Praise for Ioanna Carlsen

Ioanna Carlsen situates herself on the borderline between noumenal and phenomenal (if there could ever be such a place). She attempts no answers, but instead finds surprising contours for the almost inexpressible. She declares beautiful truths, like ‘seeing is forgetting the name of what is seen…’ Nuanced, shadowy, alert to metaphysical paradox, Carlsen’s poems are like that shimmer glimpsed up ahead on the highway that we never quite reach, but that keeps drawing us forward.
— Sven Birkerts, author of Changing the Subject: Art and Attention in the Internet Age
It is the soul of Breather that I love, its deep thinking & feeling & searching & humility, the way the poet proceeds as just another human, always leaving room for the thoughts & feelings of other humans breathing alongside her.
— Jennifer Tseng, author of The Man with My Face
 

By Ioanna Carlsen

Breather
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Praise for Jon Davis

In Acrobat, Jon Davis, poet of jazz, blues and misery, of daughters and horses, of regret, asks the questions we’ve been avoiding. What if we were wrong about art’s humanitarian potential? What if all this time we should have been feeling instead of naming? What do we do with the dawning realization that the apocalypse, by comparison, turns out to be the easier choice? This is the work of a great, and largely unsung American poet at his most relentless, at his most and least wise; it is a map to hold in our hands as we fly off the end of the world.
— Pam Houston, author of Deep Creek: Finding Hope in the High Country
By turns strange, funny, profound, and irreverent, this is an amazing, novel collection of poetry full of beautiful noise and powerful language.
— Tommy Orange, author of There There
Off-the-charts terrific.
— David Foster Wallace, author of Infinite Jest

By Jon Davis

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An Amiable Reception for the Acrobat
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Improbable Creatures
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Praise for Karen Whalley

I’ve been waiting for years for Karen Whalley’s second collection to be published. These beautifully clear, meditative poems have it all; dexterously situated in daily experience, they meet with the difficulties of lived life, over and over with a deep, often heartbreakingly honest and humane insightfulness. Fluent, full of breakthroughs and surprises, these extraordinary poems never seem to falter; Whalley is an extraordinary poet, and this is a book in a thousand.
— Tony Hoagland
My Own Name Seems Strange to Me moves with fluid sureness from poem to poem, assessing our gains and our vulnerabilities. I love the arc of the book, how it goes from familiar to strange. How, though grounded in the real world, the poet’s astute observations reach deeply, easily, into philosophy and meaning. ‘Somewhere there is always light / To cast the world into shadows,’ she tells us in the moving poem, ‘Dusk.’ In ‘Honey,’ Whalley describes the surprise of learning that a bee creates only one teaspoon of honey in its entire lifetime, but allows that this ‘is as much as most of us / Ever achieve.’ Nothing feels like a stretch, everything the poet points out to us, in her control. The reader gets to know and care about intricate family relationships; in ‘Sister,’ a sibling rivalry that has remained hidden: ‘How, like a child swimming the surface / Of a lake thinking nothing lies beneath the mirror on which she floats.’ Casual, brilliant associations, but there is no mistaking how deep the currents of feeling run, every poem so carefully turned like a beautiful piece on the potter’s wheel.
— Elaine Terranova
Reading Karen Whalley’s poems is like watching a magic show. They begin quietly in observations of the everyday, then suddenly explode into truth and revelation. This brilliance, of breaking open the familiar to reveal its depths, is the essential brilliance of metaphor. ‘Art washes away from the soul the dust of ordinary life,’ said Picasso, and that’s exactly what these poems do. Beneath their lucid, meticulous surfaces, the wrenching beauties of human life emerge in all their wild complexity and vividness. Whatever sleight-of-hand brought these poems into being, their startling courage and honesty remain with me. This is a brave and memorable book.
— Chase Twitchell
In My Own Name Seems Strange to Me Karen Whalley has given us ‘sad and gorgeous songs’ about the work of being alive, having a needy, imperfect, aging body, about religion’s promises vs. the facts on the ground, about the need to weep, about the adored person changing or collapsing or betraying—and about who, after all this time, absolutely still deserves to be punished. Muriel Rukeyser’s favorite assignment was to ask students to write poems that complete the sentence ‘I could not tell….’ Whalley’s wonderful poems—tender, brave, ironic, angry and hopeful—rise fiercely to that challenge.
— Patrick Donnelly
 

By Karen Whalley

My Own Name Seems Strange to Me
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Praise for Bert Stern

