Witness

by Shawn Pittard

Grounded in a landscape of rivers, oceans, forests and dreams, Witness is an intimate and unflinching exploration of family, love, aging, dementia, caregiving and death. These poems are meditations on the changing sense of identity we experience in older age which, ultimately, reveals one’s unique, intrinsic character. By caring for his declining mother, the poet is guided into his own older age and towards a better understanding of his own essential self.

Enjoy a video of Shawn reading from Witness:

Early Praise for Witness:

The poems in Shawn Pittard’s Witness offer us a world where every breath, every step could be the last, yet each also serves as revelation, a panorama, a shimmering strand in the web of connection and existence. With his broad cosmological perspective, he zeroes in with his poetic zoom lens to capture the challenges of aging, mortality, and loss—all the fragilities he encountered during years of daily caretaking for a beloved parent. These poems remind us how We love and dream on the backs/ of vast tectonic plates.// Standing on what feels like solid ground. (from “Requiescat”)

—Susan Kelly-DeWitt, author of Frangible Operas

With these reflections Pittard invites us to appreciate the paradoxes raised by death—the mundane becoming the sacred; the losses, a gift; mortality AND joy. He shows a way to be open to the necessary contemplations at end-of-life—what does it mean to be on this life’s ride and what is our place in the tapestry. A throughline of this collection emphasizes the mystery of connection—the ways we are and remain connected through intuition, touch, time, memory, dream, and inspirited energy—through this life and beyond death.

—Molly DenBoer Stuart, facilitator, Conversations about Death Programs

Shawn Pittard’s book of poems, Witness, pays homage to his father and mother. It is a work of beautifully assembled words shaped around gratitude and respect. It is a book of sharing. Hard times/good times. It is a continuum. A collage of family moments hung on a wall at home. Deeply personal. A reflection. A celebration—

Shawn opens the door and welcomes you to come inside.

—Danyen Powell, facilitator, The Sacramento Poetry Center’s Tuesday Night Poetry Workshop

About the Author

Shawn Pittard is the author of two slender volumes of poetry: Standing in the River, which was the winner of Tebot Bach’s 2010 Clockwise Chapbook Competition, and These Rivers from Rattlesnake Press. He’s been a coach for Poetry Out Loud and a California Poet in the Schools. Shawn taught recitation and writing in middle schools and high schools, including juvenile hall (yep, they’re good kids), as well as with veterans and the men in Folsom Prison. By day, he labored in the field of environmental protection, planning, and public policy, focusing on energy.

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Depression of the Zillenium

by Elle Verde

Elle Verde shares her experiences from 2019 to 2022 in her new poetry collection, Depression of the Zillenium. Each section of the book explores a unique year of circumstance and challenges: dealing with her depression, having a job deemed as an “essential worker,” coping with death in her family, violence in the news, questioning her faith, and, of course, living through and beyond the COVID pandemic. And while there are glimmers of hope, amid her people-watching and doom-scrolling, Elle tries to beautify the world around her with her words.

Early Praise for Depression of the Zillenium:

“… [T]his felt like reconnecting to an old friend while reading it—bonding through nostalgia, heartache, loneliness, and beauty. There were times where [she] captured my breath with a single line and made me sit and stare at the words [she] crafted together like crocheted mittens. Through [her] poetry people can be reminded of the complexity of the human experience- whether it be being a lonely child and watching parents grow older, dependence on seeing regular strangers at bus stops, and the exhaustion of being in community with shallow people.”

—Allison Couch, English teacher and Speech & Debate Coach

“[Elle Verde] writes poems close to poetry’s bone: in and of the body, the family, the observable world that both holds us and harms us. Torn between tenderness and torment, these poems rightly see us as a molecule of copper / set over fire.”

 —Todd Robinson, author of Mass for Shut-Ins

About the Author

Elle Verde (also known as Danielle Valverde) is an alumnus from the University of Nebraska in Omaha Creative Writing program, currently parsing life as a young adult in a post-pandemic world. She has had poems published in Plainsongs, 13th Floor Magazine, Scribe: Lincoln High School Literary Magazine, and Talented: 2012 Poetry Collection.

In this chapbook, Elle examines her experiences and relationships from living as a young adult before, through, and after the pandemic, specifically focusing on family, church, and herself. In the midst of her cynicisms, she finds moments of beauty and nostalgia in the mundane. Elle currently lives in Lincoln, Nebraska. In her spare time, she likes to crochet, draw, and paint.

