Bøker utgitt av Kelsay Books

With earnest, open-hearted attention through the wilderness of grocery lines, gardens, corners, and prayer, Taylor-Troutman's Tigers, Mice & Strawberries invokes the lightness of small talk while it brings fresh delight to big questions of family, place, grief, and grace, inviting readers to consider how the little things in life maybe aren't so little at all.-Melissa A. Butler, author of How to Notice, in a button, and Atlas of Ordinary ThingsIt's rare that poetry this heartfelt is also so substantial, managing both to inspire a smile of deep recognition, empathy for the suffering, and a gentle assurance that there is indeed light just a little further ahead. I'm grateful for Andrew Taylor-Troutman as a poet, essayist, and human being. And I'm confident that diving into this book will be a gift to you too.-Gareth Higgins, author of How Not to be Afraid and founder, The Porch Community.Andrew Taylor-Troutman uses a poetics of love to elevate his observations of God's creation. The reader is welcomed in with a warmth rare in contemporary poetry. Taylor-Troutman's subject matter is what he sees and knows. We gain insight into the work and mind of a minister. Taylor-Troutman writes with bemusement and compassion about his three children. Grace, which shapes the poet's life, also describes his poetic craft. He deploys rhyme to delightful effect and frequently writes in form. Tigers, Mice & Strawberries is an offering of love. In Taylor-Troutman's words, "And still we make more space, / fill the walkways of our hearts, / the way we do love, the way we do art."-Joan Barasovska, author of Orange Tulips, Carrying Clare, Birthing Age

Karen Jones' new chapbook, Gold Ray, presents an invitation to see "...farther into the forest . . . enticing us from the trail into enchantment..." ("Winter Moss"). In the voices of keen observer, scientist, outdoorswoman, and educator, Karen takes us through forest, sand beaches, river, and bay to preserve the natural world with her acutely articulated observations. Her poems incorporate nostalgia, resilience, and ultimately, celebration, exhorting the reader to experience this world fully.-Rachel Barton, Editor, Willawaw JournalIn Gold Ray, Karen Jones gives us a world that is beautiful, complex, and fragile, and most of all, a world worth saving. Her poetry will dazzle you with language as beautiful and magical as the world she describes.-Doug Stone, Author of Sitting in Powell's Watching Burnside Dissolve in Rain

Althea Romeo Mark's On the Borders of Belonging, is the voice of a poet who understands what it means to cross borders, whose ancestors knew the language of survival, the language of Africans forced to cross borders "willingly and unwillingly." There is a sacredness deeply engraved in each poem in this book, the honesty of each verse, each line, inviting us to come closer, drawing us to commune not only with the poet here, but also with the long line of ancestral and living border-crossers. There is a subtlety as she juxtaposes the pain of leaving and the peace of belonging in each line of these powerful poems about the other, the refugee, the wanderer who dares to move against borderlines drawn to stop us, and how, we become, and then, we belong.-Patricia Jabbeh Wesley, Author of Praise Song for My Children: New and Selected PoemsOn the Borders of Belonging, by Althea Romeo Mark, is a poignant exploration of remembrance and acknowledgement with themes assembled around portraits of displacement, tradition, alienation, memories and the notion of belonging. While the Caribbean migrant experience is a lingering trope, the ideas reach forward and back across a universal space. Migration is portrayed with curiosity, trepidation, regret and often with fear of being discovered, fear of 'not making it', fear of not being accepted. The titles themselves represent flashes of light into these Insights. Unusual imagery and pleasing musicality enhance the messages colored in this collection.They invite contemplation and recognition of our shared humanity. -Alscess Lewis-BrowneAlthea Romeo Mark's latest poetry collection, On the Borders of Belonging, brings alive the refugee experience in vivid imagery and detail. Her language shines a light, by turns both harsh and tender, illuminating the violence and economic pressures that force families to flee their homes, risking dangerous ocean or desert crossings to face bureaucracy and even racism in the hopes of gaining asylum in a strange land. It's impossible to read Romeo Mark's work without emerging with a greater understanding, empathy, compassion, and respect for the courage of the refugee.-Carmel Mawle

