by Joan Colby

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Joan Colby, a masterful poet and avid bird lover, takes us on a lyrical exploration inside the bird kingdom. Through her careful observances and vivid imagination, we often see ourselves—our human interactions, our social conditions, our philosophies, our celebrations, our grief. And sometimes, of course, a poem is simply about the bird.

                          There’s always one
Who is preoccupied—a dreamer
Contemplating the poetry of a cornfield,
Gleaning the easy pickings of
The left behind.

About the Author

Joan Colby has published widely in journals such as Poetry, Atlanta Review, South Dakota Review, Gargoyle, Pinyon, Little Patuxent Review, Spillway, Midwestern Gothic and others. Awards include two Illinois Arts Council Literary Awards and an Illinois Arts Council Fellowship in Literature.

She has published 22 books including Selected Poems (FutureCycle Press) which received the 2013 FutureCycle Book Prize and Ribcage from Glass Lyre Press which has been awarded the 2015 Kithara Book Prize. Three of her poems have been featured on Verse Daily and another is among the winners of the 2016 Atlanta Review International Poetry Contest. Her poems are included in numerous anthologies, the latest being Poets to Come which was published in accordance with the Walt Whitman Bicentennial Convention, May 31-June 2, 2019. Her newest books are Her Heartsongs from Presa Press (2017), Joyriding to Nightfall (2019) from FutureCycle Press, Elements (2019) Presa Press and Bony Old Folks (2019) Cyberwit Press. Colby is a senior editor of FutureCycle Press and an associate editor of Good Works Review.

Learn more about the poet on her website: www.joancolby.com, on Facebook (Joan Colby), or Twitter: @poetjm.

Early Praise for The Kingdom of Birds:

Written by a poet at the top of her conjoined powers of observation, understanding, imagination, and craftsmanship, these poems are as clear-eyed and precise as a hawk in descent, and often as fierce. Like Audubon in her poem “The Artists of Exactitude” (though unlike him because her subjects are not dead), Colby is an Obermeister[ ] of observation/ Threading the needle of particulars. These poems capture how the experience of watching birds impinges on our minds and stirs our emotions. The hinges of [crows’] wings seem to groan/ Like the rheumatic branches. Even my eyes/ Ache with the freight/ Of their passing. Gulls who ride the swells are Snugged to our planet/ like fleas/ In a heaving vastness. All night the owl is silent as a ghost/ On glider wings. A seized bird is lifted skyward/ into the rapture of a redtail’s/ Book of revelations. A Cooper’s Hawk stoops from clouds,/ A lightning bolt thrown by a fierce/ Old god. Colby’s metaphors, exact and original, continually delight.

—Judy Kronenfeld, PhD, lecturer emerita, UC Riverside
author, Bird Flying Through the Banquet

I wake to wings crashing into my window, Joan Colby informs us in this congregation of bird poems, as casually as if we’d just sat down with her morning coffee and toast. There is, however, nothing casual about her poetry, nor is the subject birds alone. Colby knows and employs the language of ornithology to riveting effect, but always with a human implication circling and circling. We’re not supposed to anthropomorphize, Colby admits, but the more we learn, the more we ponder. And doesn’t the power of strong poetry lie in its ability to make us ponder? In these poems, see how Colby selects the delectable morsel, knowing exactly what [we] want. Try just one poem. You’ll follow like a soar of larks.

—Dana Wildsmith, author, One Light

Ever a sharp observer of people Joan Colby has an eye and much affection for nature as well. In these poems her viewing of birds reflects back to the human world with the attention for detail that has long given her poetry a vigorous edge. She never shirks from harsh facts, though she can still leave us with the observation that we roost in each other.

