by Penelope Scambly Schott

These delightful and conversational poems explore the concept of gOD, with a sense of humor, a childlike wonder, a reverence for the natural world, and a look in the mirror.

Enjoy a Video of Penelope Reading from the Book:

Penelope Scambly Schott — A Featured Poet on The Poetry Box LIVE (Jan 2024)

Early Praise for gOD: A Respectfully Divergent Testament:

Penelope Scambly Schott has captured a marvelously witty glimpse of the divinity that resides within us all: a self-awareness creating universes and loving every tiniest bit, laughing and crying over our human foibles and destructive tendencies. With brilliant use of poetic form and license, the author invites us to really examine our understanding of the Source of all and the consequences of our own actions. This is a must-read for anyone who is at one of those points of asking, “What’s it all about, anyway?”

—Reverend Dr. Ruth L. Miller, author of Unveiling your Hidden Power and Uncommon Prayer

Penelope Scambly Schott spins out a powerful picture of the Deity in gOD: A respectfully Divergent Testament. The “whole other” mystery who creates the universe turns out to be totally relatable, showing up in a series of conversational poems, revealing a deep caring about all of creation and its creatures. Schott’s testimony is indeed respectful and not so divergent that I can’t give it my own respectful “Amen!”

—Karl Vercouteren, United Church of Christ pastor, retired

About the Author

Penelope Scambly Schott lives in the small town of Dufur, Oregon (population: 635). She has published several books of poems and is a past recipient of the Oregon Book Award for Poetry. Penelope was raised to believe that every religion is a folk custom and that each one should be respected. Her own faith practice is climbing Dufur hill where, from the top on clear days, she can see five mountains. She and the dog do this daily; on Sundays her husband accompanies them.

Previous chapbooks published by The Poetry Box include Sophia and Mister Walter Whitman and November Quilt.

The post gOD: A Respectfully Divergent Testament appeared first on The Poetry Box.

by Emily-Sue Sloane

These poems are a meditation on the myriad divisions and inequities we face, both personally and as a society. In Disconnects and Other Broken Threads, award-winning poet Emily-Sue Sloane pulls on many of the fraying threads that divide us and gently weaves them with striking imagery to inspire connections through hope and, at times, humor.

Enjoy a Video of Emily-Sue Reading from the Book:

Early Praise for Disconnects and Other Broken Threads:

In Emily-Sue Sloane’s powerful new chapbook, Disconnects and Other Broken Threads, the poems’ directness about suffering, loss and injustice tears at our hearts and asks us to recognize what needs healing or that we must grieve bravely what may never be healed. Sloane sees, feels and speaks with honesty that will not accept the glib comfort of pretense. In “A Daughter’s Question,” she says of the speaker’s mother: She never said / and I never thought to ask / until it was too late / what made her so angry. The poem reaches out with a broken heart. It asks us to open ours. Sloane suggests again and again, with rage, regret, humor, irony and anger: This is what it takes to be alive.

—Scudder Parker, poet and author of Safe as Lightning

Reading these poems is like microdosing on the big, unwieldy emotions we may struggle to put into words late at night around a campfire, looking up at the stars. Like a gardener cultivating a bonsai tree, Emily-Sue Sloane takes big, wild concepts like mortality, impotent rage, grief and regret and presents them to us as stark small snapshots of everyday life. The overwhelming world pulls back a little as these words gently take our hands and say, I know. I know. Me too.

—Rorie Kelly, singer/songwriter, Shadow Work (album)

In Disconnects and Other Broken Threads, Emily-Sue Sloane protests the ills of society which destroy people and ideals, the personal failings which lead to broken lives and the eternal human lament upon the death of beloved persons. Indignant of social injustices, she deconstructs the makeup of contemporary life, giving a thundering voice to the voiceless (“Hollow-Eyed Hunger,” “Freedom Canceled,” “Undone”).

In spite of the wonderfully tantalizing title, the poet weaves subtle hidden connections—how wonderful or ironic that in this chapbook’s very first poem, “Hard-Wood Wisdom,” the lyric voice is that of an oak tree’s bark speaking in first person. The connection is unmistakable. Compassion, love, ideals and dreams underlie the brokenness. Throughout, the reader will encounter and enjoy the music traditionally associated with poetry, but all too often absent today—alliteration, assonance, rhythm: Time shreds memories / into random wisps, / seaweed swept ashore / only to be snatched / back by rapacious tides.

