A poem by Sara Backer is featured EACH Friday in April 2021 in Cut Bank Journal Online! Check it out! http://www.cutbankonline.org/weekly-flash-prose-and-prose-poetry/
Congratulations to NEPC poet Sara Backer!
Congratulations to NEPC poet and Plymouth Poet Laureate Stephan Delbos on the publication of his new book!
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/.
New Poetry & Open Mic, April 11, 2021, 3 pm, with Kelly DuMar, Ruth Smullin, Ann Taylor
Join the New England Poetry Club on April 11, 2021, 3 pm.for New Poetry & Open Mic with Kelly DuMar, Ruth Smullin, and Ann Taylor who will read from their new books of poetry. (Bios and book purchasing information below.)
This event is free and open to the public. Members will receive the zoom link information in a newsletter; please email info@nepoetryclub.org if you are not a member. Sign-up for the open mic in the chat box before the reading begins.
Kelly DuMar is a poet, playwright and workshop facilitator who is the author of three poetry collections, girl in tree bark, All These Cures, and Tree of the Apple. Her plays are published by dramatic publishers, and her poems, prose and photos are published in many literary journals including Bellevue Literary Review, Tupelo Quarterly, Crab Fat, Storm Cellar, Corium & Tiferet. Kelly serves on the Board of the International Women’s Writing Guild (IWWG), and produces the Bi-Monthly Open Mic Writer Series attended by women worldwide. Kelly founded and leads the Farm Pond Writer’s Collective, now in its fifth year, and facilitates a variety of creative writing workshops in person and online. She blogs her daily nature photos & creative writing at kellydumar.com/blog
Purchasing information: girl in tree bark
Ruth Smullin grew up in inner city and suburban Boston where she currently lives. Her work has been published in Atlanta Review, Common Ground Review, Constellations, Crucible (winner of the Sam Ragan Prize), Ibbetson Street, Naugatuck River Review, Plainsongs, Sow’s Ear Poetry Review, The Aurorean, and is forthcoming from Main St. Rag. Her chapbook, The Open Door, was published by Finishing Line Press in 2020.
Purchasing information: If you wish to purchase The Open Door, please email Ruth Smullin at rasmullin@verizon.net.The cost is $10, which includes shipping to any address in the USA.
Ann Taylor is a Professor of English at Salem State University in Salem, Mass. where she teaches both literature and writing courses. She has written two books on college composition, academic and free-lance essays, and a collection of personal essays, Watching Birds: Reflections on the Wing (Ragged Mountain/McGraw Hill). Her first poetry book, The River Within, won first prize in the 2011 Cathlamet Poetry competition at Ravenna Press. A chapbook, Bound Each to Each was published in 2013. Her most recent collection, published in 2018, Héloïse and Abélard: the Exquisite Truth, is based on the twelfth-century story of their lives.
Purchasing information: www.dosmadres.com
See the inimitable Regie Gibson, NEPC advisory member, March 25, 7:30 pm!
An extra-terrestrial visits earth and assumes human appearance. He is “curiously drawn to the Americans” yet, is unable to penetrate the essence of who they are. He finds that American literature helps him better understand them. Weaving together, music, visual imagery, story, and song, Here, Among the Americans… is a spoken word journalistic exploration into the modern poetic voice of this country—a voice, at this time in our history, needs so much to listen to.
Works by Robert Hayden, Walt Whitman, Langston Hughes, Emma Lazarus, Kent Forman, & Regie Gibson. Music by Guy Mendilow and Mazz Swift
With some segments filmed on site at Porter Square BooksRegie O’Hare Gibson Regie Gibson ProjectGuy Mendilow Ensemble Sarah De Besche
https://www.broadbandcollab.com/product-page/regie-gibson-letter-and-spirit-here-among-the-americans
Congratulations to NEPC member Howard Faerstein on the publication of his new chapbook!
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
New Poetry & Open Mic, March 14, 3 pm, with Linda Haviland Conte, Timothy Gager, Eleanor Kedney
Join us for a reading of poetry by NEPC members with new books!
Until further notice, all events will be online; this series is free and open to the public.
Members will receive the zoom link information in a newsletter; please email info@nepoetryclub.org if you are not a member.
Bios for New Poetry Reading, March 14, 2021
Linda Haviland Conte is the author of Seldom Purely (Ibbetson Street Press, 2020) and Slow As A Poem (Ibbetson Street Press, 2002). Her work also appears in several anthologies and magazines. She was a panelist at the Massachusetts and New Hampshire Poetry Festivals (2017). Linda is Treasurer and Membership Coordinator for The New England Poetry Club. Seldom Purely is available at Lulu, Barnes & Noble, and Amazon.
People can message her through my website (lindaconte.net) to order my chapbook Slow As A Poem.
Timothy Gager is the author of sixteen books of fiction and poetry. His latest, an Amazon #1 Best Seller, Poems of 2020,is his ninth of poetry. Timothy hosted the successful Dire Literary Series in Cambridge, Massachusetts from 2001 to 2018, and as a virtual series starting in 2020. Timothy was the co-founder of The Somerville News Writers Festival. He has had over 600 works of fiction and poetry published, of which seventeen have been nominated for the Pushcart Prize. His work also has been nominated for a Massachusetts Book Award, The Best of the Web, The Best Small Fictions Anthology, and has been read on National Public Radio.
Purchase link:
2020 Poems by Timothy Gager | BigTablePublishing
Eleanor Kedney is the author of the full-length collection Between the Earth and Sky (C&R Press, 2020) and the chapbook The Offering (Liquid Light Press, 2016). Between the Earth and Sky is a 2020 Best Book Award Finalist in Poetry (American Book Fest). Her work has appeared in Miramar Poetry Journal, New Ohio Review, Under a Warm Green Linden, Sliver of Stone, and other journals, and anthologies. Her poem “Bubbles Blown through a Wand” won the 2019 riverSedge Poetry Prize (University of Texas Rio Grande Valley). “A Park Bench in Prague” was nominated for a Pushcart Prize by Fjords Review. Kedney is the founder of the Tucson branch of the New York-based Writers Studio, and served as the director for ten years. She lives in Stonington, Connecticut and Tucson, Arizona. Learn more at eleanorkedney.com.
To purchase Between the Earth and Sky please visit C&R Press: C&R Press or email Eleanor Kedney at eleanorkedney@yahoo.com for a signed copy.
Congratulations to NEPC poet Paul Nemser, winner of the Editor’s Choice Award from Red Mountain Press!
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.