The Pronunciation Part

by Flavian Mark Lupinetti

Grand Prize Winner, The Poetry Box Chapbook Prize 2024

In his prize-winning poetry collection, The Pronunciation Part, based on his 35 years as a cardiothoracic surgeon, Flavian Mark Lupinetti presents the triumphs and tragedies of the practice of medicine. The reader will explore the operating room, the emergency room, the intensive care unit, and the secrets of the human heart—in every sense of the word.

Enjoy the video of Mark Reading from the Book:

Early Praise:

I read The Pronunciation Part in one sitting the first time around. Now, a few months later, I have read it straight through again, and with the same amazement and pleasure. These poems have the propulsive force of a page-turning novel coupled with accurate, edgy language that lends wit to even the grimmest situations. The poems are so vivid, I can see the chapbook as a short film. There is a historical line of physician literary artists. With The Pronunciation Part, Flavian Mark Lupinetti joins the tradition.

—Donna Hilbert, contest judge, author of Threnody and Enormous Blue Umbrella

Tough, a master storyteller, irreverent with a biting ironic sense of humor, a scalpel sharp intellect and deep compassion to match, Mark Lupinetti is a rare poet. This debut collection, The Pronunciation Part, opens onto a world readers of poetry seldom see, the world of a heart surgeon who performed decades of heart transplants and surgeries as well as worked in a hospital ER helping patients who ranged from pandemic Covid patients to gunshot victims. Who is more qualified to be a poet than a heart surgeon? The best poets are always heart surgeons resurrecting our hearts. Mark Lupinetti is a stunning example. Particularly moving is his poem, “Peonies” for his wife who died of cancer: I remember the night you estimated how many times I told you I loved you./I remember how you loved peonies, like the peonies I planted on your grave. From the first poem to the last, Lupinetti held me in his electric language thrall, with his unforgettable, impeccably crafted imagery where every single end line was a gut punch.

—Pamela Uschuk, author of Refugee and Crazy Love, American Book Award

Crafting lived experience into thoughtful, compelling art is one of the things a poet can do, and exactly what Mark Lupinetti does in The Pronunciation Part. The poems in this chapbook are narrative driven, cohesive and have a tight-fisted muscularity to them, not unlike the human heart. Lupinetti’s work makes the political intricately personal and thoroughly felt.

—Elizabeth Jacobson author of Not into the Blossoms and Not into the Air

These poems align the practices of medicine and the lyric imagination, exploring the complexities, limits and revelations of both getting it right and getting it wrong. Only a perspective hard-won from decades in the operating room, and in the mind’s operating room, could devastate and console with passages like the only clue the patient has/ about the quality of the surgery/ is how well you closed the skin, as in “Surgery Interns Know the Rules.” I admire this excellent collection of poems.

—Ed Skoog, author of Mister Skylight, Rough Day and Travelers Leaving for the City

About the Author

Flavian Mark Lupinetti, a Pushcart nominated poet, fiction writer, and cardiac surgeon, received his MFA from the Vermont College of Fine Arts. He received first place awards in the 2023 Social Justice Poetry Contest sponsored by Sport Literate and the 2014 Betsy Sholl Poetry Award sponsored by Words and Images. His creative writing has appeared in Bellevue Literary Review, Cutthroat, december, Redivider, ZYZZYVA, and other publications, and his contributions to the scientific literature include more than 90 peer-reviewed papers, research studies, and monographs. A native of West Virginia, Mark now lives in New Mexico.

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Ice Cream for Lunch: A Grandparents Handbook

by Laura Foley

Editor’s Choice, The Poetry Box Chapbook Prize 2024

This sage grandparent’s tale begins atypically, with the birth of a special needs first grandchild, with learning to set aside anxiety, accept what is and practice gratitude, “learning to love/in sun and shade,/and finding grace.” The poems make delicious meals of the joys of grandparenting, the sweetness and humor as well as the wisdom gained, the ways grandparents can learn to relax and enjoy each moment, “singing/Let It Go, Let It Go,” with grandchildren, “knowing/both joy and sorrow are holy.”

Enjoy the video of Laura Reading from the Book:

Early Praise:

Reading Ice Cream for Lunch: A Grandparents Handbook transported me to a place of calm, a place of serenity, a place of awe. For the better part of a morning (for as soon as I finished the book, I read it again) I forgot about our troubled and troubling world and instead, remembered what a holy gift it is to spend time with those we love, especially children. Young Evelyn sees the best in everyone, teaches us to listen to the chairs, tells us when a beloved dog dies, Alys has just gone home—her old one and proclaims Grandma, you’re beautiful. Without being cloying, Laura Foley uses just the right details to capture a grandmother’s love of her three unique and remarkable grandchildren. I was absolutely charmed by this book.

