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 Cathy Cain

Like prism light, Cathy Cain’s poems in A Shape of Sky reveal, in distinct colors, the predicament and magic of living in our bodies. Cain, a visual artist as well as a writer, illuminates complexity, beauty, and exuberant sensuousness wherever she directs her gaze. Whether she focuses on the work of artists like David Hockney, James Turrell, Kiki Smith, the process of making art, or merely the everyday, her poetry reminds us that an aesthetic view can sustain us with energy and hope.

About the Author

Poet and visual artist Cathy Cain is the author of Bee Dance (The Poetry Box, 2019) and Empty Space Places You (Finishing Line Press, 2018). Her honors include the Kay Snow Paulann Petersen Award for Poetry; the Edwin Markham Prize for Poetry; and First Place, Second Place, and Honorable Mentions from the Oregon Poetry Association. Her poetry has appeared in Reed Magazine, The Poeming Pigeon, Verseweavers, and VoiceCatcher.

Cain is a two-year Poet’s Studio alumna and a 2014-2015 Atheneum Fellow, both at the Attic Institute of Arts and Letters. Additionally, she has studied with Portland’s Mountain Writers Series and with visiting poets through Literary Arts.

She holds degrees in literature and visual art from Lewis & Clark College, MAT; Oregon State University, BFA; and University of Washington, BA, Phi Beta Kappa.

Cain taught in the public schools for over thirty years. She is the lucky wife of a sweet man, and the mother of two fine sons. She lives with her husband near Portland, Oregon.

Early Praise for A Shape of Sky:

Cathy Cain’s poems are balanced between the light and darkness of what is said and unsaid, of what decays and what blossoms. Her wonderful book tends to the margins of existence with a steady eye. Time and again, the poems in A Shape of Sky are like maps to guide us through the transformations that can come from perspective, resilience, and wonder.

—David Biespiel, author of A Place of Exodus

What strikes me about [the poem] “Overlap” is how carefully it examines the seemingly mundane. The allusions are poignant while still leaving the objects and the tiny clashes between them to speak for themselves.

—David Perez, Poet Laureate Emeritus, Santa Clara County, CA, and author, Love in a Time of Robot Apocalypse

The experience of reading Cathy Cain’s A Shape of Sky is akin to walking through an art museum, if all the paintings were rendered in words. In language that is lyrical, sensual, and brave, Cain expertly braids experiences of the natural world, the body, the mythic and spiritual, and the creation and contemplation of art into poems that radiate both light and darkness. At times, the words themselves seemed to lift off the page and hover before me, illuminated. In this astonishing collection, Cain creates for the reader “a delicate descending/ from heavy dream into uncluttered light.”

—Brittney Corrigan, author of Daughters

ENJOY CATHY READING FROM HER NEW BOOK:

CATHY CAIN — A Featured Poet on The Poetry Box LIVE (Jan 2021)

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by Rebecca Smolen

Excoriation is an honest, thought-provoking exploration via poetry, into motherhood, relationships, heartache, love, and the cosmos. Rebecca Smolen shares her experiences in a way that’s meant to dig a little deeper, delving into each wound until nothing but truth remains. Through evocative metaphor and verse, Smolen challenges her readers to let these poems get under their skin, even if it hurts a little, for this is where healing begins.

About the Author

Rebecca Smolen is a writer based in Portland, Oregon transplanted from New Hampshire in 2014, and is a mom of two adorable little gingers. She grew up on a dead-end road exploring drainage pipes and pond life. She has a strong feminist voice that sometimes gets trapped within society’s confines, but vows to teach her son and daughter that there are no confines.

Smolen has a degree in creative writing and philosophy and works as veterinary technician. She is trained and certified in the Gateless Method and leads writing workshops employing this method, which was scientifically created to avoid provoking the fight or flight reaction generating a safe place to produce raw, new writing that will spotlight the strongest aspects of that material.