—Tonia Leon, bilingual poet and translator,
author of My Beloved Chaos and Slow-Cooked Poetry/Poesia a fuego

About the Author

Emily-Sue Sloane is an award-winning poet who published her first full-length collection, We Are Beach Glass, in 2022. She has won first-place awards from Calling All Writers, the Long Island Fair, Nassau County Poet Laureate Society, Performance Poets Association and Princess Ronkonkoma Productions. Her poems have been published in numerous journals and anthologies, including Amethyst Review, The Avocet, Bards Against Hunger, Boston Literary Magazine, Corona, Evening Street Review, Front Porch Review, Long Island Sounds Anthology, Mobius Magazine, MockingHeart Review, Nassau County Poet Laureate Society Review, Panoplyzine, The Poeming Pigeon, PoetryBay, The RavensPerch and Shot Glass Journal. Sloane holds a B.A. in Anthropology from Vassar College and lives in Huntington Station, NY, with her wife, singer-songwriter Linda Sussman. In addition to writing, she enjoys reading, yoga and exploring her native Long Island’s natural beauty.

Learn more at https://EmilySueSloane.com.

The post Disconnects and Other Broken Threads appeared first on The Poetry Box.

by Leanne Grabel

“Generously candid and open-hearted, this book gives us its bracing gift: full spectrum marital truths that are as irresistible as the cream in the center of the bon bon.”

 —Paulann Petersen, Oregon Poet Laureate Emerita

My Husband’s Eyebrows is a humorous examination and honest celebration of Grabel’s long marriage—its good, its bad, its ugly—told through a collection of prose poems and poetry, punctuated by the author’s richly colored, exuberant, exaggerated illustrations.

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ENJOY A VIDEO OF LEANNE READING FROM THE BOOK:

Leanne Grabel— A Featured Poet on The Poetry Box LIVE (October 2022)

About the Author

Leanne Grabel is a writer, illustrator, and performer in love with mixing genres. Her first collaboration was with a bongo player and sax player in the mid-70s and her most recent collaborations were with filmmaker Penny Allen and dancer/choreographer Gregg Bielemeier. She has written & produced numerous multi-media shows, including “The Lighter Side of Chronic Depression” and “Anger: The Musical.” Grabel’s graphic novel, Brontosaurus Illustrated, recently serialized in The Opiate, was published by The Opiate Books in 2022. Grabel is the 2020 recipient of the Bread & Roses Award for contributions to women’s literature in the Pacific Northwest. She and her husband started and ran Cafe Lena, a poetry hub and restaurant, throughout the 90s. Grabel is a retired special education teacher, the mother of two daughters and the grandmother of two nubbins, Ophelia and Elliot.

Early Praise for My Husband’s Eyebrows:

Maintaining that “opposition is the lifeblood,” Leanne Grabel takes us on a savvy, sassy, biting history of her thirty-eight-year marriage. She may—as she asserts at one point—always regret each snappish remark, each of her self-described crocodile bites. But we don’t. We welcome the rub, the friction, the sparks emanating from this artist’s poems and vivid illustrations. What verve! Generously candid and open-hearted, this book gives us its bracing gift: “full spectrum” marital truths that are as irresistible as “the cream in the center of the bon bon.”

 —Paulann Petersen, Oregon Poet Laureate Emerita

Anyone familiar with Leanne Grabel’s writing or her graphic and performing art will recognize the quick and, at times, acid wit, her dance with impulse and anxiety and a demanding sense of independence. What readers of this prose poetical chronicle of her marriage My Husband’s Eyebrows will find new is how the long trace of time in that marriage imprints a newfound ability to reflect on that past, a broadening sense of trust and even a patience that early in the text she says does not feel capable. Patience, Dante’s highest virtue, makes for a beautiful and transformative honesty, a song of acceptance and appreciation: “I thought I’d never see It again/ I mean him in the glint of/ my hunger . . .”

—Charles Seluzicki, author of Elegiac

Leanne Grabel bursts out of her box in My Husband’s Eyebrows, an illustrated chapbook that is a witty, gritty, sometimes hilarious, and always honest examination of her marriage and stages of her life and growth. In language and images that are as exuberant and colorful as fireworks on Independence Day, Leanne shines a new light on her marriage, from the first honeyed sexual encounters to the time, 38 years later, when “My husband and I sit on our brown leather couch like couch pillows. We could probably feed the hungry of a small nation with all the crumbs beneath the cushions.”