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by Richard Jordan

First Place Winner of The Poetry Box Chapbook Prize 2023

The poems in The Squannacook at Dawn range from formal verse to free verse to prose poetry and are linked by the speaker’s experiences with water. While many of the poems revolve around fishing, they also explore the speaker’s relationship with the loss of his father, the peace of the natural world, aging, environmental change, and spirituality.

Enjoy a Video of Richard Reading from the Book:

Early Praise for The Squannacook at Dawn:

Each of the twenty poems that comprise The Squannacook at Dawn is so well crafted that the art is all readers experience, the craft a scaffolding that has been removed. Each poem begins with a sense of welcome and closes unpredictably, yet inevitably (i.e., no better ending seems possible). This is high praise, but it’s not my only reason for selecting this manuscript as winner of  The Poetry Box Chapbook Prize for 2023. Read together and in the order they appear in the collection, these twenty poems create what feels like a twenty-first poem: the chapbook itself. The poet has not only written twenty fine poems—none an imitation of another in content or form—but when read straight through, the poems provide readers with a tightly woven and beautiful verbal tapestry, each poem contributing indelibly to the chapbook’s larger context or story.

—Andrea Hollander, contest judge and author of And Now, Nowhere but Here

The art of poetry and the art of fishing come together in these deeply felt, beautifully observed poems. The attentiveness to word and cadence speaks to and for all that the poet notices, be it river currents or dragonflies or ospreys. The earth and the waters are also very much speaking, and Richard Jordan has listened carefully. The scenarios vary as they reflect the amplitude of memorable occasions, but the aim is true in poem after poem—a sense of gratitude to be in the undiminished splendor that is out-of-doors.

—Baron Wormser, author of The History Hotel and former Poet Laureate of Maine

The Squannacook at Dawn is the perfect antidote to an age of human beings anxiously awaiting the next ping of their cell phones. If you’ve ever wondered where fly fishers get their patience and why they don’t get bored, the answer is clear in this vivid, wise collection. It’s in poet Richard Jordan’s dad, an iridescent scale glued to his thumb/ glinting in the April morning sun. These poems, some of them gently formal, others prose poems, dissolve the work week in the natural world’s healing magic: egrets, otters, and of course, rainbow trout. Even Jesus prefers the river to the church here—not just for baptism but for beauty and peace. Jordan is at his best observing the specific: loosestrife, cognac pipe tobacco, Macoun apples, the “jug-o-rum” croak of a bullfrog, mist. Even if your dad never taught you how to tie a fly, you need to spend some time in the shade near the water with a copy of The Squannacook at Dawn.

—Christine Potter, author of Unforgetting and Sheltering in Place.

In The Squannacook at Dawn, Richard Jordan uses close observation of nature, strong memories, and exquisite language to evoke the holiness of fishing. He pulls the reader in with precise details such as in the poem, “Night Fishing with Otters,” where he describes five young otters at the edge of sedge and bulrush and the mother otter with a hefty, flapping catfish plucked/ from the mud. Whether he’s delineating moments spent fishing with his father, witnessing old men talking, or remembering a house that once stood by a creek, he leads the reader to feel at home in nature, to appreciate the fleeting beauty of the world.

—Judy Kaber, author of Renaming the Seasons and former Poet Laureate of Belfast, Maine

About the Author

A Ph.D. mathematician by training and data scientist by vocation, Richard Jordan has been an avid reader of poetry for almost as long as he can remember and has been writing poetry for twenty years. His poems have appeared in many literary journals, including Tar River Poetry, Rattle (finalist for the 2022 Rattle Poetry Prize), Little Patuxent Review, Sugar House Review, New York Quarterly, Autumn Sky Poetry Daily, Rappahannock Review and Valparaiso Poetry Review. When not doing math or reading & writing poetry, he is most likely at a river or lake somewhere casting away. He resides in Littleton, Massachusetts, a short drive from the Squannacook River.

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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)

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by Christine Higgins

A Poetry Box Chapbook Prize Winner – Second Place, 2019

Hello, Darling explores the relationship of a mother with her daughter struggling with mental health. Christine Higgins shares both the joy and the complexity of childrearing, while paying tribute to an exuberant and creative child. Motherhood doesn’t end, but it does change when the daughter dies at the age of seventeen. These poems explore the grief of both parents and what it takes to heal from within that grief.  In Hello, Darling, Higgins gives voice to sorrow while holding fast to the love that is essential.

About the Author

Christine (Mullin) Higgins was born in Staten Island, New York.  She has been writing poetry since the 3rd grade when Sr. Thomas created a writers’ club that met before the school day began. A graduate of Marymount Manhattan College, she moved to Baltimore to attend The Writing Seminars of The John Hopkins University.  For ten years, she taught writing at Loyola University, and also for the Masters in Writing Program at The Johns Hopkins University in Washington, D.C.

