by James K. Zimmerman

Finalist in The Poetry Box Chapbook Prize, 2023

The poems in The Further Adventures of Zen Patriarch Dōgen were inspired by the life and teachings of Dōgen Zenji, a thirteenth-century Japanese monk credited with bringing Chan Buddhism to Japan and founding the Sōto school of Zen. The writing is founded upon the presumed experience and perspective Dōgen would have if he were alive today. Essential Buddhist concepts of bare attention, full presence, impermanence, no-self, and the path to liberation from suffering play out through the “eyes of a river” – in a self-driving car, a dentist’s chair, the water’s edge, the contemplation of circularity. In a world of bare attention and full presence, there are no words; inherent in these poems is the paradox of attempting to express this experience through the medium of language.

Enjoy a Video of James Reading from the Book:

Early Praise for The Further Adventures of Zen Patriarch Dōgen:

While “wanting you to not know/ anyone/ has been/ here/ at all,” James K. Zimmerman, in the persona of Dōgen Zenji, offers the reader a glimpse of enlightenment as embodied presence in situations taken, sometimes humorously, from our contemporary world. The Further Adventures of Zen Patriarch Dōgen elucidates the intricacies of Zen philosophy in poems spare as “a winterbreath of silence” and lush as “the rhythm/ of hands,/ gullwing,/ flutter/ of beachplum/ blossoms.” Reader, you will find here wisdom, and its sister, compassion.

—Gillian Cummings, author of The Owl Was a Baker’s Daughter

As I sit now in the now with James K. Zimmerman’s book of luminous meditative poems, The Further Adventures of Zen Patriarch Dōgen, I find myself deeply touched by their silence and their music. Each poem embodies Buddhist teachings: bare attention, no-self, impermanence, and so much more. The poet holds moments of life in his open hands, sings them and lifts them beyond words, bringing me to deepest stillness. I treasure this unique book and shall keep it close to my meditation seat and my heart.

—Judith S. Schmidt, Ph.D, author of In the Garden of Love and Loss

In The Further Adventures of Zen Patriarch Dōgen, James K. Zimmerman takes us inside the world of emptiness of Zen practice and reveals that it is teeming with life: frog ponds, katydids, and wrens; crystals of melting ice. Zimmerman’s Dōgen encounters the modern world of the self-driving car and the dentist chair, imagines the process of frying an egg, listens to the aye yamma hew of his monkey mind. Silence harbors birdsong, sirens, sneezes. The practitioner struggles, returns, returns yet again—and is suddenly aware of something indescribable: the sound of waking up. Nouns fall upon us like snowflakes and melt away. A slow and attentive reading of this spare collection offers a taste of the continuity of motion found in stillness—an endless becoming that moves inevitably like “cormorants to chum.”

—Kathryn Weld, author of Afterimage and Waking Light

In poems both playful and profound, James K. Zimmerman interrogates what it means to be a “human doing,” both in body and mind. Literally enacting on the page cycles of thought, cycles of nature, cycles of life and death, Zimmerman taps into the beauty, strangeness, difficulty, and promise of the meditative life. While he deals with the abstractions of self and mind, creation is never far from his view and there are stunning moments of beauty like the “one shooting star across/ the velvet skin of midnight” that bring the fullness of the world to his work. Just as “…a thought sings in (silence),” I thought about these poems long after reading them.

— Lynn Schmeidler, author of History of Gone and Half-Lives

About the Author

James K. Zimmerman is an award-winning, neurodivergent writer, frequently a Pushcart Prize nominee. His poetry appears in Atlanta Review, Carolina Quarterly, Chautauqua, december, Folio, Lumina, Nimrod, Pleiades, Rattle, and Salt, among many other publications, and is also featured on websites such as The Poetry Foundation, American Life in Poetry, and Vallum. He is the author of “Little Miracles” (Passager Books) and “Family Cookout” (Comstock Press Books), winner of the Jessie Bryce Niles Prize. He resides at the crepuscular edge between this universe and the one next door, often with one foot in each, and, in his spare time, cultivates roses, orchids, and paradoxical questions.