Leanne opens the book with a Charles Bukowski quote and the lines: “I feel an epiphany coming on.” This epiphany is not accompanied by choirs of angels but by the noise of a vacuum as she turns over the couch cushions and cleans out the metaphorical basement: “There are mold spores from the late 19th century down there. They’re so old they could be valuable. Or deadly. I’m just happy to see them dying in the new light.”  In honestly confronting her own anxiety, selfishness, fears, and desires, in probing what in her long marriage is liberating and what is left over from family trauma and from the 19th century, Leanne throws open the marital curtains to let a new light in.

—Barbara LaMorticella, author of Rain on Waterless Mountain

If you want to know what life feels like when someone’s being honest and funny and insightful and daring—and I mean beyond what you might imagine to be daring and brave and real—here’s your book with words and explosively jazzy a-ha moment drawings to match. And if you don’t want to experience honesty and reality, all the more reason to read the words and dive into the pictures, because this book will open your heart, your mind, and your emotions in ways that you might not expect. Leanne Grabel writes that “candy is absolutely necessary.” I would add, this book is absolutely necessary.

—Christopher Beaver, film producer/director

Witty. Fun. Honest. Deeply loving. Unforgivable. Over the top. TMI. Delightful. Did I say loving? Plus, those wild illustrations.

—Penelope Scambly Schott, author of A is for Anne, Crow Mercies, The Perfect Mother, Sophia & Mister Walter Whitman, and more

Leanne Grabel’s insights, her wry, bright lines and her luscious, hilarious, moody drawings are emotionally resonant, scorchingly honest, and highly entertaining. Grabel pulls back the curtains on marriage—the real and the complex. My Husband’s Eyebrows, should be handed to each and every couple as ink dries on their marriage licenses. After the honeymoon, they can refer to this treatise on marriage as a long game, contemplate the gravity of time, and learn about the grit, both coarse and fine, of doubt. Someday, they’ll thank her. I thank her, right now, for this illustrated chapbook where text and visuals complement and illuminate each other, like well-seasoned couples.

—Suzanne Sigafoos, author of This Swarm of Light

Supposedly there are 36 Questions that when shared between two people seeking intimacy, will lead to love. The 22 poems that comprise My Husband’s Eyebrows outline what it’s like to sustain that love—a love that begins with bathing in warmed honey—golden, thick, and sweet and climbs a rock-hard wall of realization that after 38 years, both of you have become absent listeners whose ears sometimes decide to just get up and go inside.

But, Oh, Sweet Reader, do not despair! No! No! Grabel’s tale is a vacation from any familiar version of marital woe. It’s a terrifically true story, spoken in words and graphic illustrations over breakfast with white-faced monkeys fanning sugar packets like paper dentures and brimming with observations of electrified eyebrows and thighs, generosity, depression, and shake the rafters loose lust.

Go grab yourself a cocktail, a joint, a warm cup of chai with extra honey, plump up that comfy pillow and start reading. Now.

—Julie Keefe, creative laureate emerita/artist

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Notes from the American Epicenter

by David Belmont

Acclaimed essayist and musician, David Belmont takes us on a poetic journey through life under lockdown in New York City during the first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic and the few months following, replete with political commentary, philosophical musings and musical references.

Enjoy a video of David reading from the book:

David Belmont — A Featured Poet on The Poetry Box LIVE (April 2021)

About the Author

David Belmont is a mixed media artist and community organizer living in New York City. He writes memoir, short fiction and poetry, as well as instrumental music. His work has appeared in The Poeming Pigeon, Wildflower Muse and FishFood Magazine. He is currently co-music director of the Castillo Theatre. He has been a professional musician for 50 years. His publicly available recorded output since 1999 can be found on Spotify, iTunes and Amazon.

<https://davidbelmontwriter.wordpress.com>

Early Praise for World Gone Zoom:

David Belmont is a man of many talents—musician, ballot access expert, postmodern philosopher, wise guy.  In recent years, David began writing fiction. Yet the Coronavirus brought out the poet in him, and he brings out a mixture of emotions, ponderings and sardonic aphorisms that help us take a new look at what we’ve just been through.

