Bøger udgivet af Flowstone Press

In her latest collection, Lorrie Ness paints an intricate, aching portrait of landscape and inheritance. Here, the wonders and cruelties of family and the natural world braid together, not quite healing but rather reshaping one another, the way an American elm crumbles so that "[e]very summer, woodpeckers / fledge from its core." When home is both "a grave and a nebula," Ness reminds us how to hold the stories of where we come from with exquisite and unwavering attention.- Empty House Press

Carol Durak, John P Harn, and Rodger Moody, originally from Michigan and Indiana, studied poetry at the University of Oregon in the late 1970s where they were advisees of the late Ralph Salisbury. Now, forty-five years later, keeping the faith, they have gathered a selection of their diverse work into a single volume, Three Chapbooks / Three Poets. "Each of these diverse, superbly-crafted chapbooks brim with intimacy. Moody's work, written in sevenlings, offers probing, witty, and sometimes dark observations of rural America where the countryside belongs to the swallows. Durak's work, intelligent and introspective, leads us to a fabled crossroads where she contemplates, what is more diligent than dust, and asks, what is more within you / than your path beyond compass? Harn's poems, full of philosophical investigations, claim that sometimes we need to see the marrow splayed to understand our place in the universe, that we face our mortality lips parted, about to say something / to the wind. Like a jazz trio, each chapbook is a distinct instrument, unique but in sync with the others, and the beat is never lost." - Michael Spring, author of dentro do som / into the sound and Kahlo's Widow

"Dear Judith Arcana Not only do I like your book, I love it. Could there ever be a collection more endearing? Great wit, music, and pacing. Vivid passionate hungers, all stitched through the nubby fabric of aging with gorgeous shining threads. We can wrap ourselves right up in these poems for courage and verve.Sincerely yours, Naomi Shihab Nye"Announcements from the Planetarium examines aging and changing, wisdom and memory, and includes poems from Arcana's Mixtape Series and her Speculative Music Theory quartet.According to Judith Vollmer, "Judith Arcana's poems [are] both familiar and refreshingly strange .... jagged elegies on 'time available' and 'the short version, ' dazzling crows, lonely streets, and mournful seers, with a hyper-realist eye on the past. Wisdom-riffs earned (wryly) 'perhaps as compensation' counterpoint her portraits of loss: of land, water, and the 'grandmothers [who]/could move like flowers' yet who, "When we came here, [...] would not come." And then: she slips away to an urgent world of 'wind, shining like the flash inside/my skull-' [to] revere and celebrate freedom ...."

Winner of the 2016 Turtle Island Quarterly Editor's Choice Chapbook Award.According to Jared Smith, "These tightly coiled lyric poems are born of the earth, and of the interface between observation, intellect, faith, and logic. They are of childhood and old age, of butterflies and songbirds and turtles, and of the mountains and grasses...all those things that are ignited and illumined by the sun. But this is not a gentle sun. It is a sun made jagged and sharp, that shatters against darkness. It turns the leaves of summer into dust and it drags life down into the darkness that shrouds it. Yet as Martin's vision shows, even in carrion there is life and light coming forth from that darkness that thrives on it. And even as the last light drops from our fingers, that light is a seed that peers over the horizon for all that will follow. This is a profound book of hope and belief in those things that are bigger than we know of."

Winner, 2016 Turtle Island Quarterly Editor's Choice Chapbook Award.According to Michael McGriff (author of Home Burial and Dismantling the Hills), "In River of Solace, time twists up through the lives in these pages like a deep, dark root. The spells Lark casts are immediate and lasting, and the echoes of these poems will haunt you. This geographic and emotional terrain matters in all the ways that count."Barbara Drake (author of Morning Light and Driving One Hundred) has this to say: "In Gary Lark's River of Solace he summons the spirits of past settlers and natives of the southern Oregon coast, a continental edge he describes as 'like standing on God's front porch.' Beginning in that past, he traverses a history of settlement, wars, and succeeding generations of locals, until we seem to meet ourselves, as we face the unsettling question of whether this western landscape will be the new destination of eco-refugees in a vastly changed world."

Winner, 2016 Turtle Island Poetry Award. According to Roger Mitchell, author of Lemon Peeled the Moment Before, "Ted Jean is the kind of poet who pulls off the road in his truck to write a poem about the universe. With its faint echoes of Snyder and Ammons, the world of these sonnets is at once immediate and distant, thick with 'corporeality' and light with the long view. If the void is never far away, its antechamber is such, as in 'Deep Weed Theory, ' that the 'transit, ' as he calls living, is one from 'heaven to Heaven.' These poems extend not just the language but our sense of what it is to be."John Rosenwald has this to say: "In Ted Jean's Desultory Sonnets I love the poet's love of color, beginning with the 'quince branch' now 'blazing' in a verbal corsage of coral, white, red, blue, and green, moving quickly in 'Regarding wife' to the 'lightly burnished white gold skin' whose description transcends the 'simply yellow' often assigned to Chinese women, to the bloom of a rhododendron's 'truncated stump, ' to the hues and 'varied minerality' of 'ancient gravel.' These colors, these simple complexities that might be 'ugly...unless...you sit and watch awhile' make him, and should perhaps make us all, start to 'choke...up, ' to realize we are not 'any kind of martyr' but instead 'in transit, in fact, from heaven to Heaven.' Yet this is no neo-Romanticism, simple in either concept or language. Just as Ted Jean's sonnets travel between fourteen-line quasi-iambic slant-rhymed constructions to seventeen-line assemblages visually resembling whirling tops, his vision ranges from simple weeds to modern physics, as Stephen Hawking, the 'hawking eorl / hankered by his unblindered bird, ' moves across the 'eternity of darkness' that lies between 'the leaf being bright / and light again.' What a whirlwind of poetry!"

