"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 ‘Must Read Monday’ 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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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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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!

Siren Lanthier .JPG

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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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.

http___elainefletcherchapman.com_img_hungerSalt

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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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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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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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! 

When_She_Was_Bad_cover

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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Monday Must Read! Walking Wildwood Trail by Amelia Williams

Amelia Williams is an artist/poet/activist from the Rockfish Valley area of Nelson County, Virginia, and author of Walking Wildwood Trail: Poems and Photographs.

Walking Wildwood Trail is more than just a beautiful books of poems. It is a brilliant artful act of protest against the Atlantic Coast Pipeline. Amelia is planting copyrighted art works with poems incorporated into them along the pending path of the Atlantic Coast Pipeline and copyrighting the entire installation.

When the proposed pipeline path was changed, another alarmed landowner contacted Amelia, and she started a second series of art installations. The newest project in Bath County consists of three parts in a large triangle, each separated by a thirty minute walk from the next, made of materials that include rocks, bone, copper pipe and jewelry parts. They represent the pipeline itself, the blast zone for construction, and the threatened homes.

Williams decided to begin this creative journey when she read about Canadian artist Peter von Tiesenhausen, who waylaid a mining company when he registered his 800 acres as intellectual property in the form of land art.

Now Amelia is teaching others how to do this, both the art and the copyright process, in an ongoing fight against the construction of this dangerous pipeline through farmlands, old growth woodlands, national forest, and near homes and schools.

“Amelia’s artworks are designed with place in mind; the sixteen on the Wildwood Trail are in muted earth tones and made of biodegradable materials. They will not be permanent in the landscape. A GPS map and trail map allow people to track down each piece, often located off the ground in trees. Working with wool, recycled paper, wood, found materials and beeswax, both plain and colored, her work looks almost as if it has grown there.”

Read More About Amelia’s Art Activism Here

Buy Amelia’s Beautiful Book Here!

Proceeds donated to Wild Virginia for the battle against construction.

 

 

 

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Monday Must Read! Everything Here Is Beautiful by Mira T. Lee

Thanks and Love to my fierce beautiful cousin, Sherrie McGimsey, for pointing me to this amazing read. Our country’s failure to properly provide services and safety for our brothers and sisters with Serious Mental Illness is a failure to the families who love them as well. They are all our children. 

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Mira T. Lee‘s debut novel, Everything Here is Beautiful, was selected by the American Booksellers Association as one of Winter/Spring 2018’s Top 10 Debut titles. Her short fiction has appeared in journals such as the Southern Review, the Gettysburg Review, the Missouri Review, Triquarterly, Harvard Review, and American Short Fiction, and has twice received special mention for the Pushcart Prize. She was awarded the Peden Prize for Best Short Story byThe Missouri Review (2010), and an Artist’s Fellowship from the Massachusetts Cultural Council (2012).

From Ms. Lee’s website: 

everything here is beautiful

Two sisters: Miranda, the older, responsible one, always her younger sister’s protector; Lucia, the vibrant, headstrong, unconventional one, whose impulses are huge and, often, life changing. When their mother dies and Lucia starts to hear voices, it’s Miranda who must fight for the help her sister needs — even as Lucia refuses to be defined by any doctor’s diagnosis. Determined, impetuous, she plows ahead, marrying a big-hearted Israeli only to leave him, suddenly, to have a baby with a young Latino immigrant. She will move with her new family to Ecuador, but the bitter constant remains: she cannot escape her own mental illness. Lucia lives life on a grand scale, until inevitably, she crashes to earth. And then Miranda must decide, again, whether or not to step in — but this time, Lucia may not want to be saved. The bonds of sisterly devotion stretch across oceans, but what does it take to break them?

Told from alternating perspectives, Everything Here Is Beautiful is, at its core, a heart-wrenching family drama about relationships and tough choices — how much we’re willing to sacrifice for the ones we love, and when it’s time to let go and save ourselves. 

From Pamela Dorman Books (Viking Penguin), January 2018. 

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from Kirkus Reviews

The tumult of loving someone with a chronic mental illness can exhaust even the most caring person.

Just ask Miranda, elder sister to Lucia, a brash, brilliant journalist whose periodic descent into severe psychosis has taxed their relationship and forced Miranda to confront the limits of family loyalty. Of course, she knows that Lucia can be attentive, charming, and kind, drawing in friends and colleagues—at least until the inevitable delusions take hold. It’s scary stuff. To Lee’s credit, Lucia, the more compellingly drawn of the two siblings, never seems like a psychological case study. Instead, we get inside her head—perhaps even inside her soul—to grapple with the challenges she faces. Her loving first marriage, to an older Israeli East Village shop owner named Yonah, begins and ends abruptly, revealing the magnitude of Lucia’s impetuous nature. Later, she hooks up with Manuel, an undocumented Ecuadoran immigrant working odd jobs in Westchester Country, New York, and has a baby. A move to Ecuador, where Lucia, Manuel, and baby Esperanza live in close proximity to Manuel’s family, is both comforting and stifling and raises questions about the cultural assumptions governing gender, parenting, and assimilation. In addition, what it means to live outside one’s country of origin is explored from both Manuel’s and Lucia’s perspectives. The book also exposes the helplessness of family members wishing to fix a fraught situation; the class dimension of health care delivery; and the rampant misinformation surrounding the treatment and diagnosis of illnesses like schizoaffective disorder. Lastly, vivid descriptions of the gentrifying Lower East Side of 1990s New York City, the heavily immigrant towns along the Hudson River, and several communities in Ecuador ground the characters in distinct locations.

