Still Life with Sorrow & Joy

by Lana Hechtman Ayers

Life is fleeting, death inevitable. Still Life with Sorrow & Joy contemplates death from myriad vantage points, including communication with those gone via letters or phone or from within the landscape of dreams, embracing the possibility of a forever connection between souls. These poems are infused with images of the cherished times spent with family and beloved pets—sweet, aching memories, as well as with images of nature’s bounty—the sublime night sky, the rush of waves, the patter of raindrops. The poet faces her own aging and mortality with a sense of acceptance, hope, and even humor. Perhaps death and what follows death will always remain somewhat of a mystery, but death’s dark shores can be illuminated and mapped, as they are in this collection, by thoughtful and heartfelt meditations, offering readers comfort and companionship as we all journey towards our great unknowable end.

Early Praise

As easily as water, that’s how I want to leave this earth writes Lana Hechtman Ayers, in this, her stellar, fourteenth collection, Still Life with Sorrow & Joy. The poems curated here are, in part, a feast of losses, but the work moves through several registers; I love that there’s also dark comedy, imaginings of the afterlife, and most of all a fierce love for this world. Ayers knows how imagination is part dream…dipperful by dipperful, how the sky is a blue door that opens both ways. Over and over again, I came across lines that I wish I had written. Hard-earned wisdom and a belief in wonder keep showing us, as readers, how to appreciate this life, sawdust scattering around us like starlight, like meteor shower. This is a book you’ll want to hold close.

—SUSAN RICH, author of Blue Atlas

Still Life with Sorrow & Joy is a joyous celebration of both. Yes, poet Lana Hechtman Ayers laments, I can’t handle another / dead dog, / dead aunt, / dead lover, / dead plumber, / dead fly even, but even this list carries a kind of delight in its unexpected variety. Or how to describe the rush of time: Hours are field mice / flitting in every direction. Ayers has learned to carry the pebbles / of grief in my arms / without dropping a single one. Indeed, this collection makes them shine.

—PENELOPE SCAMBLY SCHOTT, author of Sophia & Mr. Walt Whitman
and gOD: A Respectfully Divergent Testament

This exquisite series of poems is an extended meditation on death, loss, remembrance and transformation through the interaction between the dead and the living, the living speaker’s deepest dreams of the beloved departed. Lana Hechtman Ayers’ speaker, who calls herself a splintered self who practices a shoddy Buddhism, enacts the growing lyricism of her poetic voice throughout this collection. As she recalls, for example, the wonder of first experiencing the Big Dipper during a blackout, when her native New York City is plunged into darkness in a five-borough power outage, she watches her father frame the constellations for her with his hands, and her child-turned-adult self still feel[s] its pulse / orbiting the fatherless galaxy of my heart. We readers know that we are in the presence of a powerful sensibility, as the poet summons us to come like a clock that chimes all hours, and we must heed her voice, because (as she addresses the force of life itself) each day you fly the moon over my house / like a flag of welcome. This is a poet who can teach us how to live, with joy, with our own dying, and what better cause for celebration could we have?

—CAROLYNE WRIGHT, author of Masquerade and This Dream the World: New & Selected Poems

About the Author

Lana Hechtman Ayers worked in insurance, mutual funds, customer service, research, and fact-checking but her true calling is publishing the work of other poets as managing editor of Concrete Wolf Poetry Series, MoonPath Press, and World Enough Writers. She also facilitates generative writing workshops in the Amherst Method, conducts an online poetry book club, and produces the weekly Poem After Poem Newsletter.

Lana earned BAs in Mathematics and Psychology, holds a Masters in Counseling Therapy, and possesses MFAs in Poetry and in Writing Popular Fiction. A multiple Best of the Net, Pushcart Prize, and National Book Award nominee, she won honors in the Discovery / The Nation Award and in the Rita Dove Poetry Prize. She was awarded writing residencies from Hedgebrook, Devils Tower National Park, and The Whiteley Foundation.

