by Lanser Howard

Silence can be as sweet as the most beautiful symphony. Or it can be a scream—so terrifying it will keep you up all night trying to get it out of your head.

Loss has followed Lanser Howard his whole life, clinging to him like a wet coat. And during such times, it is the silence that always seems to speak the loudest. It screams truth, and anyone who has gone through deep, dark pain knows this. Too often, this screaming silence feels inescapable—like you can never turn it off—and can make you feel like you’re losing your mind. You will do anything to block out the noise of The Screaming Silence.

In his first full-length poetry collection, Lanser Howard examines loss, the most bare-bones of human emotion. He takes readers on a merciless journey through the depths of agony and grief—through The Screaming Silence—and then into the light of hope. Hope to have the courage to fight on.

READ SAMPLES FROM THE BOOK IN LANSER’S FEATURE ON MEDUSA’S KITCHEN.

About the Author

Lanser Howard began his career as a journalist and then transitioned into film where he wrote and produced an award-winning documentary film and other screenplays. His sole focus now is on poetry and literature with The Screaming Silence as his first full-length book of poetry.

An Oakland, California native, now living in the Sacramento area, Howard travels the country selling food products by day, writer by night.  He has worked extensively with combat veterans filtering their traumatic experiences through his eyes in much of his work to show you their world after the smoke clears, but the gripping pain remains.

Howard’s visceral, minimalistic style paints hard-hitting portraits of the dark and lonely process of fighting through tragedy and loss and how to heal oneself with words, hope and an unwavering strength of self.

<Instagram: @lanserhoward>

About the Artist

For James Picard, art is life. He works feverishly, seizing every opportunity to create the vivid and striking images his mind conjures up, whether that be painting, drawing, writing or film making. His work has been featured in almost 200 art exhibitions throughout North America and Europe.

Picard was the first artist to exhibit his paintings at the historical Alcatraz Prison in San Francisco, part of his “The Dark & The Wounded” painting series and world art tour which he filmed and turned into a documentary, and which won awards across the North American Film Festival circuit culminating in a screening in May 2018 at the 71st Cannes International Film Festival.

Picard is an  talented artist with a big heart. He has received many awards and accolades for his artwork and for his contributions to communities and charities throughout North America. He currently lives in both Los Angeles, California and Vancouver, British Columbia.

<www.jamespicard.com>

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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 Laurel Feigenbaum

Matrimony is the story of a long marriage, a family, and the inevitable changes that occur over time. Married for 66 years when her husband passed away, the poet shares her journey of learning to live alone for the first time, her grief, and recognition of the natural aging process as it affects us all.

About the Author

Laurel Feigenbaum was born and raised in San Francisco and Beverly Hills. She holds a BA in English Literature from UC Berkeley, and an MA in Educational Research and Psychology. She credits her interest in poetry to Wordsworth and her father who loved wordplay, and often quoted lines he admired or found useful. After family and careers in education and business, she gathered what she refers to as “late-life courage” and began writing in class and workshop settings. Writing for her is a way of exploring and coping with the often-absurd world in which we live, and the inevitable changes that come with a long life or any life.

Matriarch of her family now, she is the mother of three, grandmother of seven and great-grandmother of two. She is a past board member of the Marin Poetry Center and author of The Daily Absurd. She received Honorable Mention for work from the Highland Park poetry challenge, and Ida Coolbrith Circle. Her work also appears on-line, Women For Change Poetry Sunday.

Advance Praise

“Matrimony’s gorgeous elegy to a husband casts a tender and unflinching eye into aging, illness, and love’s ‘armory of memory.’ These poems speak to the natural absolute of death with Yeatsian candor, but they also remind me of contemporary masters of the short form—Jane Kenyon and Jean Valentine—in their precision. Feigenbaum’s accuracy also calls to mind the photographer Cartier-Bresson’s ‘decisive moment,’ in which spontaneous and ephemeral events record, in one deft impress, the essence of pure feeling. I’m so grateful to these poems for lessons in how to write, and, more importantly, how to live.”

~ Jane Miller, acclaimed poet & author of Who is Trixie the Trasher? and Other Questions

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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 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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