     In World Gone Zoom, we experience the pandemic from the viewpoint of someone who is uncompromised and dedicated not to truth-telling but to life-exposing. Part Ferlinghetti, part Rock ‘n Roll, David’s poetry is meant to be read out loud, almost sung.  His observations will sting, bite, hypnotize and make you laugh all at the same time.  It’s the kind of laughter that makes you uncomfortable, as it should. In Zoom he brings the music with him and hits some much needed dissonant notes.

—Caroline Donnola, chair, Creative Writing Department, UX at the All-Stars Project

Who would have thought that Dylan, Lennon, Marley, Morrison, Ochs, Byrne and Donovan could have presaged a world gone zoom?  That’s the lyrical genius of New York City artist, David Belmont, who riffs off these legendary poets to conjure up a “New York tough” pandemic life—sequestered and blandly hunkered down. With simple, stark—and often very funny—imagery, David invites you into a NYC “struggling in place,” with no way home. Enjoy, savor, and smile at our human predicament.

—Janet Wootten, SVP, Rubenstein Communications

World Gone Zoom, David Belmont’s powerful reflection of the COVID world is like looking down a microscope into our transmuted lives under virus and when he strikes a personal note in “Harry Grimes” and “The Corner Store” our humanity is deeply touched. The powerful “Americans in Conversation” also has a simplicity that evokes the deteriorating heartbeat of the country. And Belmont’s pointed distilling of observance and emotion into notes, like his musical references, are both consumable and long lasting; his rhythms urging you to pick up drums and beat to the pulse of the city. As the directness of his words construct a range of emotions, World Gone Zoom, a must read, carries us along Belmont’s four-month roadmap of the shifting COVID world.

—Marc Maislen, director, New Visions Arts

David Belmont takes us on a surprisingly heart-warming and heart-wrenching journey through the 2020 pandemic in his book of poems. Throwbacks to other times, other genres, a cacophony of emotions and memories (recent and long past) fill the pages in his sparse and thoughtful verse. World Gone Zoom captures and expresses thoughts/feelings/reflections that we all may have but gives them the light of day with both poetic dexterity and musical sensibility (and history) making it a true gift to read.

—Cathy Salit, author, Performance Breakthrough

america has gone/ from red and blue/ to black and blue David Belmont says, and he’s right. World Gone Zoom is a collection of true tales about living in New York City during the time it acquired the name “epicenter.” World Gone Zoom is up-to-date and comes with a soundtrack. Listen to it. Glisten with it. Someday it will be history. We hope.

—Gary Phillips, Poet Laureate of Carrboro, North Carolina

With heart aflame and the eyes of a hawk, musician and writer David Belmont swoops— masked—through New York City in pandemic lockdown, picking up strands of hope, fear and wry humor, and plaiting them into what he calls a poetic diary of the times. World Gone Zoom: Notes from the American Epicenter is Belmont’s debut poetry collection. With its steady beat and soaring riffs, there’s not a word out of place.

     We scratch/ our heads/ wearing gloves, Belmont writes in “How Long Blues,” as he observes the sudden changes overtaking his city during the spring and summer of 2020. Worldwide revolution, New York politics and economic dislocation are the big topics in World Gone Zoom; cherry blossoms raining on police cars and neighbors/ washing their/ paper bags/ with bleach among the smaller flourishes.

—Nan K. Chase, author, Lost Restaurants of Asheville

Poetry is the ideal form for a diary of the pandemic.  Belmont voices the uncertainty of each day, the complexity of our lives upended and illuminated by the inescapable impact of the virus. His question: What follows pause? Play? Fast forward? Rewind? In Belmont’s poetry—all of the above. Don’t look here for a linear story of a pandemic—or even a moment’s thoughts—and you will find a little humor, a little philosophy and plenty of politics. Ordinary people of the world unite—you have nothing to lose and a world to rebuild.

—Christine Helm, faculty, East Side Institute

David Belmont’s writing beautifully captures the nuances of this unique time—the sights, sounds and emotions that we will crave to revisit, process and reflect upon. The subject at hand is dark and heavy but David’s writing, filled with sensitivity, is somehow light and refreshingly witty. I found my eyes dancing down the page, wanting to read more despite that we are still amongst these challenging times.  Generations to come will beg for details and we can return to David’s poignant words to honor a time that, for better or for worse, has shaped our history.

