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 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 Michael B. Carroll Jr.

Songs of an Indomitable Spirit is the follow-up to Carroll’s 2019 chapbook, The Dichotomy Between Light & Dark. This beautiful, full-length collection is a testament to Carroll’s enduring strength and tenacity, consisting of 31 pieces that explore the peaks and valleys of his life, leaving no topic deemed “taboo.” Songs examines various social and personal relationships forged throughout Carroll’s life, using a musical cadence and the rhythm of sound to deliver a powerful collection that explores themes, such as nostalgia, social injustice, strife, sexuality, love, faith and renewed hope. The common thread throughout is emotional intelligence. How much can one ultimately endure? How does one navigate the challenges of interpersonal relationships? And most importantly, how does one respond to life’s staggering melodies? These are the Songs of an Indomitable Spirit.

PROCEEDS FROM PRE-ORDERS WERE DONATED TO MINNESOTA FREEDOM FUND!

Each of us can make a difference to help stop the unjust incarceration of minorities and the unjustified, brutal force during arrest that has become all too common.

About the Author

Michael B. Carroll Jr. is a graduate of West Chester University of Pennsylvania with a Bachelor of Science degree in Professional Studies (Health Science/Psychology dual minor). He is a native of Philadelphia, PA and his poems have appeared in publications such as Maudlin House, Wingless Dreamer, and Cathexis Northwest Press. Carroll’s work was recently showcased in Kosmos Quarterly: journal of global transformation as a “Featured Poet.”

He refers to his greatest aspirations in life as M&M Dreams, which represents his undying love for music and the practice of medicine. Music continues to inspire him to live, love and create, passionately—while his desire to practice medicine keeps him emotionally connected to his humanity. When not writing poetry, songs, or studying medicine, Carroll enjoys spending time with his family and friends, and pretending he’s a part of Buffy’s crime-fighting, “Scooby Gang.”

INSTAGRAM: @sirdukeofwagadu

Early Praise for Songs of an Indomitable Spirit:

Songs of an Indomitable Spirit opens with a proclamation: I swear there’s a vision on the tip/ of my tongue…/ sitting, standing, tap-dancing on/ the edge, daring to be savored (“Visions”). What readers will savor in Michael B. Carroll, Jr.’s second book is the inspiring journey the poet takes them on as he chases delight in the streets…and danc[es], rough through the pain (“Interlude: Reminiscing about the days”).

The tension between delight and pain permeates poems that feature a young black man striving to live in a world where, on one hand, the screaming voices of our African American mothers,/ [are] enough to make a love song cry (“I’m not mad, I’m angry”); where, on the other, fifty shades of God (“Hootin’ ‘n’ Hollerin’ (reprise)”) strengthen his faith.

It’s a world in which the poet challenges himself to discard the limiting labels history has imposed on him. When he asks himself, What if you decided to forsake all others and chose only to love you? (“Choices”), we cheer for that indomitable spirit daring to define itself. Along the way, we grow to admire the poet who wishes to be remembered as a strong man who wrote poems that helped him gather the strength to finally break free (“Victory”).

—Carolyn Martin, Ph.D., poetry editor
Kosmos Quarterly: journal of global transformation

There is an exciting fearlessness to Michael Carroll’s poetry. Strikingly fresh language, vivid and bold, and fresh, jazzy rhythms join to convey a profundity of vision. In Carroll’s poems, we can find joy, love, humor, anger, regret. But, above all, we see a young and accomplished poet with the courage to question society’s norms; the strength to explore psychological depths, both his own and others’; while retaining and sharing the wonder, the uniqueness, and the value of the lived moment.

—Thomas F. Hinchcliffe, PhD.,
professor of English: Psychoeducational Processes

There is a fine essence of an ethereal hue grounded in Michael Carroll’s inkwell that speaks to the heritage of timelessness in our surroundings . . .

—silent lotus

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by Debbie Hall

A Poetry Box Chapbook Prize Winner – Third Place, 2019

“How many close calls before we become ghosts?” wonders the author of this collection, where she reflects upon her experiences—emotional, relational and spiritual–during her partner’s yearlong battle with a life-threatening illness. Threaded throughout these poems is the presence of the natural world—always a source of solace, but now more acutely and deeply felt.

About the Author

Debbie Hall is a psychologist, photographer and writer who lives in southern California with her partner and two vocal and talented rescue cats. She and her partner share a passion for traveling the world.  She feels incredibly fortunate to have had the time and means to launch a second career as a poet after retiring from psychological practice.  Debbie completed her MFA in 2017 at Pacific University in Forest Grove, Oregon.  She considers poets her rock stars.

Debbie’s poetry has appeared in a number of literary journals and anthologies, including the San Diego Poetry Annual, Serving House Journal, Sixfold, Poets Reading the News, Poetry24, Bird’s Thumb, Califragile, Gyroscope Review and Hawaii Pacific Review. Her essays have appeared on NPR (This I Believe series), in USD Magazine, and the San Diego Union Tribune.  She received an honorable mention in the 2016 Steve Kowit Poetry Prize and won second place in the 2018 Poetry Super Highway contest. Her first poetry collection, What Light I Have, was published in 2018 by Main Street Rag Books and was a finalist in the 2019 San Diego Book Awards. She is thrilled that her chapbook, Falling Into The River, just won third place in the 2019 Poetry Box Chapbook Prize.

