So Much Depends on the Light

by Susan Coultrap-McQuin

In the tradition of nature poets like Mary Oliver, Susan Coultrap-McQuin pays close attention to the land around her, especially to what she finds in her own Minnesota backyard: a prairie of wildflowers, a hillside of oaks, and a pond that reflects the sky. In this landscape, she watches monarchs and bumblebees, nuthatches and hawks, turtles and foxes, as well as her grandchildren’s play, and all these make their way into her poems. Filled with vivid imagery and engaging metaphors, her poems invite readers’ own reflections on nature and the seasons of life, on grief and delight, on those we love and on those we will leave behind. Many poems convey feelings of awe and reverence in response to nature’s beauty and mystery. They express a spirit of gratitude and peace. Above all, these poems give special meaning to the importance of place—the place we choose for living our life and for leaving our legacy.

Early Praise

In Susan Coultrap-McQuin’s beautiful new book, So Much Depends on the Light, we spend time with a narrator who takes us through the gardens and hiking trails of her life. Coultrap-McQuin has an unfailing sense of the right detail, the right word, and often makes excellent use of the title to convey her delight with the natural world. She likes to write concrete poems using shape as a visual clue in poems about trees, butterfly wings, and hummingbirds hovering.  Her poems are compact; her language concise, and she knows how to leave something for the reader.  In one of my favorite poems in the collection, “If I Could Meet Mary Oliver,” the speaker says I would meet her in October / at the edge of the woods. / We would stand in the field / admiring the goldenrod. I love seeing the world through Susan Coultrap-McQuin’s generous and hopeful eyes.

—JOYCE SUTPHEN, Minnesota Poet Laureate, 2011-2021, author of Carrying Water to the Field

This moment calls you, writes Susan Coultrap-McQuin. Whether this call is from the lilacs, or a grey Buddha of a toad, or a pond nearby that begins to hum, it’s always from an expansive sense of time on the American prairie. Here is a poet who might also be naturalist, illustrator, spiritual advisor; with vivid specifics, charm, and reverence, she lures the reader into savoring “the rhythms of a life.” Yes, the Midwestern snow lingers, but these poems reveal many seasons’ wisdom, “the parenthetic of the warm blue sky,” and ultimately a call to the resilience we learn from nature.

—KORY WELLS, author of Sugar Fix

Susan Coultrap-McQuin’s So Much Depends on the Light features poems of exquisite tenderness and attention to nature and humanity’s role in it. Coultrap-McQuin’s speaker is a lyric tracker, studying the cold crackled trees and the lusty bees, delivering to us the richness of the various settings the poems encounter—prairie, woods, frozen lake. These poems situate earth as our cherished inheritance and deep responsibility—calling us to be, again and again, beguiled by surprise.

—AMIE WHITTEMORE, author of Nest of Matches

So Much Depends on the Light is poetry alive with the natural world, full of the rhythms of the seasons. It is a meditation of language that is sometimes quiet, sometimes melodious, a witness to joy and sometimes sorrow, always with a keen eye, always insightful. Be prepared to bask in the gentle beauty of the earth, take in the wind over the prairie, sip the nectar of the monarch, and exult in the rich pollen of Susan’s pen. My heart is full of light in this wonderful collection.

—ELLEN LAGER, author of When a Tree Falls

So Much Depends on the Light is a chance to immerse yourself in the wonders of the prairie. Susan Coultrap-McQuin invites readers to pause, listen and observe, with a chance to nurture, tend and let go.  Like Scheherazade, Susan tells tales of the prairie with grace and panache. And we, beguiled by surprise, learn what nature has to offer and like church bells we ring with contentment. She scatters pollen with her pen until our senses bloom like flowers.  Susan knows the land and what is in it and honors that by this tribute. Her poem, “Like a Mother” reminds us that the scent of soil soothes.  She helps us fall in love with nature, shares joy, amazement and grief in her gentle observations.

—ANNETTE GAGLIARDI, author of Benevolence, Poet Laureate, League of Minnesota Poets

 

About the Author

Susan Coultrap-McQuin is a retired educator and nature lover. From a very young age, she has had her hands in the soil of gardens and her eyes on natural wonders. It was probably inevitable that, when she retired and started writing poetry over ten years ago, she would first be inspired by the wild prairie, flowers, trees, and pond of her own backyard and neighborhood in Minnesota. She loves to wander woods and fields, both at home and abroad; if you invite her to an arboretum or botanical garden, she will always say “yes.”