In Margaret Duda's vivid and transporting poems, we can smell the candles burning, coffee brewing, stuffed cabbage simmering. She embraces her Hungarian-American heritage with palpable love and appreciation, bolstered by a deep memory of precise details from the past. I was enraptured by her tender stories of the courageous ancestors who helped mold her into the mother, the grandmother, and the poet she would become, writing poems in the beautiful tradition of elegy entwined with celebration.-Andrea Potos, author of Her Joy BecomesHeartbreaking, heartwarming and inspirational, Margaret Duda's poetry collection I Come from Immigrants, is a three-generation epic historical romance adventure like Titanic, which Duda and her husband watched night after night as he fought cancer. A skillful storyteller, Duda brings her characters to life and makes us feel like they are part of our lives. In "Mourning Portrait," Duda writes: Looking like Bergman's characters, they grieve for the body in the coffin. -Sharon Waller Knutson, author of The Vultures Are CirclingMargaret Duda, born in the U.S., has managed to let us enter her world of a Hungarian immigrant family. In the title poem, she sets the tone: I come from Hungarians who left almost everything behind / to insure their children had chances they only dreamt of, / as they boarded immigrant ships from Bremen to New York. Duda's stories make you laugh and cry. Motherless children, new Americans full of hope, courage and determination. Love that makes them strong. You will enjoy this journey of a life that had it all.-Rose Mary Boehm, author of SaudadeMargaret Duda's collection shows us how narrative poetry can plumb the depths of joy, beauty, sorrow, and grief. It reads like a novella, each poem, a tiny gem of a chapter in her past or present life. I cried with Margaret as she recounted her mother's fraught passage to America. Most touching for me were Margaret's words in the poem, "Lone Survivor," where she lives for three. The ending poem "Only a Bed of Water Now," clarifies for all children of immigrants the connection the ocean makes between today's person in America and our Old World ancestors.-Joan Leotta, author of Feathers on Stone

Merryn Rutledge's compelling voice places us in a luminous yet unsettled and unsettling world in poems that insist we listen as well as look, touch as well as taste. Devotion to a world-that-is combines with humor at its quirks, hope for its amazements, delight in its pleasures. Who among us could find serendipity, even wonder, in cleaning a dishwasher filter? Perform the difficult work of painful remembrance while finding grace? As the poems "heave into memory," they challenge us to plumb dire loss and find redemptive awe. Disturbing readers in the best ways, the book both gives us pause and lets us pause, connecting the ordinary to the extraordinary, the mundane to the sublime.-Karen Kilcup, Elizabeth Rosenthal Professor, University of North Carolina Greensboro, winner of the 2021 Winter Goose Poetry PrizeSweet Juice and Ruby-Bitter Seed startles the reader into wakefulness. Deceptively simple, sometimes pastoral, this courageous book consistently chooses honesty over sentiment. In doing so, it builds trust, invites companionship. Unafraid of grief, deeply caring, never jaded, the poems are raw and tender. In "A Northerner Faces East" she writes: What millions of breaths have I not noticed, my brother whispered just before his last one.Her husband's death, her rural southern childhood, simple joys, terrible loss-all are shared with generosity. We are offered a glimpse of what it might be to live together bravely.-Scudder Parker, author, Safe as Lightning The imagery in this beautiful collection is dense and original as the poet depicts vividly recalled childhood experience and fresh, daily views of the natural world. But the poet does not stop there, nor shirk from the hardest experiences in her own life-a disabling and furious grief, the wrongs of racism, and homelessness expressed in tangible form. The book is crunchy with memorable phrases, and its images will haunt you.-Mary Dingee Fillmore, author, An Address in Amsterdam

"Only the simple things in life are true," Carolyn Clark writes in Watershed, a book that offers incontrovertible evidence to prove it true. In meditations on the bucolic life of upstate New York, Clark marvels at the enduring beauty of the natural world and finds within it echoes of the Greek antiquity from which some areas take their names. While nature is always welcome in these poems, it is the community of people Clark honors with them that somehow resonate more deeply, perhaps the way they offer stark relief to the isolation and fear of the pandemic. Clark's book assures us, with warm comfort, that our connections are what keep us aloft, whether marital, communal, or natural. -Charles Jensen, writer, https: //linktr.ee/charlesjensenCarolyn Clark gets better with each book, each poem. Where else could we get woodlands, strawberries, free range blue eggs, in a world populated by Artemis, Eurydice, Apollo, and horses. To create the beauty and mystery of classic myths within the natural world is to be inside and outside of the imagination, a rare read. Cobwebs, woodchucks, compost, Covid, stars-poems from the pandemic that make us heal. Clark says, "My heart glows with affection." So do ours, your readers.-Grace Cavalieri, Maryland Poet LaureateThis book's title points two ways: literal and metaphoric. In her poems, Carolyn Clark pictures the first and seeks the second. A free spirit with wordplay, rhyme, and cognates across the European language spectrum, she addresses her trees as "rusting red/organ donors/doing their job/better than me" and pauses during a pandemic to "feel no guilt/in rejoicing in nature." Clark's work celebrates marriage's sick days and valentines, a ranch's new blue eggs and hand tools and dearly aging mares-aware that we are "just one stop away from extinction," yet affirming hope as a space to live in. -Mary Gilliland, author of The Devil's FoolsCarolyn Clark is a keen observer of the world around her, and an excellent communicator of what she sees. Like the best poets, she helps us see our own world more clearly and experience it more fully.-Michael R. Burch