by Lauren Tivey

A Poetry Box Chapbook Prize Winner – First Place, 2019

Moroccan Holiday is a poetic series following a married couple—an American woman, and her Scottish husband—on an extended vacation in Morocco. As the husband suffers an extreme alcoholic relapse, the couple confronts longstanding issues of disease, abuse, and painful family memories, against the rich backdrop of an unfamiliar culture.

Judge’s Comments:

“Lauren Tivey embarks on a trip to Morocco, a foreign landscape of exciting people, smells, and destinations, with her alcoholic husband. She carries with her a dread of what she may face with her husband’s disease in a Muslim country. In beautifully-executed and moving poetic forms, she takes the reader with her through the landscapes of Ramadan and his alcoholism, family histories with drunkenness and rehab, and her moments of stillness when she is alone with mint tea and her journal. We feel how hard it is to stuff love, fear, and compassion in a suitcase just to unpack again in a new port of call.”

~ Tricia Knoll, Contest Judge, 2019
author of How I Learned to Be White and Broadfork Farm

About the Author

Lauren Tivey is the author of four chapbooks, most recently Moroccan Holiday, which was the winner of The Poetry Box Chapbook Prize 2019, and The Breakdown Atlas & Other Poems (Big Table Publishing Company, 2011). Tivey is a Pushcart Prize nominee, and her work has appeared in Connotation Press, The Coachella Review, and Split Lip Magazine, among dozens of other web and print publications in the U.S. and U.K.

After much international travel, including a six year stint living in China, she now resides with her husband, and a little black cat named Poppet, in a cottage surrounded by flower gardens in St. Augustine, Florida. She teaches English and Creative Writing at Flagler College.

Tivey can be reached at her writing blog: https://laurentivey.wordpress.com

What They’re Saying  . . .

In this stunning collection of finely wrought poems, Lauren Tivey writes of a holiday with deep pain and small joys. The speaker takes us on a journey of trauma as her husband relapses into alcoholism during the vacation, and tells of her difficult responses to his behavior. His disease of unrelenting suffering transforms the couple. He is, she says, “…a brute / swimmingly sloshed…” and she wonders if she can “…save him / somehow from chasm’s edge.” She writes “I keep talking to fill the silence, the absence / of his presence, in a blue city beyond the sea.” The poems are, in fact, brilliantly alive with shades of blue, some bright and cheery, and others darker, more sinister. As this couple journeys, she is wracked with agony, though the speaker does find momentary happiness that her husband’s “…eyes are clear in the luminosity / of negative ions—sea, sun, wind—an elemental / cleansing.” These poems pull the reader in with their heartbreaking urgency, history, and quests. Deeply moving, always expressing complex ideas in radiant language and astonishing details, Moroccan Holiday is a must-read book that sings the duality of love and estrangement.

~ Virginia Chase Sutton, author of What Brings You to Del Amo

These poems, gathered so astutely in Moroccan Holiday, have such exquisite and crisp detail that they will haunt you for a while. “Circus,” “The Nomad,” and “Hunger” are a few perfect examples, among the many in this book, of poems that will take you by the throat and choke you with their undeniable power and brilliance. Rich images, lyrical lines that are relentless in their beauty. These poems resonate with a lush wickedness of the tongue “of two broken people craving delights of the orchard” and the bitterness of people who’ve had to battle alcoholism and marriage and love for a long while. “I’ve grown tired of the stale taste of beer, bars, men. There are better things to do.” These are magnificent poems written against the backdrop of our crumbling world, Morocco, and beyond.

~ Virgil Suarez, author of 90 Miles: Selected and New Poems

Written with startling poignancy and richness, Lauren Tivey’s collection of poems, Moroccan Holiday, narrates a couple’s troubled voyage to a place “used to ruin,” seesawing between the splendor of its setting and the upcoming catastrophe into the depths of alcoholism and its legacy. The book starts “on a boat…gliding across the iridescent bay” on way to holiday, and quickly thrusts us into the precipice of Tangier, with its one-legged beggar, insane woman with oozing skin lesions, and scattering rats, which parallels their descent and struggle to prevail, as individuals and as partners. The poet asks, “I want to know when / to give up on someone.” The reader is left pondering this and other brutal questions, but it is clear that “moments of gladness exist.” Tivey’s work is a compelling case study, both fascinating and surprisingly compassionate, absolutely worth reading.

