Dear Beautiful Gay

by Mary Warren Foulk

In 2021, Mary’s Erasures of My Coming Out (Letter) won The Poetry Box’s annual chapbook competition. A hybrid erasure collection, she attempted a redaction, flipping the meaning of her coming out letter and the act itself on its head. Mary was influenced by the work of Jen Bervin, Mary Ruefle, and Ángel García. 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 have done with that energy if it hadn’t been exerted on hiding, on passing, on fear, on denial? A few of the questions asked and answered.

Dear Beautiful Gay is a companion collection. Mary remained haunted by the letter and felt there was much more to say. In this current climate and political context, she decided to craft a love letter to her younger self, to her older brother Stephen, to her LGBTQ+ students, family and friends, to all the “Beautiful Gays” in her life. She felt an urgency and a need to celebrate their collective humanity. It is part tribute, part rallying cry.

Early Praise:

Proving herself to be a master of the erasure form, Mary Warren Foulk revisits the 2002 coming out letter she wrote to her mother, which she so beautifully mined for her award-winning collection Erasures of My Coming Out (Letter). Beginning as a tender message of support to her younger self, Dear Beautiful Gay becomes a celebration of— and rallying cry to— friends and family under threat by a society that persists in perceiving them as being outside “the norm.” To read this stunning collection is to experience new waves of meaning and emotion with each poem, not the least of which was my wish that Foulk’s mother (parents) had responded to her coming out with the same loving acceptance that Foulk offers every beautiful gay.

—Linda Ferguson, award-winning writer, author of Of the Forest and Not Me: Poems About Other Women

In a letter, Mary Warren Foulk began her plea to her mother to understand her committed relationship with a woman. A letter meant to open discussion. She looks again at the letter and sees words and phrases embedded, addresses to Dear Beautiful Gay. Her erasures reimagine the letter to yield affirmations, statements of support, and love. The content finds possible rejection but also acceptance and respect. Foulk advises not to be silent, hidden or denying. Dear Beautiful Gay is an exquisite work of erasure that ends with hope, love, and trust for every one of the beautiful gays.

—Tricia Knoll, poet of The Unknown Daughter and Wild Apples

About the Author

A graduate of Vermont College of Fine Arts, Mary Warren Foulk (she/her) has been published in The Hollins Critic, Palette Poetry, Fjords Review, Clockhouse, Silkworm, The Gay & Lesbian Review, and North American Review, among other publications. Her work also has appeared in Who’s Your Mama? The Unsung Voices of Women and Mothers (Soft Skull Press), (M)othering Anthology (Inanna Publications), and My Loves: A Digital Anthology of Queer Love Poems (Ghost City Press). She has two award-winning chapbooks, If I Could Write You a Happier Ending (dancing girl press) and Erasures of My Coming Out (Letter) (The Poetry Box). Her newest collection, The Show Must Go On (Fernwood Press, 2025), was a finalist for the 2021 Gival Press Poetry Award, and the Inlandia Institute’s 2022 Hillary Gravendyk Prize, and a semi-finalist for the Word Works’ 2022 Washington Prize.

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Homage to Kafka

by Laura Ann Reed

In contradistinction to the plethora of critical literature that analyzes the oeuvre of Franz Kafka, the poems in this chapbook echo and mirror Kafka’s own artist process by which his detached visual descriptions create a sense of the anonymity and alienation of the modern experience.

The individuals in Kafka’s novels and stories often become mired in or barred from their surroundings, or topographies while trying to resolve their conflicts.  The visual descriptions of topography are as integral to the story as are character and plot twists. Hence, the poems in Homage To Kafka employ metaphor, metonymy, cadence, image, assonance, and dissonance to portray the topographical textures in which the characters struggle to achieve both personal freedom and connection to the social order.

The poems have been paired with paintings by Paul Klee for the reason that there are strong artistic congruences between the two men. Whereas both Kafka and Klee have been misconstrued and mislabeled as “fantastical”—meaning portraying as real what does not, in reality, exist—nothing could be more erroneous. In fact both artists intuited certain very real, if disquieting, contradictions, anxieties, and ambiguities in modern life.  Including the oscillating processes of emancipation and isolation, as well as estrangement and connection that exist under the benign surface of society.

Unlike the critical literature about Franz Kafka, this chapbook is art in conversation with art.

