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The Birth of a Press Part 7: Snags, Roadblocks, & Near Catastrophies

September 25, 2020 By Dimitri Reyes Leave a Comment

Snags, Roadblocks, & Near Catastrophies

Admittedly, the temptation is there to leave off the Birth of a Press with a summation of our mission and description of our programs. It might seem then that our growth and development proceeded without a hitch, which is far from the truth. Though we have emerged satisfied and quite successful, we certainly have had our snags and roadblocks—even a few mild catastrophes (mild only in the sense that we would not be beaten by them).

Distributors

Probably the most disastrous catastrophe occurred in 2002, when our distributor filed Chapter 11 and took our money and our inventory with them, but let’s back up for a minute. At CavanKerry’s inception, we had been of interest to both Consortium and University Press of New England. But after several meetings, both of them bowed out for fear that we would not be able to pull off what we proposed. I was never anything but completely honest about my lack of publishing experience, and since I had to find a distributor before I actually produced books and could build a track record, they were reluctant to take the chance. At this point, we were close to print with Howard Levy’s book, and we were very concerned about not having a way to get the books out there.

I spoke with a marketing expert who recommended that I contact a publishing consultant she knew who had worked for one of the large publishing houses as the company liaison with their distributors. He had subsequently left the corporate world to start his own consulting business and was available to search out a distributor for us; he found us LPC. They appeared to be an excellent choice because they were known for their interest in poetry, and in fact had represented it at many small press conferences. Soon after we signed on with them, our books were everywhere; sometime later we had a call from the Barnes and Noble corporate offices offering to do a special promotion of Breath of Parted Lips: Voices from the Robert Frost Place in over 600 of their stores during the Christmas season.

But that never panned out; the honeymoon was short-lived. We could not reach the LPC sales representatives by phone, catalogs were not printed, and there were long gaps between payment checks. I was very wary and spoke repeatedly to our expensive consultant/liaison who tried to reassure me that LPC remained strong and healthy. I finally decided to bypass him and wrote to the LPC CEO stating that, as soon as our contract was up (which was a matter of weeks), I wanted to end our relationship. I requested the return of our inventory. I heard nothing. Within a month, we received a letter from the bankruptcy court announcing their dissolution. The next several months were filled with costly communications with lawyers and pleas to the court to release our inventory. During this time, not only did we lose tens of thousands of dollars owed to us in sales, but we had no books to sell, so we couldn’t even find another distributor to represent us. When we finally got our inventory back many months later, we signed on with Small Press Distribution and remained with them for several years.

I learned a great deal from that experience—firstly, that no one, specifically no distributor, would hold all of our inventory ever again; while it had been very seductive to have them house our books, relieving us of the responsibility and expense of storing them ourselves, it cost us dearly. Secondly, I committed to listening more to my own feelings and concerns early on. I had long been uncomfortable with the service we were getting from LPC (almost from the outset), and though I verbalized it to our staff and to our consultant, they cautioned me to be more patient and not jump the gun as I was often known to do. Though they were trying to protect the press and my name as an extension of CavanKerry, in retrospect, I wish I had jumped the gun and gotten out of the gate before our inventory was commandeered. I wonder if there is any such thing as jumping the gun when the business is yours and the buck stops with you? I think not.

A she lion, as are all creators of businesses, I knew intuitively when my baby was threatened, but I held back out of my concern that I not be too precipitous or rash. Rash?! What would have been so terrible?! I had a clause in my contract with LPC that I could also sell our books through SPD and SPD had accepted us. But we didn’t follow through; we didn’t think we needed two distributors. We were all hoping for the millions of sales we would make through our commercial distributor, so we were lulled into believing that things would improve. Alas, this was not the end of our distribution problems.

Though our relationship with Small Press Distribution was a very good one and their staff and service excellent, our book sales did not grow as we had hoped. After two years, it became abundantly clear that the only way to increase sales was with a sales force. SPD did not have one. A book wholesaler rather than a distributor, it relied on print catalogs and internet promotion. CKP already had a very liberal and generous advertising program in place whereby our books were well represented in the literary journals, Poets & Writers, and other trade magazines, but that was not enough. We needed sales people meeting in person with booksellers to draw attention to our books. Once again, our staff thought I should be patient. This time I was not.

In what felt like my endless search for a national distributor, I revisited Consortium but was turned down for the second time—this time because, though we proved we could do a great job of publishing poetry, all of their other presses were publishing poetry as well, and the market was glutted with it. Sales were very poor and they did not welcome another kid on the block. There weren’t enough sales to go around as it was.

In addition to several other national distributors, we also approached University Press of New England once again. They were going through their own growing pains and struggling with reduced sales of their own books and initially did not want to take on another press’ potential troubles. Relentless, I all but hounded them. Several good friends of CavanKerry— among them Syd Lea, Cleopatra Mathis, and Don Sheehan— approached them. We sent them our sales figures, our projections, our catalogs, our ads, our pleas. They finally agreed. From the outset, our sales increased over 150%.

After many successful years with UPNE, we noticed a drop off in 2018 in their marketing efforts and sales results. By summer, they announced that they would shutter operations at the end of the year. By November, they were gone and, yet again, we were set adrift. This time, at least, we had our books – our precious books. Nonetheless, this kicked off several months of hunting and consulting with other presses experiencing the same limbo, before we came to rest with the University of Chicago Press. We are grateful that, with their Chicago Distribution Center offering fulfilment and marketing support, we can return our full attention to the art of bookmaking.

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The Birth of a Press Part 6: CavanKerry’s Commitment to Community

August 14, 2020 By Dimitri Reyes Leave a Comment

Commitment to Community

Like the soft place in my heart reserved for First Books and LaurelBooks, I have another for our community outreach programs that bring poetry to new audiences. In fact, very early on, when someone asked me for a phrase, (a possible tagline) that would describe CKP, I immediately answered, “a not-for-profit press that serves both art and community.” And that we do. In fact, our community programs are our lifeblood. As I mentioned earlier, I was raised in a community that took care of each other—be it building extensions on one another’s houses, minding the children, or organizing a beach patrol to fix up the beach so the kids could swim in safe, clean water. In addition to my concern for including the general reader in the poetry banquet, it’s natural for me to want to create that same spirit of connectedness and generosity in CKP.

One such program is GiftBooks, which brings fine literature to underserved populations. The idea came from a story I read sometime ago of a man who stood on a corner giving out free poetry books to passersby. This seemed like such a simple way to share poetry with people who might otherwise not be privy to it. Though we don’t quite stand on street corners, we do give liberally; in our 20 years of service we’ve donated nearly 35,000 books to underserved communities in such places as geriatric centers, shelters, hospitals, correctional facilities, schools, and underfunded libraries. Operation “Support Our Troops” and the Widows and Children’s Fund of Police and Firefighters Lost on 9/11, as well as schools and libraries damaged by Katrina are three of our early recipient groups among countless others. Most recently, we’ve donated over 700 books to 15 hospitals to support our frontline healthcare workers during COVID-19. Requests from interested agencies are welcomed.

Another of our outreach programs is Presenting Poetry & Prose, which focuses on bringing literary art to people where they live—into their own homes and meeting places. The original “Presenting Poetry & Prose” was a program I founded and curated at the John Harms Center for the Arts in Englewood, New Jersey. Though the program was desired and highly successful to the writers who participated and the audience we were able to attract, it was unable to sustain itself because we could not maintain an audience. It occurred to me at that time that to ask people to come out of their homes to a theatre to listen to poetry on a weeknight, as nice as it was, would be somewhat unrealistic. People are inundated with time commitments to family, work and rest and have little time (and inclination, I believe) to break away to come to hear poetry being read. In addition, since most poetry and prose readings take place in libraries and bookstores, they tend to be attended only by those who visit these places, which excludes a large percentage of the reading population. As we pointed out earlier in this discussion, it was clear that we needed to bring the poetry to the audience rather than ask them to come to us.

Thus, CavanKerry brings poetry into people’s neighborhoods and community centers through free readings at hospitals, community centers, churches, schools, synagogues, prisons etc. We do this in two ways. First, we accept requests for free readings from the general reading public/specific groups and work with the individual/social director/librarian to arrange these readings in which CK writers read their own work and the work of others, without any cost to the person or organization requesting it. Usually 2-3 CK writers participate in each reading/discussion. In addition, “Presenting Poetry & Prose” is an outgrowth of the GiftBooks program in that populations that receive free books are also offered free readings and workshops. These too are sponsored and organized by CK and conducted by CK poets.

In lieu of in-person appearances during the COVID-19 pandemic, we have made our two editions of The Waiting Room Reader free for download on our website and provided weekly excerpts from our books in our “Words to Keep You Company” series, as well as curating and collecting new writing from several of our authors in response to the state of the nation in our “Dispatches from 2020” series. Further, former Associate Publisher Teresa Carson, other guest writers, and I have made consistent new contributions to our blog. Each of these efforts serves to offer a window for our writers to connect with our readers during this time of isolation and desperation.

Finally, and perhaps most importantly, as part of their contractual agreement with CavanKerry, our writers are committed to three free outreach efforts each year while their book is in print; these are over and above any marketing or literary readings/workshops they do. Thus, our writers go out into their own communities and bring their poems and stories to listeners: offering workshops/readings, mentoring younger writers, visiting infirm writers et al. CavanKerry writers then become the spine of our community outreach: they participate in other CK activities as part of a communal or cooperative body. In addition to being excellent writers, each is an excellent teacher and reader. Writers who have published their first book have learned a great deal about the heroic making of poems: they thereby have a great deal to offer students of poetry. Writers are welcome visitors to ailing individuals and members of the writing community in need; they make themselves available to go out to read & conduct workshops to underserved communities in their geographical area.

A Community of Writers

The twin to our community of readers is CKP’s commitment to creating a community of writers as a partial antidote to the isolation and loneliness that we writers often feel. Our goal was to create a community where writers could share their art and the process of making art. Towards that end, we instituted the CKP Writer’s Summit which once occurred annually at my home. The summit included 5 hours of poems, conversation, and good food and touched on topics of interest and concern to the writers and the press. Additionally, CKP or the writers themselves arrange for readings and events in which they can read together and introduce each other’s work; these are joyful occasions when the poets share their work to each other and a broader audience.

CavanKerry writers also participate with CK where we need them—in reading new manuscripts, in recommending others, writing articles for the CKP newsletter, offering workshops, helping with fundraising, and organizing events. Throughout the ongoing quarantine, we have launched virtual programming and readings featuring 12 of our authors in collaboration with multiple institutions, including Caldwell University and the Poetry Society of NY to further connect with our authors during this period where in-person events are not possible. More and more, we resemble that community we set out to create.

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The Birth of a Press Part 5: CavanKerry’s Commitment to the Art of Fine Literature

June 24, 2020 By Dimitri Reyes Leave a Comment

Literary Art

Not surprisingly, the publishing of First Books/ New Voices has always been at the forefront of CavanKerry’s concerns. New, talented writers are abundant, yet the doors remain mostly shut to them! We decided to focus on this very worthy group with the hope that more publishers would join us in the cause; perhaps, others would start presses as well! This concern included a commitment to an embargo on competitions and reading fees. In their emphasis on winners and losers, competitions seem to subliminally pit writers against one another and exacerbate the envy and insecurity that often already exists. While fiction writers and poets of considerable reputation are often free from the burden of contest entries and reading fees, unpublished poets as well as those with short publishing histories face prohibitive and costly expenses just for the chance to get noticed. This breeds resentment and can be fatal to prospects of brilliant-yet- unpublished works of fine literature. We reasoned that these works deserved the same rights to be seen and read by all.

As a result, we made a commitment to publish 2-3 First Books/New Voices every year; manuscripts would come from open submissions and recommendations as well as from the considerable array of worthy poets I already knew. Due to the fact that publishing (like so many other industries/arts) seems to venerate the young, particular notice is given to older poets. That said, no generation has been neglected—our writers range in age from late twenties to early eighties.

Of the 100+ books we have published, we can proudly say that many of our writers have gone onto flourishing careers. Beginning in September of 2000 with our own first book, A Day this Lit by Howard Levy, we have since published reputable names, such as Karen Chase, Peggy Penn, Sherry Fairchok, Sondra Gash, Liz Hutner, Christopher Matthews, Eloise Bruce, Celia Bland, Catherine Doty, Giorgianna Orsini, Joan Seliger Sidney, Laurie Lamon, Chris Barter, Andrea Carter Brown, Robert Seder, Richard Jeffrey Newman, Ross Gay, Joseph Legaspi, Christine Korfhage and Teresa Carson just to name a few.

On the other side of the publishing spectrum, out-of-print books also concerned us. The plethora of exquisite work allowed to go out-of-print due to slow/limited sales is staggering. We added these to our list and committed ourselves to publishing reprints of fine books that we believe deserve permanence while doing all we could to not allow any of our own books from going out of print. Martin Mooney’s Grub was our first reprint. I was drawn to him first as a gifted writer and that interest deepened once I heard that his publisher had ‘pulped’ the 600 copies of Grub that remained in storage without informing Martin. Nor did they invite him to purchase or simply remove them. Worst of all, he discovered the fate of his books when he contacted his publisher and was unable to purchase books for a reading. Grub along with Moyra Donaldson’s Snakeskin Stilettos were our first reprints.

CavanKerry’s interest in writers who are “under-recognized” or “rejected by the literary mainstream” came to include a scope broader than merely poets who were previously unpublished. Many seasoned, mid-career poets are forced to solicit a new publisher for each new book. CavanKerry has provided a home for many of these Notable Voices, including Robert Cording, Mary Ruefle, Kenneth Rosen, Jack Wiler, Karen Chase, Baron Wormser, Sam Cornish and more.

Another interest of ours are intelligent, insightful works that focus on the creative process and the making of art; these are CK Critical Collections. Our Carolyn Kizer (introduction by Maxine Kumin) and John Haines (introduction by Dana Gioia) books collect the essays and poems of reputable poets and essayists across the country who have studied the works of these two brilliant writers and write in depth about it.

Our initial aesthetic commitment goes hand-in hand with our community focus which revolves around our interest in special projects. CavanKerry has published two collections to benefit another arts organization. The Breath of Parted Lips: Voices from the Robert Frost Place, Volumes 1 and 2 were published to honor the great work of The Robert Frost Place Center for Poetry and the Arts in Franconia, New Hampshire under the protective mantle of former executive director, Donald Sheehan, where many notable and fledgling artists, including myself, have made and shared poems.

LaurelBooks

But we were not finished. Like any excited home or business builder we kept finding new rooms to add to our structure. During our second season, we found yet another category of book that we wanted to support: specifically, those that dealt openly and honestly with the profound psychological, emotional, and physical issues connected to illness. This came to us in the form of Life with Sam by Elizabeth Hutner, a book sent to us by Molly Peacock which recounted the deeply moving story in poems and photos of a woman who lost her 5 year old son to leukemia.

Having spent most of my adult life with serious (though not life threatening) orthopedic problems (two spinal fusions and one ankle fusion, among several other surgeries), I struggled as a writer with a need to confront the effects of these in my writing and a need to escape them. When I suffered a very serious fall that resulted in a trimalleolar fracture of my left ankle, I avoided the pain in my writing until Molly insisted I confront it. I balked. I didn’t want to appear self-pitying, nor did I want to write about what I was convinced no one wanted to hear. Yet, as a psychologist, I knew how important it was that I do so.

So much work about illness, including my own, seemed to tackle the problems either glibly or stoically; all seemed to avoid the emotional pain that, by necessity, accompanies serious illness. This is important and powerful work and very necessary for writers and readers alike. Readers need poems to help them live with and through their illnesses. Poems name things for us. Sometimes they name what we feel—what we cannot express on our own. They tell us that we are not alone. The incredibly courageous story of Sam brought to mind the whole array of important works that are a necessity to read for the families, caregivers, physicians, and those living with their illnesses. I wanted CavanKerry to claim this work as a major part of our mission. We approached the Arnold P. Gold Foundation for the Advancement of Humanism in Medicine requesting that they partner with us in CavanKerry’s imprint, LaurelBooks, The Literature of Illness and Disability. The name stems from my mad love affair with trees and a line from one of my poems:

Have you noticed

how the laurel dips down

crawls along the ground

to find the sun

like any life or body

that’s known love?

The Gold Foundation agreed and with them we have brought Life with Sam, in the form of both books and readings/discussions, to medical communities across the country.

Our second LaurelBook, Body of Diminishing Motion, by Joan Seliger Sidney, tells the story in poems and a memoir of a woman who has battled with Multiple Sclerosis for over 40 years. Body of Diminishing Motion was also distributed and read to the medical community as well as to a general readership. The third, fourth, and fifth LaurelBooks also deserve notice: Robert Seders’ To the Marrow is a memoir written by a man who underwent a bone marrow transplant for lymphoma; Mark Nepo’s Surviving Has Made Me Crazy is yet another powerful story in poems and memoir of a man who survived lymphoma; and Teresa Caron’s, Elegy for the Floater recounts in poems the life of an extremely dysfunctional family that focuses on the youngest sibling who committed suicide. Our 2009 LaurelBook, We Mad Climb Steep Ladders by Pam Wagner, tells the story in poems of a woman’s inevitable plunge into the madness of schizophrenia and her eventual but very slow return to a tempered sanity.

Since then, as of January 2020, we’ve had the pleasure of publishing LaurelBooks like Little Boy Blue (Grey Jacobik— a mother and her emotionally challenged son), Letters from a Distant Shore (Marie Lawson Fiala— a mother whose son suffers a cerebral hemorrhage), Motherhood Exaggerated (Judith Hannan— a mother’s story of a daughter’s Ewing’s Sarcoma), My Crooked House (Teresa Carson— experience with obsessive-compulsive disorder), Sweet World (Maureen Seaton— a woman’s recreation of life as a survivor of Breast Cancer), Cracked Piano (Margo Taft Stever— recalling a life through letters of a relative who was a victim of psychiatric incarceration in the 19th century), and The Body at a Loss (Cati Porter— a woman’s articulation of the complexities regarding diagnosis, treatment, and recovery of Cancer). LaurelBook readings have taken place at Columbia University’s Medical Schools, UMDNJ, cancer support groups, Robert Wood Johnson University Hospital, and many others. I’ll go into greater detail in the next section of the Community blog in this series.

I am very proud of this work and the positive impact it has had both within the writing community and among a more general audience. CavanKerry’s tagline is “lives brought to life,” with a simple but powerful mission to explore what it means to be human. Each of the 100+ books we have published in the last two decades has furthered that mission and worked to bring fine literature to an ever-growing audience.

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The Birth of a Press Part 4: Building Our Image

September 18, 2019 By Dimitri Reyes Leave a Comment

Our Logo

Next, I wanted a symbol for CavanKerry. Recognizing that a well conceived logo would go a long way towards advertising the press and would come to represent our books, I obsessed over this one. I wanted it to announce as many of CKP’s values as possible. I searched the Book of Kells and every book on Irish and Celtic imagery that I could find. I chose the linked horizontal circles for their separate identities, their friendship, and relatedness; each intricate, complex, and richly colored. They are the counties of Cavan and Kerry. They are my mother and father. They are my writing and together they are my country.

But the circles are far more than my history; they represent the equality of aesthetics that CavanKerry would represent. Having lived a good part of my writing life on the outside, it’s always distressed me how many journals, presses, and university programs emphasize and support only one type of poem to the exclusion of all others. My goal was to create a press that could not be defined by one aesthetic, but rather one that was inclusive. CavanKerry would not publish only my personal preference in poems but would rather strive for artistic diversity by representing a broad range of aesthetics. I am always honored and delighted when people comment that CKP writers are so different from one another and that other than the fineness of the art, one cannot define the poetry that CKP will publish. CKP looks for voices—diverse, distinct voices that are honest and accessible.

Not for Profit

One of our most critical steps was that we needed to establish the press as a not-for-profit. Since sales would never support us, grants would be necessary. And grants equaled not-for-profit. I had also reassured Alan that his money would not just dissipate; I truly believed in what I was about to do, and likewise, that once people and foundations found out about what we were doing, they would want to help support us through donations and grants. We would create a community and the community would help to keep itself alive.

I spoke with Sara Gorham at Sarabande and was given the name of an attorney who specialized in creating not-for-profits (her generosity also included suggestions for printers and a designer.) She cautioned me that to apply myself would be tricky at best, since the government did not view publishing per se as a not-for-profit venture. (Clearly, they’re more than mildly delusional about the profitability of publishing poetry!) With his help, once we defined our publishing program (which initially included First Books, Notable Voices, Reprints, Critical Collections, and Special Projects) and built a Board of Directors, we were defined as a not for profit/ 501(C)(3) organization and given five years to establish enough donor support to warrant permanent not for profit status.

Our Board of Directors

It was also clear that we needed a Board of Directors that would include experts in all of the arenas that our work would take us— a not-for-profit expert, a publisher/editor, poets, of course— and I found these in my teachers, colleagues and friends. I approached my teachers, Molly Peacock, Jerry Stern, and Louis Simpson, and poets Afaa Michael Weaver and Baron Wormser, whose creative work and integrity I admired and valued. Molly introduced me to Declan Spring, publisher/editor of New Directions, friend and not for profit guru, Didi Goldenhar, and Sandra Gold, a powerhouse of a woman and intellect and founder/chair of her own not-for-profit. Rounding out the Board along with Alan and me.