Susan grew up in a Chicago suburb and earned degrees at Iowa State and the U of Iowa.  She was a professor and administrator at universities in Minnesota and New York and has served on a variety of regional and national boards. Her poems have appeared in many journals and anthologies, and she has a chapbook of her travel poems, entitled What We Bring Home (The Poetry Box, 2021). Among her honors is a Pushcart nomination. Susan is married with two grown children and four grandchildren, who join her in tending gardens and naming wildflowers and pollinators in her yard.

 

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Heirloom Eyes

by Rhea Grove

Heirloom Eyes is a poetry collection that explores themes of separateness, wildness, inheritance, play, creativity, home, love, and the relationship between human beings and the natural world. In essence, it is about the heritage of finding your place in the world. The tone oscillates between exploratory, optimistic, deeply skeptical, and ambivalent, all of which culminate towards a place of acceptance with not knowing; but also joy and passion in the unending exploration of what may never be known. The setting takes place in Central Oregon, where the author lives, and interacts curiously with the river, birds, and other creatures living nearby. She hopes that through this book, the audience might feel at home in the ambivalence of what it means to live in a world where important concepts are hardly ever set or pristine, but most always, and especially in good company, can be quite beautiful.

Early Praise

Rhea Grove is a poet who obviously finds joy in words and in the quirks of animals and humans. People need to have fun reading poetry, and for this I would send them to the radiant poems in Rhea’s Heirloom Eyes. We also need to think more deeply about what goes on in our lives, another reason to read these beauties.

—THOMAS MOORE, author of Care of the Soul

About the Author

Rhea Grove is a poet and happy resident of Central Oregon, where she lives with her husband. Inspired by the birds, rivers, and other creatures living nearby, she writes poetry to explore and celebrate where she lives, who she is, and the relationship between the two. This is her first book.

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A Spring of Resilient Light

by Karen Poppy

In her bold second collection, A Spring of Resilient Light, Karen Poppy crafts poems that speak from the body, the land, and the unseen. Her voice—part oracle, part survivor—confronts cycles of harm and violence, from personal violation to inherited wounds, and the healing that follows. These poems embrace rupture as a path to transformation. Poppy interrogates the boundaries between destruction and beauty, guiding readers through ash and regrowth toward a fragile, defiant wholeness shaped by endurance, truth-telling, and deep ecological connection.

Early Praise

In Karen Poppy’s poems, there are rebirths of epic proportions: uprisings, upwellings, upbraidings. “Nothing short of fire / Can tow me under,” she writes, and it is this attitude, the titular resilience in the many faces of death –– abuse, gendered violence, and generational trauma –– that resonates throughout these confident, coal-hot poems. Like Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring, which famously caused theatregoers to riot, there is brutality in Poppy’s lived cycles of annihilation and renewal: sacrifices to be made, compromises to be dealt, partings to steward, and losses to mourn. “I consume myself, / My own alchemy of fire,” she reports, but, later, as the book progresses, she writes, “I’ve survived everything, / Even my self-drowning”––and the final poems suggest a trajectory of healing. Psychological and unyielding, this collection gives equal measure to vulnerability and strength. It asks, “Can oblivion be beautiful?” and dares to say it can. It leads us to the brink, and then it leads us out.

—JANE HUFFMAN, author of Public Abstract

Karen Poppy’s poems continually pay homage, with surety and wonder, to the lush sanctum of the natural world. This sibylline, wide-awake second volume is an unusual fusion of witness, protest (“Take away every poem / In which a woman’s body/ Is a road. / Take away every song / In which a woman’s body / Is a back road…”), and a jubilant celebration of the earth—a dynamic paean in which the poet, employing sensual description, artful concision, and silence, seems akin to a contemporary, far-seeing Cassandra, as well as a womanly Chiron, a wounded but indomitable healer offering hard-won spiritual wisdoms and earnest revelations in verse.

—Cyrus Cassells, 2021 Texas Poet Laureate,
author of Everything in Life is Resurrection: Selected Poems, 1982-2022

In A Spring of Resilient Light, Karen Poppy reckons with the power we have in the face of nature, and recognizes our powerlessness, too, asking us to consider that maybe it is best to flow in this life, in this universe where we matter as much as we don’t, and to be “healing light and soothing / Darkness.” In poems that brim with linguistic exactitude, Poppy takes on violence, environmental and cultural “plundering,” and by doing so, raises her voice against silence. Silence can lead to overwhelming grief, yet in these pages there is no grief, but rather, there is an acknowledgement that it exists, that everyday things, such as an article of clothing, can remind us of what we carry inside, that our life can be an “open vessel…[ready] for every beauty.” Open this book and read the beauty that awaits you inside of it.

