by Judy K. Mosher

A Poetry Box Chapbook Prize Winner – First Place

Shrinking Bones by Judy K. Mosher is the first place winner of The Poetry Box Chapbook Prize for 2018. These poems grew from the author’s journey with her aging mother and her memory of her “past paid work-life” as a professor of anatomy and physiology. The collection is a rich marriage of poetic observation joined with an in-depth understanding of the human body. It portrays a beautiful story of love, loss and grief, as well as the complex relationship between mother and daughter.

About the Author

Judy K Mosher, Ph.D., writes poetry and prose from her home in Santa Fe, where she wanders the mountains and arroyos with her golden retriever, Jessie. Home for over thirty years, New Mexico always kindles awe.

Judy’s professional life primarily consisted of teaching in higher education. Her Ph.D. specialties were Biomechanics and Exercise Physiology. As a professor, she facilitated nursing, physical therapy, and physical education students’ mastery of anatomy and physiology. Judy has also worked in academic, environmental, and community non-profit administration. She recently earned a Certificate in Creative Writing from Santa Fe Community College.

Many American adult children experience the challenges of distance when their parents age. Judy feels blessed that her Mother relocated making Santa Fe her home during her final twenty years. When poor health arrived, geographical convenience and a strong adult mother-daughter friendship provided a container until Evelyn passed at age eighty-eight. Their time together seeded the poems in this collection.

Her prose and poetry have been published in Adobe Walls, CALYX, Malpais Review, Noyo River Review, and 200newmexicopoems.wordpress.com among other places. She has received finalist and honorable mention awards in numerous poetry contests. Judy co-authored Bosque Rhythms, a collection of poems dedicated to Bosque del Apache Wildlife Refuge, with Lee Dunne, Cheryl Marita, Paula Miller and Elizabeth O’Brien. Bosque Rhythms was a 2015 Finalist in the New Mexico-Arizona Book Awards. Shrinking Bones is her first chapbook.

What They’re Saying  . . .

“In Shrinking Bones you come to know a mother and her daughter as Judy K. Mosher’s mother ages, shrinks, and dwindles toward death. Mosher skillfully juxtaposes each poem with a description of bones –  fingertips, ossicles, orbits, even a phantom limb – to build a framework of tender poems that detail how her mother cared for her, mellowed as time passed, even what made her mother laugh. Mosher’s sensitive and delicate poetic touch shares how she tended her mother’s wounds at the end of a long life and holds her memory now with each look in the mirror. If your relationship with your mother was not thus, you might wish it could have been.”

~ Tricia Knoll, author of How I Learned To Be White and Broadfork Farm

“As the skeleton is the hardscape of the body, so poetry creates a precise armature of language on which to hang experience and emotion. Judy Mosher has done a masterful job of bringing anatomy and poetry together in a way that enhances the understanding of both. The metaphors here give the reader new insight into the universality — and specifics — of the mother-daughter bond. An enlightening collection!”

~ Miriam Sagan, poet

“To witness the death of her mother and her own grief, Mosher has invoked the metaphor of the bones of the body to describe the gentle path to the end. Her mastery, the metaphor and the simplicity of the poems focus a unique light on the journey.”

~ Lee Firestone Dunne, author of Life in the Poorhouse and Cocktail Shaker

Book Launch Readings:

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by Penelope Scambly Schott

A Poetry Box Chapbook Prize Selection – Second Place

Reading November Quilt, by acclaimed author and poet, Penelope Scambly Schott, is akin to making a new friend. Brew a cup of tea and curl up in your favorite reading chair as you’re invited to share life experiences, aphorisms, confessions, and curious ponderings in this delightful collection of 30 poems (one for each day of the month).

About the Author

Penelope Scambly Schott leads a double life. In Portland, Oregon she goes to theater and poetry events and she and her husband host the White Dog Poetry Salon in their home on a hill. In Dufur, Oregon (population 604) she and the white dog climb D hill between the wheat fields and admire the east side of Mount Hood. Also in Dufur she writes and leads an annual poetry workshop. Here she and the dog wander about in the dark. The dog admires the dirt underpaw while the woman sniffs stars.

