Journey of Trees

by Susan Landgraf

Finalist, The Poetry Box Chapbook Prize 2023

In Journey of Trees, we find layers of fire, family, fruition and failure. Life is a journey, and trees can help us and/or show us where we’ve been and where we might go. These poems are both cautionary and celebratory. What has been felled—trees or a marriage, a dream or a body—might rise again in some other form or direction.

Trees talk. If we listen, we can learn from them. And if we revere them, spend time with them, we can become more spiritually enriched. In fact, trees are our better “half” —taking in carbon monoxide and releasing oxygen. Photosynthesis is a Greek word meaning “light” and “putting together.” In other words, if trees weren’t here, we wouldn’t be either. These poems by Susan Landgraf also have a way of putting things together and shedding light.

Enjoy a Video of Susan Reading from the Book:

Early Praise for Journey of Trees:

The poems in Susan Landgraf’s Journey of Trees are bursting with fire, fed by the kindling of myth and lyrical curiosity. Deeply meditative, these poems linger in spiritual landscapes, with music in each lush line: “a moth’s wings singe.”

—Jane Wong, author of Meet Me Tonight in Atlantic City,
How to Not Be Afraid of Everything and Overpour

Susan Landgraf’s Journey of Trees is a craftsman’s art, of burnished grain and fine joinery. This elegant, exquisitely crafted collection is rooted in mythologies that have traveled across time and cultures, branching delicately into the origin stories and fairy tales of an individual childhood, a marriage. Throughout the journey the tree is sentry, companion, instrument –  anchoring seaside or river’s edge, holding the climbing child, framing the death bed. Within this ancient wood of tree families, and family trees, stories are created or received, or, as in “Psalm Tree” (Dearest willow, which art in weeping, / Sorrow hath begotten your name) reworked, whittled or grafted anew. In bounty of leaf, apple, bird, these poems— at once quiet and mighty— show how we story-tell our way into truth-telling. And why? Because words … prepare the soul.

—Sati Mookherjee, author of Eye and Ways of Being

About the Author

Susan Landgraf received an Academy of American Poet Laureates grant, resulting in A Muckleshoot Poetry Anthology: At the Confluence of the Green and White Rivers, which she curated; Washington State University Press published it in early 2024. Her other books include Crossings (Ravenna Press), The Inspired Poet (Two Sylvias Press), What We Bury Changes the Ground (Tebot Bach), and Other Voices. More than 400 poems have appeared in Nimrod, Prairie Schooner, Poet Lore, Third Wednesday, and others. Landgraf served as Auburn’s Poet Laureate from 2018-2020. She has given more than 150 workshops in the US and abroad and is the recipient of a Theodore Morrison Scholar Poetry Award for Breadloaf and Artist Trust, Jack Straw, and King County Arts Commission grants. A former journalist, she taught at Highline College for 30 years and at Shanghai Jiao Tong University. She loves epiphanies and believes poetry can save you.

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Remote Control

by Laura Esther Sciortino

The work in this collection is a practice in ordinary love, both longing for and celebrating connection. Here, we may partake in reading as if a friend speaks to us directly. This friend that—despite mistakes and overreaching—invests herself with unabashed earnestness in the greenest of hope, imagination, freedom, beginner’s mind, surrender, and renewal.

Enjoy a Video of Laura Reading from the Book:

Early Praise for Remote Control:

Adopting many guises, the speakers of Laura Sciortino’s smashing new chapbook Remote Control at times give advice, provide witness, make prayers, lament, gossip, agitate and soothe. The mix includes small invitations, such as “Swell,” whose lyrical sentences entangle gestures domestic and marine, and the dense canopy of “Green,” whose lush prose block sways with need and rebirth. Sciortino suggests her mission and method here in “Not My Last Words,” warning, But my work is not / to tell/ My work / my love is to show.

—Ed Skoog, Author of Travelers Leaving for the City

With sass and swagger, with spunky outspokenness, with humble wonder, Laura Sciortino offers us her debut book of poems. In this collection where paying attention is a kind of love, Sciortino’s work finds its own easy place / a moggy right place / clear as water / old as sunlight.

—Paulann Petersen, Oregon Poet Laureate Emerita

Sciortino’s poetry Remote Control opens up to the vulnerable self with wit, memorial, potency, and song. Alternatively commanding and beguiling these poems speak to the lyricism of sexual attraction and attrition, moving with a shining intelligence through the fragile units of the family and the powerful bonds of friendship and marriage. Sciortino places her work at the center of lived experience, she has a fantastic eye for our embodied metaphors in pockets, remotes, and drill press. We read to know a life other than our own. These poems are a delightful introduction to Sciortino’s perceptive modern vision, through the lens of a wondering and generous talent.