Enjoy a video of Laura Ann reading from her new book:

Early Praise:

Like her subject and muse, Laura Ann Reed’s Homage to Kafka contains anxieties, prophecies, and “contagious organisms.” The poems understand the contradictions inside Kafka as a writer and person that made it possible for him to locate the contradictions of the world around him. Reed’s poems offer an unsettling insistence that readers face reality without blinking and without judgment. The poems get into Kafka’s atmosphere as well as the floors of his interior with fresh language and surprising insights.

—Sean Singer, author of Today in the Taxi

 

In Homage to Kafka, Laura Ann Reed uses the alchemy of lyric poetry to evoke the strangeness of Kafka’s world. In twelve masterful poems, Reed echoes Kafka’s own linguistic powers. The reader is alternately bewildered and illuminated by the cadence, diction, and musicality of her writing. An intangible quality that one finds in Kafka too, in which every word has its precise place even as that same word threatens to open into an abyss of contradictions is to be found in this profound and beautiful collection.

—James R. Martel, professor of political science/Kafka studies, University of San Francisco

 

About the Author

Laura Ann Reed was born in Berkeley, California, earned her B.A. from The University of California, Berkeley which included a year at l’Université Aix-Marseille in France, and lived most of her life in the San Francisco Bay Area before relocating to the Pacific Northwest with her husband, Grant Reed, in 2004. She earned a master’s degree in the performing arts and taught dance at the University of California before earning a master’s degree in clinical psychology. Her work has been published in seven anthologies, including Poetry of Presence Volume II and has appeared in a large number of journals in the United States, Great Britain and Ireland. Homage to Kafka is her second chapbook. She is a contributing editor with the Montréal Review. Learn more at: lauraannreed.net

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Andes

by John L. Miller

John Miller explores the inner travel of the mind and heart, particularly in the encounter of anticipating mourning. The poems as collected represent time, events and thoughts of realizing that the his mother was dying.

Enjoy a video of John reading from his new book:

Early Praise

As if John Miller were literally looking for home through this sweet group of poems, he writes in the opening line of the title poem, Green slopes all the way up when that close to the equator, places him where he has not yet set foot. And more from the same poem, I remember its blood collected into a paint bucket, Then two. My grandfather talked to the farmer, as if his memory is of a cerebral-felt reality. The short brisk important group of Poems, Andes, is a search for home, a memory of people, places imagined yet truly felt as his place and family of origin. The visceral quality of the works might as well be trading bones. I would come to touch  their longing responses of a transplanted family. John Miller was the product of immigrants, My mother once, while I listened to her and street traffic…on our linoleum floor, our Brooklyn apartment…in Spanish sembrar, to sow. And that John has done as an American poet living in Portland, Oregon, he makes us feel as he does.

Along with the loving dedication to John Miller’s parents, and the final poem in this heart-wrenching collection, “What a performance is,” and last line, Know you are never accidental, is what all people want to feel, which makes the work something that nearly everyone can relate to. The work is universal in that it is visceral, not only the works of the intellect, but deeply felt. We are lucky to have John Miller share them on the page.

—Diane Corson, author of Along the Fault of Me

What do we do in the face of profound loss? How do we navigate a world where only the present remains certain? In Andes, John Miller confronts these questions with unflinching courage, unveiling “the inestimable power of sorrow” through every carefully wrought line. The future/ may be thunder. But it invites me to/ prepare—among words,/ lift. Miller’s poetry offers a rare combination of raw honesty and transcendent beauty, creating a space for quiet reflection and shared humanity. Andes invites readers to explore the maps no one has made yet, as they chart their own journey toward meaning and resilience.

—M. L. Lyons, author of Songs from the Multiverse

When poets write a collection of poems, often they involve matters of the heart. With John Miller’s Andes, he has spoken from his heart. Traversing familial relationships, especially with his mother, continuing affinity for South America, and the life he lives here in America, Miller is certainly aware of matters regarding his heart. Andes is written with imposing attention given to syntax and maxim. Well-thought-of writers of verse are noted for such. Cheers to John Miller for sharing matters of his heart in Andes.

—Emmett Wheatfall, author of First Among Beautiful Stars

About the Author

John Miller’s poetry received category placement in the Oregon Poetry Association’s Fall 2023 contest. His chapbook Olympic was published by The Poetry Box in 2022, with other poetry featured at the Elisabeth Jones Art Center’s Festival of Feelings, and at the 2021 Connecticut Poetry Festival.  His poems have also been published in the anthology Opening the Gate, River Heron Review, Third Wednesday: A Literary & Arts Journal, Tiny Seed Literary Journal, West Trade Review and others.