What They’re Saying  . . .

Falling into the River is a book of remarkable candor and tenderness. Faced with a somber “unexpected detour,” Debbie Hall has forged poetry that is deeply attentive and hopeful. Near misses and nimbus clouds hijacking the sky are offset by gifts from nature and the poet’s playfulness. Hall gives us the egret, “lustrous with first light,” and weeds, “resplendent in their ratty coats.” Surgery is compared to the pas de trois in a ballet, and mortality appears as a gorilla in a tutu. These poems are delightful: intimate, unflinching, and imbued with love.

­—Rebecca Patrascu, Before Noon

When immeasurable fear arrives on the shores of poetry it is sometimes greeted with neither aversion nor welcome. Despite its alarming unease and three hundred mile per hour winds—the call to respond, repair, and interpret is the poet’s duty. This new poetry collection by Debbie Hall, Falling Into the River, documents a couple’s processing of shared weakening and fear. These are poems with spines. “Words you can barely form / with your own mouth, / vocabulary that you must now / make your own.” Hall is gifted with a language that is rich in observation and conveys it with profound courage and tenderness—“Here, sit in my lap now.”

—Sam Roxas-Chua,
Saying Your Name Three Times Underwater

Language formed from ache, perseverance and enlightenment construct Hall’s poems: a cancer survivor’s grateful soul mate who comes back from a despairing precipice—love’s shared journey—to discover in these intimate poems that even a long life is short. We learn, too, how the residential soul survives for illumination, to know endurance is born from restoration and hope. Poems to remind us that we fall to get up and go on, mostly, a little more stooped, but thankfully keen to the transient world, each day sanctified with “…the calculus of near misses / allotted each of us.”

—Jeff Walt, Leave Smoke

Falling into the River, Debbie Hall’s newest collection, is a graceful and unflinching telling of the perilous medical journey of the poet’s longtime love. This is a poet with a gift for staying present no matter what. She knows herself and she knows her heart, and in that knowing we come to know ourselves as well. As readers we are up-close witnesses to every phase: the anxious wait for results; vigilance during the partner’s illness and treatment; self-questioning about how to best offer comfort; and ultimately the return of her partner to health. With the instincts of a tracker and all senses on high alert, Debbie Hall never strays from the natural world, which provides inspiration, hope, solace and even distraction when needed. Hall’s brilliance with extended metaphor will dazzle you. Look what she does with the jigsaw puzzle, the fire bulletin, Swan Lake, the tomatoes! Oh, the tomatoes! These poems portray a shared life lived with gusto, through times of ecstatic contentment, despair and renewal. This collection is a celebration of life and love—a testament to treasure.

—Lin Nelson Benedek,
When a Peacock Speaks to You in a Dream

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by Penelope Scambly Schott

A Poetry Box Chapbook Prize Selection – Second Place

Reading November Quilt, by acclaimed author and poet, Penelope Scambly Schott, is akin to making a new friend. Brew a cup of tea and curl up in your favorite reading chair as you’re invited to share life experiences, aphorisms, confessions, and curious ponderings in this delightful collection of 30 poems (one for each day of the month).

About the Author

Penelope Scambly Schott leads a double life. In Portland, Oregon she goes to theater and poetry events and she and her husband host the White Dog Poetry Salon in their home on a hill. In Dufur, Oregon (population 604) she and the white dog climb D hill between the wheat fields and admire the east side of Mount Hood. Also in Dufur she writes and leads an annual poetry workshop. Here she and the dog wander about in the dark. The dog admires the dirt underpaw while the woman sniffs stars.

Penelope’s verse biography A is for Anne: Mistress Hutchinson Disturbs the Commonwealth received an Oregon Book Award for Poetry. Other books include Serpent Love: A Mother-Daughter Epic about a struggle with her adult daughter, along with an essay in which the daughter gives her point of view, and Bailing the River, a poetry collection full of dogs, coyotes, and the unsolvable and sometimes funny mysteries of the ordinary. Most recent is House of the Cardamom Seed.

She is grateful to her family and her weekly hiking group as well as Word Sisters, Cool Women Poets of New Jersey, Pearls, and her far-flung on-line critique group.

What They’re Saying  . . .

“Penelope Scambly Schott’s award-winning chapbook of thirty poems—organized and titled as one-a-day offerings for the month of November—reads like a series of brief, conversational letters to the reader. Longings are shared, intimacies revealed, disappointments confessed. Along the way, truths are discovered and delivered aphoristically: ‘Lives don’t have plots; they have refrains.’ Thoughtful and thought- provoking, these poems are not as much meditations as they are invitations—to ponder, to converse, to be disturbed, to love, to never forget. “Sometimes,” Schott writes, ‘I am the surface of a lake / perturbed by every passing breeze that blows.’ In November Quilt, she blows back.”

~Andrea Hollander, author of Blue Mistaken for Sky

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