In these poems told from the writer’s home on the outskirts of the city, dreams recur, lore emerges, memory merges with imagination, artifice with nature, and the physical with other possibilities. Continue reading
Irina Ratushinskaya will forever be known as the poet who was arrested for her writing, sentanced to a Soviet prison camp. And who continued in the face of persecution to write new poems. She wrote them on bars of soap, memorised them, and then washed away the ‘evidence’. Irina is a recognised poet in both the International community and the United States. Many of Irina’s poems have the earmarks of a well-seasoned traveller: and eagerness for adventure, melancholy good-byes, and a faith forged from life’s journey. Continue reading
A new collection of prose poems from the author of “Pretty Happy” and “Miracles and Mortifications”, the latter of which won the James Laughlin Award from the Academy of American Poets. This darkly comic book takes the reader on two separate but interrelated journeys. Eduardo is part alter ego and part cultural artefact, recalling Berryman’s character Henry from the “Dream Songs”. Continue reading
A chapbook of poetry. a city whole of everything, trembled /each structure wind a beating heart / breathing into society sails by wealth / breathing out sighs of unearthly excess /a desert posture retained /now a city vincible — Selection taken from ‘a city’. Continue reading
Anne Claire Poirier filmmaker extraordinaire, lost her daughter to heroin. Yanne, aged twenty-six, was strangled. In this haunting text, Poirier unearths her daughter’s past in an effort to understand her, and to understand what pushes young people to risk their lives for the drugs they believe will set them free. This text was read during the film called Let Me Go! (National Film Board). Continue reading
One afternoon when poet John Leax was standing in a grocery store checkout queue, a tabloid news headline beckoned: ‘Leaping Turtles Invade US’. As he looked more closely at the accompanying image, two lines sprang into his imagination: Suppose one could believe the tabloid headlines; Suppose the stories under them were true; Leax later wrote that ‘true story’. Then he wrote another. And another. They are all collected in “Tabloid News”. As he wrote, Leax explored two linked impulses that he found in the tabloids: desire and fear. We desire connection to beings other than ourselves. Yet we fear what we do not know-what is alien or different from us. In poems like ‘Baby Born with Antlers’, ‘Dog Makes $60 Million Modelling’ and ‘Duck Hunters Shoot Angel’ Leax grapples with this conflict between desire and fear humorously, chillingly, poignantly and artfully. If you have ever been attracted — or repelled — by a tabloid news headline, these poems are for you. Continue reading
The first collection of powerful personal poetry by an extremely accomplished poet. Ex-U.S. Poet Laureate Robert Haas calls her style realist and modernist, and compares her to William Carlos Williams. Continue reading
Esther Schor’s poems live where the poet who must choose-rhyme and rhythm; the wayward fortunes of travel, art and myth-meets the given of everyday life: children and comets, punchlines and snow. In her formal sequence, ‘Cumbria,’ enduring ruins and rocks of the Lake District tell us our own frailty; they speak of ‘Death / how it comes and goes, how a cry / becomes speech, turns to a whisper.’ In the title poem, two narrators take us to Sumatra in the late 18th century. The “Hills of Holland” is a truly ambitious work by an extremely talented writer. Continue reading
Luci Shaw was born in 1928 in London, England, and has lived in Canada, Australia and the U.S.A. A 1953 high honors graduate of Wheaton College in Illinois, she became co-founder and later president of Harold Shaw Publishers, and since 1988 has been a Writer in Residence at Regent College, Vancouver, Canada. Shaw is a frequent retreat facilitator and leads writing workshops in church and university settings. She has lectured in North America and abroad on topics such as art and spirituality, the Christian imagination, poetry-writing, and journal-writing as an aid to artistic and spiritual growth. Continue reading
Newer Lies contains a sequence of narrative lyrics guaranteed to turn readers upside over with its relentless restraint and exquisite comprehension of the world in which we live, work, and die. It’s meticulous, accomplished, and endlessly revealing. From East Coker to Northern Ontario, the fine line between poetry and deceit lurks, inevitably, in the corners of each of our lives. Dan Jalowica illuminates precisely these in language honed, spare, pure, gorgeous. Continue reading