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In You Will Remember Me, Barbara Lydecker Crane's masterful sonnets illuminate the work and lives of artists from medieval through contemporary times. We visit a lustful duke of Milan in "His Last Mistress," Van Gogh and a French asylum in "My Present," Munch's health battle in "After Influenza," Sherald on her Blackness in "Tell Me What You Think," or the first Native Harvard graduate in "Imagining Caleb." Often accompanied by full-color reproductions of the art that inspired them, these vivid ekphrases immerse in a synergistic experience of sight, language, and meaning that's both entertaining and enlightening.PRAISE FOR YOU WILL REMEMBER ME:Barbara Lydecker Crane's poems are like verbal paintings-less like text and more like an art book's color plates. The sonnets she's written here seem to be narrated by artists, both famous ones and many lesser known. The artists' points of view inject real immediacy and intimacy. In poems where readers plunge from words into painting-and from painting, into the mind of the portrait subject or of the artist-she brings those people's bodies and thoughts to vivid life. The artworks that she refers to, in chronological order from 1460 to 2010, weave a thread of world history that informs and engrosses. This book is a unique blend of art, history, and poetry.- Deborah Warren, author of Strange to Say and Connoisseurs of WormsBarbara Lydecker Crane lets us overhear the contempt of Holbein for his royal model, Henry VIII; the daring of Caravaggio, who used a dead prostitute as his model for the deceased Virgin Mary; and Copley's admission of what he does to save his hide in a competitive world. These poems not only give us fascinating information about the lives of artists through the ages but also give fresh insights into how the arts reflect and enhance each other. I am hoping that this ambitious and impressive collection will become not only a rich artwork in its own right but also a teaching tool for the common benefit of poets, visual artists, students, teachers, and readers alike. This book deserves an audience as broad as that.- Rhina P. Espaillat, author of And After All and The FieldBarbara Lydecker Crane's new book of ekphrastic epiphanies brings us poems of rare precision and hard-won wisdom. Crane's painterly sonnets embody history's sweep: we encounter the artist as creator ("I Am What God Has Made Me" in Albrecht Dürer's voice), and the fire of ambition (Jean-Michel Basquiat defiantly asking "What Do They Know?"). Like Mary Cassatt, who features in "The Opera Box," a poem based on her 1878 painting, Crane possesses a clear and tender gaze whose "sight lines veer / left and right" but whose "only view / is art." You Will Remember Me is a treasure trove of inventive moments in which painting, subject, backstory, and biography cast an illuminating glow upon each other.- Ned Balbo, author of The Cylburn Touch-Me-Nots and 3 Nights of the PerseidsABOUT THE AUTHOR:Barbara Lydecker Crane's poems have been widely published in formal-friendly journals and anthologies. Her previous poetry collections are Zero Gravitas, AlphabeTricks (for children), both published by Kelsay Books, and Back Words Logic, published by Local Gems Press. She loves writing and art making in equal measure, and also enjoys traveling, either solo or with her family.

¿In Seeing the There There, David Alpaugh intermixes his poetry with his visual artwork, realized in collaboration with artists and photographers worldwide. The result immerses the reader in surprises of sense and meaning. Alpaugh's poetic musings and preoccupations range from the irreverent to the meditative, and include people, society, culture, nature, and the universe-visible, theoretical, imagined. This is a unique book that engages the reader with written and visual treats at each turn of the page.PRAISE FOR SEEING THE THERE THERE:Seeing the There There is compelling and wonderful, but how best to describe a book that combines a colorful picture with a poem on each page? There are gut-wrenching truths, accompanied by unexpected rhymes, puns, wit, and humor. Every time you turn a page, another visual and verbal surprise awaits you, with titles and opening lines like these: "Mayfly": "Here Today / Gone Today / No Tomorrow"; "Old Fogies": "Never tire of telling us / how thankful they are / to be born when they were / on the planet that was"; "Selfie": Narcissus was the entreprenewer who tried to take one first"; "Trying to live in 'the moment?'": "No one's ever that fast!" Yes, this is a one-of-a-kind book. You will want to own it, read it, savor it. It is simply amazing!- Susan Terris, author of Familiar TenseDavid Alpaugh's brilliance delights us once again in this remarkable collection. His visual poems take imagery and verse to a whole new level. As you time-travel through his poetic multiverse, you'll discover whirling dervishes, a three-legged cat, a postcard from a volcano, a poppy apocalypse, a grief-stricken jack-o'-lantern, a revolutionary sonnet, a whiff of vermouth, and the heaviest crow. There are intricate ironies and shades of truth that will entice your imagination both verbally and visually. With every turn of the page, there is a unique turn of phrase. Seeing the There There deserves a place on everyone's nightstand-for it is truly, in the poet's words, "a messenger" that "arrives and begs your attention."- Connie Post, author of Prime MeridianSeeing the There There is a bright, wonderful book. David Alpaugh knows how to capture a rare poetic moment and create total delight. Each poem finds us in a sui generis universe: surprising rhymes surfing on fresh insight. Never have animated thoughts and choice images spent such quality time together! - Marvin R. Hiemstra, author of Poet Wrangler: Droll PoemsABOUT THE AUTHOR:David Alpaugh is the author of Spooky Action at a Distance (Word Galaxy Press, 2020), a book of "double-title" poems, a form he invented; Seeing the There There, a book of visual poems; and Counterpoint, winner of the Nicholas Roerich Poetry Prize from Story Line Press and reissued in 2021 by Red Hen Press. He has published more than four hundred poems in literary journals from Able Muse to Poetry to Zyzzyva. He is one of the contemporary poets included in the Heyday Press anthology California Poetry from the Gold Rush to the Present and has been a finalist for Poet Laureate of California. He teaches literature for the Osher Lifelong Learning Institute at its Cal State East Bay Campus and poetry writing at the University of California, Berkeley Extension.

