Bøger udgivet af Quercus Review Press

"Flicker is a memoir in verse of a life well lived. Lynn Hansen rightly names the collection for her favorite bird, and for the flickers, or moments, of happenings caught in words, illustrating phases and interests of a lifetime. She carries us through childhood's joys of "forest humus, thick moss / and a bouquet of wild orchids" and woes, "the word move was profane because it frees the rat of anxiety that gnaws on the tight knot in my gut." She rejoices when she declares, "When I retire I'm going to write poetry." Then for a decade or more, that's precisely what she has done. Lynn was determined to be a scientist in a time it was regarded as impossible for women; her thirty-three-year career of teaching biological sciences at the college level has proven her right. Her keen naturalist's eye, her awareness and love of all life on this planet, and beyond, show in her poems. She even celebrates the lowly zucchini and rutabaga, though she does sigh toward the end of summer, "Zucchini manna again?" These observations are woven into the sum of time, the treasure of relationships, "just as our lives gathered out of jumble, then cemented with a matrix of mutual respect." Lynn's lone robin "lifts his bugle beak to call up morning," and so lifts us all." -Patricia Wellingham-Jones, Los Molinos, California "This collection by Lynn M. Hansen is an excellent read. While each poem is intensely personal, moving from childhood experiences to motherhood to traveling the world to growing older, Hansen generously takes us along on all her journeys, creating poems that welcome all comers. Her close observations of the natural world, of lands both distant and close to home, create a landscape at once scientifically clear and poetically imagined, and her poems about growing up and getting older and the joys and losses that come with those parts of our lives, will make readers laugh and cry, sometimes all at once. In reading this book, I grew to even more deeply appreciate our world, our Great Central Valley, and Lynn Hansen's poetry, and I suspect the same will be true for all who read this celebratory work." -Gillian Wegener, Poet Laureate of Modesto, California. "Lynn Hansen's gorgeous book of poems is a testament to a writer who loves life and fully embraces living every day. It's rare that a trained scientist will turn to poetry to reflect on the natural world and even rarer that those written poems would be this wonderfully lucid, evocative, and heartfelt. Filled with keen-eyed wonder and amusement, these poems will teach readers about life and how to live." -Sam Pierstorff, Editor, Quercus Review Press

"Brenna Lemieux's a wonder-and it is her sense of wonder for both the natural and intellectual worlds, those slippery worlds we all inhabit, both in our heads and out of doors, that make her poems so profoundly satisfying. Her poems are tender and whimsical, but never precious or cute-her lines are confident and easy, thrilling in their embrace of the off-balance world we all walk through. She's a poet who goes beyond the mere noticing of detail to the delicate labor of seeing all the colors in the many swaths of her experience. The Gospel of Household Plants is a book to immerse yourself in, to revel in, and find yourself changed by." -Allison Joseph "'The thumb, then, is the dragon, / clamped in the wet dungeon so he can't / ignite the palace, ' explains 'Thumb-Sucking, ' from the marvelous opening section of The Gospel of Household Plants. I can't remember the last time I read a collection so abundant in stories, whether closely remembered or boldly imagined. The poet's craft is always apparent in her pitch-perfect phrasing and her eye for symbols organic to the scene, as when 'The roadside crows swarm the cornstalk, / and church-spire upward, thick and black / as blown cinders.' These lyrics celebrate and interrogate in turn, as our protagonist comes of age, falls in love, and dares to ask: What now? Given Brenna Lemieux's fierce intelligence-'You tell me / I'm crazy, but the right kind of crazy'-her readers can always look forward to the answer." -Sandra Beasley "In this chilling debut, Brenna Lemieux conjures a set of private mythologies, punctuated as the most compelling myths are, with bursts of violence. These poems offer a deep awareness that nature is rarely human sized, even if we can only see it from our anthropocentric perspective. Insects and plants hold a special place for Lemieux because they are unconcerned with the questions of obedience, obligation, discipline, and decorum that recur throughout these poems." -Jason Schneiderman "In Brenna Lemieux's powerful poems, precise and compelling images draw us deep. We witness the succession of generations, the grief of what the poet calls the 'perpetual withdrawal, ' the inescapable letting go of this life. This is a striking debut collection." -Peggy Shumaker

