Member News

In The Plague of the Tender-Hearted, Cindy Frenkel makes her way through the maze of family death, divorce, even a brother’s suicide without ever losing the ability to embrace joys small and large. Despite heart-rending troubles there is still beauty in the natural world, the discovery of an unlikely new love, and moments with a beloved daughter when night “stars spill out, / enough to occupy the universe.”

–Mary Jo Firth Gillett

With her three-part alchemy of plain speaking, suddenly perfect metaphors, and explosive, morally anchored last lines, Cindy Frenkel portrays a family in The Plague of the Tender- Hearted. From the witty to the elegiac, the poems quest for the why beneath a brother’s suicide and examine the underside of prosperity. But the marvels of this collection are the sassy buoyant poems of love for a daughter and unexpected love after divorce. Frenkel uses memory, the dynamics of ageing parents, and the legacy of the holocaust to pierce us with her bullseye poetic one-liners. The Plague of the Tender-Hearted, with its gem-like rhymes, is both an exploration and a revelation.

–Molly Peacock, author of The Analyst and Cornucopia: New & Selected Poems

New book captures New England from another time

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.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HcT5xAd4TiU&authuser=0

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/. 

Out of Order can be ordered from the publisher:
https://mainstreetragbookstore.com/product-tag/howard-faerstein/
or purchased directly from Howard. If interested, write to hfaerstein@aol.com