Fundraising

Fundraising was also a challenge. It rapidly became clear that my fantasy that we would readily attract supporters once our mission was clear and we were fully functioning was naïve. Not that we didn’t find grantors and donors, we very definitely did, but not as many and not as quickly as I had hoped. I was partially responsible for that.

It was my decision that we would not solicit donor support until we were well under way and had a track record that would validate our right to support. Our attorneys and accountant both disagreed with me on this but I was adamant; we waited for two years before we started an annual appeal program. In the meantime, we added a grant writer to our staff and began the exploration of available funding. During our second year, we were awarded our first 2 grants: one for LaurelBooks from the Gold Foundation which included an annual commitment to co-sponsor our Literature of Illness and Disability imprint, and the second from The Puffin Foundation for the cover of our first Laurel Book, Life With Sam. But these were from 2 private funders, it would be awhile before we could qualify for federal and NJ grants; these also required audits. In due time we received grants from NEA, NJ State Council on the Arts, and the NJ Cultural Trust along with grants from other private foundations.

Our advance period was up in 2004. We held our breath as our application for 501(C)(3) was reviewed by the Internal Revenue Service. Several tests had to be conducted on our donor numbers and would decide whether or not we had garnered enough support to warrant final 501(C)(3) status. Surprisingly, the emphasis was on the number of donors, not on the amount of their checks, so in the view of the IRS, a gift of $5 was the same as $1,000. We feared that our initial reluctance to appeal for donations until we could demonstrate that we warranted donor support significantly reduced the number of people we eventually attracted as supporters.

We were 2 years behind where we needed to be and though I still hold fast to the morality of that position, I spent that whole final year friend-and-fund-raising, in a constant state of high anxiety. The other way we could have added significantly to our donor base was if we had agreed to conduct a competition or charged reading fees for each manuscript we read. Both would have added hundreds of names to our list of supporters. But once again, these were non-negotiable; we had built our house on ‘no competitions’ and ‘no reading fees.’ We would not back pedal; principle would supersede practical.

The IRS had given us 4 to 5 years to do the critical work of building a viable press and community outreach program. In September of 2005, we received our final determination from the IRS that we were in fact made a 501(C)(3) public charity. We were afloat! We did it!

Read the Rest of “Birth of a Press”

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The Birth of a Press Part 3: “Strokes of Fortune”

August 1, 2019 By CavanKerry Press Leave a Comment

Part 3: Strokes of Good Fortune

Hallelujah!

Then as if all my collective saints, angels, and muses had heard my pleas and harangues and either concurred or together conspired to silence me, my dream became a possibility! The product of both an enormous stroke of good luck that took the form of an inheritance my husband, Alan received quite unexpectedly and most of all, his enormous generosity to me, I now had the start up capital to start my press. I was delirious. The first thing I did was call Molly and the second was to call my friends Karen Chase, Howard Levy, and Peggy Penn to tell them that I would be honored to publish their books. We were all elated.

I hit the ground running. I had to learn everything. Immediately! I decided to do it in tandem with the most capable person I knew who miraculously was looking for part-time work. Florenz Eisman (then Greenberg) was a former creative writing student of mine who, in addition to having a great gift for writing, had worked for several years as a vice president for a public relations firm. She, in the course of her career had done just about everything—from secretarial work, to research, to writing. She knew her way around people, business, and most importantly, books. Even computers!

Our Press Needed a Name

This was the first of many not-so-simple decisions we had to make. Surprisingly, in all of my dreaming, I had never come up with a name. That took considerable thought.

Remarkably at major points in my life—when life seemed to be clearing a path for me and success was in the wings, a woman in my life died. Or so it seemed. When I was given my husband, son, and Ph.D, it was my good friend Janice; when I was given my press, it was my mother. My love for Janice however was pure; my love for my mother was anything but. A driven and possessive woman, my mother was far more interested in my intellectual and social successes rather than my writing success. Her great pride was in the fact that I was a psychologist and a professional woman. It was “nice” that I wrote poems. During her illness, however, she developed a marked and seemingly earnest interest in my writing.

During her last visit to my home in East Hampton, she (and my father!) read my poems. In our family room I had a basket where I kept all of the journals that my published work was published in. I cautioned both of my parents that my work was brimming with profanity and what they’d consider obscenity, and that they violated all of Mom’s prescriptions about voicing personal family matters in public. They were undeterred as they handed poems back and forth to each other. Mom, did you read this one? Dad, look at this one.

My mother who could hardly see twisted the pages high into the light to read every poem. Remarkably, no one died. Not them. Not me. Rather than be horrified, they were interested in what the poems had to say. My father reminded me that he’d been a laborer all his life so he’d heard those words before. Nor was he surprised by all the raging that went on in the poems. They asked me questions, particularly about events recorded in the poems. They did not argue; they did not chastise; most importantly they did not judge.

It Was a Miracle of Sorts

These poems had been there in the same spot during scores of previous visits and they showed no interest in reading them, but this time they were ready. I don’t know what prompted that openness, but I know the three of us were grateful. This was an intimacy that we had never known. For years, I had kept much of myself from their view. They knew only facts about my life; I kept what mattered safe inside; I had strayed from their version of good and wholesome and I long since saw any value in exposing either them or me to the worlds that separated us. They did not need to know; I did not need to confess. Yet on this weekend, this Saturday afternoon in November— I like to think it was even Thanksgiving weekend, as we always spent it together—we were ready. The gift of that closeness served us well during my mother’s illness.

My parents have always amazed me in their ability to grow as human beings as they aged. My father’s steps were always steady and involved with virtually no regression. He held fast to what was important to him, namely his Catholicism and the Church as supreme authority, but he was open to influence about everything else. All his life, he loved to learn. The world of people and nature were magical places for him and he reveled in each story or creation.

My mother was more complicated. Her growth did not come until her cancer. Prior to that she was of one mind about most things and that mind was always hers. You couldn’t convince her of anything and she was unpredictable—completely open one day and then refusing to talk the next. If she let you in, perhaps revealing some confidence, she would quickly shut you out. After revealing a devastating account of her mother’s death when she was a very young child, she was furious when I referred to it later on. She was enraged that I had taken this secret wound from her. I had violated her. She refused to speak to me. I stayed away from her for long stretches of time.

Miraculously, however, when she got sick, she shut the door on all that anger and resentment; it was simply over. She had other places to go. Kinder, happier places in which to live. It was as if she were reborn, but this time without the darkness. With her own mother seemingly close and whole, she began forming the bedrock of love that we all count on to carry us into adulthood, trusting that the world will care for and love us. She finally knew she was blessed. She finally believed she was loved. She was grateful and said so for every kindness or attention. Being close to her was effortless. She invited it; we all accepted.

And she lost no time. She wanted to know everything about each of us. In my case, my writing—what was I writing? Was I writing? I should be writing. I should tell my story. She gave me Reader’s Digest large print books that included autobiographies of strong women. Write your story, she said. People will read it; you tell the truth. Her support was palpable and unwavering. I told her that I had been writing the memoir of my young self as a 12 year old girl. She wanted to read it; I read it to her during hospital visits; I sat by her bed for hours everyday writing while she slept.

Our Name

There was no greater gift I could have received than to be close to my mother when she was dying. It had always saddened me that such distance was necessary, but my sanity required it. Though she longed for closeness on one level, she destroyed it on every other. To face a parent’s death with coldness between you is a barren, painfully lonely land. To be able to go with her and face it together was a blessing. She talked to me of cooking for Dad, teaching him to cook, her concerns for the grandchildren, what she felt, what she wanted, what she worried about. I was able to give to her for the first time since I was a child.

Shortly after she died, the money miraculously arrived for the birth of the press. A friend suggested I name it for her. I liked the tribute and was relieved and very pleased that rather than cut her out as I had in the past, I now wanted to include her in this major event in my life. But to name it after her alone would be incomplete. There was more I wanted to say with that name and I didn’t want to exclude my father. I settled on CavanKerry—the two counties in Ireland where they were born—my father, Cavan; my mother, Kerry. Though CavanKerry would not be an “Irish” press, it was from that land—those two lands—that my own writing grew.

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The Birth of a Press Part 2: “Starting Your Own Press; The Challenge”

April 4, 2019 By CavanKerry Press Leave a Comment

Part 2: Start Your Own Press

For years, I dreamed of starting my own press that would bring out the work of all these gifted writers along with my own and get our shows on the road. Despite my initial success in contests, interest in my work diminished as my fascination with the poem as a visual life in space increased. Once I abandoned the more traditional long line that started and returned to the left margin for a form that flowed from the emotional logic of the voice and used the whole page as canvas to bring this voice to life on the page, I was ‘out there’ on my own. Clearly, the more inventive I became, the more I reduced my already slim chances of winning a competition. I had stepped over the line. Journal editors remarked on the interesting form that would be a ‘typesetting nightmare’ to publish. Others found it too distracting. With each submission I offered to have the poem typeset myself if it interested the journal editors. (Those who accepted my poems did not ask me to do that.) Clearly, if I was ever to see my poems collected in a book, I would have to publish my own.

Other friends were coming to the same conclusion about their own books. Either bite the bullet and risk castigation by the literary elite for self-publishing or abandon the work to the bottom of a dusty file cabinet. Neither solution was attractive: inviting public criticism or disappearing. Of the two, I chose the first; the latter was unthinkable. I would give myself one more year to find a way to start my own press, but if unsuccessful, I’d publish my book myself despite the fact that my preference was always to publish other work beside my own. The dilemma was more than personal; it was and still is universal.

I had no training or experience with publishing but that seemed very surmountable. I knew the books I wanted to print. I had a clear vision of what books should look like. I had ideas. Lots of ideas. Which I shared freely with anyone who would listen– Alan, my husband, Molly Peacock, my mentor, my friends, other poets, other mentors. I talked and talked…and talked. Interestingly enough, especially given my complete lack of confidence during the first three-quarters of my writing life, I had full confidence that I could create this dream press of mine. I had come through a Ph.D. program with a concentration in research, and those skills taught me a bit about how to explore more than human behavior. I would follow the same logic to learn about publishing. What I didn’t have was money. More than a minor problem.

I continued to talk. I continued to dream.

My mission became all the more urgent as I heard more and more stories about friends without publishers—in some cases after three or four books (maybe all with different presses). It had always been my assumption that once you found a publisher for your first book, your problems were solved—you could count on them to publish subsequent work (provided of course that the art remained at the highest level.) Discovering that one cannot assume one has a home with a publisher at least until one has published several books and developed a significant name in the literary community, was devastating. Publishers for the most part only supported poets whose careers were already made.

My concerns were broadening, crystallizing. Given the paucity of publishing venues for poetry, the absence of opportunities for first book publication (other than those supported by fee for entry competitions), an apparent bias against older writers, as well as one against psychological and emotionally daring work, I dreamed of a press established, first, to provide publishing opportunities for gifted writers under-recognized or rejected by the literary mainstream, and secondly, to create a community of and for writers: a home where writers could share their art and the products of that art with each other and with the greater community of readers. My childhood living in a small blue-collar community which took on each other’s burdens as their own as well as my early years at The Frost Place Center for Poetry and Arts in Franconia, New Hampshire formed the bedrock of my commitment to a community of writers. A community of writers and a community or readers: I wanted to do my part to make that happen.

The Challenge

Along the way it became clear that to sell poetry, publishers needed to expand its audience. Since marketing and selling books will only be as successful as is the product/literature desirable, the way to sell poetry is to increase both its availability and relevance to general audiences. But poetry isn’t discovered in book stores. One doesn’t happen on a great book of contemporary poetry displayed on front tables; these are reserved for Stephen King, John Grisham and self-help. Poetry tends to be hidden on back shelves and must be searched out. But only by those who know it’s there—poetry enthusiasts, not the general reader.

Poetry can often overwhelm and intimidate the general reader; in fact, many believe they aren’t smart enough to understand it, that it’s more intelligent and more important than they are. It stands apart from them—several steps above them. It makes them feel small.

I knew first- hand how intimidating poetry can be based on the way it was taught to me in college (it was never part of my grade or high school curriculum)—day after day dissecting word after word after word of The Wasteland. Alas, that experience was a wasteland for me and turned me away from poetry for many years. Not surprisingly, readers like me, diminished by the arcane ways that poetry was presented would not turn to it for pleasure or solace as those who love it do. It follows that to sell books of poetry, publishing’s challenge would be to create a readership that cares about it and believes it cares about them. Fortunately for me, many years later, having experienced the endless bliss one finds in the simple but profound brilliance of Emily Dickinson, Robert Frost, and Walt Whitman, I returned to poetry and fell very deeply in love.

In my subsequent fantasies of my dream press, I vowed that it would increase poetry’s relevance to a general readership by publishing fine art that centered on real people living real lives and written in fine but accessible language. Ours would be a poetry of heart and emotion rather than exclusively intellect and ideas. Our challenge (and that of the broader literary/publishing community), would also include bringing that poetry to its readers rather than waiting for the audience to come to it. That would require an outreach program that brought the poems and poets to people where they live— in their homes, community centers, offices, hospitals, prisons, schools, geriatric centers, shelters. I was dreaming. I was planning. I was ready. Where would the money come from?

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The Birth of a Press Part 1: “No Room at the Inn”

January 2, 2019 By CavanKerry Press 1 Comment

Part 1: No Room at The Inn

I’ve often thought of poetry as the orphan child of publishing. Commercial publishers have all but abandoned it. Other than the most visible and prestigious poetry virtuosos whose connection to a particular press give it a kind of pedigree— an aesthetic imprimatur— commercial presses do not publish poetry. There are reasons for this rather depressing state of affairs. Publishers cannot publish what they cannot sell. The audience for poetry is extremely small and is comprised mostly of writers, academics, and/or what might be considered an artistic elite. It would follow then that, since the audience is so limited, so also are the opportunities for writers of poetry seeking publishers.

To make matters worse, despite the fact that a writer may have as many as 30 or 4O poems published in literary journals, until you’ve published your first book, you are regarded as unpublished and are therefore ineligible for further awards, virtually stuck professionally. Without a book, you cannot teach. In some cases, you cannot even read your work since readings often take place in universities and book stores. Universities pay honoraria, but only to writers with published books; book stores tend to invite only published writers to read because they will sell books. Some poets turn to self-publishing for a solution, only to find it’s frowned on by the literary community. This, despite the fact that Virginia Wolfe and Walt Whitman, among many others like them, self-published. Sadly, the publishing community cannot help these new voices and rejects them when they try to help themselves.

The very noble task of keeping poetry alive then has been assumed by small independent presses. Bless them! Fortunately for all of us who write it, there are more and more cropping up every year. But alas, there are still too few to resolve the dilemma of the rudderless poet. The number of books that can be published by these underfunded small presses in a given year is a small fraction of the talent waiting in the wings for a vehicle to bring their work to their potential readers. Not surprisingly, the few available opportunities are offered to the more experienced, more widely published poets. The unfortunate result is that, other than a few occasional bows in the direction of a new talent, the majority of small presses do not print first books. Certainly not first books of poetry. They can’t afford to.

Except through contests.

Contests have become small press publishing’s very welcome resolution to the isolation of new poets. But the situation remains critical. Other than self-publishing, virtually the only way to get a book published as a new poet is to win a competition. But this means you have to be the one in a possible 2000 entrants to win one of a maximum of 15-20 first book competitions, so most new talent goes undiscovered. New poets are on their own, and the overwhelming proportion remain unpublished.

Regrettably but predictably, like their commercial older, bigger siblings, small presses too are constricted by the lack of funds, even more so since small presses that focus on poetry and literary prose do not have the popular best seller that their larger brethren count on to pay the bills. They must rely on other sources of income beyond sales. Most, therefore, are established as not–for-profit organizations that qualify for public support, such as grants and tax-deductible donations. But there too they encounter ceilings.

Small presses must live frugally. Most are founded, organized and managed by volunteers who work endless hours for little or no money. They love poetry and want to do their share to bring more of it—particularly contemporary poetry—into the world. Beyond grants and donations, most independent small presses help defray the enormous costs of giving birth to books by conducting the annual competitions mentioned above, which bring in substantial funds, making many more books possible and provide wonderful opportunities for the gifted, ‘unpublished’ writer who is the winner.

But contests have their downsides. Besides fueling the envy/competition (one winner versus hundreds, perhaps thousands of losers) that so many of us writers and artists battle with, contests require entry fees—many quite substantial. Since they are the only viable route to publication, more and more ‘unpublished’ writers spend countless dollars they often do not have entering multiple contests annually. For a fortunate few, there are letters announcing that they’ve been chosen as finalists; in the end, however, the likelihood of winning is miniscule.

The problem is even greater for an older writer. Readers for these contests are often young graduate students in creative writing programs. Their preferences in subject matter and writing style are often very different from that of their older sibs. As a result, publishing joins many other arts/professions which shy away from middle aged and senior writers—particularly those producing daring, unconventional work.

Along the way, this became my story too. I had started writing poetry when I was already 42 years old, but was now approaching 60 with no book. Sure, I’d received lots of encouraging letters from enthusiastic small press editors and contest judges telling me my book was in the running, a finalist even! Like so many others, I’d wait several months before the letter would finally come from the Academy or from Pitt… Each time, no shout of Congratulations! Instead, reaffirmations of how publishable my work is, how fine… but….

In the beginning you can’t believe it; you got here, all the way to this amazingly delicious place that says, yes! You belong here…in fact you’re right up there at the top with the best of them…. Unquestionably your book will be scooped up by another publisher, the editor reassures you; they see it time and time again; your book will find a home. And you tell everyone you know…

But then it happens again. And again… And all you want is to get your first book out there where people will read it—you imagine it beautifully placed in an artful collection. There’ll be a picture and ‘blurbs’ from people saying congratulations and calls for readings and getting to work on the second one. And you’re ready. The work is ready. But “We’re sorry…”

Too many of my friends, friends I got my MA with, friends I workshopped poems with, taught with, read with… all the same story, all this talent, all this art, all this disappointment/rejection. It was becoming increasingly clear that the likelihood of any of us winning became smaller with each year. Publishers seemed to pass over former finalists for the newest talent. Eventually we stopped entering… Some set manuscripts aside; others like me just continued to write more poems and finished second and sometimes third books and dreamed of finding them a home.

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The Birth of a Press: Commitment to Art

December 6, 2012 By CavanKerry Press Leave a Comment

Part 4 in our ongoing series, The Birth of a Press, CKP publisher Joan Cusack Handler discusses the ins and outs of running a poetry press.

Not surprisingly, at the forefront of CavanKerry’s concerns is/was the publication of FirstBooks or New Voices. Since the talent was so abundant and the doors mainly shut, we wanted to focus on this very worthy group of writers. Hopefully more publishers would pick up the cause; perhaps others would start presses. This concern included a commitment to no competitions and no reading fees. In their emphasis on winners and losers, competitions seemed to pit writers against each other and exacerbate the envy and insecurity that often already existed. And they are costly. As are reading fees. Unpublished poets as well as those with short publishing histories should have the same rights to have their books read as do poets of considerable reputation and fiction writers, neither of whom are charged reading fees.

Our commitment was/is to publish 2-3 First Books/New Voices every year; manuscripts would come from open submissions and recommendations as well as from the considerable array of worthy poets that the publisher already knew. In addition, due to the fact that publishing like so many other industries/arts seem to venerate the young, particular notice was/is given to older poets. (That said however, no generation has been neglected; our writers range in age from late twenties to early eighties.) Our first New Voices book was A Day This Lit by Howard Levy published in September of 2000. As of the Fall of 2012, of all the books we have published, we have introduced New Voices: Howard Levy, Karen Chase, Peggy Penn, Sherry Fairchok, Sondra Gash, Liz Hutner, me- Joan Cusack Handler, Christopher Matthews, Eloise Bruce, Celia Bland, Catherine Doty, Giorgianna Orsini, Joan Seliger Sidney, Laurie Lamon, Chris Barter, Andrea Carter Brown, Robert Seder, Richard Jeffrey Newman, Ross Gay, Joseph Legaspi, Christine Korfhage, and Teresa Carson.

CavanKerry’s interest in writers who are “under-recognized or rejected by the literary mainstream” came to include many more than previously unpublished poets. So too the seasoned poets at mid career (or beyond) mentioned earlier, many of whom have already published several books by as many publishers, and must, with each new book, solicit another. These are CavanKerry Notable Voices and include Robert Cording, Mary Ruefle, Kenneth Rosen, Jack Wiler, Baron Wormser and Sam Cornish.

Out of print books also concerned us. The plethora of exquisite work that is allowed to go out of print due to slow/limited sales is staggering. We added these to our list and committed to both publish reprints of fine books that we believe deserve permanence, and to do all we can to not allow any of our own books to go out of print. Martin Mooney’s Grub was our first. I was drawn to him first as a gifted writer; that interest deepened once I heard that his publisher had ‘pulped’ the 600 copies of Grub that remained in storage. Without informing Martin and at least inviting him to purchase them or simply remove them. He discovered that the books were destroyed when he contacted his publisher to purchase books for a reading. Grub and Moyra Donaldson’s Snakeskin Stilettos were our first reprints.

