poetry | fiction | non-fiction | children's
Because the Sky by Tony Medina An homage to those suffering in Palestine.Cover art by Palestinian artist Haya Mohammed. Use the Donate button to Order Now for $21 (postage included) or, order through donate using the sidebar ➡️Thank you! Estimated shipping
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
“In the poems of Fairy Tale, magic and beauty thread the speaker’s path through forests of cruelty and risk. The vivid, particular world of Langley’s speaker traces an arc from childhood into maturity, sharing with us a sweetness inseparable from danger, “the knowledge that all / cherry pits contain a small dose of cyanide.”
– Cindy Huyser, poet and editor, author of Burning Number Five: Power Plant Poems
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.
Jessica Walsh’s The List of Last Tries is a miracle of focus, a sustained gothic nursery rhyme that describes a girl’s coming of age and coming into power, for which she is shunned and exiled as freak, witch, and murderer. She “split(s) worms lengthwise,” “pop(s) open cow eyes,” and even eats a bug in defiance of the conventional shrieks of other girls.
Conceived “in the month of pearls” as she tells us in her poem “Birthstone,” Gabrielle Langley is a poet of true luminosity, stringing her “English words like pearls” across continents — from Paris and Milan to Katyn and Istanbul, Lebanon and beyond. I find her to be a remarkable imagist of postmodernity. In Azaleas on Fire, she leads her reader through gardens of flowers rescued from romantic tradition through irony where the fragrance of narcissus and gardenias meets charred wood, “the burn of salt water rising to swallow small children.” She weaves delicacy with strength, a floral lace that is beautiful, tough, untearable.
With gentle imagery and language, Sandy Roberts explores her own spiritual roots and survival of growing up in the deep South of 1940’s Texas, and the pain and hardship of the changing physical and political landscape.
Emily Dickinson kept at her side the two same books that were prominent in Sandy’s own childhood home – the dictionary and the bible. Perhaps those books were enough to plant the seed to love words, language, and the images and the connections.
In this age of truths coming to light, Czerwiec’s Conjoining shows us who the monsters really are and in her poetry — fierce and precise wielded deftly as any surgeon might their blade — she dissects the body politic. We hope you will join us in celebrating and lifting Czerwiec’s important voice in the contemporary literary landscape.
Red Sky: Poetry on the Global Epidemic of Violence Against Women is an anthology of work featuring poems by Naomi Shihab Nye, Tony Hoagland, Thylias Moss, Fady Joudah, Jaki Shelton Green, Hélène Cardona, Zeina Hashem Beck, and 100+ poets in response to the global epidemic of physical, psychological, emotional, and systemic violence against womxn. Red Sky is a collection of work by established and widely published poets as well as new and emergent voices around the world.