Bøker i New Women's Voices-serien

Lois Baer Barr's Tracks: Poems on the "L" announces an exciting new voice. Her poems are attentive to the electrical details of urban life, which she observes on her journeys across Chicago's "L." From these details, Barr constructs a portrait of Chicago as it is today: a city marred by violence and by grotesque wealth; a city whose beauty is urgent and extraordinary for those who care to look at it closely. This is a poetry written in the public square and for it-a poetry that proposes, through the precision of its attention, to help us see each other more clearly.-Toby Altman, Author of Discipline ParkThe movement of the train meets the movement of life in the poems of Lois Baer Barr's Poems on the "L", and we readers are Barr's fortunate passengers, carried through a range of Chicagoan experiences in fresh, thoughtful, and indeed poetic ways. These poems carry a sense of joy of the communal journey-and what it means to never stop being surprised by our time with others, as so beautifully summed up in words from the final poem of the collection "Fail Better II": I want to ride the "L" again- / share air space, delays, rattles / and hums. Sway with other riders. / A poetry petri dish, the "L" / is so full of people's stories, / you cannot fail to find one.-Andrea Witzke Slot, Author of The Ministry of Flowers (Valley Press) and To find a new beauty (Gold Wake Press)What a wonderful read!! Inventive, touching, funny, Tracks: Poems on the "L" is Lois Baer Barr's love letter to Chicago and to her life in late middle age. She takes us on a journey through physical and emotional landscapes with an empathy and expansiveness that leaves her readers changed, as she is changed by her encounters with the people she meets.-Ellen Birkett Morris, Author of LOST GIRLS

Torch the Empty Fields reveals the voices of mothers, daughters, friends, partners, and even the earth Herself. Examining personal and social loss and celebrating survival, these are wry and graceful poems of witness and new beginnings, a reflective collection inspired by Virgil's poem of nature and the land, The Georgics. When you torch the fields, the new growth is lush; the narrative poems in this deft work explore our burning struggles and the wonders of life.

"Snake and Eggs" was a finalist in Finishing Line Press's New Women's Voices Competition. The book teems with images from the natural world to describe a woman's interior, emotional landscape while exploring complex themes of motherhood, grief, mental health, and ancestry.

How could I resist a book titled Feather & Bone? In the wake of a horrific act of human violence, these poems meditate on daily violences in the natural world. Vultures circle, hungry birds plunge into windows, and an owl spends the night cutting up his victims. A stranger lurking in the shadows reminds the speaker that she is also prey to forces beyond her control. And yet, these are not poems of unrelenting despair, but a life-affirming celebration of the "thumping heart of it all." Braiding images of beauty and brutality, poet Kathleen Williamson finds music in the inevitable cruelties of survival.-Jackie Craven, author of Cyborg Sister, Secret Formulas & Techniques of the Masters, and others Part field guide, part confession, Kathleen Williamson's Feather & Bone studies human nature with the careful eye of an ornithologist. From brooding to migration, Williamson asks us to re-examine our relationship not only to the natural world but to the ties and traditions we dare call humanity. These poems are anything but hollow-boned, and yet, page after page, they take flight.-Stacey Balkun, author of Sweetbitter

In this award-winning, debut poetry collection, K.E. Ogden turns our gaze to mapping grief as a transformative journey of resilience. Five poems in the collection have been honored, including "Mapping the Route," a winner of the 2022 Academy of American Poets Henri Coulette Memorial Prize and featured on the Academy of American Poets website. This first poem in the book explores the tension between our past nostalgia and longings and our present homes. In the midst of a father's love for his daughter, there are directions given. These poems are songs of devotion to "all the chaos and misery and hope that simmers . . . in the minds of people," as poet Jimmy Baca shared. There is mud and bird shit, there are bones and dead bodies, there are hot biscuits and a cat's torn ear, and shovels, and sawdust. These poems do offer comfort during tough times, a map for transcending grief and turning tragedy into gateways for metamorphosis. Ogden's poems invite you to make new worlds in changed landscapes, to see beauty in dark, shark-infested waters, and to find elation and joy in being alive.