Another of our interests is intelligent, insightful works that focus on the creative process and the making of art; these are CK Critical Collections. Our Carolyn Kizer (introduction by Maxine Kumin) and John Haines (introduction by Dana Gioia) books collect the essays and poems of reputable poets and essayists across the country who have studied the works of these two brilliant writers and write in depth about it.

Rounding out our initial aesthetic commitment and introducing our community focus is our interest in special projects; CK published two collections to benefit another arts organization. The Breath of Parted Lips: Voices from the Robert Frost Place, Volumes 1 and 2 were published to honor the great work of The Robert Frost Place Center for Poetry and the Arts in Franconia, New Hampshire under the protective mantle of former executive director, Donald Sheehan, where many notable and fledgling artists, including myself, have made and shared poems.

Finally, it’s important to note that integral to CKP’s identity is our commitment to producing beautiful books. For CKP, books are art pieces whose visual/ physical art must equal the literary art that it frames.

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The Birth of a Press: Halleluiah!

October 25, 2012 By CavanKerry Press Leave a Comment

Part 3 in our ongoing series, The Birth of a Press, CKP publisher Joan Cusack Handler discusses the ins and outs of running a poetry press.

Then as if all my collective saints, angels and muses had heard my pleas and harangues and either concurred or together conspired to silence me, my dream became a possibility! The product of both an enormous stroke of good luck that took the form of an inheritance my husband, Alan, received quite unexpectedly and most of all, his enormous generosity to me, I now had the start up capital to start my press. I was delirious. The first thing I did was call Molly and the second was to call my friends Karen Chase, Howard Levy and Peggy Penn to tell them that I would be honored to publish their books. We were all elated.

I hit the ground running. I had to learn everything. Immediately! I decided to do it in tandem with the most capable person I knew who miraculously was looking for part-time work, Florenz Eisman (then Greenberg). In addition to having a great gift for writing, Florenz had worked for several years as a vice president for a public relations firm. She, in the course of her career had done just about everything—from managing a department to research to writing. She knew her way around people, business and most importantly, books. Even computers!

First on our agenda, our press needed a name. That was not a simple decision. Surprisingly, in all of my dreaming, I had never come up with a name. That took considerable thought.

During her last visit to my home in East Hampton, she (and my father!) read my poems for the first time. I kept all of the journals that my work had appeared in in a basket in front of the fireplace in our family room. I cautioned both of my parents that my work was brimming with profanity and what they’d consider obscenity and that they violated all of Mom’s dictates to never speak outside of our family of anything personal. They were undeterred. They handed poems back and forth to each other. Mom, did you read this one? Dad, look at this one. My mother who could hardly see twisted the pages high into the light to read every poem. Remarkably, rather than be horrified, they were interested in what the poems had to say. My father reminded me that he’d been a laborer all his life so he’d heard those words before. Nor was he surprised by all the raging that went on in the poems. They asked me questions. Particularly about events recorded in the poems. They did not argue; they did not chastise; most importantly they did not judge.

It was a miracle of sorts. These poems had been there in the same spot during scores of previous visits and they showed no interest in reading them, but this time they were ready. I don’t know what prompted that openness, but I know I was grateful. We were all three grateful. This was an intimacy that we had never known. For years I had kept much of myself from their view. They knew only facts about my life; I kept what mattered to myself; and I no longer saw any value in exposing either them or me to the worlds that separated us. Yet on this weekend, this Saturday afternoon in November let’s say –I like to think it was even Thanksgiving weekend –we always spent it together—we were ready. The gift of that closeness served us well during my mother’s illness.

My parents have always amazed me in their ability to grow as human beings as they aged. My father’s steps were always steady and involved virtually no regression. He held fast to what was important to him, namely his Catholicism and the Church as supreme authority, but he was open to influence about everything else. He loved (and still does) to learn. The world of people and nature were magical places for him and he reveled in each story or creation. My mother was more complicated. Her growth did not come until her cancer. Prior to that she was unpredictable–completely open one day and then refusing to talk the next. If she let you in –perhaps revealing some confidence, she would quickly shut you out. I stayed away from her for long stretches of time.

Miraculously however, when she got sick, she shut the door on all that anger and resentment. It was as if she were reborn, but this time without the darkness, her own dead mother (she died when my Mom was 6) close and whole, forming the bedrock of love that we all count on to carry us into adulthood trusting that the world will care for and love us. She finally knew she was blessed. She finally believed she was loved. She was grateful and said so for every kindness or attention. Being close to her was effortless. She invited it; I/we all accepted. And she lost no time. She wanted to know everything about each of us. In my case, my writing—What was I writing? Was I writing? I should be writing. I should tell my story. She gave me Reader’s Digest large print books that included autobiographies of strong women. Write your story, she said. People will read it; you tell the truth. Her support was palpable and unwavering. I told her that I had been writing the memoir of my young self as a 12 year old girl. I read it to her during hospital visits then sat by her bed for hours writing while she slept.

There was no greater gift I could have received than to be close to my mother when she was dying. To face a parent’s death with coldness between you is a barren painfully lonely land. To be able to go with her and face it together is/was a blessing. She talked to me of cooking for Dad, teaching him to cook, her concerns for the grandchildren, what she felt, what she wanted, what she worried about. I was able to give to her for the first time since I was a child.

Shortly after she died, the money miraculously arrived for the birth of the press. A friend suggested I name it for her. I liked the tribute, but I didn’t want to exclude my father. I settled on CavanKerry—the two counties in Ireland where they were born—my father, Cavan; my mother, Kerry. Though CavanKerry would not be an “Irish” press, it was from that land –those two lands–that my own writing grew.

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The Birth of a Press: The Challenge

October 3, 2012 By CavanKerry Press Leave a Comment

Part 2 in our ongoing series, The Birth of a Press, CKP publisher Joan Cusack Handler discusses the ins and outs of running a poetry press.

Poetry often overwhelms and intimidates the general reader; in fact, most believe they aren’t smart enough to understand it. It’s more intelligent and more important than they are. It stands apart from them—several steps above them. Alas, it makes them feel small.

I knew first hand how intimidating poetry can be based on the way it was taught to me in college (it was never part of my grade or high school curriculum)—day after day dissecting word after word after word of The Wasteland. Alas, that experience was a wasteland for me and turned me away from poetry for many years. Not surprisingly, readers like me, diminished by the arcane ways that poetry was presented would not turn to it for pleasure or solace as those who love it do. It follows that to sell books of poetry, publishing’s challenge would be to create a readership that cares about it and believes it cares about them. Fortunately for me, many years later, having experienced the endless bliss one finds in the simple but profound brilliance of Emily Dickinson, Robert Frost, and Walt Whitman, I returned to poetry and fell very deeply in love.

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The Birth of a Press: Start Your Own Press

October 3, 2012 By CavanKerry Press Leave a Comment

Part 1 in our ongoing series, The Birth of a Press, CKP publisher Joan Cusack Handler discusses the ins and outs of running a poetry press.

The story of CavanKerry Press begins with my own writing story and is grounded in my study of human behavior and my life as a clinical psychologist. People fascinate me. As do their stories. Each and every one—diverse and unique, public and private. But that doesn’t really explain my need to publish books.

For years, I dreamed of starting my own press that would bring out the work of all these gifted writers along with my own and get our shows on the road. Despite my initial success in contests, interest in my work diminished as my fascination with the poem as a visual life in space increased. Once I abandoned the more traditional long line that started and returned to the left margin for a form that flowed from the emotional logic of the voice and used the whole page as canvas to bring this voice to life on the page, I was ‘out there’ on my own. Clearly the more inventive I became, the more I reduced my already slim chances of winning a competition. I had stepped over the line. Journal editors remarked on the interesting form that would be a ‘typesetting nightmare’ to publish. Other’s found it too distracting. With each submission I offered to have the poem typeset myself if it interested the journal editors. (Those who accepted poems, did not ask me to do that.) Clearly, if I was ever to see my poems collected in a book, I would have to publish my own.

I continued to talk. I continued to dream.

My concerns were broadening, crystallizing. Given the paucity of publishing venues for poetry, the absence of opportunities for first book publication (other than those supported by fee for entry competitions), an apparent bias against older writers, as well as one against psychological and emotionally daring work, I dreamed of a press established, first, to provide publishing opportunities for gifted writers under-recognized or rejected by the literary mainstream, and secondly, to create a community of and for writers: a home where writers could share their art and the products of that art with each other and with the greater community of readers. A community of writers and a community or readers: I wanted to do my part to make that happen.

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HAPPY BIRTHDAY & THANKS, WALT!

May 31, 2018 By CavanKerry Press Leave a Comment

A few years ago, I was privileged to read at the Something Old, Something New (Jersey) 350th birthday celebration at the Hoboken Historical Museum. Curated by CavanKerry poets, Teresa Carson and Danny Shot, the program included several contemporary poets reading the work of one of New Jersey’s great poetry masters—William Carlos Williams, Walt Whitman, Allen Ginsberg to name a few.

I was delighted to be assigned Whitman. He’s my personal Great. I’m hard pressed to say what I love more about him—his wildly generous soul or his wildly generous poems. It’s often said that Whitman’s greatest gift to us is his creation of a grand mythical figure whose voice he sings. Loudly and openly. He is Everyman. He is every cell in every body. He is the God Man—and he challenges us to the same.

When I think of all we have inherited from him—and the list is long, the most important to me as a poet and person, is that he gives us permission. Permission as writers, permissions as people. To glory in who we are. Unadulterated, unmasked, unadorned. And we revel in this counsel. As writers we want to be creative, honest, imaginative and original, but we have barriers to that freedom. We also want to attract readers and praise; we want to be good poets, but we’re often held back by what we perceive of as the unseemliness of our experience, our feelings and our motives. We think we have to turn away from who we are in order to create selves that are worthy of this elevated art. Regrettably, we believe poetry is holier than we are, so we must make ourselves worthy to write it.

Whitman debunks that. Poetry is not better than him; it is him. It is his bowels, his brain, his bicycle, his Brooklyn Bridge, his lilacs, wounded soldiers, lovers, trees. Not that he wasn’t as greedy for recognition as the rest of us, but he refuses to relinquish originality –by writing ‘inside’ the lines –to get it. Likewise, he doesn’t aspire to be worthy. He is worthy. While we often think of humility as a desirable trait in the person or poet, Whitman is anything but. Yes, he was vulnerable and often vacillated between approval and rejection of his more successful contemporaries (Emerson, Whittier, Longfellow…) and wanted at least to be counted among them–if not seen as their superior–but he was also steadfast in his commitment to his universe and subject matter–the whole world of what it is to be human. The whole world of what it was to be Whitman.

He takes on sex, heterosexual and homosexual, and writes proudly and abundantly of its pleasures capturing them in the most exquisite language and line. He elaborates on the wildly feral magic of love and wrote generously of it. He glories in the organs of the body as much as the lilies of the field. For him, there is no subject that isn’t appropriate fodder for poetry. In terms of craft, he blows out the more traditional poetry line, stretching it to the end of the page and then some—one wonders how far he’d have carried it if he were not bound by something as trite as paper size. He refuses to allow himself or his readers to take a back seat to life—he’s audacious, grandiose, honest, narcissistic, courageous, hedonistic, spiritual and compassionate without apology; in fact, he glories in his greatness—the greatness we all share as humans. He calls on us to be courageous—to break out of convention, to give ourselves over to our imaginations and our bodies –both so ready to create for us provided we keep dogma and judgment away. As did he. Having known him, my poems have never been the same—the nuns would definitely disapprove. Whitman is our mentor, our Everyman Poet challenging us to strip naked each time we sit down to write —be as big as we are, as raw as we are and can be. I happily bow to his wisdom.

Wherever you are, Walt, I trust you’re having one hilarious, outrageous, glorious day! Happy Birthday, Dear Friend, thanks for all the gifts.

Grab the latest from Joan Cusack Handler!

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Book Press Release: How They Fell

October 3, 2014 By CavanKerry Press Leave a Comment

How They Fell

Poems by
Annie Boutelle

HOW THEY FELL (CavanKerry Press; October 2014; $16.00, paperback), Annie Boutelle’s third volume of poems, collects work that speaks to this acutely-attuned poet’s broad range of observations, perceptions, and literary styles. With poems rooted in both the real and the mythic, Boutelle taps her Scottish roots, hearkens to childhood and coming-of-age, and explores the often tenuous, sometimes dangerous interplay between woman and man. Her poems are steeped in allusions, but also peppered with whimsy and wit, as they ponder the everyday and the extraordinary.

The poet’s sense of duality takes precedence from the start:

Born in one country, I’ll die in another. And if
I dream, I’m where I was before I was: and if

I’m awake, I’m where I’ll be after I am; and hard
at times to tell which space.
(from “Country”)

Memories of a Scottish childhood unfold like photographs: a “father with the movie-star good looks,” a mother “fussing over bouquets for shut-ins,” and boys, “tall, loyal, clumsy,” the objects of jealous adolescent longing. Then come the inevitabilities: the end of innocence, the coming of love, of marriage, of life.

In the middle section of HOW THEY FELL, “Passage,” Boutelle reimagines the origin story of Adam and Eve after the Fall. In short, primal bites, these poems explores central questions of the birth of our race: “How could they know how far to the gate?” “How to see sky with so many leaves in the way?” “How to trust it was there?” These poems, sensuous, visceral, full of both fear and discovery, map the essential nature at the heart of the human experience, which is to say, the experience of being a man, a woman, a couple:

They weep for the place they found.
Its mystery and musk.
Its deep unease.
They weep for the place they cannot return to.
Each will refuse to forgive the other for many things.
But this night has nothing to do with forgiveness.

(from “Sequel”)

There is boundless wit woven through the lines of Boutelle’s verse. Eve discovers “Birds sang the same old songs./It annoyed her intensely.” In “Honey Blue,” a woman converses with her long ago removed uterus, which she encounters smoking a cigarette under a lamppost on Chestnut Street. There is a poem about the Pope’s toothpaste being FedExed to the Vatican from Germany, one about Queen Elizabeth’s hairdresser frustrated by the same old hairstyle, and another on the poet laureate losing his inspiration with “the sudden absence of pseudo-/ephedrine.”

Boutelle’s eye for the revelatory detail, her ear for a craggy consonance and airy assonance, and her mind with its well-honed intelligence, reveal and explore the self, in particular a self wrought from history, myth, and tradition,” said Eric Pankey of Nest of Thistles, winner of the Samuel French Morse Poetry Prize. With HOW THEY FELL, this gifted writer further illuminates her singular poetic vision.

~~~

About Annie Boutelle

Born and raised in Scotland, Annie Boutelle was educated at the University of Saint Andrews and New York University. She has recently retired from the English Department at Smith College, where she founded the Poetry Center and has served as the Grace Hazard Conkling Poet in Residence. Her work has appeared in various journals, including the Georgia Review, the Green Mountains Review, the Hudson Review, Nimrod, Poet Lore, and Poetry. She lives with her husband in western Massachusetts. For more information, visit annieboutelle.com.

~~~

HOW THEY FELL by Annie Boutelle
Publication Date: October 2014
Price: $16.00; ISBN: 978-1-933880-44-0
Distributed by: University Press of New England (UPNE), 800-421-1561 or 603-448-1533, Ext. 255

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Press Release: Something Old, Something New (Jersey)

March 11, 2014 By CavanKerry Press Leave a Comment

Something Old, Something New (Jersey)
An Afternoon of Poetry to Celebrate the State’s 350th Birthday

Hosted by
CavanKerry Press and Hoboken Historical Museum

April 6, 2014, 3 p.m., at the Hoboken Museum, 1301 Hudson St.

For a small state, New Jersey has produced, or been home to, a disproportionate number of poets who shaped, and reshaped, 19^th and 20^th century American poetry through their innovative work: Walt Whitman, William Carlos Williams, Joyce Kilmer, Allen Ginsberg, Amiri Baraka – to name a few. The state continues to be fertile territory for contemporary poets, as the home of such notable poets as Herschel Silverman, Alicia Ostriker, and Hoboken’s own Joel Lewis, Danny Shot and Eliot Katz.

The Museum is pleased to team up with CavanKerry Press to celebrate the state’s 350th birthday with a showcase bridging the past and present of New Jersey poetry at the Hoboken Historical Museum on Sunday, April 6, at 3 p.m. All are welcome, and the event is free, thanks to support from the New Jersey Historical Commission.

This two-hour public event will feature 10 contemporary New Jersey poets reading poems written by their historic predecessors, as well as a poem of their own. In addition to the above-mentioned poets, other contemporary poets reading at the event will be Teresa Carson, Vivian Demuth, Cat Doty, Reg E. Gaines, Joan Cusack Handler, and Rich Villar. Dr. Mary Rizzo, Public Historian in residence at the Mid-Atlantic Regional Center for the Humanities at Rutgers—Camden, will introduce the program, providing historical context on these great New Jersey poets and give insights into the importance of their works in American literary history. Dr. Rizzo formerly served as the Associate and Interim Executive Director for the New Jersey Council for the Humanities, and collaborated with CavanKerry Press on an innovative program called Poetry Heals, which brings trained poets into hospitals to facilitate workshops for healthcare professionals, helping them use poetry to develop their deep listening, speaking, and thinking skills. She has been actively involved in the planning to commemorate the 350th anniversary of New Jersey, serving on the education committee.

The Poets

Walt Whitman (1819-1892, lived final two decades in Camden) is America’s most renowned, most influential and, many agree, its greatest poet ever. He aimed to be the first “national expresser,” the first American poet to put in words what was “common to all” Americans. Reading by Joan Cusack Handler.

William Carlos Williams (1883-1963, Rutherford) is known as an experimenter, an innovator, and a revolutionary figure in American poetry. He was a core member of the Imagist movement, which was a reaction against the rigid and ordered poetry of the late 19^th and early 20^th century. Reading by Joel Lewis.

Joyce Kilmer (1886-1918, b. New Brunswick, moved to Mahwah as an adult) is mainly remembered for a short poem titled “Trees,” which begins, “I think that I shall never see/A poem as lovely as a tree.” As Thomas Vinciguerra wrote in The New York Times, it is a “work [that] needs no explanation.” Reading by Vivian Demuth.

Allen Ginsberg (1926-1997, b. Newark, lived in Paterson), one of the most respected Beat writers and acclaimed poets of his generation, holds a prominent place in post-WWII American culture. His 1956 Whitman-inspired poem, “Howl,” stunned many critics and is widely considered a revolutionary event in American poetry. Reading by Eliot Katz.

Herschel Silverman (b. 1926, has lived in Bayonne since the 1950s) was a contemporary of and friend to the major Beat poets—Ginsberg, Corso, Olson. Though influenced by the Beats, his voice is distinct, intertwining the seemingly contradictory concepts of hipness and familial bliss. Silverman will present his own work.

Alicia Ostriker (b. 1937, lives in Princeton) “has become one of those brilliantly provocative and imaginatively gifted contemporaries whose iconoclastic expression…is essential to our understanding of our American selves,” in the words of Joyce Carol Oates. Ostriker is professor emerita of English at Rutgers University. Ostriker will present her own work.

Stephen Dunn (b. 1938, has lived in Port Republic and Ocean City) is the author of over a dozen books of poetry, reflecting the social, cultural, psychological, and philosophical territory of the American middle class. Dunn won a Pulitzer Prize for his book Different Hours (2000), and has taught at the Richard Stockton College of NJ. Reading by Cat Doty.

Robert Pinsky (b. 1940, Long Branch) is one of America’s foremost poets/critics. His verse reflects his concern for a contemporary poetic diction that nonetheless speaks of a wider experience. Pinsky was U.S. poet laureate from 1997–2000, and launched the Favorite Poems Project, wherein ordinary Americans read their favorite poems for an audio archive at the Library of Congress. Reading by Rich Villar.

Amiri Baraka (1934-2014, Newark) was an influential poet, author and playwright, as well as actor, teacher, theater director/producer, and activist. Considered one of the revolutionary provocateurs of African-American poetry, he was appointed poet laureate of New Jersey in 2002. Reading by Reg E. Gaines.

Jack Wiler (1951-2009, grew up in Wenonah, lived in Jersey City) was a key figure in the Slam poetry movement at the Nuyorican Poetry Café in NYC, and possessed a singular and unmistakable poetic voice. Through the Dodge Foundation’s Poetry in the Schools program, he worked with many teachers and students. Reading by Teresa Carson/Danny Shot.

The organizers of the event are Teresa Carson, Associate Publisher of CavanKerry Press, and Danny Shot, former editor/publisher of Long Shot Magazine, and a poet and English teacher, along with Robert Foster, Executive Director of the Hoboken Historical Museum. Carson is a poet as well as publisher at the not-for-profit literary press, which has been based in Fort Lee, NJ, since its inception in 2000. She has coordinated events such as poetry readings, book parties and fundraising events, including statewide community outreach programs for CavanKerry Press. Danny Shot teaches English at Brooklyn Tech High School. He co-founded Long Shot Magazine with Eliot Katz in the early 1980s. He has performed at, as well as coordinated, events throughout the region.