—Liz Carlson, founder, Common Point Acupuncture

David Belmont has written a collection of poems with a rock n roll heart, but with bebop wit. The rocker roots are obvious in the epigrams that set up most of the poems, along with pop-up allusions throughout (i hope we’ve stabbed it/with our steely knives). Those legacy linkages are followed by arena choruses that are as fresh as newly sprayed graffiti: coronavirus on tour, social distancing on fluid parade. But what I found especially arousing in Belmont’s latest work is an edginess in cadence and tonality that is like some Dizzy Gillespie solos.  (A cool cat like Lenny Bruce maybe, but more spare.) These jab at you (sports stadiums/ now empty foxholes), unbalance you (the lord of the flies/ family book club), and open your ears to alternative ways of keeping time (get tested/ quantify/ uncertainty). World Gone Zoom performs the pandemic with a musicality that reverberates with both rock and jazz.

—Don Rubin, Professor Emeritus, Communication, Education, & Linguistics, University of Georgia

The post World Gone Zoom: Notes from the American Epicenter appeared first on The Poetry Box.

by Sue Fagalde Lick

The aging woman playing the piano at church may look saintly, but her mind is busy wondering things like what’s under the priest’s robes and why Jesus didn’t invite the women to join him. Also, when someone faints in the Communion line, should she keep playing? All the while, she is playing, singing, and directing the choir, hoping that she’s on the same verse as everyone else. The Widow at the Piano takes readers on a journey through the distracted mind of the music minister who has recently lost her husband to Alzheimer’s disease and whose only nearby family is the church family at Sacred Heart Church in Newport, Oregon. These poems look at the challenges of leading small church choirs, traditional vs. modern church music, the role of women ministers in the male-dominated Catholic Church, faith vs. practical concerns, and life behind the scenes at Mass, with an honest blend of reverence and irreverence from a writer who has always felt not quite Catholic enough.

Enjoy a video of Sue reading from the book:

Sue Fagalde Lick — A Featured Poet on The Poetry Box LIVE (June 2021)

About the Author

Having escaped the newspaper business in Silicon Valley, Sue Fagalde Lick now lives on the Oregon coast, where she writes, does the singer-songwriter thing, walks her dog, and talks to herself. Her day job—until her pastor reads this book and excommunicates her—is directing the church choir at Sacred Heart Church in Newport. This job requires her to play the piano, sing, and direct the choir at the same time, so God should forgive a few wrong notes.

A native San Josean who earned a degree in journalism so she could make a living, she earned her MFA in creative writing at Antioch University at the age of 51. Sue has published her poetry and prose in various literary journals and come in second in more contests than she can count. Her previous books of prose include Stories Grandma Never Told: Portuguese Women in California, Childless by Marriage, and Up Beaver Creek. Last year, she published her first poetry chapbook, Gravel Road Ahead, which tells the story of her journey with her late husband Fred through Alzheimer’s disease. She blogs at www.childlessbymarriage.com and www.unleashedinoregon.com. Visit her website at www.suelick.com.

Advance Praise

This beautiful, searching collection brims with charm and honesty, with humor and heartache and heart. I’d listen to any song The Widow at the Piano wants to play.

~ Gayle Brandeis, author of Many Restless Concerns
and The Selfless Bliss of the Body

There is both genuine faith and wrestling with faith in this book. The vivid description of the interior of a formal Catholic church, the homeliness of its details and the description of the interaction with the other congregants shows that for Sue Lick the church is a home and family, a home which allows her to open and practice her most devotional channel, music. And the music can lead to the feeling of God flowing through her hands.

~ Barbara LaMorticella, co-editor of Portland Lights
host of Talking Earth poetry show (KBOO FM)

The Widow at the Piano had me at the lines, “If Jesus Came To My Door/I’d say Excuse the mess/and He would.” This is a book of poetry formed with multitudes of just the right touch. A touch of humor, a touch of grief. A touch of bawdy, a touch of intimate. A touch of religious, a touch of reverent. Put all of these together and you get one wonderful and satisfying read.