An evocative and beautifully written debut.

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Buy this beautiful, necessary book

everything here is beautiful

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Monday Must Read! The Selfless Bliss of the Body by Gayle Brandeis

gayle brandeisGayle Brandeis grew up in the Chicago area and has been writing poems and stories since she was four years old. She is the author of Fruitflesh: Seeds of Inspiration for Women Who Write (HarperOne), Dictionary Poems (Pudding House Publications), the novels The Book of Dead Birds (HarperCollins), which won Barbara Kingsolver’s Bellwether Prize for Fiction of Social Engagement, Self Storage (Ballantine) and Delta Girls (Ballantine), and her first novel for young readers, My Life with the Lincolns (Holt), which won a Silver Nautilus Book Award and was chosen as a state-wide read in Wisconsin. She released The Book of Live Wires, the sequel to The Book of Dead Birds, as an e-book in 2011. 2017 brings the release of two new books: in June, a collection of poetry, The Selfless Bliss of the Body (Finishing Line Press) and in November, a memoir, The Art of Misdiagnosis: Surviving My Mother’s Suicide (Beacon Press.)

Gayle’s poetry, fiction and essays have appeared in numerous magazines and anthologies (such as Salon, The Rumpus, The Nation, and The Mississippi Review) and have received several awards, including the QPB/Story Magazine Short Story Award, a Barbara Mandigo Kelley Peace Poetry Award, a grant from the Barbara Deming Memorial Fund, and a Notable Essay in Best American Essays 2016. Her essay on the meaning of liberty was one of three included in the Statue of Liberty’s Centennial time capsule in 1986, when she was 18. In 2004, the Writer Magazine honored Gayle with a Writer Who Makes a Difference Award.

Gayle currently teaches in the low residency MFA programs at Antioch University Los Angeles and Sierra Nevada College, where she was named Distinguished Visiting Professor/Writer in Residence 2014-2015. She served as Inlandia Literary Laureate from 2012-2014, acting as literary ambassador to and for the Inland Empire region of Southern California. During her tenure, she worked extensively with the community, including at-risk youth, and edited the anthology ORANGELANDIA: The Literature of Inland Citrus. Gayle is currently editor in chief of Tiferet Journal and founding editor of Lady/Liberty/Lit. She is also mom to kids born in 1990, 1993 and 2009.

Visit Gayle’s Website

Buy Gayle’s Beautiful Book!

Praise for The Selfless Bliss of the Body

“From the title poem, The Selfless Bliss of the Body… “somewhere under skirts/of black, a nun brings/herself to orgasm/” to the final poem, “Last Words”… “my love/for the world riding/ my last breath- I love you/ I love you I love you” I am enthralled, inspired; each poem a gift of wonder.”–Alma Luz Villanueva, author of Gracias

“My whole body arcing / to face itself..” Brandeis, the “Chagall woman” writes at the beginning of this volume. Yes, it is quite a feat to face the translucent and filmy, vibrating and silent flux of being and “almost-not-being.” For this reason alone, we must rise and applaud. Gayle offers us a rarely seen contemporary woman-metaphysics — a liquid diamond made of light areoles and auras, a floating naked body of “surrender,” of “danger zones,” of self-silhouettes — a “pulse of pure movement.” These undulations of perception, eros, and constant questioning, body-life and social investigations of the continuous blur of woman-existence is key to all of our ongoing world chatter. Perhaps, with this book, this almost-self-magic collection, all of us can notice what it takes to inscribe and see our hardened rushing lives as truly meaningful, even though they come and go, as we peer at them. A monumental achievement.–Juan Felipe Herrera, Poet Laureate of the United States

More from Gayle Online

http://therumpus.net/author/gaylebrandeis/

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=6470116

https://writersalmanac.org/poem_author/gayle-brandeis/

http://aflwmag.com/2017/06/20/gbrandeis/

http://www.literarymama.com/profiles/archives/2003/10/gayle-brandeis.html

http://davidabramsbooks.blogspot.com/2015/09/my-first-time-gayle-brandeis.html

Gayle on Youtube

The Art of Misdiagnosis Book Trailer

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3ww-UtoxnHM

The Book of Live Wires Part 1

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uT2Ldr-EpAc

The Book of Live Wires Part 2

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CBygN8Ds25k

Vanna White Is Pregnant

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g87HuJR3V-g

Happy Reading!

xo

Mary

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