1664 – The Year New Jersey Began

The colonial history of New Jersey started after Henry Hudson sailed through Newark Bay in 1609. Although Hudson was British, he worked for the Netherlands, so he claimed the land for the Dutch, who called it New Netherlands. Small trading colonies sprang up where the present towns of Hoboken and Jersey City are located. The Dutch, Swedes, and Finns were the first European settlers of the land that was home to the Delaware Indians.

In 1664 the British took control of the land and added it to their colonies. King Charles II of England granted a sizeable parcel of land to his brother James, Duke of York. James in turn gave a piece of this valuable real estate to two loyal noblemen, Sir George Carteret and John Lord Berkeley, who divided the land in half and officially renamed it New Jersey, after the Isle of Jersey in the English Channel, where Carteret had been governor. The document that records this transaction, now housed at the New Jersey State Archives in Trenton, proclaims, “said Tract of Land is hereafter to be called by the name or names of New Cesarea [sic] or New Jersey.” And so New Jersey was born.

CavanKerry Press (CKP) is the sole not-for-profit independent literary press with regularly scheduled book releases based in New Jersey. From its inception in 2000, its vision has been to present, through poetry and prose, Lives Brought to Life, and to create programs that bring CavanKerry books and writers to diverse audiences. To date, CKP has published 67 books—59 poetry collections and 8 prose books. CKP focuses on outreach and programming that are aligned with its organizational priorities and that use its strengths—e.g., donating GiftBooks to underserved communities, running workshops, organizing readings and panel discussions. The press, which has been a decade-long recipient of GOS support from the New Jersey State Council on the Arts, has a strong commitment to the New Jersey literary community; in 2013, CKP served all 21 counties in New Jersey through its community programs.

About the Hoboken Historical Museum

Founded 1986, the Museum’s mission is to educate the public about Hoboken’s history, diverse culture, architecture and historic landmarks. In 2001, the Museum moved into one of the oldest buildings on the waterfront, in the former Bethlehem Steel shipyard, at 1301 Hudson St., Hoboken, where it maintains a series of rotating exhibits. The Museum is open six days a week, 2 – 7 pm on Tues. – Thurs., 1 – 5 pm on Fridays, and noon – 5 pm on weekends. It offers special exhibits, tours, events and lectures, as well as educational programs for adults and children on a weekly basis. An updated schedule of events and an online catalog of many items in its collections are available at www.hobokenmuseum.org. The Museum is a nonprofit tax-exempt 501(c)3 entity.

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Book Press Release: My Mother’s Funeral

October 17, 2013 By CavanKerry Press Leave a Comment

My Mother’s Funeral

A Memoir

by Adriana Páramo

Adriana Páramo’s poignant and atmospheric memoir, My Mother’s Funeral, traverses time and place as she recalls her Colombian childhood, her indomitable mother, and the intractable bonds of family origins. Immersing readers in an unfamiliar and often mysterious world, Páramo’s mesmerizing narrative bears the hallmarks of the fiction of Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Isabel Allende, yet is firmly grounded in reality. “With her luminous and elegant prose, Páramo gives us a deeply moving and richly observed portrait of not only a family but an entire nation,” says Patricia Engel, author of Vida. “Full of hope, tenderness, and redemption, My Mother’s Funeral is a memoir of astonishing beauty; a spellbinding and devastating meditation on the ways we are transformed by love and loss, and how we may leave our home, but our home never leaves us.”

As the title suggests, the memoir begins with death—the passing of Páramo’s mother, matriarch of a poor and proud family. As she rushes from Florida to Medellín for the funeral, she is flooded with a torrent of memories—not only of her mother, but of her absent father, and a childhood marked by poverty, but also by love, discovery, and rebellion. Her final memories of her mother are shaded by the aging woman’s Alzheimer’s, but the whole story Páramo reclaims here begins before the writer was born, and the journey she will takes is a composite of all the women her mother was.

Páramo’s mother, Carmen, met her father at a party in her small hometown of Mariquita in the early 1950s. Swept up in the romance, the virginal bride moved away with her new husband, and quickly learned the truth about his wandering ways. Still, Carmen bore him six children—one son and five daughters—whom she singlehandedly raised. Determined that her children would not be condemned to the same life of hardworking drudgery, she rode them hard and brooked no arguments about her circumscribed view of the world. But, there was much love and laughter in the home as well, as Páramo recounts some hilarious, even magical escapades. Steeped in a culture little known to American readers, the memoir offers a rare glimpse into its cuisine, mythology, realm of women, and views on sex and religion.

As Páramo came of age, she would clash with her mother, particularly as the younger woman embraced radical politics, with violence mounting in Colombia, and pushed against the constraints of her provincial life. Yet, as she takes this journey of the heart to understand the sources of her rebellion, the writer at last come to terms with the force of nature that was her mother, and the indelible mark this woman has left on her daughter’s life. As she faces the implications of her mother’s death, and reluctantly bids this remarkable woman an earthly goodbye, Páramo comes to terms with a new truth: “Mom and I had been a unified whole. Without her, there was no me.”

“Adriana Páramo takes the experience of her mother’s death and funeral in her native Colombia as the jumping off point for an emotionally sprawling, heart-rending and gut-laugh Libretto about her family’s life, loves, realities and illusions, poverty and the riches of the heart in the land of her birth,” says Kerry Dean Feldman, Professor Emeritus of Anthropology, University of Alaska. “In this intensely personal and evocative memoir, Adriana Páramo confronts her own past, her family’s past, and, to some extent, her homeland’s past,” adds James Cañón, author of Tales from the Town of Widows. “She uses her personal experiences to recreate her mother’s life, to convey her own loneliness and isolation, and to try to answer questions concerning life and death that are worthwhile, and that often take a lifetime to answer.”

~~~

About Adriana Páramo

Adriana Páramo is a Colombian anthropologist winner of the Social Justice and Equality Award in creative nonfiction with her book Looking for Esperanza. Her writing has appeared in Alaska Quarterly Review, The Los Angeles Review, Consequence Magazine, Fourteen Hills, Carolina Quarterly Review, Magnolia Journal, So To Speak, Compass Rose, andPhati’tude, among others. Páramo has volunteered her time as a transcriber for Voice of Witness, a book series which empowers those affected by social injustice.

~~~

MY MOTHER’S FUNERAL by Adriana Páramo
Publication Date: October 2013
Price: $21.00
ISBN: 978-1-933880-39-6
Distributed by: University Press of New England (UPNE), 1-800-421-1561 or 603-448-1533, Ext. 255

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Book Press Release: My Mother's Funeral

October 17, 2013 By CavanKerry Press Leave a Comment

My Mother’s Funeral

A Memoir

by Adriana Páramo

~~~

About Adriana Páramo

Adriana Páramo is a Colombian anthropologist winner of the Social Justice and Equality Award in creative nonfiction with her book Looking for Esperanza. Her writing has appeared in Alaska Quarterly Review, The Los Angeles Review, Consequence Magazine, Fourteen Hills, Carolina Quarterly Review, Magnolia Journal, So To Speak, Compass Rose, andPhati’tude, among others. Páramo has volunteered her time as a transcriber for Voice of Witness, a book series which empowers those affected by social injustice.

~~~

MY MOTHER’S FUNERAL by Adriana Páramo
Publication Date: October 2013
Price: $21.00
ISBN: 978-1-933880-39-6
Distributed by: University Press of New England (UPNE), 1-800-421-1561 or 603-448-1533, Ext. 255

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Publisher’s Note

Secure online donations through PayPal. Or send a check to:
CavanKerry Press, 5 Horizon Road, #2403 Fort Lee, NJ 07024

2020 Highlights

Throughout 2020, despite the COVID-19 pandemic, CavanKerry has committed to its mission to support communities in need with high quality, accessible literature by..

Continuing to publish its full complement of memoir and poetry in the spring and fall of 2020
Maintaining its full staff to ensure quality publishing while responding to new challenges
Distributing over 1,300 gift books to high school students through Poetry Out Loud NJ and to frontline medical staff at 15 hospitals
Launching virtual programming featuring 16 CKP poets and memoirists
Collaborating with institutions including Caldwell University and the Poetry Society of New York to present poetry to diverse audiences
Providing free downloads of both Waiting Room Reader volumes on our website when our living rooms became waiting rooms
Implementing “Words to Keep You Company”– a biweekly selection of writing in the spirit of the Waiting Room Reader
Curating “Dispatches from 2020” a special online folio about COVID-19 and Black Lives Matter, featuring work from our authors and staff
Hosting ongoing blogs on our website from Teresa Carson (“On Poetry” and Joan Cusack Handler (“Birth of a Press“)

Our writers furthered our mission by...

Offering readings of their work at no charge via live venues and various online formats to over 5,000 adults and thousands of students across the country
Serving as judges for Poetry Out Loud competitions and medical-school student writing contests
Providing workshops to doctors and nurses at Sloan Kettering Memorial Hospital, at Case Western Reserve University, and through the Gold Foundation to address their psychological and emotional responses to the pandemic, as well as to several homebound individuals
Directing the Frost Place Conference on Poetry and Teaching, which fosters effective teaching of poetry in schools
Leading a group of volunteers to produce and distribute over 30,000 masks to hospitals and community organizations in need
Mentoring fledgling writers and writers in need through face-to-face sessions in person and online, serving writers with disabilities and illnesses, the elderly, children and teens, college students, and other professional poets
Developing programs deliberately focused on managing the effects of COVID-19 in schools from elementary to post-doctoral, all online
Responding in support of Black Lives Matter with a host of online presentations and readings and by participating in demonstrations across the country

Join us in celebrating our authors!

Garrison Keillor selected Tina Kelley as one of the winners of the Pandemic Poetry Contest
Jack Ridl was named Poet Laureate for life in Douglas, Michigan for his poetry and extraordinary efforts to enrich the lives of those in his community through poetry
Robert Cording’s Without My Asking was selected as a finalist for the 2020 Connecticut Book Awards
Brent Newsom received the Maureen Egen Writers Exchange Award from Poets & Writers

What's next for CavanKerry Press?

This September marks 20 years since CavanKerry released its first book, A Day This Lit, by Howard Levy. Throughout our 20 years, we have committed to publishing books of literary art that are accessible to all readers, and we are proud to announce our forthcoming titles:

Fall 2020

The Snow’s Wife, poetry by Frannie Lindsay
Rise Wildly, poetry by Tina Kelley
Places We Return To: A Celebration of Twenty Years Publishing Fine Literature by CavanKerry Press

Spring 2021

Wonderama, poetry by New Jersey poet Catherine Doty
Unnatural Selection: A Memoir of Wilderness and Adoption, by Andrea Ross
Pelted by Flowers, a first book of poetry by Kali Lightfoot
Deke Dangle Dive, poetry by Gibson Fay-Leblanc

Fall 2021

Her Kind, poetry by Cindy Veach
Uncertain Acrobats, a first book of poetry by Rebecca Hart Olander

Secure online donations through PayPal. Or send a check to:
CavanKerry Press, 5 Horizon Road, #2403 Fort Lee, NJ 07024

Donors who contribute $250 or more may opt to receive a copy of each of our new books in 2021*

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outreach draft

Commitment to Community

While publishing books is our reason for being, CavanKerry has a deep commitment to connecting with the community. Since its inception in 2000, CavanKerry’s mission has included the creation of programs that bring our books and writers to diverse audiences where they live, work, and receive services.

Events

We are an active participant and sponsor of festivals, events and conferences with a focus on our authors as well as partnerships.

Location/ Description

Outreach Programs (click the arrows to learn more)

Collaboration with Non Profit Organizations

CavanKerry partners with other arts organizations on programming/co-sponsoring literary events. These include:

Further Education

CavanKerry partners with schools and art organizations to provide professional development as well as facilitate poetry classes by coordinating books as well as authors for said classes.

LaurelBooks

The Waiting Room Reader

With CavanKerry’s commitment to supporting the community and producing works of Lives Brought to Life, has come the publication and donation of the Waiting Room Reader: Stories to Keep You Company, Volumes I and II. The Reader is an anthology of poetry and prose from many authors, a compilation of wonderful words designed to ease the stress and anxiety of patients held captive in hospital waiting rooms, anticipating news of a loved one or health care for themselves.

To date, over 19,000 copies of the Readers have been gifted to over 80 hospitals in the New York metropolitan area and nationwide for the benefit of their patients. Pending funding, long term plans include publishing a new volume every three to four years, large print, Spanish, and multi-language editions.

CavanKerry Press books are proudly distributed by the Chicago Distribution Center

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ADA Awareness Month Highlights

August 28, 2020 By Dimitri Reyes Leave a Comment

July 26, 2020 marked 30 years of the Americans with Disabilities Act, a civil rights law prohibiting discrimination against individuals with disabilities navigating all spaces of life including jobs, transportation, schools, and all other places opened to the general public. As a proud supporter of the Americans with Disabilities Act, CavanKerry Press decided to amplify those voices who live with a disability and/or speak on the subject of disability by highlighting those particular writers in our Words to Keep You Company posts this month.

Please enjoy these excerpts from our authors.

You can learn more about the ADA at https://adata.org/learn-about-ada

"Slow Dance With Broken Shoulder" by Judith Sornberger (From Practicing the World)

Cast and all, we dance our kitchen floor
though my broken wing holds us apart—
like some olden-time bundling board—
folded, as it is, over my heart.
This spring our woods turn young as we turn old,
though new birdsong still catches us off guard
as much as when feet lose their earthly hold.
Still, who’d believe I’d take a fall so hard?
But, love, let’s be voracious as the creatures
after dozing away winter in their lairs
who guzzle all the good from our birdfeeders—
those pesky chipmunks, squirrels and black bears.
Let’s dance with every hungry foe age sends us
until one finally dips us, drops us, ends us.

"The Perfect Knot" by Christopher Bursk (From A Car Stops and a Door Opens)

Last night I uncovered poems
hid so well it took me fifteen years to find them,
a ribbon tied around a packet of blue linen
as if whoever bound those sonnets
wanted whoever unwrapped them
to appreciate that some words ought to deserve more
than ordinary paper. It’s my father’s handwriting. His
rhymes grasp each other so earnestly
it’s hard for me to keep reading.
I long . . . I yearn . . . I crave . . . I burn . . .
You sizzle . . . you spark.
Everything you touch turns bright.
Every day I am away from you is night.
You are my only light. My only dark.
Every noun is a tear, every verb a goodbye,
With each adjective I am preparing to die.
At first I can’t tell if these are suicide notes
or love poems. To whom is my father speaking?
My mother? A mistress?
Someone so beautiful even the adverbs had to be beautiful
too, adjectives chosen
so every letter glides into the next,
every vowel nestles in a consonant’s arms.
Why can’t those we love be only
what we want them to be and perhaps only
what they wished to be?
There are secrets you whisper to your son
when you are dying, but there are other secrets
you wrap in dark purple ribbon
and hide—words too revealing to be published,
too important to throw away,
the kinds of poems old men write.
They know no one’s going to read them
while they are alive
but they write them anyway. And save them.
See, I am writing one now.

"Venon, France" by Joan Seliger Sidney (From Body of Diminishing Motion)

I have come back
to the mountains above Grenoble
where once I jogged along muddy trails,
Jean-Paul’s finger at my back,
prodding me. Where once I walked
from house to house, tasting
Madame Bernard’s vin de noix, Maria’s clafouti.

I have come back
to study yoga with Françoise
and transform my body into light.
To sit in a circle of neighbors, as the sun
sinks into the crevice between two peaks.
To let them carry me
in my chair wherever
stairs block my wheels. Not to walk,
but like Lazarus to rise.

I have come back
to explore Le chemin de guérison intérieure
at l’Arche, in the Abbé de St. Antoine.
To hear Jeannette ask God to heal me
in a chapel sunlight through stained glass, stone
by stone released from five hundred
years of earth. Five times each day, the medieval
clang reminds me to stop
and listen to magpies outshout
one another, to the donkey alone
in tall grass braying.

"At Home" by Joan Cusack Handler (From The Red Canoe: Love in its Making)

I am a fool wrapped in a blue blanket looking for something to say.

Shadows and their awful doubts whisper at the window. My feet—cold. My head—filled with cotton. Alan plays scales on the piano; David plucks Bach; the cat dozes on the couch.

I’m more of an invalid than a wife or mother.

It’s time to return to work, the doctor says. No, Doctor. I know this house: its turns
and conveniences, its willingness to wait. I am safe within its walls, joints and bones.
It offers itself undaunted, as safe map and glove. Like a flexible cast or loving par-
ent, it assumes all care: keeps danger out, asks little of the back, no steps to climb,
no unexpected turns, no cars or brutal collisions, no hideous laughter or pity. Ex-
tending its arms, it invites me to even give up my crutches and walk the hall from
my room to the kitchen or my son’s room alone. Alan brings a chair to the stove
and together we fix meat sauce for supper. Nothing can happen to me here. No,
Doctor. I won’t go outside again until this back can carry me: bearing her share of
my ordinary life: driving David to music or baseball or myself to the office or shop-
ping for groceries or Christmas. But you need not be concerned; I’m not closed in
here. I have windows: eight foot floor to ceiling windows invite other lives. News-
papers and TV tell me all I need to know.

"The Catatonic Speaks" by Phoebe Sparrow Wagner (From We Mad Climb Shaky Ladders)

At first it seemed a good idea not to
move a muscle, to resist without
resistance. I stood still and stiller. Soon
I was the stillest object in that room.
I neither moved nor ate nor spoke.
But I was in there all the time,
I heard every word said,
saw what was done and not done.
Indifferent to making the first move,
I let them arrange my limbs, infuse
IVs, even toilet me like a doll.
Oh, their concern was so touching!
And so unnecessary. As if I needed anything
but the viscosity of air that held me up.
I was sorry when they cured
me, when I had to depart that warm box,
the thick closed-in place of not-caring,
and return to the world. I would
never go back, not now. But
the Butterfly Effect says sometimes
the smallest step leads nowhere,
sometimes to global disaster. I tell you
it is enough to scare a person stiff.

"Watching John's Heart" by Teresa Carson (From Elegy for the Floater)

Park roof level, race back to ER

where John’s hooked up to machines that track

the jagged-but-stable peaks of his heart.

His arm cuff auto-inflates;

red numbers flicker like crazy slots

until 70 & 120 win.

He, ever the scientist, explains:

systolic contracted, diastolic relaxed.

Sublingual vasodilator kicks in

EKG fine, pressure fine, take a deep breath for me . . .

Oncall GP shows chart to specialist:

"Walking Home Late after Practice" by Jack Ridl (From Losing Season)

Walking home late after practice,
Scrub kicks the snow, imagines

each flake a phony word, a lie,
a promise he believed, floating
up off into the air, mixing
in the wind, melting. Scrub

keeps walking, passes
under the streetlight across
from his house, sees the light on
in the kitchen, pauses, looks

back, suddenly starts to dance,
dance under the long deflected pass
of the moon’s light. His feet
slide softly over the layers

of snow, piled and trampled hard
by schoolkids, teachers, people
heading to a friend’s house. Scrub,
the dancer, whirling himself

into the soft night, into the wild
applause of the falling snow.

"Invisible Fence" by Margo Taft Stever (From Cracked Piano)

So many people have moved in.
I don’t know them anymore.
I don’t know their names.
Not even my dreams make sense.

The birds have flown up from the privet.
They don’t know that the door
jams aren’t square, that something
is very wrong in this house.

All my friends have left for the country,
and I alone stand on the sidewalk,
staring into closed suburban windows,
fixating on muffled arguments.

Even my own dog won’t stay. The invisible
fence advisers leave cryptic messages
on my answering machine about restraining him.
They are baffled by his

arrogance, his willingness
to approach the electric wire,
as if nothing at all could shock him.
Someone I have never met

climbs secretly up a ladder
onto the porch of our new addition.
He is purple, a statue
in the most conceptual museum.

Cold water drips from the sink.
Drip rhythm: Two drips.
Two drips. Two drips.
Only the cold water drips.

Voices bubble up in the neighborhood,
human sounds mixed with the bark of dogs,
gas flames of cookouts.
Sometimes I think about nothing

except a few birds and the rain—how they
continue to sing even when it’s raining,
even when the cold raining rain
refuses to stop.

"A Valentine for Miss Van Duyn" by Andrea Carter Brown (From The Disheveled Bed)

Dear Mona Van Duyn (Mrs. Jarvis Thurston),

You probably don’t remember me, but I

have never forgotten the time you confessed

The pain subsides, but the want never goes away

entirely. We were sitting across from each other,

rocking on a white porch under tall sweet gums.

Back then, I had just begun, but you had lived

the whole arc: desire, disappointment, despair.

Your words saved me, I know now, helped me

through grief to the beginnings of acceptance,

humor, cheer. Seated in another garden years

later, for the first time I have the guts to read

those Valentines to the Wide World in which

you chronicle the loss that laid you low and how

writing brought you back. Surrounded by lilacs

almost too old to flower, a single bird circles.