She is the author of thirteen previous collections of poems and chapbooks, including: Sky Over (Fernwood Press, 2026), The Autobiography of Rain (Fernwood Press, 2024), Overtures (Kelsay Books, 2023), When All Else Fails (The Poetry Box, 2023), Red Riding Hood’s Real Life (Night Rain Press, 2017), The Moon’s Answer (Egress Studio Press, 2016), Dance From Inside My Bones (Snake Nation Press, 2007), winner of the Haas Award, and Chicken Farmer I Still Love You (D-N Publishing, 2007), winner of D-N’s annual award. She published a romantic time travel adventure, Time Flash: Another Me (Night Rain Books, 2018), and hopes someday to complete the sequel, currently stalled at 25,000 words.

Originally, from New York City, she relocated to the Pacific Northwest after a dozen-year sojourn in New England. She now lives in coastal Oregon on unceded lands of the Alsea people with her beloved husband and fur babies, where on clear, quiet nights she can hear the Pacific Ocean whispering to the moon. Rain devotee, former coffee obsessive, her favorite color is the swirl of Van Gogh’s The Starry Night.

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Possible Lives

by Frederick Asnes

In this posthumously published collection of poetry, Possible Lives by Frederick Asnes, the reader is taken into the poet’s later years of his life, where he explores what it means to be older and how eloquently he viewed the world around him, with clever musings leading the way on his thoughtful, poetic journey.

Sample Poem:

IMAGINATION

“I would spread like the weather
and take in the world,” it says.
“Only reason keeps me in check.”
But it knows better. It flies
a little and then returns
to the safety of its familiar coop,
having learned long ago it is not
an eagle. Circles within circles
are its world. And now it pecks
and struts, entirely self-absorbed.
Yet it has peopled poems
and, while its heart fluttered,
had visions of its final flight.

About the Author

Frederick Asnes grew up in Framingham, Massachusetts; he studied writing with Robert Lowell and John Malcolm Brinnin at Boston University. In 1964, he moved to Austin, Texas where he studied with Thomas Whitbread at The University of Texas where he earned his PhD. He taught creative writing at the university for many years. He also later taught at Rice University. In the Fall of 1974, Fred was first published in Lucille Poetry Journal #4. His first book These Little Worlds was published in 1985 by Slough Press.  It was selected as co-winner in the Austin Book Awards in poetry. Fred died in 1992 while living in Houston, Texas with his wife Elizabeth. This posthumous book contains poems from various periods of his life but focuses mainly on his later years.

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In the Hour of Awakening

by Joanne Monte

In the Hour of Awakening, Joanne Monte brings her advocacy for social justice and human rights issues to light in many of her award-winning poems, ranging in themes of war, genocide, and crimes against humanity. These human rights abuses and horrors, suffered, and told to her, by members of her own family, are just as relevant today. What we discover in reading these poems is how the past can connect us to the present, how it can give us a glimpse into the future so that we can gain an understanding of our common humanity and our world.

Early Praise

We opted instead for light cries out Joanne Monte In the Hour of Awakening, her latest collection of poems that explores our long history of human rights abuses and suffering. Yet rather than focusing on the pain of humankinds’ often shameful past, she is continually searching for the smallest glimmer of light in the dust-filled darkness that often covers our world. There’s a keen sense of urgency in Monte’s words—treat yourself and open the pages to this glittering new collection of poems and join her as she listens for the singing on the other side of the wall. You won’t be disappointed.