—OCTAVIO QUINTANILLA, author of The Book of Wounded Sparrows
and Las Horas Imposibles / The Impossible Hours

About the Author

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Death Is the Dismount

by Stuart Watson

Casting a keen eye on transcendent wonders and head-scratching absurdities, Stuart Watson writes poetry informed by thirty years in daily newspaper journalism and 76 years swimming the rapids of life. These poems range from meditations on the beauty and brutality of nature, to the absurdity of human behavior. Read the news. Laugh, cry, reflect. Turn the page. Watson’s poetry maps the landscape of human relationship, from connection to rupture, bliss to tortured doubt. In Death Is the Dismount Stuart takes you from the paucity of orgasms to the absurdity of fashion advertising, to reflections on late-life discoveries about one’s true parentage, odes to donuts, regretful reckonings with youthful infidelity and keys to aging well. If you ever wanted to sit inside a confessional and listen to others unload, you’re in the right place.

Early Praise

What do I want from a poem? I never know until the poem presents the gift. The best poets offer them in surprise packaging. You read. You think. You read again and your breathing slows. You imagine a thing or feel a thing or think a thing you haven’t imagined or felt or thought before. That’s the kind of poetry Stu Watson offers. Call it a slow smolder. Then let it catch fire.

—SUSAN PALMER, novelist, author of The Tabernacle Bar and The Booker Rebellion 

The poems in this fine collection sing of love and sex and death and donuts so sweet you cannot eat them and, of course, of the dogs who teach us how to live. Do yourself a favor and savor these poems slowly and let their jubilance uplift you from where you have sat far too long thinking of the daily news.

—TIM SCHELL, author of Road to the Sea

In his collection Death Is the Dismount, poet Stu Watson offers brand spanking new takes on aging replete with blush-worthy lust, tender declarations of love, honest appraisals of his family history, and eloquent reckonings with what comes closer every day, death. I will wave my crazy arms until they burst / into flame, announcing my departure / from here, and imminent arrival / wherever this hasty soul is meant to go. Couplets, tercets, quatrains and narrative are enlisted to accomplish his energetic mission in imagery and language—sometimes Michelangelo, sometimes Pollock, as he references in “Right Time.” There’s a surprise ‘round every turn of page, tripped up by the delightful word “nidge” here or, there, lost and found in lines such as: …a tree with denuded / branches, like a beautiful woman / who went out walking without her / clothes, then decided to stop and stay / outside our house…from “When Time Stood Still.”

—ELLEN WATERSTON, Oregon Poet Laureate, author of As Far as I Can Anthem

About the Author

Stuart Watson fell in love with poetry as a college student, but heeded the guidance of an esteemed instructor, the late James Naiden, to pursue a paycheck in journalism. Its rewards exceeded the mercenary. His writing for the Medford Mail Tribune was honored as the state’s best in its 1983 journalism awards. Now retired, he has been writing short fiction and poetry for the last ten years. More than ninety stories have appeared in mostly digital journals. He was the second-place honoree in the 2025 Cambridge Short Story Prize. This is his first collection of poetry, many of which have appeared in print and online journals. He lives in Hood River, Oregon, with his wife, the novelist Kathy Watson, and the world’s best dog, Satchel. He toots his horn online at chiselchips.com.

Instagram: @stuwatson50 / BlueSky: @windblastedpappy.bsky.social

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THE VIRGINIA POEMS

Based on the Writings of Virginia Woolf

by Barbara Fried

Here is the life of Virginia Woolf, from her late Victorian childhood writing to her soft toys in the nursery at 22 Hyde Park Gate, through her fame as a novelist, to her last despairing days at Monk’s House as World War II raged, set in poems, as in her voice. It is as if Virginia were talking to us from a stage, in a one woman play, playing her remarkable self. The poems chronicle her colorful life—her relationships with her exacting father and beautiful mother, her sister, the painter, Vanessa Bell, her ever-supportive husband, Leonard Woolf, her love of Vita Sackville-West and friendships with Lytton Strachey and Katherine Mansfield, her passion for her beloved Cornwall seacoast, and for the great city of London, the sheer hard grind of writing, the birth of her modernist novels, the glow and pitfalls of fame, aging, the war years, her final gallant fight against depression.

