This is a beautifully-crafted, witty and sometimes sad exploration of the challenges of youth and contemporary life. Sad Havoc draws on the poet’s memories, often viewed through the prism of his later experience of different countries and cultures. The poet’s unique style, often playful, occasionally irreverent, is arresting in its evocation of the chaos, humour and the pathos of urban living.
Read More“Anyone’s Son is a book of music and memory. In this remarkable first collection, David Meischen brings us with him across decades and landscapes, through bedrooms and parked cars, across a life riven through with longing. Queer as every Texas sunset, queer as needing to leave and stay at once. This is a book of opening and unbuttoning. This is a book unzipping its very text so a reader might see the heart throbbing there below the page.” —Sam Sax, bury it
Read More"Meischen conjures the hackberries and mesquite, the cotton harvests and 'rainless earth' of his rural Texas homeplace with meticulous reserve, clarity, and crisp music. A work of abiding love and questing memory, this new volume provides the stirring pleasures of a family album while nimbly skirting sentimentality and reflexive nostalgia in favor of well-earned insight, jubilant celebration (mornings aglow like 'carnival glass'), and able compassion. The highest compliment that I can pay Meischen is that his German-American family chronicle brings to mind James Agee's indelible and legendary 'Knoxville: Summer of 1915.' Caliche Road Poems is a vibrant contribution to the literature of Texas." - Cyrus Cassells, Texas Poet Laureate, 2021, author of Is There Room for Another Horse on Your Horse Ranch?
Read MoreComprised of 21 poems written in the voice of Mother Mary, "My Name is Mary" is a not-so-religious accounting of her life and the life of her most famous child. She fiercely desires the "kingdom of justice" and expresses herself with passion, sarcasm, deep pain and strong will. Organized according to the mysteries of the traditional rosary, these poems have a distinct voice and perspective that will make for thoughtful meditations.
Read More“Ann E. Michael’s poems of fullness and emptiness combine keen observation, philosophical questions, and a refreshing groundedness that invite the reader into complex, cleanly crafted contemplations of ordinary moments—moments turned extraordinary through her clear-eyed vision and delicious language. Smart, surprising, and wry, these poems honor equally the losses and the gains. A rich and rewarding collection.” —Hayden Saunier, author of A Cartography of Home
Read More“Barefoot Girls offers a series of narrative, lyrical, persona poems backgrounded in Springsteen’s 1st three albums but projected through a girl’s perspective. The poems, inspired by memories of late adolescence, relate the stories of young women navigating sexuality, feminism, intellectual growth, and the urge to escape from “my hometown.” The 24 pieces in this chapbook represent a selection of a larger series of poems Ann E. Michael has written that explore female teen dynamics, such as the common feelings of otherness when the young person recognizes adulthood looms, and as parental and social expectations press her to follow proscribed behaviors.”
Read More“In The Capable Heart, Ann Michael evokes the wild beauty and power of horses that move us deeply and simultaneously call us to rein them in. Layered metaphor and images born of passionate attention describe the richly sensuous and spiritual encounter between women and horses: the caution and the ensuing trust, the strength arising from their closeness. We learn of the discipline between horse and rider that teaches a young daughter “who she is and who she will be,” of a mother's awakening to the restraints of her own domesticity-whether to follow the unbridled urges of her heart or to don the traces, bearing “with good will the burdens others impose . . . and pull for love.” These are moving, carefully crafted poems that earn our trust and build a world we enter and live in, which is what good poetry does.” - Paul Martin, author of Closing Distances
Read MoreFinishing Line Press, 2006.