—Lesléa Newman, author of I Carry My Mother and I Wish My Father

Laura Foley once again, and in the unwavering clarity we have come to expect from her poetry, teaches us how to navigate life—but this time, in the companionship of Evelyn, Eleanor and Milo. At once funny, tender, wise and generous, Foley translates the worlds of her grandchildren, inviting us to recognize Santa in the garbage truck driver, the Queen in the white-haired lady on the park bench, even the magnificence of our own aging bodies… The most important thing I learn from my granddaughter, Foley writes, is I’m here! I’m here! I’m here!

—Brooke Herter James, winner of the Fish Poetry Prize

In Ice Cream for Lunch: A Grandparents Handbook—a cornucopia of tenderness and delight in gentle, quiet poems—Laura Foley manages to convey the delicious sweetness and poignancy of grandparenthood without ever surrendering to the temptation to be maudlin or cloying. She knows both joy and sorrow are holy, expressing a deep reverence for the lives and lived experience of her young grandchildren in direct, spare language; she is always steeped in the wonder I don’t let go. Finally, she offers the reader the freedom to loose the ribbons of ourselves to the spirit of the wind. Those who have grandchildren will resonate with the newness, the pleasure, and the ache inherent in that relationship; those who do not will wish they did.

—James K. Zimmerman, author of The Further Adventures of Zen Patriarch Dōgen

There’s nothing sticky-sweet in this spirited collection of poems exploring one grandmother’s relationship with her grandchildren as they dance and sing, climb hills, feast on mussels, or simply sit together side by side, with eyes closed, instructing each other. Willing to follow wherever the joyous curiosity and imagination of the child may lead, the poet also acknowledges the inner feelings of sadness and longing that well up at times beneath the surface— yet finds her way back to the present moment, knowing both joy and sorrow are holy.

          The many adventures of this lively bunch will wake in the reader a palpable joy, while the haunting poem “Sacred Space” embodies an overarching sense of comfort and safety in the close love and light of family.  This book is a gem—completely whole from start to finish in its wisdom, its humor, and the gift of openness—every word an embrace of the world as it is.

—Clyde Watson, author of Father Fox’s Pennyrhymes

About the Author

Laura Foley is the author of ten previous poetry books, most recently, Sledding the Valley of the Shadow. Her book Why I Never Finished My Dissertation received a starred Kirkus Review and an Eric Hoffer Award. She has won a Narrative Magazine Poetry Prize, The Common Good Books Poetry Prize, Atlanta Review’s Grand Prize and others. Her work has been included in many journals including: Alaska Quarterly, Valparaiso, Poetry Society London, Atlanta Review, Poetry of Presence: An Anthology of Mindfulness Poems, and How to Love the World: Poems of Gratitude and Hope. She lives on the steep banks of the Connecticut River in New Hampshire, and romps with the grandchildren as often as possible.

Learn more at lauradaviesfoley.com

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by Allison Thorpe

Designer’s Choice, The Poetry Box Chapbook Prize 2024

A Girl, Her Slipper, and Yesterday’s Rainbow explores escape and memory. Discovering no Cinderella footwear in the alcoholic environment of growing up, a girl runs off to the freestyle chaos of the 1970s before seeking asylum in quiet country living. After her husband’s death, she retreats to the city but discovers you can’t hide from memories. With acceptance and humor, these poetic musings paint experiences familiar to so many.

Enjoy the video of Allison Reading from the Book:

Early Praise:

In this evocative collection, Kentucky poet Allison Thorpe weaves a tapestry of memory, changing place, and belonging. With a keen eye for detail and a voice that resonates in both its tenderness and rebellion, Thorpe invites readers through the field of my history, yesterday’s rainbow a riot of weeds.

Thorpe’s poetry vibrates with the tension between roots and developing wings, spanning rural landscapes and city environs. Her vivid language brings to life a place where memories rise like party balloons, a testament to the power of place in shaping identity and the pull between “home” and our wider worlds. Her verses craft a poignant exploration of what it means to leave, to stay, and the unseen forces that shape our perceptions of place and self, offering a lyrical reflection on the complexities of longing and becoming, times where each night we charted the stars with our farewells.