Dip into any poem or read straight through to experience episodes from an exceptional life. Each poem vibrantly captures Woolf’s personal reflections, yet each has a universal resonance—the void left after a mother’s death, the loneliness of a love extinguished, the deep satisfaction of a day well lived—and each poem is enriched with a quotation from Woolf’s diaries, letters or novels that inspired it. From cover to cover this is a narrative of the fascinating life of a literary giant. A splendid collection for newcomers to Woolf to discover her rich life, and past admirers to reacquaint, remember and savor.

Early Praise

In The Virginia Poems, Barbara Fried’s cinematic poetry collection, readers are invited to fully inhabit Virginia Woolf’s life: the rooms where she lived and worked, her marriage and relationships with family members and friends, the cities and country landscapes she loved, and the historical events of her time—all grounded in Fried’s encyclopedic knowledge of Woolf’s diaries and published works. Fried’s dazzling vocabulary shines as she channels Woolf’s voice and vividly imagines her innermost thoughts and feelings, while thoughtfully curated footnotes contextualize and deepen each poem’s layers of meaning. Rich in image and detail, these poems will resonate as profoundly with long-time readers as with those just discovering Woolf’s work. A singular, stunning collection.

—Brett Warren, author, The Map of Unseen Things

Barbara Fried unveils the poetry hidden in Virginia Woolf’s prose in The Virginia Poems. Using fragments of Woolf’s writing as inspiration, she creates luminous poems that capture her vision, and emotion, even the music, what Woolf called the “secret transactions, a voice answering a voice.” For anyone who loves Woolf, this collection will enchant and linger and make you want to begin it again.

—Bill Walker, former manager, McGraw-Hill Book Clubs

Extraordinary writing often inspires reinterpretation by later writers: Dickens’s David Copperfield, becomes Kingsolver’s Demon Copperhead, and Twain’s Huckleberry Finn becomes Everett’s James. Barbara Fried, in her Virginia Poems takes her deep immersion into Virginia Woolf’s diaries and letters and creates a poetic biography of Woolf, experimenting with different forms of verse (something I think Woolf would have appreciated) as she moves from Woolf’s early memories through to her eventual suicide. Reading these poems reconnects a reader who knows Woolf well to her rich and complicated life and should provide the impetus for one who perhaps has only read one of Woolf’s novels to go back and explore the world that Virginia experienced.

—Alice van Buren Kelley, author, The Novels of Virginia Woolf: Fact and Vision and To the Lighthouse: The Marriage of Life and Art.

Riveting. Insightful. Compassionate. “Painterly Writing” describes both Virginia Woolf’s writing and Barbara Fried’s mastery of her life and legacy through the precision of poetry. The Virginia Poems delve into the depths of Woolf’s conflicts: insecurity and ambition, desire and discretion, madness and joy. Readers will savor this collection from beginning to end, and over again.

—Alice Kociemba, author, Bourne Bridge, co-editor, From the Farther Shore: Discovering Cape Cod & the Islands through Poetry

About the Author

Like many lifelong writers, Barbara Fried was a girl on a bed with a pen in her hand. She had a career in marketing and communications as a Director of Marketing for Prentice-Hall Publishers, Director of Development for The International Fund for Animal Welfare and Board Member and grant writer for the Cape Cod Literacy Council. She is a member of the ESP Poets Workshop on Cape Cod, and has been published in Reflections, ONE ART and forthcoming in Black History in Poetry, Vol. 1. Her long-term study of Virginia Woolf began at Boston University where she earned a BA in English Language and Literature. She is a member of the Virginia Woolf Society of Great Britain.

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Middle Ground
Poems for Young Hearts

by Phillip Shabazz

Middle Ground is a 152-page poetry collection that traces the arc of adolescence through five seasonal chapters, speaking directly to the lived experiences of young people while maintaining poetic craft. Designed for middle and high school students as well as adult readers, the collection refuses to soften the realities of contemporary youth—economic hardship, systemic racism, gun violence, incarceration, mental health struggles—while insisting on beauty, resistance, and the possibility of transcendence.