"Amid the many delicious feasts contained in Full Mouth-ranging from caviar and oysters to donuts and dumplings-you'll find the "sweet improbable globes" of oranges, and the batter of funnel cakes wiggling "across a lake of boiling oil," expansive descriptions that insist on the transcendent experience that food can offer us. And what Eddy offers us here is a globe-trotting, memory-packed, omnivorous bounty of poems that interrogate appetite in all its forms. Through the full-mouth music of Eddy's language, this book explores family, intimacy, what nourishes and sates, and what it truly means to break bread." -Matt Donovan, author of two collections of poetry-Vellum (Mariner, 2007) and the chapbook Rapture & the Big Bam (Tupelo Press, 2017)-as well as the collection of essays, A Cloud of Unusual Size and Shape: Meditations on Ruin and Redemption (Trinity University Press, 2016). He is Director of the Poetry Center at Smith College.

The poems of Everything reaches out to everything else explore the nature of our world now and the interconnectedness of all life. Poems are set in the older urban neighborhoods of Los Angeles which are bounded by the LA River that was thwarted and yet is reclaiming itself. These poems capture longings, fears, and the beauty of the moment, all set among the anxiety of living now. This chapbook Includes the poem, Atwater, winner of the Crossing Boundaries Award for Innovative and Experimental Writing from International Quarterly.

Amanda Gomez's Wasting Disease is the antithesis of the vajazzled pussies of which she writes. The collection's poems strip away social constructs, to expose naked pain. Little girls disintegrate like diseased starfish. The Jets rape Anita because she's a brown girl. A dreamer performs her mother's autopsy, clearing out the torso to make a maternal space for herself. Lips become scissors. And love is venomous. Gomez takes us to the brink of confusion, rage, fear, abandonment, despair-the horrors of a people in steep decline-and holds us on the precipice with a final line of disconcerting commentary, a new kind of nakedness ... a lesson in scars. Read the collection. See us our worst. Hope for something better. -Kit-Bacon Gressitt, publisher of Writers ResistWhat is language in the hands of a poet? Should it yield smoothness, a polished and easy finish? That would be too easy. In the poetry of Amanda Gomez, language is above all restored to its true function, so we might trust it again and give it the proper respect- for its capacity to expand rather than merely limit experience, for its ability to render visible rather than subdue or eclipse. If an autopsy is meant to see into the flayed body, poetry is meant to lovingly return it to itself. "Please, don't take me for tragic," she asks; for this is a poet brave enough to "wear the galaxy like a dress." -Luisa A. Igloria, author of Ode to the Heart Smaller than a Pencil Eraser and The Buddha Wonders if She is Having a Mid-Life Crisis"Amanda Gomez spares no one and no thing in her brilliant and sharp debut, Wasting Disease. 'I guess what I am saying is, every girl / learns to disintegrate' she tells us, not in resignation but in rage. This is a book of so many things-yes, rage, but there is so much more. Gomez writes 'Everywhere I stare my shadow is running.' And haven't we all known that place? That place of self-loathing and displacement? In Wasting Disease, Gomez sticks her hands deep in the mud to pull out all the things we have buried, not to shame us, but to ask "who made us feel this way?" The fingers point in complicated directions-to gender, to race, to colonization, to language, to ourselves-but make no mistake: Wasting Disease is not a book asking you to come clean. Rather, it begs you to dance in all the facets of your humanity, light and dark." -Nishat Ahmed, Author of Field Guide for End Days and Brown Boy

"Against the horrors of history, these poems seek to give urgent voice to the women so often erased from the record. In Leibowitz's imagination, time periods collapse; the Annunciation or the trial of Artemisia Gentileschi have all the freshness and verve of today. 'Teach me what to do with these pink obligations,' she asks in a poem. In the truest sense of ecphrasis, Leibowitz speaks out of these pictures to the fragility and endurance of faith and of art. -Richie Hofmann, PhD, Pushcart Prize recipient and author of Second Empire (2015)"As lush in its imagery as it is uniquely precise, HYPATIA AT THE MUSEUM grants new agency to the archetypal maiden. These intricately-wrought poems glimmer, swell, and burst with talent. M.G. Leibowitz has given us all a true gift." -Leslie Sainz, 2019 National Poetry Series Finalist

A collection of fabulist poetry inspired by experiences as a part of the queer community and the natural world.