PRAISE FOR BRIGHT EXIT "Honesty will never go out of fashion in poetry, especially as it is channeled through the clean lyrics of Laurie Zimmerman's Bright Exit. These poems are so searching; they press against the veil of appearances, demanding to learn the truth of what's really there --tender hearted, and sensuous, sure, but equally smart and tough-minded, repeatedly, impressively refusing easy sentimentality. It's that rigor of honesty that makes these poems the rich, reliable tutorial in soul-making that they are. I relish them." -TONY HOAGLAND, author of Unincorporated Personas in the Late Honda Dynasty "Toward the end of Mann's "Tonio Kroeger," the artist declares that for him nothing is "sweeter and more worth knowing than longing after the bliss of the commonplace." Laurie Zimmerman's poems are grounded in that same sense. She has a great eye for detail (a bird has "tiny noduled feet," mussels have "blue doors, thin wings opening and closing") and a great heart for the larger events of human life: "Celebration Fragments" is one of a group of poems about coming through breast cancer that are heart-breaking, celebratory and true. The tone is always modest, but poem after surprising poem is the work of a wise and humane new writer." -ED OCHESTER, Editor, Pitt Poetry Series & author of Sugar Run Road "Laurie Zimmerman's collection Bright Exit is a study in loss-loss of names, loss of identity, loss of relationships, loss of footing in the world: "Someone is saying goodbye. Someone/is saying I'm dying and hello." But these losses do not drown the poet or the reader. Instead Zimmerman's poetry provides a tender and sure kind of lift out of what could be despair. Her words move the reader toward an understanding that even such a collection of losses can lead us toward a new sense of self and the world around us all, and even as the last poem in this wonderful collection ends, and "the poem folds its wings/but another happiness/flies up," readers get to fly with it, buoyed by all of these fine poems." -GILLIAN WEGENER, author of The Opposite of Clairvoyance

With his remarkable first collection 'No Elegies, ' Lindsay Wilson is working that old, necessary literary alchemy: in speaking so beautifully, so honestly about the world he inhabits, he inhabits us. "You are," Wilson writes, "what the paltry thief has left." Though Wilson is talking to himself-listing his own betrayals, mis-rememberings, and griefs-we can't help but take stock of our own selves, our own souls. That's not a word I use lightly. From front to back, 'No Elegies' is a soulful book, suffused with death and jazz, sugar and stars, "lupus and low pines, / heat and transience." -Joe Wilkins, author of The Mountain and the Fathers and Notes from the Journey Westward Lindsay Wilson's 'No Elegies' reads like a dreamscape that coaxes the reader further and further into the wild lands of place, love, loss and sorrow. As quintessentially American as this book may be, the overall effect evokes the Japanese concept Wabi Sabi, the poignant loveliness of transient existence. The delicate/powerful presence of these poems perches on absence and the dark matter of one poet's life, especially his mother's death. Given that the greatest writing alchemizes vision and beauty out of raw reality, this poetry is pure metaphorical magic. To riff off Lindsay's poem "No Elegies," your heart will fly in response and never return tame to its cage. -Susan Deer Cloud, author of Hunger Moon and Fox Mountain Linguistically nimble, unfettered by sentimentality or melodrama, Lindsay Wilson's poems manage to be mournful and ironic at once, completely modern without sacrificing feeling. When writing about death, as he often does in this collection, Wilson lightens his dark materials with a subtle wit and a voice that is, by turns, serious and sly, brooding and skeptical. Witness the scene of the grief-stunned son having a beer with a garden gnome, or leaning down to the carpet to measure the distance between the sunlight and a splotch of his dead mother's blood. Loss is everywhere in the book, but never familiar, never static: the turned earth of the dead has "no locks to pick," the backlit Sierras are "a jagged cardiac line." The end result is a collection that is chiseled and refined by loss, but nonetheless leaves us feeling both satisfied and renewed. -Steve Gerhke, author of Michelangelo's Seizure and The Pyramids of Malpighi

"Paul's poetry is planted in the order of the earth but stretches, grows organically to enfold the ripened fruit of wife, child, friend. His is the grace of honesty without brutality, deep feeling without sentimentality. His work wears well - and abides within his reader." -W.H. Ryan "Paul Neumann's poetry engages both intellect and feeling with a subtle blend of nature's many moods and settings, rendered in rich, vivid detail; each poem culminates in a stunning perception of the unity pervading all nature, a unity that includes both poet and reader. Neumann's art is so subtle that his poems become a kind of invisible glass through which the reader seems to be looking into the poet's innermost being, seeing what the poet sees, feeling as he feels. Neumann's awareness of life's final days, symbolized by the setting sun, and his acceptance of it as an inevitable part of human existence, leaves the reader uplifted in spirit. From Neumann's perspective, life flows from and through nature, and this union brings a deep sense of the rightness of all that he sees, and has seen." -Bernard Morris "Paul Neumann's contemplative poems are tender and wise, humble and celebratory. Here is a father, husband, son, and friend who chronicles human relationships and a life well-lived in California's Central Valley and on its Central Coast, a true poet in tune with the natural world like few poets have ever been. I love this book. This Valley is a generous gift from a poet at his best. It is our good fortune to enjoy it again and again." -Lee Herrick

"Paul Neumann has written his finest work to date, a poetic guidebook on living in the present moment. 'Life can be a journey from miracle to miracle, ' he reminds us, and the sage-like clarity in these poems arises in one's eighties, I imagine. The entire first section, poems devoted to his young granddaughter, is a moving and heartfelt road map for the world ahead of her, and the denouement is a meditative exploration of his own aging and mortality. This is a poet's poet at his best. Our world is better with this poet gracing it. This a beautiful collection from a beautiful man." -Lee Herrick, author of Gardening Secrets of the Dead and This Many Miles from Desire.