Ordinary Omens

by LeAnn Bjerken

Ordinary Omens is an exploration of moments in our lives that have a connection to the extraordinary. The poems seek understanding of both common and unusual occurrences, examining their ties to nature and the natural world, as well as the supernatural via the tools and rituals associated with faith, superstition, luck, and magic.

Here you will find a yearning to understand the past (both our own personal history and that of others) and how it influences our future. In these selections, Bjerken dives into the timelessness of love, the fearful and wondrous gift of motherhood, the presence of hope amid uncertainty, the power of faith, and the resolution of a repeated wish.

Early Praise for Ordinary Omens:

Ordinary Omens combines earthly beauty with cosmic magic. Each poem contains its own universe, paying tribute to our senses with detailed imagery, and at the same time, reaching out to the mysteries of the universe. The poetry touches the true and authentic inner longings of the readers and carries us toward deeper realms involving the intersection of our own personal language with a new voice from the Muse, the voice of LeAnn Bjerken. The reader will soar on the wings of pure poetry, poetry our world needs now more than ever.

—Nila J. Webster, author of Remember Rain
and Songs of Wonder for the Night Sea Journey

LeAnn Bjerken’s Ordinary Omens reads like a book of rituals, potions, incantations, and talismans for conjuring the magic that only domesticity can make. With trusting intimacy and captivating sensuality, Bjerken traces the ecstatic, headlong cycles of desire and fulfillment from which enduring love is spun. Her poems remind us that, in our loving and loved bodies, we are of the same dirt as the earthworm and burrowing rabbit, the same air as the birds, the same water as the minnow born ready to swim and make a home in—and of—this world.

—Jonathan Johnson, author of May Is an Island

LeAnn Bjerken’s Ordinary Omens opens with a spell and then casts one. The speaker takes us from her birth through key moments in her life, focusing primarily on the experience of falling in love, and these ordinary experiences are made extraordinary through Bjerken’s surreal images. One of my favorite poems in this book, “Keep on Floating,” feels like a Marc Chagall painting in that it’s a real world made less and more real by being tilted sideways: I stay home to climb the walls with you. / We walk the ceiling / tripping in the door frames / stepping around lights. Reading this book feels like we’re in a world that is both familiar and new, made so by the magic of language and love.

—Laura Read, author of But She Is Also Jane

About the Author

Originally from Minnesota, LeAnn Bjerken holds an MFA in creative writing from Eastern Washington University. A former journalist, freelance writer and mermaid performer, she has temporarily traded her fins for legs in order to better keep up with her daughter. Her poetry has appeared in Miracle Magazine, The Pacific Northwest Inlander, Spokane Coeur d’Alene Living Magazine, and online publications including Devilfish Review, The Artistic Muse, The Lake, Fox Adoption Magazine, and Plants & Poetry Journal. When not out seeking inspiration, she can be found at home snuggling with her husband Steve, daughter Eowyn, and cat Tikki.

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Remote Control

by Laura Esther Sciortino

The work in this collection is a practice in ordinary love, both longing for and celebrating connection. Here, we may partake in reading as if a friend speaks to us directly. This friend that—despite mistakes and overreaching—invests herself with unabashed earnestness in the greenest of hope, imagination, freedom, beginner’s mind, surrender, and renewal.

Enjoy a Video of Laura Reading from the Book:

Early Praise for Remote Control:

Adopting many guises, the speakers of Laura Sciortino’s smashing new chapbook Remote Control at times give advice, provide witness, make prayers, lament, gossip, agitate and soothe. The mix includes small invitations, such as “Swell,” whose lyrical sentences entangle gestures domestic and marine, and the dense canopy of “Green,” whose lush prose block sways with need and rebirth. Sciortino suggests her mission and method here in “Not My Last Words,” warning, But my work is not / to tell/ My work / my love is to show.

—Ed Skoog, Author of Travelers Leaving for the City

With sass and swagger, with spunky outspokenness, with humble wonder, Laura Sciortino offers us her debut book of poems. In this collection where paying attention is a kind of love, Sciortino’s work finds its own easy place / a moggy right place / clear as water / old as sunlight.

—Paulann Petersen, Oregon Poet Laureate Emerita

Sciortino’s poetry Remote Control opens up to the vulnerable self with wit, memorial, potency, and song. Alternatively commanding and beguiling these poems speak to the lyricism of sexual attraction and attrition, moving with a shining intelligence through the fragile units of the family and the powerful bonds of friendship and marriage. Sciortino places her work at the center of lived experience, she has a fantastic eye for our embodied metaphors in pockets, remotes, and drill press. We read to know a life other than our own. These poems are a delightful introduction to Sciortino’s perceptive modern vision, through the lens of a wondering and generous talent.