John is a founder of Portland Ars Poetica, a literary poetry collective whose activities include generative workshops, a book club and performance events.  Born and raised in Brooklyn, New York, he’s lived in Portland, Oregon since 2012 and has a degree in English from Amherst College.

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Heart & Bones

by Sandra Rendig

Sandra Rendig shares the arc of her life through poetry. In Heart & Bones, the reader encounter poems that honor the heritage and proud independence of her Italian parents, the sights and sounds of her childhood home in Sonora, California, and a deep-rooted bond with her husband of 53 years. The natural world with its powerful energy and intriguing beauty weaves throughout her story as she bares the bittersweetness of her current winter season.

Sample Poem:

Woods Lake In July

Oppressive Central Valley heat
dampens skin all morning.
Time to escape, unleash dusty kayaks
hanging in the hot garage,
move to higher ground.
We find the coolness of mountains,
the peacefulness of water,
our kayaks slipping across Woods Lake,
clear, cold and rippled,
surrounded by red fir and white pine,
thickly scented green.
Snow- capped mountains pierce
the clear, blue sky.

Upon cracked and creviced backs
of hulky granite
delicate plants nestle and bloom.
On thin reed tips
mystical dragonflies balance,
lift, hover and zip
above the water’s breath.

The sway of tree tops
amid the silent stone,
the warm sun bouncing brilliant
points of light upon the water—

all this grandeur speaks
like a raven’s call,
urgent and exciting,
wild and wonderful—
rock to river,
mountain to tree,
you to me.
We glide through diamonds
as we paddle back to shore.

Enjoy a video of Sandra reading from her new book:

About the Author

Sandra Rendig was born and grew up in the 1950’s in the small town of Sonora, California, a rural land of hills, trees, and creeks.  The natural world remains a strong influence in her writing.  Her parents, children of Italian immigrants, have significantly influenced her writing.  Many of her poems honor their self-reliance and strong work ethic.  She often writes about the beauty and emotional impact of the changing seasons.  Now that she is 78 years old, several of the poems reflect the passing of her own seasons.

After a 30 year career teaching young children (preschool – 4^th grade), she has been writing poetry for self-exploration, joy and solace.

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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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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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White Sail at Midnight

by Ginny Lowe Connors

In Maggie Smith’s well-known poem “Good Bones,” the speaker claims “The world is at least fifty percent terrible…” And although some of the poems in Ginny Lowe Connors’ White Sail at Midnight do confront the terrible, they do so in balance with poetry that takes the reader on an exploration of mystery and beauty in this world we inhabit. Follow with Connors on her quest to determine what may be preserved as time passes, as these poems of mortality call out to the eternal.

Enjoy a Video of Ginny reading from the book:

Early Praise for White Sail at Midnight:

White Sail at Midnight is a quietly comprehensive book of poems.  Connors’ adept use of language and syntax shifts natural paradigms and teases out the extraordinary in the everyday: the sky becomes a “bowl of blue,” and “bittersweet” becomes a double entendre of nightshade and sorrow.  Whether rendering meditation on the poignantly perplexing beauty of impermanence, measuring time and passage in pastoral images, or considering her worldview through the lens of the Connecticut landscape, each poem is startling and fresh in its method and presentation.

—Antoinette Brim-Bell,  Connecticut State Poet Laureate

A quality of attentive wonder charges and characterizes the beautifully crafted, thought-provoking poems in Ginny Connors’s White Sail at Midnight. Through these meditations about personal experiences, relationships, and the lives of others, Connors explores the reality and mystery of existing in this world and universe. Acknowledging that “we are so alone” and that “suffering and grief are guaranteed,” the poet shows a life lived “grateful and terrified”—one that soberly faces “you have to figure out / which way to go, and sometimes you guess wrong,” and at the same time, one that is awed by the world’s “restless beauty…trying to take hold,” and “mortality calling out to the eternal.” Here is the earnest and candid work of a seasoned poet.

—Aaron Caycedo-Kimura, Author of Common Grace

. . . this jeweled mosaic, shivering slightly/ in the breeze that wafts up from the lake. . .

Connors is describing an orb spider’s web, the beads of rain on it shimmering in windblown sunlight, but the image serves as an apt emblem for this collection of poems about being mortal in a mortal world.  Finely woven, out in the open, Ginny Lowe Connors’ poems catch the momentary light and shadow of transformations and survivals, sorrows and healings. Connors meets the world, “this unfathomable wildness,” with gratitude, terror, and wonder.  Her poems are finely observed, deeply felt, offered to us with a quiet generosity. What can we do but meet them with a deep bow?