—Shaun Turner, poet and editor

The poems in Allison Thorpe’s brilliant, new chapbook literally bring the reader to a point that teeters the fluid and the frozen. A Girl, Her Slipper, and Yesterday’s Rainbow balances on the palpable tension between a life tethered to family and its messiness and the untethered life of free-spirited and unpredictable adventure, bringing the book its energy and its dramatic core. In the poems, the speaker comes of age through discovery, journeying from thoughts of herself as street clutter to the experience of thrills mothers warned about and on to the maturity of feeling happy just to be a knobbly goddess. In these poems, Thorpe keeps us guessing by changing from her usual lyrical countryside venue to a kaleidoscope of settings and poetic forms. The surprising anecdotes, the inventive language, the speaker’s honesty, all these give these poems an almost supernatural quality, balancing the reader on the virtual tightrope of life.

—Nancy K. Jentsch, author of Between the Rows

Through A Girl, Her Slipper, and Yesterday’s Rainbow, we take a journey alongside a girl who is the daughter of a father who was captain of the drink/A flagging ship in a whiskey sea and a mother who snuck Newports and danced to Billie Holliday with arms fluid as liquid persuasion. I say “alongside,” but I felt as if I was inside of this girl—that I was this girl—so visceral is the portrait created by poet Allison Thorpe. A girl, simple as a sidewalk, who is lured to leave the dark things congregating within her Tenth Avenue Normal and head west with a girl with ears slathered in dazzling dots. A girl who forgot the language of snow as Arizona sun converted/ the crust from my northern bone / into orange smoothies and halter tops—who becomes a woman who loves/ to stare into the sky/ as if it were an oracle. Throughout this stunning collection, Thorpe turns to nature to make sense of the girl’s world. Even as the girl-turned-woman moves to the city and tries on different “slippers” (Jimmy Choos), she can’t resist waving to a “suspicion of crows” (strutting the pigeon roof like princes) from her urban balcony, just in case. Thorpe’s masterful use of the organic transforms the inexplicable—but highly relatable—into something I could touch and, more importantly, feel deeply.

 —Missy Brownson, author of Hush Candy

About the Author

Sylvia Ahrens (writing as Allison Thorpe) grew up on the shores of Lake Michigan. After adventuring around the country, she and her husband settled at the end of a lovely dirt road in Kentucky where they built their own home of natural stone and wood, raised a family and an organic garden, and reveled in bird song for almost four decades. Along the way, she earned degrees in English Literature, Creative Writing, and Women’s Studies. Her books include six collections of poetry and a series of cozy mysteries.

Inspirations include the growly screams of Janis Joplin, the enduring courage of Aung San Suu Kyi, the complex melodies of Bela Fleck, and the beautiful finality of the Oxford Comma. She works as a writing mentor at The Carnegie Center for Literacy and Learning, loves lilacs, yearns to be a poker star, and lives in Lexington, Kentucky.

Learn more at allisonthorpe.com

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by James K. Zimmerman

Finalist in The Poetry Box Chapbook Prize, 2023

The poems in The Further Adventures of Zen Patriarch Dōgen were inspired by the life and teachings of Dōgen Zenji, a thirteenth-century Japanese monk credited with bringing Chan Buddhism to Japan and founding the Sōto school of Zen. The writing is founded upon the presumed experience and perspective Dōgen would have if he were alive today. Essential Buddhist concepts of bare attention, full presence, impermanence, no-self, and the path to liberation from suffering play out through the “eyes of a river” – in a self-driving car, a dentist’s chair, the water’s edge, the contemplation of circularity. In a world of bare attention and full presence, there are no words; inherent in these poems is the paradox of attempting to express this experience through the medium of language.

Enjoy a Video of James Reading from the Book:

Early Praise for The Further Adventures of Zen Patriarch Dōgen:

While “wanting you to not know/ anyone/ has been/ here/ at all,” James K. Zimmerman, in the persona of Dōgen Zenji, offers the reader a glimpse of enlightenment as embodied presence in situations taken, sometimes humorously, from our contemporary world. The Further Adventures of Zen Patriarch Dōgen elucidates the intricacies of Zen philosophy in poems spare as “a winterbreath of silence” and lush as “the rhythm/ of hands,/ gullwing,/ flutter/ of beachplum/ blossoms.” Reader, you will find here wisdom, and its sister, compassion.

