Like time travel to a bygone era, this second volume of poetry by Gregory Joseph Firlotte depicts summertime in subjects ranging from the natural world to inner worlds where love, hope and dreams reside — alluding to the sumptuous years of the Gilded Age leading into the twentieth century in often surreal and metaphysical landscapes crafted in words, emotions and visions. Throughout are vintage and contemporary black and white photographs that complement many of the poems, capturing the feeling, places and geography of New England environs which are integral components of Firlotte’s romantic style. The wraparound cover of drifting lily pads — a photo taken by the author on a July afternoon while canoeing on Cobbosseecontee Lake in Central Maine — inspired the book’s summertime theme.https://www.amazon.com/Gilded-Summer-Poetry-Gregory-Firlotte/dp/B0948JWX4V/ref=sr_1_2?dchild=1&keywords=firlotte&qid=1621056436&sr=8-2
In Gloria Mindock’s powerful new book, the flames of love die out and the ashes linger until they dissolve into air. The body is hostage, in charred relics of failed intimacies—The burnt-out ends of smoky days (T.S. Eliot). There’s beauty in the truth of Mindock’s words and images: Things got smokier, battling the embers with//false waters. And there’s hope: Not everyone believes in destruction.// All the heart wants is to beat. Above all, these poems radiate feeling, compassionately aware, attuned to a world of broken love that is burned beyond recognition, the ashes drifting and settling: how much sorrow can this heart take?// There is never an answer. Ash sears and sings. -Dzvinia Orlowsky, author of Bad Harvest
Ash by Gloria Mindock (Glass Lyre Press, 2021, Glenview, IL) To order: www.glasslyrepress.com
Poet, photographer, and multi-genre writer, Shanta Lee Gander is the winner of a full-length poetry prize from Diode Editions with her debut poetry collection, GHETTOCLAUSTROPHOBIA: Dreamin of Mama While Trying to Speak Woman in Woke Tongues out this June.
GHETTOCLAUSTROPHOBIA time travels by creating and recapturing memory from a fractured past to survive in the present and envision a future. In her first full-length collection GHETTOCLAUSTROPHOBIA: Dreamin of Mama While Trying to Speak Woman in Woke Tongues, Shanta Lee Gander navigates between formal and vernacular styles to introduce the reader to a myriad of subjects such as scientific facts that link butterflies to female sexuality and vulnerability; whispers of classical Greek myth; H.P. Lovecraft’s fantastical creature, Cthulhu; and the traces of African mythmaking and telling. Beneath the intensity, longing, seeking, wondering, and the ‘tell-it-like-it-is’ voice that sometimes tussles with sadness, there is a movement of sass and a will that refuses to say that it has been broken. Gander leaves a door ajar in this ongoing conversation of the Black female body that walks the spaces of the individual within a collective; the tensions between inherited and hidden narratives; and the present within a history and future that is still being imagined. To pre-order your copy, visit: GHETTOCLAUSTROPHOBIA by Shanta Lee Gander | Diode Editions Shanta Lee is a Connecticut native and a new member of the New England Poetry Club.
NEPC member Kate Chadbourne is hosting a free, open-to-all Poetry Celebration this month on YouTube with weekly videos, prizes for participation, and tons of great community spirit and inspiration. The latest video … Read more
This latest issue of Arrowsmith journal includes an excerpt from Mark Pawlak’s forthcoming memoir “My Deniversity: Knowing Denise Levertov” (MadHat Press fall 2021). In this excerpt, he recounts a time … Read more
Stephen M. Honig announces his publication this March of his third book of poetry, entitled Obligatory Covid Chapbook. The volume traces the first ten months of the pandemic from a personal and societal perspective. This COVID chapbook, along with Mr. Honig’s prior works (Messing Around With Words, Rail Head), are available through Amazon Books and Barnes and Noble.
Small Talk, a new collection of poems by Plymouth Poet Laureate Stephan Delbos, will be published in April by Dos Madres Press. Reviewing the book in The Boston Globe, Nina MacLaughlin wrote: “Elegant and intimate… Delbos proves his deep attunement to the natural, and to bright blasts of language.” Small Talk can be purchased here: https://www.dosmadres.com/shop/small-talk-by-stephan-delbos/.
Paul Nemser’s new book A Thousand Curves, which is forthcoming in spring, 2021, won the Editor’s Choice Award from Red Mountain Press. The poems in A Thousand Curves find inspiration from nature, travel, mysticism, memory. Time is understood in glimpses—raindrops, tides changing, splashes of a waterfall. Sometimes the background leaps out of the foreground. Bugs grind leaves, a line from a rock song repeats and repeats. Here are ecstasies and nightmares, mysteries and clarities of daily life, fateful steps, chance encounters, donkeys braying, one nightingale calling, reflections off an office building’s floor-to-ceiling window. These glimpses can become a poem overnight or take decades to finish. In time the poems come together as a book that moves among traces of these myriad conversations. The internal speaks with the external. Permanence speaks with change. Ultimately the book is about the twists and turns that life takes over a lifetime, the record of a journey with a thousand curves.
“Paul Nemser’s A Thousand Curves contains many thousand brilliances—of language, of content, of perception—with each line indisputably in service to a larger wondering (Before this world,/we passed through clouds of others). Wild with insight and passion, these poems posit the marriage of body to world, flesh to thing, and exhibit an affinity for the beauty in the ordinary (Breathe in like screws turned in olive wood./Sigh out like milk-happy foals.) Most of all, these poems are visions from a grounded mystic, a speaker conversant with both the real and the mysterious, love and loss, this side of life and the other, and to experience the scope of this skill and ambition is thrilling. An immense and memorable achievement.”
–Joan Houlihan
“The particular pleasure of reading Paul Nemser’s poems emerges slowly, the reader paying close attention to the use of words, to the sophistication of form, until—suddenly—a cymbal crash that goes straight to the heart. We make our way, as Nemser writes in ‘After the Calm,’ ‘in weaves/of raspberries that thorn across fences fallen to gaps.’ Woven together are myths, impressions both internal and external, memories, and images. The greatest pleasure, though, at least for me, comes with the surprise of the line that shoots straight at and into us; and so, with clear eyes, we delight in, from ‘Morning After,’ ‘My pale, my pearl, my onions in a pan.’ Every one of Paul Nemser’s poems has its own surprises and its own rewards. Certainly, they engage the intellect, but time after time they open the heart.”
—Margery Irvine
About Paul Nemser
Paul Nemser grew up in Portland, Oregon, where he fell in love with poetry while reading in the storage room in back of his family’s tool store. He received an AB from Harvard College where he studied with Robert Lowell and Elizabeth Bishop, and an MFA in Writing from Columbia University School of the Arts where he studied with Stanley Kunitz and many others. He also received a JD from Boston University School of Law. His love of reading and writing poetry has continued throughout his life. Beside his new book, A Thousand Curves (Red Mountain Press, 2021), his book Taurus won the 2011 New American Poetry Prize from New American Press, and his chapbook Tales Of The Tetragrammaton (2014) was published by Mayapple Press. His poems appear widely in magazines, including AGNI, Beloit Poetry Journal, The Kenyon Review, London Review of Books, The Missouri Review, and Plume. He lives with his wife Rebecca in Cambridge, Massachusetts and Harborside, Maine.