—Merridawn Duckler, author of Idiom, Interstate, Misspent Youth and It’s a Wonder

In Laura Sciortino’s debut chapbook, Remote Control, her lyrically adventurous, playful, and irreverent poems offer wisdom on navigating the human condition. Like the mall vending machine where, at 13, she inserted one dollar and my cursive / for handwriting analysis, Sciortino’s poems dispense elegant, idiosyncratic advice mixed with the fruits of her own loving and astute attention.

It’s better to show than to say she writes in “Advice for a Young Woman Looking for Love” and show she does, through dazzling images and skillful wordplay. With wit and insight, she explores the vivid and mundane moments that make up a life, from postpartum muck, slipped condom funk, to being certain as a fiery coal, purple hot and set to cook, to learning to relax in a moggy right place / clear as water/old as sunlight, all the way to death and beyond.

[M]y work is not/to tell / My work / my love is to show, to point, to offer as gift Sciortino writes in “Not My Last Words.” And what a gift this book is to all who read it.

—Rebecca Jamieson, author of The Body of All Things

About the Author

Laura Esther Sciortino writes poetry, fiction, and lyric essay. Her work has appeared in The Comstock Review, Muse/A Journal, great weather for MEDIA’s Escape Wheel Anthology, Dadakuku, The Flying Dodo, and Unleash Lit. Along with her husband, son, and their three affable cats, Laura lives in Portland, Oregon.

To learn more and get in touch, please visit LauraEstherSciortino.com.

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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 Gary Percesepe

though we parted that spring the roads
kept freezing and thawing between snows
until the weak sun wakened me and I realized 
our love had made me thinner.

Winter is a season of the heart. The Winter of J is a collection of poems set in Buffalo, New York, where Gary Percesepe spent twelve years—one winter falling in and out of love with J, and taking an axe to the frozen sea inside.

From First Date and new love:

She was hair and bruises with a shot of ragamuffin

my thoughts slowed to the pace of
        drifting snow

to blizzards and frozen rivers blued from bridge lights, we come inevitably to Breakup—

she will appear
like a cutting stone
her laughter a fresh sword

Finding resolution at last in acceptance, but not without lingering questions:

can memory freeze in place like this?

The Winter of J is a lyrical meditation on love and temporality. With the poet, we wonder how such a short span of time can have such a lasting impact, while marveling again at the resiliency of the human heart:

the poet amounted his affair
summed it at five months
licked his ice cream cone
and melted
We know these women only from their leavings.
We love to watch them go.

About the Author

The Winter of J is Gary Percesepe’s eighth book. He is associate editor at New World Writing (formerly Mississippi Review), where he has worked closely with executive editor Frederick Barthelme for many years. Prior to that, he was an assistant fiction editor at Antioch Review.

His work has appeared in Story Quarterly, N + 1, Salon, Mississippi Review, Wigleaf, Westchester Review, Brevity, PANK, The Millions, Atticus Review, BULL, The Good Man Project, Word Riot, Necessary Fiction, and many other places. In 2014, Pure Slush Press published his first collection of poetry, FALLING, and a collection of flash fiction titled, ITCH.

Percesepe spent twelve years one winter in Buffalo, where he met J and took an axe to the frozen sea inside. Thawed at last, he met Resea Burns in White Plains, New York, and they’ve been together ever since. Gary Percesepe teaches philosophy at Fordham University in the Bronx.

<garypercesepe.com>

Early Praise for The Winter of J:

In The Winter of J, Gary Percesepe writes compellingly about the commingled passion, loneliness, and surprising bliss of a doomed relationship with “J,” a woman who moves fleetingly and luminously through his life one winter season. It is a scorching exploration of both transience and intimacy, transcending the personal to touch a universal connection with all that is.

~ Joelle Fraser, author of The Territory of Men

Percesepe cuts himself wide open in this candid portrayal of a love story that soars before bursting into flames and cinders. Lucid and visceral, every page packs an emotional punch. Percesepe dissects the foibles of love with a surgeon’s scalpel and a watchmaker’s keen eye. The writing is at once subtle but searing, and while the journey he describes is his own, the path will be intimately familiar to any reader who has ever loved and lost someone they cherish.