Read More“Ann Michael’s poems combine music, formal dexterity, and insight into a synthesis that’s as pleasurable as a perfect meal. The poems can be somber and delightful in the same breath as she explores “the gradual dispersal of / everyday occurrences.” She lifts the lid on life and family moments–bee keeping, horse rearing, mothering–with lines that feel more discovered than written. Michael approaches it all with a mix of seriousness, honesty, and playfulness. I have been waiting for a book like this.” - Grant Clauser, author of Muddy Dragon on the Road to Heaven
Read More“It is my contention that true peace is not static but mobile, resilient, transforming. Wilhelm's translation of the I Ching says of T'ai (Peace): “The Receptive, which moves downward, stands above; the Creative, which moves upward, is below. Hence their influences meet and are in harmony, so that all living things bloom and prosper...at which time the forces of nature prepare the new spring.” What I attempted to do when choosing the poems for this collection was to celebrate the harmonious energy of spring as well as to acknowledge the past and future seasons that make up our lives collectively and individually. Some of these actual and metaphorical seasons are not those of prosperity and balance, but the I Ching is, after all, the Book of Changes.”
Read MoreMoonstone Press, 2022.
Read More“Ann Michael has found a vast universe in very small places, and every poem is a return to a much-loved landscape. One thinks of William Blake’s “To see a World in a Grain of Sand/And a Heaven in a wild Flower.” —Harry Humes, author of August Evening with Trumpet
Read More“With surreal creatures like blue lions and a parallel universe where radiation suits are normal everyday attire, Of All Stars the Most Beautiful gives life to the imagined reality of climate change and contemplates what role humans play in the galaxy. Using a variety of poetic forms and styles, Violet Mitchell asks her readers to consider what is possible within this universe as well as themselves.”
Read More“In this startling debut collection, Jason Morphew creates a world more real than the reality we think we live—his poems evoke landscapes and innerscapes at once recognizable and surreal, sensual and death-haunted, populated by vitamixes and mystics and canadian whisky and the American south and encounters at CVS. The quest to live without numbing oneself (through narcotics or love or sex or material accommodations) is a struggle at the heart of these saturated, vividly intelligent and often wryly funny poems. This powerful books of poems will accompany you into your best days and your mislaid days, capturing exquisitely that odd realization of adulthood: ‘What now? Am i really mortal?’” - Meghan O’rourke, author of Sun In Days and The Long Goodbye
Read More“"Everyone was hammered. / That was the dress code." In Order to Commit Suicide, by Jason Morphew, comprises such dry declarative lines through a range of subjects, from "Charlie Sheen" to the "Deepwater Horizon," even "The Death of Loved Ones." Morphew's poems do not mince their words, they do not tease, and they do not disappoint.”
Read More“A poet on fatherhood -- the good, the bad, and the scary -- up close in the thick of it and then the birds-eye view. Smart, candid, and often wickedly funny -- starting with a title that riffs Heidi Murkoff ’s best-selling pregnancy guide What to Expect when You’re Expecting.“
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Ghost Road Pub Group, 2006.
Read More“Taking up where A Mnemonic for Desire left off, with a song forming out of nothing, Steve Mueske's second collection, Slower than Stars, is by turns playful, irreverent, surreal, and deeply lyrical. His poems, often philosophical, are informed by writers such as Kafka, Joyce, and Nietzsche; artists Paul Klee, Andy Warhol, Man Ray, and Jan Groover; as well as the work of poets, photographers, and musicians.”
Read More“A lovely collection of divinatory symbols masquerading as poems, in Otherwise, Magic, Lauren Paredes beckons us into her world where the paradox of modern life combines with fairy tale. She shrouds us in beautiful language, gentle rhythm and a wide-eyed wonder. We, like the speaker, find spiritual meaning in ‘the only newborn to board this plane,’ ‘the taste of merlot and party-soft cheese’ and always, always, the celestial influence of the Moon and her metaphysical counterparts.” - Elizabeth Hellstern, author of How to Live: A Suggestive Guide & creator of the Telepoem Booth®
Read More“Powell's poetic master stroke is in the way she elevates her subject matter, not through over romanticisation, but through creating an understated luminosity.” - Daniel Harlow
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