poetry | fiction | non-fiction | children's
Grasping the Fading Light by Julie Bloss KelseyWinner of the 2021 International Women’s Haiku Contest. Order copies here This manuscript has a global feel in spite of it being a personal experience. The poems are strong and forceful and at
Comb is the story of a girl “under the spell of history,” growing up in the shadow of the legendary Khyber Pass which is both a bridge between disparate civilizations and an impassable divide. Shadab Zeest Hashmi reveals the tangles of empire and language, history and myth, exile and belonging — from the lens of childhood, integrating memory with the history of one of the most significant geopolitical and cultural thresholds of the world. This is a book that honors thresholds in a time of closed doors, written with a poet’s conviction in the regency of love.
The Language of Loss contains tanka and haiku of exceptional quality. But it is the remarkable way in which the poet links tanka and haiku that elevated The Language of Loss into the winner’s circle. The poems on each page come together in a conversation of many layers. That these conversations will deepen and change for each reader is due to the author’s expertise. I am delighted to congratulate Debbie Strange on her winning collection.
In Eating the Light, these new poems of Mary Moore ‘s new poems offer a feast for the reader. On subjects both natural and human-wrought, her eye is the painter’s: vividly clear. She creates an appetite for looking and a fulfillment of seeing. Moore’s perceptions are sensuous, intelligent, and the world in the poems is a world transformed both physically and emotionally. Her metaphors illuminate and satisfy, and having dined with her, we begin to glow, sated on such delectables. These poems embody a kind of mystical sensitivity to the sources of life: immediate, continuously perishing, making its considerable mark in these gorgeous lines.
This is a deeply felt book about a family in crisis that lives inside you and lends itself to multiple readings. Sad, but not without its small, yet sustaining, redemptions: “In the evening, overflowing with secret love,/ I dangle my feet above the receding/ spillway and listen: ripples. The moon’s/ reflection rides them like a blessing.