Bøger udgivet af Glass Lyre Press

Pui Ying Wong's An Emigrant's Winter offers fresh eyes on both Chinese and American landscapes. Being the stranger gives the poet-narrator a visionary lens to see paint "almost undone / by humidity and time," to identify with a gecko "playing dead / with its eyes open." The poet is an undercover observer, hiding out front like the gecko, hiding to survive. Boundary-crossing poet Pui Ying Wong is always lyrical, no matter where she lights. By contrast with the images from Hong Kong ("the neighbors, quiet / as an unstrung guitar.") Wong's America is charged with big stories and sounds: "Her roads link two oceans, / meeting only in icy water / like her political parties." ("America is Big") Our poet is a wry observer: ..".her advertisements / try to sell you the real you." Wong's poetical roads also link oceans and nations. Every poem in the collection offers song and insight, wit and complex emotion compressed artfully. There's no stuffiness, no academic filler. Pui Ying Wong's work gives us hope: that poetry still has the power to move us, to wake us, to enhance our seeing. The poems are wrought like the finest ironwork balconies overlooking San Francisco or Paris. The poems are tender like the voice of a lover who knows how to use language to hold us all in an embrace. This is a major book that should win both national and international literary prizes. --Marilyn Kallet, author of 17 books, including The Love That Moves Me, poetry from Black Widow Press

Helen Degen Cohen was an authentic cineaste with an insatiable appetite for film, but especially the films of Fellini, Pasolini, Bresson, Ozu, Godard, Zhang Yimou, Bela Tarr, and Parajanov, all of whose work she celebrates, often ekphrastically, in My Life on Film, a posthumous collection of 53 poems. "My life on film," she writes, "is everything / that has ever floated through me," and we witness that parade in this volume that is truly an "insomnia of pictures." Helen was passionate about art (both viewing it and creating it), but she also treasured life, and her love of life suffuses these beautifully crafted poems about the joy of watching great films. --Bill Yarrow, author of The Vig of Love

Pirene's Fountain's tradition of excellence in writing and thought continues in this special double-feature edition. Features, interviews, reviews, and brilliant works of poetry are brought together to inspire and nurture the creative spirit. The voices in Pirene's Fountain create a meaningful and lasting dialogue for all lovers of exceptional poetry and writing.

The wonderfully observational poems in Kevin Casey's American Lotus remind us how separate we are from the natural world, how we sometimes suffer because of that estrangement, and offer us a way to bridge that divide. With a radical sympathy, poems like "Red Maple (Acer rubrum)" suggest that like this tree "felled weeks ago, plunging with a sigh/ as the earth rushed up to receive it" we too have been "trimmed from this life." Once inside the rooms of these poems, deep images, sly rhythms and musicality reward close reading as in "Hancock Point, Early Autumn" where "Autumn is a bleached whelk chrysalis, / a mermaid's purse of brine and bone." And yet, the "ripe and heavy" "game bags at our backs" in "Partridge Hunting" will likely break your heart.--Nina Dellaria, Co-Founder & Editor of Bird's Thumb

"Val Dering Rojas is a poet of the elements, as if earth, fire, air, water and aether were contained in her quill. 'There is no science/which knows my fear/of how the land will love us, ' she says, intimating that a true, natural, mysterious force is at work, which may very well be found in her ability to limn the ineffable with poetry. Rojas' poems vary widely even in this small collection--prose poem, surrealist dream, Ferlinghetti-like line breaks--no form seems beyond her. Her titles alone suggest a map for the questing soul: "Awake," "Loss," "How to Leave the World." These are powerful, musical evocations of modern life, written with blood and daring and a gimlet eye." --Corey Mesler, author of Opaque Melodies that Would Bug Most People

