by Rheanna Haaland

Catching Narcissus is a collection of poems which form a smooth, yet unsettling, reflection of the critical loathing and lustfully egotistical self. Through the intermittent lens of mythology and too-real modern life lessons, it is a story shaped by the caveat: “this is going to hurt.” From its old-flame trick-candle arsonist love story to the hydrocodone overdose, Haaland examines—and attempts to reconcile—recovery from crippling addiction and the endlessly resurrected, unwelcome love it both nurtures and asphyxiates.

About the Author

Rheanna Haaland (she/her/they/them) could say this book is about you. But it isn’t.

Haaland was raised by wolves on the prairie but relocated to Minneapolis, after finishing a bachelor’s degree in writing. Unsatisfied with writing alone, they considered several additional lines of work to compliment the necessary exorcism of poetry (including but not confined to copy editor, bookseller, web series producer, script writer, prep cook, pizza transportation specialist and actual batman). Haaland settled finally on pursuing a career as a surgeon.

While currently attending Northwestern Health Science University Haaland also works as a medical scribe in a local emergency room. (Countless HIPPA-compliant stories about will almost certainly prompt future collections. She loves it.)  She will remain in school for the foreseeable future, while continuing to write.

Haaland was the 3rd place winner of the 2018 Erotica Grand SlaMN Championship for spoken word poetry. Their work has appeared most recently in Auk Contraire, and The Same. The poem “—Me, Everyday” was previously printed in the 2019 edition of Red Weather Magazine, alongside many of her other pieces not published in this book. Haaland’s first collection An Eyeful of Hennepin Neon (The Poetry Box, 2018) is available through The Poetry Box website. She lives in Minneapolis with her outspoken tabby cat, Brummell, whose input on molecular geometry and organic chemistry homework is less than helpful. Both of them thank you for reading this far.

Early Praise for Catching Narcissus:

Rheanna Haaland’s book, Catching Narcissus, interweaves themes of classical mythology with stark overtones of mental torture and struggle. Themes of obsession, heartbreak, narcissistic abuse and recovery are all present in this wonderfully executed work, reflecting the authentic reality of human emotion when faced with the unnatural reality of loving a Narcissus. Absolutely worth a read for anyone who has struggled with love, loss, abandonment, or narcissistic abuse. Haaland’s words cut to the core of the human experience.

—Liz Collin (Red Eye Ruby)

R. S. Haaland takes you behind the eyes of a character tortured by addiction, obsession, and the allure of the darker things in life. Catching Narcissus is a sympathetic story with an undertone that is both unsettling and genuine.

—BIGnick, Kaleidoscope Nights

From broken to passing, Catching Narcissus begins fragmented and broken and ends with an idea of composure that invokes hope for a future. Haaland climbs out of a hole, carrying all the baggage that came out, and finds a way to survive. Mechanically thoughtful and brutally honest, Catching Narcissus doesn’t pull punches, even when those punches are directed inward.

—Tim Nunes, Senior Editor at PlayStation Universe

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by Julia Paul

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

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

ENJOY A VIDEO OF JULIA READING FROM THE BOOK:

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

About the Author

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

Advance Praise

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

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

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

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

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

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

The post Staring Down the Tracks appeared first on The Poetry Box.

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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