A series of personal events led later in life to a rewarding career, including research, where she has focused on substance use disorders and mental health. Her work has appeared widely in numerous print and on-line journals.  She is the author of two chapbooks, co-author of In the Margins: a Conversation in Poetry (Cherry Grove Collections, 2017), and Plum Point Folio, a collection of her poems and her husband’s photographs.  Her awards include a residency at the McDowell Colony, and Individual Artist Awards from the Maryland State Arts Council in Poetry and Non-Fiction.  She is currently at work on a memoir about grief.    

What They’re Saying  . . .

Christine Higgins is a poet and a mother who is examining, hunting, searching for meaning in the death of her and her husband’s only child, Emily, who was also a gifted poet searching for life’s meaning. Go as far back in human history as it is recorded and you’ll find mankind, poets in particular, dealing with the grief, sorrow, and pain of life.

This collection of poems clearly defines Emily and the loss her death brought. The donation of their daughter’s heart is powerfully described in “The Boy.” My favorite poem is “Love Child” which is about her parents after Emily’s death and a trip to Key West. It speaks to the truth William Faulkner spoke to all writers. Be the last voice on the barren rock in the last sunset still speaking we were put here, not to survive but to prevail. Christine Higgins has, as we Lakota say, written a Death Song that acknowledges when sung, we are always present. This is poetry at its purest and best. I wish I could send a copy to every mother whose son I taught who has his name carved on The Wall of black granite. Then they would know the spirit lives long after we’ve left the earth.

­~Andrew Brown, The Chugalug King

Hello, Darling. In the title poem of this carefully arranged chapbook, Christine Higgins greets her newborn daughter immediately after giving birth. But too quickly the daughter is being whisked away by the nurse, and so the very word hello—such a plain and common American word—is already beautiful with poetic power. The poems that follow in this small but stunning collection are narrative in that they tell the story of a mother’s love that must endure—and survive—a painful letting go. But these poems also rise, as good poems do, up and out of the personal narrative. An accomplished poet, Christine Higgins lets go of her beloved daughter in a way that, as grieving mother, she surely must have thought impossible. To the world then, especially to those who think it impossible, she offers these poems. They sing Hello—that ordinary word of greeting, of recognition—to the beloved. Even in the face of death they sing. And they keep singing, the connection ever strong.

­~Madeleine Mysko, Crucial Blue

I read Hello, Darling with my whole heart and soul. Poet Christine Higgins is a mother who suffers the unimaginable grief of losing her daughter. In poem after poem, in myriad forms, she composes a song that has everything in it—her daughter’s birth, her life, and her life after…. I read it again and again because I wanted to be beside these poems, to feel their tenderness, their hope, and their deep love.

­~Kendra Kopelke, Hopper’s Women

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by Melissa Fournier

A mother’s worst fear is realized at 23 weeks into the pregnancy, and a baby girl is born at the edge of viability. Melissa Fournier shares her profound grief for her daughter’s brief life in these intimate poems that reflect the power of grace to transform sorrow into resilience and hope.

About the Author

Melissa Fournier is a wife, mother, and social worker living in Traverse City, Michigan. Her poetry has appeared in Dunes Review, The Sow’s Ear Poetry Review, Pulse: Voices from the Heart of Medicine, and Medical Literary Messenger. She is co-editor of AFTER, Stories about Loss and What Comes Next (Barnwood Books, 2019). She has a background in mental health, adult, pediatric and perinatal hospice, is a student of Narrative Medicine, and works as the program director for a non-profit bereavement center, where she continuously dares to choose a life of joy and awe.

What They’re Saying…

In this collection, Melissa Fournier’s poems mirror the presence of her lost child: small, exquisite, unknown. Speaking quietly and directly, Fournier evokes what will remain forever unsaid—grief which cannot be completely limned, the potential life which will not be realized, the mysteries of faith and dreams.

Like the goldfinch in the eponymous poem, all of these poems are spare and unsparing; light enough to hold easily in the palm of the hand but carrying tremendous emotional heft. I’m reminded that trustworthy voices are those who do not turn away from pain or love. Fournier is one of those voices.