—Gillian Cummings, author of The Owl Was a Baker’s Daughter

As I sit now in the now with James K. Zimmerman’s book of luminous meditative poems, The Further Adventures of Zen Patriarch Dōgen, I find myself deeply touched by their silence and their music. Each poem embodies Buddhist teachings: bare attention, no-self, impermanence, and so much more. The poet holds moments of life in his open hands, sings them and lifts them beyond words, bringing me to deepest stillness. I treasure this unique book and shall keep it close to my meditation seat and my heart.

—Judith S. Schmidt, Ph.D, author of In the Garden of Love and Loss

In The Further Adventures of Zen Patriarch Dōgen, James K. Zimmerman takes us inside the world of emptiness of Zen practice and reveals that it is teeming with life: frog ponds, katydids, and wrens; crystals of melting ice. Zimmerman’s Dōgen encounters the modern world of the self-driving car and the dentist chair, imagines the process of frying an egg, listens to the aye yamma hew of his monkey mind. Silence harbors birdsong, sirens, sneezes. The practitioner struggles, returns, returns yet again—and is suddenly aware of something indescribable: the sound of waking up. Nouns fall upon us like snowflakes and melt away. A slow and attentive reading of this spare collection offers a taste of the continuity of motion found in stillness—an endless becoming that moves inevitably like “cormorants to chum.”

—Kathryn Weld, author of Afterimage and Waking Light

In poems both playful and profound, James K. Zimmerman interrogates what it means to be a “human doing,” both in body and mind. Literally enacting on the page cycles of thought, cycles of nature, cycles of life and death, Zimmerman taps into the beauty, strangeness, difficulty, and promise of the meditative life. While he deals with the abstractions of self and mind, creation is never far from his view and there are stunning moments of beauty like the “one shooting star across/ the velvet skin of midnight” that bring the fullness of the world to his work. Just as “…a thought sings in (silence),” I thought about these poems long after reading them.

— Lynn Schmeidler, author of History of Gone and Half-Lives

About the Author

James K. Zimmerman is an award-winning, neurodivergent writer, frequently a Pushcart Prize nominee. His poetry appears in Atlanta Review, Carolina Quarterly, Chautauqua, december, Folio, Lumina, Nimrod, Pleiades, Rattle, and Salt, among many other publications, and is also featured on websites such as The Poetry Foundation, American Life in Poetry, and Vallum. He is the author of “Little Miracles” (Passager Books) and “Family Cookout” (Comstock Press Books), winner of the Jessie Bryce Niles Prize. He resides at the crepuscular edge between this universe and the one next door, often with one foot in each, and, in his spare time, cultivates roses, orchids, and paradoxical questions.

He can be contacted at https://jameskzimmerman.net

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by Sue Fagalde Lick

Blue Chip Stamp Guitar is a love story—about Sue and her guitar It starts with a cheap guitar the poet’s mother bought with Blue Chip stamps and continues through her life, outlasting jobs, marriages, and deaths. A guitar is just a wooden box with six strings strung from one end to another, but in the musician’s hands, it becomes music and magic, companion and comfort. These backstage poems describe the teenager dreaming of fame, the young adult dealing with sex and stage fright, and the seasoned performer lugging gear and singing through bad weather, hecklers, sore throats and sore fingers. At the beginning and the end, she plays alone, feeling the calluses on her fingertips as she sends music into the air. These poems will appeal to all music lovers, especially the musicians who share that special bond with their instruments.

Enjoy a Video of Sue Reading from the Book:

Early Praise for Blue Chip Stamp Guitar:

Robert Frost states that the final poem in a book is the book itself, and this holds true for Sue Fagalde Lick’s book of poems where each poem is a story and the book itself comprises a story too of her early life as an emerging singer/songwriter, guitarist and performer. We follow her and her first guitar through hints of a short-lived first marriage, one or two stalled relationships with unworthy boyfriends and finally a longer, good marriage which ends tragically. Her guitar accompanies her throughout and may go out of tune or need new strings but it never fails her. These poems are accessible, unwavering, and painful in their honesty. There is no pretention or affectation in this work, just solid storytelling, and poetic craft at its best. Here is a rich life, bittersweet, at times vulnerable yet underneath is a quality of humility with fierce independence in the life and the poetry, but we also know this will not be the end of the story.

