Poetry

Hurricane Sisters, award-winning poet Ginger Andrews’ second collection, contains poems of fierce candor and sharp, unique awareness from the perspective of Andrews herself, a cleaning woman in North Bend, Oregon. These Carver-esque insights into the everyday of the American working class balance grief, depression, lust, poverty, and, above all, faith; not in something beyond or higher than the living experience, but in a spirituality amidst the material truths of this world, even under the grimmest of circumstances. Hurricane Sisters stares into the holy, the barbaric, the beautiful and the hideous, the realities of blue-collar Americana, with the frankness and empathy of a survivor and a believer. It sees everything and never averts its eyes.

"The presiding spirit behind Ginger Andrews first book, An Honest Answer, must be William Carlos Williams. When he said he wrote in the speech of Polish mothers, he could have included the American working class anywhere. The sinewy resilience in Andrews’ individual poems honors the tradition of his free verse lyrics. She listens for the poetic measure in American speech and reproduces it in unique forms. I would venture to say that the poetry of Ginger Andrews is as close to the tradition of Williams as American free verse has ever been. . . . As for the voice speaking to us in these poems, it is as fresh as Ray Carver seemed twenty-five years ago. Another poet who comes to mind is her fellow Northwesterner Vern Rutsala, himself a descendent of Williams, who, like Williams, has kept his eye on the working poor throughout his career. Andrews is working class, born again in Sappho, an Ahkmatova who cleans houses and teaches Sunday school. These figures come to mind not for the sake of hyperbole, but to help understand the originality of this new and remarkable poet."
—Mark Jarman

In Alphabetica, Juliet Mattila guides readers through a poetic journey that captures moments of clarity and introspection within the intricate landscapes of memory, art, and nature. Her deft language and keen observation bring to life the invisible spectrum of emotions and experiences that define human existence. Through carefully crafted lines and a reflective voice, Mattila examines themes both personal and universal, inviting readers to see the world anew. This collection resonates with a timeless legacy, blending tradition with insight and paying homage to poetic forms while exploring contemporary depths. Alphabetica is a work that challenges and rewards, inviting readers who seek meaning in layered expressions of language.

Each person lives but a single life—yet this is not wholly true. While our lives progress as a result of the choices we make—this career, that husband, this town, that house—we are left imagining a life we might have lived. If we are defined by our choices, in what ways are we limited by them? What of the spiritual lives we lead, the inner lives that others cannot truly know? Which life is truest?

A woman recalls her special bond with her father and compares it with her ties to other men; a man copes with his unloved life and finds a way to secretly inherit it; after making love for the first time, a young woman wishes to go back in time, erase what she’s done.

In readable, finely wrought, resonant, and memorable poems about the nature of longing and disappointment, desire and betrayal, pleasure and sorrow, The Other Life explores the dualities in life that every person experiences.

This book is about Latina identity, a timely subject in today's America. The author’s journey begins as she, full of love for Mexico and its culture despite her closest blood connection being her bisabuela, boards a bus. She starts out determined: “Yes foreign is a word for fear. Yes I am coming home.” But then, because “it is afraid, staying in a language where you were not born,” she retreats, hiding first behind we, then behind masks. But when it becomes clear that the masks are her true self, she loses her fear, and barrels ahead as I, fully committed, all the way to the end.

This collection of poetry by the editor of EXPANSIVE POETRY, focuses
on life in New York—in language alternately hip, and nostalgic, the ten
characters in “Nomads” focus on abortion, divorce, the forces threatening the neighborhoods, and the need to preserve the family; in “The Psychiatrist At the Cocktail Party: A Dramatic Sequence,” Feirstein presents in formal verse a hilarious, and disturbing cast of urban professionals, sexual bandits, opportunists and international terrorists.

The Long Conversation combines David Dooley’s books The Volcano Inside and The Revenge by Love to create an extended dialogue between past and present, between stories of everyday life and accounts of historical figures, between the demands and delights of art and those of life, culminating in an eleven-poem sequence about the painter Georgia O’Keeffe and her husband, the photographer Alfred Stieglitz. Lyrical moments flourish within traditional dramatic monologues and a bold and unusual mix of other narrative strategies. The language ranges from vigorous Southern dialect, and even profanity, to a confident and original high style. In The Long Conversation, love is always complicated, the angle of vision is often surprising, and language must be able to cope with every kind of challenge.

Six Mile Mountain is the seventh of Richard Tillinghast's twelve collections of poetry. The poems in this book, sometimes political in emphasis, sometimes sensual, sometimes elegiac, are rooted in the landscape of Ireland and America and explore love and betrayal, family, duty and grief, and the nature of personal identity. Tillinghast is adept with form, moving back and forth between free verse and metrical verse.