—JOHN BARGOWSKI, author of American Chestnut

Joanne Monte reveals again, her powerful poetic skill to make readers feel for those caught in the chaos of war. Often it’s women, the mothers, who must scrape together a life for their children from sparse resources in a world made horrific by the insanity of wartime violence. She writes: At first,/ the people had been given baskets of gold,/ sweet melons, and peaches in wine—told that the wall/ will keep out the unwanted, … And many, believing it to be true,/ danced in their imagined autonomy, but only/ until they heard singing on the other side of the wall. How truly Monte portrays our common humanity, our hope for joyous singing. What we envy is the happiness in others that bloody war cannot win. She is a soulful poet who understands well our struggle to gain a world of peace in which our spirit can thrive. She’s a poet of longed for tranquility who understands well our common humanity across all borders. She knows that without nurturing sustenance, there can be no triumphant placidity. And, without peace, there can be no provisions for life. This profound realization composes In the Hour of Awakening.

—DANIELA GIOSEFFI, poet, critic, American Book Award winning author

 

About the Author

Joanne Monte was born and raised in New Jersey. Many of her poems have appeared in literary journals such as Poet Lore, The Washington Square Review, The Red Cedar Review, ellipsis…literature and art, Thirteen Bridges Review, Marrow Magazine, Lucky Lizard Journal and Poetry Super Highway, among others.

Joanne’s first poetry book, The Blue Light of Dawn, received The Bordighera Poetry Prize, sponsored by The Sonia Raiziss-Giop Charitable Foundation, and was published by Bordighera Press in 2013. She is also the author of The Day to Eternity (Word Association Publishers, 2012), a novel set during the Korean War, which was inspired by her father and uncles who had fought in the conflict.

In addition to receiving a Pushcart nomination, she is the recipient of  the New Jersey State Council on the Arts fellowship. Her other awards include Sixfold Poetry Prize, The Jack Grapes Poetry Award, Palette Poetry Award, Princemere Poetry Award, New Millennium Writings Award, Sheila-Na-Gig Poetry Award, Etched Onyx Magazine Award, and the Writer’s Digest Award.

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A Moment’s Breath

poems by Susan Willis Johnson

A Moment’s Breath considers the questions arising from interwoven threads of the vulnerable rhythms of a marriage, the guidance and death of a father, the hope and loss of a nephew, the persistent reach for justice, the looming risk of wildfire, all sourced in love and loss and grief. These poems return again and again to the contemplative stance of surrender in the absence of answers and the seeking of a peace in the certainty of uncertainty. Following the seasons of the year through the enduring presence of place in the mountains, amid ridges and rivers, firs and pines, they reveal “a moment’s breath on earth” and invite the reader to stillness, even among the questions.

Early Praise

Reading Susan Willis Johnson’s A Moment’s Breath feels like a much-needed mountain retreat—spacious, reverent, dreamy and nourishing. Equal parts reflection, wonder, and offering, each poem reads like a prayer, feels like an invitation, unfolds like a film. Visually rich and aurally evocative—the sound of her kitchen, of scattered petals, crows and chickadees, the last of the geese, the clip of pliers, grief, wind…. A Moment’s Breath is a deftly crafted collection filled with radiance, hospitality and generosity. What a gift!

—M Freeman, author of The Illuminated Space: A Personal Theory & Contemplative Practice of Media Art

In her second book of poetry, A Moment’s Breath, Susan Willis Johnson walks beside us through her beloved woods and ridges along the waters of the Cle Elum River, sharing with us the quiet, peace, loss, and renewal she discovers there each day. From the collection’s first poem in which she slowly fully open[s] again, to “Sorrow” and the grief of green needles, fallen, on to “Midwinter”’s return to light, spring, and finally “Renewing Our Vows,” she shows us how she listens, sees, and grows just as the woods do, especially after devastating fire. All along these forest paths, her imagery, language, and form flow naturally and beautifully, softening our spirits and pointing to the way of love.

—Karen Gookin, author of The Hills Around Are Dust and Light

These poems are sweet and tender, full of moments of quiet beauty and the joys of living alongside the ache. They are prayers and longings rising from grief and the threat of climate chaos, while seeking solace in the natural world. They invite the reader to join a communion of the vulnerable and find sanctuary among the images.