—Margaret Gibson, Connecticut Poet Laureate Emerita, author of The Glass Globe

About the Author

Ginny Lowe Connors is the author of five previous poetry collections, the most recent of which is Without Goodbyes: From Puritan Deerfield to Mohawk Kahnawake (Turning Point, 2021). Among her awards are the Sunken Garden Poetry Prize, Atlanta Review’s Grand Prize, and the Founders Award, sponsored by the National Federation of State Poetry Societies. She was named “Poet of the Year” by NEATE (New England Association of Teachers of English). In 2018 she was named the winner of Passager’s annual Poetry Contest.  Essays and book reviews she’s written have appeared in such publications as the Hartford Courant, Baltimore Review, New York Journal of Books, Switchback, and North American Review. In 2023 Connors was Writer in Residence at Trail Wood, former home of naturalist Edwin Way Teale. She holds an MFA in poetry from Vermont College of Fine Arts. As publisher of her own press, Grayson Books, Connors has edited a number of poetry anthologies, including Forgotten Women: A Tribute in Poetry. A Board Member of the Connecticut Poetry Society, she is co-editor of Connecticut River Review.

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A Journal of Poetry & Art

The final issue of The Poeming Pigeon: A Journal of Poetry & Art (Issue #14) includes poetry and artwork by 76 poets/artists from around the globe.

Cover Design by Robert R. Sanders, featuring the drawing “Vacant” by artist Zoe Huot-Link of Shoreview, Minnesota.

Contributing Artists:

Amit, Jan Baross, Kateryna Bortsova, Dale Champlin, Margaret Chula, Gerburg Garmann, Tim Gillespie, Zoe Huot-Link, Abigail Ella Johnson, Michelle Kogan, Robb Kunz, Christopher Luna, Jone Rush MacCulloch, Janet Manalo, Veronica Michalowski, Donald Patten, Jennifer Pratt-Walter, Robert R. Sanders, Willa Schneberg, Marilyn Stablein, Jennifer Weigel, Elaine Franz Witten

Contributing Poets:

Deborah Akers, Pamela R. Anderson-Bartholet, Shawn Aveningo Sanders, Lana Hechtman Ayers, Rachel Barton, Ruth Bavetta, David Belmont, Suzanne Bruce, B. J. Buckley, Cathy Cain, Dale Champlin, Margaret Chula, Kris Demien, Amelia Díaz Ettinger, Sandra Dipasqua, Sara Eddy, Ann Farley, Linda Ferguson, Holly Fine, Nancy Flynn, Tim Gillespie, Karen Gookin, Keri Hakan, Suzy Harris, Mary Beth Hines, Ann Howells, Marilyn Johnston, J.I. Kleinberg, Tricia Knoll, Kim Peter Kovac, Jim Kraus, Susan Landgraf, Eric le Fatte, Sherri Levine, Dan Liberthson, Adria Libolt, Sue Fagalde Lick, Cynthia Linville , Betsy Mars, Carolyn Martin, M. F. McAuliffe, Jade Rosina McCutcheon, Karla Linn Merrifield, Judith H. Montgomery, Marjorie Moorhead, Cristina M. R. Norcross, Dayle Olson, Francis Opila, Gus Peterson, Jennifer Pratt-Walter, Lisa Rhoades, JoAnna Scandiffio, Willa Schneberg, Penelope Scambly Schott, Leah Stenson, Doug Stone, Stephanie Striffler, Climbing Sun, Julene Tripp Weaver

A Few Sample Pages:

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Life in No Ordinary Time

by Laurel Feigenbaum

While the ninety-six-year-old poet’s personal life and that of her family remains stable, the world suffers increasing turmoil—be it war, displacement, or threats to our democracy. Laurel Feigenbaum’s poems of time and place reflect her observations, thoughts, feelings, and reactions to the crosscurrents of events over the recent decade. Politics, advancing technology, climate change, a lingering virus, family and aging are all topics she tackles in Life in No Ordinary Time with her trademark wit and poetic voice.

Early Praise for Life in No Ordinary Time:

Wildfires and calving glaciers, war mongers, cryptocurrency, woke culture, unchecked technocracy, a demented demagogue, the surveillance state, the rich getting richer and the poor getting poorer—the dreary earmarks of our zeitgeist seem endless. Laurel Feigenbaum takes them on with the perspicacity of her 96 years on earth and her trademark wit, dry as a three-olive martini.

