"This work is unlike any other, in its range of rich, conjuring imagery and its dexterity, its smart voice. Carroll-Hackett doesn’t spare us—but doesn’t save us—she draws a blueprint of power and class with her unflinching pivot: matter-of-fact and tender." —Jan Beatty

Archive for the ‘Books’ Category

Monday Must Read! Drifting in Awe by Larry Thacker

Larry D. Thacker is a Kentuckian poet, writer, and artist now hailing from Johnson City, Tennessee with his wife, Karin, and their cat, Abraham Lincoln. A five year veteran of the US army and having served fifteen years in the realm of student services in higher education, he finally paid heed to the voices of adventurous reason and will soon complete his poetry and fiction MFA at West Virginia Wesleyan College. He earned his bachelor of history, master of education in counseling, and education specialist degree from Lincoln Memorial University, home of the Mountain Heritage Literary Festival. Besides Drifting in Awe, he is the author of Mountain Mysteries: The Mystic Traditions of Appalachia (2007), and the chapbooks Voice Hunting (2011) and Memory Train (2015). His poems have appeared in over a hundred journals and magazines.

Keep up with what’s happening at http://www.larrydthacker.com

and on Instagram at: thackalachia

Buy this beautiful book here!   

Also, keep an eye out for Larry’s forthcoming collection, Grave Robber Confessional, later this year, from one of my favorites, FutureCycle Press. 

Thacker

Praise for Drifting in Awe

The poems in this resonant book offer a strong, hands-on encounter with the world as it is, with the weather, geography, the trees, our fellow creatures. Attending to the muscular and physical realities of the local world, however, rightly leads these poems to the lesser-known and less-certain wonders of the metaphysical, to the apprehension, as far as the mind can reach, of a meaning beyond the limits of physical knowledge. What’s out there beyond the fog rising in a cove? What questions should we ask, only to voice them, knowing they have no ready answer? That strange little paradox is why we have poetry at all, and here is a fine book to prove that point, with elegance, and with elegant reserve.

—Maurice Manning

Larry Thacker writes of the natural world and what hovers on the edge of consciousness. Entities “seen in the corner of the eye” or “the sound of the sun” might manifest if one becomes still enough to see and hear. Drifting in Awe, gives us a manual for doing just that. In his first full length collection, Thacker invites us to be still and let that world come to us if we are brave enough. 

—Jane Hicks

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Art, Artists, Bless the Day, Books, Creativity, Must Read Monday, Must Read Writers, poetry, Writing

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Monday Must Read! Starlight & Error by Remica Bingham-Risher

Remica Bingham-Risher, a Cave Canem fellow and Affrilachian Poet, is the author of Conversion (Lotus, 2006) winner of the Naomi Long Madgett Poetry Award and What We Ask of Flesh (Etruscan, 2013). She is currently the Director of Writing and Faculty Development at Old Dominion University. She resides in Norfolk, VA with her husband and children.

Purchase this beautiful book here.

starlight remica

Learn more about Remica here

Praise for Starlight & Error

There’s starlight and sunlight – and no error I could find – in this elegant book where the soul shines through every line. Only when we see how richly the poems matter to the poet can they come so close to us – entering with inescapable feeling and authenticity. We believe, and live, what each poem says, because the heart knows truthful detail. Central to our humanistic beliefs are the love of daughter, wife, stepmother, lover. Here, we learn this all over again, and how complex problems like memory become strengths. Only perfect craft can make it all happen, with experience leading the way. Remica Bingham-Risher has written a world-class book of poems. It’s the best of the best in American poetry. This is no imitation. This is the real thing.–Grace Cavalier

 In Starlight & Error, Remica Bingham-Risher redefines the beat of the heart not only in the adult situations of romantic love but also in the adult decisions within the love of family. The scope of her vision helps us see into our own lives with a sharper focus. At a time in America when we need hope the most, this book offers us an open path; we no longer “wonder what other secrets/ we’ve been keeping/ on this side of the world.” Here- in her songs of forgetfulness and of memory, songs of the closed fist and the open palm, songs of regrets and of gratitude-we clearly see a world worth fighting for.–A. Van Jordan 

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Art, Artists, Bless the Day, Books, Creativity, Gratitude, Must Read Monday, Must Read Writers, One Love, poetry, Writing

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Monday Must Read <3 Siren by Kateri Lanthier

What a BEAUTIFUL book! 