—Merridawn Duckler, author of Idiom, Interstate, Misspent Youth and It’s a Wonder

In Laura Sciortino’s debut chapbook, Remote Control, her lyrically adventurous, playful, and irreverent poems offer wisdom on navigating the human condition. Like the mall vending machine where, at 13, she inserted one dollar and my cursive / for handwriting analysis, Sciortino’s poems dispense elegant, idiosyncratic advice mixed with the fruits of her own loving and astute attention.

It’s better to show than to say she writes in “Advice for a Young Woman Looking for Love” and show she does, through dazzling images and skillful wordplay. With wit and insight, she explores the vivid and mundane moments that make up a life, from postpartum muck, slipped condom funk, to being certain as a fiery coal, purple hot and set to cook, to learning to relax in a moggy right place / clear as water/old as sunlight, all the way to death and beyond.

[M]y work is not/to tell / My work / my love is to show, to point, to offer as gift Sciortino writes in “Not My Last Words.” And what a gift this book is to all who read it.

—Rebecca Jamieson, author of The Body of All Things

About the Author

Laura Esther Sciortino writes poetry, fiction, and lyric essay. Her work has appeared in The Comstock Review, Muse/A Journal, great weather for MEDIA’s Escape Wheel Anthology, Dadakuku, The Flying Dodo, and Unleash Lit. Along with her husband, son, and their three affable cats, Laura lives in Portland, Oregon.

To learn more and get in touch, please visit LauraEstherSciortino.com.

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by Dianalee Velie

While Dianalee Velie was teaching poetry in Italy, she composed these poems to reflect her love of the country and for her cousins in Santa Croce di Camerina, Sicily. Italian Lesson celebrates the sights and sounds of Italy—explorations of the local food & drink, sightseeing expeditions, and the lively spirit of the Italian people as they welcomed and shared their way of life. Come along on her Italian journey and you too will fall in love.

Inside the book, readers will also enjoy photos from the journey, taken by the author’s husband, Robert J. Popp. Here are just a few samples:

About the Author

Dianalee Velie is the Poet Laureate of Newbury, New Hampshire where she lives and writes.  She is a graduate of Sarah Lawrence College, and has a Master of Arts in Writing from Manhattanville College, where she has served as faculty advisor of Inkwell: A Literary Magazine. She has taught poetry, memoir, and short story at universities and colleges in New York, Connecticut and New Hampshire and in private workshops throughout the United States, Canada and Europe. Her award-winning poetry and short stories have been published in hundreds of literary journals and many have been translated into Italian.

In the past, she enjoyed traveling to rural school systems in Vermont and New Hampshire teaching poetry for the Children’s Literacy Foundation. Her play, Mama Says, was directed by Daniel Quinn in a staged reading in New York City. She is the author of five books of poetry, Glass House, First Edition, The Many Roads to Paradise, The Alchemy of Desire, Ever After and a collection of short stories, Soul Proprietorship: Women in Search of Their Souls. She is a member of the National League of American Pen Women, the New England Poetry Club, the International Woman Writers Guild, the New Hampshire Poetry Society and founder of the John Hay Poetry Society.

Early Praise for Italian Lesson:

In her newest book, Dianalee Velie provides the reader with a vacation in Italy— the best kind of vacation, stunning beauty enjoyed in the company of the people one loves. Page by page, we are served her sheer pleasure of being alive. We travel with her to northern Italy, Tuscany, the Amalfi Coast, and Sicily; along the way, we vicariously sip espresso and grappa, drink wine, or taste olive oil, all served in an impressive array of poetic forms (terza rima, ottava rima, terzanelle, rondeau). In a particularly playful exploration of traditional form, Velie describes a Lipizzaner stallion named Petrarch inside a Petrarchan sonnet. Along the way, we share with humor the inevitable snafus of being a tourist, such as her near disaster with a saint’s relics. Throughout Italian Lesson, imagery transcends the gastronomic to the historic and sacred. In one poem, the spear points of marching Roman soldiers transmogrify into olive tree leaves; in “Wizened,” we encounter a persona poem from an olive’s point of view. In “Blessings of the Birds,” a “flock of common redpoll finches/ their tiny heads capped in scarlet” land on her patio and become “like the cardinals descending upon Rome.” This poet is singing to the rafters about the glory of life.

—Alexandria Peary, New Hampshire State Poet Laureate

I have never been to Italy, and now I have. These poems have given me this country through lovers’ heightened senses: a wild and synesthetic journey.

—Marie Harris, New Hampshire State Poet Laureate Emerita

Dianalee Velie is a poet of exceptional vision and creativity.  In Italian Lesson, like a master crafter of Vino Nobile, she picks her poetic grapes, her words, with care and insight, and creates sensual, evocative and multilayer images filled with love and nostalgia not just for Italy, but humanity, nature, earth, in poems that must be savored verse by verse. Che vino perfetto! Cin cin!

—Ala Khaki, poet, author of Return

Everyone who has visited or dreamed about Italy will delight in the wide-ranging images and experiences captured in Dianalee’s poetry. Her words make me eager to return to Il Bel Pease.

