by Carolyn Martin

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

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

About the Author

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

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

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

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

<www.carolynmartinpoet.com>

Enjoy a video of Carolyn reading from the book:

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

Early Praise for Nothing More to Lose:

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

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

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

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

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

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

~Therese Kolbert Dieringer

The post Nothing More to Lose appeared first on The Poetry Box.

A Poetry Box SELECT title

by Jeanne Julian

The poems in Like the O in Hope take the reader on a journey, a quest from dark to light—both literally and spiritually. Beginning with hesitation and humility, Jeanne Julian transports us toward transcendence. As an accomplished poet, she weaves a myriad of poetic form from traditional to modern free verse, from sestina to chant, stopping to enjoy some lighter fare along the way: bemoaning a neighbor’s back-yard beacon; going AWOL from a boring seminar; even deliberately mistranslating directives from dictators to render them harmless. Gradually, revelations about the magic of place and of connection lead to contentment and even enlightenment and ends with a poem revealing how love can feel transcendent even with recognition of the finite.

About the Author

Jeanne Julian is the author of two chapbooks: Blossom and Loss (Longleaf Press) and Relic and Myth (Prolific Press). She moved with her husband to New Bern, NC, after retiring from a 27-year career in media relations and marketing at Westfield State University. She discovered that North Carolina is one of the worst states for hurricanes, but one of the best for writers. Her practice of poetry has been energized by some dynamic writers’ organizations there: the North Carolina Writers Network, the North Carolina Poetry Society (NCPS), Carteret Writers, Pamlico Writers Group, and the Nexus Poets’ open mic series, which she helps to coordinate. She is especially grateful for the Neuse River Writers whose critiques helped shape many of these poems.

Her poems appear in Prairie Wolf Press Review, Poetry Quarterly, Lascaux Prize 2016 Anthology, High Desert Journal, North Carolina Literary Review, pacificREVIEW, The RavensPerch, and other journals, and have won awards from The Comstock Review, Naugatuck River Review, and the NCPS.

She grew up in Ohio, graduated from Allegheny College, and earned an MFA from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. Jeanne is an enthusiastic photographer, and also practices yoga when not distracted by tennis, gardening, making omelets, and gazing at the creek and the national forest just beyond her back yard.

www.jeannejulian.com

What They’re Saying…

In Like the O in Hope, Jeanne Julian shines her discerning eye on a world she refuses to experience in comfortable terms. Sometimes her beam is heavenly like sun; others icy like a laser. In the collection’s first poem, “The Owl Wonders,” her evolution from observer to participant takes shape: Do closed eyes ready it for coming night, the search for morsels? That’s how I hunt, too: in the dark.

These poems can be considered travel poems, but not in the conventional sense. The various locations and cultures are backdrops, the poet illuminating their lessons, yet, while geographical, they are also interpersonal. She reveals often-overlooked significance in the common occurrence, not as an intruder or tourist, but as an inquisitive member of any chosen environment or universe, and challenges herself scanning for associative relevance there. She chaperones us from cathedrals to open markets; from labyrinths to “No Man’s Land,” marking how we will owe survival to the feigned, to the risk and sanctity of close calls, to edges, margins.

Some journeys are closer to home. In “Threadbare,” she examines family relationships informing us, I want to be distraught. And I want evidence: are these inner chambers threadbare from caring, or its lack? Poem after poem, her command of poetics and language satisfies because, with her perceptions, she entices a reader to take these journeys with her in a valid search for kindness and beauty, for healing and hope. Spending time with Like the O in Hope will enlighten the soul – time well spent.

—Sam Barbee, author of That Rain We Needed;
past president, North Carolina Poetry Society

Reading Jeanne Julian’s first full length book Like the O in Hope, it’s obvious that the poet is also an acclaimed photographer. Not only are the poems rich in images and details, but as in photography, the light source is all important. In these poems, the light sources are varied and are what illuminate, enliven, and enervate our lives and our very beings. Julian knows that no extended meditation on what brings light to our lives would be complete without the lighter side of life, humor and laughter. She delivers this lightness with poems like “Solar Boy! with Frog.” I look forward to returning to these poems and already hold dear these lines from the final poem, “Just (us) In Time:” Our sacred time does not stand still. / Until our now, with its greening / patina, has passed, we will try / to make it shine. Shine on!

—Malaika King Albrecht, author of What the Trapeze Artist Trusts;
founding editor, Redheaded Stepchild

Book Launch Readings

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