Penelope’s verse biography A is for Anne: Mistress Hutchinson Disturbs the Commonwealth received an Oregon Book Award for Poetry. Other books include Serpent Love: A Mother-Daughter Epic about a struggle with her adult daughter, along with an essay in which the daughter gives her point of view, and Bailing the River, a poetry collection full of dogs, coyotes, and the unsolvable and sometimes funny mysteries of the ordinary. Most recent is House of the Cardamom Seed.

She is grateful to her family and her weekly hiking group as well as Word Sisters, Cool Women Poets of New Jersey, Pearls, and her far-flung on-line critique group.

What They’re Saying  . . .

“Penelope Scambly Schott’s award-winning chapbook of thirty poems—organized and titled as one-a-day offerings for the month of November—reads like a series of brief, conversational letters to the reader. Longings are shared, intimacies revealed, disappointments confessed. Along the way, truths are discovered and delivered aphoristically: ‘Lives don’t have plots; they have refrains.’ Thoughtful and thought- provoking, these poems are not as much meditations as they are invitations—to ponder, to converse, to be disturbed, to love, to never forget. “Sometimes,” Schott writes, ‘I am the surface of a lake / perturbed by every passing breeze that blows.’ In November Quilt, she blows back.”

~Andrea Hollander, author of Blue Mistaken for Sky

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by Gudrun Bortman

A Poetry Box Chapbook Prize Selection – Third Place (tie)

My meadow scorched and bleak

                   without the cooling trees.
Trenches gape, deep as graves, and the garden
chokes under dust and rock.
 
But there     see?     There: a sapling thrives,
a seed that rode in on the fire’s wings.

In November 2008, a vicious wildfire swept through Santa Barbara, California, forcing many residents to flee in fear, while wondering what would survive the angry flames. These poems tell that story through one woman’s experience of loss and her resiliency to rebuild in the aftermath of destruction. Above all, this is a story of hope.

About the Author

Gudrun Bortman grew up in Hamburg, Germany and moved to the US in her twenties. She is an artist, a garden designer and a poet. An avid reader, journal and letter writer all her life, love of language led her to poetry. Her poems have been published in Sukoon Literary Magazine, San Pedro River Review, Buzz, Rare Feathers and To Give Life a Shape, books published by Gunpowder Press. She lives in Santa Barbara, California.

What They’re Saying  . . .

“Gudrun Bortman’s Fireweed is perhaps the truest, and most eloquent, exploration ever of the quiet resilience necessary to survive California’s devastating and seemingly endless fire weather. In lines that are spare yet vivid, she shows us how to remain ‘bright & miraculous on ash-bare earth.’”

~ David Starkey, Santa Barbara Poet Laureate Emeritus

“Fireweed is a fierce book of immolation and ash-scape, tracing the arc of a disaster in poems that by turns whisper, sing and keen to one another and to us. The delicate china teacup, crisped fragment of needlework, iron goat figurine that remain when all else has burned away, the ‘ghosts of books’ that fall to ashes at a touch: Gudrun Bortman renders these details with a tenderness and precision that take my breath away. Like the literal mosaic she creates from fragments of a life gone, then puts to use as a tabletop, these poems together form a whole that is stunning in both its beauty and its utility. They allow me to trust the penultimate poem’s claim that, in spite of all, ‘there are new layers to be lived.’”

~ Catherine Abbey Hodges, author of Raft of Days

“In her thoughtful and imagistic collection of poems, Fireweed, Gudrun Bortman trains the eye of a devoted naturalist on the way fire is shaping California’s landscapes and the people who inhabit them. Opening the book is a woman documenting profound personal loss in the face of destruction, the moon transformed to ‘a burning coal’ and her home and almost everything in it ‘a pyre.’ Yet, even while mourning, the poet seeks understanding by imagining fire as a murder of crows or even a snake-like being that consumes without discrimination. And she finds resilience in the natural world as well: in the return of finches and bindweed to charred mountain slopes, in the unchanged songs of coyotes at dusk. This book is an important chronicle of how we endure and how we begin anew.”

~ Emma Trelles, author of Tropicalia

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by Christopher Bogart

A Poetry Box Chapbook Prize Selection – Third Place (tie)

Twenty-six Mexican migrants were discovered in the Sonoran desert near Yuma, Arizona. Twelve of them were wandering around the desert, delirious and dying of thirst. Fourteen were taken by pickup truck to the morgue. The deceased became known as the “Yuma 14.” These poems tell their story.