Detailing the global mishigas, she remarks, as if she were Issa’s shadow, “Meanwhile—I’m busy battling ants in my kitchen.” Regarding genetic engineering: “Despite my unease…/ at least there’ll be chocolate.” She imagines her time here as “a practice life,” preparing her to “scat like Ella,” “Get down and dirty with Etta,” and even take on a new lover, all in the next life. Lucky for us, we don’t have to wait that long to see Laurel in action. Her Life in No Ordinary Time is a savvy, bracing, and thankfully entertaining antidote to our time, our place.

—Thomas Centolella, author of Almost Human

About the Author

Laurel Feigenbaum was born and raised in San Francisco and Beverly Hills. She credits her interest in poetry to Wordsworth and her father who loved word play, and often quoted lines he admired. After careers in education and business, in her early eighties she gathered courage to begin writing. Poetry is her way of exploring and coping with the often-absurd world in which we live and the inevitable changes that come. Matriarch of her family now, she is the mother of three, grandmother of seven, and great-grandmother of eight. Author of The Daily Absurd (2015) and Matrimony (The Poetry Box, 2020), her most recent work can be found in The Amsterdam Quarterly and The Marin Poetry Center Anthology. She can be heard reading her poetry on Voetica.com.

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The Beautiful One’s Ark

by Sher A. Schwartz

A lyric collection of poetry exploring contemporary rural/agrarian life in Eastern Oregon. These poems are rooted in place and season. They explore loss, change, transformation, and inter-species sharing. Celebrating sound and expressing a variety of poetic forms, Schwartz’s poems reveal the poet’s life with hunting dogs, donkeys, birds, and the ever-changing environment.

BONUS: Each printed book will include a QR-Code for access to enjoy recordings of Sher reading select poems from the collection. 

Enjoy a Video of Sher reading from the book:

Early Praise for The Beautiful One’s Ark:

Eastern Oregon is a region often over-looked by the rest of the state, its austere, dramatic terrain far removed from the easy green world to the west. Schwartz stands as its advocate and caregiver. Here is a poet who has clearly taken the time to attend to the living world around her, its prairie and drylands, wide-open horizon and wild creatures. This is a collection written with musical lyricism by someone who understands that healing the land heals us as well.

—Caroline Boutard, author of Each Leaf Singing

From her 200-acre rewilding project near the Columbia River comes the bountiful inspiration for Schwartz’s first collection. The poetry is filled with transformations, of myth, of landscape, of species, relationships, and between the domestic and the wild.

The poet has an eye for the illuminating detail, which she sets to a music all her own, “the lower meadow/ sober purple oboe/ sprays hoarfrost solos,” and in the persona poem, “Wolf Eye,” “we lock eye to eye/ The dog, the girl/ Her brown eye, my golden/ Twining curls and silver tipped fur/ But, I burn…”

She sings of an altered climate’s collision with the world she cherishes and has nurtured. The collection holds a graceful, often witty, call for humans to realize their interconnectedness with nature, all of us sharing space on this fragile ark.

—Kim Hamilton, author of Calling Through Water and Visitation

Every reader will want to be aboard The Beautiful One’s Ark as Noah’s wife saves a drowning dragonfly. This whole collection constitutes a love song to the writer’s husband, their farm, and all the animals on that farm – including some they don’t want. Sher Schwartz celebrates dancing donkeys, dogs in the bed, even the mouse in the outhouse and the feline perpetrator of pigeon murder. Praise be to the country life and a poet who so gracefully puts it into words.

—Penelope Scambly Schott, author of Waving Fly Swatters at Angels

About the Author

Sher A. Schwartz is a published essayist, poet, old time fiddle musician, singer, and retired professor. She was born in Georgia, raised in Virginia, and spent many summers in rural West Virginia with her mother’s family. Her vocal training, beginning at twelve, and later rhythm guitar playing in an old-time string band laid the foundation for the musicality in Schwartz’s poetry. Schwartz has written country and mountain folk songs and composed classical hymns. She lived for many years in a cabin on the beach in Alaska while teaching in the humanities department at the University of Alaska in Ketchikan. Her band Red Hoochie and the Tomcods played at festivals and events around Southeast Alaska.

In 2011, she retired from academic life and moved to Eastern Oregon, where she’s trained and competed with her hunting dogs, and helped restore two hundred acres on an old farm to native grasslands and pollinator plants. Schwartz has continued to perform with the old-timey Sugar Hill Band throughout the Columbia River Gorge though she writes more poetry these days than songs and essays.

You can hear Sher Schwartz voice poems from many different poets, including her own, at her website: sherpoetry.com

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