—Dave Mehler, editor of Triggerfish Critical Review, author of Roadworthy

In Blue Chip Stamp Guitar, Sue Fagalde Lick shares a love story between a woman and music that “sound[s] like fireworks on an ordinary night, / like ice cream sundaes and kisses that make you swoon.” We follow the “squeaky-voiced kid with the cheap guitar” as she matures into a love-worn woman who learns that “Fingers exposed,/easily wounded, / are hard to heal.” Her line “I returned, restrung, and tried again” speaks to her resilience in life and in music. This collection takes the reader into the “raw, unpolished edges, dust, and glue, / the underbelly of a cathedral,” of a life lived in pursuit of music and love finally found in Fred, the husband/roadie to whom the book is dedicated. By the end of this intimate collection, you’ll be singing, “Let’s play another memory.”

—Lacie Semenovich, author of Community, Not Market, and Legacies.

In this resonant collection, memory is music and reflection its instrument. We accompany a young girl through the epic arc of a lifetime in which her beloved guitar is witness, ballast, and protagonist. We are initiated into the great ache of desire and tenderness as each poem strums love and loss, sovereignty and transcendence through us. We see how the constants in life punctuate the evolution of our true music. The pretty voice deepens to an unexpected beauty. We pour it into the air, even when there is nothing left to give. We resurrect from the velvet case the ballast of memory. We conjure the self we have been as we sing the song we are becoming.

Sage Cohen, author of Writing the Life Poetic and Fierce on the Page

“Every song is new” says poet Sue Lick, and we lean in to listen as each piece in this collection sings of love and loss and exploration and becoming. In Blue Chip Stamp Guitar, Lick invites us into her long-term relationship with music, her varied relationships with men, with managers, with audiences and lovers and always, like a solid melody in the midst of all this counterpoint, her relationship with herself. Lick says, “I harmonize with my younger self,” and here, through writing both fearless and gentle, we receive the gift of a voice that “holds every song that I have lived.”

—Bethany Lee, author of The Breath Between and Etude for Belonging,
poetry editor of Untold Volumes

About the Author

Sue Fagalde Lick escaped life as a Silicon Valley journalist to write, sing, and wander the beaches and forests of the Oregon coast. Her publications include The Widow at the Piano: Poems by a Distracted Catholic, Gravel Road Ahead, and the forthcoming collection Dining Al Fresco with My Dog, along with poems in Cirque, Rattle, The MacGuffin, Sage Soup, Cloudbank, New Letters, The American Journal of Poetry, and other literary journals. In addition to performing both poetry and music as much as possible, Sue is a Catholic music minister, playing piano and guitar for Masses, funerals, potlucks, and other festivities. She travels with a notebook and sheet music in one hand and a guitar in the other and has learned that doesn’t leave much room in the trunk for clothing, strangers ask questions when you walk in with a guitar, and everything is better with music.

Learn more about Sue at https://www.suelick.com.

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by Penelope Scambly Schott

These delightful and conversational poems explore the concept of gOD, with a sense of humor, a childlike wonder, a reverence for the natural world, and a look in the mirror.

Enjoy a Video of Penelope Reading from the Book:

Penelope Scambly Schott — A Featured Poet on The Poetry Box LIVE (Jan 2024)

Early Praise for gOD: A Respectfully Divergent Testament:

Penelope Scambly Schott has captured a marvelously witty glimpse of the divinity that resides within us all: a self-awareness creating universes and loving every tiniest bit, laughing and crying over our human foibles and destructive tendencies. With brilliant use of poetic form and license, the author invites us to really examine our understanding of the Source of all and the consequences of our own actions. This is a must-read for anyone who is at one of those points of asking, “What’s it all about, anyway?”

—Reverend Dr. Ruth L. Miller, author of Unveiling your Hidden Power and Uncommon Prayer

Penelope Scambly Schott spins out a powerful picture of the Deity in gOD: A respectfully Divergent Testament. The “whole other” mystery who creates the universe turns out to be totally relatable, showing up in a series of conversational poems, revealing a deep caring about all of creation and its creatures. Schott’s testimony is indeed respectful and not so divergent that I can’t give it my own respectful “Amen!”

—Karl Vercouteren, United Church of Christ pastor, retired

About the Author

Penelope Scambly Schott lives in the small town of Dufur, Oregon (population: 635). She has published several books of poems and is a past recipient of the Oregon Book Award for Poetry. Penelope was raised to believe that every religion is a folk custom and that each one should be respected. Her own faith practice is climbing Dufur hill where, from the top on clear days, she can see five mountains. She and the dog do this daily; on Sundays her husband accompanies them.

