Poetry

Known for his powerful readings and unusually warm and compassionate voice, Charles Coe's poems speak to the heart and mind as well as the ear. Combining subjects as diverse as Afro-American history, myth, jazz, and family as well as surprising observations of those unexpected moments of joy to be found in a work-a-day inner city life, Coe offers us poems as personal as the tale of a sister who opened his life to literature and closed her own with dope; as quietly momentous as the story of Rosa Parks. Here are poems for Ella Fitzgerald and Charlie Mingus alongside a haunting homage to the 'guests' of a battered women's shelter. Above all, Coe's poems touch upon what is essential in us all and speak of life as a gift that is far from perfect but all we have.

Charles Coe is the winner of the Massachusetts Cultural Council Poetry Fellowship. A jazz and popular vocalist, he was born in Indianapolis, lives in the Boston area and travels widely to perform and record his work.

Get on Up!

Can anybody else here say that
in the summer of 1967,
when they were fourteen years old,
their mama took them to a James Brown concert?
Did you walk alongside her
Through the gates of
A minor-league ballpark
On a hot, cloudless Indiana night
When the moon shone like a spotlight
On the rough wooden stage?
Was anybody else here sittin' beside their mama
On those hard benches
When James's band, the Famous Flames
Came out to lay down
A red carpet of funk
And the announcer whipped that crowd
Like a bowl of black cream
'til the Godfather of Soul finally skated onstage
like a waterbug,
tellin; everybody 'bout his brand-new bag?
If your mama yelled like everybody else,
Then let it now be told!
Let everybody know how
She clapped her hands raw
As James flew back and forth across the stage,
Sweat and grease from his conked-up hair
Pouring down the front of his ruffled shirt,
Purple satin jacket ripped off and tossed aside.
Let everybody know how she stomped her feet
When he grabbed that mike like a dog grabs a bone,
Fell to one knee,
And begged for: "just one more chance,
Baby, baby please,"
And then when he fin

"Poetry at its most satirical and courageous. A tremendous book."—Seamus Heaney

"Few voices in American literature are so honest and daring."—Mark Strand

"One of our most brilliant poets."—Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz

"I feel the primal grain and temper of the genuine here."—William Heyen

"A lament, a protest, an inextinguishable song."—Sherod Santos

"Among the best and most original poets in America."—Stanley Kunitz

"Nothing short of splendid."—Robert Nazarene

"The kind of energy found in the poems of William Carlos Williams and Gary Snyder."—Joseph Bruchac

These poems tell harsh truths of hopelessness and genocide. The confusion of children whose religion is forbidden; the ironic poverty of a lottery winner; an alternate American history in which Columbus turns and sails away—in deceptively simple language, we hear the protest of survivors. "'Indian' is not a derogatory word. It's what we call ourselves."

AFTER A SERMON AT THE CHURCH OF INFINITE CONFUSION

At ten, Mary Caught-in-Between
came home from sunday school,
told every animal and bird and fish
they couldn't talk anymore,
told her drum it couldn't sing anymore,
told her feet they couldn't dance anymore,
told her words they weren't words anymore,
told Raven and Coyote they weren't gods anymore,
said god was a starving white man
with long hair and blue eyes and a beard
who no one loved enough to save
when they nailed him to a totem pole.

John Smelcer has written over forty books of poetry and prose. He is a member of the Alaskan Ahtna tribe.

"Coe writes about his parents with warmth, insight, and grace . . . with celebration as well as regret. A collection that captures the tenderness and intimacy within the black family. His words construct a path from the innocence of childhood into the winter of aging. His book will outlive much of the poetry being written today."—E. Ethelbert Miller

No relationship is more personal, yet universal, than that of parent and child. These richly detailed poems connect readers with their own experiences in that most fundamental of relationships, and are poignant reminders that the lives of those closest to us sometimes offer the deepest mysteries.

"domesticity"

pampered little girl
no crystal ball to warn you
of dirty laundry mountains.

From "How My Father Learned to Cook":

Because of the tomatoes in a neighbor's garden,
my father learned to cook. Because of late summer
home-grown Indiana tomatoes, drooping on the vine
my father learned to cook. Imagine him at twelve leaning
over the fence of the neighbor's garden curious but shy,
and the neighbor pointing to the open gate.
Imagine father digging in the soil, caught in the rhythm
of the gardener's dance
and later handing his surprised mother
the overstuffed paper bag.

A pretty story, but it never happened; here's what did:

Charles Coe's poetry and prose have appeared in numerous newspapers and magazines, and his poems have been set to music by composers Julia Carey, Beth Denisch, and Robert Moran. Coe also writes feature articles, book reviews, and interviews for Harvard Magazine, Northeastern University Law Review, and the Boston Phoenix. He is also a jazz vocalist, performing and recording throughout New England.

"Beautiful and ambitious….Rooted in the rich haiku tradition and giving us an international sense of place."—Marjory Wentworth, South Carolina Poet Laureate

Six global partners in distant regions create poetry that is immediate, intimate, and modern, in an ancient poetic form. While exploring the richness of seasons, the book metaphorically visits incidents such as the Arab Spring, climate change, and urban violence. With Catherine Aubelle (France), Flor Aguilera Garcia (Mexico), Gabriele Glang (Germany), and Kae Morii (Japan).