Teresa Scollon, poet and author
To Embroider the Ground with Prayer

This extraordinary collection of images, as spare as Japanese paintings, gives the reader a sensation of being in the poems and artfully conveys, not only what is in a scene but what is tragically absent; we fully realize what is kept and what has been taken away. With her sensual language, this poet has an astonishing ability to elicit the ache of grief, her skill with metaphor leading us to understand what is inherently incomprehensible. Beginning with the Kandinsky circles, which announce the rich hue of blood and the gong of the singing bowls, we are alerted to the start of a pivotal event so sad and so requiring of reflection, that we cannot turn away. Images heighten our senses, from the sky-fallen goldfinch to the fused eyelids to the hungry fox to the desperation of Jochebed. We blur into the backwards-counting haze of anesthesia, swallow at the leaf taped to the patient’s door, look up at the transformation of cherry blossom branches into mother’s lace-covered sleeves, and clench at the hurl of the pear. You cannot open this book without entering this world of impossible decisions and unimaginable outcomes, and I doubt you can read it without tears. But read it…because then you will know you are not alone.

~ Joanna White, poet and music professor

The nurse tapes a sign on her hospital room door to warn the other staff that this mother’s baby has died. Untethered, these poems of grief and rage capture, somehow, the delicacy of the dead child’s eyes, the surreal vision of the ravenous fox in the henhouse, and the simple fact of blossoms blooming at the burial. Blood takes turns with the bloodless. The mother of Moses hides her blessed infant in the reeds while Thomas doubts his Christ is ever coming back. In a poetic voice of unwanted authority and fearless sight, Fournier knits fragments together into the baby’s shroud to show us, the readers, the empty home, the mother’s weeping breasts, this child Camille Grace, this family, this world, its grief.

~ Dr. Rita Charon, Columbia University Narrative Medicine

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by donnarkevic

A young boy grows up in a small steel town along the Ohio River between 1963 and 1968, while another boy’s suicide overshadows the community. These poems tell their story.

Sample Poem:

“I Could Just As Well Be a Poet of Sewing Needles”
~ Garcia Lorca

On the back porch, Bessie sits
on a wooden chair,
the finish on the seat worn,
a white moon where a flower pot rested.
By the dim light of a 40-watt sun,
she sews a tear in her husband’s work-shirt
turned inside out on her lap.
She wets the thread.
Removing her glasses, she slips the fiber
through the needle’s eye.
To prevent the seam from fraying,
she creates a running stitch along the length
of the tear, then inserts the needle
just the way her mother taught her.
After knotting, she bites the thread
so close to the shirt
she can smell the faint odor
of blast furnace steel and his sweat.
Turning the shirt right side out,
she places the needle in the cushion,
her husband dead only a week
but her grandson in need of a shirt tonight,
his new job, a pin man in the wire mill
on the graveyard shift.

About the Author

During the 1950’s and 1960’s, donnarkevic grew up in Ambridge, PA, a steel town north of Pittsburgh along the Ohio. Many family members lived within walking distance of each other and worked in the local steel mills. For twelve years, the author attended Catholic schools, later graduating from the University of Pittsburgh with a BA in Secondary Education. Besides being an English teacher, donnarkevic has been a steelworker, a teamster, a food service worker, a prison inmate counselor, and presently works with the mentally challenged. Family, blue collar work, and religion are often reflected in the writer’s poetry, short stories, and plays.

After college graduation, donnarkevic moved to Philippi, WV, to teach and considers West Virginia an adoptive state. Its people, its heritage, and its extraction industries are often reflected in his work.

Late in life, the author earned a MFA from National University. Literary journals have published work alongside writers such as Joyce Carol Oates, Naomi Shyhab Nye, and Barbara Smith. Main Street Rag published the chapbook, Laundry, in 2005. In 2013, FutureCycle Press published, Admissions, a full-length book of poetry. Plays have received readings in Chicago, New York, Virginia, and West Virginia.

Nearing retirement, the author intends to continue writing and seeking opportunities to learn and to teach other writers.

What They’re Saying  . . .

These poems by donnarkevic, emotionally riveting and often deeply disturbing, are pure marvels. Readers will sense the words and images for this work were not readily at hand, nor even that these poems could have been fashioned by a mere re-shaping of poetic styles already in existence.  Rather the language of these poems seems forged from the explosive heat and fury of WWII and Vietnam and the hammering personal events of the poet’s formative years. The images are often startling:  “the tabernacle, God’s golden hideout”; the moon as a “round white scar in the sky / a pool where the tears of stars collect”; “dead as red tongues of slag / the steel mill dumps; the golden monstrance / peacocking the Eucharistic host, / the Cyclops eye of the God.”         

This series of images gives only an inkling of donnarkevic’s ability. Often poems conjure the everyday sensory experiences of that period: waxing cars, watching television on sets with older technology, listening to 45 rpm records.  Occasionally words and images are quietly humorous.  At the same time ordinary, conversational speech is entwined with powerful symbols and indelible historical images to create work that is nothing short of revelatory.           