Her first chapbook, Womanhood and Other Scars was published by The Poetry Box in 2018. Her poetry and essays can be found most recently in Allegory Ridge, Feminine Collective, Tiny Seed, The Inflectionist Review, Unchaste Anthologies, Hip Mama, Mutha Magazine, VoiceCatcher: a journal of women’s voices & visions, The Poeming Pigeon: Cosmos, and the anti-fascist anthology, Shout.

Early Praise for Excoriation:

When you stare long enough into darkness, you fabricate what you may need; what might need you. Smolen’s compelling work does this enticing dance across the pages. Each piece falls into its own structure, rhythm—a movement that calls out to them. Wanting them, needing them in just the perfect two-step to make your eyes follow them from moving through “water” to the “beyond.” In this intricate dance with words, Rebecca leaves us wrapped in possibilities of what love looks like in self and the love tango with others.

—Nastashia Minto, Poet/Author of Naked

Rebecca Smolen’s Excoriation is part declaration and part dream of a travel in the honesties of existence. From the spark that is “My Call to Verse,” to the inner and outer travel of “{Body as Home},” to the closing call to endlessness that is “Moribund Happiness,” this collection invites the reader to experience unalloyed entanglements of history, agency, anger, and love, and of hope that can reside at heart.

—John Miller, founder of Portland Ars Poetica

In Rebecca Smolen’s Excoriation, you experience alchemy, the transformation of a woman’s raw loss into a dance, a music, a clear vision, “how the stars/are brightest in the northeast in winter.” In poems addressed to her lost love, she remembers the first goodbye after the first kiss, how it “became the new snow smell/mixed with the smoke from each chimney,” and you feel that relationship char in words, “raw and still bloody.” Smolen’s poems are “heavy with the life [she knows she has] needed to release.” In rich language and provocative shapes, her poems are generous acts, each a form of healing, “to fall first,/ to shine… to know how to rain,” their “purpose to ease another’s” pain. Read these brave poems to understand that the world “is merely attempting to find its own way back” through the mystery and science of this writer’s voice.

—Kate Gray, author of Carry the Sky
and For Every Girl: New & Selected Poems

Enjoy Rebecca Reading from Her New Book:

Rebecca Smolen — A Featured Poet on The Poetry Box LIVE (Nov 2020)

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by Rheanna Haaland

Catching Narcissus is a collection of poems which form a smooth, yet unsettling, reflection of the critical loathing and lustfully egotistical self. Through the intermittent lens of mythology and too-real modern life lessons, it is a story shaped by the caveat: “this is going to hurt.” From its old-flame trick-candle arsonist love story to the hydrocodone overdose, Haaland examines—and attempts to reconcile—recovery from crippling addiction and the endlessly resurrected, unwelcome love it both nurtures and asphyxiates.

About the Author

Rheanna Haaland (she/her/they/them) could say this book is about you. But it isn’t.

Haaland was raised by wolves on the prairie but relocated to Minneapolis, after finishing a bachelor’s degree in writing. Unsatisfied with writing alone, they considered several additional lines of work to compliment the necessary exorcism of poetry (including but not confined to copy editor, bookseller, web series producer, script writer, prep cook, pizza transportation specialist and actual batman). Haaland settled finally on pursuing a career as a surgeon.

While currently attending Northwestern Health Science University Haaland also works as a medical scribe in a local emergency room. (Countless HIPPA-compliant stories about will almost certainly prompt future collections. She loves it.)  She will remain in school for the foreseeable future, while continuing to write.

Haaland was the 3rd place winner of the 2018 Erotica Grand SlaMN Championship for spoken word poetry. Their work has appeared most recently in Auk Contraire, and The Same. The poem “—Me, Everyday” was previously printed in the 2019 edition of Red Weather Magazine, alongside many of her other pieces not published in this book. Haaland’s first collection An Eyeful of Hennepin Neon (The Poetry Box, 2018) is available through The Poetry Box website. She lives in Minneapolis with her outspoken tabby cat, Brummell, whose input on molecular geometry and organic chemistry homework is less than helpful. Both of them thank you for reading this far.