—Ken Tentarelli, award-winning historical fiction author

ENJOY A VIDEO OF DIANALEE READING FROM THE BOOK:

Dianalee Velie — A Featured Poet on The Poetry Box LIVE (May2021)

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by Barbara A. Meier

Barbara Meier may have been born in Oregon, but she grew up in Kansas, and can’t seem to get the prairie out of her system. This collection of poems is an homage her family homestead near Sylvan Grove, Kansas, and the magical times she enjoyed growing up on a farm, enjoying the kinship of cousins and grandparents.

About the Author

Barbara A Meier traded an ocean of wheat for the Pacific Northwest in 1979. She married, had babies, and pretty much gave up on her dreams of acting and writing. Thirty-three years later, she found herself alone, staring at the Pacific Ocean, and writing poems again.  She still wants to try and get back on stage.

Recently she retired from teaching kindergarten and moved to Colorado to spend time with her mom.  She was just in time for the COVID-19 quarantine.

She has two chapbooks published Wildfire LAL 6 (Ghost City Press, Summer 2019) and Getting Through Gold Beach (Writing Knights Press, November 2019). She has been published in The Poeming Pigeon, TD; LR Catching Fire Anthology and The Fourth River.

<https://basicallybarbmeier.wordpress.com>

<facebook.com/poetwholivedbythesea>

Enjoy a video of Barbara reading from the book:

Barbara A. Meier — A Featured Poet on The Poetry Box LIVE (March 2021)

Early Praise for Sylvan Grove:

When I visited Kansas to share the poetry of my father, someone told me “Kansas is a state unaccustomed to literary affection; but your father loved who we are.” In that tradition of prairie patriotism, Sylvan Grove leaves no doubt this place can be loved with honest lyric skill. The poems in this book return to iconic moments of perception in a landscape where miracles yield their bounty to the steady gaze. A guide to weather describes certain effects of light as not rare, but rarely seen, and this book brings to light myriad Edenic pleasures of Kansas ground. In the work of mending, turning sod, tornado watch, windmill, firefly, wheat turning green to gold, and other magic moments, Meier performs alchemy, turning the ordinary unseen to resonant glimpses that remain.

—Kim Stafford, author
Early Morning: Remembering My Father: William Stafford

Barbara Meier spent her early childhood in a small Kansas town auspiciously named Sylvan Grove because its twin groves were a landmark in an otherwise almost treeless landscape. In twenty-six imagery-rich poems she invites us to attend her reunion with this place. We hear a calf bawling, the vanes of windmills clacking, cicadas. We feel the dangers of living on a farm:  tornado supercells, chemicals, and the clashing of the combine’s gears and blades when riding without a seat belt beside her father. Meier offers us the creatures of prairie from boxelder bugs to horny toads to the dying Ford pick-ups against a backdrop of her family’s life. She includes stories from a family graveyard that a woman dare not forget if she is to know her place in this contemporary world of shifting horizons. I admire the juxtapositions in these poems of place—the limestone fenceposts of the north-central Kansas landscape, for example—with the sensitive and beautifully lyric spiritual and emotional connection to family, wheat fields, and the history buried in the soil both in the graveyard and in the fields where it was possible to find a sword from Custer’s cavalry. William Stafford, one of Kansas’ transplants to Oregon like Meier, became one of Oregon’s finest poets. This Sylvan Grove work would be a collection he would have been drawn to— as was I.

—Tricia Knoll, author of How I Learned to Be White

Sylvan Grove features a pleasantly surprising use of language, a delightful linguistic play in these poems, woven into an articulate and holistic world view. For the children in these poems, the “Garden of Eden” is a pasture in which they are sentinels of silage… Prairie angels with sunflower swords.  But this is Eden before the Fall, and the farmer who owns these fields is dying among the many dangers and options for death among farm machinery, crops poisoned by unrecognized chemicals, and tornados spawning little devils on the horizon… In these pages, family lore on the prairie tells of  Wild Uncle Bill’s Sword, the rag rugs knotted by the grandmother’s blind hands, and the brittle failure of mating rituals of Eastern boxelder bugs. There are echoes of William Stafford here, another poet whose myth-making began in Kansas and found its way to the Pacific Northwest.  A quietly vivid debut.

—Carolyne Wright, author
This Dream the World: New & Selected Poems

Readers of Barbara A. Meier’s remarkable chapbook, Sylvan Grove, will quickly identify with its central theme: growing up in a precise geographical region, leaving, and then returning after a long absence.

With a keen eye and ear for lyrical imagery, Meier tells childhood stories about living on the Kansas plains where We were sentinels of silage…/ Prairie angels with sunflower swords, keeping out all that is bad…/ The Garden of Eden, before the fall (“The Garden of Eden”). These stories rest in corrugated boxes,/ stacked like hay bales in the back/of a dusty blue Ford pickup,/ Paradoxes wrapped in twine and baling wire (“Old Hi-Way 18”).