Hiromi Yoshida's debut poetry chapbook, Icarus Burning, offers a tantalizing glimpse into the post-9/11 world of fallen icons, failed hook-ups, and burning pianos. Out of this ash heap, Icarus is resurrected as the signifier of fluctuating desire-"waxing toward the boiling point on the Hudson horizon." The American psyche's Ground Zero museum scintillates, bursting open to showcase Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton, Gregory Corso, Patty Hearst, Norman Bates, Rosa Parks, and the Virgin Mary. They are the iconographic phantasmagoria presiding over the "nymphomaniacal caravan" of New York City's subway commuters. Hiromi Yoshida's radical lyricism gives them all poetic justice, and more.

In Go Ask Alice, Liz Axelrod invites us to view the world through the looking glass prism of her thoroughly postmodern imagination. Ironically, though, instead of distortions, we enjoy sharp observations that capture our contemporary landscape with an irreverent and dark, celebratory wit. This collection offers a panoply of our common obsessions-food, sex, politics, technology-showing how they impinge upon and transform our many identities. As passionate as "full moon fever," yet delicate as "hand-colored sound-bytes," these poems create a wonderland of extravagant delights well worth exploring. ~ Elaine Equi *** "The sky's the limit," writes Liz Axelrod, "if you've got good aim." She does. With Lewis Carroll's Alice as a guide through a terrain of lived experience, Axelrod shoots the shit out of the clown circus that is life itself-and never misses. A single page has healing powers (and not only when watching Netflix). Meanwhile, Axelrod's Saturn births the hexagon cloud that brings our matter home, home to these very healing pages. ~ Sharon Mesmer

Balzac's Robe and Other Poems is a chapbook whose poems are both humorous and serious. They take a careful look at a hawk on the western California coastline, at a "clean room," at love and loss, at a ribald dinner party, and other quirky encounters. These poems are a selected from the poems Marello wrote over a span of twenty-five years, from the 1990s to the present.

House of Women is where the inner lives of the women you love dwell. Kristin Kovacic's poems let you peer inside to honest female experiences in its many forms--lover, mother, daughter, artist, teacher, wife. New Women's Voices Series, No. 119

Sarah Sala's collection is full of sly and beautiful poems. Startling and exploratory, her voice is completely unique, and her vision blazes in every line. This is important new poetry by a poet of genuine talent. -Laura Kasischke THE GHOST ASSEMBLY LINE does a lot in just a few poems. I love how present the past is in this collection - family history, a city's history, and the small painful moments from a life are celebrated alongside quotidian concerns, or a lover's body. Intimate and public spaces fill this collection and the effect is dizzying in the best way. It reminds us that poems are the place where everything happens at once. -Matthew Rohrer Sarah Sala's work goes beyond our everyday use of a word like catharsis to its older definition, a purgation. It is urgent, and yet, in the many faces of violation here, there is a voice that wants to make us safe, and it does this by presenting America with its own broken surface. These poems burst from the seed of Yeats's terrible beauty. They brandish themselves on blank space, praise what negation does to desire, and shiver gorgeously with rare kindness. In their gleam, we see splendor, outrage, and "a torrential downpour into nothingness. -Natalie Eilbert

"Gina Forberg's new book, Leaving Normal invites us into a microcosmic world delving deep into her role not only as a daughter to her dying mother but also as a mother raising a son with special needs. Through driving narrative and lyricism she asks us to bear witness to the difficult, the unspoken and fear surrounding these events. In the poem Leaving Normal, she speaks to us with an honest, no holds barred voice: When my son says, "fuck" instead of "truck," "weed" instead of "read," I am grateful for the sounds he makes, for the missed chords, for the imperfection of song. This honesty and authenticity is pervasive throughout the book. When she can hardly bare another moment of her mother's suffering she admits in Bedtime Story: When her breathing became labored / I was grateful / for the thunder of the subway, passing, // silencing her body. All night I lay there / and when I heard / the rails rattle, I wanted one train // then another. Leaving Normal is a book of unparalleled compassion, devotion and love. It is Gina Forberg at her most revelatory, vulnerable self.

owlmouth is a collection of poems about transformation. Michele Marie Desmarais (Métis, Dakota, European) offers perspectives on the environment, being-in-relationship, the need for change and the process of healing. These poems are an expression of an Indigenous worldview replete with relationships between human and other-than-human persons. owlmouth is about the possibilities of transformation within a life-in the face of colonialism and the sometime liminal identities on the urban rez. Reflecting on experiences of historical trauma due to the Indian Residential/Boarding Schools, as well as climate change and the responsibilities we have for our relatives who include both human and other-than-human persons, owlmouth is also about intergenerational resiliency, healing and the necessities of transforming the dominant culture. Depending on the Nation or culture, an owl may bring medicine, wisdom, or death. These poems explore all three within the overall theme of transformation, and, in doing so, reflect upon belonging, home, Indigenous/Native American perspectives, and the intersection of multiple moments, beings and cultures.

