Bento by the Sea

by Sue Fagalde Lick

Food is more than fuel for our bodies. It can be the milk that spills, the bento bowl that heals, the popovers flavored with grief, or the soup in which one sees the truth. Sue Fagalde Lick’s poems in Bento by the Sea look at food in all these ways and more.

In the title poem, two widows find comfort in a simple takeout supper they eat while watching the sun set over the Pacific Ocean and contemplating how one goes on alone. In “Ripe,” a daughter caring for her aging father enjoys a ripe orange from the tree she gave him as a tiny plant on Father’s Day many years earlier. In “Charlie’s Dinner,” an elderly widower living in a nursing home takes delight in having someone cook for him.

Early Praise

The opening poems in Sue Fagalde Lick’s charming chapbook engage in a contemporary debate most readers can identify with: what constitutes a healthy diet. Although veggie burgers have replaced baloney sandwiches, the narrator wonders: given constantly shifting guidelines, what will our children’s children eat when today’s repasts are deemed unsound? (“Sacrilege”). However, Lick considers that it is not what just what we eat that’s essential to good health, but it’s having someone to share a meal with. She is a master at capturing the loneliness experienced by those who have lost a spouse when what was once a communal event transforms into an isolating one. Bento by the Sea is engaging, poignant, and nourishing. Readers will enjoy feasting on these poems again and again.

––CAROLYN MARTIN, author of Brainstorming

I wholeheartedly recommend this invitation to a meal of the heart. In these pages, Sue Fagalde Lick reminds us that in poetry, as in memory, and in life, we are in communion with each other, even when it may seem like we take our meals alone. These poems speak from a place of solitude, gratitude, and grief. They reach out with a quiet resilience, to share familiar menus, flavors, and feelings, and in doing so, Sue has set a table for us all. Sit down, enjoy.

—CHARLES CASTLE, author of Chasing Down the Storm and On the Beach of Borrowed Time

Bento by the Sea is a memoir in food poems. In grade school, poet Sue Fagalde Lick is one of the kids “sticking out our chocolate tongues.” As an adult, she buys a can of the Sloppy Joe mix her mother used to serve. Maybe just this once. For me. Eating out after her husband’s death, she can still pretend / he’s waiting for me down the road. When a woman from church asks how to be alone, she tells her, You just sleep, eat, and go on. And so she does, with wit, wisdom, and grace.

—PENELOPE SCAMBLY SCHOTT, author of On Dufur Hill

The act of eating changes at different stages of our lives. In Bento by the Sea, Sue Fagalde Lick brings home how the basic need of satisfying hunger becomes entwined in historical period, social class, religion, location, and community. In childhood, we strive to balance the joy of crafting baloney sculptures of dinosaurs with social divides played out in the school cafeteria. Over time, diets become embedded with a sense of right and wrong. A more sophisticated understanding of nutrition taints memories of Sloppy Joes. Relationships and community become more complicated. In the writing about food, Sue doesn’t shy away from anger, loss and mourning. Some meals arrive with a twist of aloneness, some come wrapped in memories of joyous holiday rituals. These poems honor those changes.

—TRINA GAYNON, author of Quince, Rose, Grace of God

In Bento by the Sea, Sue Fagalde Lick serves up life one poem at a time. Food is the starting point—baloney sandwiches, sloppy joes, holiday meals—but what lingers is everything gathered around the table: childhood, first dates, family, love, loss, laughter, and the wisdom of living. In this intimate collection, Lick treats you like a friend, inviting you to listen while she shares the stories of her life—openly, honestly, and without holding back. Food brings us to the table, but we soon realize that it’s about so much more than food: it’s about who we are, who we’re with, what we’re surviving, and what we will carry forward. Lick pulls up a chair for us all. Come hungry for poetry—and leave with an appreciation for all that’s been given.

—JENNIFER ROOD, author of Present and Speaking Everywhere, Past President, Oregon Poetry Association

Sue Lick’s new, beautiful poetry collection examines the childhood, relationships, loss, aging, and memories that make up a life. With close narratives and observations about near-misses, real misses, and confessions, you are right there with her. Equal parts funny and moving, this collection will haunt you in the best way.