Part One introduces young speakers discovering their voices, navigating family complexities, and establishing identity. Poems like “To Grandma” connect Harriet Tubman to chocolate cake, while “Father’s Day” confronts paternal absence with unflinching clarity. “Calculus of the Kitchen” and “Silk Scarf” address class and racial profiling. The chapter establishes the collection’s central tensions: belonging vs. alienation, safety vs. danger, inheritance vs. self-creation.

Part Two centers on summer’s openness—first love (“Puppy Love,” “First Kiss in Summer”), friendship, and loss. “The Day the Lake Stopped Singing” confronts drowning and grief. “For My Brother Back From Juvenile Lock Up” and “Welcome Home, Little Man” address incarceration’s impact on families. The chapter balances joy (skating rinks, swimming pools) with awareness that not everyone survives summer.

Part Three This chapter serves as the collection’s moral compass, rejecting easy binaries in favor of the complex, lived truth of the ‘middle ground’. It moves into autumn’s moral complexity. “Middle Ground” serves as the collection’s title poem and thematic anchor, arguing for the legitimacy of uncertainty and nuanced thinking. “What I Can’t Undo” and “The Secret I Buried” examine complicity in harm. “My Uncle’s Code” explores gang violence and loyalty. “Girl, Incarcerated” speaks to systemic injustice. The chapter refuses easy answers while insisting on accountability.

Part Four enters winter’s austerity. These poems confront survival, silence, systemic oppression, and the weight of history. “Tied To The Earth I & II” address racial identity and microaggressions. “The Ballad of Hollow-Eyed Joe” uses folklore to explore community memory. “Snowblind Silence” depicts domestic tension. “Wishes For You” offers benediction amid hardship. The chapter shows winter not just as season but as condition—economic, emotional, historical.

Part Five arrives at spring as both renewal and reckoning. “Car Windows Down” celebrates survival. “Ode For Frederick Douglass” positions literacy as insurrection. “Growth Hurts” acknowledges the pain of transformation. “Desired Ones: An Invocation” closes the collection by calling on ancestral powers, folk wisdom, and communal strength—”I call on all folk powers of super hearts and ghosts.”

Early Praise

In 100 uniquely executed poems, Phillip Shabazz captures the innocence and whims of youth to such a fine degree, both adolescents and their elders will find themselves on numerous pages. Flowing seamlessly through the seasons, Shabazz masterfully and metaphorically invites readers into a kaleidoscope of emotions and life experiences. Tender moments like first love, first paycheck, basketball finesse balance the harsh realities of family imprisonment, peer drowning, actualities of poverty. Through vivid and often unexpected imagery, Shabazz demonstrates keen mastery of the young adult psyche as it navigates life’s celebrations and sorrows.

—LINDA VIGEN PHILLIPS, author of Crazy

At the close of this new poetry collection offered especially to young readers, Shabazz calls out to all sources of his personal and cultural inspiration in this invocation: I call on Mother Earth, her gardens young and old to give us life, not too much strife, and books of tales twice told.  In Middle Ground, Shabazz illuminates a young poet’s life into vivid episodes with quotes from the likes of Langston Hughes, Mary Oliver, Nikki Giovanni and the Bard himself, William Shakespeare, naming each epoch of influence. Within each section, the reader experiences how a poet’s heart learns to beat in rhythms of family, friends, young love, neighborhood, and culture. These poems take the reader to a sphere of experienced wonder where the streetlights were once galaxies and where: That tightness in your chest is your heart learning to hold more sky.

—ROBERTA SCHULTZ, author of Deep Ends

With rich rhymes, words selected to be slant and lyrical, Phillip Shabazz blazes through adolescence and young adulthood with both witness and balm. There are ghosts invented to explain the shape of my own jaw and mothers’ Sunday blouses, puppies and candy, and grit and grace, and please, can we please, find that Middle Ground he aspires to in this collection? Shabazz’ images are ethereal and ghostly, imprinting us with the grandmothers, grandfathers, uncles, mothers, fathers, school friends, and first loves… but it’s not just vivid and well-crafted reminiscence. These are poems of survival and aid; he tells us how the silence isn’t silent and the past doesn’t compress or disappear. Every closely chosen word is loose and tight at the same time, casual but packed with the might of image. This book is for those of us who’ve made it through, and especially for those still struggling, of any age.

