poetry

John Leax | Tabloid News | Gazelle Books

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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 →

Esther Schor | The Hills of Holland | Gazelle Books

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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 | What the Light Was Like | Gazelle Books

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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 →

Dan Jalowica | Newer Lies| Gazelle Books

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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 →

M. Travis Lane | Touch Earth | Gazelle Books

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In a moment when poetry is blindfolded in the labyrinth of world politics, trying to find its way to the solutions, Lane gives us the rational route. She has put her fragile eggs (bubbles) in the basket of balance and harmony, the ironic optimism that suffuses her compassionate and intelligent writing… These are not classical puzzles planted as they are in history. They are Now. — Linda Rogers. Continue reading →

Judith Roche | Wisdom of the Body | Gazelle Books

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This is a meditation in poetry on the ‘bodiness’ — the physicality — of all things: our bodies and how they change, the salmon and their life cycle, trees, flowers, the earth, everything caught in the mystery of time. The book contains a series of poems on the life cycle of Pacific Northwest salmon that was a City of Seattle public arts project, and poems from the libretto of a musical piece by noted composer Janice Gitech, ‘Navigating the Light’. — Patricia Monaghan Continue reading →

Ruth Goring | Yellow Doors | Gazelle Books

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“When I write poetry it’s usually pointless to start with an idea. I start with an image or a striking phrase and let it take me somewhere. For years I have thought of my poems as paintings: I want readers or hearers to be startled by colors, dazzled by the fall of light on some ordinary object or gesture. But they are not just visual; words are little buckets to scoop textures, fragrances, intriguing sounds, evocative flavors out of our teeming world. “A good rule for writing a poem: You have to earn the right to use an abstract word. Abstractions—love, truth, perspicuity—are vague by themselves. But if you have been immersed in some wet ocean of shifting blues, the word beautiful may surface like Venus, sudden, radiant and dripping.” — Ruth Goring Continue reading →