—LORNA ROSE, poet and essayist at The Good Men Project

 

About the Author

Sue Fagalde Lick lives alone in the forest on the Oregon coast, which is a good thing because her writing projects, books, and musical instruments take up the whole house. She writes poetry, fiction, and nonfiction. Her recent publications include the poetry book Dining Al Fresco with My Dog, the novel Back to Ona Beach, and a memoir, No Way Out of This: Loving a Partner with Alzheimer’s. Her latest obsession is her Substack “Can I Do It Alone?” which takes an honest look at the realities of living alone by choice or by chance.

When not writing, Sue sings and plays piano, guitar, mandolin and ukulele, takes long walks in the woods, and eats like a queen.

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The Sound of Water

by Shawn Pittard

The title of this collection is drawn from Basho’s timeless poem, “Old Pond,” in which we hear a frog create the sound of water. Pittard follows that sound from his local rivers to the Alaskan wilderness. He explores wild places and the wildness that still thrives in city spaces, celebrates the beauty and resilience of our natural world, admires its great migrations, respects its tragic cruelties. These poems teem with life—bantering geese, dabbling ducks, blackberries and bees, rattlesnakes entangled in a courtship dance, thin coyotes. We humans share space with them, we endure drought and fires together, grow up and grow old in their presence.

Early Praise

The poems in Shawn Pittard’s newest collection continue on the path of the naturalist shaman, who finds the sacred in the everyday, the spiritual in the air around us—who sees “voices in the wind” and who hears the silences hidden in each moment as prayers embedded in the world around us—in the beauty, the terror, the uncertainties of tomorrow—in “a goldfield of wildflowers / under a bluebird sky.

—Susan Kelly-DeWitt, author of Frangible Operas

 In The Sound of Water, the final volume of his chapbook trilogy, Shawn Pittard is at the height of his powers: a poet-citizen of the wild, sustained by its marvels and mysteries, whether it be encountering a loose formation of geese casting its ancient shadow // on commuters’ cars / crossing the bridge or walking in wolf tracks on the floodplains of Alaska’s Tsiu River. Mapping an expansive interior/exterior landscape, Pittard’s poems offer readers a sacred communion, inviting us to take our place alongside our animal kin and bask in the quiet dazzle and warmth of his words.

—Moira Magneson, author of Eye of the Elephant

Shawn Pittard’s poems take you places. His urban rivers are conduits, reminding us that there is more going on than mundane city life— more going on beneath the frenzy of commuter traffic coursing over bridges. Step into the riffles where steelhead feast on orange roe below the salmon’s spawn. Listen to the banter of migrating geese. Conjure a father and two prodigal sons sorting fishing gear on the tailgate of a pickup truck. Let memories pull at the stones beneath your feet.

—Danyen Powell, author of Seeing Again

 

About the Author

Shawn Pittard is the author of four slender volumes of poetry: Shelter in Place from The Poetry Box; Witness, which was a Finalist in The Poetry Box 2024 chapbook contest; Standing in the River, which was the winner of Tebot Bach’s 2010 Clockwise Chapbook Competition; and These Rivers from Rattlesnake Press. His poems have been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and featured at American Life in Poetry. He’s been a coach for Poetry Out Loud and a California Poet in the Schools, taught recitation and writing in middle schools and high schools, including juvenile hall (yep, they’re good kids), as well as with veterans and the men in Folsom Prison. By day, he labored in the field of environmental protection, planning, and public policy, focusing on energy.

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Loose on the Leash

by Ann Farley

6:20 AM. Two thirds of the year morning light is dim or barely there. In this early hush, a woman and her dog walk through neighborhood and park. They encounter owls and herons, marathon runners and skateboarders, fellow walkers and a beaver family. Loose on the Leash details the many rewards of walking a dog: peace to clear one’s mind, connections made and memories unearthed, surprise encounters and chance conversations, curious T-shirt messages, coyote sightings and unwavering loyalty.

