Matrimony

by Laurel Feigenbaum

Scheduled Release Date: Feb 18, 2020

Matrimony is the story of a long marriage, a family, and the inevitable changes that occur over time. Married for 66 years when her husband passed away, the poet shares her journey of learning to live alone for the first time, her grief, and recognition of the natural aging process as it affects us all.

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“Matrimony’s gorgeous elegy to a husband casts a tender and unflinching eye into aging, illness, and love’s ‘armory of memory.’ These poems speak to the natural absolute of death with Yeatsian candor, but they also remind me of contemporary masters of the short form—Jane Kenyon and Jean Valentine—in their precision. Feigenbaum’s accuracy also calls to mind the photographer Cartier-Bresson’s ‘decisive moment,’ in which spontaneous and ephemeral events record, in one deft impress, the essence of pure feeling. I’m so grateful to these poems for lessons in how to write, and, more importantly, how to live.”

~ Jane Miller, acclaimed poet & author of Who is Trixie the Trasher? and Other Questions

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Moroccan Holiday

by Lauren Tivey

The Poetry Box Chapbook Prize, 2019
1stPlace Winner

Scheduled Release Date: Jan 21, 2020

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.

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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

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Hello, Darling

by Christine Higgins

The Poetry Box Chapbook Prize, 2019
2nd Place Winner

Scheduled Release Date: Jan 21, 2020

Hello, Darling explores the relationship of a mother with her daughter struggling with mental health. Christine Higgins shares both the joy and the complexity of childrearing, while paying tribute to an exuberant and creative child. Motherhood doesn’t end, but it does change when the daughter dies at the age of seventeen. These poems explore the grief of both parents and what it takes to heal from within that grief.  In Hello, Darling, Higgins gives voice to sorrow while holding fast to the love that is essential.

 

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I read Hello, Darling with my whole heart and soul. Poet Christine Higgins is a mother who suffers the unimaginable grief of losing her daughter. In poem after poem, in myriad forms, she composes a song that has everything in it—her daughter’s birth, her life, and her life after…. I read it again and again because I wanted to be beside these poems, to feel their tenderness, their hope, and their deep love.

­~Kendra Kopelke, Hopper’s Women

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Falling into the River

by Debbie Hall

The Poetry Box Chapbook Prize, 2019
3rd Place Winner

Scheduled Release Date: Jan 21, 2020

“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.

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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

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Notes from a Caregiver

by Meg Lindsay

Scheduled Release Date: Jan 21, 2020

Inspired by the doctor and poet, William Carlos Williams, who wrote poetry on his prescription pad when on house calls, the poems in Notes from a Caregiver originated in waiting rooms and doctors’ offices when Meg Lindsay’s husband collapsed with multiple myeloma, a cancer, causing bone fractures. Lindsay writes of her personal journey as a caregiver, not clichés and ‘feel good’ sayings, which can be isolating and make one feel inadequate. Instead, she uses poetry to reveal authentic emotions, often odd and unpredictable, ranging from compassion to despair to anger and even to humor.

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Meg Lindsay’s poems are deeply moving and sometimes even humorous. Each verse guides us through the twists and turns of a bone cancer diagnosis too late to avert injury, treatment, repair. Her words gently illuminate the arduous road she and her husband are traveling and the continuous dialog between caregiver and patient. Their unrelenting partnership and love offer us a way forward.

—Jen Walker, Attorney, Literacy Advocate and Multiple Myeloma Caregiver

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Shadow Man

by Margaret Chula

Tentative Release Date: November 5, 2019

In Shadow Man, Margaret Chula brings her father out of the shadows where he had been since 1957, the day her mother packed their five children—all under the age of ten—into the car and drove away. Over the years, Margaret comes to accept the differences between a mother who wants China cups with saucers and a father who’s content with a Budweiser. Through writing about these awkward, often heartbreaking, interactions with her estranged father, she discovers that there’s more than one truth and that each of us must find our own.

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“Shadow Man is a deeply touching portrayal of love, loss, and forgiveness.”

—Penelope Scambly Schott, Oregon Book Award for Poetry

 

“Through Chula’s insights, we as readers can understand our own fraught relationships with parents.  As adults facing honest memory, we can arrive at the grace of reconciliation that she shows is possible and essential for our own serenity.”

—Bill Siverly, author of Nightfall

 

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What She Was Wearing

by Shawn Aveningo Sanders

Tentative Release Date: November 12, 2019

In What She Was Wearing, Shawn Aveningo Sanders uses poetry to tell her #MeToo story—one that has been over 30 years in the making. Inspired, by the courage of so many women who have bravely opened up, Aveningo Sanders decided it was time to join the conversation and share her story. It is her hope this work can help women of all ages face and cope with their own experiences, while letting them know they can indeed heal and go on to enjoy loving, trusting relationships.

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“Shawn Aveningo Sanders’s story of living with the aftermath of violence emerges like a geode that’s been cracked open after years underground. Each image has been remembered and re-remembered, stored, pressurized, and slowly shaped into a single facet of the experience. From the earrings she was wearing to explaining the assault to her college-age children years later, Aveningo Sanders spares no detail and lets no one off the hook. Starkly honest and memorably graceful, these poems are a virtuoso performance of feminism and survival, as well as a wholly human story that far too many women will understand.”

—Amy Miller, author of The Trouble with New England Girls

 

“Dedicated ‘to those who have suffered in silence,’ this book is a testimony to Shawn Aveningo Sanders’ courage. For thirty years, she kept a secret that verged on unraveling her, a secret so devastating she once attempted suicide. But here she transcends the traps of shame and self-reproach to confront—in a sequence of poems and epistolary prose—the four men who, as college fraternity brothers, raped her. Forced into silence for too long, women all over this world are now speaking out, saying #MeToo. What She Was Wearing is Sanders’ brave voice joining this transforming chorus.”

—Paulann Petersen, Oregon Poet Laureate Emerita

 

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