Previous chapbooks published by The Poetry Box include Sophia and Mister Walter Whitman and November Quilt.

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by Emily-Sue Sloane

These poems are a meditation on the myriad divisions and inequities we face, both personally and as a society. In Disconnects and Other Broken Threads, award-winning poet Emily-Sue Sloane pulls on many of the fraying threads that divide us and gently weaves them with striking imagery to inspire connections through hope and, at times, humor.

Enjoy a Video of Emily-Sue Reading from the Book:

Early Praise for Disconnects and Other Broken Threads:

In Emily-Sue Sloane’s powerful new chapbook, Disconnects and Other Broken Threads, the poems’ directness about suffering, loss and injustice tears at our hearts and asks us to recognize what needs healing or that we must grieve bravely what may never be healed. Sloane sees, feels and speaks with honesty that will not accept the glib comfort of pretense. In “A Daughter’s Question,” she says of the speaker’s mother: She never said / and I never thought to ask / until it was too late / what made her so angry. The poem reaches out with a broken heart. It asks us to open ours. Sloane suggests again and again, with rage, regret, humor, irony and anger: This is what it takes to be alive.

—Scudder Parker, poet and author of Safe as Lightning

Reading these poems is like microdosing on the big, unwieldy emotions we may struggle to put into words late at night around a campfire, looking up at the stars. Like a gardener cultivating a bonsai tree, Emily-Sue Sloane takes big, wild concepts like mortality, impotent rage, grief and regret and presents them to us as stark small snapshots of everyday life. The overwhelming world pulls back a little as these words gently take our hands and say, I know. I know. Me too.

—Rorie Kelly, singer/songwriter, Shadow Work (album)

In Disconnects and Other Broken Threads, Emily-Sue Sloane protests the ills of society which destroy people and ideals, the personal failings which lead to broken lives and the eternal human lament upon the death of beloved persons. Indignant of social injustices, she deconstructs the makeup of contemporary life, giving a thundering voice to the voiceless (“Hollow-Eyed Hunger,” “Freedom Canceled,” “Undone”).

In spite of the wonderfully tantalizing title, the poet weaves subtle hidden connections—how wonderful or ironic that in this chapbook’s very first poem, “Hard-Wood Wisdom,” the lyric voice is that of an oak tree’s bark speaking in first person. The connection is unmistakable. Compassion, love, ideals and dreams underlie the brokenness. Throughout, the reader will encounter and enjoy the music traditionally associated with poetry, but all too often absent today—alliteration, assonance, rhythm: Time shreds memories / into random wisps, / seaweed swept ashore / only to be snatched / back by rapacious tides.

—Tonia Leon, bilingual poet and translator,
author of My Beloved Chaos and Slow-Cooked Poetry/Poesia a fuego

About the Author

Emily-Sue Sloane is an award-winning poet who published her first full-length collection, We Are Beach Glass, in 2022. She has won first-place awards from Calling All Writers, the Long Island Fair, Nassau County Poet Laureate Society, Performance Poets Association and Princess Ronkonkoma Productions. Her poems have been published in numerous journals and anthologies, including Amethyst Review, The Avocet, Bards Against Hunger, Boston Literary Magazine, Corona, Evening Street Review, Front Porch Review, Long Island Sounds Anthology, Mobius Magazine, MockingHeart Review, Nassau County Poet Laureate Society Review, Panoplyzine, The Poeming Pigeon, PoetryBay, The RavensPerch and Shot Glass Journal. Sloane holds a B.A. in Anthropology from Vassar College and lives in Huntington Station, NY, with her wife, singer-songwriter Linda Sussman. In addition to writing, she enjoys reading, yoga and exploring her native Long Island’s natural beauty.

Learn more at https://EmilySueSloane.com.

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by Jarold Ramsey

Rushing in as a welcome surprise, these “new late poems” were mostly composed both late in the year and late in the author’s years. In Jump Straight Up, Jarold Ramsey versifies and pokes at an odd knot of themes:  encroaching age overtaking a long wonderful marriage; the delights of grandparenthood; awareness of our “interspecies” situation in the everyday natural order; the blessings and challenges of Central Oregon’s canyons, summits, and rangelands; and the intriguing ways the mostly horizontal left-to-right axis of our lives seems to shift in old age toward the vertical—“way down” (and out) but also “jump straight up” (in the imagination).