In Two Tongues, Lana Issam Ghannam writes about her experiences growing up as a first-generation Palestinian-American in post-9/11 America. She creates small scenes from big perspectives in each poem as she navigates her two cultures from adolescence to adulthood. She moves in and out of family duty, religion, culture, gender expectations, patriotism, and competing languages in the search for her truest identity. These poems represent her growth, stand for her pride, and strive for the absolute strength known by so many immigrated families-"I grow beneath the ground / in this America of coloring seas. / …I am of this earth, this flame / …I own the roots of this land."

The poems in Frost Flowers by Winifred Hughes plunge, open-eyed and open-hearted, into the natural world-its seasonal rhythms and impenetrable mysteries, its vanishings, its incorrigible quality of being alive. They seek to chronicle the encounter between the non-human and the all-too-human, the passion and longing of our species as we relate to our natural environment, both apart from it and a part of it. Like the swallows and tanagers and foxes, like the box elder and frostweed, we are transitory creatures living in vivid moments. These poems are propelled by curiosity, precise observation, and a sense of wonder; they are a searching, a probing into the secrets at the heart of natural processes, which are the fundamental processes of life and death. The natural world appears under all its contradictory aspects-sharp stones in a streambed, hatchlings clinging to their precarious nest, wildflowers that are both beautiful and poisonous, the exuberance and overflowing life of a flock of blackbirds. In the midst of such fullness and blossoming, there is always the possibility of frost, whether nipping early buds or being transformed into late-blooming flowers made of ice. Like our fellow species, from hardwood trees growing slowly over centuries to small passerines with speeded-up metabolisms, we are subject to the passage of time; before we can quite grasp it, our moment is gone. Throughout, we are inextricably bound up in our natural context, in the wild places and wildlife that are increasingly threatened by human activity.

Traversing the sparse and sometimes rugged territory from Stevensville, Montana to the Flathead Indian Reservation, Bitterroot poignantly witnesses the complex intersections of Native and non-Native culture in Montana. A testament to the spirit of the land and those shaped by it, this collection reveals the ways in which the West remains both fraught with tension and modeled by beauty. Narrated by a young teacher with unexpected ties to the children in her classroom, each poem unfolds another layer of mountain life- from hauling wood and making fire to navigating a blizzard and grieving the loss of a student. Page by page, life presses closely against that which is raw and wild, lending individual moments a sense of urgency: "What I remember/ from Ovando, though, is stars. Stars and ice/ and the shock of our short inward breath." Attentive to a long tradition of tough Montana poets, Jessica Jones pays homage to giants such as Richard Hugo and James Welch while befriending contemporary writers like Jennifer Finley Greene and Robert Lee. A runner-up with Open Country Press and honorable mention with Cutbank at University of Montana, Bitterroot is essential for any avid reader of Western literature.

New York City native Dina Paulson-McEwen's debut poetry collection, Parts of love, (Finishing Line Press, 2018) was a 2017 finalist in the Finishing Line Press New Women's Voices Chapbook Competition. Parts of love explores interstices in loving, delving into themes of relationships, living, the body, and desire, and includes prose and lyric poems. "Paulson-McEwen plays with paradox, excavating moments of hope amongst the seeming ruins, "that signal you sent - / a dagger of fire / amongst all the black - / will bring me home /". These poems are not merely to be read, but to be dissolved into with a whole and vulnerable spirit," writes author Robin Richardson. Parts of love speaks to (an) experience of love from/within a woman's body. Author Marthe Reed writes, "Simultaneously site of desire, sexual fulfillment, ritual, and reproduction, the girl body [in Parts of love] is figured also as site of disobedience, investigation, erasure, trauma of the medicalized self. Paulson-McEwen's response? Go into dream, into ritual, into love-making and self-love, resistance writ as love-cum-beloved...Tantric, celebratory, bewitching, Parts of love takes l-o-v-e as a new divine/beloved, site and center of worship, ecstatically evoking love's manifold quotidian forms against any and all erasures."