~ Carolina Hospital, author of Key West Nights and Other Aftershocks

Travel and travail share a common root, revealing at a deep linguistic level that to journey is to suffer. Change and transformation are by nature difficult. The travelers in Moroccan Holiday do indeed go far, traversing physical continents and emotional minefields. Lauren Tivey is an uncanny poet, conjuring metaphor and image to convey the tale of a husband and wife at the edge of love’s limit, where they are pushed by his relapse into alcoholic toxicity. The weight of their pasts and the exhaustion of carrying it all provide a sharp contrast to the cinnamon-scented streets and lush-laden markets of Morocco that would otherwise have beguiled them. The poems deliver a mix of seduction and despair, sorrow and enchantment (so many names for blue in this heady place). Through travel and travail, the woman and man somehow endure, learning how to lay down the burdens handed to them long ago and to take delight in the pleasures of their precarious present.

~ Holly Iglesias, author ofSleeping Things

Lauren Tivey’s Moroccan Holiday is a gorgeous, heartrending blue tempest that charts the roughhousing of addiction in a dry land with rich diction, depth, intelligence, and awareness. Despite tumult, the center never wavers, clear among the significant lost boys, the poems’ hope and generosity rising like Morocco’s pink wild roses and, yes, they do make a “difference to the world.”

~ Liz Robbins, author of Freaked

Book Launch & Readings

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by Christine Higgins

A Poetry Box Chapbook Prize Winner – Second Place, 2019

Hello, Darling explores the relationship of a mother with her daughter struggling with mental health. Christine Higgins shares both the joy and the complexity of childrearing, while paying tribute to an exuberant and creative child. Motherhood doesn’t end, but it does change when the daughter dies at the age of seventeen. These poems explore the grief of both parents and what it takes to heal from within that grief.  In Hello, Darling, Higgins gives voice to sorrow while holding fast to the love that is essential.

About the Author

Christine (Mullin) Higgins was born in Staten Island, New York.  She has been writing poetry since the 3rd grade when Sr. Thomas created a writers’ club that met before the school day began. A graduate of Marymount Manhattan College, she moved to Baltimore to attend The Writing Seminars of The John Hopkins University.  For ten years, she taught writing at Loyola University, and also for the Masters in Writing Program at The Johns Hopkins University in Washington, D.C.

A series of personal events led later in life to a rewarding career, including research, where she has focused on substance use disorders and mental health. Her work has appeared widely in numerous print and on-line journals.  She is the author of two chapbooks, co-author of In the Margins: a Conversation in Poetry (Cherry Grove Collections, 2017), and Plum Point Folio, a collection of her poems and her husband’s photographs.  Her awards include a residency at the McDowell Colony, and Individual Artist Awards from the Maryland State Arts Council in Poetry and Non-Fiction.  She is currently at work on a memoir about grief.    

What They’re Saying  . . .

Christine Higgins is a poet and a mother who is examining, hunting, searching for meaning in the death of her and her husband’s only child, Emily, who was also a gifted poet searching for life’s meaning. Go as far back in human history as it is recorded and you’ll find mankind, poets in particular, dealing with the grief, sorrow, and pain of life.

This collection of poems clearly defines Emily and the loss her death brought. The donation of their daughter’s heart is powerfully described in “The Boy.” My favorite poem is “Love Child” which is about her parents after Emily’s death and a trip to Key West. It speaks to the truth William Faulkner spoke to all writers. Be the last voice on the barren rock in the last sunset still speaking we were put here, not to survive but to prevail. Christine Higgins has, as we Lakota say, written a Death Song that acknowledges when sung, we are always present. This is poetry at its purest and best. I wish I could send a copy to every mother whose son I taught who has his name carved on The Wall of black granite. Then they would know the spirit lives long after we’ve left the earth.

­~Andrew Brown, The Chugalug King

Hello, Darling. In the title poem of this carefully arranged chapbook, Christine Higgins greets her newborn daughter immediately after giving birth. But too quickly the daughter is being whisked away by the nurse, and so the very word hello—such a plain and common American word—is already beautiful with poetic power. The poems that follow in this small but stunning collection are narrative in that they tell the story of a mother’s love that must endure—and survive—a painful letting go. But these poems also rise, as good poems do, up and out of the personal narrative. An accomplished poet, Christine Higgins lets go of her beloved daughter in a way that, as grieving mother, she surely must have thought impossible. To the world then, especially to those who think it impossible, she offers these poems. They sing Hello—that ordinary word of greeting, of recognition—to the beloved. Even in the face of death they sing. And they keep singing, the connection ever strong.