In Daniel Galef's Imaginary Sonnets, a cast of people and objects from mythology, history, the news, and the quotidian parades through a variety of imaginative scenarios. In dialogues, dramatic monologues, satires, lamentations, eulogies, and execrations, the sonnets adopt perspectives ranging from the familiar to the novel to the twisty and surprising. Characters include not only widely known figures such as Cassandra, Pandora, St. Augustine, Byron, and Doris Day, but also obscure ones such as Henrique of Melacca, Emmett Till's father, John Taurek, and-more startling-a salmon, a snowflake, and a pair of parallel lines. Imaginary Sonnets entertains and entrances with every turn of the page.PRAISE FOR IMAGINARY SONNETS:I love sonnet sequences, and Daniel Galef has written a rollicking collection that is alive with wit, intelligence, and wild imagination, as in the poem of unrequited love between two parallel lines. If you want to know what Cézanne has to say, not to mention Cassandra, Alcibiades, and "Parmenides to Doris Day," then dig into this cornucopia of crazy, formal fun.- Barbara Hamby, author of HoloholoDaniel Galef's sonnet cycle is a rare feat of empathy, wit, style, and (as the title hints) imagination. I'm thankful to have this book, in which the messy overlaps of life are somehow illuminated in work of astonishing, clear-eyed discipline.- Jack Pendarvis, author of Movie StarsDaniel Galef's debut collection, Imaginary Sonnets, demonstrates his mastery of the form as well as his ability to reinvigorate it with wit and experimentation. These fourteen-line biographies and tales open up a world, largely drawn from literature, that your history books ignored and that you will enjoy.- A. M. Juster, author of Wonder and WrathThe sonnet is one nifty little container, isn't it! Each of these poems contains its own tiny library-of books, sure, but life experiences, history . . . okay, everything, from Pandora (she of the box full of imps) to Casey (he of the Mudville Nine) and beyond. There's even a taco talking to a chalupa, and I'm not making that up. Nobody could make that up except Daniel Galef.- David Kirby, author of Help Me, InformationABOUT THE AUTHOR:Daniel Galef was born and raised in Oxford, Mississippi, where he spent his afternoons on the veranda of Square Books. After studying philosophy and classics at McGill University in Montreal, he received his MFA from the fiction program at Florida State University in Tallahassee. His poetry covers a diverse range of styles and genres, including light verse (Light Quarterly, the Saturday Evening Post, the Washington Post Style Invitational), children's literature (Spider, the Caterpillar, School Magazine), and serious formal poetry (Able Muse, Atlanta Review, the Lyric). Besides poems, he also writes fiction (Indiana Review, Juked, the Best Small Fictions anthology), nonfiction (Word Ways, Working Classicists, the Journal of Compressed Creative Arts), humor and satire (American Bystander, NationalLampoon.com, the Journal of Irreproducible Results), and plays (Players' Theatre Montréal, Théâtre MainLine Theatre). In 2022 he placed second in the New Yorker cartoon caption contest. This is his first book.