I don’t need binoculars to see it is the rare cross

between Blue- and Golden-winged Warblers:

my first Brewster’s. I don’t know yet what life

will bring, but I believe, because you wrote it

so, our life will be full, if not with children, then

with other riches. For “Late Loving,” especially,

for “A Reading of Rex Stout,” and for “Goya’s

‘Two Old People Eating Soup’,” for “Letters

from a Father,” “The Block,” and for “Caring

for Surfaces,” I thank you from the very bottom

of my mending heart. Yours most sincerely,

Andrea Carter Brown (Mrs. Thomas Drescher)

"Entering the Light" by Elizabeth Hall Hutner (From Life With Sam)

Nobody in New York ever has light.

In every apartment I looked at,

I always asked, “Is there enough sun

to grow anything?” I chose our last place

in Brooklyn because of all the windows,

three in the living room alone,

but we were surrounded by buildings.

The plants I bought at the hardware store

did not all survive.

The first time we went to the hospital,

I bought a basket of African violets.

My mother had had one when I was born.

The last, I found a Swedish ivy plant.

We started your last three months in a room

full of light. As the doctors tried the final

experimental treatments, I put toys

away at night, tucking them on the shelf

in front of the windows just as, at home,

I picked up toys after you went to bed.

I watered the ivy from a paper cup

I brought with your dinner from the Chinese

restaurant down the street.

Our old doctor went to Boston

and the new doctor sent us home

too soon. When we came back the next day,

we had to take a different room

with fewer windows, and they were blocked

by buildings, so the room was dark.

I had left the plant at home, of course.

The doctors tried more treatments while I looked

for a brighter room, and your stepfather

put together a small wooden helicopter

with a solar panel.

By the time I found a sunnier room,

you no longer ate the meals I brought you.

We moved across the hall anyway,

and the blades on the helicopter

spun all day long as you sat in the big, blue chair

or lay in your bed, eyes closed, resting.

While you slept, I read a book about children

who have almost died and have seen the light.

They said it was beautiful, and they said

they did not want to come back.

After you died, I moved to New Jersey

to the house we had planned to live in together.

It had eight windows in the living room

and was so full of the November light!

I hung our plants or set them on the bookshelf.

I put our couch by the windows too,

so I could lie there under your comforter

with its soft cover of clouds and stars,

and watch the blades of the helicopter
spin day after day in the sun.

"Zona Viva" by Peggy Penn (From So Close)

Mexico City Market

Something about the day of the night-before-leaving

teases the yellow smog into a dream light;

I walk in a gaslit dusk, breathless,

through the Zona Viva, to find a souvenir.

Now, almost disappeared beneath the shops

that sell their artifacts, sit soft mounds

of Indian women, working in their office

of children and rags. Whirling children,

tied by invisible strings, are learning

the subtracted gravity of the Zona Viva:

the strings cannot rappel them over the fell

of poverty’s edge. They are hostage tops,

caught in the hands of their holders, blurring

in an exudation of women and myrrh.

Within the flags of paper lace, cut-out fish,

birds and braided dolls, a woman weaves in a strand

from her own shawl, not distinguishing

person from place. Watching me,

she opens her flower hand stirring

the sleeping baby in her skirt: begging,

her dropped petal fingers curl toward me,

arrowhead eyes fly toward me as I reach down

with a coin for her hand. In the gaping yellow night,

I feel my own child’s hand pull me down.

“Am I going to die?” she asks, nearly grown,

I count to twenty.

Paris. An ovarian cyst after midnight

twists her to the floor; she is yours,

and mortal, avoid the hospital.

We lock in two curves, her back against my front,

between my knees, rocking, counting,

our breaths timed with her pain . . .

twenty seconds, and we rest in between . . .

helplessly, I am chanting, “in – be – tween,

. . . there is a small space between the pains

where we rest . . .” wet as seals, our
holds slip,

counting, the small space comes.

we rest in long breaths.

“Ma, am I going to die?“

“Not while we breathe, no one dies . . .

count, it is time to count!“

We count again twenty . . . and the hours slip,

even, now subsiding, you fall to my side.

I pull the sheet down to cover you,

my long lovely daughter, sleep in this bough

of arms and legs, while we wait

for some act of reinstatement,

until the fever breaks,

or the ancients return to the Zona Viva.

The Indian woman’s eyes never leave my face

as I kneel down to her baby.

I buy a painted tin votive,

thanking God for a miracle. Permissibly,

we gaze at each other’s hammock bodies,

listening to the script of origins,

seeing volcanoes overturn or spare the pyramids,

begin the tops or stop their orbital spin.

Inhale, suppose there is spirea in the air,

where the women sit, twilit, watching the day close,

a book held fast in the hand of a sleeper,

where it is written: in this place of accidents,
we are innocent. Inhale.

"Letter to My Nieces on Their Birthdays" by Jack Wiler (From Fun Being Me)

Good day to my favorite nieces.

All joy and luck to two wonderful young women.

This is a note from your uncle.

Your silly and foolish uncle.

You probably have never had anyone write you a poem.

May you have many more.

From young men who love you

and write passionately of your charms.

That will come.

But for now you’ll have to take this as your gift.

I want to tell you about where you came from,

where you are, and where you can go.

You’ve spent your young lives in South Jersey

like your parents, and their parents and like me for a while.

You’re two white girls in a world that is changing.

I’m an old man from a very different world.

When my father was young, he had negro maids

and cooks and a man brought milk each morning

in bright, glass containers.

Milk and cream and chocolate milk,

all fresh and pure and right from the farm.

He had a gardener come and trim the bushes.

He had a cook make everything they ate.

Roasts and turkeys and casseroles,

rich in cheese and meat and milk

When I was young, we ate Thanksgiving Dinner

in the kitchen with the colored folk.

When I grew up, colored people could only

be janitors or porters on the railroad.

Now no one rides a railroad except as a treat.

I remember when I was ten, seeing young negro men

dancing to wild music and wishing I could dance like that.

They were up on a stage, legs all pumping, arms strong and wild

and I wanted to jump up and join them.

But I didn’t

It was South Jersey and you didn’t do that in 1964.

The world spins, girls,

and changes all the time.

You have to be ready to spin and change with it.

You have to jump on the stage with the colored men

and dance with them.

You have to watch how the world spins and grab it

when you can.

It’s easy to do just what the world expects.

When I was young, the world expected

you to hate negroes.

The world expected a black woman would clean your house.

That she would do it for next to nothing.

The world expected that you would grow up and get married

and have a couple of kids and love your children

and you would never have to work.

The world never expected women to work

or negros to have real jobs

or white folks to dance to negro music.

But that music has always been America’s music

and it makes us dance.

The world is a wild dance

and you have to jump in.

The world isn’t South Jersey.

The world isn’t the USA.

The world is a wild mix

of horror and joy.

One day you’ll fall in love.

Your heart will be an untamed beast

and you should never,

never,

tame that beast.

The beast made you.

The beast held you to its heart and said, I love you.

The beast mows your lawn

and cooks your dinner.

The beast watches you ride your bike and is terrified you’ll die.

The beast is your parents and the beast is you.

Don’t be scared.

Get up and dance.

Don’t be afraid of what your friends say.

Don’t worry about your grades.

Don’t be stupid and listen to the voice that says,

what will my friends say?

The moon rises up tonight, wild and huge and it’s asking you to dance.

Reach out and take its hand, my beautiful girls.

Dance across the lawn and feel your feet wet with dew.

And while you’re dancing, think about me,
asleep and dreaming of girls dancing in the dew.

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CavanKerry Authors

Nin Andrews
Nin Andrews grew up on a farm in Charlottesville, Virginia. She received her BA from Hamilton College and her MFA from Vermont College. Her poems and stories have a appeared in my literary journals and anthologies including Agni, Ploughshares, and Best American Poetry. The recipient of two Ohio Arts Council grants, she is the author of many books including Miss August (CavanKerry Press 2017), The Book of Orgasms, Southern Comfort (CavanKerry Press 2009), and Why God Is a Woman.

Christian Barter
Christian Barter is the author of three books of poetry – The Singers I Prefer in 2005, In Someone Else’s House (2013), and most recently Bye-bye Land, winner of the 2017 Isabella Gardner Award from BOA Editions. His poetry has appeared in journals including Ploughshares, Tin House, New Letters, Georgia Review and The American Scholar and featured on poets.org, Poetry Daily, and The PBS Newshour. He has received a Hodder Fellowship from Princeton University, the 2014 Maine Literary Award for Poetry, and was the Centennial Poet Laureate of Acadia National Park. For thirty years he has worked for the trail crew there as a stone worker, rigger, arborist and supervisor.

Jeanne Marie Beaumont
Jeanne Marie Beaumont is the author of Letters from Limbo (CavanKerry Press, 2016), Burning of the Three Fires, Curious Conduct, and Placebo Effects, a winner of the National Poetry Series (Norton, 1997). She coedited The Poets’ Grimm: 20th Century Poems from Grimm Fairy Tales. In 2019, her play Asylum Song had its world premiere at the HERE Theater in New York. Her poem “Afraid So” was made into an award-winning short film by filmmaker Jay Rosenblatt. She won the 2009 Dana Award for Poetry. She teaches at the Unterberg Poetry Center of the 92^nd St. Y. www.jeannemariebeaumont.com

Pam Bernard
Pam Bernard, poet, professor, and editor, received her MFA from the Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College, and BA from Harvard University. Her awards include a NEA Fellowship and two Mass Cultural Council Fellowships. She has published three full-length collections of poetry, and a verse novel entitled Esther (2015). Ms. Bernard lives in Walpole, New Hampshire, where she teaches creative writing at Franklin Pierce University, and also conducts private workshops in memoir and poetry.

Bhisham Bherwani
Bhisham Bherwani studied Fine Arts at New England College. He is also a graduate of New York University and Cornell University, and the recipient of fellowships and scholarships from The Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, New England College, and The Frost Place. He was born in Bombay, India; he lives in New York City. With CavanKerry Press, Bherwani released The Second Night of the Spirit in 2009.

Celia Bland
Celia Bland‘s three collections of poetry (including Soft Box, from CavanKerry, 2004) were the subject of an essay by Jonathan Blunk in the summer 2019 issue of The Georgia Review. Cherokee Road Kill (Dr. Cicero, 2018) featured pen and ink drawings by Japanese artist Kyoko Miyabe. The title poem received the 2015 Raynes Prize. Her work is included in Native Voices: Indigenous American Poetry, Craft and Conversation (Tupelo Press 2019). Selected prints of the Madonna Comix, an image and poetry collaboration created with artist Dianne Kornberg, were exhibited at Lesley Heller Gallery in New York City, and published by William James Books with an introduction by Luc Sante. Bland is co-editor with Martha Collins of the essay collection Jane Cooper: A Radiance of Attention (U. of Michigan, 2019). She wrote the catalogue essay for “In the Midst of Something Splendid: Recent Paintings by Colleen Randall” opening at the Hood Museum, Dartmouth College in January 2020. She is the author of young adult biographies of the Native American leaders Pontiac, Osceola, and Peter MacDonald (Chelsea House Books). Originally from the Blue Ridge Mountains of North Carolina, Bland teaches poetry at Bard College, where she is associate director of the Bard College Institute for Writing & Thinking.

Annie Boutelle
Annie Boutelle, born and raised in Scotland, was educated at the University of St. Andrews and New York University. She teaches in the English Department at Smith College, where she founded the Poetry Center. She lives with her husband in western Massachusetts. How They Fell released with CavanKerry Press in 2014.

Andrea Carter Brown
Andrea Carter Brown is the author of The Disheveled Bed (CavanKerry Press, 2006) and two chapbooks, Domestic Karma (Finishing Line Press, 2018) and Brook & Rainbow (winner of the Sow’s Ear Press Chapbook Prize, 2001). September 12, her collection of award-winning poems about 9/11 and its aftermath, is forthcoming in 2021 for the 20^th anniversary of 9/11. Her poems have won awards from Five Points, River Styx, and PSA, among others, and are cited in the Library of Congress Online Guide to the Poetry of 9/11. She was a Founding Editor of Barrow Street and Managing Editor of The Emily Dickinson Journal. Currently she is Series Editor of The Word Works Washington Prize. An avid birder, she lives in Los Angeles where she grows lemons, limes, oranges, and tangerines in her back yard.

Eloise Bruce
Eloise Bruce’s book Rattle was published by CavanKerry in 2004. She is member of the critique and performance group Cool Women. In 2018 she received the New Jersey Governor’s Award for Arts Education. She has had various roles at the Frost Place Center for Poetry and the Arts. Since its inception she has been integral in nurturing and guiding Poetry Out Loud in New Jersey and she is youth editor for RavensPerch Magazine. A chapbook Scud Cloud, a conversation in poetry with her husband David Keller about living with his dementia is due out in 2020 from Ragged Sky.

Christopher Bursk
A recipient of NEA, Guggenheim, and Pew Fellowships, Christopher Bursk is the author of sixteen books, including A Car Stops And A Door Opens, Dear Terror, The Infatuations and Infidelities of Pronouns, Cell Count and The Improbable Swervings of Atoms (winner of the Donald Hall prize in Poetry from AWP). Most importantly he is the grandfather of six, and has three imaginary friends, Wobbly, Oliver, and Nobody.

Kevin Carey
Kevin Carey is the Coordinator of Creative Writing at Salem State University. He has published three books – a chapbook of fiction, The Beach People (Red Bird Chapbooks) and two books of poetry from CavanKerry Press, The One Fifteen to Penn Station and Jesus Was a Homeboy, which was selected as an Honor Book for the 2017 Paterson Poetry Prize. Kevin is also a filmmaker and playwright. His latest documentary film, Unburying Malcolm Miller, about a deceased Salem, MA poet, premiered at the Mass Poetry Festival in 2016. His latest play “The Stand or Sal is Dead” a murder mystery comedy, opened in Newburyport, MA. at The Actor’s Studio on June 21^{st –}24^th 2018. A new collection of poems, Set in Stone, released in May of 2020. http://kevincareywriter.com

Marina Carreira
Marina Carreira (she/her/hers) is a queer Luso-American writer and multimedia artist from Newark, New Jersey. She is the author of Save the Bathwater (Get Fresh Books, 2018) and I Sing to That Bird Knowing He Won’t Sing Back (Finishing Line Press, 2017). Marina is a recipient of the Sundress Academy for the Arts Summer 2021 Residency Fellowship. As a visual artist, she has exhibited her work at Morris Museum, Artfront Galleries, West Orange Arts Council, and Monmouth University Center for the Arts, among others.

Teresa Carson
Teresa Carson holds an MFA in Poetry and an MFA in Theatre, both from Sarah Lawrence College. She is the author of three collections of poetry: Elegy for the Floater (CavanKerry Press, 2008); My Crooked House (CavanKerry Press, 2014), which was a finalist for the Paterson Poetry Prize; The Congress of Human Oddities (Deerbrook Editions, 2015). She is a co-founder of the Unbroken Thread[s] Project, which explores how histories/myths/memories are excavated, interpreted, transformed and transmitted. A fairly new resident of Sarasota, Florida, she works to bring poetry to everyone in Sarasota County through her Poetry in Un/Expected Places project, which involves collaborations with artists from all genres.

Sandra Castillo
Born in Havana, Cuba, Sandra M. Castillo left the island of her birth with her family in the summer of 1970 on one of the last of President Johnson’s Freedom Flights and grew up in South Florida. Her work explores issues of memory, history, gender and language, but it reflects a personal vision, tied primarily by history, personal and otherwise. She depicts contradictory worlds, the memory of a homeland and memory politics while examining the ordinary reality of exile as well as the duality of existence. Eating Moors and Christians (CavanKerry, 2016) is a startling collection of poems of her life in post-revolutionary Cuba, of exile in Miami, and her journey back, each time unearthing powerful new memories and voices that become part of this great ajiaco of magic, glorious food, and unforgettable people, as well as the haunted spaces between “history and sorrow.”

Karen Chase
Karen Chase lives in Western Massachusetts. She is the author of two collections of poems, Kazimierz Square and BEAR as well as Jamali-Kamali, a book-length homoerotic poem which takes place in Mughal India. Her award-winning book, Land of Stone, tells the story of her work with a silent young man in a psychiatric hospital where she was the hospital poet. Her memoir, Polio Boulevard, came out in 2014, followed by FDR On His Houseboat: The Larooco Log, 1924-1926 in 2016.

David S. Cho
David S. Cho was born and raised in the Chicago area, along with his brother and extended family, the proud children of Korean immigrants in the early 1970s. He holds a BA from the University of Illinois, MFA and MA from Purdue University, and MAT and PhD from the University of Washington, and has taught in West Lafayette and Crawfordsville, Indiana; Chicago; and Seattle and Tacoma, Washington. Formerly an associate professor of English and director of the American Ethnic Studies program at Hope College (Holland, Michigan), he now serves as the director of the Office of Multicultural Development at Wheaton College. He is the author of a chapbook, Song of Our Songs (2010), a book of poems, Night Sessions (2011), and a scholarly monograph on 20th-century Korean American novels, Lost in Transnation (2017).

Robert Cording
Robert Cording taught for 38 years at Holy Cross College in Worcester, Massachusetts, and is now a poetry mentor in MFA program at Seattle Pacific University. He has received two National Endowment for the Arts fellowships in poetry and his poems have appeared in publications such as the Nation, Georgia Review, Southern Review, Poetry, Hudson Review, Kenyon Review, New Ohio Review, New England Review, Orion, and the New Yorker. He has released five books with CavanKerry Press: Against Consolation (2002), Common Life (2006), Walking With Ruskin (2010), Only So Far (2015), and Without My Asking (2019).

Sam Cornish
Sam Cornish grew up in Baltimore, MD and lived in Boston, MA until his death in 2018. Following his move to Boston, he was a teacher at the Highland Park Community School in Roxbury, MA, and was also active in the Poetry in the Schools Program in Boston and Cambridge, MA. In the early 80s, he was the Literature Director of the Massachusetts Council on the Arts and Humanities and subsequently, an instructor in Creative Writing at Emerson College until his retirement in 2006. In addition to his nine books of poetry and two children’s books, he has been published in dozens of periodicals, including Essence, Ploughshares, The Harvard Review, the Christian Science Monitor and the Boston Globe. In 2007, he was chosen as the first Poet Laureate of the City of Boston. CavanKerry Press released An Apron Full of Beans: New and Selected Poems in 2008.

Paola Corso
Paola Corso is the author of 7 poetry and fiction books set in her native Pittsburgh where her Italian immigrant family found work in the steel mills. Most recent are The Laundress Catches Her Breath (CavanKerry Press, 2012), winner of the Tillie Olsen Award in Creative Writing, Once I Was Told the Air Was Not Breathing, winner of a Triangle Fire Memorial Association Award, and her forthcoming collection Vertical Bridges: Poems, Essays, and Photographs of City Steps. Her nonfiction has appeared in venues such as The New York Times, Women’s Review of Books, and U.S. Catholic. Writing honors include a New York Foundation for the Arts Poetry Fellowship, Sherwood Anderson Fiction Prize, and inclusion on Pennsylvania Center for the Book’s Cultural and Literary Map. A literary activist, Corso is co-founder and resident artist of Steppin Stanzas, a poetry and art project celebrating city steps. She is a member of Park Slope Windsor Terrace Artists Collective who exhibits her photographs in libraries, galleries, and open studios. She divides her time between New York City where she is on the English Department Faculty at Touro College and Pittsburgh. paolacorso.com

Shira Dentz
Shira Dentz is the author of two chapbooks and five books including Sisyphusina (PANK, 2020), door of thin skins, a cross-genre memoir (CavanKerry, 2013), and how do I net thee (Salmon Poetry), a National Poetry Series finalist. Her writing appears in many venues including Poetry, American Poetry Review, New American Writing, Iowa Review, Academy of American Poets’ Poem-a-Day series (Poets.org), and NPR. A recipient of awards including an Academy of American Poets’ Prize, Poetry Society of America’s Lyric Poem Award, and Poetry Society of America’s Cecil Hemley Memorial Award, she is Special Features Editor at Tarpaulin Sky and teaches in upstate NY. More about her writing can be found at www.shiradentz.com.

Moyra Donaldson
Moyra Donaldson lives in Northern Ireland. She has nine poetry collection, Snakeskin Stilettos, Beneath the Ice, The Horse’s Nest and Miracle Fruit, from Lagan Press, Belfast and an American edition of Snakeskin Stilettos, published in 2002 from CavanKerry Press. Her Selected Poems and The Goose Tree, were both published by Liberties Press, Dublin. Moyra has also collaborated with photographer Victoria J Dean, resulting in the art book Dis-ease and with visual artist Paddy Lennon, resulting in a limited edition book of poetry and paintings, Blood Horses, from Caesura Press. Her latest collection, Carnivorous was published by Doire Press, Spring 2019. In 2019, Moyra received a Major Artist Award from the Arts Council of Northern Ireland.

Catherine Doty
Catherine Doty is a poet and educator from Paterson, New Jersey. She is the author of two collections of poetry: momentum (CavanKerry, 2004) and Wonderama (CavanKerry, 2021). She has received prizes and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the New York Foundation for the Arts, the New Jersey State Council on the Arts, and the Academy of American Poets. An MFA graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, she has taught for the Geraldine R. Dodge Foundation, the Frost Place, and the New York Public Library, among others. Her poems have appeared widely in journals and anthologies.

