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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by Cathy Cain

Like prism light, Cathy Cain’s poems in A Shape of Sky reveal, in distinct colors, the predicament and magic of living in our bodies. Cain, a visual artist as well as a writer, illuminates complexity, beauty, and exuberant sensuousness wherever she directs her gaze. Whether she focuses on the work of artists like David Hockney, James Turrell, Kiki Smith, the process of making art, or merely the everyday, her poetry reminds us that an aesthetic view can sustain us with energy and hope.

About the Author

Poet and visual artist Cathy Cain is the author of Bee Dance (The Poetry Box, 2019) and Empty Space Places You (Finishing Line Press, 2018). Her honors include the Kay Snow Paulann Petersen Award for Poetry; the Edwin Markham Prize for Poetry; and First Place, Second Place, and Honorable Mentions from the Oregon Poetry Association. Her poetry has appeared in Reed Magazine, The Poeming Pigeon, Verseweavers, and VoiceCatcher.

Cain is a two-year Poet’s Studio alumna and a 2014-2015 Atheneum Fellow, both at the Attic Institute of Arts and Letters. Additionally, she has studied with Portland’s Mountain Writers Series and with visiting poets through Literary Arts.

She holds degrees in literature and visual art from Lewis & Clark College, MAT; Oregon State University, BFA; and University of Washington, BA, Phi Beta Kappa.

Cain taught in the public schools for over thirty years. She is the lucky wife of a sweet man, and the mother of two fine sons. She lives with her husband near Portland, Oregon.

Early Praise for A Shape of Sky:

Cathy Cain’s poems are balanced between the light and darkness of what is said and unsaid, of what decays and what blossoms. Her wonderful book tends to the margins of existence with a steady eye. Time and again, the poems in A Shape of Sky are like maps to guide us through the transformations that can come from perspective, resilience, and wonder.

—David Biespiel, author of A Place of Exodus

What strikes me about [the poem] “Overlap” is how carefully it examines the seemingly mundane. The allusions are poignant while still leaving the objects and the tiny clashes between them to speak for themselves.

—David Perez, Poet Laureate Emeritus, Santa Clara County, CA, and author, Love in a Time of Robot Apocalypse

The experience of reading Cathy Cain’s A Shape of Sky is akin to walking through an art museum, if all the paintings were rendered in words. In language that is lyrical, sensual, and brave, Cain expertly braids experiences of the natural world, the body, the mythic and spiritual, and the creation and contemplation of art into poems that radiate both light and darkness. At times, the words themselves seemed to lift off the page and hover before me, illuminated. In this astonishing collection, Cain creates for the reader “a delicate descending/ from heavy dream into uncluttered light.”

—Brittney Corrigan, author of Daughters

ENJOY CATHY READING FROM HER NEW BOOK:

CATHY CAIN — A Featured Poet on The Poetry Box LIVE (Jan 2021)

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by Rebecca Smolen

Excoriation is an honest, thought-provoking exploration via poetry, into motherhood, relationships, heartache, love, and the cosmos. Rebecca Smolen shares her experiences in a way that’s meant to dig a little deeper, delving into each wound until nothing but truth remains. Through evocative metaphor and verse, Smolen challenges her readers to let these poems get under their skin, even if it hurts a little, for this is where healing begins.

About the Author

Rebecca Smolen is a writer based in Portland, Oregon transplanted from New Hampshire in 2014, and is a mom of two adorable little gingers. She grew up on a dead-end road exploring drainage pipes and pond life. She has a strong feminist voice that sometimes gets trapped within society’s confines, but vows to teach her son and daughter that there are no confines.

Smolen has a degree in creative writing and philosophy and works as veterinary technician. She is trained and certified in the Gateless Method and leads writing workshops employing this method, which was scientifically created to avoid provoking the fight or flight reaction generating a safe place to produce raw, new writing that will spotlight the strongest aspects of that material.

Her first chapbook, Womanhood and Other Scars was published by The Poetry Box in 2018. Her poetry and essays can be found most recently in Allegory Ridge, Feminine Collective, Tiny Seed, The Inflectionist Review, Unchaste Anthologies, Hip Mama, Mutha Magazine, VoiceCatcher: a journal of women’s voices & visions, The Poeming Pigeon: Cosmos, and the anti-fascist anthology, Shout.

Early Praise for Excoriation:

When you stare long enough into darkness, you fabricate what you may need; what might need you. Smolen’s compelling work does this enticing dance across the pages. Each piece falls into its own structure, rhythm—a movement that calls out to them. Wanting them, needing them in just the perfect two-step to make your eyes follow them from moving through “water” to the “beyond.” In this intricate dance with words, Rebecca leaves us wrapped in possibilities of what love looks like in self and the love tango with others.

—Nastashia Minto, Poet/Author of Naked

Rebecca Smolen’s Excoriation is part declaration and part dream of a travel in the honesties of existence. From the spark that is “My Call to Verse,” to the inner and outer travel of “{Body as Home},” to the closing call to endlessness that is “Moribund Happiness,” this collection invites the reader to experience unalloyed entanglements of history, agency, anger, and love, and of hope that can reside at heart.

—John Miller, founder of Portland Ars Poetica

In Rebecca Smolen’s Excoriation, you experience alchemy, the transformation of a woman’s raw loss into a dance, a music, a clear vision, “how the stars/are brightest in the northeast in winter.” In poems addressed to her lost love, she remembers the first goodbye after the first kiss, how it “became the new snow smell/mixed with the smoke from each chimney,” and you feel that relationship char in words, “raw and still bloody.” Smolen’s poems are “heavy with the life [she knows she has] needed to release.” In rich language and provocative shapes, her poems are generous acts, each a form of healing, “to fall first,/ to shine… to know how to rain,” their “purpose to ease another’s” pain. Read these brave poems to understand that the world “is merely attempting to find its own way back” through the mystery and science of this writer’s voice.