In Sweeping Fossils nature surprises us with startling messages that are at the same time hidden and inescapable. Maria Elena B. Mahler has the rare ability to perceive these messages and to transcribe them for us in her dreamlike poetic voice. She can "write nature." Deserts and reeds, rivers and ants talk to us in these pages; they take us to the essence of who we are. --Mariano Zaro, author of The House of Mae Rim

Representing a breadth of renown contemporary poets, with varying aesthetics, this volume of the Aeolian Harp Series showcases the talents of ten poets as they revel in the fierce joy of writing. In this anthology Jocelyn Heath, Tanya Ko Hong, Raymond Gibson, Cynthia Atkins, Jennifer Martelli, John James, Shadab Zeest Hashmi, Susan Berlin, Mark Lee Webb, and Pamela Uschuk reveal the best of their work and their underlying philosophies.

M.E. Silverman's The Floating Door moves from the peculiar and vivid details of growing up Jewish in America to a series of musings about the last Jew in Kabul, over whom "the sun snaps shut/ like a casket." Noah and Abraham and Isaac vie for attention in a child's mind with schoolyard rhymes like step on a crack, break your mother's back. A menorah takes center stage, then a Captain America glass. Throughout, there's a daring coupling of whimsy and pathos. Shoes from the piles in the Holocaust Museum, "rise leisurely, puppets on strings" to "sweep through the air like Astaire and Rogers." --Jacqueline Osherow

In his stunning third collection, God of the Kitchen, poet Jon Tribble creates an unflinching account of his first job -- and an unsettling portrait of an Americana that exists under the ever-watchful eye of Colonel Sanders. These insistent, unsentimental poems grunt and heave with the bone-deep exhaustion of real work, detailing the perils of an adolescence performed in a uniform of grease and flour and sweat. At once elegy and critique, interrogation and ode, this book is dense, dazzling, and utterly necessary, revealing again and again what it means to be a body expendable, a cog in the larger machine that is Corporate America, and how the scars from such an experience linger long after the final paycheck is spent.--Stacey Lynn Brown, author of Cradlesong

Hope and peace is pitted against relentless oppression and death in Gloria Mindock's Whiteness of Bone. Mindock gathers the eye witness accounts of the voiceless, the unheard, and crafts a voice in their stead. From El Salvador to Rwanda, Darfur to the Congo, mass graves and war crimes deafen and suffocate. Genocide is a quagmire of ruthless animal instinct, senseless violence, rape and torture, massacre and slaughter. When such darkness goes ignored, the gaping maw of the abyss grows ever larger still. Victims of war escape only to be confronted by the merciless apathy of the world. Survival is an exercise in learned helplessness. Mere existence is not living. The gutted and the mute fall silent. Yet what can poetry do? It is language when there are no adequate words. It is urgency, immediacy, and testimony. It is how compassion and empathy can pour themselves into the confines of silence and fill it up instead. When there is simply no explanation left for catastrophe and horror, it is poetry that can capture and cradle the souls of those decaying in fields of white bone.

"In this new and startling collection, Diane Frank's poems transcend not just genres but entire dimensions. When she speaks to J.S. Bach, she really means it and when Bach speaks back, she listens -- entirely -- the way certain moths perceive sound via their whole body, even their wings. How is this accomplished? It will seem to come through the poems themselves -- their music, tonal qualities and subjects, yet it goes even deeper as it pushes up like duende through the soles of your feet. The voice is declarative, emphatic, spirit driven. She will tell you, 'When a buffalo enters your dream, / listen for arpeggio hooves, / the weight of music, / a copper moon / above a vanishing prairie' and you will, you must listen." --Lois P. Jones, author of Night Ladder, Radio Host, KPFK's Poets CafE