Early Praise

Ann Farley’s Loose on the Leash delights the reader with early-morning observation and surprise encounters along the path she walks daily with her dog, Ella. Writing of life and death, loss and belonging, Farley inspires us to wake and open with each step we take. Sometimes I wish / there was no such thing as time / just gradations / of shadow and light, she writes in “daylight savings time,” where footsteps meet memory.

—DEBRA ELISA, author of You Can Call It Beautiful

Loose on the Leash brings us into that liminal space of first light, the people and creatures she meets while walking her German shepherd, Ella, often going out before dawn. Part prayer, part meditation, part chronicle, she infuses these musings with sometimes playful, sometimes reverent language, attentive to the ways humans and animals share space. She shows us a great blue heron jabbing at anything that moves: / wood frogs, spotted salamanders, / garter snakes striped yellow and orange. And how the swoop of a great horned owl, a vision / in white, evokes the possibility of angels. The way being in the natural world with her dog allows her to experience time and space differently (only now / again / now), and then she warmly invites us to go there with her.

—SUZY HARRIS, author of Listening in the Dark

Farley’s daily dog-walking ritual with her German Shepherd companion opens doors to unexpected encounters with nature, memories, and humans bearing gifts. These gifts of conversation and circumstance catapult readers into historical time, other cultures, and the unique milieu of a diverse American neighborhood. Woven through these lyrical walks is Ella a powerful benign creature whose life symbolizes the best in dog—a connector and healer who unites hearts even when the world seems misshapen and broken.

—SHER SCHWARTZ, author of The Beautiful One’s Ark

 

About the Author

Ann Farley, an only child of two only children, learned at an early age to entertain herself by making up stories and playing with words. Her poems have appeared in Peregrine, Timberline Review, Third Wednesday, Gobshite Quarterly, Willawaw, Verseweavers, and others. Her first chapbook, Tell Her Yes, was a finalist in The Poetry Box Chapbook Prize and published in 2022.

She loves travel, anywhere and everywhere, from local trails to the tip of South Africa, and enjoys photography, watercolor painting, a good book and a cup of tea. She lives in Beaverton, Oregon with her kind and patient husband, Kevin, and their exuberant German Shepherd, Ella.

Instagram: @farley2324

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Waking in the Blue
Poetry & Essays about Mental Health

Edited by Sherri Levine and Sam Rose Preminger

In this ground-breaking anthology—curated by Sherri Levine—more than three dozen authors share their poetry and personal reflections on illness, healing, and how mental health shapes the craft of writing. In the Foreword by John Fox, founder of The Institute for Poetic Medicine, he writes, “Waking in the Blue is infused with inclusion & surprise, heartbreak & struggle, wisdom & love.” This book is an invitation for anyone to tap into their own creative spark as a way to heal and maintain their own mental health or help someone who may be struggling. The compassionate message that rings true throughout these pages will remind the reader: you are not alone.

Contributing Poets/Essayists:

Kelli Russell Agodon • Shawn Aveningo Sanders • Lana Hechtman Ayers • Miriam Bassuk • Zan Bockes • David Stanford Burr • Susan Carberry • Elisa Carlsen • Linda Casebeer • Dale Champlin • Tinamarie Cox • James Crews • Merridawn Duckler • Nadine Dunseith • Nadine Ellsworth-Moran • Elizabeth Brulé Farrell • Andrea Hollander • Dana I. Hunter • Marc Janssen • Auna Johannesen • Joan Kantor • Tricia Knoll • Payal Kudesia • Laurinda Lind • Catherine Mary Macías • Karen Marker • Carolyn Martin • Emily Moon • Frances Opila • Sam Rose Preminger • Anna Quon • Bonnie Henderson Schell • elmo shade • Diana Spore • Margaret Stawowy • Chase Twichell • Jeanann Verlee • Koon Woon • Victoria Wyttenberg

Early Praise

Waking in the Blue is testimony and revelation, a breaking through barriers of silence, shame and stigma, revealing healing powers of poetry, courageous self-expression, and empathic community by those who have walked the talk, those living with severities of mental health distress such as anxiety, depression, bipolar disorder, PTSD, grief, and more. Reading Waking in the Blue is to know you are not alone. Be inspired to befriend your own poetic voice and discover the gifts it will bring.