Early Praise for Catching Narcissus:

Rheanna Haaland’s book, Catching Narcissus, interweaves themes of classical mythology with stark overtones of mental torture and struggle. Themes of obsession, heartbreak, narcissistic abuse and recovery are all present in this wonderfully executed work, reflecting the authentic reality of human emotion when faced with the unnatural reality of loving a Narcissus. Absolutely worth a read for anyone who has struggled with love, loss, abandonment, or narcissistic abuse. Haaland’s words cut to the core of the human experience.

—Liz Collin (Red Eye Ruby)

R. S. Haaland takes you behind the eyes of a character tortured by addiction, obsession, and the allure of the darker things in life. Catching Narcissus is a sympathetic story with an undertone that is both unsettling and genuine.

—BIGnick, Kaleidoscope Nights

From broken to passing, Catching Narcissus begins fragmented and broken and ends with an idea of composure that invokes hope for a future. Haaland climbs out of a hole, carrying all the baggage that came out, and finds a way to survive. Mechanically thoughtful and brutally honest, Catching Narcissus doesn’t pull punches, even when those punches are directed inward.

—Tim Nunes, Senior Editor at PlayStation Universe

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by Penelope Scambly Schott

A Poetry Box Chapbook Prize Selection – Second Place

Reading November Quilt, by acclaimed author and poet, Penelope Scambly Schott, is akin to making a new friend. Brew a cup of tea and curl up in your favorite reading chair as you’re invited to share life experiences, aphorisms, confessions, and curious ponderings in this delightful collection of 30 poems (one for each day of the month).

About the Author

Penelope Scambly Schott leads a double life. In Portland, Oregon she goes to theater and poetry events and she and her husband host the White Dog Poetry Salon in their home on a hill. In Dufur, Oregon (population 604) she and the white dog climb D hill between the wheat fields and admire the east side of Mount Hood. Also in Dufur she writes and leads an annual poetry workshop. Here she and the dog wander about in the dark. The dog admires the dirt underpaw while the woman sniffs stars.

Penelope’s verse biography A is for Anne: Mistress Hutchinson Disturbs the Commonwealth received an Oregon Book Award for Poetry. Other books include Serpent Love: A Mother-Daughter Epic about a struggle with her adult daughter, along with an essay in which the daughter gives her point of view, and Bailing the River, a poetry collection full of dogs, coyotes, and the unsolvable and sometimes funny mysteries of the ordinary. Most recent is House of the Cardamom Seed.

She is grateful to her family and her weekly hiking group as well as Word Sisters, Cool Women Poets of New Jersey, Pearls, and her far-flung on-line critique group.

What They’re Saying  . . .

“Penelope Scambly Schott’s award-winning chapbook of thirty poems—organized and titled as one-a-day offerings for the month of November—reads like a series of brief, conversational letters to the reader. Longings are shared, intimacies revealed, disappointments confessed. Along the way, truths are discovered and delivered aphoristically: ‘Lives don’t have plots; they have refrains.’ Thoughtful and thought- provoking, these poems are not as much meditations as they are invitations—to ponder, to converse, to be disturbed, to love, to never forget. “Sometimes,” Schott writes, ‘I am the surface of a lake / perturbed by every passing breeze that blows.’ In November Quilt, she blows back.”

~Andrea Hollander, author of Blue Mistaken for Sky

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by Rebecca Smolen

This collection of poems explores what it means to be a woman in the 21^st century. Through the eyes of the poet as young girl, teenager, daughter, granddaughter, wife and mother, we traverse both the triumphs and heartbreaks of womanhood. Let these poems blanket you in the realization you are not alone—you have a community who will help you navigate the waters of misogynistic behavior and societal expectations. The scars of each of our experiences are there to remind us how far we’ve come, and give us the strength to keep rising.