~ Len Kuntz, author of This Is Why I Need You

The Winter of J is not simply a love story—it takes as its subject the evolution of love from its tender and uncertain beginnings, through disillusion and withdrawal, to the place of after-love, where the writer can attempt recollection in a semblance of tranquility. The love and un-love story plays out in the wintry cityscape of Buffalo —sometimes tender, sometimes solemn, sometimes wryly funny (as when the poet considers whether it’s possible to say “riding shotgun” when referring to a Buddhist passenger), using a mélange of forms, including prose and free verse, and a subtly shifting and tricky point of view. The poems have striking images: the city as “a white/ shaking dome/ fastened to a great lake;” rich and evocative allusions to Cheever and Rich; and strong statements that marry philosophy to the experience of pain as the poet attempts “to learn again the calculus of loss, the difficult/ arithmetic of the heart.”

~ Mary Grimm

“Why am I here? I am here to learn again the calculus of loss,/ the difficult arithmetic of the recalcitrant heart.” Reader, that’s why you are here too. Through the recounting of a five-month affair in Buffalo, Gary Percesepe in The Winter of J mines the large life lessons that love discovered and love dissolved have to teach.

~ Bill Yarrow, author of Accelerant and Against Prompts

In his sharp new collection of poems Gary Percesepe gives us pretty much a relationship from A to Z: from the early days “when everything I wanted was in that room” to the bittersweet ending when the relationship becomes, as Woody Allen famously put it, a dead shark—all capped by the memories that linger, the good and the bad, and the eventual moving on (“The mystery of beginning, resumes.”) At times prose-like and lyrical, wise and searching, tender and erotic, jubilant and heartbreaking, Percesepe’s writing never fails to keep the reader engaged. And I like that the characters live in Buffalo and Upper Niagara—hardy people from the north country who can teach us about toughness, love and resiliency, and give us wonders like The Winter of J.

~ Tim Suermondt, author Josephine Baker Swimming Pool

Gary Percesepe presents emotional density in The Winter of J that shifts atmospherically from one poem to the next. This episodic meditation on the journey of a relationship is equal parts subtle and harsh, as it examines what it is to be both nourished and brutalized by love.

~ Jen Knox, author of Resolutions

The Winter of J is a lyrical undressing of the beauty and the pain and the resolution of love—and love lost. Percesepe’s poems are vivid and gorgeous, delivering one unforgettable line after the other.

~ Jules Archer, Author of Little Feasts and All the Ghosts We’ve Always Had

To read Gary Percesepe’s poetry collection The Winter of J is to not only feel more connected to the world, but also to the people who populate it. His poems’ dazzling imagery (“When she finally arrived, it was like a cello played inside me”; “Hours hung on the line like frozen shirts”), demonstrate Rita Dove’s notion that “Poetry is language at its most distilled and most powerful.” Gary Percesepe has written a book for all seasons, where empathy abounds like lake effect snow in Buffalo; where readers are encouraged to learn, unlearn, and enter conversation: “Please, someone, interrupt.”

~ Joey Nicoletti

Gary Percesepe has been delighting us with his poetry for many years. Here he turns his steady eye on the thing that makes most eyes unsteady: the breakup of a relationship that “falls of its own weight.” Masterfully realized, these poems reach deep into love and loss, and what it means to live with them both.

~ James Valvis, author of How to Say Goodbye

Reading the poetry of Gary Percesepe’s The Winter of J, his latest collection, is like sitting down with a good friend, talking through the night—the dark world outside the window raging in its cold while the hearth and fire warm the body. This is a poetry of juxtaposition—one story with many sides, both glimpsed and full viewed, swirling the reader’s head to reveal gems of lyrical truths that only poetry can find. The writing is direct and real in creating a world of escape, longing, and need. This poetry is, as Percesepe writes, “the calculus of loss, the difficult/ arithmetic of the heart.” You can’t resist this book—so don’t.

~ Sam Rasnake, author Cinéma Vérité and Inside a Broken Clock

Familiarity in landscape, subject, and the connected ache of them is why this brief yet staggering (at times) collection is an important read. Percecepe draws you into the Jeep he is driving, shows you the road, gestures to the cup holder and makes you wonder who last quenched their thirst from that space. It is not possible to read these words without placing yourself within their storied worlds.

~ Kate Hill Cantrill

The Winter of J tracks love, and the long tender education of its aftermath, with intimacy, honesty, humor. Percesepe has crafted a map of heartbreak and reconstruction so freshly told, you’ll understand your own love stories anew. This is what it feels like to be adrift in another.

~ Sarah Herrington

Percesepe’s poetry seems straightforward but is complex as flowers, and contained by no borrowed forms but original truths and no meter but the throbs of a heart.

~ James Robison

Gary Percesepe drops you into an ambiguous world and pulls you back again, still reeling. He does it so deftly, you don’t even realize you’re bleeding until it’s over.

