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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Poems by Marshall Witten

with Illustrations by Elaine Franz Witten

Drawn from episodes over a long life, the poems of My Mind’s Eye survey the joys and sorrows, the affirmations and contractions of the world. The natural world becomes a mirror for human actions. And if simplicity is sometimes trampled by our greed and recklessness, knowing our true place restores at least a corner of the world.

About the Author & Artist

Marshall Witten, having practiced law for more than 50 years, has turned on his retirement to writing poetry. The natural world inspires many of his poems, as do politics, philosophy, travel, human relationships, aging, and death.

His poems have appeared in The Mountain Troubadour, published by the Poetry Society of Vermont. One of his poems was awarded honorable mention in the 2016 W.B. Yeats Society of NY international competition. In 2016 he published a chapbook, Meditations on Change.

Before retiring, Marshall spent several years as a prosecutor in the office of the Manhattan District Attorney, followed by more than half a century practicing in Vermont. He trained many young lawyers – imparting both a superb knowledge of substantive law and high ethical standards.

Beyond his legal career, Marshall held a variety of public service positions, many focusing on higher education. He chaired the Vermont State Colleges Board of Trustees for 13 years. He also served on the National Commission on the Responsibilities for Financing Post-Secondary Education.

As an elected public servant, Marshall served as Bennington County State’s Attorney, and later in the Vermont House of Representatives chaired the Vermont House Appropriations Committee. He was a founding director and later served as chair of the Vermont Community Foundation.

He now lives with his wife, a professional artist who has illustrated his three books. They live at the end of a road in rural Vermont, take long walks with their dog; he shovels snow when necessary, and writes because it’s always necessary.

Elaine Franz Witten majored in art at Connecticut College, New London, CT. She took her first sculpture course at Columbia University, N.Y.C. Decades later, after raising three children and working as a Registered Nurse, she returned to sculpture. Her nurse’s knowledge of anatomy informs her work. She was mentored by Jane Armstrong, Fellow N.S.S. Elaine’s career in art now spans thirty years.

Elaine is a national and international award-winning sculptor. She casts bronzes in the ancient lost-wax method. Her bronzes have been exhibited in over one hundred forty national and international exhibitions and solo shows, and museums. Her work is in public and private collections in U.S., Canada, and in the private collection of the Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia. In 2013, Elaine became a purveyor of sculptures to the U.S. State Department. Her work was chosen for Presidential gifts by President Obama. Elaine has taught sculpture workshops in Vermont for the last sixteen years. Her work is represented by galleries in Dorset, VT, Saratoga, NY, Newport, RI, Kennebunkport, ME, and Wellington, FL. She is a past Trustee of The College of Fine Arts, Montpelier, VT.

Elaine paints in oil, watercolor and also renders ink drawings. Painting in a “poetic realism” style, she intuitively captures how her experience of living with nature in rural Vermont affects her and her artistic voice. Before illustrating My Mind’s Eye, Elaine produced ink illustrations for Marshall’s previous books, Reflections on Change and Remembering Harvey. Her cover drawing was inspired by the questioning mind and discerning eye of the poet.

Book Launch / Readings:

The Poetry Box LIVE – September Edition

Early Praise for My Mind’s Eye:

I’ve long thought that important poetry’s basis is human maturity, a clear-eyed awareness, which some never attain, of the human condition in its full actuality. By this measure, Marshall Witten’s My Mind’s Eye—by turns wry, deeply loving, empathetic, and soberly realistic—is a signal achievement, a monument to a long life well and attentively lived. At one point, the poet writes, “The real risks and tests of life/ are learning how to trust and love.” My Mind’s Eye is testimony to one man’s having triumphantly met such challenges, its salutary conclusion being that “We have this moment; do not let it slip/ away unnoticed; keep it in your grip.” The world feels a safer and saner place for the lessons in this stirring volume.

—Sydney Lea, Vermont Poet Laureate (2011-2015)

Marshall Witten’s My Mind’s Eye views experience through the lens of a poet’s observations. One poem states “To look is to ask…”—and that is what these poems do. He explores Vermont’s rich and contradictory seasons of intense winter and spring’s rebirth. Narratives tell gentle stories of saving salamanders who cross the road every spring to return to vernal ponds. He witnesses a fox and vixen dancing, a bear eying sheep, a goshawk hovering, and shares the humor in how the barred owl’s advertises for a mate. His poems take you on some of his life’s adventures, (at least one is somewhat perilous) from the Uffizi Gallery to Zen meditation, a loving wife, and his walks with his dog Charlie down a road between trees that threaten to be widow-makers. Several of Witten’s poems scrutinize recent political events, the “combing over” of bald truth and air-brushed lies, and the grief of climate change. Throughout, he holds on to the password to his soul.

