath the Gravel Weight of Stars

by Mimi German

Scheduled Release Date: Mar 15, 2022

For complete details, reviews and ordering information click here.

What is the language of the streets, of the unhoused millions who inhabit them?

As a poet and an activist/advocate for the houseless, Mimi German has written poems that tell the stories of the unseen. Beneath the Gravel Weight of Stars is a lyrical force as it translates the language of suffering, trauma, addiction, sorrow, love, and the fires of life & death. These poems are filled with a language you might not readily recognize—In the staccato breaks of thought and phrases that carry multiple meanings—to reveal the hidden, the underworld, and the shadows of the heart.  

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“What does it mean to be housed in this increasingly complex world? What does it mean to be houseless? Beneath the Gravel Weight of Stars (formerly titled Eyes of Horse Hair) explores these questions with lyric, evocative constellations of images, where we see how lavender begs to the sky between the hours, and that shows—and evokes—so much, without having to be explicit. These brief poems reverberate beyond what is on the page, giving readers much to think on and feel long after the final page. Stunning music is scattered throughout all of these poems.

—Lisa Kwong, guest editor for The Hopper Poetry Prize

Earth Resonance

Poems for a Viable Future

by Sam Love

Scheduled Release Date: Mar 15, 2022

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Resonance—A small vibration at the right frequency that creates a larger vibration.

Earth Resonance is a collection of Sam Love’s environmental poetry. These accessible poems do not simply bemoan the state of melting glaciers, stranded polar bears, or sizzling summer temperatures, but instead give the reader an in-depth autopsy of our culture’s footprint on the natural world, with humility and a dash of humor.

The subjects range from meditations on Mother Earth to the changes in migratory patterns caused by climate change. Far from a doom and gloom portrait of the contemporary environmental crisis, Earth Resonance has some fun with everything from imagining the craziness of shipping bottled water 6,000 miles to how bacteria evolving for a counterattack must be laughing at us—the humans who think we hold dominion over them.

As you read this celebration of holistic thinking and planetary consciousness, you will never look the same way at a plastic bag bouncing across the urban landscape. Who knows, you might even be compelled to ride your bike to work or at least remember to turn of the water while you’re brushing those pearly whites.

 

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“Sam Love is a profoundly engaged environmentalist and, it turns out, he is also a good poet. This collection of his poetry is an inspiration even to an old enviro warhorse like me. His observations are keen and informed by good science and searing honesty. The reader keeps engaged because Love is a very witty guy. You will likely rage and laugh and cry at the utter folly of our ways.”

—Gus Speth, author of America the Possible,
Dean emeritus, Yale School of the Environment,
former Chair of the President’s Council on Environmental Quality

 

Erasures of My Coming Out (Letter)

by Mary Warren Foulk

First Place Winner of The Poetry Box Chapbook Prize, 2021

Scheduled Release Date: Feb 1, 2021

In this hybrid erasure collection, Mary Warren Foulk is attempting a redaction, flipping the meaning of her “coming out” letter (and the act itself) on its head. What if she never had to “come out?” Never had to write such a letter? What if the process was rendered unnecessary—erased? What might she’d have done with that energy if it hadn’t been wasted on hiding, on passing, on fear, on denial? A few of the questions asked/answered in this powerful poetry.

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To uncover the human heart that quietly waits inside every life and every poem is no small feat and yet is what Erasures of My Coming Out (Letter) does with deftness and hope. Shaped by both the weight of secrecy and the release of recovery, the poems draw our eyes and minds into the page and the careful search taking place in, around, and beneath each word. “Erasure poetry” may sound like it is the rubbing out of meaning, but the poems within this beautiful volume show that it has the very opposite effect, allowing love and truth to surface and catch the light that is their birthright.

—Annie Lighthart, Contest Judge, 2021 and author of PAX and Iron String

For complete details, reviews and ordering information click here.

Of the Forest

by Linda Ferguson

Second Place Winner of The Poetry Box Chapbook Prize, 2021

Scheduled Release Date: Feb 1, 2021

A story of three siblings, a spouse and a surname, Of the Forest is threaded with poems that hint of danger while also celebrating love…and the sumptuous pleasures of language itself.

The collection reimagines childhood as a journey through a forest where two brothers are, respectively, a wolf and a bear, and their younger sister (their sometimes prey), is someone who society wants to be a “pink balloon,/ a party decoration.” By living in a “womb of imagination,” she transforms herself into a fox whose “topaz eyes glow through fronds/of metaphor and ink.”

When the fox leaves the forest of childhood she revels in her new terrain. Now, with “words unsheathed,” she wonders if she’ll ever “howl in the presence of bears and wolves,” while she still dreams of a world where all creatures can astonish themselves “with unimagined flowering.”

Along the way, the poems ask where does memory end and imagination begin, what power does a name hold over us, and how can we use language to find understanding, humor and grace.

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From DeForest, her family name, Linda Ferguson provides the ground on which she weaves magic from the ordinary into the extraordinary: her birth where she is already a child of the forest, unfurling, two brothers of different dispositions, one a wolf, the other a bear cub, the love of her husband who made the outside world bloom, and creation of their two children spun from the straw of our genes.

Demonstrating her mastery of metaphor, a cinnamon tree stump becomes a small bear becomes a brother she calls Hansel, the other, more troublesome brother, Johann, becomes a blue-eyed wolf—slinking bones and a cold, faded coat, while she emerges as a fox with topaz eyes [that] glow through fronds of metaphor and ink.

Though she tells us this is a simple suburban story, every poem in this collection is a jewel, obscured by a diaphanous curtain of imagination, beckoning us to look behind. Her word play imagines her name “to be the petal of a red, red rose” or to remain nameless “ready to plunge … into new wet worlds. The chapbook is a delight to read; one can almost hear the forest sing.

—Judith Armatta, author of Twilight of Impunity

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Let’s Hear It for the Horses

Third Place Winner of The Poetry Box Chapbook Prize 2021

by Tricia Knoll

Scheduled Release Date: Feb 1, 2021

Horses and humans go back in time with each other thousands of years. A young girl’s love for horses or a particular horse is the stuff of legends, bestselling novels, and movies. In Let’s Hear It for the Horses, Tricia Knoll’s poetry explores her lifelong fascination with these strong and sometimes symbolic creatures and shares stories and memories of her best rides.

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It’s a great pleasure to browse this collection, just as Tricia Knoll’s horses browse the field, looking for new, green blades of grass. She writes in the fine tradition of Maxine Kumin, and like that earlier poet, even has a poem for a horse named “Jack”. Full of the breathtaking observations of the horse lover, Knoll takes the reader close to real and imagined horses—close enough to feel the tickle of their whiskers or notice the green spit on their lips. She also shares stories of the father who died before she was grown, but who guided her into life by taking her as a child on trail rides, or to see the Lipizzaner horses. You don’t have to know horses to love these poems; they can serve as a generous introduction to the joy and sadness that canters in the air beside them.

—Judith Barrington, author of Long Love: New & Selected Poems, 1985–2017

For complete details, reviews and ordering information click here.