—Diane Kaufman, MD, founder/director, Hold On Campaign for Suicide Prevention

Though there is plenty in these pages to feel sad or scared or mad about, the poems and brief essays in this anthology contain beauty and wisdom and deep humanity. To enter the work of these poets is to be allowed into an authentic, vulnerable place that is moving, compassionate and often exquisitely created. I felt honored to be let inside the minds of these authors, but best of all, I was lifted time and again by the authors’ faith in poetry—how for both reader and writer, no matter how disordered or stormy the weather of our hearts and minds, poetry can keep us alive. Thank you Sherri Levine and Sam Rose Preminger for compiling this important book.

—Julia Levine, PhD, author, winner of the Pablo Neruda Prize in Poetry

Sherri Levine’s edited anthology, Waking in the Blue: Poetry & Essays for Mental Health, is a powerful collection of Poetry and essays by a blend of highly respected and emerging contemporary poets. What makes this collection stunning is Levine’s invitation to each contributor to address how their mental health affects their creative process. Each entry includes one to four poems followed by a brief essay in which the author describes—and occasionally analyzes—how their life experiences shaped their work. This is one of the most haunting and satisfying literary anthologies I have ever read. We first see the actors presenting their craft on stage, and then we go backstage to sit with them as they tell their stories. While the Poetry is often lyrical, melancholy, and nuanced—with occasional hints of sunshine and humor—the essays often reveal horrifying traumas, quiet isolation, and years of crippling anxiety. These narratives serve as a powerful testament to how poetry can be used to navigate a difficult past. As a reader, I came away with a far deeper respect for these writers and the resilience behind their craft. This book should be required reading for aspiring poets and mental health professionals alike.

—James Pennebaker, professor emeritus of psychology, University of Texas at Austin

How does a mad girl pop and sizzle? The writings in Waking in the Blue are testimonies to the lived experiences of its writers and their mental health challenges. They are not just histories of sadness and trauma. Here are the mechanics of writing for psychological survival: raw, marvelous metaphors, honest anguish, poetry shaped by emotion. These poems and writings remind us that even in the depths of suffering, language can become a lifeline—and that the fragile, courageous act of telling one’s story can turn solitude into solidarity and pain into something luminous.

— Sherry Reiter, PhD, CM, director, The Creative “Righting” Center

Waking in the Blue is a celebration of human spirit—how we endure, how we suffer, how we thrive. As Payal Kudesia writes, “My mental illness often feels like both a curse and a muse,” but when these experiences are shared with courage, honesty and generosity, they become gift. How do we meet what is most difficult? How does writing help us practice self-compassion and self-awareness? How do we honor all aspects of our aliveness? How do we go on when our next breath feels like a risk we’re not sure we can take? These writers open us to the complexities of our humanness. I found myself and my beloveds on every page. This book makes me tremble and want to cheer at the same time.

—Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer, author of The Wonderment, host of The Poetic Path

About the Editors

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Brainstorming

by Carolyn Martin

After a debilitating stroke hit her in August 2025, Carolyn Martin was thrilled to discover she still had her voice and her ability to write poems. This chapbook is a collection of  ”stroke narratives” that document her physical, emotional, and spiritual experiences during her initial recovery. They are complemented by lyrical poems that revel in the inner and outer worlds she has explored for years. Since every poem is, in essence, a brainstorm, she hopes these poems will stir up a life-nurturing storm in readers.

Early Praise

There are many ways to go through a storm:  battening down, being swept away, dragging anchor. In her incredible new book Brainstorming, poet Carolyn Martin has chosen to travel with all sails beautifully unfurled—eyes, mind, and heart open. And with Martin at the helm, this ship is unsinkable. As the poems journey through her internal and external landscapes, they are infused with inspiriting life. Martin asks, “Is there a world somewhere that’s wide enough / for all the joy we were born to generate?”  She and her vital book open this necessary world for us. Even before we reach the last page, we are gratefully answering, “Yes! Oh, buoyantly Yes!”