One of my favorite poems describes the passing of time measured in the slow failure of car parts. Tucked throughout the book are Witten’s poems that tell of a lifelong friendship with Harvey to whom the book is dedicated. Resonant with the old saying to have a friend you must be a friend, Witten’s tender poems about Harvey span from college days into aging and declining capacities.

Elaine Franz Witten’s drawings illustrate My Mind’s Eye and focus the sensitivity of Witten’s poetic vision.

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

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A Kaleidoscope of Butterflies; A Drift of Honeybees

by Pamela R. Anderson-Bartholet

A gardener tends her vegetables and flowers while devising a way to manage her burgeoning chipmunk problem. A daughter pens a letter to her dead father. Jesus saunters into hot yoga and dazzles the assembled practitioners. Three sisters play on their swing set in the middle of the night. In these—and other—poems from Just the Girls: A Kaleidoscope of Butterflies; A Drift of Honeybees, women support, cheer, challenge, and, ultimately, sustain each other. Just the Girls celebrates women and what it means to be connected to the female whole.

About the Author

Pamela Anderson-Bartholet is a poet, lover of blues music, traveler, hiker, and yoga practitioner who grew up in Warren, Ohio, in an area once known as The Steel Valley. Much of her writing focuses on the Holocaust, reflecting stories her father recounted from his service as a paratrooper in the 82nd Airborne during WWII. Her poem “Pack It: The American Paratrooper Teaches the New Kid to Pack His Parachute” was published in JennyMag.org, and her Holocaust poem “My Brother’s Coat” won the Association of Writers and Writing Programs Intro Journals Project Award. Her poetry also has appeared in Whurk, Mason’s Road, Atticus Review, Sky Island Journal, and elsewhere.

She holds an MA in English Literature from Kent State University and an MFA from the Northeast Ohio Master of Fine Arts Program (NEOMFA), which awarded her a Bisbee (Arizona) Travel and Study Fellowship. She has been a ghostwriter, grants writer, and fundraiser for public radio. When she is not traveling with her husband to far-flung places to snap pictures of windows, doors, and lightbulbs, you can find her in Northeast Ohio; Virginia’s Shenandoah Valley; or Charlotte, North Carolina.

<pamelaranderson.org>

Book Launch / Readings:

The Poetry Box LIVE – September Edition

Early Praise for Just the Girls:

Pamela Anderson’s Just the Girls is a poetic celebration of female friendship. In brilliantly created portraits of a family of sisters, aunts, mothers, and daughters, Anderson gives us a close look at the many ways in which women matter to each other. The imagery is precise and unexpected including stitchery, bread baking, yoga postures, and a pink shoe discovered beside a highway. “We try to keep safe what cannot be saved,” Anderson writes. “Here you will find the space to be./ Here your heart will pry itself open.”

—Maggie Anderson, author of Dear All,

“Hold/ each word to the last word./ Then begin again.” So concludes Pam Anderson’s poem “How to Read a Poem,” and it serves as the perfect guide for reading the poems in this wonderful book. And when we devote that kind of attention to her words, we find ourselves amply rewarded—the tell-tale sign that we’re in the presence of a poet with an ear for how language shapes our worlds, and an eye alert to the details that make those worlds real to us. What a splendid, moving collection of lyrics!

—Dr. Steven Reese, author of Excentrica: Notes on the Text

Pam Anderson’s poetry leaves you with two impressions: One, she’s just like you. She has girlfriends, goes to yoga, deals with health issues, wonders what Jesus would do, and remembers a fantastical childhood. Two, she gives our everyday lives a voice that is rich and cuts to the quick. She has a gift for articulating the beauties and mysteries of our lives in poetry that will leave you wanting more. She’s the kind of writer who will cause you to sit and read poetry longer than you ever expected. Her poetry is a “chocolate brownie fresh from the oven;” one you’ll want to chew slowly and savor.

—Diane Laney Fitzpatrick, author and social media strategist

Reading Pam Anderson’s collection is like thumbing through the memory box under the bed: a photo of elder women, maybe in day dresses and deep-pocket aprons, teaching a girl to bake family favorites, “Aunts/bending, brushing on cold water,/ and baking hard, gold shells that/ echoed when tapped with a bare knuckle.” Three sisters in nightgowns sneaking out to the moonlit swing set. A woman gaining strength, confidence and wry observations in yoga class: “I manage a reasonably stable roost/ before folding my hands into prayer and adding/ my voice to the obligatory group OM.” These poems are a poignant catalog of what we learn from girls and women, inspiration and cautionary tale, and our complicated memories of domestic life.

—Karen Schubert, author of The Compost Reader

Pam Anderson’s work is smart, sensitive, and at times wonderfully wry. Her singular voice is invitational but without compromise. Her lovely personality is here right with her unsparing eye.

—Thomas Dukes, poet and author

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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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