When the poet returns home for the first time in forty years, the central paradox of this collection becomes clear: many things have changed except one: I left alone./ I remain alone. (“Reunion, 1979-2019”). This intimate—yet universal—truth must give us pause.

Meier knows what every good writer knows: a journey is not complete until its story is told. Readers will be grateful that she shares her journey and its stories in such engaging, vivid poetry. This is a collection not to be missed.

—Carolyn Martin, poetry editor,
Kosmos Quarterly: journal for global transformation

Gorgeous and evocative, Meier’s work is beautifully reminiscent without being sentimental. The poems in Sylvan Grove are resplendent with the countryside details of North Central Kansas, lines full of grasshoppers and barbwire, chest-high wheat and dogs leaping through the fields. I’ve been carrying these poems in my mind as I walk through my summer days, grateful for their imagery and precision. As you move through your day, these poems will stay with you.

—Peter Brown Hoffmeister, author of Too Shattered for Mending

Barbara A. Meier’s latest collection of poetry, Sylvan Grove, is not unlike any of her previous collections.  There is a familiarity to her words and her passion for what she translates from eye to pen.  It is both tactile and sensual.  It is both accessible and intangible.  And as much as that is comforting it is also deceiving.  Because what lies beneath her words is a world of constant discovery and self-examination.

—Douglas Scott Delaney, author
Tower Dog: Life Inside the Deadliest Job in America
and The Last Ten Miles of Avery J. Coping

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by Deborah Meltvedt

The collection of poems Building a Woman is a trajectory of one life from girlhood to womanhood with all the complications of family, the joy of friends, grief and loss, and ultimately finding lasting love. It weaves in experiences of growing up as a doctor’s daughter in California in the 1960s and 70s and the cultural expectations of women (and their reproductive lives) in the past and still today. Building a Woman also gives tribute to how we often find worth within prescribed family lives, but maybe more so through long lasting women friendships.

About the Author

Deborah Meltvedt is a high school teacher who loves to blend medical science and art in both the classroom and in her own writing. Deborah grew up in the suburbs and fields of the San Joaquin Valley whose landscapes and culture form a backbone to her poetry. As a doctor’s daughter and feminist, she feels strongly about women’s health and reproductive rights and respecting the traditional and non-traditional paths women take in their lives.

Her poems and stories have been published in the American River Literary Review, Susurrus, Under the Gum Tree, Tule Review, The Poeming Pigeon, and the Creative Non-Fiction Anthology What I Didn’t Know: True Stories of Becoming a Teacher.

Deborah lives in Sacramento with her funny and supportive husband, Rick Kushman, and their cat, Anchovy Jack, who in his former life used to be a pirate.

Enjoy a video of Deborah reading from the book:

Deborah Meltvedt — A Featured Poet on The Poetry Box LIVE (Feb 2021)

Early Praise for Building a Woman:

Building a Woman is composed of poems that showcase Deborah Meltvedt’s unique voice in which she delves into her personal history and offers it like a mirror, exposed and shining, to readers. She draws upon childhood’s wishes, adolescence with all its loves and losses, and womanhood’s strengths and vulnerabilities. Her words ring out like bells and call to us like a friend, urging us to come visit; stay a while; enjoy.

—Anara Guard, author of Hand on My Heart

Building a Woman presents a series of candid poems that tell Deborah Meltvedt’s story of girl-dom, of growing up one of four daughters in California’s central valley, struggling to make sense of family discord, budding sexuality and feminism. She accomplishes this with arresting images and precise language that chronicles a woman’s journey to self-acceptance and love, she writes, that “becomes visible on the backs of/ all of us growing up and almost away.” The poems not only illustrate Meltvedt’s life experiences but also offer unflinching glimpses into the universal challenges and joys of what it is to be female moving from one millennium to another.

—Jan Haag, author of Companion Spirit

Deborah Meltvedt weaves words into magic carpets that transport the reader through imagery, memory, and experience—pulling threads from pain, grief, shame, triumph and joy. Her writing takes my breath and rearranges me—in all of the best ways.

—Jodi Angel, author of You Only Get Letters from Jail and The History of Vegas

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by Tiel Aisha Ansari

A Poetry Box Chapbook Prize Winner – First Place, 2020

The Day of My First Driving Lesson was written in the wake of the author’s parents’ deaths. It is a deeply moving poetic memoir celebrating her parents and the tremendous impact they had on her life. Ansari explores themes of growing up as an expatriate, bereavement, grief, and celebration in this non-traditional collection inspired by a workshop taught by Penelope Scambly Schott.

