by Carolyn Martin

Nothing More to Lose is an intense, hair-raising, and hopeful account of one family’s resilience and faith. With poems based on Therese Kolbert Dieringer’s autobiography (My Life – Lived and Remembered: A journey across Hungary, Germany, and America), Carolyn Martin tracks the Kolbert family as they escape from Hungary in 1944, endure seven years of starvation and sickness in Germany, and arrive to a new life in America in 1952. Refugees who know neither the language nor landscape, they finally find some semblance of peace in their new home.

Martin knows her subject well. Dieringer is a family friend whose autobiography she edited in 2008. This intimate connection flows through powerful free verse poems that are filled with immediacy, insight, and compassion. Nothing More to Lose will open readers’ hearts and minds to the challenges that refugees in every era experience. It will also affirm the power poetry has to bear witness to that suffering and to the strength lying deep within the human spirit.

About the Author

From associate professor of English to management trainer to retiree, Carolyn Martin is a lover of gardening and snorkeling, feral cats and backyard birds, writing and photography. After years of producing academic papers and business books, she discovered that poetry is the way her heart and mind interact with the world —in images, rhythms, sounds, and intensities of language. So she has settled into the joyful challenge of translating experience into as few words as possible.

Martin’s aesthetic is embodied in Jack Kerouac’s comment in Dharma Bums: “One day I will find the right words, and they will be simple,” and in Sting’s statement, “All my life I have tried to find the truth and make it beautiful.”

Her poems attempt to use simple words to embrace truths wherever she finds them, and to turn them into something approximating the beautiful.

Her poems have appeared in journals throughout North America, Australia, and the UK, and her fifth poetry collection, The Catalog of Small Contentments, will be released by The Poetry Box^® in 2021. She is the book review editor for the Oregon Poetry Association and the poetry editor of Kosmos Quarterly: journal for global transformation.

<www.carolynmartinpoet.com>

Enjoy a video of Carolyn reading from the book:

CAROLYN MARTIN — A Featured Poet on The Poetry Box LIVE (Feb 2021)

Early Praise for Nothing More to Lose:

It would seem that Carolyn Martin, the poet, and Therese Kolbert Dieringer, the persister, have become quantumly entangled—that state of essential being in which what happens to one happens to the other, what is felt by one is felt by the other, no matter any barriers of time or distance. How else to explain Therese’s experiences—surviving Nazis, spousal abuse, and being found by new, liberating love—expressed with such first-hand poetic beauty by Carolyn’s stirring and sterling lines? Alert Bohr and Planck! Martin and Dieringer have established the principle of poetic entanglement and extended it to us. Thomas Merton wrote, “We have all stood in front of that special image that sang to our soul.” Were he alive today and asked for an example, he would hand the person this chapbook.

~Wayne-Daniel Berard, co-founding editor of Soul-Lit: a journal of spiritual poetry  and author of The Realm of Blessing

In her introduction to Nothing More to Lose, Carolyn Martin says, “… even in the worst of times, people can be kind.” That idea buoys these poems that share a truly horrific tale of survival beginning in WWII Hungary. Through Martin’s deftly crafted images, we see into the life of Therese Kolbert Dieringer as she and her family flee Nazis, bombs, starvation, and more. The long journey that concludes in America brings Therese to a safer, but not necessarily less cruel, place. I had to take little breaks as I read these poems; that human beings are capable of causing so much pain is nearly unbearable. But Dieringer’s voice comes through each of Martin’s poems showing how kindness and cruelty co-exist in us all, and how true strength and resilience cannot be extinguished. Most importantly, kindness wins.

~ Kathleen Cassen Mickelson, cofounder of Gyroscope Review
and blogger at One Minnesota Writer

In Nothing More to Lose, Carolyn Martin has read and written my soul. No one has been able to feel what I felt before this poet shared her inspired words with me and now with the world. I spent more than 70 years trying to forget the events that shaped my life and gave me nightmares. Now, through working with Carolyn on both my autobiography and this chapbook, I feel healed. The nightmares are gone.

I hope these poems will help readers find courage in the realization we are not here on our own. We are guided by a Higher Power. This book is a good way to end my journey.

~Therese Kolbert Dieringer

The post Nothing More to Lose appeared first on The Poetry Box.

by Lanser Howard

Silence can be as sweet as the most beautiful symphony. Or it can be a scream—so terrifying it will keep you up all night trying to get it out of your head.

Loss has followed Lanser Howard his whole life, clinging to him like a wet coat. And during such times, it is the silence that always seems to speak the loudest. It screams truth, and anyone who has gone through deep, dark pain knows this. Too often, this screaming silence feels inescapable—like you can never turn it off—and can make you feel like you’re losing your mind. You will do anything to block out the noise of The Screaming Silence.

In his first full-length poetry collection, Lanser Howard examines loss, the most bare-bones of human emotion. He takes readers on a merciless journey through the depths of agony and grief—through The Screaming Silence—and then into the light of hope. Hope to have the courage to fight on.

READ SAMPLES FROM THE BOOK IN LANSER’S FEATURE ON MEDUSA’S KITCHEN.

About the Author

Lanser Howard began his career as a journalist and then transitioned into film where he wrote and produced an award-winning documentary film and other screenplays. His sole focus now is on poetry and literature with The Screaming Silence as his first full-length book of poetry.

An Oakland, California native, now living in the Sacramento area, Howard travels the country selling food products by day, writer by night.  He has worked extensively with combat veterans filtering their traumatic experiences through his eyes in much of his work to show you their world after the smoke clears, but the gripping pain remains.

Howard’s visceral, minimalistic style paints hard-hitting portraits of the dark and lonely process of fighting through tragedy and loss and how to heal oneself with words, hope and an unwavering strength of self.

<Instagram: @lanserhoward>

About the Artist

For James Picard, art is life. He works feverishly, seizing every opportunity to create the vivid and striking images his mind conjures up, whether that be painting, drawing, writing or film making. His work has been featured in almost 200 art exhibitions throughout North America and Europe.

Picard was the first artist to exhibit his paintings at the historical Alcatraz Prison in San Francisco, part of his “The Dark & The Wounded” painting series and world art tour which he filmed and turned into a documentary, and which won awards across the North American Film Festival circuit culminating in a screening in May 2018 at the 71st Cannes International Film Festival.

Picard is an  talented artist with a big heart. He has received many awards and accolades for his artwork and for his contributions to communities and charities throughout North America. He currently lives in both Los Angeles, California and Vancouver, British Columbia.

<www.jamespicard.com>

The post The Screaming Silence appeared first on The Poetry Box.