Sherry Fairchok
Sherry Fairchok was born in Scranton in 1962. She spent the early part of her childhood in Taylor, PA, a coal-mining town, in which her family has lived since the 1880s, and where her grandfather, great-uncles, and great-grandfather worked as miners. She earned a bachelor’s degree from Syracuse University and an M.F. A. degree from Sarah Lawrence college. Her poems have appeared in the Southern Review, Ploughshares, DoubleTake, and Poetry Northwest, among other journals. She works as an information technology editor and lives in Mount Vernon, NY. In 2003, CavanKerry Press published her collection The Palace of Ashes.

Gibson Fay-LeBlanc
Gibson Fay-LeBlanc’s first collection of poems, Death of a Ventriloquist (University of North Texas, 2012), won the Vassar Miller Prize and was featured by Poets & Writers as one of a dozen debut collections to watch. His poems have appeared in magazines including Guernica, the New Republic, Tin House, jubilat, FIELD, and the Literary Review. He currently serves as executive director of the Maine Writers & Publishers Alliance and lives in Portland, Maine with his family. His second collection, Deke Dangle Dive, released with CavanKerry in 2021.

Marie Lawson Fiala
Marie Lawson Fiala, born in Europe, came to the United States as a child. Her first language was Czech, and she learned English only after starting grade school. She earned her Bachelor of Arts degree in Psychology with Distinction from Stanford University, her Juris Doctor degree from Stanford Law School, and her Master of Fine Arts in Writing from the University of San Francisco. Ms. Fiala is a full-tie practicing attorney and a partner in an international law firm, specializing in complex commercial litigation. Letters From a Distant Shore was released in 2010.

Sondra Gash
Sondra Gash grew up in Paterson, NJ. Her poems have appeared in The New York Times, Calyx, The Paterson Literary Review, and U.S. 1 Worksheets, and her full-length collection Silk Elegy was released by CavanKerry in 2002. She has received grants from the New Jersey State Council on the Arts and the Corporation of Yaddo, and won first prize in the Allen Ginsberg Poetry Competition. In 1999, the Geraldine Dodge Foundation awarded her a fellowship to the Virginia Center for the Arts. She lives with her husband in New Jersey, where she teaches writing and directs the poetry program at the Women’s Resource Center in Summit.

Ross Gay
Ross Gay was born in Youngstown, Ohio and grew up outside of Philadelphia. His poems have appeared in American Poetry Review, Harvard Review, and Atlanta Review, among other journals. Ross is a Cave Canem fellow and has been a Breadloaf Tuition Scholar. Against Which, Gay’s debut collection of poetry, was published by CavanKerry Press in 2006. In addition to holding a Ph.D in American Literature from Temple University, he is a basketball coach, an occasional demolition man, a painter, and teaches at Indiana University.

Loren Graham
Loren Graham was raised in and around Broken Arrow, Oklahoma. He studied as a writer and composer at Oklahoma Baptist University, Baylor University, and the University of Virginia. He received a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in 2009 for poems that became part of Places I Was Dreaming (CavanKerry Press, 2015). He currently lives in Helena, Montana, with his wife, Jane Shawn.

John Haines
John Haines, poet, essayist, and teacher was born in 1924 and died in March 2011. After studying painting, he spent more than twenty years homesteading in Alaska. The author of more than ten collections of poetry, his works include At the End of This Summer: Poems 1948-1954, The Owl in the Mask of the Dreamer and New Poems 1980-88, for which he received both the Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize and the Western States Book Award. He taught at Ohio University, George Washington University, University of Montana, Bucknell University, and the University of Cincinnati. He was Resident at the Rockefeller Center, Bellagio, Italy and Rasmuson Fellow at the U.S. Artists Meeting, Los Angeles. Named a Fellow by The Academy of American Poets in 1997, his other honors include the Alaska Governor’s Award for Excellence in the Arts, two Guggenheim Fellowships, an Amy Lowell Traveling Fellowship, a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, and a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Library of Congress. In 2008, Sewanee Review awarded Haines the Atkin Taylor Award for Poetry. CavanKerry had the honor of publishing Descent in 2010, as well as A Gradual Twilight: An Appreciation of John Haines, a collection of reflections on Haines’s writing.

Joan Cusack Handler
As the founder of CavanKerry Press, Joan Cusack Handler is a poet and memoirist, a psychologist in clinical practice, and a blogger for PsychologyToday.com (“Of Art and Science”). Her poems have been widely published and have received awards from The Boston Review and five Pushcart nominations. A Bronx native, she has four published books with CavanKerry – GlOrious (2003), The Red Canoe: Love In Its Making (2008), Confessions of Joan the Tall: A Memoir (2012), and Orphans (2016) – and currently resides in Brooklyn and the East Hamptons. Joan is married to a great man and fellow psychologist, has a loving son and daughter-in-law, and two amazing granddaughters.

Judith Hannan
Judith Hannan is the author of Motherhood Exaggerated (CavanKerry Press, 2012), her memoir of discovery and transformation during her daughter’s cancer treatment and transition into survival. Her most recent book is The Write Prescription: Telling Your Story to Live With and Beyond Illness. Her essays have appeared in such publications as The Washington Post, AARP: The Girlfriend, Woman’s Day, Narratively, The Forward, Brevity, Opera News, The Healing Muse, and The Martha’s Vineyard Gazette. Ms. Hannan teaches writing about personal experience to homeless mothers, young women in the criminal just system as well as to those affected by physical and/or mental illness. She is a writing mentor with the Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center’s Visible Ink program where she also serves as an interventionist in a study to evaluate the benefits of expressive writing among elderly cancer patients. In June, 2016, Ms. Hannan joined the faculty of the inaugural Narrative Medicine program at Kripalu. In 2015, she received a Humanism-in-Medicine award from the Arnold P. Gold Foundation. Ms. Hannan serves on the board of the Children’s Museum of Manhattan where she is also Writer-in-Residence. www.judithhannanwrites.com

Elizabeth Hall Hutner
Elizabeth Hall Hutner was a writer, scholar and musician who lived in Princeton, N.J., where she completed her Ph.D. in Comparative Literature at Princeton University. Her short essays have been published in A Real Life, a bimonthly magazine. Hutner graduated from Yale University, where she studied with Mark Strand and J.D. McClatchy, and she worked with Marvin Bell at the Breadloaf Writer’s Conference. She also held a Master of Arts from Princeton. She died of breast cancer in November, 2002. In 2004, her collection of poetry, Life With Sam, was published as the first entry in CavanKerry’s LaurelBooks collection.

Marcus Jackson
Marcus Jackson was born in Toledo, Ohio. His poetry has appeared in The New Yorker, Harvard Review, The Cincinnati Review, and Hayden’s Ferry Review, among many other publications. He has received fellowships from New York University and Cave Canem. His debut collection of poetry, Neighborhood Register, was published by CavanKerry Press in 2011.

Susan Jackson
Susan Jackson is the author of Through a Gate of Trees (CavanKerry Press, 2007) and the chapbook All the Light in Between (Finishing Line Press, 2013). Her writing has been published recently in Tiferet Journal, Lips, Paterson Literary Review, and Nimrod International Journal. She was awarded a fellowship from the New Jersey State Council on the Arts, Geraldine R. Dodge Foundation Residency Grants to the Vermont Studio Center and Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, a Pushcart nomination, and recognition from the Allen Ginsberg Poetry Awards. During the summer, Jackson coleads a group in “Poetry as Spiritual Practice.” With four grown children and two granddaughters, she and her husband live in Teton County, Wyoming.

Gray Jacobik
Gray Jacobik is a widely anthologized poet; The Double Task was selected by James Tate for the Juniper Prize; The Surface of Last Scattering received the X. J. Kennedy Prize; Brave Disguises, the AWP Poetry Series Award. In 2016 The Banquet: New & Selected Poems received the William Meredith Award in Poetry. She’s been awarded The Yeats Prize, the Emily Dickinson Award and the Third Coast Poetry Prize. Jacobik is a painter as well as a poet and several CKP covers have featured her art. She has released two poetry collection with CavanKerry Press – Little Boy Blue: A Memoir in Verse (2011) and Eleanor (2020). http://www.grayjacobik.com/

David Keller
David Keller is the author of five collections of poetry, including The Bar of the Flattened Heart 2014. He has taught poetry workshops in New York and has served as Poetry Coordinator for the Geraldine R. Dodge Biennial Poetry Festival, on the Board of Governors for the Poetry Society of America, and as a member of the Advisory Board of The Frost Place. Along with the late Donald Sheehan he founded the Frost Places Center of Poetry and the Arts in Franconia, NH in the late 1970’s. He had published widely in magazines and journals including Poetry, Sou’wester, and Gettysburg Review.

Tina Kelley
Tina Kelley’s fourth poetry collection, Rise Wildly, was released in 2020 by CavanKerry Press, which also published Abloom and Awry (2017). Ardor won the Jacar Press 2017 chapbook competition. Her other books are Precise (Word Press), and The Gospel of Galore, winner of a 2003 Washington State Book Award. She co-authored Almost Home: Helping Kids Move from Homelessness to Hope, and was a reporter for The New York Times for a decade, sharing in a staff Pulitzer for coverage of the 9/11 attacks. She wrote 121 “Portraits of Grief,” short descriptions of the victims, and many stories about oppression: the health problems of a Native American tribe living near a Superfund site, a high school student who challenged a proselytizing public school teacher and who received a death threat for his stance, a transgender vocational school principal in a rural town, and the lives of children waiting to be adopted out of foster care. Her journalism has appeared in Orion, Audubon, and People magazines, and her poetry has appeared in Poetry East, North American Review, Poetry Northwest, Prairie Schooner, The Best American Poetry, and on the buses of Seattle. She and her husband have two children and live in Maplewood, NJ.

Christine Korfhage
Christine Korfhage was born in Albany, NY and grew up overseas. A former artisan and juried member of the League of New Hampshire Craftsmen, she began writing poetry at age 49. Returning to school after three decades, in 1999 she received her B.A. from Vermont College’s Adult Degree Program where she was awarded a Fellowship for Excellence in Creative Writing. She received her M.F.A. from Bennington College in 2001. Her poems have appeared in many journals, including Chiron Review, Connecticut River Review, Nimrod International Review, Paterson Literary Review, Pearl, Red Rock Review and The Spoon River Poetry Review. A mother and grandmother, Christine lives in New Hampshire. CavanKerry Press published her poetry collection, We Aren’t Who We Are and this world isn’t either, in 2007.

Laurie Lamon
Laurie Lamon’s poems have appeared in journals and magazines including The Atlantic, The New Republic, Arts & Letters Journal of Contemporary Culture, Plume, Ploughshares, J Journal: New Writing on Justice, Innisfree Poetry Journal, North American Review and others. She has two poetry collections published at CavanKerry Press: The Fork Without Hunger (2005), and Without Wings (2009). She was the recipient of a Pushcart Prize and was selected by Donald Hall as a Witter Bynner Fellow in 2007. She currently holds the Amy Ryan Endowed professorship at Whitworth University in Spokane, Washington, and is poetry editor for the literary journal Rock & Sling. She lives with my husband Bill Siems, and their two Dachshund Chihuahua dogs, Willow and Johnny.

Joseph O. Legaspi
Joseph O. Legaspi, a Fulbright and New York Foundation for the Arts fellow, is the author of two poetry collections from CavanKerry Press, Threshold (2017) and Imago (2007); and three chapbooks: Postcards (Ghost Bird Press), Aviary, Bestiary (Organic Weapon Arts), and Subways (Thrush Press). His poems have appeared in POETRY, New England Review, World Literature Today, Best of the Net, and the Academy of American Poets’ Poem-a-Day. He co-founded Kundiman (www.kundiman.org), a national organization serving generations of writers and readers of Asian American literature. He lives with his husband in Queens, NY.

Harriet Levin
Harriet Levin is the author of The Christmas Show (Beacon Press, 1997), winner of the Barnard New Women Poets Prize and The Poetry Society of America’s Alice Fay di Castagnola Award; Girl in Cap and Gown (Mammoth Books, 2010), a National Poetry Series finalist; and My Oceanography (Cavankerry, 2018). Her novel How Fast Can You Run, (Harvard Square Editions, 2016) grew out of a One Book, One Philadelphia writing project from interviews with Sudanese refugee Michael Majok Kuch and was excepted in The Kenyon Review. She holds a MFA from the University of Iowa and teaches writing at Drexel University.

Howard Levy
Howard Levy is the author of CavanKerry’s first book, A Day This Lit (2000), as well as Spooky Action at a Distance (2014). His work has appeared in Poetry, Threepenny Review, and The Gettysburg Review. He has served as a faculty member of the Frost Place Poetry Festival and currently lives in New York.

Kali Lightfoot
Kali Lightfoot lives in Salem, Massachusetts. She worked as a teacher, wilderness ranger in Washington state, executive at Road Scholar, and most recently as founding executive director of the National Resource Center for Osher Lifelong Learning Institutes. Lightfoot earned an MFA in writing from the Vermont College of Fine Arts in 2015. Her poetry has appeared in journals and anthologies and been nominated for Pushcart Prizes by Lavender Review and Poetry South, and Best of the Net by Star 82 Review. Kali received an honorable mention in the SFPA Speculative Poetry Contest, and she has written reviews of poetry books for Broadsided Press, The Hopper, and Solstice. Her debut poetry collection, Pelted By Flowers, was released by CavanKerry Press in 2021.

Frannie Lindsay
The Snow’s Wife, released by CavanKerry in November 2020, is Frannie Lindsay’s sixth volume. Her others are If Mercy (The WordWorks, 2016); Our Vanishing (Red Hen, 2012); Mayweed (The WordWorks, 2010); Lamb, (Perugia, 2006);and Where She Always Was (Utah State University, 2004). Her honors include the Benjamin Saltman Award; the Washington Prize; the May Swenson Award; and The Missouri Review Prize, and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Massachusetts Cultural Council. Lindsay’s work appears in the Atlantic Monthly, The American Poetry Review, The Yale Review, Field, Plume, and Best American Poetry. She is a classical pianist and teaches workshops on grief and trauma.

Christopher Matthews
Christopher Matthews was born in Donegal, Ireland and grew up and was educated between that country and England. He took his bachelor’s degree at the University of Ulster and obtained a PH.D from the University of Durham: its subject was Ezra Pound. His poems have appeared in The American Scholar, Crazyhorse, The Dublin Review and other journals. He currently teaches literature to undergraduates in Lugano, Switzerland. Eyelevel: Fifty Histories released with CavanKerry Press in 2003.

Michael Miller
Michael Miller‘s Darkening the Grass (2012) is the third book by an accomplished American poet who is in his eighth decade. The Joyful Dark, his first book, was the “Editor’s Choice” winner of the McGovern Prize at Ashland Poetry Press. His poems have appeared in The Kenyon Review, The Sewanee Review, The American Scholar, The New Republic, Raritan,The Southern Review, The Yale Review and other publications. Born in New York City in 1940, he now lives in Massachusetts.

Martin Mooney
Martin Mooney’s poetry, short fiction, reviews, criticism and cultural commentary have been published in Irish and British periodicals. Following Grub, which on its original release in Ireland won the Brendan Behand Memorial Award, Mooney published Bonfire Makers, Operation Sandcastle, and Rasputin and His Children. His poems have appeared in Field and The Gettsyburg Review. He was writer-in-residence as the Brighton Festival and the Aspects Festival of Irish Writing, and twice was appointed a member of the resident faculty at The Robert Frost Place Poetry Festival in Franconia, NH.

Dipika Mukherjee
Dipika Mukherjee is the author of two novels: Shambala Junction, which won the UK Virginia Prize for Fiction, and Ode to Broken Things, which was longlisted for the Man Asian Literary Prize. Rules of Desire is her short story collection. She has published two books of poetry, The Palimpsest of Exile and The Third Glass of Wine, and received the Liakoura Poetry Prize in 2016. She teaches at the Graham School at the University of Chicago, as well as StoryStudio Chicago, and holds a doctorate in sociolinguistics. More at dipikamukherjee.com.

Mark Nepo
Mark Nepo has moved and inspired readers and seekers all over the world. Beloved as a poet, teacher, and storyteller, Mark has been called “one of the finest spiritual guides of our time.” A #1 New York Times bestselling author, his twenty-two books (Including 2007’s Surviving Has Made Me Crazy) and fifteen audio projects have been translated into over twenty languages. Mark has appeared with Oprah Winfrey on her Super Soul Sunday program on OWN TV. In 2015, he was given a Life-Achievement Award by AgeNation. And in 2016, he was named by Watkins: Mind Body Spirit as one of the 100 Most Spiritually Influential Living People.

Richard Jeffrey Newman
Richard Jeffrey Newman, an associate professor at Nassau Community College, New York, is an essayist, poet and translator who has been publishing his work since 1988, when the essay “His Sexuality; Her Reproductive Rights” appeared in Changing Men magazine. Since then, his essays, poems, and translations have appeared in a wide range of journals, among them Prairie Schooner and Birmingham Poetry Review. He has given talks and led workshops on writing autobiographically about gender, sex, and sexuality. The Silence of Men was released by CavanKerry Press in 2006.

Brent Newsom
Brent Newsom is the author of Love’s Labors (CavanKerry Press, 2015) and the librettist for A Porcelain Doll, an opera based on the life of deafblind pioneer Laura Bridgman. His poems have also appeared in Southern Review, Hopkins Review, Cave Wall, and other journals. He lives and teaches in central Oklahoma.

Kari O’Driscoll
Kari L. O’Driscoll is a writer and mother of two living in the Pacific Northwest. Her work has appeared in print anthologies on mothering, reproductive rights, and cancer, as well as online in outlets such as Ms. Magazine, ParentMap, The ManifestStation, and Healthline. She is the founder of The SELF Project, an organization whose goals are to help teenagers, teachers, and caregivers of teens recognize the unique challenges and amazing attributes of adolescents and to use mindfulness and nonviolent communication to build better relationships. Her memoir, Truth Has a Different Shape, was published in Spring 2020. You can find her at www.kariodriscollwriter.com.

January Gill O’Neil
January Gill O’Neil is the executive director of the Massachusetts Poetry Festival, an assistant professor of English at Salem State University, and a board of trustees’ member with the Association of Writers and Writing Programs (AWP) and Montserrat College of Art. A Cave Canem fellow, January’s poems and articles have appeared in the New York Times Magazine, Former U.S. Poet Laureate Tracy K. Smith’s podcast “The Slowdown,” the Academy of American Poet’s Poem-A-Day series, American Poetry Review, New England Review, and Ploughshares, among others. In 2018, January was awarded a Massachusetts Cultural Council grant, and is the John and Renée Grisham Writer in Residence for 2019-2020 at the University of Mississippi, Oxford. She has released three collections of poetry with CavanKerry Press – Underlife (2009), Misery Islands (2014), and Rewilding (2018).

Rebecca Hart Olander
Rebecca Hart Olander grew up in eastern Massachusetts between Gloucester and Boston. She earned a BA from Hampshire College, an MAT in English from Smith College, and an MFA in Writing from Vermont College of Fine Arts. Her poetry, book reviews, and collaborative writing and collage have appeared widely in journals and anthologies. A chapbook, Dressing the Wounds, was released in 2019 by dancing girl press. Rebecca lives in western Massachusetts where she teaches writing at Westfield State University and is the editor/director of Perugia Press, a nonprofit feminist press publishing first and second full-length books of poetry by women. Uncertain Acrobats, her full-length debut, is due out in November 2021 with CavanKerry Press.

Georgianna Orsini
Georgianna Orsini attended Wellesley College and Harvard University and received her B.A. degree from Columbia University, during which time she worked as a Program Coordinator at International House. She has lived in Tuscany and New York. Her gardens have been featured in House and Garden, House Beautiful and American Women’s Garden. At present, she lives in the mountains of North Carolina where she continues to make gardens. An Imperfect Lover, her collection of poems and watercolors, was released by CavanKerry in 2004.

Adriana Páramo
Adrianna Páramo is a Colombian anthropologist and winner of the Social Justice and Equality Award in creative nonfiction with her book Looking for Esperanza. Her writing has appeared in Alaska Quarterly Review, The Los Angeles Review, Consequence Magazine, Fourteen Hills, Carolina Quarterly Review, Magnolia Journal, So To Speak, Compass Rose, and Phati’tude, among others. Páramo has volunteered her time as a transcriber for Voice of Witness, a book series which empowers those affected by social injustice. Her memoir, My Mother’s Funeral, was released by CavanKerry in 2013.

Peggy Penn
Peggy Penn’s poetry appeared in several publications including O Magazine, The Paris Review, Beloit Poetry Journal, Western Humanities Review, Southern Poetry Review and Margie Review. She won the poem for the first poem published in the journal Kimera, and the first Emily Dickinson Award for innovative poetry. She released two collections with CavanKerry Press – So Close (2001) and My Painted Warriors (2011) – before her death in 2012.