—CHRISTINE ARDVIDSON, author of Nobody Cares What You Think

About the Author

Phillip Shabazz serves as a Poet-in-the-Schools of North Carolina and is the author of four poetry collections and two novels, including the coming-of-age novel Pearls In The Sea (2026). His most recent collection, Moonflower, is published by Fernwood Press (2025). His work has been nominated for Best of the Net and has been included in the anthologies Paul Green: North Carolina Writers on the Legacy of the State’s Most Celebrated Playwright, Crossing the Rift: North Carolina Poets on 9/11 & Its Aftermath, and Home Is Where: African American Poetry from the Carolinas. Some publication credits in journals include Fine Lines, Florida Review, Galway Review, BREATHE, Queen’s Quarterly, K’in, and Thimble.

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La Cuenta-Mundo / The World Counting

Poems by Gabriela Mistral
Translated by Doreen Stock

Originally written in Spanish by Chilean, Nobel Prize winning poet, Gabriela Mistral, and now translated by Doreen Stock, these poems speak to a newborn baby of the elemental things of our world, touching on the most powerful forces in the universe: light, water, air, fire. Deceptively simple, they call forth what it means to be human, to be born human, and to live in the midst of profound mystery touching the core of existence.

Early Praise

I’m so grateful for these wonderful translations of Gabriela Mistral’s strange, loving poems to a newly born child. They are deep with mysterious imagery and tenderness, and these versions are a great contribution to our understanding of one of the finest 20th century poets.

—MATTHEW ZAPRUDER, I Love Hearing Your Dreams and How to Continue

In these breathtaking poems by Gabriela Mistral, we are invited to experience the world with wonder through the presence of a newborn child, and through the mother who beholds that life with awe. Doreen Stock’s luminous translations carry Mistral’s tenderness into English with extraordinary care. This is a poetry collection to read slowly and savor whenever one needs a reminder of life’s beauty. Stock’s love of language and her deep sense of the sacred shine through on every page as time pauses before the miracle of new life.

—ELANA ROSEN-BROWN, Rabbi, Congregation Rodef Shalom, San Rafael, CA

Doreen Stock delivers the brilliance of Gabriela Mistral in the ways only a great translator can, one intimately connected not only at the level of the word, but the syllable, the very clay from which Mistral draws her breath to form this litany of fire, of loam, this trembling halfway between the body and the soul. In these early poems, written long before her Nobel recognition, animals, fruits, wounded pines, and mountains bow to the tenderness and awe few poets have managed to capture in language as well as Mistral does. Stock has descended into the petrichor of Mistral’s imagination in these sparse poems that belie their complexity, and has emerged with a rare gift, one that will compel you to abandon yourself, dizzy to the swaying.

—MARCELO CASTILLO HERNANDEZ, Cenzontle and Children of the Land

About Doreen Stock

Poet, literary translator and memoir practitioner, Doreen Stock has been exploring creative nonfiction for sixty plus years from the feminine point of view as a wife, mother of three, grandmother of eleven, ands great-grandmother of 13. Her first book of poems, The Politics of Splendor, Alcatraz Editions, Santa Cruz, 1984, was part of a New American Writers exhibit at the Frankfurt Book Fair that year. It combined her own poetry and prose poems with translations from the work of Marina Tsvetaeva and Anna Akhmatova. More recent publications include: Bye Bye Blackbird (The Poetry Box, 2020), poems of her mother’s last year, and A Noise in the Garden, selected poems with an afterward by Stephen Kessler (Kelsay Press, 2022). She co-translated Excellency/Free Will, a book of translations from the Spanish of Amparo Casasbella Alconada, Prosa American Editores, Buenos Aires with her husband, Marcelo Holot. She is a founding member of the Marin Poetry Center.

For more information, please visit DoreenStock.com

About Gabriela Mistral

Gabriela Mistral was born in 1890 in Chile in a provincial village where, at the age of fifteen, she began to teach school and to compose her early poems. She went on to win prizes and widely publish her collections of poetry until in l945 she became the first Latin American woman to win the Nobel Prize for literature. Although she was Pablo Neruda’s teacher and mentor, her work is much less well known than his. Due to her unflagging love and advocacy for children in the difficult world they continued to inherit as well as her prominence as an international educator she became Chile’s delegate to the United Nations.

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Moon Talk

by Nathalie Le Breton

Moon Talk is a journey inspired by the forests of the Pacific Northwest, the island of Berneray in the Outer Hebrides of Scotland, and a breast cancer diagnosis. It is foremost a journey toward light while attempting to express the complexities of relationships and accept the mysteries of life and death.

