Congratulations to Ellie O’Leary!

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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.

Congratulations to Martha Collins, the 2020 recipient of the Poetry Society of America’s William Carlos Williams Award for her book Because What Else Could I Do (University of Pittsburgh Press)

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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.”
https://poetrysociety.org/about/news/annoucing-the?fbclid=IwAR3eZTTtnjKgv0fahFIS5rDutJ-Hm7IaR0F-zFXOMW_dTMbwFIzgTA4qc7Y

Congratulations to Eleanor Kedney on the publication of her new book!

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In Eleanor Kedney’s Between the Earth and Sky, a brother’s heroin addiction is at the center of a family where love is difficult to accept from one another, yet it is the thing that delivers understanding and forgiveness to a sister who bravely carries the family legacy.

Praise for Between the Earth and Sky

“Grief, as we all know, is a country without borders, without laws. In her stunning first collection, Eleanor Kedney speaks to it in a language of metaphor, of love and loss, a language of ‘howl, full throttle, singing the way children sing / before they learn not to.’ These brave, forthright poems deal with a lost, addicted brother, an absent father, a mother making do with a fate as ‘thin and papery as moth wings.’ Her true subject is pain and the solace of poetry in dealing with it. Indeed, ‘the wind is a dangerous thing,’ as is the courage it takes to observe and take note of the beautiful colors of ‘a cold and long white sky.’ There is magic in these poems, the magic of the imagination used to make remedy and comfort out of the pain of loss. A bravo performance, in so many important ways.”
—Philip Schultz, winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry 

“In these pages, Eleanor Kedney has given language to a deep confrontation with despair and turned it into something generous and rewarding for readers. How do we make sense of who we are? What other lives shimmer beneath our skin? How do we understand our dead? Kedney answers these questions (and more) with the tenacity and precision of an alchemist. And like any good purveyor of magic, she reveals a map to elicit all that is both holy and profane. She reminds us that if we are awake to music, to wonder, our words will allow us to talk to all that remains inerrable. I read this book and was strangely transformed, alive to ‘lifted bones, returned to emptiness.’ ”
—Juliet Patterson, winner of the Nightboat Books Poetry Prize

“Between the Earth and Sky is a wonderful book about vibrant, generous grieving. As Eleanor Kedney looks toward nature to mourn her parents and her brother, we see these complicated, pained people in a millipede, a lizard, a particular bleeding tree, and their absence blooms. When we commune with Kedney’s keen images, it’s as though we, too, are being visited. We feel what has been lost and what remains because we’re with a master of unvarnished elegy, of the ‘ungroomed silences’ that punctuate our days, of a gravel-throated lyricism. These are truly good poems about nature, addiction, devotion, forgiveness; about what we do to gather ourselves together and, although diminished, sing.”
—David Wanczyk, editor of New Ohio Review

“Eleanor Kedney’s Between the Earth and Sky takes an unflinching look at life, and the hard facts of death. . . . This is poetry of absolute clarity that cherishes each incident, memory, and simple detail that together choose life—despite all the losses—and lets it sing.”
—Christopher Buckley