––ANNIE LIGHTHART, author of Pax

Dazzling in its execution, Carolyn Martin’s eloquent Brainstorming brings to mind William Faulkner’s claim that we humans have the ability not only to endure extreme adversity, not only to survive, but to prevail. And prevail Martin does, in these poems and in her life, against the traumatic physical and mental dislocations wrought by a massive stroke that left her left side weakened and her spirit at sea. With masterful objectivity, unsinkable playfulness, and deep compassion, Martin recreates for us the details of a journey we cannot begin to imagine: progressing from physical pain, from the shock and grief of “never again,” to recalculating every single move she once took for granted, to ever‑increasing gratitude, acceptance, and, yes, joy. This book has enlarged and deepened me, and I cannot praise it enough.

––INGRID WENDT, recipient of the Oregon Book Award, author of Keeping It All Afloat

Brainstorming, the latest book by Carolyn Martin, bears witness to trauma through the lens of poetry. A stroke survivor whose poetry is raw, unpretentious, and unfiltered, Martin offers readers poems that are deeply personal and, at times, powerfully spiritual. The versification traverses surprise, sorrow, sheer grit, and self-determination that attests to the poet’s zest for life. Brainstorming is filled with the kind of poetry that speaks to the compassionate need for a healing heart. Carolyn Martin stands among the finest of Oregon poets. This collection bears witness to this attribution.

––EMMETT WHEATFALL, author of Contradictions from an Uncertain Silence

 

About the Author

From New Jersey English teacher to international management trainer; from author of business books to poetry collections; from work addict to devotee of the Spanish proverb, “It is beautiful to do nothing and rest afterwards,” Carolyn Martin is blissfully retired—and resting—in Clackamas, Oregon.

Although a stroke in August 2025 weakened her body. Martin’s mind remains strong. She still embraces poetry as her way of interacting with the world—in images, rhythms, sounds, and intensities of language. That is why she continues to pursue the joyful challenge of translating experience into as few words as possible. In doing so, she embraces Anne Sexton’s dictate: “One of my secret instructions to myself as a poet is: Whatever you do, don’t be boring.”

Martin’s poems have appeared in more than 200 publications around the world, and she has six full-length collections and three chapbooks under her creative belt. In addition, she was the winner of the 2025 Hudson-Fowler Prize for Poetry from the University of Central Arkansas.

Website: carolynmartinpoet.com

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Thin Soup

by Stephen James Penner

In Thin Soup, Stephen James Penner explores eternal themes of life and death, love and longing, hope and sorrow, beauty and lament. The poems are personal, a good number reflecting the wonderings within the poet who is a Mennonite Christian, and thus a pacifist, who believes the divine spark resides within all human beings.  He is a product of the sixties in American life, a unique slice of our country’s history.  The dramatic social and cultural happenings of those days are always with him and come through in this collection. With appreciation for complicated spaces as he searches for clarity, the multi-cultural experiences he has lived have informed and enriched his life, and his writings.

Early Praise

Steve’s poems—accessible, story-driven, dusted with earth—do what poetry does best; inviting us into this ordinary place, this ordinary time, this ordinary body to bring us not beyond the ordinary but so deeply into it such that memory, conversations within and between, connection to place, other, and the Divine holding is—embroidered in gold.

—Julia Baker, poet, author of The Moon is Always Whole 

In Thin Soup, Stephen Penner traces the winding paths of memory, faith, love, loss, and belonging through poems rooted in farm fields, distant cultures, family histories, and ordinary acts of grace. With the wisdom of age and the curiosity of a lifelong traveler, he reflects on what it means to be human in a world marked by beauty and sorrow, where personal grief is inseparable from the suffering and hope of others. These deeply human poems honor what endures—relationships, compassion, wonder, and the courage to let go—while searching for meaning in the seasons that shape every life.