Enjoy a Video of Jarold Reading from the Book:

Jarold Ramsey — A Featured Poet on The Poetry Box LIVE (Nov 2023)

Early Praise for Jump Straight Up:

A descendent of strummers and pickers and fiddlers, the compiler and editor of the justly famous Coyote Was Going There (his anthology of Oregon Indian Literature), Jarold Ramsey now gives us this welcome book of “new late poems.” Whether it’s with elegies or tributes, Ramsey prompts us toward joy, urging us to “jump straight up, / free of the gravity of time.” Like Old Man Coyote “forever meddling with every polarity / he meets,” this wise, spirited, buoying voice defies dichotomies and denies divisions. When Ramsey asserts “On both sides, let there be a sharing of light,” we say a grateful “Amen.” Jarold Ramsey is an Oregon treasure.

—Paulann Petersen, author of My Kindred

Robert Frost remarked that a poem begins in delight and ends in wisdom. Jarold Ramsey’s “new late poems” abound with both. Walk these pages and meet the Happy Boy, the granddad standing on his head, elegies to friends and peers, love poems of long marriage, an ode to Satchmo conceived on a treadmill, an Aeolian harp, a curious wolf spider, and a slime mold that talks. Jump Straight Up is a buoyantly beautiful report from a Northwest master at age 85.

—John Daniel, author of Gifted and Lighted Distances: Four Seasons on Goodlow Rim

How often do you get to read poems firmly planted in a boyish elderhood, alive to past wonders yet rueful over losses rich and uncountable? This book delivers rich devotions to local antics and timeless questions, to natural wonders and human resonance with family neighbor, community character, companionable spider, meadowlark, coyote, amoeba. Long a student of story from Native myth to Shakespeare, Ramsey here delivers accounts of history, local lore, love for kinfolk, and yearning to understand the changes carrying us all along, richly in need of poems just like these.

—Kim Stafford, author of Singer Come from Afar

About the Author:

Jarold Ramsey grew up on a ranch north of Madras, Oregon, and earned a BA in English from the University of Oregon, and a PhD in English Literature from the University of Washington. For nearly thirty years he taught Shakespeare, Modern Poetry, Creative Writing, and Native American Literature at the University of Rochester in New York State. He and his wife Dorothy, also a teacher, have three children and five grandchildren. After retirement, in 2000 Jerry and Dorothy moved back to the family ranch in Central Oregon, where they assumed the roles of “Groundskeepers Emeriti.”

Ramsey’s books of poems include Love in an Earthquake (1973), Hand-Shadows (1989), and Thinking Like a Canyon: New and Selected Poems (2012). His collection of Northwest Indian traditional stories, Coyote Was Going There (1977) is still in print. Since moving back to Central Oregon, he has written two books on the region’s local history, New Era (2003) and Words Marked by a Place (2016), and he serves as Advisory Editor of the local history journal, THE AGATE. His poetry has won numerous awards, including the Lillian Fairchild Award and the Quarterly Review International Poetry Prize; and in 2017 he was given the C.E.S. Wood Award for Lifetime Achievement as an Oregon Writer.

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by Karen Gookin

These poems sketch a portrait of the author’s growing-up years in Montana surrounded by her wheat-farming father, a busy at-home mother, two older siblings, and a lonely grandmother. Moments of strife and stress return, but here you will also find joy and a great deal of love and gratitude for each other, for hard work, for the mystery of faith, for the land, and for what the land has endured. Her poems become the embodiment of memories—from eating brown sugar sandwiches, to skipping rocks on a Glacier Park lake, to wandering through dreams and the afterlife—as they offer family stories, tragedies, speculation, and attempts to understand it all.

Enjoy a Video of Karen Reading from the Book:

Karen Gookin — A Featured Poet on The Poetry Box LIVE (Nov 2023)

Early Praise for The Hills Around Are Dust and Light:

Like the speaker in “Dreaming the Houses,” the poems in Karen Gookin’s resonant debut collection walk the length of memory, not only revisiting but re-entering experience. In so doing, they defy time even as they forge a delicate truce with it, braiding memory, dream, and vision to render moments large and small that span five generations. The dust and light of the collection’s title filter through as loss and grace in these poems; the skipped stones of sixty years ago fly out again from the hand of the brother long gone, leaving their ripples. There is no dogma here, rather a steady gaze on mystery, a soul alert to it, and poems that come to us as gifts and guides.

