The succinct poems of Small Sovereign explore the paradox of personal power and powerlessness with irony and tenderness: “I am a clumsy giant/trying desperately not/to destroy my own city.” Poet Michael Favala Goldman interrogates our attempts to bridge the gap between the material world and emotion-based relationships.
– from Homestead Lighthouse Press.
Eleanor Kedney’s collection Between the Earth and Sky (C&R Press, 2020) has been named a 2021 New Mexico-Arizona Book Awards finalist in Poetry. Other honors include the 2019 riverSedge Poetry Prize (University of Texas Rio Grande Valley) for her poem “Bubbles Blown through a Wand” and a 2020 Mslexia finalist Prize for her poem “Imagine,” and a finalist mention for the 2020 Best Book Award (American Book Fest). Her poems have appeared in journals, magazines, and anthologies, including Fjords Review, Miramar Poetry Journal, New Ohio Review, and Under a Warm Green Linden. Kedney is the founder of the Tucson branch of the New York-based Writers Studio, and served as the director for ten years. She is a Tucson Poetry Festival board member. To purchase Between the Earth and Sky from the publisher, click
Author Photo by Chris Conforti
Thomas DeFreitas is celebrating the recent publication of his chapbook Winter in Halifax (Kelsay Books). This collection of 26 poems includes “The Old Dry Dock” (an ode to a Boston barroom), “Our Lady of Cambridge” (finding the Madonna in unlikely places), “Chasing the Waves” (the poet’s elegiac remembrance of his father), and “Detox” (a sobering look at the consequences of alcoholism). Cathie Desjardins has praised the volume, and has observed “[a] skillful use of language and form [that] unerringly serves what’s being closely observed or recalled.”
Laura Budofsky Wisniewski’s Sanctuary, Vermont, is the winner of the 2020 Orison Poetry Prize.
Here, past, present, and future residents of Sanctuary, a richly imagined Vermont town, are given voice. Laura Budofsky Wisniewski joins the lineage of Edgar Lee Masters, Gwendolyn Brooks, and Louise Glück in inhabiting and valorizing the extraordinary inner lives of everyday people. Sanctuary’s townspeople endure hardships and loneliness, suffer injustice and racism, but still find moments of solace, beauty, and communion.
More information about his book can be found here: https://huergayfierro.com/hasta-que-no-haya-luna/
Masquerade is a jazz-inflected, lyric-narrative sequence of poems, a “memoir in poetry” set principally in pre-Katrina New Orleans and in Seattle, involving an interracial couple who are artists and writers. Moved by mutual fascination, shared ideals and aspirations, and the passion they discover in each other, the two are challenged to find a place together in the cultures of both races and families, amidst personal and political dislocations as well as questions of trust—all against the backdrop of America’s racism and painful social history. The twentieth century’s global problem, the color line, as W. E. B. du Bois named it, is enacted here in microcosm between these lovers and fellow artists, who must face their own fears and unresolved conflicts in each other. Similar stories have been told from the male protagonist’s point of view; Masquerade is unique in foregrounding the female perspective. Here are online links for a few of the poems that will be in the book:
Bass River Press (an imprint of the Cultural Center of Cape Cod) and Calliope Poetry have teamed up to publish a new poetry collection that explores the beauty, history, and … Read more
NEPC Advisory Member Denise Washington is one of the presenters!
Register for the Zoom link and find more information here
Rozzie Reads Poetry and Open Mic
Thursday, June 17th, 2021, 7 pm on Zoom
Sponsored by Friends of the Roslindale LibraryFeatured Poets
Born and raised in the Philippines, José Edmundo Ocampo Reyes is the author of Present Values, winner of the Jean Pedrick Chapbook Award from the New England Poetry Club. His poems have appeared most recently in Scoundrel Time, Solstice, and Memorious; and have been anthologized in The Powow River Anthology (Volumes I and II), Villanelles, and The Achieve Of, The Mastery: Filipino Poetry and Verse from English, mid-‘90s to 2016.
Wendy Drexler’s third poetry collection, Before There Was Before, was published by Iris Press in 2017. Her poems have appeared in Barrow Street, J Journal, Lily Poetry Review, Nimrod, Pangyrus, Prairie Schooner, Salamander, South Florida Poetry Review, among others. Her work has been featured on Verse Daily and WBUR’s Cognoscenti, and in numerous anthologies. She is poet in residence at New Mission High School in Hyde Park, MA, and is programming co-chair for the New England Poetry Club.
To sign up for this Zoom reading, contact hguran@aol.comand let me know if you want to read in the open microphone
Friends of Roslindale Branch Library
www.friendsofroslindalelibrary
