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Winner of a 2023 Blue Light Book Award, Bridge at the End of the World, New and Selected Poems complements Scott T. Starbuck's 30 years of activism and creative writing instruction, including his Trees, Fish, and Dreams Climateblog with readers in 110 countries, and ecopoetry workshops the past four years at Scripps Institution of Oceanography in the UC San Diego Masters of Advanced Studies Program in Climate Science and Policy. This book features new work about the climate emergency, and brings together the best poems from four climate-themed books, Industrial Oz (Fomite, 2015), Hawk on Wire (Fomite, 2017) (July 2017 Editor's Pick at Newpages.com, and chosen from 1,500+ books as a 2018 Montaigne Finalist at Eric Hoffer Awards), Carbonfish Blues (Fomite, 2018), and Between River & Street (MoonPath Press, 2021). New endorsements are from Washington State Poet Laureate Rena Priest, and writers Jerry Martien, Michael Spring, and Diane Frank. Other endorsements are from leading activist Bill McKibben, Senior Research Scientist at IPAC Caltech Yun Wang, Terrain.org Editor-in-chief Simmons B. Buntin, and poets Henry Hughes, Craig Santos Perez, Thomas Rain Crowe, Sandra Alcosser, John Shoptaw, Daniela Gioseffi, John Keeble, Eric Magrane, Teresa Mei Chuc, Prartho Sereno, Gail Entrekin, Anne Elvey, Marybeth Holleman, Ken Waldman, Bill Siverly, Florence Sage, Daniel Hudon, and Nancy Cook. Shoptaw, a poetry lecturer at University of California, Berkeley, wrote, "Ecologists read the signs of unsustainability, poets give them voice, none more compellingly than Starbuck," and Michael Potts of the University of South Australia wrote in a 2017 review at Plumwood Mountain Journal, "Starbuck compels the reader to think about not just climate change itself, but also how deeply ideology and symbolism are embedded in the functioning of Western society and how unthinking acceptance of them has led to a world where money is digital. The digits on a screen are now no longer connected to any real or physical thing, but they are enough to make us acquiesce and take part in the continued rape of the planet [ . . . .] Starbuck attempts to cut through [this] in these poems." Vivian Hansen at University of Calgary wrote in a 2019 review at The Goose (official publication of ALECC, the Association for Literature, Environment, and Culture in Canada), "Starbuck's style looks outward from his grounded position as a fisherman. [. . . .] He calls for human devotion toward the wild and climate change, a devotion that intercepts the hunter and veers toward prophecy and the promise of a new vision." Bryan R. Monte wrote about Starbuck's poems in a 2017 review at Amsterdam Quarterly, "[They are] the type the world needs in order to save the planet from wide-spread, lasting ecological destruction. [ . . . .] [This] is a powerful poetry [ . . . ] worth reading and discussing-especially in writing programmes."

Winner, 2022 Blue Light Poetry Prize Charles Rammelkamp is Prose Editor for BrickHouse Books in Baltimore, where he lives with his wife, Abby. The two are retired from federal government service. Rammelkamp is the author of several collections of monologue.There have been many biographies of Harry Houdini but nothing quite like A Magician Among the Spirits, a nod to Houdini's own book by the same title. Charles Rammelkamp gets right under Houdini's skin to create a first person poetic autobiography of sorts that brings the world's most famous escape artist to life. A Magician Among the Spirits is a fast moving, deeply engrossing story of magic, transformation, drama, mystery, travel, and trauma in 55 poems that trace the course of Houdini's life, from his first dabblings in magic to his slightly mysterious death described in the coda by bereaved wife Beatrice. A striking portrayal of Houdini, as richly lyrical as it is engrossing. - Magdalena Ball, Editor-in-chief, Compulsive Reader Charles Rammelkamp's engaging book of poems, A Magician Among the Spirits, presents the life of America's best-known magician, Harry Houdini. Escape becomes obsession, motif, and metaphor in this astonishing book. A Magician Among the Spirits, which appropriately takes its title from Houdini's own account of his campaign to expose fraudulent mediums, is a series of autobiographical monologues in Houdini's voice, with his wife, Bess, providing a coda after his death. These well-researched poems incorporate a wealth of detail, and reading this book is like listening to an entertaining raconteur. A Magician Among the Spirits will fascinate and delight both magicians and readers with a casual curiosity about Houdini. Rammelkamp is an impressive writer - both accomplished poet and masterful storyteller. - Miriam N. Kotzin, author of Debris Field. (David Robert Books 2017)

Winner, 2022 Blue Light Book Award In this richly diverse mélange of human lives, many actual and many imagined, Stewart Florsheim embraces the light and the dark much as his beloved Rembrandt employed chiaroscuro to reveal the complexity of a single individual, and thus, all individuals. Florsheim's vision is encompassing, with room enough for the emotional convolutions of family, Holocaust survivors, spiritual seekers, intimate partners, world travelers, artists, and even total strangers. Taking his cue from Aristotle, and perhaps from the painters he admires, he approaches life from theparticular. Pulsing through the array of details is the tempered passion of someone who considers desire as "the trembling to be whole."- Thomas Centolella, author of Almost Human Here, as in his previous collections, Stewart Florsheim combines closely observed detail with moments of transcendence-sometimes metaphorical, other times supernatural-that conjure the lost world of European Jewry, the intimate sphere of his family life, and the lines of blood and spirit that connect the two. He steps into famous paintings as if through a looking glass and renders public events with evocative brushwork. Having read his poetry for more than thirty years, I am impressed by how consistent his body of work is and grateful for the rich worldview it provides.- Scott Norton, author of Developmental Editing: A Guide for Freelancers, Authors, and Publishers, Second Edition (forthcoming 2023) In his third full-length poetry collection from Blue Light Press, Stewart Florsheim wrestles with the possibilities and contradictions of what it means today to be a man. The child of a Holocaust survivor, he lends his poetic voice to the lost and dispossessed, "amusing the angels," perhaps, by evoking his forebears, with insight and tenderness, in all their flawedhumanity. Many of these poems can be read as prayers, as when he recalls his adolescent terror at facing the high jump in gym class, "hoping my wings won't get mangled/as I ascend above the trees/into the incandescent light." Without ignoring any of the familiar impulses orvanities of a husband, father, and successful man of the world, he nonetheless embraces the vulnerability of his anima. Making pesto with his daughter, he confides how much he loves the smell of basil, evoking Italian landscapes he hopes to share with her someday. His ekphrastic poems could be a volume all of their own, filled with the color, light, and stories of the paintings that come under his knowledgeable and imaginative gaze. Everything in daily life, from taking out the trash to sexual desire -"the trembling to be whole" - comes under the poet's lens as he strives to "discover the pleasures of being vigilant."- Barbara Quick, author of The Light on Sifnos and What Disappears