He can be contacted at https://jameskzimmerman.net

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by Sue Fagalde Lick

Blue Chip Stamp Guitar is a love story—about Sue and her guitar It starts with a cheap guitar the poet’s mother bought with Blue Chip stamps and continues through her life, outlasting jobs, marriages, and deaths. A guitar is just a wooden box with six strings strung from one end to another, but in the musician’s hands, it becomes music and magic, companion and comfort. These backstage poems describe the teenager dreaming of fame, the young adult dealing with sex and stage fright, and the seasoned performer lugging gear and singing through bad weather, hecklers, sore throats and sore fingers. At the beginning and the end, she plays alone, feeling the calluses on her fingertips as she sends music into the air. These poems will appeal to all music lovers, especially the musicians who share that special bond with their instruments.

Enjoy a Video of Sue Reading from the Book:

Early Praise for Blue Chip Stamp Guitar:

Robert Frost states that the final poem in a book is the book itself, and this holds true for Sue Fagalde Lick’s book of poems where each poem is a story and the book itself comprises a story too of her early life as an emerging singer/songwriter, guitarist and performer. We follow her and her first guitar through hints of a short-lived first marriage, one or two stalled relationships with unworthy boyfriends and finally a longer, good marriage which ends tragically. Her guitar accompanies her throughout and may go out of tune or need new strings but it never fails her. These poems are accessible, unwavering, and painful in their honesty. There is no pretention or affectation in this work, just solid storytelling, and poetic craft at its best. Here is a rich life, bittersweet, at times vulnerable yet underneath is a quality of humility with fierce independence in the life and the poetry, but we also know this will not be the end of the story.

—Dave Mehler, editor of Triggerfish Critical Review, author of Roadworthy

In Blue Chip Stamp Guitar, Sue Fagalde Lick shares a love story between a woman and music that “sound[s] like fireworks on an ordinary night, / like ice cream sundaes and kisses that make you swoon.” We follow the “squeaky-voiced kid with the cheap guitar” as she matures into a love-worn woman who learns that “Fingers exposed,/easily wounded, / are hard to heal.” Her line “I returned, restrung, and tried again” speaks to her resilience in life and in music. This collection takes the reader into the “raw, unpolished edges, dust, and glue, / the underbelly of a cathedral,” of a life lived in pursuit of music and love finally found in Fred, the husband/roadie to whom the book is dedicated. By the end of this intimate collection, you’ll be singing, “Let’s play another memory.”

—Lacie Semenovich, author of Community, Not Market, and Legacies.

In this resonant collection, memory is music and reflection its instrument. We accompany a young girl through the epic arc of a lifetime in which her beloved guitar is witness, ballast, and protagonist. We are initiated into the great ache of desire and tenderness as each poem strums love and loss, sovereignty and transcendence through us. We see how the constants in life punctuate the evolution of our true music. The pretty voice deepens to an unexpected beauty. We pour it into the air, even when there is nothing left to give. We resurrect from the velvet case the ballast of memory. We conjure the self we have been as we sing the song we are becoming.

Sage Cohen, author of Writing the Life Poetic and Fierce on the Page

“Every song is new” says poet Sue Lick, and we lean in to listen as each piece in this collection sings of love and loss and exploration and becoming. In Blue Chip Stamp Guitar, Lick invites us into her long-term relationship with music, her varied relationships with men, with managers, with audiences and lovers and always, like a solid melody in the midst of all this counterpoint, her relationship with herself. Lick says, “I harmonize with my younger self,” and here, through writing both fearless and gentle, we receive the gift of a voice that “holds every song that I have lived.”

—Bethany Lee, author of The Breath Between and Etude for Belonging,
poetry editor of Untold Volumes

About the Author

Sue Fagalde Lick escaped life as a Silicon Valley journalist to write, sing, and wander the beaches and forests of the Oregon coast. Her publications include The Widow at the Piano: Poems by a Distracted Catholic, Gravel Road Ahead, and the forthcoming collection Dining Al Fresco with My Dog, along with poems in Cirque, Rattle, The MacGuffin, Sage Soup, Cloudbank, New Letters, The American Journal of Poetry, and other literary journals. In addition to performing both poetry and music as much as possible, Sue is a Catholic music minister, playing piano and guitar for Masses, funerals, potlucks, and other festivities. She travels with a notebook and sheet music in one hand and a guitar in the other and has learned that doesn’t leave much room in the trunk for clothing, strangers ask questions when you walk in with a guitar, and everything is better with music.