—Kate Gray, author of Carry the Sky
and For Every Girl: New & Selected Poems

Enjoy Rebecca Reading from Her New Book:

Rebecca Smolen — A Featured Poet on The Poetry Box LIVE (Nov 2020)

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by Rebecca Smolen

This collection of poems explores what it means to be a woman in the 21^st century. Through the eyes of the poet as young girl, teenager, daughter, granddaughter, wife and mother, we traverse both the triumphs and heartbreaks of womanhood. Let these poems blanket you in the realization you are not alone—you have a community who will help you navigate the waters of misogynistic behavior and societal expectations. The scars of each of our experiences are there to remind us how far we’ve come, and give us the strength to keep rising.

About the Author

Rebecca Smolen is a writer based in Portland, Oregon transplanted from New Hampshire in 2014. She has a deep love for short story, poetry, hugs and animals. She grew up on a dead end road exploring drainage pipes and pond life. Since settling here, she works as a veterinary technician, volunteers with the Pacific Pug Rescue, chaperones class field trips occasionally for her two small children, promotes ‘feminism is for everyone,’ attempts to stay connected with friends, goes to as many writing workshops and retreats as her budget and time constraints allow, and pet sits on the side to earn funds for the aforementioned.

Rebecca enjoys writing darker than most would assume of her, diving deep into forgotten memories and her weird dreams which fuel her creativity. She loves twisting the normal route of thinking and creating new metaphors. She is a true believer that once put down in print, words are no longer for the writer, but instead are meant to help, heal or console others.

You can find her writing recently published in the Unchaste Anthology, Vol. 2, Mutha Magazine, and VoiceCatcher: a journal of women’s voices & visions.

[Instagram: @MC1Rsnap / Facebook.com/rebecca.smolen.5 ]

What They’re Saying…

Womanhood & Other Scars is more than a book. It’s an invitation, not just to peer into the inner life of its author, but to walk around, sniff the marrow inside her bones and explore the bruises buried deep inside. These 24 poems take an unflinching look at life, using metaphors that pulse with the heat of a variety of emotions, from the intensity of maternal love to the aching need to break free from isolation and anxiety.

Many of the poems also celebrate the happiness of connecting with others. In “Dusting,” Smolen muses on the particles of dried skin cells that coat her and “considers of what creatures, wounds, this dust was stripped.” She also comes to the conclusion that in a world where our cells all intermingle, “I can no longer be considered a singular woman nor ever deserted again.” Similarly, in “Where Has Peace Gone?” she says she will “gulp heartily without breath” the laugh of a loving friend. That, she says, is where peace is.

The wounds described in Womanhood and Other Scars often stem from a sense of disconnection, especially between parents and children. The mother in “Never Far From Dwelled Upon Fairytales” is determined to help her daughter achieve outward beauty, but ends up damaging the child who’s now haunted by repeated criticisms of her appearance. In the same poem, the child’s innocence drowns in the “disappointed sigh” of her dad.

In Smolen’s world, the isolation of people living in their separate shells can be intolerable, but through her art, she bravely seeks to make connections by exposing her rawest emotions in her finely crafted poems.

~ Linda Ferguson,
author of Baila Conmigo

Rebecca Smolen’s Womanhood & Other Scars refreshes the messages in Anne Sexton’s poetry: a woman is more than a mother/daughter/wife, more than the blood she spills. Each poem exposes complicated relationships, her mother’s hands like “ballerina’s feet un-shooed” or choosing the “easy love” of children over a sleeping husband. These poems unleash truth that might be unbearable if it weren’t so carefully crafted and deeply developed.

~ Kate Gray
author of Carry the Sky

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by Kali Rose Schmidt

All That She Can is a collection of poetry that encompasses motherhood, family history, what it means to be a woman today—and the lust inside of us all. All That She Can tells the story of love, betrayal, passion, and rage. It explores themes of family while acknowledging the complexity of familial ties; it reaches into grasping the twisted nature of mental health; and it documents the contradictory feelings of elation and rejection that often arise within romantic relationships.

About the Author

Kali Rose Schmidt is a Canadian-American writer and poet from North Carolina currently living in Toronto with her two children, three stepchildren, one husband, and a very large, shaggy dog named Henry. Kali frequently alternates between writing and fitness coaching, between working her mind and her body, and is a certified yoga teacher. She has work published in a variety of journals, including Huffington Post and Moonchild Magazine. She earned her BA in English from Campbell University.

Her first publicly shared poem was written in 5th grade, about her thoughts on 9/11. Her second published work was an underground newsletter written in defiance of the new administration in her high school in 2008, delivered in clandestine places like the school bathrooms and cafeteria. The local news got involved. She hasn’t stepped away from cultural commentary and controversy since.

When not writing or dabbling in fitness, Kali can be found drinking enormous iced-coffees, attempting to teach her children yoga, lounging outside on a sunny day, or hopping on an airplane.

Twitter: @kalirschmidt
Instagram: @kaliroseschmidt
Website: https://kaliroseschmidt.com

What They’re Saying…

All That She Can is a peek inside a half-closed window shade of romance, reality and regret. Kali writes with unforgiving honesty and guts and I like that. A good poet makes the reader feel the pain and the pleasure and Kali gives us that on every page. These are poems you don’t walk away from…you limp. These are stories that leave you bruised…but smiling.

~ Todd Cirillo
author of Burning the Evidence

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