This edition brings together selected poems from all six previous editions of Frederick Feirstein's poetry published between 1974 and 1997. Feirstein is one of the founders of Expansive Poetry which reaches out to audiences beyond the academy and incorporates free verse, formal, and narrative techniques. The poems in this selection combine extraordinary lyric and storytelling skills. A poet of urban anger, humour reconciliation, and revelation. Frederick Feirstein dares to work on an epic scale. His ambitious vision makes for a unique accessible achievement in American poetry. This broad selection of poems is a cause for celebration.

“Lola Haskins’s range is broad; her perceptions are always surprising. Natural objects surpass themselves and episodes of women’s history are rewritten in this lively, adventuresome collection.”
—Maxine Kumin

“ . . . Hunger is a cabinet of crystals each one with a cutting edge. It’s a wonder.”
—Beloit Poetry Journal

“She knows we are rooted to the earth but long for the stars. . . . And she’s wise enough to know that love searches us out. Dazzling.”
—Northwest Arkansas Times

“[The poems] richly present the experience of women, as the complexity of their material, emotional, and imaginative lives presses against the constraints of their assigned roles. . . wonderfully evocative.”
—The Hudson Review

“. . . Convincing and exquisitely visual. It plays off a painterly use of visualization and technique even as it enacts the limits of such artistry in the face of real feeling. . . . It is the clarity of Haskins’s poems and (her speakers’) observations, combined with the sometimes elegant, sometimes searing restraint with which the observations are made, that gives these poems their impact.”
—Colorado Review

Frederick Feirstein's tenth book, Time's Refugee, is chock-full of some of his best lyric and dramatic poems.

They are passionate, wise, and totally accessible to the general public. The diction is colloquial and the form excels in meter and rhyme.

The Enemies of Leisure, a collection drawn from a decade of writing, wonders about the odd paradoxes of pleasure and mindfulness, leisure and labor, invisibility and truth. Bound by Aristotle’s comment, “Happiness appears to depend on leisure,” the book divides into four sections, gathering poems concerned with sex and love, home and distances, idleness and work, and uncertainty and death. Mixing traditional and open forms, as well as high and low idioms, these poems’ symmetry depends on remaining always precise without making too much sense, as they yoke the influences of Ashbery and Rich, Dorn and Wilbur, poets otherwise as estranged from each other as waffles from lust, domestic chores from Beauty and the Beast, ideas from hamburgers, and dying from a train trip cross country.

There are “no things / without the ideas we call them by,” proclaims the book’s opening poem, “American Ghost,” inverting Williams’s dictum not to undermine the dominant aesthetic principle of contemporary American poetry so much as to turn it inside out, to make room for a poetry that oscillates between the ghostly presence of thought and the constant fading of experience. Making their bleak way forward toward the new millennium from the barracuda under a tropical bay to “above the abundant sand of the Sudan,” these poems express the importance of being “grateful for / those interruptions in the blink / of time we had,” while cultivating “the grace to know what to ignore.”

Stephen Gibson’s poems are the work of a serious, intent, often appalled tourist. The word might look like a putdown, but his subject is the glamour and horror of history, and when it comes to the past, attentive tourism is the best that any of us can hope for. This tourist’s gaze if focused and fascinated, his tone is even and intelligent (as he has it in one poem, “scared in the headlights, but the brain busy nonetheless”), and his technique is all but flawless (unobtrusively so, a true case of art hiding art). Together the gaze, the subjects on which it alights, and the poet’s superlative skill add up to poems of astute, moving observation and often overwhelming authority.
—Dick Davis

Counterpoint, the first full collection of poems by David Alpaugh, was selected out of over 800 manuscripts for the seventh annual Nicholas Roerich Poetry Prize by Story Line Press in 1994. The subjects of the book’s contemporary, witty, bizarre, and often moving poems range from POWs and salespeople to art and the dead. Alpaugh’s works speak to one another—child to adult, animal to human, ad man to poet, New Jersey to California, and past to present. He writes with affection and care for each of these points of unlikely connection. Harold Witt called Alpaugh “a unique voice to hear now and to listen for in the future.” More than twenty-five years after Counterpoint’s initial publication, these words ring more true than ever.

An interdisciplinary scholar, devotee of the classics, and leading practitioner of Expansive Poetry, Frederick Turner asks in the introduction to Hadean Eclogues, “Suppose there could be a poetry, even a scientific description of reality, that left undamaged the principles, the honor, the history and myth, the ritual, the intellectual criteria of believers and unbelievers—as long as they were people of depth and thought and imagination?”