—David Chorlton

Enjoy Joan’s Daughter Wendy on Her Mother’s Behalf:

The Poetry Box LIVE — October 2020

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by Sherry Rind

Between States of Matter points out that we spend more time getting somewhere than being there, more time in the process than the final form. And beings are always trying to upend the way things are, whether it’s a lion appearing in the front yard, a plant sneaking out of its assigned place, or the author shifting between her own self and a dog. The poems move between yearning and acceptance, yet are shot through with sardonic humor—the poet compares a battle of King Kong and Godzilla to the current state of affairs; a dead husband showing up for dinner must be taken to a restaurant because the speaker still can’t cook his favorite food; a seeker of enlightenment will reach that state only by dying in an earthquake. Yet the place that is Between States of Matter is full of possibility. Change could go anywhere.

Enjoy a video of Sherry reading from the book:

Sherry Rind — A Featured Poet on The Poetry Box LIVE (June 2021)

About the Author

Granddaughter of immigrants, Sherry Rind takes her chances with poetry instead of crossing the Atlantic with a few biscochos by way of kosher food. She published her first poems when still in college. Earning her BA in a recession, she decided the only solution was to return to school, working as a teaching assistant and earning her MA in advanced writing. She taught writing at community colleges and for arts commissions, and worked in development and at miscellaneous other jobs, as writer do.

She received grants and awards from the Seattle and King County Arts Commissions, Pacific Northwest Writers, National Endowment for the Arts, and Artist Trust.  She edited two books about Airedale terriers and published numerous articles about parrots. She has published two chapbooks, The Whooping Crane Dance and A Natural History of Grief, runner-up for the Quentin R. Howard Chapbook Prize. Her books are The Hawk in the Back Yard, winner of the Anhinga award and published by Anhinga Press, and A Fall Out the Door, winner of the King County Arts Commission Publication Award and published by Confluence Press. She has always lived with multiple animals and knows she is one.

What They’re Saying…

Nothing stays at rest, writes Sherry Rind, and, indeed, these are restless poems—probing, examining, taking nothing for granted—by a poet who is not fooled by easy appearances. There is an edge to Rind that has been honed on the worn stone of experience, the relentless strop of memory. Still, she finds solace in the adaptability of wild animals, insects, birds, the fierce allegiance of dogs and the tenacity of plants. She is, finally, a poet of hope, one who has been able to, as Wendell Berry says, Be joyful/ though you have considered all the facts.

—Samuel Green, Inaugural Poet Laureate, Washington State

Traversing a tightrope of grief and loss, Sherry Rind’s Between States of Matter blends exquisite imagery with explorations of science and art. These poems reach widely through history and literature to capture Darwin, Sarah Stone, and Percy Bysshe Shelley. Though mortality is never far away, the organic force of life and living comes to the fore: He has important work/just staying alive,/ keeping his carbon burning. Rind is a gardener steeped in the natural world: The mint lacks regret when it dies back in winter;/ only I mourn its leaves’ lost companionship/ for my bourbon. There is an edge to her verse—a poignant music that captures the stillness between what we long to catch hold of and what’s inevitably lost.

—Judith Skillman, Came Home to Winter

The poems in this new collection proliferate with imagery in motion between states of being—flora and fauna domestic and wild, and constant shifts and transitions in their natural history. There are vegetable gardens and suburban lawns to be cared for, exotic and extinct birds and their lore preserved by collectors, sea turtles hauling up between sand and sea to lay their eggs, adolescent cougars prowling human neighborhoods in the interface zones at the edges of former wilderness. All of this richness is refracted through the poems’ prevailing subject—the awareness of life’s evanescence made acute by loss and its lifelong burden of grief. Many of these poems deliver quiet epiphanies, a flash of uplifting or devastating insight at the end: when the great joints of the earth/ begin to shift against their sockets./ All our work will be undone. Dwelling in a state between states, Rind invites us to contemplate how time refracts everyone’s history and to enter these poems like light passing through the ever-shifting gather of glass.