Flawless in its versification, deeply impressive, and perpetually pleasure-giving. I have to say, there isn’t a poem in this book that I can resist, and I know the reader will share my pleasure.
— David Ferry, National Book Award-winning author of Bewilderment
Writing in the ninth decade of his life, Stern’s extended meditation on mortality is luminous and lucid, deeply felt … Over and over I found myself startled and moved by discoveries that the poems enact, by their beauty and depth. This is one of the most rewarding books I’ve read in a long, long time.
— Chase Twitchell, author of Horses Where the Answers Should Have Been
On every page of this book, Bert Stern sounds the tragic-comic note of a master. And from this double plane of regard, his poems are as aglitter with gaiety as they are alive to the tears of things.
— George Kalogeris, author of Dialogos: Paired Poems in Translation
Bert Stern’s poems are rare vessels of encounter, necessity, and vacancy, splendid visions of a blessed world where life is both given and taken away. Stern finds life and immediacy in birds and leaves, mountains, rivers and mist, and he makes himself available to these objects to the degree where he can say, I am so naked that I have no skin. These are the poems of an aged man who is widely engaged in his world and all it imparts.
— Richard Fein, author of I Think of Our Lives: New and Selected Poems
 

By Bert Stern

What I Got For a Dollar
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What I Got for a Dollar

 

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Praise for Patricia Corbus

Patricia Corbus is a brilliant, virtuoso poet. Her rich linguistic palette channels an adventurous and fabular intelligence that reminds us of poets like Stevens, Ruefle and Ashbery. Finestra’s Window is a collection full of mortal daring and formal bravado. Corbus’s work amazes and delights me, as it will any reader of poetry.
— Tony Hoagland, author of Application for Release from the Dream
In language that is both accessible and vivid, Patricia Corbus’s Finestra’s Window vigorously leaps between myth, fantasy, the past, and the very present, mortal, human world. This is a very exciting and distinctive new book.
— Lynn Emanuel, author of The Nerve of It: Poems New and Selected

By Patricia Corbus

Finestra’s Window
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Wit and driving force, newly minted metaphors, vocabulary forged in energy, and unflappable nerve make these poems something genuinely new. Finestra’s Window will be an energy source for generations to come.

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Praise for Dicko King

Dicko King’s first poetry collection, Doggerland: Ancestral Poems, depends on a strange parallelism of time past and present, similar to the sedimentary sequences found in rock. But here it also includes all the intricate and intimate bloodlines born and nurtured within its span of 30,000 years. I am grateful to King for giving us this visceral, personalized Irish history—as the bards would—in poetry.
— Norman Dubie, author of The Mercy Seat: Collected and New Poems, 1967–2000
Doggerland, Dicko King’s wonderful debut volume, is rich in the history and also prehistory of Ireland, before the ‘indigenous’ Irish, when they were still ‘shallow-rooted,’ migrating. The poems are mysterious, at once fabulous and erudite, telling in their knowledge of the evolution of a nation. But they are also forthright about the unchanging universality of human nature, which will, instinctively in play, still kill “small and grand” beings (‘Berries’). In the taut restraint of these poems, King delivers to us poetry’s grand bargain with philosophy, that truth be delivered by beauty.
— Cynthia Hogue, author of Revenance
This is a genuine touch of Ireland from every side with the poet as historian, storyteller, and wit at its epicenter.
Washington Independent Review of Books
 

By Dicko King

Doggerland
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Dicko King calls this work “an ancestral chronicle,” but it’s bigger than that—something more like a species chronicle. King traces us out of the primordial ooze through our revolutions and migrations, and then, only finally, to his clan and family. This is poetry rising out of the blood and bones.

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Praise for Peter Nash

In ‘Tracks’ Peter Nash describes lying down in the hollow of dry needles where a doe and her newborn fawn have lain. And this is what his poems allow us to do—to inhabit the experience of another being and in so doing, to deepen our own. This collection is rich with praise and rich with cold, clear truth-telling. I admire Peter Nash’s craft and courage.
— Ellen Bass
Without ever shouting, Peter Nash’s poems of rural life are deeply moving, whether as elegy or celebration. They develop thier themes through inspired description that is both true to the immediate occasion and deeply resonant. This is a rich, wise, and delightful book.
— Carl Dennis
Here’s a poet who has lived his life, not just imagined it. When he remembers the ‘arrowhead,’ ‘flickering tongue,’ and ‘black seeds’ of a snake’s eyes, you see them too. When ‘hooves thud in the meadow,’ you know he heard that sound. The book is a loose group of sequences, poems of love, of suffering, of sudden enlightenment, sometimes back to back, sometimes rising to the surface just when the reader is ready for them. One typical sequence—about the bony old mare put to pasture and then, when her legs begin to go, put down—reveals the man as well as the mare, also aging yet true to his time and place. ‘This day / could stand for any of my days, / and if I had to leave / now would be a good time.’ Those lines end his book, and he has earned them.
— Taylor Stoehr
 