Karen Neuberg's the elephants are asking is a brave, moving plea and testimonial, a sonorous cry out to the world to save the planet from the calamitous effects of climate change on all living things. These poems speak deeply from a bereft heart, with luminous words that have an urgency to save and breathe life into the wrath of decay, the human toll on the earth, "Whatever remains / will glow in the / dark bone by bone." The poet's eye noticing the indelicate erosion of all the things in our natural world, and all that we hold most dear. These wise, cautionary tales, map the trajectory of a corrupt and fool-hearty world and warn: "Information pours and pours burying us beneath ourselves." Neuberg challenges us with an intrepid call to arms--to confront and implore us to look, act and begin to pick up the pieces to save our world, to lovingly protect the sacred places. --Cynthia Atkins, author of In The Event of Full Disclosure

"In this, Tim Suermondt's third full-length book of poems, he uses the word beautiful sixteen times, each time the word as fresh and apt a choice as it is the first time. But that's not surprising if you know Suermondt's work. He is a poet who seems especially well-fitted out to find moments of beauty in this world without sacrificing his wry understanding of the world's absurdities and complications. One might say, in fact, that Suermondt's alter ego is a Romanticist of both tender and heroic proportions, who not only transforms the mundane into the mythic, but more cleverly, the mythic into an everyday occurrence. With charm, wit, and whimsy, his voice-whether that of philosopher, lover, or friend-convinces us that being alive is beautiful, despite its adversities. And that is beautiful, indeed." --Myrna Stone, author of The Casanova Chronicles

Cameron Morse confronts hard truths and transforms them. These poems offer readers faith in life and in art--a medical diagnosis and the clinical procedures that it involves can be shoved aside. We have here a poet whose craft and strength of will proceed toward beauty, family, and birth. We are not alone, these poems show us, gathering the spirits of Diana herself, St. Francis, Shelly, and, to my mind, the most uplifting evidence of poets such as William Stafford, Donald Justice, and all predecessor poets who, like Cameron Morse, continue to show us how to live. --Robert Stewart, The Narrow Gate: Writing, Art & Values.

Representing a breadth of renown contemporary poets, with varying aesthetics, this first volume of Aeolian Harp Series showcases the talents of ten poets as they revel in the fierce joy of writing. In this anthology Devon Balwit, Ruth Goring, Peter Goodwin, Lana Bella, Andrena Zawinski, Lois Marie Harrod, Petra Kuppers, Karen Schubert, Marc Frazier, and Hedy Habra reveal the best of their work and their underlying philosophies.

In preparation for a talk I was to give in my synagogue on the first section of Genesis--the one in which God creates the world in 6 days, including Adam and Eve, and rests on the seventh--I printed out a scholarly essay entitled, And God Created Humans.My printer, however, is very old and with every exertion, wheezes like a coal miner might after 40 years in the mine, which seems like something I could say about myself, climbing a staircase or running to catch a bus, though I can't remember the last time I took a bus. But I'm straying from the point, which is the ink did not transfer smoothly to the paper and the resulting smear and shadow obscured some of the words, such that it appeared the title of the essay was no longer, And God Created Humans. Rather, it read, And God Created Hummus.

Representing a breadth of renown contemporary poets, with varying aesthetics, this first volume of Aeolian Harp Series showcases the talents of ten poets as they revel in the fierce joy of writing. In this anthology Gail Goepfert, Nicole Rollender, Terry Savoie, Susan Tepper, Peggy Dobreer, Joseph Fasano, Margo Berdeshevsky, Bill Yarrow, Susan Cohen, and Rustin Larson reveal the best of their work and their underlying philosophies. As Ralph Hamilton of RHINO Poetry puts it after editing this volume, "Each of these poets in her or his own way has staked a claim on the world. A claim on life."