Early Praise

By turns musical, magical and matter of fact, Moon Talk embraces both the extraordinary mysteries and the everyday details of life. Nathalie Le Breton populates her book with ghosts and dreams as well as moss, seaweed and Yorkshire pudding baked with wild mushrooms. Along the way, she takes us dancing through darkness and glowing light and all the places in between, while exploring her relationship with love, mortality, teacups, and the moon itself.

—LINDA FERGUSON, author, Of the Forest

About the Author

Nathalie Le Breton grew up in the Southwest of France. She now lives in the Pacific Northwest, where she works, writes, and studies plant magic. Moon Talk is her first chapbook.

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Seeing Again

by Danyen Powell

The poems of Seeing Again are both concrete and imagistic. Sometimes surreal, they evoke a sense of place in the heart and mind as well as in the world. Light on the page, they balance like a mobile, sing visually. Powell’s rich imagination inspires the reader to tap into their own, to join him in his exploration of the ordinary and the astonishing.

Early Praise

Danyen Powell in “Seeing Again” uses unique language and spacing between words and lines that allow his words to blossom out of mystery into meaning. As in his poem “Inside The Grey Barn” shadows turn the great key of silence. And in the title-poem, “Seeing Again” there’s the undeniable songbird pierces countless veils. In his penultimate poem, “We Were Always Hungry” he says that through plagues and wars we longed for our legacy to be more—than a stone mouth unable to tell its story. With this book he leaves us a legacy of beautiful poems.

—Allegra Jostad Silberstein, Inaugural Poet Laureate of Davis, California

In his newest poetry collection, Seeing Again, Danyen Powell, invites readers to see his world—our world, but changed. Using spare, evocative language, he conjures images and recreates scenes and moments he has witnessed, bringing that attention into each poetic choice he makes. These poems celebrate the world’s wonders and reveal his own deep connection with it and his compassion for all that lives.

Powell’s vision is accessible in each poem, but none insists on a singular understanding. His familiar word choices and subjects—Nature and neighborhoods, mourning and mornings, every form of light–contribute to this sense of openness. Also, his use of white space on the page may be the most significant feature that welcomes readers to investigate the possibilities in each word, each line break, each stanza, and to engage with the resonances and contradictions they find in these pages and in their own lives.

—Ann Conradsen, poet, Sacramento, California

Danyen Powell’s Seeing Again builds a secret garden by words, which is the labyrinth of unknown human darkness. In his poems, dealing with death and dying, he tries to find the way out with great passion, but meanwhile he indulges in details of the darkness leading him to be lost. We will explore complexity in his almost minimized forms.

—Bei Dao, poet and editor of Jintian (Today), Beijing, China

Danyen Powell’s new collection of poems rings with emotional intensity and visual clarity. He is a poet who observes the world closely—both its physical and human elements—and brings them together in resonant juxtaposition. We feel the pain of losing a loved one, marvel at the majesty of Nature, and savor the evocative landscapes he creates. Each poem has its own heartbeat and invites the reader to connect with it.

—Shawn Pittard, author of Shelter in Place and Witness

About the Author

Danyen Powell has been facilitator for the Sacramento Poetry Center’s weekly Tuesday Night Poetry Workshop for over 30 years and still going strong. He’s been a judge for the Poetry Out Loud National Recitation Contest and is the author of two chapbooks, Anvil and Blue Sky Flies Out, both from Rattlesnake Press. In 2014, Danyen published a bilingual collection of poems, Las Palabras Mueren de Sed / Words Die of Thirst.  His poem “Pantoum of the Oncology Ward” was the grand prize winner of the Ad Schuster’s Annual Citation at the 74th Annual Poets Dinner in Berkeley California. He volunteered as a docent at The Crocker Art Museum with his wife Betsy and runs a family construction business with his son Joel.

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Still Life with Sorrow & Joy

by Lana Hechtman Ayers

Life is fleeting, death inevitable. Still Life with Sorrow & Joy contemplates death from myriad vantage points, including communication with those gone via letters or phone or from within the landscape of dreams, embracing the possibility of a forever connection between souls. These poems are infused with images of the cherished times spent with family and beloved pets—sweet, aching memories, as well as with images of nature’s bounty—the sublime night sky, the rush of waves, the patter of raindrops. The poet faces her own aging and mortality with a sense of acceptance, hope, and even humor. Perhaps death and what follows death will always remain somewhat of a mystery, but death’s dark shores can be illuminated and mapped, as they are in this collection, by thoughtful and heartfelt meditations, offering readers comfort and companionship as we all journey towards our great unknowable end.