Kateri Lanthier‘s work has appeared in numerous journals, including Green Mountains Review, Hazlitt and Best Canadian Poetry 2014. She was awarded the 2013 Walrus Poetry Prize. Her first book of poems is Reporting from Night (Iguana, 2011). She lives in Toronto with her family.

“If you drop your weapons’-grade handshake, I’ll carry your kiss to the car. 

Court controversy, skip the altar. What will survive of us is Spring.”

–from “Uncontrolled Burn” 

Purchase this gorgeous book here!

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Praise for Siren 

from Vehicule Press

“Siren, Kateri Lanthier’s astonishing second book, calls us to attention. In her search for what she calls “compelling melancholy,” Lanthier’s new poems not only draw on the ghazal’s history as love poetry but remind readers of the dangerous and alluring quality of the ancient form itself. The siren was a lethal yet seductive figure, and that sense of power—and as well as her fast-taking bemusement at her own reputation—is present in lines that marry unnerving dream logic to emotional fearlessness. Siren is an uncompromising achievement: an original style at once mysterious, witty and musical that refines and clarifies the world in consistently surprising ways.” Call it playing with fire. Call it connect-the-dots lightning.”

“…a heartfelt cry after the shipwreck…a restless and fearless engagement with the world” – Green Mountains Review

“Desire, then, rules these poems. These poems are not sweet. They are remarkably beautiful just to say out loud.” -Hannah Brown, Toronto Review of Books

“Kateri is a full speed poet, no meandering allowed. One minute you’re a grand piano and the next a Formula One engine. Lanthier finds a way so that “coral has osteoporosis” and “The satellite dish and the satellite must weep for their decay.” Lanthier ties these disparate threads together into an information overload, poems ripe with jaw drop.” – Michael Dennis

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Art, Artists, Bless the Day, Books, Creativity, Gratitude, Must Read Monday, Must Read Writers, One Love, peace, poetry, Writing

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Monday Must Read! Hunger for Salt by Elaine Fletcher Chapman

Elaine Fletcher Chapman lives on the West side of the Chesapeake Bay. She holds an MFA from The Bennington Writing Seminars, Bennington College where she has worked on the staff since 1999. She founded The Writer’s Studio where she teaches poetry and nonfiction, provides editing services and organizes poetry readings and writing retreats. Her poems have been published in The Tishman Review, The EcoTheo Review, The Cortland Review, Connotation, The Sun, Calyx, Poet Lore, 5AM, Salamander, and others. She was guest blogger on The Best American Poetry Blog. Green River Press published her letterpress chapbook, Double Solitude. She writes non-fiction as well as poetry.

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For further inquiry: visit Elaine’s website here. 

Purchase Hunger for Salt Here

Visit  St. Julian Press

Praise for Hunger For Salt

“The poems of Elaine Fletcher Chapman are meditations waiting for our eyes to open. A few of these poems remind me of the beautiful seashells one finds on the beach after a storm. Chapman writes from the heart reminding us to discover the strength to love. There is loss as well as celebration in Hunger for Salt. Here are poems Thomas Merton would tuck somewhere inside his robes. Here is the Chapman rosary for our days to come.”~ E. Ethelbert Miller Editor, Poet Lore Magazine

“In Elaine Fletcher Chapman’s Hunger for Salt, the hunger is palpable: for the natural world, the spiritual world, and the realm of the carnal. These powerful, well-crafted poems invite the reader into the place where these worlds meet. There is an intimacy here missing from much contemporary poetry, and intimacy is what drew me in until my hunger, like salt, dissolved.”~ Wyn Cooper

“Hunger for Salt is a tender evocation of the natural world. Chapman displays a poet’s sensibility, a quiet attentiveness to personal wonder, intimacy and grief. The stillness of these poems exposes the refractive quality of memory and desire; it is a poignant and elegant debut.”~ J. Mae Barizo