Donald Platt
Donald Platt’s seventh and sixth books are respectively One Illuminated Letter of Being (Red Mountain Press, 2020) and Man Praying (Free Verse Editions / Parlor Press, 2017). His fifth book, Tornadoesque, appeared through CavanKerry Press’s Notable Voices series in 2016. His poems have appeared in The New Republic, Poetry, Nation, Paris Review, American Poetry Review, Kenyon Review, Georgia Review, Ploughshares, Southwest Review, Tin House, Yale Review, and Southern Review, as well as in The Best American Poetry 2000, 2006, and 2015. He is a recipient of two fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts (1996 and 2011), of three Pushcart Prizes, and of the “Discovery”/The Nation Prize. Currently, he is a full professor of English at Purdue University.

Cati Porter
Cati Porter is a poet, editor, essayist, arts administrator, wife, mother, daughter, friend. She is the author of eight books and chapbooks, including My Skies of Small Horses, The Body, Like Bread, and The Body at a Loss. Her poems have appeared in Verse Daily, Contrary, West Trestle, So to Speak, The Nervous Breakdown, and others, as well as many anthologies. Her personal essays have appeared Salon, The Manifest-Station, Lady / Liberty / Lit, and Zocalo Public Square, Pratik and Shark Reef. She lives in Inland Southern California with her family where she runs Poemeleon: A Journal of Poetry and directs Inlandia Institute, a literary nonprofit and home to Inlandia Books, including The Hillary Gravendyk Prize.

Dawn Potter
Dawn Potter is the author of eight books of prose and poetry, including How the Crimes Happened (2010), and Same Old Story (2014) . New work appears in the Beloit Poetry Journal, the Split Rock Review, Vox Populi, and many other journals. She has received fellowships and awards from the Elizabeth George Foundation, the Writers’ Center, and the Maine Arts Commission, and her memoir Tracing Paradise won the Maine Literary Award in Nonfiction. Dawn directs the Frost Place Conference on Poetry and Teaching and leads the high school writing seminars at Monson Arts. She lives in Portland, Maine.

Wanda S. Praisner
Wanda S. Praisner, a recipient of fellowships from the NJ State Council on the Arts, the Dodge Foundation, PFAWC, and VCCA, has work in Atlanta Review, Lullwater Review, and Prairie Schooner. Books include: A Fine and Bitter Snow (USCA, ’03), On the Bittersweet Avenues of Pomona (Spire P., ’05), Where the Dead Are (CKP, ’13), Sometimes When Something Is Singing (Antrim H., ’14), Natirar ( Kelsay B., ’17), and To Illuminate the Way (Aldrich P., ’18). A resident poet for the state, she’s received sixteen Pushcart Prize nominations, the Egan Award, Princemere Prize, Kudzu Award, First Prize in Poetry at the College of NJ Writer’s Conference, and the 2017 New Jersey Poets Prize.

Jack Ridl
Jack Ridl, Poet Laureate of Douglas, Michigan (Population 1100), in April 2019 released Saint Peter and the Goldfinch (Wayne State University Press). His Practicing to Walk Like a Heron (WSUPress, 2013) was awarded the National Gold Medal for poetry by ForeWord Reviews/Indie Fab. His collection Broken Symmetry (WSUPress) was co-recipient of The Society of Midland Authors best book of poetry award for 2006. His Losing Season (CavanKerry Press) was named the best sports book of the year for 2009 by The Institute for International Sport.Then Poet Laureate Billy Collins selected his Against Elegies for The Center for Book Arts Chapbook Award. Every Thursday following the 2016 election he sent out a commentary and poem. The students at Hope College named him both their Outstanding Professor and their Favorite Professor, and in 1996 The Carnegie (CASE) Foundation named him Michigan Professor of the Year. More than 90 of Jack’s students are published, several of whom have received First Book Awards, national honors. For further information about Jack, his website is www.ridl.com.

Kenneth Rosen
Kenneth Rosen was born in Boston, and has lived in Maine since 1965. He recently taught at the American University in Bulgaria, and as a Fulbright professor at Sofia University. Whole Horse, his first collection, was selected for Richard Howard’s Braziller Poetry Series. Others are The Hebrew Lion, Black Leaves, Longfellow Square, Reptile Mind, No Snake, No Paradise, and The Origins of Tragedy. He founded the Stonecoast Writers’ Conference in 1981, and directed it for ten years.

Andrea Ross
Once a park service ranger and wilderness guide, Andrea Ross now teaches writing at UC Davis. She has been awarded several California Arts Council residencies and a fellowship at the Mesa Refuge. Her work can be found in Ploughshares, Terrain, the Café Review, and the Dirtbag Diaries Podcast. She lives in Davis, California with her husband and son. Her debut memoir, Unnatural Selection, was released by CavanKerry Press in 2021. Find out more at andrearosswriter.com.

Mary Ruefle
Mary Ruefle has published several books of poetry, including Among the Musk Ox People (Carnegie Mellon, 2002). Apparition Hill was completed in 1989 in China, where she was teaching. It falls between her books, The Adamant (University of Iowa, 1989) and Cold Pluto (Carnegie Mellon, 1996). She is the recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Creative Fellowship, a Whiting Writers’ Award, and an Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. She teaches in the MFA in Writing Program at Vermont College.

Maureen Seaton
Maureen Seaton has authored numerous poetry collections, both solo and collaborative. Her honors include the Lambda Literary Award, NEA, Illinois Arts Council Grant, Audre Lorde Award, and the Pushcart. Her memoir, Sex Talks to Girls (University of Wisconsin Press, 2008 & 2018), also garnered a “Lammy”. With poet Denise Duhamel, she co-authored Caprice: Collected, Uncollected, and New Collaborations (Sibling Rivalry Press, 2015); and with poet Neil de la Flor, she co-edited the anthology Reading Queer: Poetry in a Time of Chaos (Anhinga Press, 2018). Seaton is a Professor of Creative Writing at the University of Miami and published Sweet World with CavanKerry Press in 2019.

Robert Seder
Robert Seder was a production and lighting designer for many dance and theater companies for 20 years, working with David Gordon, Lucinda Childs, Meredith Monk, Carolyn Brown, Eric Bogosian, and Philip Glass, among others. He was a semifinalist for the Julie Harris Playwright award in 1987 with LIGHT, and wrote several other plays, produced in New York City, Madison and Boston. He also wrote novels and short stories in addition to his narrative of his first bone marrow transplant. He was an enthusiastic participant and teacher in the Bard College Language and Thinking Program and also offered “Writing Our Illness” workshops to the community. After undergoing a second bone marrow transplant in August 2001, he died on March 6, 2002, from multiple infections that his weakened immune system was unable to defeat. His posthumous collection, To The Marrow (2007), chronicles his journey through bone marrow transplantation.

Fred Shaw
Fred Shaw is a graduate of the University of Pittsburgh, and Carlow University, where he received his MFA. He teaches writing and literature at Point Park University and Carlow University. His first collection, Scraping Away, released with CavanKerry Press in April 2020. A book reviewer and Poetry Editor for Pittsburgh Quarterly, his poem, “Argot,” is featured in the 2018 full-length documentary, Eating & Working & Eating & Working. The film focuses on the lives of local service-industry workers. His poem “Scraping Away” was selected for the PA Public Poetry Project in 2017. He lives in Pittsburgh with his wife and rescued hound dog.

Danny Shot
Danny Shot was longtime publisher and editor of Long Shot magazine, which he founded along with Eliot Katz. His poems and stories have been widely anthologized and he’s performed his work everywhere. Mr. Shot lives in Hoboken, NJ (home of Frank Sinatra and baseball). He was featured in the widely acclaimed TV show State of the Arts. His play Roll the Dice was produced in September 2018 as part of the New York Theater Festival. Danny currently serves as Head Poetry Editor of Red Fez (https://www.redfez.net/) online magazine. WORKS was published by CavanKerry Press in 2018.

Joan Seliger Sidney
Joan Seliger Sidney is writer-in-residence at the University of Connecticut’s Center for Judaic Studies and Contemporary Jewish Life. She also facilitates “Writing for Your Life,” an adult writing workshop. Her dream-came-true job was teaching creative writing at the Université de Grenoble, France. Her poems have appeared in Michigan Quarterly Review, Massachusetts Review, Louisville Review, Kaleidoscope, and Anthology of Magazine Verse & Yearbook of American Poetry. She has received fellowships from the Connecticut Commission on the Arts, the Christopher Reeve Paralysis Foundation, the Craig H. Neilsen Foundation, and the Vermont Studio Center. Her poems published in 2003 were nominated for a Pushcart Prize XXIX. She has three published books: The Way the Past Comes Back (The Kutenai Press, 1992), Body of Diminishing Motion (CavanKerry Press, 2004), and Bereft and Blessed (Antrim House, 2014). She lives in Storrs, Connecticut, with her husband. Their four adult children are thriving.

Robin Silbergleid
Robin Silbergleid is the author of several books and chapbooks, including In the Cubiculum Nocturnum (Dancing Girl Press, 2019) and the memoir Texas Girl (Demeter 2014); she is also co-editor of Reading and Writing Experimental Texts: Critical Innovations (Palgrave 2017). Currently, she lives in East Lansing, Michigan, where she teaches and directs the Creative Writing Program at Michigan State University. Her collection The Baby Book was published by CavanKerry in 2015.

Dianne Silvestri, MD is a graduate of Butler University and Indiana University School of Medicine. She was associate professor of dermatology at UMass Chan Medical School until leukemia forced her retirement. She has studied poetry at workshops including Tupelo, PoemWorks, and Colrain, and authored the chapbook Necessary Sentiments. Her poems have appeared in Journal of the American Medical Association, Barrow Street, The Main Street Rag, and Naugatuck River Review, among others. She is a past Pushcart Prize nominee, and cofounder and leader of the Morse Poetry Group in Massachusetts. The mother of four and grandmother of seven, she enjoys gardening and ballroom dancing with her husband. www.diannesilvestri.com

Judith Sornberger
Judith Sornberger’s newest poetry book, I Call to You from Time came out in July 2019 from Wipf & Stock. Her other full-length poetry collections are Practicing the World (CavanKerry, 2018) and Open Heart (Calyx Books). She is also the author of five chapbooks, most recently Wal-Mart Orchid, winner of the 2012 Helen Kay Chapbook Prize (Evening Street Press). Her prose memoir The Accidental Pilgrim: Finding God and His Mother in Tuscany was published by Shanti Arts Press. She is a professor emerita from Mansfield University of Pennsylvania where she taught English and created and taught in the Women’s Studies Program.

Sarah Sousa
Sarah Sousa is the author of the poetry collections See the Wolf (2018) named a 2019 ‘Must Read’ book by the Massachusetts Center for the Book, Split the Crow, and Church of Needles. She is also the author of two chapbooks: Yell, which won the 2018 Summer Tide Pool Prize at C&R Press, and Hex which won the 2019 Cow Creek Chapbook Prize. Her poems have appeared in the Massachusetts Review, North American Review, the Southern Poetry Review, Verse Daily and Tupelo Quarterly, among others. Her honors include a Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Fellowship and a Massachusetts Cultural Council Fellowship. She is a member of the board of directors of Perugia Press.

Margo Stever
In 2019, CavanKerry Press published Margo Taft Stever’s Cracked Piano and Kattywompus Press published her chapbook Ghost Moose. She is the founder of the Hudson Valley Writers Center and founding editor of Slapering Hol Press. She teaches poetry to at-risk children at Children’s Village. For more information, please see www.margotaftstever.com.

Carole Stone
Carole Stone has published three books of poetry and seven chapbooks. Her most recent poetry collections are American Rhapsody, CavanKerry Press, 2012, Hurt, the Shadow, Dos Madres Press, 2013, Late, Turning Point, 2016, All We Have is Our Voice, Dos Madres Press, 2018. Her most recent poems have been published in Slab, Cavewall, Bellevue Literary Review and Blue Fifth Review. Her poems shared second place in The Allen Ginsberg Poetry Contest in 2014 and 2015 and honorable mention in 2017.

Daniel B. Summerhill
Daniel B. Summerhill is a poet, performance artist, and scholar from Oakland, California. His work has been published in Obsidian, Rust + Moth, COG, Columbia Journal, The Hellebore, Gumbo, The Lily Poetry Review, and elsewhere. His collection Divine, Divine, Divine (Nomadic Press, 2021) was a semifinalist for the Wheeler Poetry Prize and a semifinalist for the Saturnalia Poetry Prize. A Watering Hole fellow, Summerhill is the inaugural poet laureate of Monterey County. He lives on California’s central coast and is an assistant professor of poetry / social action and composition studies at California State University, Monterey Bay.

Cindy Veach
Cindy Veach is the author of Her Kind (CavanKerry Press, forthcoming October 2021) and Gloved Against Blood (CavanKerry Press, 2017), named a finalist for the Paterson Poetry Prize and a ‘Must Read’ by The Massachusetts Center for the Book. Her poems have appeared in the Academy of American Poets Poem-a-Day Series, AGNI, Prairie Schooner, Poet Lore, Michigan Quarterly Review, Diode and elsewhere. She received the 2019 Phillip Booth Poetry Prize and the 2018 Samuel Allen Washington Prize. www.cindyveach.com

Phoebe Sparrow Wagner
Artist, poet, co-author of Divided Minds: Twin Sisters and their Journey through Schizophrenia (St Martins Press, 2005) and author of We Mad Climb Shaky Ladders (CavanKerry Press, 2009). Her third book, poems and original art, Learning to See in Three Dimensions (Green Writers Press, 2017) is now also available from Amazon and other booksellers. Visit http://phoebesparrowwagner.com for Wagner’s poetry.

Sarah Bracey White
A southerner transplanted to New York, Sarah Bracey White mines her past in memoir, essays and poetry. Her published works include Primary Lessons: A Memoir; The Wanderlust: A South Carolina Folk Tale; and Feelings Brought to Surface, a poetry collection. Her essays have been anthologized in Children of the Dream; Dreaming in Color, Living in Black White; Aunties: 35 Writers Celebrate Their Other Mother and numerous other publications. The New York Times, the Afro-American Newspapers and the Journal News have published her essays. Sarah is a frequent contributor and performer with Read650. Visit her website www.onmymind.org for more information.

Jack Wiler
Jack Wiler was raised in New Jersey and lived in Jersey City until his death in 2009. Diagnosed with AIDS in 2001, Jack spent the last years of his life writing and educating students about poetry. For much of his life, he worked in pest control, most notably for Acme Exterminating in New York. He worked for Long Shot Magazine for many years and in association with the Geraldine R. Dodge Foundation worked as a visiting poet in the schools. Jack’s words can be found online at http://jackwiler.blogspot.com and in his two CavanKerry collections, Fun Being Me (2006) and Divina Is Divina (2010).

Baron Wormser
Baron Wormser is the author of eighteen books (including The Poetry Life Ten Stories, 2008, Impenitent Notes, 2011, and Unidentified Sighing Objects, 2015). Wormser has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation. From 2000 to 2005 he served as poet laureate of the state of Maine. In June, 2020, Songs from a Voice, Being the Recollections, Stanzas and Observations of Abe Runyon, Songwriter and Performer, a fictional consideration of the early years of Bob Dylan will be published. He lives in Montpelier, Vermont, with his wife Janet.

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Words to Keep You Company

Taking care of one’s health is important to us. We understand that poetry is one of the many art forms that can love, heal, and make one feel less alone.

In the spirit of our Waiting Room Reader series, we would like to offer poems and excerpts from our latest books on a regular basis throughout the coronavirus outbreak. It is our hope that these selections will offer comfort and companionship through this season of isolation and quarantine.

From the press and our authors to you: here are some words to keep you company.

"The Kiss" by Donald Platt (From Tornadoesque)

Not like Rodin’s famous

Kiss, in which the two, larger than-lifesize, naked bodies

rise out of rough

stone smooth-skinned and turn blindly into each other,

his huge hand

grappling her hip, her arm flung around his neck to draw

him down

to her. Neither a kiss to be bragged about afterward

like Tania

telling the whole dinner table how thirty-two years ago

Allen Ginsberg

had kissed her full on the mouth. “Not many women can say

that.” She blushed

proudly. No. It happened at a stand-up party where everyone

had to scream

over the grunge rock and was jammed shoulder-to-shoulder

in a small, hot, swaying

apartment. My wife was downstairs. I had just

entered the living

room, seen Sharon in her emerald shawl, waved, elbowed my way

through the throng

to give her my gros bisous. Intending to kiss her once on each cheek,

I missed

the second time and brushed my upper lip against only her ear

and fine, lavender-scented

auburn hair. “Me too,” yelled Nathan as a joke and a dare,

tilting his cheek

up at me, tapping the tanned flushed flesh with a forefinger.

“Here, Don,

right here!” I obeyed and kissed him, my lips soft

against his new-shaven

sharkskin stubble, my nose grazing his thick, lustrous black

hair that I had wanted

to sink my hands into and tangle all night. I held the kiss two seconds

longer than

necessary to call his wise-ass bluff, let him know

that I meant it

Shocked, he stepped back. His wife, Katie, laughed. But Sharon and he

got it, how I had surprised

myself, in that small moment when my lips touched his skin

smelling of cheap

English Leather after-shave splash, with passion.

"The Compact" by Sondra Gash (From Silk Elegy)

I find it rolled up in her nightgown,
glazed cloisonné, blackberries
etched on the lid.

Beneath the clasp
Mama’s scented face powder
sprinkled over the mirror.

I clear a space with my finger
and she’s here — in my cheeks,
my dark curls, the same eyes,

green as her jade healing stones.
Mama thinks she’s in Odessa
but she’s weaving dreams

in the asylum. She’s told me
so many stories that sometimes
I think I’ve been there.

And so many times she’s told me,
I come from a long line
of rhapsodic women.

"Into Light" by Michael Miller (From Darkening the Grass)

Morning, and the body unfolds
Before the tulips in the garden open
As the sun edges over the mountain
Where the hawk glides,
A kite without string.
Now I awaken to light
Yawning through the window,
To sleeves of the sun
Stretching out to us,
To the calls of cardinals
With crests of flame
And mourning doves wooing
The winter from my bones.
I turn from the blur of years
To nuzzle into your sleeping valleys
Before you move from loveliness
To rituals as the day arrives
Without mistakes or lies,
Without the frayed ends
Of old dreams or the loose ends
Of thoughts waiting to be tied.
Our bodies ease into openness
Like morning glories climbing
The trellis behind the house
While the remains of night disappear
Like stars in a constellation
We can only remember,
And then we consider
The divisions we live with,
The distance between
The soul’s requirements
And the other life
That the day demands.
There are no beginnings or endings
But only the love which
Continues because it does,
Because it falls with
The last snow of winter
And rises with the tulips
That push into light.

"Webcam: Pemaquid Point Lighthouse" by Sarah Sousa (From See the Wolf)

the image will automatically refresh every five minutes

At 5 am the frame may be black
but the ocean’s right there
if I could hear it. beating
against striations of iconic rock.
I’m not sure when the light goes dark,
it’s on a timer like the webcam
and their syncopation’s off.
On other days at 5 am the light,
as they say, is a beacon:
casts its bluish haze over the ground,
as they say, sweeping,
but which looks to me like an ultrasound,
the light in its center a fetus.

With each refresh day advances.
I usually miss that moment dawn
because it happens in the interval
and I suspect the webcam’s
five minutes is closer to ten.
The sky is dark, the sky is light.
There’s the rough outcrop, whitewashed
lighthouse anchored in rock but tipped
toward the silver, viscous ocean.
In one frame the scene is nature’s,
then there’s a girl
mid-sprint on the yellow grass,
running away from me.

"Notions" by Cindy Veach (From Gloved Against Blood)

There is a hierarchy in the arts: decorative art at the bottom,
and the human form at the top. Because we are men.
—LE CORBUSIER AND AMÉDÉE OZENFANT, 1918

Mother of pearl and bone buttons,
Coats & Clark thread.

I’d sort and touch every notion
in her basket

with its silk loops for thimbles
and pine posts for bobbins.

First day of school outfits, hems,
elbow and knee patches she conjured

from that basket.
I need some notions

meant a trip to Woolworth’s—
ice cream at the soda fountain for me,

every flavor of rickrack, bias tape, grosgrain
for her. How she could darn

socks by the hour,
create buttonholes by hand,

always kept her notions
organized, neat

so she could find what she needed—
a rhinestone button, safety

pins, scarlet embroidery floss
to stitch I love you.

She said a woman
could never have enough—

fabric could unravel, split, fray,
but a woman with notions

could mend what was torn—
make it like new

button up
against his absence.

"Photographs, or The Way It Was on the Outside" by Shira Dentz (From door of thin skins)

A bird skating on ice on its wing tip a wide photo album cream-white inside
sepia-tones spotted with teal ochre siren red wet like in marbles a san francisco
honeymoon spanish omelette colors a trolley what’s that? their future kids say
both movie stars mother in her mid-calf elegant swing coat blonde waves and
betty boop lipstick have to say iridescent moon yes moon-white not sun-white
the man astaire no harm in his face just good times white dress dancing the
biggest smiles ever never saw her smile like that a princess did the bat think the
dark shoe it perched on and stayed with was another bat?