—Larry Dunn, author of A Beanie and a Cup of Tea: A Father’s Poems of Loss and Love

In Thin Soup the world is large and small, we are lost and found, spaces and words- the spaces between words and the words between spaces rest heavy on the eyes. Penner examines a life and asks questions, some dangerous and some answered. He relates experiences from Africa, from California’s central valley, from Oregon, from a young man, from now, and from duty and from intention. Thin Soup is anything but.

—Marc Janssen, Salem Poetry Project and author of November Reconsidered

Thin Soup is both an elegy and a prayer— for lives and days lost and for peace yet to be realized. This collection of poems is full of startling imagery that holds in tension the personal and the political, memory with the grace of letting go, and connection in the midst of loneliness. Mud becomes a woman, an artist’s sculpture transmuted into resistance to abusive power. Memories blur between the explosive energy of fútbol and the destructive power of missiles to recall an ethics of responsibility for the other. Thin Soup is aflame with rage at injustice while also full of gentle invitations to accept the everyday gifts of wonder that arrive in the shape of a plum, a handshake, a song. That these poems are attentive to the limits of words to bridge these tensions is part of what makes them so profound.

—Deborah Lyons, English instructor, Reedley (CA) College

A consummate storyteller, Stephen Penner’s poems lead us on epic journeys: across continents and centuries, to childhood and back, through political realities, into both the mundane and the profound. Reading this collection moves us through loss and anxiety, into the mystery of hope and the haunting beauty that comes when we walk each other through the morass.

—Hope Nisly, political organizer and retired librarian

About the Author

Stephen James Penner lives with his wife of 50 years, Glena, in Salem, Oregon. A native Californian, he lived in Africa for six years but spent most of his life under the hot sun of the San Joaquin Valley in the Golden State. For a season he ran marathons and maintains exercise rhythms to this day. He follows soccer, the Pittsburgh Pirates, and appreciates intelligent, animated, meditative conversation. His years working with Mennonite Central Committee and as a Mennonite pastor have informed his life and poetry. His previous books include a memoir, Tea in the Desert, and two books of poetry, A Simple Meal and February Run.

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My Therapist Approved These

by Nicole Mihelis

This collection of poems revolves around and is inspired by past love (both settled and unresolved), the idea of aging and seeing our parents through a different lens, the mental gymnastics of the dynamic trio (Anxiety, Depression, and ADHD), the poet’s home away from home in Ithaca, NY, and other related topics to human existence. Each poem touches upon subjects broached in her therapy sessions, and while others were born in her mind while on the road listening to music. While none of these topics are particularly groundbreaking, there’s comfort in bringing new light and perspective to familiar thoughts that plague the minds of multiple generations.

Early Praise

Both gentle and powerful, My Therapist Approved These is a delicate, intimate read. The collection is what everyone’s therapist wishes they could be with themselves: tender, introspective, and frank. Nicole’s poems balance the marks that the outside and the inside of our worlds leave on each other while navigating how to carry all that happened in the past without forgetting to look to the future.

—Paz Pacheco Hall, author of MAPBOT

I approve of these as well. Nicole showcases the unsaid in My Therapist Approved These in a nuanced and attentive manner. Read this if you’re looking for the candor and grit that often gets neglected in our everyday lives and is seen eye to eye only in therapeutic settings. Nicole doesn’t run away from the tragedies but rather provides the reader with an up-close view of the confrontation so many of us avoid.

—Zaira Gomez, author of Language Runaway

About the Author

Nicole Mihelis physically resides in Western Connecticut with her significant other and their dog, Acadia, but her heart and mind are constantly wandering. Her bachelor’s degree in psychology from Ithaca College and master’s degree in counseling from Villanova University have allowed writing to play a healing role in her life despite not pursuing it as a career. Rather, she is an academic advisor in higher education. She is often influenced by love, loss, nostalgia, mental health, and sporadic inspirations while listening to music. When she’s not advising students or feeding her inspiration, she finds comfort in hiking, exploring new restaurants, singing her heart out in the car, and traveling.

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