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Art, Artists, Bless the Day, Books, Creativity, Gratitude, Love, Must Read Monday, Must Read Writers, One Love, poetry, Writing

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Monday Must Read! New Poets of Native Nations

New Poets of Native Nations by Heid E. Erdrich 

from Graywolf Press 

MMR Native Nations

from Erdrich’s introduction: 

“Native nations are our homelands, our political bodies, our heritages, and the places that make us who we are as Natives in the United States of America. More than 566 Native nations exist in the U.S. and yet “Native American poetry” does not really exist. Our poetry might be hundreds of distinct tribal and cultural poetries as well as American poetry. The extraordinary poets gathered in New Poets of Native Nations have distinct and close ties to specific indigenous nations—including Alaskan Native and island nations. Most are members or citizens of a tribe: Dakota, Diné, Onondaga, Choctaw, and Anishinaabe/Ojibwe (my tribe), and more than a dozen others. These nations determine their own membership and their own acceptance of descendants. My criterion that a poet have a clear connection to a Native nation has nothing to do with blood quantum, the federal basis for recognition of American Indians. Race also has nothing to do with it. Geography is not a factor. These poets live on reservations, in nations, and in cities or towns. Some of their reservations and homelands are urban; most are rural. Many of these poets have relatives across the borders of Mexico and Canada. Most are multiracial. They are also a diverse group in terms of age, gender, education, and poetic styles, but they have one thing in common. Not one of them identifies as “Native American” alone.”

Read more at LitHub. 

Purchase this beautiful book here. 

 

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Art, Artists, Bless the Day, Books, Creativity, Editing, Gratitude, healing, Love, Must Read Monday, Must Read Writers, One Love, poetry, Writing

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Monday Must Read! The Uses of the Body by Deborah Landau

Deborah Landau is the author of three collections of poetry. Her poems have appeared in The Paris Review, Poetry, The New Yorker, Tin House, and The New York Times. She directs the Creative Writing Program at New York University and lives in Brooklyn.

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Purchase The Uses of the Body here, thanks to Copper Canyon Press. 

“A thrilling meditation on the passages of a woman’s life.”  

                                                                                           –O, The Oprah Magazine

“Like Richard Linklater’s Boyhood, but for girls (and women): Deborah Landau’s vividly relatable third collection, The Uses of the Body, reminds us that coming of age lasts well beyond adolescence. ”  

                                                                                          –Vogue

 

Deborah Landau’s third collection, The Uses of the Body, is propelled by two unanticipated events–a death and a birth. The drives and vulnerabilities of the female body, and its various “uses,” fill these lyrically haunting poems with tenderness, regret, and desire. The poems slant and swerve as Landau explores the complexities of marriage, motherhood, and sexuality, conjuring a cherished domestic life beset by ennui and illness and singing often unspoken truths.

The uses of the body are wake up.
The uses of the body, illusion.

The uses of the body. Rinse,repeat.
To make another body.

September. Draw the blanket up.
Lace your shoes.

The major and minor passions.
Sunlight. Hair.

The basic pleasures. Tomatoes, Keats,
meeting a smart man for a drink.

The uses of the body.
It is only a small house. It gets older.

 

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Art, Artists, Bless the Day, Books, Creativity, Gratitude, Must Read Monday, Must Read Writers, One Love, poetry

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Monday Must Read! When She Was Bad by Gabrielle Brant Freeman

An amazing first collection from a fierce and amazing poet! 

Gabrielle Brant Freeman‘s poetry has been published in many journals, including Barrelhouse, Hobart, Melancholy Hyperbole, Rappahannock Review, Shenandoah, storySouth, and Waxwing. She was nominated twice for the Best of the Net, and was a 2014 finalist. Freeman won the 2015 Randall Jarrell Poetry Competition, and she received a Regional Artist Grant in 2015 from the North Carolina Arts Council. Freeman earned her MFA through Converse College. When She Was Bad is her first book of poetry.

Visit Press 53 to buy this beautiful book here! 