About the Author

Rebecca Smolen is a writer based in Portland, Oregon transplanted from New Hampshire in 2014. She has a deep love for short story, poetry, hugs and animals. She grew up on a dead end road exploring drainage pipes and pond life. Since settling here, she works as a veterinary technician, volunteers with the Pacific Pug Rescue, chaperones class field trips occasionally for her two small children, promotes ‘feminism is for everyone,’ attempts to stay connected with friends, goes to as many writing workshops and retreats as her budget and time constraints allow, and pet sits on the side to earn funds for the aforementioned.

Rebecca enjoys writing darker than most would assume of her, diving deep into forgotten memories and her weird dreams which fuel her creativity. She loves twisting the normal route of thinking and creating new metaphors. She is a true believer that once put down in print, words are no longer for the writer, but instead are meant to help, heal or console others.

You can find her writing recently published in the Unchaste Anthology, Vol. 2, Mutha Magazine, and VoiceCatcher: a journal of women’s voices & visions.

[Instagram: @MC1Rsnap / Facebook.com/rebecca.smolen.5 ]

What They’re Saying…

Womanhood & Other Scars is more than a book. It’s an invitation, not just to peer into the inner life of its author, but to walk around, sniff the marrow inside her bones and explore the bruises buried deep inside. These 24 poems take an unflinching look at life, using metaphors that pulse with the heat of a variety of emotions, from the intensity of maternal love to the aching need to break free from isolation and anxiety.

Many of the poems also celebrate the happiness of connecting with others. In “Dusting,” Smolen muses on the particles of dried skin cells that coat her and “considers of what creatures, wounds, this dust was stripped.” She also comes to the conclusion that in a world where our cells all intermingle, “I can no longer be considered a singular woman nor ever deserted again.” Similarly, in “Where Has Peace Gone?” she says she will “gulp heartily without breath” the laugh of a loving friend. That, she says, is where peace is.

The wounds described in Womanhood and Other Scars often stem from a sense of disconnection, especially between parents and children. The mother in “Never Far From Dwelled Upon Fairytales” is determined to help her daughter achieve outward beauty, but ends up damaging the child who’s now haunted by repeated criticisms of her appearance. In the same poem, the child’s innocence drowns in the “disappointed sigh” of her dad.

In Smolen’s world, the isolation of people living in their separate shells can be intolerable, but through her art, she bravely seeks to make connections by exposing her rawest emotions in her finely crafted poems.

~ Linda Ferguson,
author of Baila Conmigo

Rebecca Smolen’s Womanhood & Other Scars refreshes the messages in Anne Sexton’s poetry: a woman is more than a mother/daughter/wife, more than the blood she spills. Each poem exposes complicated relationships, her mother’s hands like “ballerina’s feet un-shooed” or choosing the “easy love” of children over a sleeping husband. These poems unleash truth that might be unbearable if it weren’t so carefully crafted and deeply developed.

~ Kate Gray
author of Carry the Sky

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Celebrating International Women’s Day, 2015

Edited by Ellen Goldberg

A small group of feminist poets, ranging in age from 15-73, explore what it means to be a woman in the 21st century. Paying homage to the women who paved the path toward freedom and equality, the poets in this collection share their voices as mothers, daughters, survivors, fighters, workers and leaders. These poems come from sometimes hidden, innate human truths. Each poem provides a means to which women can express their rage, frustration and grief, all the while finding the humor, joy and celebration in what unites us all.

“What would happen if one woman told the truth about her life?
The world would split open.”  ~ Muriel Rukeyser

Contributing Poets:

Fran Payne Adler • Judith Arcana • Shawn Aveningo • Gail Barker • Judith Barrington • Brittney Corrigan • Pam Crow • Linda Ferguson • Ila Suzanne Gray • Andrea Hollander • Tricia Knoll • Elise Kuechle • Carter McKenzie • Penelope Scambly Schott • Marilyn Stablein • Carlyn Syvanen • Sharon Wood Wortman

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