­~Madeleine Mysko, Crucial Blue

I read Hello, Darling with my whole heart and soul. Poet Christine Higgins is a mother who suffers the unimaginable grief of losing her daughter. In poem after poem, in myriad forms, she composes a song that has everything in it—her daughter’s birth, her life, and her life after…. I read it again and again because I wanted to be beside these poems, to feel their tenderness, their hope, and their deep love.

­~Kendra Kopelke, Hopper’s Women

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by Debbie Hall

A Poetry Box Chapbook Prize Winner – Third Place, 2019

“How many close calls before we become ghosts?” wonders the author of this collection, where she reflects upon her experiences—emotional, relational and spiritual–during her partner’s yearlong battle with a life-threatening illness. Threaded throughout these poems is the presence of the natural world—always a source of solace, but now more acutely and deeply felt.

About the Author

Debbie Hall is a psychologist, photographer and writer who lives in southern California with her partner and two vocal and talented rescue cats. She and her partner share a passion for traveling the world.  She feels incredibly fortunate to have had the time and means to launch a second career as a poet after retiring from psychological practice.  Debbie completed her MFA in 2017 at Pacific University in Forest Grove, Oregon.  She considers poets her rock stars.

Debbie’s poetry has appeared in a number of literary journals and anthologies, including the San Diego Poetry Annual, Serving House Journal, Sixfold, Poets Reading the News, Poetry24, Bird’s Thumb, Califragile, Gyroscope Review and Hawaii Pacific Review. Her essays have appeared on NPR (This I Believe series), in USD Magazine, and the San Diego Union Tribune.  She received an honorable mention in the 2016 Steve Kowit Poetry Prize and won second place in the 2018 Poetry Super Highway contest. Her first poetry collection, What Light I Have, was published in 2018 by Main Street Rag Books and was a finalist in the 2019 San Diego Book Awards. She is thrilled that her chapbook, Falling Into The River, just won third place in the 2019 Poetry Box Chapbook Prize.

What They’re Saying  . . .

Falling into the River is a book of remarkable candor and tenderness. Faced with a somber “unexpected detour,” Debbie Hall has forged poetry that is deeply attentive and hopeful. Near misses and nimbus clouds hijacking the sky are offset by gifts from nature and the poet’s playfulness. Hall gives us the egret, “lustrous with first light,” and weeds, “resplendent in their ratty coats.” Surgery is compared to the pas de trois in a ballet, and mortality appears as a gorilla in a tutu. These poems are delightful: intimate, unflinching, and imbued with love.

­—Rebecca Patrascu, Before Noon

When immeasurable fear arrives on the shores of poetry it is sometimes greeted with neither aversion nor welcome. Despite its alarming unease and three hundred mile per hour winds—the call to respond, repair, and interpret is the poet’s duty. This new poetry collection by Debbie Hall, Falling Into the River, documents a couple’s processing of shared weakening and fear. These are poems with spines. “Words you can barely form / with your own mouth, / vocabulary that you must now / make your own.” Hall is gifted with a language that is rich in observation and conveys it with profound courage and tenderness—“Here, sit in my lap now.”

—Sam Roxas-Chua,
Saying Your Name Three Times Underwater

Language formed from ache, perseverance and enlightenment construct Hall’s poems: a cancer survivor’s grateful soul mate who comes back from a despairing precipice—love’s shared journey—to discover in these intimate poems that even a long life is short. We learn, too, how the residential soul survives for illumination, to know endurance is born from restoration and hope. Poems to remind us that we fall to get up and go on, mostly, a little more stooped, but thankfully keen to the transient world, each day sanctified with “…the calculus of near misses / allotted each of us.”

—Jeff Walt, Leave Smoke

Falling into the River, Debbie Hall’s newest collection, is a graceful and unflinching telling of the perilous medical journey of the poet’s longtime love. This is a poet with a gift for staying present no matter what. She knows herself and she knows her heart, and in that knowing we come to know ourselves as well. As readers we are up-close witnesses to every phase: the anxious wait for results; vigilance during the partner’s illness and treatment; self-questioning about how to best offer comfort; and ultimately the return of her partner to health. With the instincts of a tracker and all senses on high alert, Debbie Hall never strays from the natural world, which provides inspiration, hope, solace and even distraction when needed. Hall’s brilliance with extended metaphor will dazzle you. Look what she does with the jigsaw puzzle, the fire bulletin, Swan Lake, the tomatoes! Oh, the tomatoes! These poems portray a shared life lived with gusto, through times of ecstatic contentment, despair and renewal. This collection is a celebration of life and love—a testament to treasure.

—Lin Nelson Benedek,
When a Peacock Speaks to You in a Dream

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