This book-length poem chronicles a family’s experience from the 1950s through the 1990s. The 1950s section was selected by Donald Hall for inclusion in the Best American Poetry series.

The poet’s first full-length collection, Quiet Money's New Edition consists almost exclusively of longer narrative poems, including the title poem about a bootlegger/pilot who flew the Atlantic solo before Charles Lindbergh. This piece is often cited as one of the most important poems of the 1980s and the movement to revive storytelling in verse.

A book-length poem that brilliantly reinvents narrative poetry, The Diviners is a single poem divided into five chapters, each a different decade. McDowell relates the most crucial developments in each decade spanning from the 1950s through 1990s, of the shared lives of Al, Eleanor, and their son, Tom. The Diviners records in blank verse the family’s beginnings, their growth, their problems, their separation, and their ultimate reunion. The events that follow the intertwined lives of the characters illustrate the endless capacity for human empathy.

The precise gaze and chiseled language of the poems in Oldest Mortal Myth authoritatively convey a broad and deep knowledge. Whether a reimagining a Greek myth in order to infuse it with a contemporary pain, extending empathy and humorous Mitmenschkeit to both denizens and voyeurs of the world's freakshows, or describing with wit and experience the spiritual affects of medical conditions, the book is infused with restrained but piercing emotion, a subtle metrical ear, and enough daring and wit to write in rhymed couplets to take the obvious, easy way. For instance, with the last line of “De Wallen, Amsterdam”: “The moon above the spires, a sexless disk,/eyes us coolly as an odalisque.” I so admire the refusal to make that last line scan as a perfect iambic pentameter line. It would be so easy; all you’d have to do is add the grammatical, but colloquial, “as.” Which would have ruined the line, and the poem. Oh, and the rhymes in the canzone! There’s much to admire here, much to enjoy.
—Marilyn Nelson

Scene of the Crime exposes the poet’s inner criminality, where matricide and mother tongue engage in diabolic discourse. Confessing her outlaw sexuality, Ransom grapples with feminist theory and disembowels postmodern philosophy. Delighting in the multiplicity of self, language and desire, Ransom fires puns dead-aimed to riddle any interpretive reduction.

Sharon Hashimoto explores themes of what is heard and misinterpreted, what is left unexplained, and what is passed down in The Crane Wife. In these pieces, the Sansei poet leafs through old photographs—one of which is of a newlywed couple with the groom’s image cut away. Here is the rediscovered piece of barbed wire from outside the Heart Mountain concentration camp. That wire, a lei, and a car trip to an empty lot are all bits of evidence. Her questions address grandparents, mother and father, siblings, and the next generation. Hashimoto also reinvents Japanese folk tales and explores the different voices of the members of a downed JAL jet. Her poems travel in new directions in an attempt to fill in the gaps.

Breath in Every Room intertwines parents and children with encounters in the natural world. Ranging from birds in the forest to a boy’s captured frogs, from rattlesnakes in the prairie to a bat fallen from the sky. The book weaves in and out of myth and dream.

Excontemporary, a collection of poems by Beth Baruch Joselow, was published by Story Line Press in 1993. Jousting with form and language, the book combines image and idea in a painterly style. It contains poetry of sharp observation, coalescing gracefully into a thoughtful meditation on the inner life and the everyday. Mark Wallace, winner of the Gertrude Stein Prize in poetry, was among many that met Excontemporary with high praise: “Joselow’s poems discover, and uncover, keen truths that always surprise and unsettle and make us think again about things we believed we understood.”

Adele Slaughter’s first book of poems, What the Body Remembers, was published by Story Line Press in 1994. It is an autobiographical collection of glimpses into a childhood fraught with familial violence, alcoholism, and trauma, and the life that has been led in its wake; the failure of a marriage and the experiences that forever mold us as human beings. Through all the abuse and suffering these poems portray, however, the driving theme behind What the Body Remembers never falters: the reader is left with an inspiring picture of courage, perseverance, femininity, and the survival of the truest self. The subject of the work remains always the poet, the speaker, even as great attention is drawn to the circumstance surrounding her, providing an impactful example of how our greatest pains may leave us changed, but not defined, and never defeated. Pat Monaghan called the book “a stunning debut volume.”

Without Asking marks Jane Ransom’s debut as a book author, initially placing her within the poetic tradition of narrative Confessionalism. But one can already sense here the ambivalence that would lead both to a break from narrative—in her second poetry book, Scene of the
Crime—and her subsequent return to narrative in Bye-Bye, her first novel. This is a writer whose epistemological inquiry continuously turns both inward and outward, from linear to non-linear and back again, in an unrelenting quest for Truth.