A.G. Harmon's Some Bore Gifts is an eclectic collection of stories spanning the traditional to the satirical, with a kaleidoscope of viewpoints and characters that includes tree cutters, department store pianists, museum guides, physicians, florists, actresses, bank managers, junk salesmen, personal trainers, and English professors. Harmon is as spellbinding in his depiction of the disenfranchised as of the socially poised, with vivid scenes of both the quotidian and the aberrant and startling. This captivating book challenges and entertains from start to finish.PRAISE FOR SOME BORE GIFTS:A.G. Harmon is a writer of the first order. These are elegant and humble and ruminative stories of people reaching their worldly ends in one way or another, and their encounters there with grace and a hard-wrought hope. Some Bore Gifts is in itself a gift, and A.G. Harmon a writer who blesses us with his art.- Bret Lott, author of Dead Low TideA.G. Harmon is that rare thing, a writer who loves his characters without idolizing them. In prose that is alternately crystalline and gritty, he shows how a heart in hiding can be brought back to life through a chance encounter with another. Some Bore Gifts are stories that track the movement from despair to hope, loss to restitution, the seemingly random steps we take along the road of grace. Harmon's consummate storytelling makes us believe in, not only the resilience, but also the essential grandeur of the human spirit.- Suzanne M. Wolfe, author of The Confessions of X In these stories, Harmon takes you-lyrically, sometimes brusquely, always with good humor-through a gallery of lives. Some full and wise, others shallow and self-concerned, still others stunted or misunderstood-a stunning human spectrum. I laughed out loud, flipped pages in worry, even felt a knife slice through my palm. But most visceral-and this is Harmon's gift-I felt myself disappear in moments of true, transcendent beauty.- Samuel Thomas Martin, author of A Blessed Snarl A.G. Harmon's new collection of stories, Some Bore Gifts, is stunningly diverse, displaying a vast range of characters and the skill to draw them that enchants his reader. From the glimpse of a migrant worker as he begins his story, "the impression he left upon the listener was that of a tune hummed from a porch step, during the long liquid hours of the first, floating dusk," to the voice of a wounded piano tuner who "leans into the memory, his gaze fastened to what he must see," Harmon creates a span of characters-an aging movie star, a college English professor-and falls into none of the possible and dangerous pitfalls. Readers are, indeed, invited to listen on the front porch. Their reward is seeing the redemptive moment of understanding that Harmon's characters discover.- Margaret-Love Denman, author of Daily, Before Your Eyes ABOUT THE AUTHOR:A.G. Harmon's fiction, essays, and reviews have appeared in Triquarterly, the Antioch Review, Shenandoah, the Bellingham Review, St. Katherine Review, Image, and Commonweal, among others. His fiction won the 2001 Peter Taylor Prize (A House All Stilled, University of Tennessee Press, 2002) and was the runner-up for the 2007 William Faulkner Prize for the Novel. His academic work, Eternal Bonds, True Contracts: Law and Nature in Shakespeare's Problem Plays was published by SUNY Press. He was a 2003 Walter Dakin fellow at the Sewanee Writers' Conference. He grew up on horse-and-cattle farms in Mississippi and Tennessee. Currently, he teaches at The Catholic University of America in Washington, DC.

The poems in Crone's Wines often unlock the memories at the fringes of consciousness, making them come alive, or reflect on the mysterious and unspoken, casting them into the realm of the familiar. With a mix of formal and free-verse poems, Crone's Wines is wide-ranging in style and scope: its many preoccupations include solitude, nature, family, love, even the lightheartedness of cat poems, and aging and death-as befits the "late poems" subtitle, informed by the poet's age. There is a sense of the spiritual and meditative in the universal poems, and a fierce openness in the poems of personal relationship, often intimate in their recollections. This a rewarding collection with a lifetime of memories and experience, delivered with wit and wisdom.PRAISE FOR CRONE'S WINES:Margaret Rockwell Finch's moving lyrics are passionate and lightly elegiac by turns. They speak unabashedly about desire and the human heart, but without the taints of sensationalism or sentimentality. Speak, however, is not the right word; given the delicately turned musicality of these poems, the mot juste must be sing. - David Yezzi, author of Birds of the AirHaunted, burnished passion echoes through these deft and beautifully alert lyrics. Margaret Rockwell Finch uses poetry's traditional means to ends that are purely her own. From time's quarrels, she has fashioned poems that resonate with poetry's timelessness. - Baron Wormser, author of The Road Washes Out in SpringLike the best of the chain of passionate women poets to which she belongs, Margaret Rockwell Finch is skilled in the perfectly torqued line, angled to pull power straight from the personal and often the collective unconscious. So many of these perfect crystals, forged with feeling and dignity out of the heart of experience, shine with the clarity of honesty and the strength of skillful craft. I am honored to count this poet as my literal and literary foremother. - Annie Finch, author of Spells: New and Selected PoemsABOUT THE AUTHOR:Maggie Finch was born Margaret Rockwell on April 20, 1921. Her poems have appeared in publications such as The Christian Science Monitor, Saturday Review, and Sequoia, and her three previous books of poems are Davy's Lake, The Barefoot Goose, and Sonnets from Seventy-Five Years. She has served as president of the National Institute of American Doll Artists and copresident of the Maine Poets Society.