"How many Christopher Lunas are there? The bard, the community dynamo, the scholar, the compassionate one, the jazz quartet, the father & lover, the world of a man: all and more are speaking in this book. So many perspectives to experience here, so much to learn about literature, attitude, action and beauty. The maestro of Ghost Town has created a bustling, radiant and necessary environment." - Dan Raphael

Shadows Within the Roaring Fork extends the range and enriches the substance of Jared Smith's visionary poetry. While many American poets register their personal psychic stresses by embracing fragmentation, discontinuity, and easy ironies, Smith's approach is coherent, wide-ranging, unabashedly direct, and fiercely humane. Like Blake, Whitman, Jeffers, and Thomas McGrath, Jared Smith refuses to speak just for himself: in these poems, the personal and the transpersonal form a kind of confluence, each stream joining and energizing the other. This is necessary poetry-the kind that offers readers the gift of realizing they are necessary as well.- Joseph Hutchison, Colorado Poet LaureateJared Smith has long been one of the chief torchbearers of American poetry, navigating a variety of social, political, and existential themes, and consistently via a voice that is uniquely his.- John Amen, Editor and Publisher of The Pedestal MagazineJared Smith's dazzling poetry brings to mind one word above all: generosity. Generosity of the human spirit and mind, of the word, and of the connectedness that binds human to human, human to nature, and nature to the larger universe. As he puts it: '"It is just these littlest things now / that carry light across the universe / and make life of it. You know." We know, but we also urgently need the poet to remind us, now more than ever. Our country, our language, and our globe are enriched by this vibrant, powerful, unflinching poet. - Eleanor Goodman, Translator of Iron Moon: An Anthology of Chinese Worker Poetry

Ghost Logic showcases Sara Clancy's distinctive poetry. These are poems that reflect an unerring vision in an unmistakable voice. As in Prayer Wheel "an estuary where logic meets optimism" ... "in sheer, cussed determination." or in At Home with the Dead "...our old debate that yesterday is not gone and matters." Clancy's language is both complex and accessible: a feast for mind and ear. - Joan Colby, The Seven Heavenly Virtues... this chapbook allows entry into a way of seeing and experiencing the world we are a part of in a way that few of us ever have a chance at, but once we have been touched by the mind that wrote these poems we will never be able to see the world the same way again. - Jared Smith, from the Introduction

¿"It's a passionate rush of language, hope in a hard time, truth in the middle of lies. This poetry sparks and burns with the hidden language and stories of women" -Minnie Bruce PrattJudith Arcana, a reproductive rights activist formerly involved in Chicago's pre-Roe v. Wade underground abortion service, imbues her poetry, fiction and essays with the same ferocity, humor and passion that informs her activism. As Grace Paley wrote, "What I love about this important book is how the work Judith began in Chicago years ago has deepened in poetry and prose with love for the lives of women."In light of the leaked 2022 decision regarding Roe, it's more important than ever that we examine and promote reproductive rights and justice. Judith has been a tireless fighter on this front for decades. Hello. This is Jane. was published on the 48th anniversary of her 1972 arrest as one of the "Abortion 7," which directly inspired the pieces in the collection. Hard to believe that 50 years later, we're now in danger of losing the progress she and so many others fought so hard for. Previously Judith tackled the topics in poetry, with What if your mother, first released in 2005. Note that this 2nd edition of the book includes an updated preface."The title poem ... should be made into a poster and pinned up on the wall in every clinic in the United States." -Peter Bours, MD, longtime abortion provider

"Intensely personal, yet effortlessly accessible, every poem is a luminous and unflinching journey through challenging human landscapes." -Sky Island JournalMark Waldron notes, "In 'unskinned' language, Lorrie Ness' poignant poems remind us our stories/histories are natural elements, root balls of raw nerves we can move and replant elsewhere, in new soil. Ness' visions in vein blue and pale green inhabit writer's groups, gas station bathrooms, autopsies and hospitals, yet faded flowers continue to bloom out of season. Family, here, is the cost of living and not living, but our memories like our DNA, Ness seems to say, are the armature of our presence. Ultimately, these poems of spade and scalpel are complex and beautiful eulogies to our hands."According to Jessica Federle, "The poems here don't flinch. A mother's death by suicide is part of what this collection examines, yet Ness retains a fearless, critical eye throughout. Ness leaves no thread unexamined, teasing out each one without ever cutting it away from its place in the whole. The suicide itself is denied the power to drive this exploration. The poet remains, with rare and intentional exceptions, in charge. This control is masterful. The language is riveting, unafraid of the grittier truths of biology. This collection is a powerful debut."

In Sara Backer's first full-length collection of poetry, Such Luck, you will find yourself on an unexpected journey, charged with visionary and psychological intensities. Her poems are well crafted and highly original. They are sometimes haunting, sometimes playful, and always introspective and intriguing. She explores what it is to be fully alive and aware in a diverse, contemporary, and sometimes surreal world. This is the kind of book you will return to for its ability to stimulate equally your intellect and imagination. A masterful and magical first book of poems.