About the Author

Christopher Bogart is a retired educator and a working poet and writer with an MA in Creative Writing from Monmouth University. His poetry has been published in Voices Rising from the Grove, Spindrift, WestWard Quarterly, Saggio Poetry Journal, The Monmouth Review (2013, 2014), Mind Murals (2013), Whirlwind Review (Fall 2014), The Howl of Sorrow, a Collection of Poetry Inspired by Hurricane Sandy, This Broken Shore (Summer 2015, 2018) and Jersey Shore Poets (First Edition).

In 2015, he was chosen as First Runner Up for Monmouth University’s inaugural The Joyce Carol Oates Award for Excellence in Fiction, Poetry, and Creative Non-Fiction. In 2017, he was chosen as one of two finalists for The Brian Turner Literary Prize for Fiction. He is presently writing poetry and short stories, translating the poetry of Federico Garcia Lorca and Arthur Rimbaud into English, as well as working on his first novel, tentatively titled The Beast, about two Central American teenage migrants who flee poverty and crime in search of a better life in America.

What They’re Saying  . . .

“A cautionary tale written in dried blood, and a grim portrait of the consequences of impossible choices.”

~ Gregg G. Brown, publisher, BLAST PRESS

“An informal and empathetic document as well as a poetic sequence, 14: Antología del Sonoran elegizes and gives voice to those no longer able to speak their stories. Christopher Bogart’s risky yet respectful poems honor the names of these dead, and insist that nothing can sever the bonds that connect us to each other.”

~ Michael Waters, author of The Dean of Discipline

“The quiet calm of the poems in Christopher Bogart’s 14: Antología del Sonoran heightens the despair in the individual stories of these fourteen doomed men and lays bare the tragedy of lives lost in the simple yearning for human dignity.”

~ Daniel Weeks, author of For Now: New & Collected Poems, 1979-2017

“‘The U.S. – Mexican border es una herida abierta where the Third World grates against the first and bleeds,’ Gloria Anzaldúa wrote in 1987. Three decades later, the open wound has grown deeper and wider, the need to address it and assist with the healing more urgent than ever. A poet citizen sharply aware of the power and limitation of art to bring about change, Christopher Bogart reminds us of the complicitous nature of silence.  Soul-wrenching in the directness and sparseness with which they capture each voice, the poems of 14: Antología del Sonoran speak of lives trapped in a system that makes dreaming for dignity a death sentence. Each poem performs a ritual that mourns, restores robbed dignity, and cries for justice.”

~ Mihaela Moscaliuc, Associate Professor at Monmouth University, author of Father Dirt and Immigrant Model

“Christopher Bogart resurrects the ‘Yuma 14’ who died on the Devil’s Highway that links Mexico to Arizona, seeking the kind of life most Americans take for granted. As their bodies lie in the burning desert or in the brilliant light of the morgue they tell us their stories, their dreams, their hopes. But this is not a book about hope. No, hope is not welcome here, just as these souls were not welcome in our country. ‘For her I wanted so much more,’ says one about his now fatherless daughter. ‘It was hard to believe I was dead,’ whispers another.”

~ Peter E. Murphy, Founder, Murphy Writing of Stockton University

“The distant deaths of ordinary people usually don’t make the news headlines and can be too easily ignored. In 14: Antología del Sonoran, Christopher Bogart rescues 14 such deaths from obscurity and into compassionate focus, bringing their humanity to life. These were 14 men – among the unnumbered migrants – who risked everything to seek the American Dream of making better lives for themselves and their families. Bogart documents each man’s death in poems that are both stark factual accounts and movingly eloquent portraits of individuals who dared to dream – and lost to the vast wasteland of the Sonoran Desert. Written with economy of language and vivid details, these poems bear witness to a daily human tragedy that, once you cross the border between knowing and not knowing, is unforgettable.”

~ Linda Johnston Muhlhausen, author of Elephant Mountain

“Christopher Bogart sets his beautiful language against harsh, hellish landscapes, which mirror hardships faced by the men he writes about. Here is the hero’s journey with little hope of transformation, or victory. These men accept the challenge despite the odds, and in these carefully crafted snapshots of their lives, Bogart shows us a terrifying sadness, beauty and bravery.”

~ Deborah LaVeglia (Moderator: “PoetsWednesday,” The Barron Arts Center)

Book Launch Readings:

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