About the Author

Tiel Aisha Ansari is a Sufi warrior poet. She works as a data analyst and professional curmudgeon for the Portland Public School District and is President Emerita of the Oregon Poetry Association. She now hosts the Wider Window Poetry show, promoting the work of poets of color on KBOO Community Radio, (https://www.kboo.fm/program/wider-window-poetry)

Her work has been featured by Fault Lines Poetry, Windfall, KBOO, and an Everyman’s Library anthology, among others. Her collections include Knocking from Inside, High-Voltage Lines, Country Well-Known as an Old Nightmare’s Stable, and Dervish Lions (forthcoming from Fernwood Press). She drinks coffee in the morning and tea at night.

Visit her online at knockingfrominside.blogspot.com.

Early Praise for The Day of My First Driving Lesson:

“I was learning to be the hero of my own story. This line from the poem “1975” could be the anthem for this powerful chapbook that traces the story of the poet’s family, an odyssey ranging from coast to coast in the United States, to Tanzania, and beyond. Alternating plainspoken narrative with vivid imagery, the poems also range through time, building a kaleidoscopic view of this interracial family’s life, challenges, inevitable aging, and the strong bonds that hold them together even beyond grief. The Day of My First Driving Lesson is a rare love letter to good parents and the legacy of compassion they leave behind.”

—Amy Miller, Contest Judge, 2020 and author of The Trouble with New England Girls

Tiel Aisha Ansari’s The Day of My First Driving Lesson reads like a memorable road trip through time, each poem noting a point of interest on the journey. Like the hermit crab in one of Ansari’s poems, its “jointed limbs…unfolding,” the family portrayed here settles into landscapes and cultures as different from each other as Pennsylvania and Tanzania, Hawaii and Oregon. “It took us fifteen minutes,” another poem recalls, “just to list the places we’d lived and why.” Ansari’s poems depict a life shaped by beloved parents and beloved homes, and fueling this collection is the question of how we navigate the eventual loss of those loves. A powerful exploration of what our families can teach us and what we have to learn ourselves along the way, The Day of My First Driving Lesson is a poignant, tender collection.

—Jennifer Richter, author of No Acute Distress and Threshold

A splendidly-woven blend of eulogy and memoir, Tiel Aisha Ansari’s stunning new collection of autobiographical poems, like a photo montage of worldwide family travels —deftly arranged by subject, theme, and intuition, rather than by chronology—is full of so much more than what happened where and when. Dedicated to her parents, who died in 2018 and 2019, these precisely detailed, deceptively simple and carefully nuanced poems let us see for ourselves, page by page, memory by memory, the emergence of the poet’s personal sense of destiny, as it was shaped within the context of family values and the freedoms they offered.Aware that the choices before her are “love, duty, [and] fear,” the poet— like the sheriff in old-time westerns—knows she has “to be ready whenever that noon train rolls in.” Readers, prepare yourselves to be swept off your feet by the brilliance and depth of love in this book, by the beauty and power of its understandings. I can’t begin to praise it highly enough.

—Ingrid Wendt, author of Evensong

Enjoy Tiel Reading from Her New Book:

Tiel Aisha Ansari — A Featured Poet on The Poetry Box LIVE (Nov 2020)

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by Marcia B. Loughran

A Poetry Box Chapbook Prize Winner – Second Place, 2020

Because everybody has a mother. And everybody’s going to lose her.

A collection of poems inspired by one woman’s relationship with her mother, the chapbook My Mother Never Died Before and Other Poems sounds heavy, but lands light. The first half includes poems written after the mother’s death. The poet focuses on the everyday, mundane details—what the funeral home visit was like, how birds felt like messages, the unexpected realities of life without one’s mother. The second half pulls back the camera to include poems written before the death, which capture the ups and downs of the mother-child relationship. Wry humor and a companionable narrative style invite the reader in to one particular take on a universal story.

About the Author

Marcia B. Loughran won Mrs. Mott’s prestigious haiku prize in fifth grade at the National Cathedral School in Washington, D.C., and resumed her writing career thirty years later. She received an MFA in Creative Writing from the Bennington Writing Seminars in 2013.

Her work has appeared in The New York Times, Verdad, Spoon River Poetry Review and elsewhere. Marcia’s first chapbook, Still Life with Weather, won the 2016 WaterSedge Poetry Chapbook Prize. She reads her work in various bars, bookstores and black-box theaters in New York City and the Catskills and is a regular at the Irish American Writers and Artists’ Salons. Marcia is a nurse practitioner and lives in Queens, NY.

<https://marciabloughran.com>

Early Praise for My Mother Never Died Before:

My Mother Never Died Before is a joyful read, full of surprises. Marcia B. Loughran shows her versatility and variety while bringing a welcome dose of humor to this collection, which is hard to pull off in poems about death. The many familiar scenes here—shopping for caskets, cleaning out papers after a parent has died, touching their intimate objects like breath mints and combs—are all painted with such clarity and reality. Loughran takes a risk by beginning with the “after” poems and ending with the “before,” but the gamble pays off beautifully—the innocence of “before” makes the “after” all the more poignant in retrospect.