By Peter Nash

Coyote Bush: Poems from the Lost Coast
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Coyote Bush is a book that pays homage to the earth. It is a paean to the stars and their constellations, the clouds and the wind, to the horses, cows, deer, and dogs, all who blessedly live without language. In these poems of place, Nash traces and retraces his time-worn paths into the hills of Northern California. He is content at times just to watch the light change or lie down in the hollow a pregnant doe has made in the night. But these are also poems of refuge and discovery, poems of love, of suffering, relationships, childhood memories, sudden enlightenment, sometimes back to back, sometimes rising to the surface when the reader is ready for them. Nash finds his place among the elements, firmly rooted between earth and sky.

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Praise for Allen West

…personal lyrics, exploring the events and circumstances of one man’s life, and at the same time untethered from the personal by their attention to history and geography The poems range over three wars and several continents as West learns to write his name, ‘Platonic, by itself,’ and then witness that self in its various incarnations. ‘Who have I been?’ he asks… ‘I am not what I was.’ Although the poems are self-reflective, West does not come to any easy conclusions…
— Wendy Mnookin, author of To Get Here and What He Took
…a stunning achievement and epic in its sweep—from childhood in Beirut to first loves to loss to the singing resilience that loss can bring. The language is musical and evocative: ‘a broom’s used beauty,’ ‘Kleenex crumpled up both sleeves / of her kimono crawling with blue dragons.’… Rarely have I read a book that moves so gracefully through the topography of a lifetime.
— Gary Held
 

By Allen West

 

Praise for Janet Winans

The finest details revive and signify as they touch the heart of memory, and the past is warmed again by long holding, deep affection, the recovered feel of things, like those coffee mugs ‘smooth as eggshell, cursive-handled Texas-ware, plain / as a potato / unremarkable. // Except to those of us / those summer mornings, holding in both hands the steam.’
— Eleanor Wilner
Janet Winans’ careful, respectful observations are sacraments of emotional clarity. Her poems seem inevitable, as if they have always existed, and in that spirit, move us out of ourselves toward larger meaning. Winans writes in ‘Farm House, Colfax, California’: ‘Sometimes a house finds its person’—which makes me understand that sometimes, if a poem has been nurtured and shaped through wisdom and patience, it will find its reader. How fortunate to be one here.
— Pam Bernard
I have followed Janet Winans’ work for many years and have come to see how much she is most a poet of observation, but I do not mean this in any standard way. The poems work not with the simple decoration of observation but with the intensity of what makes an observation arresting to begin with: In a word, she wrestles, and quite successfully, with feeling. She is at work being alive in the world, moving through it as we all are but with the gift, the earnest gift, of seeing into things.
— Alberto Rios
 

By Janet Winans

 

Praise for Terry Adams

In Adam’s Ribs, Terry Adams makes a not-so-subtle claim to be the new American Adam. I’d say wholeheartedly that he succeeds. His voice is both gritty and dreamy, and it gets in your ear surreptitiously like the jazz he writes about so eloquently.
— Ann Neelon, author of Easter Vigil
Terry Adams’s poems dazzle with their keen expressiveness and perfect lines. They do more than dazzle: they get inside you and stir the emotions by rendering his personal encounters with the living and the dying precisely, unsparingly, plainly, unmanipulatively.
— Phyllis Koestenbaum, author of Doris Day and Kitschy Melodies
Poems that etch themselves into our minds by virtue of their powerful and sometimes astonishing images, their often-risky subject matter, their angled approach, their tone of contemplation and yearning.
— Chitra Divakaruni, author of Mistress of Spices
Terry Adams’s long-awaited debut book is a treasure trove of poems about family, motorcycles, Vietnam, the scrotum, Flash Gordon, jazz, the pink and yellow gills of a dead catfish—and just about everything under the Buckeye-and-Golden-State sun. His characters bump into one another or, more often, take leave of one another, and his narratives and incantations are charged with a wistfulness quite unique, given the current literary scene. If Adams risks sentiment, he is part of a long tradition of poets who have eschewed what could be called ‘university wit.’ …Adam’s Ribs resonates with free verse by Whitman, Bly, Dickey, James Wright—and a host of bards going back to the Old Testament patriarchs. This is one smackeroo of a book. For God’s sake, beg, borrow, or Steal it! Read it!
— James Reiss, author of Riff on Six: New and Selected Poems
 

