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 Cathy Cain

Cathy Cain, like a bee to flower, gathers thought from one encounter with nature to another. She speaks from many perspectives — as herself, as tree, as mushroom, or as goddess-hero. Sometimes playful, even mystical, Cain is deeply honest as she confronts the state of our relationship with the natural environment, with technology, and with what it means to be human.

About the Author

Poet and artist Cathy Cain​’s honors include the Kay Snow Paulann Petersen Award for Poetry​ ​and the Edwin Markham Prize for Poetry. ​She is the author of Empty Space Places You (Finishing Line Press, 2018). Her poetry has appeared in Reed Magazine, VoiceCatcher, The Poeming Pigeon, and Verseweavers.

Cain holds degrees in literature and visual art from Lewis & Clark College, MAT; Oregon State University, BFA; and University of Washington, BA, Phi Beta Kappa. She has studied at the Pacific Northwest College of Art, the Attic Institute of Arts and Letters, and with Portland’s Mountain Writers Series.

The mother of two sons, Cain taught in the public schools for over thirty years. She lives with her husband near Portland, Oregon.

What They’re Saying…

Thrumming with a wise and generous curiosity, the poems in Cathy Cain’s Bee Dance are bright signposts pointing a way forward through a difficult age. Whether about lichen, lava, or driving through a long tunnel, Cain’s poems show us the pleasure of pattern and the possibility of imagination, of living with both grace and alarm. This book beautifully does poetry’s steadfast work of naming and knowing the lives all around us. Here, the natural world meets the human over rich, porous boundaries: trees speak of long affection, stones quiet the mind, brushed hair sends off shooting stars. The poems in Bee Dance are blessings for the reader, as Cain’s poem “Small Blessings” states so well: “One for each of us / so we know we’re not alone.”

— Annie Lighthart, author of Lantern and Iron String

The energetic dance of bees at the hive focuses on describing a roadmap to abundance. Cathy Cain’s poems in Bee Dance explore expanses of a world filled with animal and vegetative creatures. She describes the wordless comfort of holding a rock while acknowledging the spirit spaces between words. Her poetry expresses the impulse to reinvent ourselves outside of cyber noise and instead define ourselves within the boundaries of sentiencies around us. Her poems suggest trail guides through the perils of today’s world that threaten lichens and suffocate us with plastics, moving us to landscapes of morning mist that say yes! and reveal honey in the communal hive.

— Tricia Knoll, author of How I Learned to be White
and Broadfork Farm

Book Launch Readings:

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