Compost Your Despair

by Hayden Dansky

The poems in Compost Your Despair call on readers to move through their own personal upheaval to stand in solidarity with the rest of the world. Hayden Dansky navigates the fluid journey of self-reflection toward collective liberation, showing that “none of us are free until we are all free.” Dansky shares their personal experience in holding several identities—both oppressed and privileged—and shows how they intersect with one another in the work for calling for a free Palestine, striving to end the violence of racism in the United States, and pursuing queer liberation. These poems demand “we all show up for ourselves, so we can show up for others.”

About the Author

Hayden Dansky is a nonbinary, transgender writer and activist. They have been writing and performing poetry for over thirteen years, and collaborate extensively with local experimental musicians, dancers, other poets and videographers to create performances that encompass multiple disciplines. In addition to Compost Your Despair, they also have two full-length poetry books: I Would Tell You a Secret (2019), a collection of existential poems that explore questions of discovery, self-doubt and what it means to be in a body that is always in transition; and We Are Already Ghosts (2026), which speaks to the real and imaginary ghosts that haunt our day-to-day lives.

Their poems can also be found in anthologies such as Isele Magazine, Beyond Queer Words, Bible Belt Queers, Thought for Food, and Dwell. They are co-director of Boulder Food Rescue, a community-led food access organization working to create a more just and less wasteful food system, by using food as a tool to meet the survival needs of people, interrupting the systems that create that need, and leveraging participatory systems of leadership, community healing, and collective action.

Website: haydendansky.com; Instagram: @haydendansky

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by C.W. Emerson

A Poetry Box Chapbook Prize Winner – Third Place, 2020

Off Coldwater Canyon explores the emergence of the HIV/AIDS epidemic in Los Angeles. The poems contained in this small volume hold a haunting, unmistakable relevance for those living through today’s near-universal experience of global pandemic. Echoing an era described by the poet as “the impossible time,” they hold out the possibility of survival in the midst of great sorrow and loss, and the attribution of meaning and purpose to the life that remains.

About the Author

Poet and psychologist C.W. Emerson, raised in western New York’s Finger Lakes region, now lives and works in Palm Springs, California.  Following a varied, non-traditional career path as musician, celebrity assistant, and fundraising executive for The American Foundation for AIDS Research (Amfar), Emerson received his Ph.D. in Clinical Psychology from Fielding Graduate Institute in 2007.

C.W. Emerson is the recipient of the C. P. Cavafy Poetry Prize, as well as awards and honors from The Atlanta Review, The Comstock Review, New Letters Press, and others. His work has appeared in journals including Crab Orchard Review, Greensboro Review, december, New Ohio Review, and The New Guard. Off Coldwater Canyon is his first published chapbook.

Early Praise for Off Coldwater Canyon:

Tender is the word I thought of while reading Off Coldwater Canyon. This is the story of a young man, a paradise he found, and how that paradise—the gay community of Los Angeles in the early ’80s—was destroyed by the AIDS epidemic. Emerson’s poetry is so honest, its narrative so clear, that his compassion runs through every line: in the care he gave to his dying friends, the comfort he later tried to offer as a caregiver for strangers, and the blunt descriptions of the hollow aftermath and long road to recovery. This is a big-hearted poet, and a book that remembers and doesn’t look away.

—Amy Miller, Contest Judge, 2020
and author of The Trouble with New England Girls

In this breathtakingly beautiful, heartbreakingly personal elegy to friends and lovers lost in the early days of the AIDS epidemic, C.W. Emerson maps a journey from innocence hungry for experience to experience hungry for lost innocence. Off Coldwater Canyon is not only an elegy to all those men who died too soon, but to a whole lost world of sensuality, possibility, daring. And if there’s no way back to that particular world, Emerson ends his suite of poems with a path that opens toward another.

