Member News

NEPC poet and board member Wendy Drexler is reading with NEPC poet (and award winner!) José Edmundo Ocampo Reyes on Thursday, June 17, 7 pm!

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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

Congratulations to NEPC poet and board member Jennifer Markell on her new book!

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Jennifer Markell‘s first poetry collection, Samsara, (Turning Point, 2014) was named a “Must Read Book of Poetry” by the Massachusetts Book Awards, 2015. Her work has appeared in publications including The Bitter Oleander, The Cimarron Review, Consequence Magazine, RHINO, Tinderbox Poetry Journal, and The Women’s Review of Books. For the past twenty years Jennifer has worked in community mental health and as a psychotherapist. She lives with her husband and two well-versed cats. Singing at High Altitude (available for pre-order from The Main Street Rag) is her second book of poetry.

“The high-altitude singing in Jennifer Markell’s poetry comes not only from birds on the wing. In these poems we hear dreams and longings, odes and elegies, love-songs and laments. We hear also of piercing childhood memories, harsh societal bewilderments, and dire ecological warnings. These beautifully crafted and deeply moving poems are the songs of ongoing life on this earth, and they rise as high as we allow our imaginations to take them.”–Fred Marchant, Author of Said Not Said (Graywolf Press)

Congratulations to NEPC poet Cindy Frenkel on the publication of her book!

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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

Congratulations to NEPC poet Gregory Joseph Firlotte on the publication of his new book!

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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

Announcing a new book by NEPC poet Gloria Mindock!

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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

Congratulations to NEPC poet Shanta Lee Gander on her forthcoming book!

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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

Congratulations to NEPC poet Stephen M. Honig on the publication of his new chapbook!

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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.