In donnarkevic’s poetry we are reminded that personal and private experience is never independent from the historical and the cultural.  A Polish Catholic altar boy grows up in a multi-ethnic environment in Pittsburgh from 1963-1968 where memories of the outrages of WWII—the Holocaust, Nazis, Mussolini,  Russian POWs, the fire-bombing of Germany–still threaten to overwhelm the townspeople’s lives even as the new horrors of Vietnam—the flagdraped coffins of American soldiers, the self-immolation of Buddhist monks, the rape of Vietnamese women, the napalmed fields and villages—become the shocking images of the period and the monstrous shapes impinging on the consciousness of the young speaker of the poems. And then there is the suicide by hanging of another young boy, Stevie, in the neighborhood, an act by which he is transformed into the speaker’s doppelganger. The speaker wears the dead boy’s clothes, takes over his newspaper route, and climbs the death tree in an effort to understand.  Stevie’s death is a dark lure and yet a clear warning to the intelligent, sensitive speaker as he moves toward self-realization.

    ~ Dr. Sandy Vrana, Professor Emerita, Alderson Broaddus University, West Virginia

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by Judy K. Mosher

A Poetry Box Chapbook Prize Winner – First Place

Shrinking Bones by Judy K. Mosher is the first place winner of The Poetry Box Chapbook Prize for 2018. These poems grew from the author’s journey with her aging mother and her memory of her “past paid work-life” as a professor of anatomy and physiology. The collection is a rich marriage of poetic observation joined with an in-depth understanding of the human body. It portrays a beautiful story of love, loss and grief, as well as the complex relationship between mother and daughter.

About the Author

Judy K Mosher, Ph.D., writes poetry and prose from her home in Santa Fe, where she wanders the mountains and arroyos with her golden retriever, Jessie. Home for over thirty years, New Mexico always kindles awe.

Judy’s professional life primarily consisted of teaching in higher education. Her Ph.D. specialties were Biomechanics and Exercise Physiology. As a professor, she facilitated nursing, physical therapy, and physical education students’ mastery of anatomy and physiology. Judy has also worked in academic, environmental, and community non-profit administration. She recently earned a Certificate in Creative Writing from Santa Fe Community College.

Many American adult children experience the challenges of distance when their parents age. Judy feels blessed that her Mother relocated making Santa Fe her home during her final twenty years. When poor health arrived, geographical convenience and a strong adult mother-daughter friendship provided a container until Evelyn passed at age eighty-eight. Their time together seeded the poems in this collection.

Her prose and poetry have been published in Adobe Walls, CALYX, Malpais Review, Noyo River Review, and 200newmexicopoems.wordpress.com among other places. She has received finalist and honorable mention awards in numerous poetry contests. Judy co-authored Bosque Rhythms, a collection of poems dedicated to Bosque del Apache Wildlife Refuge, with Lee Dunne, Cheryl Marita, Paula Miller and Elizabeth O’Brien. Bosque Rhythms was a 2015 Finalist in the New Mexico-Arizona Book Awards. Shrinking Bones is her first chapbook.

What They’re Saying  . . .

“In Shrinking Bones you come to know a mother and her daughter as Judy K. Mosher’s mother ages, shrinks, and dwindles toward death. Mosher skillfully juxtaposes each poem with a description of bones –  fingertips, ossicles, orbits, even a phantom limb – to build a framework of tender poems that detail how her mother cared for her, mellowed as time passed, even what made her mother laugh. Mosher’s sensitive and delicate poetic touch shares how she tended her mother’s wounds at the end of a long life and holds her memory now with each look in the mirror. If your relationship with your mother was not thus, you might wish it could have been.”

~ Tricia Knoll, author of How I Learned To Be White and Broadfork Farm

“As the skeleton is the hardscape of the body, so poetry creates a precise armature of language on which to hang experience and emotion. Judy Mosher has done a masterful job of bringing anatomy and poetry together in a way that enhances the understanding of both. The metaphors here give the reader new insight into the universality — and specifics — of the mother-daughter bond. An enlightening collection!”

~ Miriam Sagan, poet

“To witness the death of her mother and her own grief, Mosher has invoked the metaphor of the bones of the body to describe the gentle path to the end. Her mastery, the metaphor and the simplicity of the poems focus a unique light on the journey.”

~ Lee Firestone Dunne, author of Life in the Poorhouse and Cocktail Shaker

Book Launch Readings:

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