by Mary Warren Foulk

First Place Winner of The Poetry Box Chapbook Prize, 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.

ENJOY A VIDEO OF MARY READING FROM THE BOOK:

Mary Warren Foulk — A Featured Poet on The Poetry Box LIVE (January 2022)

About the Author

Mary Warren Foulk has been published in VoiceCatcher, Cathexis Northwest Press, Yes Poetry, Arlington Literary Journal (Gival Press), Los Angeles Poet Society, Pine Hills Review, Palette Poetry, Visitant, Silkworm, and Steam Ticket among other publications. Her work also has appeared in (M)othering Anthology (Inanna Publications) and My Loves: A Digital Anthology of Queer Love Poems (Ghost City Press). Her chapbook, If I Could Write You a Happier Ending, is forthcoming from dancing girl press (2021). 

Mary has attended several writing workshops and conferences, including The Writers Studio and AWP events, as well as received several artist and educator grants, including from the National Endowment of the Humanities. She recently won the “Teach! Write! Play!” fellowship to the Martha’s Vineyard Institute of Creative Writing and her poem “The Inventory of Fumbling” received first place honors. Her poem “portrait of a queer as a young boy” has been nominated for the 2021 Best of the Net Anthology. A graduate of the MFA Writing program at Vermont College of Fine Arts, Mary lives in western Massachusetts with her wife and two children. She is an educator, writer, and activist.

Instagram: @mwfoulk
www.facebook.com/mary.w.foulk
Twitter: @mwfoulk

Early Praise for Erasures of My Coming Out (Letter):

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

Mary Warren Foulk’s Erasures of My Coming Out (Letter) is an invitation, not only to experience the repetitive, exasperating nature of coming out, but also to experience coming into oneself. Foulk’s poetry holds the roots of connection and understanding in its palms and offers them piecemeal to everyone who is willing to listen. Not only are the erasures in this collection moving, in every sense of the word, but also painfully necessary—today, tomorrow, always. 

—Siarra Riehl, MFA, transdisciplinary novelist, teacher, and performer

Erasures of My Coming Out (Letter) is a true gift to the literary world, a fierce tour of the wild, nuanced gamut of the human emotional experience. Through poems that are so sparse they give the illusion of delicacy, Foulk demands space for her true self to bloom, shines light into both the darkest and tidiest corners of living and therefore, by extension offers her findings to everyone else who needs them. These poems defy fragility, are frank in their calling out the injustice of circumstances that even demand a coming out letter through the reclamation, the recasting, the redefinition of the self, and with love. This manuscript is an unequivocal triumph. 

—Kate Senecal, MFA, award-winning writer, Asst. Director of Pioneer Valley Writers’ Workshop

This striking series of erasures plumbs the nature of redactions. Of the space between the words we write and the words we feel. Their bare, raw nature. Foulk’s reworkings of her own language are stunning, and while it is fundamentally a coming out letter, it is also an invitation to be worked and reworked. A struggle toward meaning and family within language itself.

—Kristy Bowen, editor, dancing girl press

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by Linda Ferguson

Second Place Winner of The Poetry Box Chapbook Prize, 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.

ENJOY A VIDEO OF LINDA READING FROM THE BOOK:

Linda Ferguson — A Featured Poet on The Poetry Box LIVE (January 2022)

About the Author

Linda Ferguson started her career writing software how-to manuals before she even owned a computer. She also worked as a copywriter and journalist until she became hooked on reading, writing and performing poetry when she saw Naomi Shihab Nye, Lucille Clifton and Jimmy Santiago Baca in the Bill Moyers program The Language of Life. Here it was, she realized: a tool to say the unsayable while savoring the pleasure of piecing together intricate word puzzles.

As a passionate community-builder, she teaches affordable creative writing classes for adults and children. Based on her belief that artistic expression should be available to everyone regardless of income or experience, she creates a warm, friendly atmosphere where students are free to delve into imagination and memory to find their voice while relishing the camaraderie of their fellow writers.

A four-time Pushcart nominee, Ferguson is also a writer of fiction and essays. Her first chapbook, Baila Conmigo, was published by Dancing Girl Press, and her collection of feminist persona poetry, Not Me: Poems About Other Women, is forthcoming from Finishing Line Press in fall 2022.