~ Heather Cox, author of California King

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by Julia Paul

In the United States, in 2017 alone, 197 people died every day from drug overdoses. The numbers have not significantly changed since, despite increasing awareness of the epidemic that holds massive numbers of individuals in its chokehold. The statistics, startling as they are, fail to include countless others who suffer or die from conditions related to addiction, such as homelessness, poverty, infections and chronic illnesses. This is a wildfire burning everywhere. It should be impossible to turn away from those who struggle with this disease, just as we don’t turn away from victims of other diseases and disasters, but the stigma surrounding addiction encourages the false and dangerous notion that addiction is a choice and a character defect.  As a society, we haven’t yet learned how to look into the eyes of the person holding a cardboard sign at the highway underpass.

Staring Down the Tracks is a collection of poems that gives voice to those affected by addiction, a population that, despite their numbers and diverse demographics, is often harshly judged and silenced by shame. The mother and son of these poems are your neighbors, friends, relatives, and co-workers who need to have a dialog with you.

ENJOY A VIDEO OF JULIA READING FROM THE BOOK:

Julia Paul — A Featured Poet on The Poetry Box LIVE (May2021)

About the Author

Julia Paul serves as president of the Riverwood Poetry Series, a longstanding reading series in Hartford, Connecticut. In addition to publication in numerous literary journals, both national and international, including Comstock Review, Minerva Rising, New Mexico Review, The Fourth River, Windmill and Connecticut Review and anthologies such as From Under the Bridges of America, The Heart of All that Is and Lavandaria, several of her poems have been performed in stage productions. Her first book, Shook, is published by Grayson Books. Paul served as Manchester, Connecticut’s first Poet Laureate, 2014-2019. She is an elder law attorney and the proud mother of three grown sons.

Advance Praise

From the opening image of a young man “clothespin-thin,” lugging “bundles / of belongings down a dirt path,” Julia Paul is prepared to stare down reality, no matter how familiar or heartbreaking. Images precise and severe are accompanied by a fragile, defiantly beautiful music as the poet describes the son whom she will lose, over and over again, a boy so spectral that “he leans against a plank of light.” As he prepares to enter yet another detox center, her son will heave “his bundle / of belongings onto the bent / spoon of his back.” The story is all too familiar; the poems are much more than familiar – brave, articulate, acutely observant.

~ Erica Funkhouser, author of Post & Rail, winner of the Idaho Prize for Poetry

Staring Down the Tracks is an extraordinary, elegant collection of poetry about the dire, dreadful, heartbreakingly common experience of opiate addiction and its ravages. If Sylvia Plath were the mother of an addict, she would write poems like “Holding the Pin between Her Teeth,” “Spell for Detaching,” “The Summer of Fire,” and so many others. With nearly 200 people dying every day of overdoses, everyone should read this.

~ Miriam Greenspan, psychotherapist and author of Healing Through the Dark Emotions: The Wisdom of Grief, Fear, and Despair

Julia Paul’s poetry collection Staring Down the Tracks takes you inside addiction’s silences to reveal, in honed works of lyricism, a mother’s relentless worry and pain and grief as her son, who “loved his skateboard,” now finds “no vein for happy” and sleeps where “bridge becomes roof.” Paul has pulled these words, somehow, from the far reaches of the unsayable. This book will help families engulfed in addiction know that they are not alone and give others insight into its horror. It is a courageous and generous collection, an essential contribution to literature about addiction that will change you.

~ Daniel Donaghy, author of Somerset: Start with the Trouble, winner of the Paterson Prize for Literary Excellence.

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by Lauren Tivey

A Poetry Box Chapbook Prize Winner – First Place, 2019

Moroccan Holiday is a poetic series following a married couple—an American woman, and her Scottish husband—on an extended vacation in Morocco. As the husband suffers an extreme alcoholic relapse, the couple confronts longstanding issues of disease, abuse, and painful family memories, against the rich backdrop of an unfamiliar culture.

Judge’s Comments:

“Lauren Tivey embarks on a trip to Morocco, a foreign landscape of exciting people, smells, and destinations, with her alcoholic husband. She carries with her a dread of what she may face with her husband’s disease in a Muslim country. In beautifully-executed and moving poetic forms, she takes the reader with her through the landscapes of Ramadan and his alcoholism, family histories with drunkenness and rehab, and her moments of stillness when she is alone with mint tea and her journal. We feel how hard it is to stuff love, fear, and compassion in a suitcase just to unpack again in a new port of call.”