Early Praise

As easily as water, that’s how I want to leave this earth writes Lana Hechtman Ayers, in this, her stellar, fourteenth collection, Still Life with Sorrow & Joy. The poems curated here are, in part, a feast of losses, but the work moves through several registers; I love that there’s also dark comedy, imaginings of the afterlife, and most of all a fierce love for this world. Ayers knows how imagination is part dream…dipperful by dipperful, how the sky is a blue door that opens both ways. Over and over again, I came across lines that I wish I had written. Hard-earned wisdom and a belief in wonder keep showing us, as readers, how to appreciate this life, sawdust scattering around us like starlight, like meteor shower. This is a book you’ll want to hold close.

—SUSAN RICH, author of Blue Atlas

Still Life with Sorrow & Joy is a joyous celebration of both. Yes, poet Lana Hechtman Ayers laments, I can’t handle another / dead dog, / dead aunt, / dead lover, / dead plumber, / dead fly even, but even this list carries a kind of delight in its unexpected variety. Or how to describe the rush of time: Hours are field mice / flitting in every direction. Ayers has learned to carry the pebbles / of grief in my arms / without dropping a single one. Indeed, this collection makes them shine.

—PENELOPE SCAMBLY SCHOTT, author of Sophia & Mr. Walt Whitman
and gOD: A Respectfully Divergent Testament

This exquisite series of poems is an extended meditation on death, loss, remembrance and transformation through the interaction between the dead and the living, the living speaker’s deepest dreams of the beloved departed. Lana Hechtman Ayers’ speaker, who calls herself a splintered self who practices a shoddy Buddhism, enacts the growing lyricism of her poetic voice throughout this collection. As she recalls, for example, the wonder of first experiencing the Big Dipper during a blackout, when her native New York City is plunged into darkness in a five-borough power outage, she watches her father frame the constellations for her with his hands, and her child-turned-adult self still feel[s] its pulse / orbiting the fatherless galaxy of my heart. We readers know that we are in the presence of a powerful sensibility, as the poet summons us to come like a clock that chimes all hours, and we must heed her voice, because (as she addresses the force of life itself) each day you fly the moon over my house / like a flag of welcome. This is a poet who can teach us how to live, with joy, with our own dying, and what better cause for celebration could we have?

—CAROLYNE WRIGHT, author of Masquerade and This Dream the World: New & Selected Poems

About the Author

Lana Hechtman Ayers worked in insurance, mutual funds, customer service, research, and fact-checking but her true calling is publishing the work of other poets as managing editor of Concrete Wolf Poetry Series, MoonPath Press, and World Enough Writers. She also facilitates generative writing workshops in the Amherst Method, conducts an online poetry book club, and produces the weekly Poem After Poem Newsletter.

Lana earned BAs in Mathematics and Psychology, holds a Masters in Counseling Therapy, and possesses MFAs in Poetry and in Writing Popular Fiction. A multiple Best of the Net, Pushcart Prize, and National Book Award nominee, she won honors in the Discovery / The Nation Award and in the Rita Dove Poetry Prize. She was awarded writing residencies from Hedgebrook, Devils Tower National Park, and The Whiteley Foundation.

She is the author of thirteen previous collections of poems and chapbooks, including: Sky Over (Fernwood Press, 2026), The Autobiography of Rain (Fernwood Press, 2024), Overtures (Kelsay Books, 2023), When All Else Fails (The Poetry Box, 2023), Red Riding Hood’s Real Life (Night Rain Press, 2017), The Moon’s Answer (Egress Studio Press, 2016), Dance From Inside My Bones (Snake Nation Press, 2007), winner of the Haas Award, and Chicken Farmer I Still Love You (D-N Publishing, 2007), winner of D-N’s annual award. She published a romantic time travel adventure, Time Flash: Another Me (Night Rain Books, 2018), and hopes someday to complete the sequel, currently stalled at 25,000 words.

Originally, from New York City, she relocated to the Pacific Northwest after a dozen-year sojourn in New England. She now lives in coastal Oregon on unceded lands of the Alsea people with her beloved husband and fur babies, where on clear, quiet nights she can hear the Pacific Ocean whispering to the moon. Rain devotee, former coffee obsessive, her favorite color is the swirl of Van Gogh’s The Starry Night.

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