She’s also an amateur dancer who loves to draw, paint, and shoot the breeze with her husband and their grown children.

Website: https://bylindaferguson.blogspot.com

Instagram: @ljd.ferguson.1

Early Praise for Of the Forest:

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

Of the Forest elegantly immerses us in a deceptively simple suburban story that can be heard/ in the whisper of birch leaves. I fell in love with this narrative, and I am so invested by the last poem, which calls us all to be the honey, the chemical/ reaction between nectar, enzymes and evaporation, that I swoon with admiration and adoration for the eloquence of the collection.

—Rebecca Smolen, author of Excoriation  and Womanhood and Other Scars

Let’s join Linda Ferguson in childhood’s deep, dark woods. The poems in Of the Forest are strong and haunting. You will be glad to know that no one was hurt in the making of this most engaging book of poetry. Suburbia flowers, sprinklers rainbow and birch trees whisper. There are butterflies but there are bee stings too. The forest is filled with moss and mystery. Linda begins her foray in her mother’s arms—her mother smells of ether and pressed cotton. In this exploration of childhood and adolescence, there are two brothers along for the journey. The brown-eyed brother wants to shock our poet. “Look! There is a bear!” But she would rather rest her cheek against the bear’s side. The three siblings are a wolf, a younger bear, and a fox poet. But because the forest is real, the wolf is a threat. As our heroine matures, she becomes a force filled with desire. She marries and writes love poems to her Scottish husband, her life filled with the green tips of possibility.

—Dale Champlin, author of The Barbie Diaries and Callie Comes of Age

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by Tricia Knoll

Third Place Winner of The Poetry Box Chapbook Prize, 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.

ENJOY A VIDEO OF TRICIA READING FROM THE BOOK:

Tricia Knoll — A Featured Poet on The Poetry Box LIVE (January 2022)

About the Author

“A horse. A horse. My kingdom for a horse!” cried King Richard the Third. Tricia Knoll’s father thought this as a child until his practical father detailed the costs and suggested he rent one. Which he did, at Colorado dude ranches. On weekends in suburban Chicago to ride hell bent on trails through cornfields. Her father did everything he could to make sure Knoll loved horses too. Summer horse camps. Riding with her dad in Rocky Mountain National Park summer after summer. Sometimes riding at mad gallops with the suburban men. Horse shows and rodeos. He was at his best in his cowboy boots and pearl snap-button Western shirts.

Knoll has degrees in literature from Stanford University (BA) and Yale University (MAT). She taught high school English. Edited a newspaper for elementary students. Served as Public Relations Director for Portland, Oregon’s Children’s Museum. Acted as the Public Information Officer at the Portland Water Bureau and went to New Orleans as an emergency responder following Hurricane Katrina.

Knoll retired in 2007 to write. Her poetry collections address interactions of wildlife and humans in urban habitat (Urban Wild); people and creatures on an organic farm in Washington State (Broadfork Farm); change in a small town on Oregon’s northern coast (Ocean’s Laughter); her understanding of white privilege (How I Learned To Be White); and relationships that sometimes go askew (Checkered Mates). How I Learned to Be White received the 2018 Human Rights Indie Book Award for Motivational Poetry. She is a contributing editor to the online journal Verse Virtual. For more information, visit triciaknoll.com.

Knoll lives in the woods of Vermont. Stables for dressage horses, a herd of pintos, and a one-horse family barn are less than a quarter mile in any direction. She smells them on warm days.

Early Praise for Let’s Hear It for the Horses:

If you know your totem animal is Horse, you’ll see these gentle giants everywhere—in the history of war, on gas-station calendars, haunting memories of harvest, a father’s fall, and your own hand’s memory of dusty withers. These poems will take you into a life enhanced by horses, as every life should be by something friendly but not defeated.

—Kim Stafford, author of Singer Come from Afar, Oregon Poet Laureate Emeritus

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

This book, with craft and saddles and the warm breath, takes me into my past, one horse-girl to another. Tricia Knoll has found her inspiration on horseback, in the giddy-up, and the pure wild gold, until the dangerous day I die. The naming of horses in “Roll Call” just about takes my breath away.

—Joan Logghe, Santa Fe Poet Laureate Emerita

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