—Cecilia Woloch, author of Tsigan: The Gypsy Poem

The radiant from which Off Coldwater Canyon emanates is the body’s own perishable luminosity, these poems the lyric record of the body’s trajectory as a falling star—meteoric, brief—during the height of the AIDs pandemic: While these poems possess the power to make a reader weep, Emerson, himself, never succumbs to a poet’s vainest temptation: to eulogize mourning. Instead, Emerson dignifies the paths of those who have crisscrossed his own with a limpid accuracy that pinpoints and transpierces the essence of our fleeting existence and names it, a quality that destines this collection to become a classic in league with Thom Gunn’s The Man with Night Sweats.

—Lise Goett, author of Leprosarium

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by Debbie Hall

A Poetry Box Chapbook Prize Winner – Third Place, 2019

“How many close calls before we become ghosts?” wonders the author of this collection, where she reflects upon her experiences—emotional, relational and spiritual–during her partner’s yearlong battle with a life-threatening illness. Threaded throughout these poems is the presence of the natural world—always a source of solace, but now more acutely and deeply felt.

About the Author

Debbie Hall is a psychologist, photographer and writer who lives in southern California with her partner and two vocal and talented rescue cats. She and her partner share a passion for traveling the world.  She feels incredibly fortunate to have had the time and means to launch a second career as a poet after retiring from psychological practice.  Debbie completed her MFA in 2017 at Pacific University in Forest Grove, Oregon.  She considers poets her rock stars.

Debbie’s poetry has appeared in a number of literary journals and anthologies, including the San Diego Poetry Annual, Serving House Journal, Sixfold, Poets Reading the News, Poetry24, Bird’s Thumb, Califragile, Gyroscope Review and Hawaii Pacific Review. Her essays have appeared on NPR (This I Believe series), in USD Magazine, and the San Diego Union Tribune.  She received an honorable mention in the 2016 Steve Kowit Poetry Prize and won second place in the 2018 Poetry Super Highway contest. Her first poetry collection, What Light I Have, was published in 2018 by Main Street Rag Books and was a finalist in the 2019 San Diego Book Awards. She is thrilled that her chapbook, Falling Into The River, just won third place in the 2019 Poetry Box Chapbook Prize.

What They’re Saying  . . .

Falling into the River is a book of remarkable candor and tenderness. Faced with a somber “unexpected detour,” Debbie Hall has forged poetry that is deeply attentive and hopeful. Near misses and nimbus clouds hijacking the sky are offset by gifts from nature and the poet’s playfulness. Hall gives us the egret, “lustrous with first light,” and weeds, “resplendent in their ratty coats.” Surgery is compared to the pas de trois in a ballet, and mortality appears as a gorilla in a tutu. These poems are delightful: intimate, unflinching, and imbued with love.

­—Rebecca Patrascu, Before Noon

When immeasurable fear arrives on the shores of poetry it is sometimes greeted with neither aversion nor welcome. Despite its alarming unease and three hundred mile per hour winds—the call to respond, repair, and interpret is the poet’s duty. This new poetry collection by Debbie Hall, Falling Into the River, documents a couple’s processing of shared weakening and fear. These are poems with spines. “Words you can barely form / with your own mouth, / vocabulary that you must now / make your own.” Hall is gifted with a language that is rich in observation and conveys it with profound courage and tenderness—“Here, sit in my lap now.”

—Sam Roxas-Chua,
Saying Your Name Three Times Underwater

Language formed from ache, perseverance and enlightenment construct Hall’s poems: a cancer survivor’s grateful soul mate who comes back from a despairing precipice—love’s shared journey—to discover in these intimate poems that even a long life is short. We learn, too, how the residential soul survives for illumination, to know endurance is born from restoration and hope. Poems to remind us that we fall to get up and go on, mostly, a little more stooped, but thankfully keen to the transient world, each day sanctified with “…the calculus of near misses / allotted each of us.”

