Member News

Sortings is a collection of poems focusing on the process of making distinctions, reflecting on life’s experiences, trying to discover and express what really mattered and continues to matter. The book explores a variety of subjects – childhood and growing up, the natural world, travel, artworks, and teaching. A major focus of this collection is the sorting through recent experiences with the poet’s mother as she traveled from the vital, funny, ironic, loving person she was, to becoming a 96-year-old elder struggling with the torments of dementia. The book has a kind of emotional coherence and a narrative arc, moving from memory to more recent subjects that inevitably link the now to the then.

https://www.dosmadres.com/shop/sortings-by-ann-taylor/

Congratulations to Tim Mayo, NEPC poet, whose chapbook, Notes to the Mental Hospital Timekeeper, won honorable mention in the 2020 Eric Hoffer Book Awards!

Hilary Sallick, NEPC vice president, discusses her recent publication, Asking the Form: “A small regret is that I didn’t include the dates of publication along with the acknowledgments of those journals that published some of the poems in Asking the Form…”

Carolyne Wright (lifetime NEPC member since 1992), has received a 2020-2021 Fulbright Scholar Award to Bahia, Brazil, which she hopes to take up after the global COVID-19 travel advisory is lifted. Her most recent book is This Dream the World: New & Selected Poems (Lost Horse Press, 2017), whose title poem won the NEPC’s Firman Houghton Award as well as a Pushcart Prize, and was also included in The Best American Poetry 2009. Also appearing in 2017 was the bilingual sequence Trazas de mapa, trazas de sangre / Map Traces, Blood Traces by Chilean poet Eugenia Toledo (Mayapple Press, 2017), a Finalist for the 2018 Washington State Book Award and the 2018 PEN America-Los Angeles Award in Translation. Wright was co-editor of the ground-breaking anthology, Raising Lilly Ledbetter: Women Poets Occupy the Workspace (Lost Horse, 2015), which received ten Pushcart Prize nominations and was a finalist in the Foreword Review’s Book of the Year Awards. She has nine other volumes of poetry (including the Blue Lynx Prize and American Book Award-winning Seasons of Mangoes & Brainfire), a collection of essays, and four other award-winning volumes of poetry in translation from Spanish and Bengali.  Wright has served as Visiting Poet and Writer at colleges and universities throughout the U.S., including Harvard, Radcliffe, Emory University and the University of Miami. She returned in 2005 to her native Seattle, where she teaches for Richard Hugo House, the Whidbey Writers Workshop MFA Program (from 2005 until the program’s closure in 2016), and for national and international literary conferences and festivals. She has received grants from the NEA, 4Culture, Seattle’s Office of Arts & Culture, and the Instituto Sacatar in Bahia, Brazil. 

Ellie O’Leary’s debut poetry collection, Breathe Here, has been published by North Country Press. Travel with these poems from the Boston Public Library through Freedom Village to points beyond, including Jerusalem and Howth (Ireland). Snowdrops and day lilies, cancer and divorce, loss and renewal are all in here as the poet attempts to keep on going, to keep on breathing.

Ellie O’Leary grew up in the village of Freedom, Maine and writes about it from many angles. Her writing has brought her opportunities that include hosting a radio show, organizing a new writing program at an Adirondacks retreat center, and earning an MFA in Maine’s Stonecoast program. She is a resident of Amesbury, Massachusetts where she serves as Poet Laureate. Her debut poetry collection is Breathe Here (North Country Press, 2020). Her memoir Up Home Again is forthcoming, also with North County Press.

Alice Fulton’s Citation: “Throughout her distinguished career, Martha Collins has devised a poetics of justice and revelation. Her singular aesthetic reaches its apogee in this sequence that witnesses personal devastation and testifies to the terrifying forces of love and grief. William Carlos Williams asked poets to write “a new kind of measure,” “the poem as a field of action,” and Collins’s innovative work answers the challenge. A life-altering tragedy is enacted in a prosody built from silence and fractured language. Radical loss decimates lines that stumble and stutter in resonant spasms. The “story”— and its emotional backlash—levitate from the fissures of a flayed syntax. Williams also advised poets to “listen to the language for the discoveries we hope to make.” But Collins must listen to discoveries she never hoped to make. Because what else could she do? The pathos of that desperate question transfigures these minimalist poems that testify to the excruciations of shame, the malevolence of scams, the sadness of delusional disorders, the helplessness of guilt and mourning. The linguistic surface is planed; the rhetoric free of pedantry or archness. Negative space vibrates with contained emotion, and it is especially moving to feel such intensity emerge from a purposefully limited palette. I could not stop reading.”
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