—Christine Valters Paintner, PhD, REACE, online Abbess of Abbey of the Arts and author of over 25 books including four collections of poetry

About the Author

Susan Willis Johnson writes in the mountain town of Roslyn, Washington. She hikes daily with family and friends on trails along the Cle Elum River Valley. Serving as the spokesperson for a Roslyn grassroots citizens’ group, she collaborated to promote sustainable forestry and to protect wildlife habitat. Susan taught in the local schools and was Co-Director of the Central Washington Writing Project. She was named the 2009 Washington State Teacher of the Year. Her chapbook, The Call Home (The Poetry Box), was a finalist in the 2022 Chapbook Contest.

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The Snow Arrow

Selected Poems by Sharon Black

Sharon Black’s The Snow Arrow: Selected Poems stays with you. Voices of unsettling detachment, breathless obsession, and whimsical celebration take turns in this provocative volume spanning over four decades of the poet’s career. Here, the everyday makes common cause with the absurd and nonsensical—real jockeying with surreal from stanza to stanza, line to line. Black’s poems both comfort and confound. Snow, houses, and the elusive nature of the self are recurring, sometimes disquieting themes.

Early Praise

Black’s writing is both tightly disciplined and coyly whimsical. The world of these poems is a convincing one with its share of keen, if sometimes surreal observation. There is a loveliness in The Snow Arrow that, as much as it doesn’t want to, sometimes hurts. At times there is also a sense of something not quite right, something off, not by a lot but by some metric of what it means to be human. These are poems in which you sometimes forget to breathe. In other places they are reminding you to breathe.

—JAMES CARPENTER,  author of Honeyed Words and Bitter

Sharon Black, a Philadelphia area poet who I heard at Slought as part of the new Slought Fellows series, is a disarmingly humble poet whose works are homey and yet, like a home, surrounded by prickly brambles and some surprises inside and out. Black does some wonderful visual conjuring in her works, like in the love poem to her house in which she talks about how the house sits in the grass like a contented cow.

—ROBERTA FALLON, artist, art critic, co-founder of ArtBlog

From the wilds of suburban life, and, once, a career in the city, this poet is a wizard of startling language and stories. She shows us her sacred sauté pan and, the refusal of some onions to properly caramelize, /as if one could be persuaded by those that do. Visit her home where there are invisible handprints everywhere,/ even the floor from push-ups and cartwheels. Share her longing to be a cavernous ship from the last century / sunk on the bottom of the sea, / fish flitting from one appalling room / to the next, each in the most impeccable disorder. Open this debut book, smooth its pages, and prepare to be surprised, challenged, and charmed.

—AMY E. LAUB, author of What Water Says and Household Goods: Poems about Home

About the Author

Sharon Black credits becoming a poet to two girlhood memories from the late 60s. The first was accompanying her physician father on house calls through central Pennsylvania farm country, staring, often bored, out the passenger seat window between patient visits. The second has to do with the long row of empty, gallon-sized glass cider bottles, dusty and draped with spider webs, that lined the north wall of the unfinished basement in her childhood home. Ms. Black’s work appears in over 40 publications over many decades. Twice nominated for a Pushcart Prize, her poems have placed in contests, secured best-in-issue accolades, and been selected for anthology/anniversary-issue publications. The Snow Arrow: Selected Poems gathers many of these poems as well as some newer pieces. Since her retirement from librarianship at the University of Pennsylvania, she has added abstract painting (see cover art) and playwriting to her creative pursuits. Her first play, Welcome to the RAA, received a staged reading at Burning Coal Theater in 2021 and she is at work on a second called The Drip in which hypodermic media indoctrination, climate change, cultism, and conceptual art collide to test family relations. She resides in Wallingford, PA with her husband George though they spend a lot of “spirit time” on Rainbow Lake in the Adirondacks.

https://www.facebook.com/sharon.black.31/

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