—Amy Miller, Contest Judge, 2020 and author of The Trouble with New England Girls

In our family, kitchens are yellow./ But yellow is a wide road, Marcia B. Loughran writes in “Differences of Opinion,” one of a dozen in her exquisitely-rendered palette of  poems My Mother Never Died Before. Loughran is a master colorist, depicting the sort of home I always wanted to grow up in or, at least, have next door: The one with that yellow-walled kitchen (the exact shade being Button and popcorn/ a three-year-old’s drawing of the sun./ Dandelions, daffodils), a patchwork quilt to comfort us/ moments of incredulity, and most of all, full of good company with whom to spend time—one of this book’s primary pleasures.

Another is its understated wit: It’s hard to laugh/ and be sad/ at the same time,/ like trying to keep your eyes open/ when you sneeze, Loughran writes in “Phone Calls” a poem that in part deliberates, with a certain gallows humor, on the comical nature of neck braces. “Burdened Vessel,” on the other hand, exerts a breathtaking gravitas, using nautical imagery as a metaphor for the sacrifices of caretaking, a stunning achievement of magical realism which resonates as deeply as her soggy cough/ a foghorn we ignore/ like the radio.

Throughout, with the strength of language precise yet lyrical, odd but familiar, full of heart though refreshingly void of even a hint of the saccharine, Loughran has written a eulogy that would make any mother proud, even (or perhaps especially) when she allows, in “Inheritance,” that I don’t miss her/ much.

—Lissa Kiernan, author of Two Faint Lines in the Violet
and Founding Director of the Poetry Barn

In these twelve terse, keenly observed, and often heartbreaking poems, Marcia B. Loughran excavates and articulates the liminal space of grief, telescoping in and around the strangest of moments—when you lose the person who gave you life. Loughran expertly captures the puzzlement and unmoored nature of losing one’s mother. And in each poem, she gives us tantalizing clues about who was lost and who was left behind. The mother at the center of these poems emerges as someone who was witty, adventurous and, above all, kind. I found myself longing to sit in her yellow kitchen while making home-made Christmas ornaments over a cup of tea, with milk from a bone china jug. The love between the mother and daughter in this volume is not flashy, it feels quiet but deeply rooted and the grief the daughter experiences is a subtle ache, encapsulated by Loughran’s perfect lines, I feel like calling my mother./ Nothing urgent, more/ like I have nothing/ to say and she was always/ the best at listening to nothing/ all the nothings that happen in a day.

—Cusi Cram, playwright, screenwriter and Arts Professor at Tisch School of the Arts

Marcia B. Loughran’s vulnerable, heartfelt poems brought me comfort I did not know I needed. Her clear, honest imagery portrayed simple snapshots of daily life that brought my Grandma back to me. Anyone who has felt alone and lost after the death of a loved one will be comforted by Loughran’s honest telling of her own grieving. Through her profound poems, Loughran bravely explores the pain of death contrasted with the power of memories.

—Lillian Sanders, author of Navigating the Afterlife and Other Reasons to Cut Class

ENJOY MARCIA READING FROM HER NEW BOOK:

MARCIA B. LOUGHRAN — A Featured Poet on The Poetry Box LIVE (Jan 2021)

The post My Mother Never Died Before appeared first on The Poetry Box.

by Carolyn Martin

Nothing More to Lose is an intense, hair-raising, and hopeful account of one family’s resilience and faith. With poems based on Therese Kolbert Dieringer’s autobiography (My Life – Lived and Remembered: A journey across Hungary, Germany, and America), Carolyn Martin tracks the Kolbert family as they escape from Hungary in 1944, endure seven years of starvation and sickness in Germany, and arrive to a new life in America in 1952. Refugees who know neither the language nor landscape, they finally find some semblance of peace in their new home.

Martin knows her subject well. Dieringer is a family friend whose autobiography she edited in 2008. This intimate connection flows through powerful free verse poems that are filled with immediacy, insight, and compassion. Nothing More to Lose will open readers’ hearts and minds to the challenges that refugees in every era experience. It will also affirm the power poetry has to bear witness to that suffering and to the strength lying deep within the human spirit.

About the Author

From associate professor of English to management trainer to retiree, Carolyn Martin is a lover of gardening and snorkeling, feral cats and backyard birds, writing and photography. After years of producing academic papers and business books, she discovered that poetry is the way her heart and mind interact with the world —in images, rhythms, sounds, and intensities of language. So she has settled into the joyful challenge of translating experience into as few words as possible.

Martin’s aesthetic is embodied in Jack Kerouac’s comment in Dharma Bums: “One day I will find the right words, and they will be simple,” and in Sting’s statement, “All my life I have tried to find the truth and make it beautiful.”

Her poems attempt to use simple words to embrace truths wherever she finds them, and to turn them into something approximating the beautiful.

Her poems have appeared in journals throughout North America, Australia, and the UK, and her fifth poetry collection, The Catalog of Small Contentments, will be released by The Poetry Box^® in 2021. She is the book review editor for the Oregon Poetry Association and the poetry editor of Kosmos Quarterly: journal for global transformation.

