by Rosalie Sanara Petrouske

First Place Winner of The Poetry Box Chapbook Prize, 2022 

In Tracking the Fox, Rosalie Sanara Petrouske weaves a tale of family ties and history. The poems are steeped in her Native American heritage and in the natural lore her Ojibwe father taught her.  Skilled in descriptive writing, she allows the readers to see waterfalls, hear winds howling, and smell delicate flowers in full bloom. They will walk with her and her father through fields of native grasses, along snowy animal tracks, and down wooded paths. As you read these poems, Tracking the Fox, draws you into Rosalie’s story and leaves you a little closer to the natural world.

Enjoy a Video of Rosalie Reading from the Book:

Rosalie Petrouske — A Featured Poet on The Poetry Box LIVE (February 2023)

Review of Tracking the Fox in Tinderbox Poetry Journal:

Early Praise for Tracking the Fox:

The poems in Tracking the Fox unfold at the slow pace of a hike in the woods, inviting the pleasures and joys of nature, while never turning away from the shared struggles and pain of the poet’s Ojibwe heritage. Hers is a fearless language that holds it all, like the black ash basket she weaves with her daughter, welcoming every reader with each personal, conversational, and precise poem. This is an ambitious, necessary voice committed to truth-telling and the naming of creatures, large and small, that make up our world. In “The Sky I Was Born Under,” written in homage to U.S. Poet Laureate Joy Harjo’s piece of the same name, she describes the scene of her own birth, ending with the lines: “I wailed for the first time, my voice/ ricocheted in the stillness,/ and all the forest creatures paused to listen.” Tracking the Fox will cause us all to pause and listen to the hard-won work of this poet coming into her own as a Native American woman and mother, promising: “we shall let our voices be heard.”

—James Crews, contest judge
poet, editor of How to Love the World

Replete with the flora and fauna of Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, Rosalie Sanara Petrouske’s Tracking the Fox takes readers on a spiritual journey imbued with the presence of her Ojibwe father, her “true north” whose teachings filled her with “the natural rhythms” of the world around her.  In the first poem, Rosalie Sanara Petrouske turns “The Medicine Bag” of her father’s family inside out, discovering sacred objects; ancestral stories of the struggle for existence despite harsh winters and brutal racism; and the tenderness of a father’s love. These “filaments…drift down” throughout the collection as the poet deftly weaves the beauty of forests and rain, sweetgrass and stars with the affirmation that comes from communal traditions and taking one’s “place amongst generations.” Tracking the Fox gives us poems to read and reread, both for the beauty of their immersion in nature and for the way they help to dissolve “deep…ancestral pain.”

—Dr. Terry Bohnhorst Blackhawk, author One Less River,
Kresge Arts in Detroit Literary Fellow

Tracking the Fox showcases Petrouske’s skill with traversing poems of the domestic and natural worlds. These narrative and meditative poems remind us how home and place return to us, even after we’ve left. I admire Petrouske’s voice, for it holds tension, making the reader eager for every reverberating, often haunting, ending. Come, listen to the voices here: a father’s utterance; the all-night rain; a fox’s silent slash of red; jack and white pines falling, their limbs “like an intake of breath.” I tell you, with lines like “I can do nothing about loss,/ except learn from others who have also lost,” this is a poet you want to know.

—Janine Certo, author of O Body of Bliss
winner of the Longleaf Press Book Contest in Poetry (2022)

Rosalie Sanara Petrouske has given us a gift to savor in these lovely poems which cross over the threshold between living and actually being in the world. What she has done so deftly is to explore her connections to her Anishinaabe past, present and future, with a heartfelt look into Ceremonial time. These poems sing with the understanding of the natural world and the inner lives of things. There are direct links between wisdom, ancestry, and the lessons of simply walking the earth, knowing how to read the sky, or how to understand the talk of crows. Take them outside and sit with them and you will be all the better for it. These heal what needs healing.

—Michael Delp, Co-editor of Made in Michigan
Wayne State University Press

About the Author

Rosalie Sanara Petrouske is also the author of What We Keep (Finishing Line Press, 2016), A Postcard from my Mother (Finishing Line Press, 2004), and The Geisha Box (March Street Press, 1996).  Petrouske’s poems and essays have appeared in many literary journals:  Passages North, Red Rock Review, Rhino, The MacGuffin, Southern Poetry Review, Third Wednesday, Sky Island Journal, Blueline, and Lunch Ticket, among others. Her poetry was also included in several anthologies, the most recent, 100 Years of Upper Peninsula Writing, 1917-2017 from MSU Press and Voice on the Water: Great Lakes Native America Now from Northern Michigan University Press.

Her poem “Eating Corn Soup Under the Strawberry Moon” was one of six finalists in the 2020 Jack Grapes Poetry Prize from Cultural Daily. In 2021, she was one of five finalists for the distinction of U.P. Poet Laureate (of the Upper Peninsula of Michigan).  Images of the natural world are prominent throughout her work as she stays true to the teachings of her Ojibwe father, who taught her how to provide careful stewardship and to always honor her surrounding environment, whether a woodland or urban landscape.

