In developing his foundational Theory of Power, Choi Hong Hi stressed the importance of reaction force and concentration of impact in the maintenance of a taekwondo student's equilibrium and the severity of their strikes to an opponent. Bringing as much mass to a blow as possible increases its effectiveness, but the swiftness in which it is delivered factors even more so. For this reason, one's speed and agility may outmatch a larger rival's potential.
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“Yu-Han Chao writes with delicacy and power. Her poems speak on many levels about life, relationships and personal nightmares. Her work flows from a mix of traditional Chinese culture, contemporary Taiwan and post-modern America. The resulting poems contain beauty and often wisdom. Many are worth reading over and over again.” —Joe Farley
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Poetry and the immediate: A collection of sensed spaces collates poetry written in notebooks, journals, computer documents, and on postcards over the span of two transformational years of the writer's life. There are several pages within this book that offer space for you to contemplate, play, explore, and create. There is also space for personal contemplation at the end of the book as you engage directly with the concepts and imagery you perceive.
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“Erika Eckart’s The Tyranny of Heirlooms is itself ‘magical material,’ a meditation on the necessity for escape, the impossibility of escape, and maybe, ultimately, ‘the illusion of escape’ that salves and saves us all. Equal parts a ‘hope chest’ and a list of regrets, the book burgeons with the accumulations of lives which are always ‘much more than…could ever fit inside.’ Eckart, then, brings those accretions outside in all their poverty and persistence. Her narrators know we ‘can’t start fresh all the way from scratch,’ so they are offered the next best thing: brute sequences of sustenance, always a day late, a dollar short, but somehow complete.” - Nicole Matos
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“Many poets write about the natural world - few poets write while acting directly to defend the natural world like environmental activist and attorney Will Falk does in When I Set the Sweetgrass Down. The natural world speaks, Falk insists, in these biophilic poems written from the frontlines of land defense campaigns. These poems are a record of what Falk heard from the natural world in places like Thacker Pass, Nevada where Falk set up a protest occupation in a beautiful mountain pass set for destruction by an open pit mine and Hawaii's Mauna Kea where Falk helped to blockade telescope construction from desecrating the sacred mountain. At a time when the destruction of the natural world is intensifying, When I Set the Sweetgrass Down will help readers find the courage they need to - and remind them why they must - act to defend the source of all life: the natural world.”
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“A collection that says maps are as mutable as minds, and that you can deepen the question and deepen the answer and still come up with double zero. In fine textures, this book suggests the act of expression is still an act of hope and that’s about all you can hope for I think.” - Nikki-Lee Birdsey, author of Night As Day
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In this collectable edition of six accordion-fold postcard-style books, Craig Foltz’s poems traverse the cultural landscape of the United States. The poems are accompanied by a photograph of each state’s sky—as diverse as the states which make up this giant country. The pages are perforated so that the poems can be sent, like balloons, through the mail. The photographs were contributed by 51 amateur and professional photographers from around the country.
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"Richard Fox weaves lyrical magic in his SWAGGER & REMORSE, a book-length series of poems at once intimate ('I'd rather be a river than anything else') and richly metaphysical ('Trees look inside the houses, see all the wood & cannot look away'). They help us to consider grief -'I'll always / think of you as I pretend to eat the living air or pull / an origami swan out of nowhere / or out of someone's ear'—with humor and mystery and an elegant humanity. I recommend these distilled and powerful poems, with their birds and trees and houses and fires and rivers and hands and salt and blood to anyone who would like a fresh pair of eyes—'Once a year the flowers on this very porch take wing / as if they just remembered something'—and a whole new landscape to marvel over." - Maureen Seaton
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“In Pentimento, Joshua Garcia fuses the sacred with the secular, moving from churches to karaoke, from Jesus at the gastroenterologist to John the Baptist cruising in a state park, all the while revealing a self and world riven by loss and the remnants of a broken faith. A master of radiant detail, he takes us beyond what we think we see, returning, again and again, to his deft layering of art and myth, to the grace of heartbreak, to the body as first wound and source of all desire. This is a beautiful book and an exciting debut.” —Bruce Snider
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“Each poet’s journey entails risks that a reader is spared. With an abundance of selfless generosity, Ash Good lets us savor her hard-won knowledge, etched in succinct rhythms and luscious detail. Her poems constitute an invigorating addition to the canon-yet-to-be of West Coast poets that has been shaped by Eloise Klein Healy, Sharon Doubiago, Judy Grahn and Philip Whalen. She is well on her way to joining these comrades with poems that joyfully offer you the pleasure of their company.” —Bill Mohr, author of Hidden Proofs & Vehemence
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"In this sense-rich, threshold-crossing, body-wise, girl-to-woman story, the lyricism of the verse novel allows for fluidity between internal and external impressions. Wonderfully grounded in concrete descriptions of cooking, crafting and motorcycle riding, it is the space between words and the ideas suspended in the titled chapters that makes way for the heightened or expansive awareness that the narrator realizes. It is through her sense-rich and supersensible realizations that she can experience the beauty of what will never happen quite like that again." - Michael Ventura & Jazmin Aminian Jordán
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“If you’re ‘thinking yourself a stranger,’ ash good’s us clumsy gods might remind you we are not alone. They sing a philosophical thrum between the ‘i’ and the ‘we,’ acknowledging how our multiple voices are ‘indistinguishable from stars.’ Poem after poem, you’ll want to witness their reinvention of memory peal and risk-defying consciousness. Personal, and political, this beautiful book burns in timeless revolution.” - Elena Karina Byrne, author of If This Makes You Nervous & Moderator, LA Times Festival of Books
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First Matter Press, 2019.
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"The voice of a medicine girl all grown up..." - Jazmin Aminian Jordán
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"David Greenspan’s Error uses language error, fragmentation, remixed text, and nonlinear temporalities to present a failure of childhood/a childhood of failure. Error examines parental abuse and animal death in Michigan’s crumbling palm, while also echoing life with an auditory processing disorder. Logic subordinates itself to aural pattern in Greenspan’s failures, turning from stutter to sustained wail."
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“Nervous System with Dramamine is a questioning of self. What is a self, what makes it, what unmakes it. Explored through poems that circle around time, reflection/refraction, language’s errors, stitched together persons, hunger, addictions, social and economic failure, and other diffuse forms of being.”
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"Flush with grief, insistent in its longing, at times flashing with anger, the language of David Greenspan's poems—so exact, so exacting—propels the reader into all the open astonishment that the Ordinary affords us. What more could we ask of poetry than that?" - Richard Deming, Director of Creative Writing at Yale University
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“I’m enthralled with the poetry of Tresha Faye Haefner; her ability to effortlessly weave the spectacular with the everyday, the celestial with the mortal and erotic. Take This Longing marks the debut of a brave and innovative voice, a sensibility that soars across galaxies of yearning in the space of a single line. Here you have it all: hotel rooms, oceans, tattooes, whales and stars–Haefner’s vision–bone-raw and myth-savvy. Romantic, gritty, and ripe with the ache and ecstasy of physical desire, these poems transcend even as they refuse to release the darkly celebrated body. This is a knockout collection from a poet I deeply admire.” –Michelle Bitting, author of Notes to the Beloved
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Pine Row Press, 2023.
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