~ Tricia Knoll, Contest Judge, 2019
author of How I Learned to Be White and Broadfork Farm

About the Author

Lauren Tivey is the author of four chapbooks, most recently Moroccan Holiday, which was the winner of The Poetry Box Chapbook Prize 2019, and The Breakdown Atlas & Other Poems (Big Table Publishing Company, 2011). Tivey is a Pushcart Prize nominee, and her work has appeared in Connotation Press, The Coachella Review, and Split Lip Magazine, among dozens of other web and print publications in the U.S. and U.K.

After much international travel, including a six year stint living in China, she now resides with her husband, and a little black cat named Poppet, in a cottage surrounded by flower gardens in St. Augustine, Florida. She teaches English and Creative Writing at Flagler College.

Tivey can be reached at her writing blog: https://laurentivey.wordpress.com

What They’re Saying  . . .

In this stunning collection of finely wrought poems, Lauren Tivey writes of a holiday with deep pain and small joys. The speaker takes us on a journey of trauma as her husband relapses into alcoholism during the vacation, and tells of her difficult responses to his behavior. His disease of unrelenting suffering transforms the couple. He is, she says, “…a brute / swimmingly sloshed…” and she wonders if she can “…save him / somehow from chasm’s edge.” She writes “I keep talking to fill the silence, the absence / of his presence, in a blue city beyond the sea.” The poems are, in fact, brilliantly alive with shades of blue, some bright and cheery, and others darker, more sinister. As this couple journeys, she is wracked with agony, though the speaker does find momentary happiness that her husband’s “…eyes are clear in the luminosity / of negative ions—sea, sun, wind—an elemental / cleansing.” These poems pull the reader in with their heartbreaking urgency, history, and quests. Deeply moving, always expressing complex ideas in radiant language and astonishing details, Moroccan Holiday is a must-read book that sings the duality of love and estrangement.

~ Virginia Chase Sutton, author of What Brings You to Del Amo

These poems, gathered so astutely in Moroccan Holiday, have such exquisite and crisp detail that they will haunt you for a while. “Circus,” “The Nomad,” and “Hunger” are a few perfect examples, among the many in this book, of poems that will take you by the throat and choke you with their undeniable power and brilliance. Rich images, lyrical lines that are relentless in their beauty. These poems resonate with a lush wickedness of the tongue “of two broken people craving delights of the orchard” and the bitterness of people who’ve had to battle alcoholism and marriage and love for a long while. “I’ve grown tired of the stale taste of beer, bars, men. There are better things to do.” These are magnificent poems written against the backdrop of our crumbling world, Morocco, and beyond.

~ Virgil Suarez, author of 90 Miles: Selected and New Poems

Written with startling poignancy and richness, Lauren Tivey’s collection of poems, Moroccan Holiday, narrates a couple’s troubled voyage to a place “used to ruin,” seesawing between the splendor of its setting and the upcoming catastrophe into the depths of alcoholism and its legacy. The book starts “on a boat…gliding across the iridescent bay” on way to holiday, and quickly thrusts us into the precipice of Tangier, with its one-legged beggar, insane woman with oozing skin lesions, and scattering rats, which parallels their descent and struggle to prevail, as individuals and as partners. The poet asks, “I want to know when / to give up on someone.” The reader is left pondering this and other brutal questions, but it is clear that “moments of gladness exist.” Tivey’s work is a compelling case study, both fascinating and surprisingly compassionate, absolutely worth reading.

~ Carolina Hospital, author of Key West Nights and Other Aftershocks

Travel and travail share a common root, revealing at a deep linguistic level that to journey is to suffer. Change and transformation are by nature difficult. The travelers in Moroccan Holiday do indeed go far, traversing physical continents and emotional minefields. Lauren Tivey is an uncanny poet, conjuring metaphor and image to convey the tale of a husband and wife at the edge of love’s limit, where they are pushed by his relapse into alcoholic toxicity. The weight of their pasts and the exhaustion of carrying it all provide a sharp contrast to the cinnamon-scented streets and lush-laden markets of Morocco that would otherwise have beguiled them. The poems deliver a mix of seduction and despair, sorrow and enchantment (so many names for blue in this heady place). Through travel and travail, the woman and man somehow endure, learning how to lay down the burdens handed to them long ago and to take delight in the pleasures of their precarious present.

~ Holly Iglesias, author ofSleeping Things

Lauren Tivey’s Moroccan Holiday is a gorgeous, heartrending blue tempest that charts the roughhousing of addiction in a dry land with rich diction, depth, intelligence, and awareness. Despite tumult, the center never wavers, clear among the significant lost boys, the poems’ hope and generosity rising like Morocco’s pink wild roses and, yes, they do make a “difference to the world.”

~ Liz Robbins, author of Freaked

Book Launch & Readings

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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 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 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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