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by Michael S. Glaser

Second Place Winner of The Poetry Box Chapbook Prize, 2022

As the increasing complexities of our world press on with their insistent yammering for our attention, it often feels difficult to hear the soft whisperings of our own spirits as they try to encourage us toward those choices which might be most meaningful for our lives. In Elemental Things, Michael Glaser employs poetry to grapple with that reality and show how attitudes of both gratitude and wonder might serve as nurturing companions for our journeys.

Enjoy a Video of Michael Reading from the Book:

Michael S. Glaser — A Featured Poet on The Poetry Box LIVE (February 2023)

Early Praise for Elemental Things:

These poems return us to the sacred in our everyday lives, calling us back to “the language of awe,” as the poet puts it so gorgeously in the opening poem. These poems feel both elemental and essential themselves, capturing so many holy moments in nature, inviting us into the solitude and presence from which absorbing poetry is born.

—James Crews, contest judge
poet, editor of How to Love the World

Elemental Things is filled with invitational pause reminding us that beneath the noise and pace we create, lies the overlooked blessings that have accompanied us all along. These are poems with room enough to allow the reader to incorporate their own experience and turn the small, uncertain, crumpled words inside our own fists into the kind of poem we want to live by.  If pen to paper is a prayer—these are word temples.

— Deanna Nikaido, poet, educator, visual artist

I have long admired the wisdom and artistry of Michael S. Glaser’s poems. He writes with compassion and depth, masterfully capturing the fragility, dignity, and complexity of the human condition. His poems remind us what a gift it is to be alive, even during difficult times. In Elemental Things he explores what it means to be blessed in a broken world and, like a modern-day Adam, he challenges us to awaken from the amnesia we experience when we forget to honor and connect with each other and the natural world. Every poem hints at ways we can move toward wholeness. Glaser’s poems remind us, gently, to love who we are and what we can still become.

—Elizabeth Lund, reviewer and host of Poetic Lines

About the Author

Michael S. Glaser is a professor Emeritus at St. Mary’s College where he served for 50 years. A Poet Laureate of Maryland (2004-2009), Glaser has received awards for his poetry, his teaching, and his service to poetry and the poetic tradition in Maryland. A former Board member of the Maryland Humanities, and the Kirkridge Retreat and Study Center, he served as a Maryland State Arts Council Poet-in-the-Schools for nearly 25 years and now co-leads retreats which embrace the reading and writing of poetry as a means of self-reflection and personal growth.

Glaser has published several collections of his own poetry, edited three anthologies and co-edited The Collected Poems of Lucille Clifton (BOA 2012).   He writes book reviews for The Friends Journal and is the proud father of five children and ten grandchildren. He now lives in Hillsborough, NC with his wife, the educator and Courage and Renewal facilitator, Kathleen W. Glaser.

www.michaelsglaser.com

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by Suzy Harris

Third Place Winner of The Poetry Box Chapbook Prize, 2022

The poems in Listening in the Dark center on the theme of growing up with an unidentified hearing loss that progressively became much worse. In her mid-20s, Suzy Harris learned the diagnosis and started wearing hearing aids. In her mid-60s, after losing most of her hearing in both ears, she received her first cochlear implant, and then a second one, which required learning to hear again.

Enjoy a Video of Suzy Reading from the Book:

Suzy Harris — A Featured Poet on The Poetry Box LIVE (February 2023)

Early Praise for Listening in the Dark:

I have seldom encountered a series of poems so closely linked and connected as a whole. This chapbook tenderly addresses the poet’s lifelong hearing loss with a surprising precision of language, starting at the very beginning of life and reimagining that time of “growing up with two languages,/ one that is silence.” No doubt these tender poems will help many readers to feel less alone as they navigate their own worlds of memory, loss, and resilience.

—James Crews, contest judge
poet, editor of How to Love the World

This chapbook from Suzy Harris offers us—in richly musical, image-laden lines—a Phoenix-tale. Mostly deaf by her mid 60’s, the poet exists in a too-silent world where “sounds/ falter and collapse.” Then she undergoes cochlear implants in both ears, artificial devices completely replacing her profoundly faulty natural hearing. With lyric intensity, her poems convey Harris’ experiences as she slowly undertakes the eerie process of learning a whole new universe of sound, translating the implants’ “ticks and taps and dings” into what’s recognizable. Risen from its own ashes, the poet’s new sense of hearing leads her toward the “exquisite harmony” of soaring renewal.

—Paulann Petersen, Oregon Poet Laureate Emerita

Listening In the Dark is a visceral prosodic manual of “How to be Deaf,” a title of one poem in this triumphant collection of a survivor poet, “…who grows-up with two languages,/ one that is silence?,” in which “Life is an erasure poem where you/ try endlessly to find the meaning.” Suzy Harris propels us into her world—an exultant quest from “Broken Listening” to the cacophony and wonder of sound. This is a collection of lived experience that only Harris could author.

—Willa Schneberg, LCSW, recipient of the Oregon Book Award for Poetry,
author of The Naked Room

About the Author

Suzy Harris lives in Portland, Oregon. Her poems have appeared in Calyx, Clackamas Literary Review, Switchgrass Review, The Poeming Pigeon, and Williwaw, among other journals and anthologies. She has been an Oregon Poetry Association prize winner and recently served as poetry editor of Timberline Review. Suzy is a retired attorney who is learning to hear again with two cochlear implants. Born and raised in Indiana, she is grateful to call the Pacific Northwest home.

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