—Jeff Walt, Leave Smoke

Falling into the River, Debbie Hall’s newest collection, is a graceful and unflinching telling of the perilous medical journey of the poet’s longtime love. This is a poet with a gift for staying present no matter what. She knows herself and she knows her heart, and in that knowing we come to know ourselves as well. As readers we are up-close witnesses to every phase: the anxious wait for results; vigilance during the partner’s illness and treatment; self-questioning about how to best offer comfort; and ultimately the return of her partner to health. With the instincts of a tracker and all senses on high alert, Debbie Hall never strays from the natural world, which provides inspiration, hope, solace and even distraction when needed. Hall’s brilliance with extended metaphor will dazzle you. Look what she does with the jigsaw puzzle, the fire bulletin, Swan Lake, the tomatoes! Oh, the tomatoes! These poems portray a shared life lived with gusto, through times of ecstatic contentment, despair and renewal. This collection is a celebration of life and love—a testament to treasure.

—Lin Nelson Benedek,
When a Peacock Speaks to You in a Dream

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by Ahrend Torrey

In Small Blue Harbor, Ahrend Torrey exalts the ordinary, everydayness of life spinning his keen observation into lyrical poems and proems. This collection celebrates our human connection with nature, influenced by a New Orleans backdrop, and gives us a glimpse of the struggles of being gay while raised in the Deep South. Torrey’s authentic, inspirational voice will have you returning to these poems again and again, finding refuge from a world that is not always kind.

About the Author

Ahrend Torrey, a poet and painter, attended college in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, earning both his MA and MFA in creative writing from Wilkes University. He is the 2014 recipient of the Etruscan Prize awarded by Etruscan Press, and many of his poems have appeared in numerous journals online and in print.

When he is not writing, he enjoys the simpler things in life, like walking around City Park with his partner, Jonathan, and their two rat terriers Dichter and Dova. He makes his home in New Orleans, and is currently working on a new collection of poems titled Bird City.

What They’re Saying…

In Ahrend Torrey’s reverent praiseworthy debut, the universe is in the details. Here, a man finds another side of himself near a flock of ducks, in the dream of a tree, as the world turns to light and faces decay. Nothing is left unexamined, nothing shunned. In every observation, the poet seems to ask: why waste time on fear of each other or any living thing? All is sacred: moths, pups, elderberries, even the corners of a violent city can be reborn. Transformation is a gift in this collection reminding us to shun the world’s quickening grind. Shouldn’t we pause for beauty? Shouldn’t we note the unseen everything trailing in our wake? Love is being carried—remembered and held in a soft space—by another. And isn’t this what “all of us gathered, in this small blue harbor” long to be?

~ Remica Bingham-Risher, author of Starlight & Error and What We Ask of Flesh

Like a scientist at the microscope, Torrey invites us to discover worlds inside the smallest moments. Stay a while, he says, and we are better for having lingered.

~ Barbara Taylor, author of All Waiting is Long and Sing in the Morning, Cry at Night

As its title suggest, Small Blue Harbor calls readers to see the power of the everyday beauty around them. Emphasizing intersections between the natural and the built worlds, Ahrend Torrey focuses on their impact on one another. With a voice that is sometimes worshipful, reverent even, and sometimes poignant, Torrey urges readers to look at the world anew and appreciate the power of the ordinary moments of life.

~ Lorie Watkins, editor of  A Literary History of Mississippi

Small Blue Harbor is large and kaleidoscopic as an ocean. Ahrend Torrey’s generous voice quests through the small things of this world to engage everything: the miracle of meals, the cabling together of the simple and difficulty, the way that daily life with its small pleasures confronts the prospect of attacks against the transgendered and legislation that could kill millions. These are poems of delicate inclusion and fierce insight.

~ Phil Brady, co-founder/Executive Director of Etruscan Press, author of Fathom and Weal

Small Blue Harbor demonstrates Torrey’s skill of combining classical and contemporary poetic styles to create a voice of wonder and astonishment that is uniquely his. Torrey’s poems and proems invite the reader on a walk with the poet through the Louisiana bayou and New Orleans to witness the ordinary… and see just how extraordinary it truly is.

~ Francisco Tutella, English-to-Italian translator of Jan Quackenbush’s play The Sparrow of Ulm (Il passero di Ulma)

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