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Praise for When She Was Bad

Lust. Love. Betrayal and loyalty. Temptation and hilarity. Gabrielle Freeman dissects her speakers’ hearts, tenderly, with supreme attention to what it is to be human, female, and fierce. Gabrielle Freeman’s poems are bad—by which I mean badass bold. Michael Jackson bad. Freeman’s bad and you know it. That’s why you read her. When She Was Bad is a smart, compassionate, tightly crafted and explosive debut.

—Denise Duhamel, author of Blowout

The poems of Gabrielle Freeman’s When She Was Bad are by turns amorous, witty, fierce, ironic and erudite, but they are always sensual and often erotic. As the title suggests, Freeman explores the promises and surprises of the human heart, and her deft free verse addresses temptations, rewards and disappointments. Her bold inquiries sharpen both her eye and her tongue, but her first collection is far from single-minded, as she makes room for owls, spider wort, Bela Lugosi, Stephen King, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar and Renoir. When She Was Bad is entertaining and enlightening, and with its publication Gabrielle Freeman steps onto the stage in full voice, singing true.

—R.T. Smith, editor of Shenandoah Review and author of Messenger: Poems

 

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Art, Artists, Bless the Day, Books, Creativity, Gratitude, Love, Must Read Monday, Must Read Writers, One Love, poetry, Writing

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Summer’s a Great Time to Get That Book in Shape!

Distance One-on-One Manuscript Consultation Proposal

A Month By Mail, Focused Completely On Your Work!

Week 1: I receive and focus on a close reading of your manuscript.

Week 2: I will closely read a second time, this time making line by line editorial comments, returning the line-edited manuscript to you, and a detailed 6-8 page letter with initial response and suggestions by mail at the end of the first week. Upon your receipt of the manuscript, we’ll have an initial phone call (these usually last around 2 hours) to discuss those suggested edits, focusing that first week primarily on characterization, consistency, voice, the perceived goals of the narrative.

Week 3: I’ll compose a second detailed letter, this time focusing on structure and control of the narrative throughline, as well as any other elements I see presenting in the submitted work. This I’ll email to you by midweek, and again, we can schedule a phone meeting at week’s end to address this second editorial run through.

Week 4: I’ll ask that you send to me a list of your questions or comments early in the week, which I’ll address in writing, as well as sending you another detailed critique letter, focused on language and new ways of understanding and crafting voice and storytelling. We’ll finish with a third phone meeting to tie up any loose ends, address any remaining questions you might have on the critique provided.

So that’s Full Line Edits, Three Critique Letters, and Three Phone Meetings.

Contact me at carrollhackettma@gmail.com for a quote and scheduling.

Let’s Make Your Beautiful Work Even Better! 

Check out all of the editing services I offer here!

editing

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Bless the Day, Books, Creativity, Editing, fiction, Love, nonfiction, One Love, poetry, Writing, Writing Coaching & Workshops

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Birthday Reading in Staunton, VA :-) Come Join Us!

Hey Virginia Peeps! Come help me celebrate my speed limit birthday! Poetry Reading!!! ❤

I’m thrilled to be reading with Seth Michelson at the Nu-Beginning Farm Store in Staunton, VA next month! Thanks and Big Love to the beautiful and generous Stan Driver for putting this event together 

Come on out and join us!

Saturday, April 7, 2018, 2-4pm
221 North Lewis Street
Staunton, Virginia

Check out this wonderful venue here! 

the store

 

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Art, Artists, Bless the Day, book tour, Books, Community Events, Creativity, Love, poetry, Readings

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Death for Beginners, New Book Released, Thanks and Love to Kelsay Books!

Happy Halloween! Death for Beginners is now released on Amazon!

What a perfect date to turn it loose ❤ Thanks and Love to Karen Kelsay Davies of Kelsay Books for making this book a home, and special spooky gratitude today to Susan Deer Cloud, Clare L. Martin, and Jerry D. Mathes II, for their willingness to read and offer their thoughts on the book 

Buy Death for Beginners Here!

Death for Beginners Front Cover Crop

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Art, Bless the Day, Books, Creativity, Gratitude, healing, One Love, publishing, Uncategorized, Writing

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