Go to Volume I Volume II Volume III
ISBN 1-882291-71-9 / 40 pp. Paper / Price: $8.00
". . . a stubborn, intelligent and affirming poetry. Her lines, like the birds she writes about, dart out of the shadows with such swiftness and grace we feel startled into perception." -- Teresa Cader, author of The Paper Wasp
L. R. Berger, along with her devotion
to the life of poetry, has been teaching writing at the University
of Massachusetts in Boston for the last ten years and works as
a psychotherapist in Concord, New Hampshire. She received her
M. F. A. from Sarah Lawrence College, but had already secretly
stapled her first book of poems together while hard at work surviving
second grade. Berger writes of her poems, "The world dares
us to love it: that terrible, sturdy, poignant brand of love that
can sometimes be wrestled out of the condition of our lives. My
poems are driven by an ongoing necessity to take up this dare.
They are both the means by which I wrestle and the hard-won outcome:
a record of how I persisted, faltered or came to arrive at something
approaching this love." She lives within earshot of the river
in Contoocook, where she attempts to keep track of her eight godchildren.
ISBN 1-882291-77-8 / 40 pp. Paper / Price: $8.00
"Wry wit, genuine feeling, and some adroit ventures into formalism distinguish Deborah Brown's first chapbook. This is a new voice to celebrate and cheer on." -- Maxine Kumin
Deborah Brown's poems have appeared in Prairie Schooner, The Connecticut Review, The Women's Review of Books, The Beloit Poetry Journal, and others. She teaches at the University of New Hampshire in Manchester and lives with her husband George and dogs, Jethro and Fifi, on a former dairy farm in Warner, New Hampshire.
NEWS FROM THE GRATE
This morning, in a poplar, grackles
bickered and squawked - a harsh sound,
a laugh from a shtetl near Vilna -
my grandmother's laugh in the kitchen.
Half out of bed, I'd leaned over a grate in the floor.
Heat and talk flowed up. She drank a glass of tea,
a sugar cube tight in her teeth, droning on
while my mother ironed starched shirts.
Sammy, her firstborn, had lost his forklift job,
Reuben's wife was pregnant for the sixth time,
Kenna still woke screaming in the night. I waited
until I slept to hear my mother say my name,
or tell how yesterday my father slapped her and left
again. She'd driven us past the Catholic orphanage.
"You're pigs," she yelled, "selfish pigs," and we were,
all three daughters, grunting and snuffling for food.
Copyright © 2001 by Deborah Brown
ISBN 1-882291-78-6 / 44 pp. Paper / Price: $8.00
She
speaks of the events that have shaped her life and family-morning
chores and a boy catching leaves in autumn. She writes of changing
seasons and personal growth, with an acute sense of being that
is both individual and universal.
Grace Mattern has been published in numerous
literary magazines and journals, and received a Poetry Fellowship
from the New Hampshire State Council on the Arts. She lives in
Northwood, NH with her husband and teenaged children, and is the
Executive Director of the New Hampshire Coalition Against Domestic
and Sexual Violence.
HAPPEN IN DARKNESS
There's this sense of diving in
as blackbirds flock back to my feeders
and poppies break old ground
as my body comes in line
to reach for yours
with a single urgency that rises
as the sun does earlier
and earlier in what feels
like a long rush back
to the long hot hum
of a summer afternoon
already past the zenith
we're traveling to now
aware all along
of what can and will
happen in darkness.Copyright © 2001 by Grace Mattern
ISBN 1-882291-79-4 / 36 pp. Paper / Price: $8.00
"With translations to and from her own Spanish poems, each poem brings a deeper understanding of the author's grandson and father as they learn to speak "a new language." . . . Watch that you don't run short of butterflies; / learn the colors of the hours. . . .
Dominican-born Rhina P. Espaillat writes
in both English and her native Spanish. She taught high school
English in New York City for several years. Her poems, essays
and short stories have appeared in numerous anthologies and magazines.
Her two books of poems are Lapsing to Grace and Where
Horizons Go, which won the 1998 T. S. Eliot Prize. Other awards
include the Howard Nemerov Prize sponsored by The Formalist, the
Sparrow Sonnet Award, three of the Poetry Society of America's
yearly prizes, and the 2001 Richard Wilbur Award for Rehearsing
Absence, a poetry collection to be published late in 2001.
Espaillat directs the Powow River Poets and coordinates the Newburyport
Art Association Annual SpringPoetry Contest. She lives in Newburyport,
Massachusetts with her husband, Alfred Moskowitz, a sculptor.
GEOGRAFÍA, CON MAPA
El nietecito, guiándome la mano,
me hace tocar ambas costas. Y le digo,
"Vamos, de aquí al oeste; monto el lejano
Mississippí, bestia de cieno; sigo
los llanos que se pliegan y se erizan
haciéndose montículos, malezas;
perdidas en las nubes se divisan
montañas que le niegan a las secas
arenas - tiéntalas - la lluvia; allá, otro mar
consume a California en sus espumas."
El, dedo y ojo, comienza a navegar
las letras que transforma en aguas, brumas,
pueblos, peligros, como quien se adueña.
Mi mano va en la suya, la pequeña.
Copyright © 2001 by Rhina P. Espaillat
MAP LESSON
My grandson takes my hand and puts it down
on one coast, then the other. Let's go east
to west, I tell him, starting from our town:
straddle the Mississippi, shaggy beast
back dull with flood silt; here's where the plains
spill out to scrubby foothills, rise to looming
mountains that snag clouds and keep the rains
from - touch this patch - desert; beyond, consuming
California tide by tide, another ocean.
He tries the route alone now, finger, eye
transmuting letters into highway, motion
of water, hum of cities wheeling by.
I watch him take possession, claim the land
perilous inch by inch. I take his hand.
Copyright © 2001 by Rhina P. Espaillat
ISBN 1-882291-80-8/ 36 pp. Paper / Price: $8.00
"These poems admit all the musics that haunt our lives; everything with which we've tried to fill the ache left by the sound of the trains when the trains didn't run anymore." -- Jean Pedrick
Betsy Sholl is a founding member of Alice
James Books and published three volumes with them. Her most recent
books are The Red Line (University of Pittsburgh, 1992)
and Don't Explain (University of Wisconsin, 1997). She
lives in Portland, Maine, and teaches at the University of Southern
Maine,and in the MFA Program of Vermont College.
SHORE WALK WITH MONK
Whoever lived here is gone, but a slick
staircase remains in the broken shell,
damaged just enough to suggest secret
recesses spiraled inside where something
slid down to poke out its head,
and when a threat appeared, scurried
or oozed back along those pearly halls.
Someone stood catatonic when shaken down
by cops, but when he felt safe on the bandstand,
he'd step out and dance, flap his elbows
like nubby wings, then back to the keyboard
to pick up his place, foot kicking
the piano's invisible flywheel.
Those were the years everyone changed shape,
painters squinted, poked their heads outside the frame.
Why have frames at all - or canvas, or paint?
And why not play the least expected note
so the music's a double exposure,
what's there and what isn't superimposed,
a musical house all fretwork and jut,
as if any minute the whole structure
might topple. But a house, once you've entered,
nothing four-square will do. You want those
crooked doors, those circular steps ending
in pure misterioso, you need
Copyright © 2001 by Betsy Sholl
Go to Volume I Volume II Volume III