By Terry Adams

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Praise for Lee Sharkey

If our dreams could edit the news (and sometimes our nightmares) these poems are how they’d wake us up to the urgency of our times.
— Betsy Sholl, Poet Laureate of Maine
Sharkey honors the accountability of language by turning her ear to the rhythms of the soul’s survival.
— Francine Sterle, author of Nude in Winter
An important book.…one of the best books of the year.
— John Deming, editor, Coldfront Magazine
‘Today the war dead failed to make the headlines / to keep myself human I construct a shrine of words.’ These taut, truth-telling poems teach us how to ‘heft…more weight than we can carry,’ how to speak the unspeakable, ‘the grief that scours the heart.’ In their concision, the eloquence of their exactitude, they say only what is needful. Silence is their punctuation. And how restorative their respect, ‘how beautiful is the gift of mourning.’
— Eleanor Wilner, author of The Girl with Bees in Her Hair
Echoing Carolyn Forche’s poetry of witness, the poems in Lee Sharkey’s A Darker, Sweeter String are imbued with a yearning for peace, and while war in its many faces is omnipresent in these beautifully wrought poems, so also is the sense of hope.… A Darker, Sweeter String, a collection that embodies the spirit that we can resolve what rends us, is a must read.
— Edythe Haendel Schwartz, Calyx Journal
If you buy no other book for the next five years, this is a must, must read, must possess.
— Irene Koronas, Wilderness House Literary Review
Perhaps what is most remarkable in this altogether remarkable writing is that it not only brings back to life but that in doing so ethically, it does so without reassurance.
— Tony Brinkley, Puckerbrush Review
In her wise and humane collection, Lee Sharkey artfully disguises a poetics of witness as a poetics of transparency.… The poems are so crystalline, clear, and pure that each subject of scrutiny attains a comprehensive relevance. Sharkey’s deft and deliberate fusion of the global with the personal transforms mere confession into a searching examination of universal human rights and the suffering which is always present throughout the world. The poems lend a voice to the voiceless and bear witness to our collective need for an understanding of the unspeakable.
— Sonja James, The Montserrat Review
When I think about Lee Sharkey’s A Darker, Sweeter String, the word that comes to mind is liminal. The poems, again and again, occupy that bewildering space between then and now, between present and future, populating the shifting temporal landscape with their characters.… Sharkey collapses time without ever becoming a historical—history matters all the more in this book for the way in which it infuses this very moment, the future we are making right now a ghost sipping from our lips.
— Melissa Crowe, The Cafe Review
 

By Lee Sharkey

 

Praise for Henry Braun

The poems are strong, impressive, learned without needing to be scholarly; loving and often surprising in the way they pull a conclusion out of darkness.… The work is very rich and diverse, although [he] keeps to his style faithfully.… [His] style is there, very solid—and bless it!… Wonderfully concise bringing together of wonder, closeness and immense distances!
— Nathaniel Tarn
I love the sweet clarity of [his] lines, their poise, their exact just-enoughness.… And here’s blessings for [his] political poems, the Whitmanesque celebration of ‘Shock and Awe,’ the best response to atrocity, yes, is to celebrate life in the face of it—, and that memorable line, which is the clearest definition of our difference as a species: ‘the only animal that runs towards fire.’
— Eleanor Wilner
Poetry too good to be gulped, it is to be relished, to be read slowly and many times. I am so happy to own this beautiful collection!… What did Thoreau say about the cost of any great work, that it cost a lifetime? It’s an extraordinary lifetime that we feel in this book.… What tremendous tact [his] poems all show, never a word too much, nothing insisted on, a light touch that looks easy, but, I think, takes tremendous art to achieve.
— Kate Barnes, former Maine Poet Laureate
A handsome, comprehensive, moving book.
— Toby Olson
[Braun’s] sensibility is a remarkable alert one. I find myself reading poems again and again as they keep coming to life in new ways.
— Baron Wormser, former Maine Poet Laureate
An accumulation of resonances…delicious lineation…how many of these poems are ars poeticae. Or how many slip through a brilliantly quiet image, from the outer world to the inner.… Profound thanks to [this] mercurial poet who conjured ‘unimagined joy’ in this ‘unprepossessing wilderness.’
— Marion Stocking
 

By Henry Braun