<www.carolynmartinpoet.com>

Enjoy a video of Carolyn reading from the book:

CAROLYN MARTIN — A Featured Poet on The Poetry Box LIVE (Feb 2021)

Early Praise for Nothing More to Lose:

It would seem that Carolyn Martin, the poet, and Therese Kolbert Dieringer, the persister, have become quantumly entangled—that state of essential being in which what happens to one happens to the other, what is felt by one is felt by the other, no matter any barriers of time or distance. How else to explain Therese’s experiences—surviving Nazis, spousal abuse, and being found by new, liberating love—expressed with such first-hand poetic beauty by Carolyn’s stirring and sterling lines? Alert Bohr and Planck! Martin and Dieringer have established the principle of poetic entanglement and extended it to us. Thomas Merton wrote, “We have all stood in front of that special image that sang to our soul.” Were he alive today and asked for an example, he would hand the person this chapbook.

~Wayne-Daniel Berard, co-founding editor of Soul-Lit: a journal of spiritual poetry  and author of The Realm of Blessing

In her introduction to Nothing More to Lose, Carolyn Martin says, “… even in the worst of times, people can be kind.” That idea buoys these poems that share a truly horrific tale of survival beginning in WWII Hungary. Through Martin’s deftly crafted images, we see into the life of Therese Kolbert Dieringer as she and her family flee Nazis, bombs, starvation, and more. The long journey that concludes in America brings Therese to a safer, but not necessarily less cruel, place. I had to take little breaks as I read these poems; that human beings are capable of causing so much pain is nearly unbearable. But Dieringer’s voice comes through each of Martin’s poems showing how kindness and cruelty co-exist in us all, and how true strength and resilience cannot be extinguished. Most importantly, kindness wins.

~ Kathleen Cassen Mickelson, cofounder of Gyroscope Review
and blogger at One Minnesota Writer

In Nothing More to Lose, Carolyn Martin has read and written my soul. No one has been able to feel what I felt before this poet shared her inspired words with me and now with the world. I spent more than 70 years trying to forget the events that shaped my life and gave me nightmares. Now, through working with Carolyn on both my autobiography and this chapbook, I feel healed. The nightmares are gone.

I hope these poems will help readers find courage in the realization we are not here on our own. We are guided by a Higher Power. This book is a good way to end my journey.

~Therese Kolbert Dieringer

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by Michael B. Carroll Jr.

Songs of an Indomitable Spirit is the follow-up to Carroll’s 2019 chapbook, The Dichotomy Between Light & Dark. This beautiful, full-length collection is a testament to Carroll’s enduring strength and tenacity, consisting of 31 pieces that explore the peaks and valleys of his life, leaving no topic deemed “taboo.” Songs examines various social and personal relationships forged throughout Carroll’s life, using a musical cadence and the rhythm of sound to deliver a powerful collection that explores themes, such as nostalgia, social injustice, strife, sexuality, love, faith and renewed hope. The common thread throughout is emotional intelligence. How much can one ultimately endure? How does one navigate the challenges of interpersonal relationships? And most importantly, how does one respond to life’s staggering melodies? These are the Songs of an Indomitable Spirit.

PROCEEDS FROM PRE-ORDERS WERE DONATED TO MINNESOTA FREEDOM FUND!

Each of us can make a difference to help stop the unjust incarceration of minorities and the unjustified, brutal force during arrest that has become all too common.

About the Author

Michael B. Carroll Jr. is a graduate of West Chester University of Pennsylvania with a Bachelor of Science degree in Professional Studies (Health Science/Psychology dual minor). He is a native of Philadelphia, PA and his poems have appeared in publications such as Maudlin House, Wingless Dreamer, and Cathexis Northwest Press. Carroll’s work was recently showcased in Kosmos Quarterly: journal of global transformation as a “Featured Poet.”

He refers to his greatest aspirations in life as M&M Dreams, which represents his undying love for music and the practice of medicine. Music continues to inspire him to live, love and create, passionately—while his desire to practice medicine keeps him emotionally connected to his humanity. When not writing poetry, songs, or studying medicine, Carroll enjoys spending time with his family and friends, and pretending he’s a part of Buffy’s crime-fighting, “Scooby Gang.”

INSTAGRAM: @sirdukeofwagadu

Early Praise for Songs of an Indomitable Spirit:

Songs of an Indomitable Spirit opens with a proclamation: I swear there’s a vision on the tip/ of my tongue…/ sitting, standing, tap-dancing on/ the edge, daring to be savored (“Visions”). What readers will savor in Michael B. Carroll, Jr.’s second book is the inspiring journey the poet takes them on as he chases delight in the streets…and danc[es], rough through the pain (“Interlude: Reminiscing about the days”).

