Finishing Line Press, 2015.
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“This carefully curated selection from an entire body of work brings an undiscovered master to light. Invisible Histories navigates the totality and the niches of life in late 20th, early 21st century global and American life: relationships, growing up, sexuality, media, the powers-that-be, magic and the occult, bodies and death, secrets and codes, and, otherwise, the spiritual and the corporeal.”
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“These poems are devoid of any artificial and spurious emotion. The employment of concrete imagery in these poems is quite admirable. Instead of rhetorical style, the poet prefers the exact word. After reading these poems, it is evident that the poet’s style is quite lucid.”
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“The poems show strong inspiration and create a lyricism of striking appeal and power. The poems included in this poetry collection are full of impressive vigor. In these poems we admire the poet's delicate touch and the felicity of expression. The flowing ease of expression confirms the fact that the style of these poems has an impressive spontaneity.”
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“No doubt, while reading the poems in the poetry collection we are struck at once by the fact that the poems are full of great depth and simplicity. Due to melody of diction in these poems, the sound of the words and phrases lingers in the mind for a long time.”
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"Composed over a two-month period between his mother's decision to enter hospice and the burial of her ashes, Postlude to the End of is conceptually, simply a diary of mourning. Through its composition with exploded lines and fractured syntax, this collection interiorizes into a visual and verbal hyperventilation of emotion. While mourning the loss of a parent may be a familiar theme, rather than just elegize through descriptive and emotional language, this collection attempts to replicate the chaotic synaptic and physiological processes of coping with deep loss."
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“These are powerful poems of love, and loss and sex and regret, wrapped up in a tidal wave of confessional. Beattie’s close and honest portrayals of relationships real and imagined evoke Frank O’Hara’s busy city streets pressed with flesh. As she writes in her preface, throughout her days she “cannot separate myself from this desire” – and what a ride it takes us on. Her art of shutting up is one that takes instead to the written page, and in Beattie’s phrase, demands we become a ‘compulsory witness’.”
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“Fern Angel Beattie's second collection of poetry explores the spectrum of light and dark emotions love causes one to swing between.”
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“The beauty of Bolton’s poems does not come from avoiding the darker sides of life, but from putting it precisely at the center. With subtle precision, she embroiders a poetic world of a child’s fears, of abuse, and of broken trust—but also of the experience of healing and of divinity—that will reach for your heart to pull you in.”
—Eva Wissting, editor of Asymptote and Populär Poesi
Poet Judith Bowles gathers in this debut collection a harvest of observations on illuminated spaces, made so by the act of paying close attention.
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“Judith Bowles has gifted readers with a metaphysical odyssey via science and the echoes of family. Her agile water music opens a treasure chest of magic and pain before floating us toward an oceanic satori.” -Richard Peabody, editor Gargole Magazine
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"Brownwood is full of angst, wry humor, and sarcasm; he's a lost twin, doppelganger, living in a melancholy place [and] this book's poetic plot . . . arrives with cinematographic aplomb." - Elena Karina Byrne
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Using Hollywood screenplay structure to illustrate a life in three acts, eighteen scenes, each with two poems as mirrors to action, filmmaker/poet Lawrence Bridges sequences through tragicomic plot twists and subplots to create a character-driven, novel-like book of lyric poems.
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“This stunning first collection of funny, strange, aphoristic , indissoluble poems reveals Larry Bridges to be as talented a poet as he is a filmmaker. Full of verve and revelation, these poems are a storehouse of sadness and awakened consciousness.”
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“Reading the subtle lyrics of this book, we can hope to be thus drenched-and with acceptance.” - David Landrey
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“Through the streets of Buffalo, Olmsted’s parks, Forest Lawn, Soho, and Crescent Street, Montreal, Jennifer Campbell’s word images never cease to accost the reader with their freshness and vulnerability. In fact, perhaps this is the main thread that weaves her poems together: what fragile creatures we are in our search for comfort and self-expression. A true lover of language, Campbell seeks to discover, by softening “everything mundane into beauty,” phrases that help us rise above it. And while the ghosts, dreams, and demons in her work are not “easily deleted,” Jennifer Campbell, the woman and poet, never shies away from confronting conflicts and loss, creating fresh images like her “custard moon,” and peeling away more layers of language, like the pages in this complex volume of remarkable poems.” - Perry S. Nicholas, author of What the World Sees
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A chapbook of reconstituted fairytale poems.
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“In BALEEN, a Poem in Twelve Days, Greek-American poet, Cea, and Portuguese artist, Vincent Sampaio, reflect on queer yearning, illness, and place as a locus of escape, not unlike Thomas Mann's Death in Venice. However, unlike Mann's novella, tragedy is not so certain. Illness doesn't mean death. Yearning doesn't mean loss. Cea's yearning is amorphous and undulant like the water they find respite in. There seems to be no component of the poem that is not also of the sea as they move, reflectively, in and out of one another. "I crush my poem to seashells," Day Five goes, "ocean it out examine the water's wares / & I will get this wrong all rust & ruins / bobbing up from the foam". Art from Sampaio responds to these crushing moments—a broken ionic column, a slippery body melding with water, a clam with teeth tonguing a pearl, one feels as uncannily in a distant memory as much as a ruin. In Cea's world, what is fragmentary is also whole, like synecdoche made literal, the parts not representative of something complete but complete in and of themselves, as if what we fail to recapture in memory makes it any less of one. What's the difference anyway between a memory and a ruin?”
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You, the scapegoat, incarnation of the ghosts of bad relationships past. I was yelled at for tripping on your human-tripping butt, left in a corner while you were cuddled. Your sleep murmurs, purr-snores, loose bits jangling all fan my fury. That cat spring roll story may not have been about you but may as well have been. You drew blood from my brother with your claws, and hissed at every catsitter until even the neighbor’s barely-speaking toddler called you Mean Kitty.
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My body is not a textbook but you are my mango. Red and wrinkly, finally proportional, a perfect pound. Little green one as pancreas, two large halves for lungs, 30 types in Hawaii alone, blossoming red, yellow, green and purple. But even on a romantic Big Island vacation, at the risk of appearing a loose woman, please remove the rings, before the doctor cuts them off between the fast, the treacly soda, and the glucose screen.
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