—Carolyne Wright, author of This Dream the World: New & Selected Poems,
and lead editor of Raising Lilly Ledbetter: Women Poets Occupy the Workspace

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by Jeanne Julian

The poems in Like the O in Hope take the reader on a journey, a quest from dark to light—both literally and spiritually. Beginning with hesitation and humility, Jeanne Julian transports us toward transcendence. As an accomplished poet, she weaves a myriad of poetic form from traditional to modern free verse, from sestina to chant, stopping to enjoy some lighter fare along the way: bemoaning a neighbor’s back-yard beacon; going AWOL from a boring seminar; even deliberately mistranslating directives from dictators to render them harmless. Gradually, revelations about the magic of place and of connection lead to contentment and even enlightenment and ends with a poem revealing how love can feel transcendent even with recognition of the finite.

About the Author

Jeanne Julian is the author of two chapbooks: Blossom and Loss (Longleaf Press) and Relic and Myth (Prolific Press). She moved with her husband to New Bern, NC, after retiring from a 27-year career in media relations and marketing at Westfield State University. She discovered that North Carolina is one of the worst states for hurricanes, but one of the best for writers. Her practice of poetry has been energized by some dynamic writers’ organizations there: the North Carolina Writers Network, the North Carolina Poetry Society (NCPS), Carteret Writers, Pamlico Writers Group, and the Nexus Poets’ open mic series, which she helps to coordinate. She is especially grateful for the Neuse River Writers whose critiques helped shape many of these poems.

Her poems appear in Prairie Wolf Press Review, Poetry Quarterly, Lascaux Prize 2016 Anthology, High Desert Journal, North Carolina Literary Review, pacificREVIEW, The RavensPerch, and other journals, and have won awards from The Comstock Review, Naugatuck River Review, and the NCPS.

She grew up in Ohio, graduated from Allegheny College, and earned an MFA from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. Jeanne is an enthusiastic photographer, and also practices yoga when not distracted by tennis, gardening, making omelets, and gazing at the creek and the national forest just beyond her back yard.

www.jeannejulian.com

What They’re Saying…

In Like the O in Hope, Jeanne Julian shines her discerning eye on a world she refuses to experience in comfortable terms. Sometimes her beam is heavenly like sun; others icy like a laser. In the collection’s first poem, “The Owl Wonders,” her evolution from observer to participant takes shape: Do closed eyes ready it for coming night, the search for morsels? That’s how I hunt, too: in the dark.

These poems can be considered travel poems, but not in the conventional sense. The various locations and cultures are backdrops, the poet illuminating their lessons, yet, while geographical, they are also interpersonal. She reveals often-overlooked significance in the common occurrence, not as an intruder or tourist, but as an inquisitive member of any chosen environment or universe, and challenges herself scanning for associative relevance there. She chaperones us from cathedrals to open markets; from labyrinths to “No Man’s Land,” marking how we will owe survival to the feigned, to the risk and sanctity of close calls, to edges, margins.

Some journeys are closer to home. In “Threadbare,” she examines family relationships informing us, I want to be distraught. And I want evidence: are these inner chambers threadbare from caring, or its lack? Poem after poem, her command of poetics and language satisfies because, with her perceptions, she entices a reader to take these journeys with her in a valid search for kindness and beauty, for healing and hope. Spending time with Like the O in Hope will enlighten the soul – time well spent.

—Sam Barbee, author of That Rain We Needed;
past president, North Carolina Poetry Society

Reading Jeanne Julian’s first full length book Like the O in Hope, it’s obvious that the poet is also an acclaimed photographer. Not only are the poems rich in images and details, but as in photography, the light source is all important. In these poems, the light sources are varied and are what illuminate, enliven, and enervate our lives and our very beings. Julian knows that no extended meditation on what brings light to our lives would be complete without the lighter side of life, humor and laughter. She delivers this lightness with poems like “Solar Boy! with Frog.” I look forward to returning to these poems and already hold dear these lines from the final poem, “Just (us) In Time:” Our sacred time does not stand still. / Until our now, with its greening / patina, has passed, we will try / to make it shine. Shine on!

—Malaika King Albrecht, author of What the Trapeze Artist Trusts;
founding editor, Redheaded Stepchild

Book Launch Readings

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