The tension between delight and pain permeates poems that feature a young black man striving to live in a world where, on one hand, the screaming voices of our African American mothers,/ [are] enough to make a love song cry (“I’m not mad, I’m angry”); where, on the other, fifty shades of God (“Hootin’ ‘n’ Hollerin’ (reprise)”) strengthen his faith.

It’s a world in which the poet challenges himself to discard the limiting labels history has imposed on him. When he asks himself, What if you decided to forsake all others and chose only to love you? (“Choices”), we cheer for that indomitable spirit daring to define itself. Along the way, we grow to admire the poet who wishes to be remembered as a strong man who wrote poems that helped him gather the strength to finally break free (“Victory”).

—Carolyn Martin, Ph.D., poetry editor
Kosmos Quarterly: journal of global transformation

There is an exciting fearlessness to Michael Carroll’s poetry. Strikingly fresh language, vivid and bold, and fresh, jazzy rhythms join to convey a profundity of vision. In Carroll’s poems, we can find joy, love, humor, anger, regret. But, above all, we see a young and accomplished poet with the courage to question society’s norms; the strength to explore psychological depths, both his own and others’; while retaining and sharing the wonder, the uniqueness, and the value of the lived moment.

—Thomas F. Hinchcliffe, PhD.,
professor of English: Psychoeducational Processes

There is a fine essence of an ethereal hue grounded in Michael Carroll’s inkwell that speaks to the heritage of timelessness in our surroundings . . .

—silent lotus

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by Doug Stone

Here, Doug Stone, a fourth generation Oregonian, shares his love of Oregon—its places, its seasons, and its people. Through his lyrical and narrative poems, we are led to witness the power of place, the bonds of family, and his tributes to favorite artist and poets—all through the lens of the ubiquitous northwest rain.

About the Author

Doug Stone is a fourth generation Oregonian and lives with his wife amid hop yards and vineyards near the Willamette River in Benton County, Oregon.  In past lives he has worked on a county road crew, been a grocery store clerk, a case worker, and an analyst and a consultant on public policy issues to state governments, AARP, and the Civil Rights Division of the US Department of Justice.

He has won the Oregon Poetry Association’s Poet Choice Award.  His poems have been published in numerous journals and in the anthology, A Ritual to Read Together: Poems in Conversation with William Stafford.  He has written two collections of poetry, The Season of Distress and Clarity, and The Moon’s Soul Shimmering on the Water.

Early Praise for Sitting in Powell’s…:

“Here the rain tells the truth about everything it touches.” Combine elegiac Oregon rain with the spareness of Tang dynasty poets, and you get the honest lyricism of Doug Stone where the joy of swallows can write in the sky that “poetry may not save the world/ but reminds me/ the world is worth saving.” And please don’t miss the magnificent tribute to artist Rick Bartow.

—Penelope Scambly Schott, author
A Is for Anne: Mistress Hutchinson Disturbs the Commonwealth
(Oregon Book Award) and Lovesong for Dufur

Doug Stone’s collection of poems, Sitting in Powell’s Watching Burnside Dissolve in Rain, is an anthem to Oregon where the author has lived a long and intensely observant life. In addition to immersing the reader in a celebration of nature, Stone also mourns the human interventions such as dams which have lobotomized those ancient voices—the sound of Celilo Falls. He grabs the reader by the collar with “The Wilson River Road”—a nasty stretch of asphalt,/ especially at night, shouldering through the mountains/ like a mean drunk staggering toward the coast. Frequently, his landscape or aspects of the weather take on an unexpected agency: the January sun troubles down/ the left margin of the sky like a misspelled word,/ neither warm nor bright, just wrong (“The Power of Place”). Or, from “Summer Heat on the High Desert:” All day the great animal of heat paces back and forth . . . his sides rise and fall with the twitching breeze . . . And sometimes it is an animal, in another place,/ more dog than he’s been in weeks,/ so complete in his rancid aura,/ oblivious to any human . . . (“Dog Days”). Stone does not flinch from melancholy but also makes room for humor—see “To the Barista at Starbucks Who Told Me Carmel Macchiato Isn’t the Heroine in Two Gentlemen of Verona.” Finally, Stone honors the Masters: Ursula K Le Guin, Rick Bartow, Peter Sears, and through ekphrasis, George Rouault and Marc Chagall, Jan Pienkowski and Leonardo Da Vinci, and, perhaps closest to his heart, an epistolary homage to Du Fu and Li Bai.

 —Rachel Barton, editor, Willawaw Journal

There is pain and there is splendor in these poems, and Doug Stone knows that the task of the poet to study and transform their meeting places. In Sitting in Powell’s Watching Burnside Dissolve in Rain, he has succeeded admirably. Here is a poet who writes in spare, direct language to set real life in motion.

—David Biespiel, Poet-in-Residence, Oregon State University,
author, A Long High Whistle (Oregon Book Award) & Republic Café

Enjoy Doug Reading from His New Book:

Doug Stone — A Featured Poet on The Poetry Box LIVE (Nov 2020)

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