Learn more about Sue at https://www.suelick.com.

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by Penelope Scambly Schott

These delightful and conversational poems explore the concept of gOD, with a sense of humor, a childlike wonder, a reverence for the natural world, and a look in the mirror.

Enjoy a Video of Penelope Reading from the Book:

Penelope Scambly Schott — A Featured Poet on The Poetry Box LIVE (Jan 2024)

Early Praise for gOD: A Respectfully Divergent Testament:

Penelope Scambly Schott has captured a marvelously witty glimpse of the divinity that resides within us all: a self-awareness creating universes and loving every tiniest bit, laughing and crying over our human foibles and destructive tendencies. With brilliant use of poetic form and license, the author invites us to really examine our understanding of the Source of all and the consequences of our own actions. This is a must-read for anyone who is at one of those points of asking, “What’s it all about, anyway?”

—Reverend Dr. Ruth L. Miller, author of Unveiling your Hidden Power and Uncommon Prayer

Penelope Scambly Schott spins out a powerful picture of the Deity in gOD: A respectfully Divergent Testament. The “whole other” mystery who creates the universe turns out to be totally relatable, showing up in a series of conversational poems, revealing a deep caring about all of creation and its creatures. Schott’s testimony is indeed respectful and not so divergent that I can’t give it my own respectful “Amen!”

—Karl Vercouteren, United Church of Christ pastor, retired

About the Author

Penelope Scambly Schott lives in the small town of Dufur, Oregon (population: 635). She has published several books of poems and is a past recipient of the Oregon Book Award for Poetry. Penelope was raised to believe that every religion is a folk custom and that each one should be respected. Her own faith practice is climbing Dufur hill where, from the top on clear days, she can see five mountains. She and the dog do this daily; on Sundays her husband accompanies them.

Previous chapbooks published by The Poetry Box include Sophia and Mister Walter Whitman and November Quilt.

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by Emily-Sue Sloane

These poems are a meditation on the myriad divisions and inequities we face, both personally and as a society. In Disconnects and Other Broken Threads, award-winning poet Emily-Sue Sloane pulls on many of the fraying threads that divide us and gently weaves them with striking imagery to inspire connections through hope and, at times, humor.

Enjoy a Video of Emily-Sue Reading from the Book:

Early Praise for Disconnects and Other Broken Threads:

In Emily-Sue Sloane’s powerful new chapbook, Disconnects and Other Broken Threads, the poems’ directness about suffering, loss and injustice tears at our hearts and asks us to recognize what needs healing or that we must grieve bravely what may never be healed. Sloane sees, feels and speaks with honesty that will not accept the glib comfort of pretense. In “A Daughter’s Question,” she says of the speaker’s mother: She never said / and I never thought to ask / until it was too late / what made her so angry. The poem reaches out with a broken heart. It asks us to open ours. Sloane suggests again and again, with rage, regret, humor, irony and anger: This is what it takes to be alive.

—Scudder Parker, poet and author of Safe as Lightning

Reading these poems is like microdosing on the big, unwieldy emotions we may struggle to put into words late at night around a campfire, looking up at the stars. Like a gardener cultivating a bonsai tree, Emily-Sue Sloane takes big, wild concepts like mortality, impotent rage, grief and regret and presents them to us as stark small snapshots of everyday life. The overwhelming world pulls back a little as these words gently take our hands and say, I know. I know. Me too.

—Rorie Kelly, singer/songwriter, Shadow Work (album)

In Disconnects and Other Broken Threads, Emily-Sue Sloane protests the ills of society which destroy people and ideals, the personal failings which lead to broken lives and the eternal human lament upon the death of beloved persons. Indignant of social injustices, she deconstructs the makeup of contemporary life, giving a thundering voice to the voiceless (“Hollow-Eyed Hunger,” “Freedom Canceled,” “Undone”).