~ Kathie Giorgio, author of If You Tame Me

“Lead us not into temptation,” goes the prayer, but the mind does what it does, despite the church pianist’s attempts to rein hers in. Sassy, yearning, and bittersweet, Sue Fagalde Lick’s oh-so-human conversations with God and with herself—part prayer, part challenge, part confession–offer a refreshing new take on the theme of the spiritual quest, in which the pilgrim could be any one of us whose minds struggle to hear the voice of God, with nothing “in between.”

~ Ingrid Wendt, Oregon Book Award recipient, author of Evensong

In The Widow at the Piano, Sue Fagalde Lick sits the reader not just in the front pew but on the bench of the organist/choir director, which is even farther forward, to examine her own faith and humanity. Reminiscent of Jan Karon’s Mitford Series, this collection of poetry highlights the goodness and foibles of a committed woman of faith with humor and steadfastness; no matter her difficulties or perceived shortcomings, she is always in the house of worship–this is a comfort.

~ Rachel Barton, Editor, Willawaw Journal

In many of the poems in The Widow at the Piano, Sue Fagalde Lick places her narrator in church—whether at the piano, directing a choir, joining a bereavement group, making a cup of tea in the church hall, or getting splashed by an unexpectedly exuberant shower of holy water—where the easily distracted speaker prays to (or argues with) God as she tackles grief, loneliness, and questions of faith. But the key word here is “distracted.” Too many other things are going on. Her dog has to pee, her pantyhose are migrating, and Jesus might be trying to sell her a vacuum cleaner. Lick’s strength as a poet comes from her courageous honesty and her ability to go from raw emotion to the perfect funny detail on a dime. She will make you laugh. Read this book.

~ ~Nancy Vieira Couto, poetry editor of Epoch
author of The Face in the Water and Carlisle & the Common Accident,
recipient of two NEA fellowships and Agnes Lynch Starrett Prize (1989)

“God do you see me?” so begins Sue Fagalde Lick’s poetry collection, The Widow at the Piano. Her personal narrative takes place from her perspective as pianist and choir director at Sacred Heart Church where she reflects on life, God, and the Catholic church. We feel her loss as a new widow in poems like “The Widow’s Dinner.” “I sit alone.” Jesus is always nearby, and the poet’s wit humanizes her religion as in her poem “If Jesus Came to My Door.” “I’d say, Excuse the mess.” Finding the funnier sides of things can reduce grief, and the humor in this collection is well placed.

~ Lara Gularte, author of Kissing the Bee

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by Heather Wyatt

Call My Name by Heather Wyatt is a collection of poems from the voice of a small-town southern woman working through relationships with her family and discovering who she is along the way. She writes of loved ones who have departed and her sometimes broken spiritual life. From pimento cheese sandwiches to walks in nature, this collection is inherently southern. With moments of both humor and heartbreak, she not only shares her struggle with body image, but takes us on a journey of love and loss, with each poem revealing the story of a woman simply wanting someone to call her name.

About the Author

Heather Wyatt is a teacher and writer by day and food TV junkie by night. Her first book, My Life Without Ranch from 50/50 Press features that love of food, but also explores the dangerous relationship we can all have with it. She lives in Tuscaloosa, Alabama and has a slight obsession with her two dogs. She both graduated from and instructs English at the University of Alabama.

She received her MFA from Spalding University in Louisville, Kentucky in poetry. Several of her poems have been featured in a number of journals including Number One, Puff Puff Prose Poetry and a Play, The Binnacle, ETA, Writers Tribe Review and many others. Her short story “A Penny Saved” was published in Perspectives Magazine in 2018. Her essay “Self-Defense” is in The Doctor T.J. Eckleburg Review, September 2018 and her essay, “Hot AF” is in the magazine Robot Butt.

Follow her on Twitter @heathermwyatt or visit her website at heathermwyatt.com for more information.

What They’re Saying…

“and give them / no chance to ignore me.” The power and danger of seeing and being seen is at the core of Call My Name. The title of the collection is both a tender prayer and an unflinching demand. In Call My Name, Heather Wyatt shows herself as a lyric poet daring enough to show her true faces to the world—faces that reflect wonder and humor and joy and anger and loss. But more than anything, these faces serve as proof of the poet’s willingness to bare herself to the world and dare her world to do the same.

~ Jason McCall, author of Silver,
I Can Explain, and Dear Hero

Heather Wyatt’s poems take a second look at things, as if she were re-evaluating her experience. With humor and precision, whether she is exploring childhood memories or re-imagining a recent walk with her dog, she gives us the real details, the key images that resonate.