Here, Margo Berdeshevsky offers us vast interiorities--sensuous, erotic, complexly feminine. These poems may be distinguished for their musical intricacy and formal variation, but they are also profoundly moving, their speakers subsumed in memory, the constant presence of their bodies, the certainty mortality, and the intrusive violence of the worlds they inhabit. This is a marvelous, deeply humane collection--one I will return to with pleasure. --Kevin Prufer

One of the poems in Jon Tribble's Natural State observes that "the finest / moment of our lives may not matter at all." That's a devastating truth, but Tribble's poems about growing up in Arkansas make every moment he renders matter, and matter deeply. Natural State may be Tribble's first collection, but it's as polished, mature, and wise as most poets' fourth or fifth, and it not only matters, its publication is one of contemporary poetry's finest moments.- David Jauss, author of You Are Not Here and Glossolalia: New & Selected Stories

Pirene's Fountain's tradition of excellence in writing and thought continues in this special double-feature edition. Features, interviews, reviews, and brilliant works of poetry are brought together to inspire and nurture the creative spirit. The voices in Pirene's Fountain create a meaningful and lasting dialogue for all lovers of exceptional poetry and writing.

In these poems, painter and poet Stephen Linsteadt opens us to the savour of life. He wants us to see, feel, hear, taste and smell that the world, moment by ordinary or agonizing moment, overflows with enlightenments and rewards. For him, one art elides into the other. His words describing painting also describe his poems: Each line a new revelation/a mystic curve or splash-Tangible, painterly landscapes become journeys of the mind, moving from, to and towards mystery, haunted by the woman, human and divine, who slips out of paintings and into poems of the body and of the soul. This gifted poet's voice is lyrical, both visionary and grounded, often dryly aphoristic: My mind is afraid I'll break my neck/ but I'm dying anyway. Mary Kay Rummel, Poet Laureate of Ventura County, CA

Representing a breadth of renowned contemporary poets, with varying aesthetics, this volume of the Aeolian Harp Series showcases the talents of ten poets as they revel in the fierce joy of writing. In this anthology Sharon Alexander, Margo Berdeshevsky, Susan Michele Coronel, Marcene Gandolfo, Nicole Greaves, Raewyn Kraybill, Brad Rose, Lindsey Royce, Leslie M. Rupracht, and Diana Woodcock reveal the best of their work and their underlying philosophies.

Unearthing Ida is a story of a complicated life--and a complicated family--told in poems so visceral and tender, they sting. Rose M. Smith has one of finest ears in poetry, and in this new book, different speakers reveal pieces of Ida's story, with different perspectives, voices, rhythms, and dictions. A poem written from the perspective of Ida's brother Albie describes her: "Ida was an A. Like A sharp. Like a slant chord thrown in at the right place, to change possibilities." Unearthing Ida is not only a beautiful tribute but a possibility-changing achievement." --Maggie Smith, author of Good Bones

Pirene's Fountain's tradition of excellence in writing and thought continues in this special double-feature edition. Features, interviews, reviews, and brilliant works of poetry are brought together to inspire and nurture the creative spirit. The voices in Pirene's Fountain create a meaningful and lasting dialogue for all lovers of exceptional poetry and writing.

Pirene's Fountain's tradition of excellence in writing and thought continues in this special double-feature edition. Features, interviews, reviews, and brilliant works of poetry are brought together to inspire and nurture the creative spirit. The voices in Pirene's Fountain create a meaningful and lasting dialogue for all lovers of exceptional poetry and writing.

Representing a breadth of renown contemporary poets, with varying aesthetics, this volume of the Aeolian Harp Series showcases the talents of ten poets as they revel in the fierce joy of writing. In this anthology Maura Alia Badji, Wendy Barker, Patrice Boyer Claeys, Peggy Dobreer, Amy Strauss Friedman, Dawn Manning, Cameron Morse, Lindsey Royce, Shikhandin, and Ann Wehrman reveal the best of their work and their underlying philosophies.

Speak and Spell takes its title from a favorite childhood toy-a mini computer that prompted the user into knowledge by helping with the spelling of new words. So does Allison Joseph in this mini collection. Joseph loves the odd and the usual, the plain and the strange, the fun and the tragic. Reading Joseph's poems is like having a conversation with a friend who never stops noticing all the little things that you might ignore. She's chatty, but she sure is perceptive.