—Catherine Abbey Hodges, author of In a Rind of Light

The poems in The Hills Around Are Dust and Light move by a quiet resolve to walk the length of memory, filtering the dust from the light. Karen Gookin’s voice is as reliable as your favorite shoes. The poems take deft twists and turns, not only to discover the miracles in a life so ordinary, but to comprehend the dust and those paths trouble takes. There are also poems of delight and satisfaction, all in a voice that is clear, precise, deeply felt, spiritual—an antidote to the confusions of our time.

—Joseph Powell, author of The Slow Subtraction ALS

Karen Gookin’s opening poem, “Etched,” invites the reader in with her theme of memory, which dazzles and takes us through the book on dark open wings. She crafts her lyrical poems with a tender nostalgia, some as sweet as the “Brown Sugar Sandwiches” of her childhood, while skillfully avoiding sentimentality. Images of houses lived in long ago, of treasured family members, of lunch dates, of secrets shared and kept close rustle as softly and poignantly as the Montana wheat fields with which she grew up. Gookin evinces a deep reverence for nature, for life and death, in poems like “What’s Left of Feathers.” As she shines a light on the dust of her memories, her words shimmer and take us with her, gladly.

—Susan Blair, author of What Remains of a Life
and editor of The Shrub-Steppe Poetry Journal

About the Author:

Karen Gookin grew up in the wheat farming country of North Central Montana. Daughter of a schoolteacher and a wheat farmer, and youngest of three children, she followed her siblings to the University of Montana, where she studied with Richard Hugo, Madeline DeFrees, and Jim Crumley. After graduation Karen taught high school English, then wrote for two newspapers. Later she and her husband Larry, whom she’d met in band at UM, moved to Oregon, then Washington, where they raised their daughters Jen and Amy. Karen received her MA in English and taught at Central Washington University for 30 years—20 of them playing flute and piccolo in the semi-professional Yakima Symphony Orchestra. Several of her poems have appeared in regional publications and online journals. Awards include the 2022 Tom Pier Prize for five themed poems in the Yakima Coffeehouse Poets chapbook. Always Montanans, Karen and Larry return to hike, camp, and stargaze in Glacier National Park every summer. She and her sister still farm their father’s land.

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by Amelia Díaz Ettinger

In Self Dissection, Amelia Díaz Ettinger takes an anatomical journey through the physical body to find answers about heritage, environment, family, and the nature of being an immigrant. The poems in these pages are written in a crisp pen like in an anatomical text, yet still allows the lyrical and metaphor to scrape the surfaces of the physical reality that is underneath, that ethereal something that is so often hard to embody.

Early Praise for Self Dissection:

Compelling, elegant, and remarkably honest, Self-Dissection is filled with stark, realistic poems that paint an intimate portrait of love, loss, family, identity, and the ever-present need for empathy. In these vibrant poems of nature and biography, Ettinger showcases a true talent for imbuing the smallest human details with authenticity and layered meanings. Each poem maps out the human heart, in all its internal conflicts, with precision and grace. Overflowing with vivid and accessible language, Self-Dissection is both intellectually stimulating and emotionally engaging.

—John Sibley Williams
author of Skyscrape and The Drowning House

In Self Dissection, the poet interrogates self, trying to grasp, both in corporeal and ethical terms, what being alive in a body means, intrinsically and in terms of external perceptions. There is a morbid satisfaction/ in this intimacy of self with self, but circumstances affect representation. I want somehow to fit/ in this olive brown skin, the speaker affirms, and, in another poem, this skin, with its five million pores bares me open. What does being The Other imply? Dull-faced immigrant’ carries a face of fear. In the end, Amelia Díaz Ettinger demonstrates how we assert our own meanings made manifest through our choices as we travel through life in our very personal bodies.

—A. Molotkov, author of Future Symptoms
and The Catalog of Broken Things

About the Author:

Born in Mexico and raised in Puerto Rico, Amelia Díaz Ettinger has written poems that reflect the struggle with identity often found in immigrants. She began writing poetry at age three, dictating poems out loud to the adults in her life who wrote them down for her. Amelia continued writing poems and short stores throughout her life, while working as a high school science and Spanish teacher. She is the author of Learning to Love a Western Sky, Speaking at a Time/Hablando a la Vez, and Fossils on a Red Flag.  Her poems, essays, and short stories have appeared in many journals, reviews, and anthologies. She recently earned an MFA in Creative Writing. Presently, she lives in Eastern Oregon with her partner, two dogs, two cats, and way too many chickens.

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