~ Greg Pape, author of Four Swans
Montana Poet Laureate, emeritus

These poems explore the boundaries and infinite potential of the mundane world. The same bodily reflexes that betray vanity, lust, and shame become the gateways to the spirit and the connective tissue that binds us to others, and even to ourselves. Wyatt conjures snapshots from memory that prove that we see ourselves best through the mirrors others provide us; and that we learn by seeing and continually re-seeing those images. We are reminded that our identities are dynamic, never static, and that revisitation can be an act of intimacy, forgiveness, and deep friendship to the self. This beautiful work invites us into the mysteries and paradoxes of our humanity with humor, candor and deep vision.

~ Ashley McWaters, author of Whitework

The post Call My Name appeared first on The Poetry Box.

More Poems about Food, Drink, Herbs & Spices 

by Cynthia Gallaher

In Epicurean Ecstasy: More Poems About Food, Drink, Herbs and Spices, Cynthia Gallaher celebrates not only historical and modern pleasures of the kitchen and the table, but also the seasonal evolutions that take place in the cultivated fields and wild terrains, and of those who harvest these foods and bring nourishment to our homes.

Epicurean Ecstasy is the larger sequel to Omnivore Odes, a chapbook of 22 poems which appeared a handful of years ago from Finishing Line Press. Thus, the “More” in Epicurean Ecstasy, with all new and a greater number of poems not found in the first volume.

A Sample Poem from the book:

“Massachusetts Cranberries”

afloat, a party of redheads on a giant waterbed,
squeezed into cozy corners before they freeze
by sleepy workers hip-high in prophylactic waders.

or are they gathered like scarlet colonies
of miniature planet mars vanquished to earth,
set loose from ancient-armored spaceships barrels.

through the processing factory window
brigades of tangy spheres bounce madly
florid against the backdrop of thick snow.

then bagged like pachinko parlor booty,
to soon become Thanksgiving sauce,
tart juice tender to holding tanks,

or strung white, red, white, red,
both self-contained and exploded on thread
in rows with popcorn.

Enjoy a video of Cynthia reading from the book:

Cynthia Gallaher — A Featured Poet on The Poetry Box LIVE (July 2021)

About the Author

Cynthia Gallaher is author of three other full poetry collections: Earth Elegance, Swimmer’s Prayer and Night Ribbons, and three poetry chapbooks: Drenched: Poems About Liquids; Omnivore Odes: Poems About Food, Herbs and Spices; and Private, On Purpose.

She also published the nonfiction memoir and reference Frugal Poets’ Guide to Life: How to Live a Poetic Life, Even If You Aren’t a Poet, which won a National Indie Excellence Award.

Gallaher appears on Chicago Public Library’s list of “Top Ten Requested Chicago Poets,” and was named one of “100 Women Making a Difference” by Today’s Chicago Woman magazine for her writing and ecological work. She has also received numerous grants from the City of Chicago Department of Cultural Affairs and the Illinois Arts Council.

Committed to the organic and sustainable foods movement, and a proponent of clean drinking water, Gallaher is a former officer on the board of directors of Illinois Consumers for Safe Food (a local affiliate of The Center for Science in the Public Interest) and has also served as a volunteer for Lake Michigan Federation’s (now the Alliance for the Great Lakes) Shorekeepers initiative and the Green Team of the Chicago Park District. She is also a certified yoga instructor and aromatherapist.

Advance Praise for Epicurean Ecstasy

Cynthia Gallaher weaves threads of science with seeds of the sacred.  The result – a walk along a path that informs with delight. Certainly the best herbal poetry since Shakespeare.

— Steven Foster, senior author of National Geographic’s A Desk Reference of Nature’s Medicine and
Peterson’s A Field Guide to Medicinal Plants and Herbs

Epicurean Ecstasy: More Poems About Food, Drink, Herbs and Spices is extraordinarily enjoyable; it prompted me to reconsider nourishment and what our own spiritual sustainability requires. Intelligent. Satisfying. Just beautiful. I’m awestruck by Gallaher’s dedication in playing a role on insisting on good, healthy food for the community.

— Dee Sweet, Associate Professor Emerita, University of Wisconsin, Green Bay,
and Wisconsin State Poet Laureate Emerita

Book Launch Readings

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