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 Leanne Grabel

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

 —Paulann Petersen, Oregon Poet Laureate Emerita

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

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ENJOY A VIDEO OF LEANNE READING FROM THE BOOK:

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

About the Author

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

Early Praise for My Husband’s Eyebrows:

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

 —Paulann Petersen, Oregon Poet Laureate Emerita

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

—Charles Seluzicki, author of Elegiac

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

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

—Barbara LaMorticella, author of Rain on Waterless Mountain

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

—Christopher Beaver, film producer/director

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

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

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

—Suzanne Sigafoos, author of This Swarm of Light

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

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

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

—Julie Keefe, creative laureate emerita/artist

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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 Meg Lindsay

Inspired by the doctor and poet, William Carlos Williams, who wrote poetry on his prescription pad when on house calls, the poems in Notes from a Caregiver originated in waiting rooms and doctors’ offices when Meg Lindsay’s husband collapsed with multiple myeloma, a cancer, causing bone fractures. Lindsay writes of her personal journey as a caregiver, not clichés and ‘feel good’ sayings, which can be isolating and make one feel inadequate. Instead, she uses poetry to reveal authentic emotions, often odd and unpredictable, ranging from compassion to despair to anger and even to humor.

Enjoy a video of Meg reading from the book:

Meg Lindsay — A Featured Poet on The Poetry Box LIVE (July 2021)

About the Author

A semi-finalist in two “Discovery”/The Nation Contests and a finalist in an Inkwell competition, Meg Lindsay has had poems published in Tricycle, Pivot, Salamander, Alimentum, Connecticut River Review, etc. and earned an MFA in poetry from Sarah Lawrence College.

Because she is also an established painter showing for decades in galleries and museums, her chapbook about the emotions and difficulties of painting, A Painter’s Night Journal, was published by Finishing Line Press in 2016.  Writers love to write about paintings, but most writers confine themselves to the subject matter of a painting, not the process, since after all most do not paint.

The subject of her writing dramatically changed direction when her husband, an athlete never ill before, collapsed with cancer in his bones, multiple myeloma, that same year. She gained direct knowledge of what it means to be a caregiver, a different and extraordinarily difficult learning process from anything she had ever known before.

<www.meglindsayartist.com>

Advance Praise

In Notes from a Caregiver, Meg Lindsay reveals the deep truth about what happens in a woman’s world, inner and outer, when her husband and life-partner is diagnosed with multiple myeloma, cancer of plasma and bones. With white-hot honesty and emotional clarity, she faces into the authentic core of her experience.

In the midst of a deeply personal, life-altering crisis, Ms. Lindsay engages the authority of a skilled and practiced poet to show us the effects of this illness upon patient, caregiver-life partner, and the deep bond at the core of a long-tern marriage. She uses her personal struggle to come to terms with the trauma contained in her experience to guide us into and through the difficult transformations, which occur when one is confronted with the challenges of living with cancer, be she, or he, patient or caregiver.

Notes from a Caregiver is a ‘must read’ for anyone, caregiver, patient, family member, or friend, who finds herself or himself in the chaos of a critical illness. I wish I had had it to accompany me when I was the primary caregiver for my husband in similar circumstances. In addition, as a psychotherapist in private practice, I see Meg Lindsay’s book of poems as a guide for medical professionals, psychotherapists, and technicians, who treat people suffering from life-threatening illnesses, and their families. We can all become more educated to the sensitivities, and vulnerabilities, of the psychic shock that comes with this territory.

Just as Dante called upon Virgil, his poet-ancestor, to guide him into and through the Inferno, so Meg Lindsay calls on her own poetic genius to accompany her, and then she, in turn, carries us in and through the Valley of the Shadow of Death and beyond.

—Bonnie L. Damron, PhD, LCSW, Archetypal Pattern Analyst

When a wife suddenly becomes her husband’s caregiver, everything changes—”because the rules of this road are different.” In poems that are brutally realistic and deeply tender, poet and painter Meg Lindsay tells us what it’s like when this new road is traveled. When her husband, collapsed with aggressive Multiple Myeloma, neither was prepared for the journey ahead. Just as Doctor William Carlos Williams wrote poems in between patients, Lindsay writes in exam rooms and waiting rooms, writes as her husband receives infusions and endures tests—and her poems tell of a new marital intimacy, one that emerged from the physical tending required by bed bath and commode, and from the emotional support demanded by a spouse’s pain and disabilities. These are important and moving poems, beautifully transparent, and a roadmap for others who may be walking this same unfamiliar path.

—Cortney Davis, author of Taking Care of Time
(Winner, Wheelbarrow Poetry Prize, University of Michigan Press)

Through her capacity for deep and sustained attention, Meg Lindsay has transformed the burdens of caregiving into a strange sort of beauty. Small, painfully human moments and mundane tasks reverberate with profound meaning. We can feel Lindsay using language to heal the rupture that illness has created, and thus, her poetry becomes a salve for all of us, who will inevitably experience the suffering of someone we love. Notes from a Caregiver offers comfort, companionship, wisdom, and even humor, to those on caregiving’s arduous journey. Lindsay’s writing teaches us that to look closely and to struggle to put what we see and experience into words, is a powerful form of love.

—Charlotte Friedman, Adjunct Professor,
Narrative Medicine, Barnard College, Columbia University

Meg Lindsay’s poems are deeply moving and sometimes even humorous. Each verse guides us through the twists and turns of a bone cancer diagnosis too late to avert injury, treatment, repair. Her words gently illuminate the arduous road she and her husband are traveling and the continuous dialog between caregiver and patient. Their unrelenting partnership and love offer us a way forward.

—Jen Walker, Attorney, Literacy Advocate and Multiple Myeloma Caregiver

This new collection, Notes from a Caregiver by Meg Lindsay, is laden with imagistic gems which brave the paradox of hope, when the “facts” are not in your favor. But there remains hope to this author, and hopelessness, inexpressible will and work and grief—all as true as any “fact.” Lindsay writes “Death is a dash/or could it be…. Theoretically.” I love the provocative questions which Lindsay insists be answered—answered with a dash—
This is a large-hearted, beautifully sequenced, well-crafted, and careful collection.

—Kate Knapp Johnson, poet, author of The Wind-Bike

“These poems are fierce, passionate paeans to love—love of self and love for a beloved husband whose sickness has interfered but not destroyed the intensity of the relationship.”

—Julie Bondanza, Jungian Analyst

Book Launch & Readings

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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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