In spite of the wonderfully tantalizing title, the poet weaves subtle hidden connections—how wonderful or ironic that in this chapbook’s very first poem, “Hard-Wood Wisdom,” the lyric voice is that of an oak tree’s bark speaking in first person. The connection is unmistakable. Compassion, love, ideals and dreams underlie the brokenness. Throughout, the reader will encounter and enjoy the music traditionally associated with poetry, but all too often absent today—alliteration, assonance, rhythm: Time shreds memories / into random wisps, / seaweed swept ashore / only to be snatched / back by rapacious tides.

—Tonia Leon, bilingual poet and translator,
author of My Beloved Chaos and Slow-Cooked Poetry/Poesia a fuego

About the Author

Emily-Sue Sloane is an award-winning poet who published her first full-length collection, We Are Beach Glass, in 2022. She has won first-place awards from Calling All Writers, the Long Island Fair, Nassau County Poet Laureate Society, Performance Poets Association and Princess Ronkonkoma Productions. Her poems have been published in numerous journals and anthologies, including Amethyst Review, The Avocet, Bards Against Hunger, Boston Literary Magazine, Corona, Evening Street Review, Front Porch Review, Long Island Sounds Anthology, Mobius Magazine, MockingHeart Review, Nassau County Poet Laureate Society Review, Panoplyzine, The Poeming Pigeon, PoetryBay, The RavensPerch and Shot Glass Journal. Sloane holds a B.A. in Anthropology from Vassar College and lives in Huntington Station, NY, with her wife, singer-songwriter Linda Sussman. In addition to writing, she enjoys reading, yoga and exploring her native Long Island’s natural beauty.

Learn more at https://EmilySueSloane.com.

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by Liz Nakazawa

These are poems of memory, thanks, prayer, bliss, dreams and blessings, embedded in color, and, while ethereal, are also rooted firmly to the earth. Hope is the sustaining thread even if some poems veer into darkness. Light is never too far away.

About the Author

Liz Nakazawa is the editor of Deer Drink the Moon: Poems of Oregon (Ooligan Press), a collection of nature poems by 33 Oregon poets. It was designated as one of the Best 100 Books about Oregon in the last 100 Years by the Oregon State Librarian. It was also a Best Picks of Powell’s.  She also edited The Knotted Bond: Oregon Poets Speak of Their Sisters (Uttered Chaos Press), a collection of poems by 32 Oregon poets. Her own poems have appeared in Turn, The Timberline Review and The Poeming Pigeon journals and haiku has appeared in ahundredgourds.

She also has a background in feature article writing for magazines and newspapers. Her articles have appeared in The Oregonian, Oregon Business Magazine, and The Christian Science Monitor. She’s also published in Psychology Today, American Health and Fitness Magazine and Northwest Travel. She has also taught freelance writing at Portland State University and at her home.

In her free time Liz enjoys bird watching, dancing (both folk and ballroom), calligraphy, reading, hiking and walking, identifying trees and flowers, writing snail mail letters to her son and friends, and collecting old books, vintage writing paper and stamps. She feels incredibly grateful for the love and nurturing, as well as friendships and community, from the pulsating Oregon poetry community. Words bloom easily here in Oregon.

What They’re Saying…

“In poems of praise, memory, reverence for nature and the multi-hued nature of spirit, Liz Nakazawa’s new collection captivates with ‘secrets of place, fugues and canons of personal history.’

“Here, one finds ‘sublime sauntering’ or a ‘legato of striding’ from a poet who urges the reader in tender imperatives to ‘enter,’ ‘abandon,’ ‘hold,’ ‘absorb.’ Nakazawa’s ‘legible musings’ range from the exquisite ‘complicated anatomy of figs’ to broad implications, geological and metaphorical, of the Missoula Flood.

“These poems, much like pages in a medieval book of hours, encourage the heart’s light to shine while one is alive ‘before that holiness of night.’”

~ Quinton Hallett, author of Mrs. Schrödinger’s Breast
and Refuge from Flux

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