What have we humans
done? Tremors shake, roil coastlands.
Irene roars ashore.

Joyce Brinkman, Indiana Poet Laureate 2002–08, is a proponent of poetry as public art.

Carolyn Kreiter-Foronda, Virginia Poet Laureate 2006–08, is the author of six books of poetry.

Elizabeth McKim (described in Poetry Flash as "powerfully womanly . . . yet devilish, daring") is a pioneer performance poet. In her bawdy and intimate fifth collection, she looks back—and forward—as she ages, in poems connected by The Red Thread, a bright motif in which all is interwoven and always beats to the rhythm of the human heart.

The poems in The Red Thread wind their way insistently through time and love and the hushed confusion of family secrets; between beloved sisters, daughter and granddaughter, through music, weddings, the blessing of carnal knowledge and across borders and checkpoints: India and the Middle East, where love letters float in the wind in which the innocent body is assaulted and a lover dies in a woman’s arms. Knitting together the heart, mind and body of one of our keenest and most tender observers, The Red Thread is a work of uncommon power.

Elizabeth McKim is a poet whose roots are in the oral tradition of song, story and chant. She performs and teaches in collaboration with artists, musicians and expressive therapists in the U.S. and internationally. Known for four previous books of poetry: Burning Through, Body India, Family Salt and Boat of the Dream, she has published in some of the nation’s most prestigious magazines, including Ploughshares, River Styx, Poetry, Painted Bride, Drumvoices and Epoch. She has been a visiting poet in hundreds of schools and colleges, and has been the Artist-in-Residence for six years at the European Graduate School for Expressive Arts Therapy in Switzerland. She is the co-author of Beyond Words: Writing Poems with Children, a pioneering text which has been in print for more than two decades. She is a member of the National Faculty of Lesley University in the Department of Creative Arts in Learning and lives in greater Boston, Massachusetts.

Best Poetry of 1999-Library Journal

Well known by readers of gay and lesbian fiction for her award-winning short story collections and novels; notorious in the legal profession as the nation's "foremost authority on lesbians and law" (Village Voice), a professor at the City University of New York, a young mother raising a son, Ruthann Robson's breadth of experience is unique among American poets. With seamless use of poetic craft and ironic wit, Robson tackles subjects as political as they are bizarre: the young woman chained to a radiator by her mother to keep her safe from harm; the teenager who gets herself knocked up because it's less dangerous to be an unwed mother than a lesbian. Affecting, terrifying, but always bathed in a clear hard light, these poems introduce a stunning intelligence and a bold new voice in American poetry.

"Ardent, passionate, and exquisitely queer…Robson's sense of playfulness is wonderful …The poems in Masks are startling not only for their quirky, often whimsical, humanity, but also for their imaginative use of form… There is history in this book. Witch burnings. Concentration camps. Poverty. Robson covers terrifying, white hot terrain with unflinching honesty and a poet's heart… She takes the magnifying glass of poetic language and investigates detail by detail every aspect of the female condition."-Lambda Book Report

"Another excellent book of poetry from 1999, Masks reveals how time and the moment of vision drive the poet to turn upon experience and make language out of it. These impressive poems swallow any distance between maker and reader as they pass from the glories of relationships to the price of loss. Some of Robson's best work is poems about famous women such as Frida Kahlo, Alice B. Toklas, Diane Arbus and Isadora Duncan. This is a truly marvelous collection that haunts the reader and never diminishes the art of the poem."-Bloomsbury Review

"Robson gives you more than you bargained for...Her first collection of poetry is terse yet throbbing, filled with the raw, aggressive energy of someone who can't be bothered with niceties...there is definite craft here: these lines aren't just thrown out but clearly thought and ret

In Midnight in the Guest Room Jan Bailey locates the "bliss of the routine" experiences in women’s lives—childhood, love, marriage, sexuality, birth, child rearing, aging—and transforms them into moments of transcendent power and beauty. With uncommon wit and sensitivity she offers us poems about the pleasures of a woman’s soft and unstylish belly; the fierceness of mother love; the desolation of a miscarriage; the hilarious illusion of sexual healing; the unexpected eroticism of breast feeding:

from "Mornings in the Blue House":
She draped her newborn like a sheaf of peonies
across her lap, peeled back the blanket from
the puffball face, then parted her robe, pinched
her nipple and settled in her daughter there
and something sweetly sexual rose between
them—the pressure, the release—and she fell
fully into love, holding nothing back
as with a man, whose wounding begins
as soon as he cries Baby and rolls over.

Rooted in the landscape of the South, celebrating the private treasures to be found in the everyday world, her poems speak to us all of the joys and the losses of the seasons of our lives.

Jan Bailey grew up in the foothills of South Carolina. The author of two highly regarded volumes of poetry, Paper Clothes and Heart of the Other, she is a recipient of the South Carolina Arts Commission Fellowship in Poetry. She holds an MFA from Vermont College and -divides her time between South Carolina, where she is chair of the creative writing department of the Governor’s School for the Arts and Humanities, and Monhegan Island, Maine, where she teaches poetry workshops and operates the island general store.