"Alice" by Martin Mooney (From Grub)

The house in Donnybrook Street was a hive of draughts,
cold infesting the long crack in the skirting
and the hardly imaginable space below the floor;

that first winter, a lace curtain of frost
on the inside of your windows brought you under
my quilt and three blankets for the first time,

where to put out your arm was to run the risk
of frostbite, and to sleep with a cheek exposed
was to dream of a visit to the dentist. . .

For the first time we went through the looking-glass
chapter by chapter, me reading, you dwindling
quickly to sleep, up to your eyes in bedclothes,

with Alice no longer the little girl she was
and my voice like the idiot grin of the Cheshire Cat,
still hovering inexplicably over your head

muttering ‘curiouser and curiouser’ to itself.

from Esther: A Novel in Verse, by Pam Bernard

Sarah counted butterflies visiting
the larkspur. Growing restless, she toed
the dirt in a circle with her buckle shoe,

tugged gently to be let free
into the kitchen garden, where
a young woman wearing a wide-brimmed
hat bent into a bed of purples and greens.

Still deep in thought, Esther followed
Sarah, stopping at the low hedge of box
and stood for a long while
watching the woman.

She was humming in the reverie
of her work, somewhere vast
and boundless, where, it seemed for a moment
the world had dropped away.

Only the wind now and humming—simple
human mettle buoyant in the sunlight.

Neither happiness nor unhappiness
inhabited that garden, just the lovely
quotidian of day.

"Mrs. Greenley" by Loren Graham (From Places I Was Dreaming)

Even though she was wrinkly and held the corner
of her mouth in a fixed, down-turned knot—

and though she went buggy about the use of dull pencils,
the way we handled scissors, our rate of consumption
of red construction paper and white paste—

and although she got spooked if you chewed on a crayon
and made you wash your mouth out with Listerine
and rinse it out three times with cold water afterwards—

and even if she poured red sawdust floor sweep
everywhere in her tile-floored, second-grade domain
and herded it constantly into piles with a push broom,
enlisting us all to scoop it up in dustpans
with her scratchy “Let’s keep it clean, boys and girls!”—

for all that, I still loved her, because everyone knew
she read the best stories of any teacher in the school.
Every day she made us clean up following lunch,
and then we sat in our seats with our foreheads down
on the cool tops of our desks, every eye closed,
each of us imagining for the next twenty minutes
what it felt like to be someone else: a family
who went to Kansas in a covered wagon, a boy
who killed giants for the king, a stuffed rabbit, a pig,
a girl who had a dream about a deck of cards,
a man who accidentally learned a magic word.

"Don't Touch That Dial!" by Carole Stone (From American Rhapsody)

Who has figured out why Joe Penner,
radio star no one knows now,
made us laugh, asking a million times,
Wanna’ buy a duck?

But like all the figures
we worshipped, he didn’t really help.
Hollow, they couldn’t save the world:
Buck Rogers whom we wanted to follow
into space, the Lone Ranger, masked man,

fighting injustice in the Old West,
Hi-yo, Silver,
the Green Hornet who went after criminals
G-men couldn’t find. Because the dial
we touched, warm from the radio tubes,

couldn’t stop evil
from lurking in the hearts of men.
The Shadow taught us this.
And we can’t pretend.

"The Bird Watcher's Daughter" by Sherry Fairchok (From The Palace of Ashes)

Off duty after his morning hike around the lake,
my father’s binoculars nap inside a plush-lined case,
their brass rims lidded with plastic caps
like coins laid on the eyes of Roman dead.

Weighty they look, and valuable,
with the intelligent metallic squint of all his instruments:
his car keys, his watch, his mechanical pencils,
his eyeglasses glittering on the coffee table.

When I work the focusing dials, like a television’s,
to tune into what he’s seen,
he grumbles from his couch, Don’t touch,
as though the high pitch of my awe will crack a lens.

But if I fold my arms like wings against my sides,
my father may hold the binoculars to my eyes
the way he once raised a cup of juice to my lips.
When he shows me a flipping aspen leaf

or an oriole’s black beak split by song,
I think his vision and mine may meet
the way each scope’s separate view
resolves into one seamless stare.

The morning he taps my door, calls out
Want to come along?
and loops the binoculars’ strap across my head,
my neck bows to take their weight.

Now the canals shredded by lake winds
and the slow-flapping heron
can feel as close, as far away
as my lather standing beside me in the field.

"The Laundress" by Paola Corso (From The Laundress Catches Her Breath)

Sheets are wet

worrisome mounds
in the basket, socks
a pair of sorry balls

dripping in self-pity,

underwear a limp limbo
of cotton blends
no longer soaking wet

and not yet dry

waiting to be hung by a woman
who scrubs away
original sin

on a rock

along the stream
with her hands
and the strength

of resolve.

Sheets are hung

on the line, socks
clipped at the heel,
drawers droop

with fear

of never taking shape
from human proportion,
a clothesline low in the middle

as if bowing its head, waiting

to be propped up by a woman
who raises this offering
that much closer

to where

the air gathers
puffs of wind
with breath enough

for divine intention.

"The Magic Mountain" by Christopher Matthews (From Eyelevel: Fifty Histories)

This is a place of recuperation, in the snows.
The luminous autumn sky giddies and rises.
Its knuckles of stone and blue are bruised in interknitting,
they secure the horizon to itself. Our flesh is gentle.

Afternoons a white stupor breathes from heaven.
There are blue nights when every heartbeat is a kiss
the breast shakes with. Everywhere the ice
mirrors your single face in sheets and flaws
and shows it cloven. The trailing sack of day
is stuffed then with resilient abstinence.

I can’t say how we came here. Half-numb, burning,
your face wears a pied mask of ice and fire.
The hearth in this high lodge flares. A gaunt window is open.
Our smiles blaze and freeze, cold air, cold flame.

"Because" by Richard Jeffrey Newman (From The Silence of Men)

Because I refuse to learn to say goodbye,
these words—but because they are not my skin,
and because my fingers are not syllables,
and because your voice on the phone is not
breath I can take into my mouth and taste,
and the phone when we speak is not your body
in my arms or your hand lifting my chin
so our eyes meet when you say I love you,

and because when I imagine your hand
lifting my chin, I want to live within
that moment with you the way language
lives within us, I am here, wrestling these lines
into form, and because the form is me
when you read it, I’ll be there, and we’ll touch.

"Today I Feel the Pain of the World" by Mark Nepo (From Surviving Has Made Me Crazy)

My dog’s hips grind where no one can see.
She wants to keep up, but has to sit.
I take her home, pet her a while,
and go for groceries where
the old man packing bags
is staring off. I know by his heavy
silver eyes that he is a widower
and just as he life my no-fat cottage cheese
he sees her floating somewhere before him
and the soda and the swordfish and the English
muffins are piling up as the black belt keeps
moving, and I gently take the cottage cheese
from his hand, and he returns, looking at
me, a bit dizzy to still be here.
He sighs, rubs his eye, and asks, “Paper
or plastic?” I help him bag
what no one can bag.

After putting soda in the fridge
I eat out anyway, and next to me,
a small woman trying to be heard
while her large partner pretends nothing
is wrong. She knocks over the salt as he
butters his bread. He shakes his head
and wonders who she is.

Beyond them, in a booth by a window,
an elderly couple. It is clear they can’t speak.
They sign each other and their faces
are lively with yes and no and in between.
Suddenly over coffee, the man sees something
across the road. He’s full of joy, pointing
and smiling, wanting his wife to see.
It could be a hawk opening its wings
or a burst of light budding
a thin maple.

His wife never really sees
but he thinks she does
and he feels relieved.

I realize we are all this way.
Whether seeing dead faces at the register
or butterflies behind light poles, sometimes
the skin of mind is torn and we are not
separate beings. Once the talking is done,
we point and point at the proofs of love
for all we’re worth.

I feel more today
than one being should
and can’t tell
if I’m in trouble
or on holy ground.

"Boys That Once Were" by Annie Boutelle (From How They Fell)

Like shreds of fog. Or the kind of tea
a poet might sip on his grey weathered
deck, hinting at something irretrievable,
the wisdom of China, or Oban, for that
matter (shells, caves, distillery fumes),
it’s never about what can be held or seen
or even sniffed, but what flickers before
it’s doused.
Unlikely ghost in the shape
of eight-year-old Quentin (Greek-god
to-be, with his aristocratic nose)
lurking behind Duncraggan’s sodden
rhododendrons for a glimpse of me;
or Willie’s nimble fingers (trained
by stamp collecting, as well as playing
the recorder) as he unfolds the note
on his desk, slid there during recess,
invitation to my party, in unexpected
iambic trimeter (it will be the first time
he wears long trousers).
And how many
scarves insist on fluttering their silken
bravado in the chancy reflection of who
we might have been, or who dreamed
us up (or who dreamed up whisky, fire
in the throat, peat and brine) and who
were we, and what might not be left?
And Gordon with his slicked hair,
flirting in the backseat with my sister,
and how jealous I was, knowing nothing
about flirting, and not likely soon to learn.
And Harris (tall, loyal, clumsy) wanted
to kiss me, but didn’t, and what his lips
might have felt like, brushing mine,
or crushing mine, there in the dark,
and how that energy stormed directly
at me, then dashed lightly away.

"Seascape" by Eloise Bruce (From Rattle)

My hand, the shell of a ghost-crab,
cracked open when I slapped my father’s face.
I mistook my hand for a bird, a sandpiper.
That I struck my father is not as important
as it is for us to keep our eyes on our hands.

I glove mine in desire
to write, take pleasure, maim, or bestow.
In the language of desire, my own hand
can command the fingers of my left
to scurry into the sea while the remaining ones
fly up at sunset. This is not a fiction;
the bones of our hands remember
forbidden fruit and the discovery of fire.

In February on the beach of my virginity,
I warm my hands over burning driftwood.
My middle-aged self has been writing of our hands,
how her fingers moved, soft as feathers
over her lover’s skin. Our hands will be warm.

The weather is wild. The wind whips my hair.
Sparks rise in bursts toward heaven.
I am yesterday, perfectly longing for tomorrow.

"Winter Clouds in Hoboken" by Danny Shot (From WORKS)

Winter Clouds in Hoboken

are different than New York City clouds
occasionally cumulus, lately ominous,

biblical in fact. New Jersey is not a place but
a state of mind according to my Brooklyn students,

the last frontier between irrelevance and extinction.
Everything you think it is, and more.

New Jersey is whole lotta place(s). My place is Hoboken
where neighbors share home-brewed coffee

the morning after Sandy flooded basements
in apocalyptic power surge, then darkness.

Where brass bands carrying statues fire cannons
in honor of obscure Italian saints though the midday streets.

Graffitied walls proclaim PK Kid is alive, Viva!
Not art to be sold in galleries across the river.

Where an empty parking space is a conversation starter
and a drunk girl cries next to a smashed cell phone

on my stoop two weeks before Saint Patrick’s Day,
a pool of green puddled at her feet.

Where we pretend we invented baseball
where everyone’s grandma dated Sinatra.

Where the poets drink like poets
and are ignored like poets.

Where the ends justify the ends
and happy hours last all night.

Seagulls peck French fries
off a white Mercedes Benz
on Washington Street

The clouds are different here.
They just are.

"Potato" by Laurie Lamon (From The Fork Without Hunger)

There is one beauty
it knows. The rest is blindness,
earth closing around itself,
surrounded by hunger.

For a hundred days,
a thousand, it is the same
dark eye looking
inward. Thinking of light.

Remembering the pressure
of soil. The seam
of water finding its heart.
And afterward

blossoms ringing through
stone.

"The Gift" by Christine Korfhage (From We Aren’t Who We Are and this world isn’t either)

In Japan long ago, when Koson
folded back the sleeves of his kimono,
picked up his pen and began drawing
the image that would later be carved
into cherrywood, then pressed
onto paper and colored in,
he had no idea that a century later
a man in rural New Hampshire
would unpin that print from his bedroom wall
where it had been hanging longer
than he could remember, roll and tie it
with curling red ribbon, then leave his home
in the dark, and drive past frozen fields and woods,
past farmhouses with wreath-covered doors
and candlelit windows, on and on,
to the roadside mailbox of a woman
he hadn’t seen in over a year.
He just knew that as he moved that pen,
line by line, feather by feather, beak by beak,
loneliness drew two wild geese flying
before a moon so large it nearly filled
the page.

"Cinderella Story" by Dawn Potter (From Same Old Story)

Given these twenty-below-zero nights—
gale winds straight from the Siberian plains of hell,
and every tormented tree in the forest groaning its misery—
this mourning dove should be dead.

Yet here she crouches, hogging the feeder tray,
pebble-eyed and jaunty despite the ice cube
that, for two arctic days, has encased her pink left foot
like an elegant cement overshoe.

Persistent chickadees flutter and dip,
yearning to snatch a perch. The dove,
eight times their size and oblivious to complaint,
just keeps gobbling. In woodpecker fashion,

she’s clamped her broad tail over the tray edge
for balance, yet all the while her icebound foot,
a rosy block of sparkles, dangles in the knife-edge breeze.
Among these busy airborne birdlets,

her shackle swings like a locket packed with lead shot.
Even so, I’m tempted to circle
optimism on the metaphysical scorecard.
After all, the bird’s not dead, not even almost dead,

though no doubt her frostbitten foot
will rot and fall off, and she’ll be forced to endure
a blackened stump for the balance of her brief days—
that is, if a fox or my own cheerful dog doesn’t

hunt her down at twilight and break her neck.
Yesterday my son was clutching me in panic:
“What can we do? What can we do?”
But today he forgets to notice her.

The dove has become ordinary window dressing.
She gobbles seed; she snaps her beak at finches;
she flaps heavily into the snow-stiffened boughs.
Her feathers gleam and her beady eye glitters.

From where we stand—
here: in our kitchen, our own snug invention—
any happy can look like an ending.

"This Can Happen When You're Married" by Karen Chase (From Kazimierz Square)

You find blue sheets the color of sky with
the feel of summer, they smell like clothes
drying on the line when you were small.
They feel unusual on your skin; you and your
husband sleep on them.

You find thick white towels that absorb a lot
of water. When you come from the bath, you are
cold for a moment, you think of snow for a moment,
you wrap yourself in a towel, dry off the water.

Now, you unpack your silver, after years, polish it,
set it in red quilted drawers your mother
lined for you when you were young.

You and your husband are in bed. The windows are open.
There is a smell from the lawn. It’s dark and late. You
and your husband are in the sheets. He is like a horse.
You are like grass he is grazing, you are his field. Or
he’s a cow in a barn, licking his calf. It’s raining out.

He gets up, walks to the other room. You listen
for his step, his breath. It is late. For moments
before you sleep, you hear him singing.

He comes to bed. He touches your face. He touches
your chin and lips. Later, he tells you this. He puts
his head on your breast. You are dreaming of Rousseau
now, paintings of girls and deserts and lions.

"An Open Letter to Our Sperm Donor" by Robin Silbergleid (From The Baby Book)

Our daughter looks like me
  people say, the architecture
of her eyebrows and pointed stare.
  But in the photograph of you
at thirteen months: our baby’s
  toothless grin after she’s grabbed
the cat by the tail. Every child
  you said needs a mother who reads
and each night I let her suck
  thick cardboard illustrations,
Big Red Barn and Goodnight Moon,
  while I balance her on my lap.
If you lived with us, you
  would know this. Perhaps
you would bring me a cup of tea
  while I nurse her on the couch,
a book of poems open nearby.
  Sometimes I wonder if you wonder
about us, when you’re at work
  in the laboratory or when
you’re feeding your new son a bottle.
  The stories of our children
are woven together. The tapestry
  couldn’t be more beautiful, filled
with these widening holes.

from "Hemlock and Hellebore" by Bhisham Bherwani (From The Second Night of the Spirit)

Mummy’s king-sized bed is half vacant.
My brother gravitates to the master bedroom.
He always has, but there is about it something
conspicuous now, something pre-Newtonian—
more fundamental, more mysterious,
than mechanics, more rudimentary than
calculus—an undetectable magnet betraying its
inestimable ethereal force. Mummy weeps more
in the monsoons, staring into the rain and over-
cast sky through windows shut to keep them from
swinging uncontrollably in cyclonic
winds and slamming. Her tears are always
stifled, her lamentation is never clean, never
a burst like a torrent. Always gasps, always
bird-like fluttering. I want her to stop.
I plead her.
She doesn’t stop.
I scream at her.
She doesn’t stop. I slam doors, I curse
the weather. She doesn’t stop. I curse
god. She is inconsolable. She is
a girl. Her moist cheeks, shining, are soft. Angelic,
she is a seraphim gazing out as if that is where
her void is, as if that’s where it’s always been.
My brother stretches out where papa slept.
He extends his arm toward her
and grunts. There is no sense in anything.
I am beset by the brutality of nonsense.
My brother sits up and walks to the bathroom.
He brings out a towel. He stands beside her,
looming above her frame, pressing
towel to her face, dabbing her cheeks. I watch
void offset void
like negatives that must
negate each other into an elemental
emptiness so dark that from it can emerge
nothing but a sliver of light like hope.

"Radios" by Adriana Páramo (From My Mother's Funeral)

Three years after the fight of the century, we gathered once more around our beloved tube radio, this time for “Rumble in the Jungle,” a fight for the World Heavyweight Championship between Muhammad Ali and George Foreman, known to Mom as Jorge Foreman. Things had changed around our home. Father was gone; so was my brother. My three oldest sisters had dropped out of school and found jobs in Bogotá. For them, high school had to wait. The well-being of our family was in their hands.

“This is going to be good,” Mom said wrapping the rosary around her fingers. “Ali’d better get off the ropes this time. He’s what, thirty something? He can’t compete with this kid Jorge.”

Ali started the fight with a ferocious attack, and the audience went wild. We could hear the spectators in Zaire chant, “Ali boma ye! Ali boma ye!” an African mantra that put my two sisters, Mom, and me into a trance and seduced us with its foreign cadence. We didn’t know what it meant and didn’t care. We were high on Ali and chanted along with our invisible African friends: “Ali boma ye! Ali boma ye!”

Mom thumped the table with her palm. Grains of salt reverberated on the wood. She kept the pounding, on and on, until she fell into a steady five-beat rhythm; her pounding melted into the noises from Zaire, and soon my sisters and I started smacking our own palms against the table. “Ali boma ye! Ali boma ye!” and it felt like we were building something big, something important, a tribe of angry, thump-crazy, sweaty, women warriors.

All of a sudden, Ali went to the ropes and allowed Foreman to hit him. Mom cried, “No, no, Chucho, Chuchito, help him! God, get him off the ropes, please, Heavenly Father!”

But Ali had different plans. He spent round after round leaning on the ropes, staying loyal to his “rope-a-dope tactic,” absorbing Foreman’s punches, taunting him with “Is that all you got, George?” or “My grandma punches harder than you do,” which made Mom snort.

Toward the end of the fight, Ali sprang from the ropes and delivered a sequence of flawless blows that sent Foreman to the canvas. The fight was over in round 8; Ali had reclaimed the WBA/WBC heavyweight titles. We jumped up from the table and hugged each other as if Ali’s victory were our own.

When the fight was over, the commentator translated the spectators’ feverish chant: Ali boma ye! meant “Ali, kill him!” Mom, being a God-fearing woman, started counting beads. She faced the radio as if directing her repentance towards Zaire and whispered an apology to Jorge Foreman for wishing him dead. “We don’t speak African, Lord. Forgive my girls and this old sinner. We’ll never chant anything we don’t understand. And please, heal poor Jorge’s eyes; Ali really did a number on that guy. Amén.”

She switched the radio off and let her fingers linger over its burgundy surface as if saying good night. Then she moved it back against the wall and covered it with a white crocheted coaster.

"Persephone's Cave" by Kenneth Rosen (From The Origins of Tragedy & Other Poems)

In winter the sun is nearer the earth than ever,
But what does it matter, every crypto-,
Proto-lover hidden in holy snow,
Living only as after-images,
The vivid violet of pigeon feathers
Or cyclamen petals that blossomed
Under Persephone’s heels
As she fled. In February, the toy bear,
The groundhog who lunches on flowerbuds—
Last year the rascal beneath my garage
Ate the tops off all my lilies—comes out to see

How everything is doing. Everything,
It just so happens, is nothing
But the puzzle of his shadow.
He peers at this as if to decipher a cause:
“How can I know what it is that I know?“
Then he tries to get back to the solitude
Of his so-called slumber,
Dreams of brown-eyed woodchuck girls
And the message he decodes
From the silence at Persephone’s cave,
Which is, “Wait. Wait for spring
Or until it’s as warm out there
As it is in here.” Or just, “Wait. Wait.“

"Gratitude" by Catherine Doty (From momentum)

One day we were big
and our mother got a job
and she knitted herself two vests
to wear to work
a green one with a turtle on the pocket
a good one, she said, to wear
while filing cases
and one of a blue, diaphanous
sparkly fuzz that made her
look like kin to the water cooler.
She loved to work, loved the office
across from the courthouse
the pigeons and the poor
around Eva’s Kitchen
where occasionally the hungry
got surplus Popsicles
and pitched the sticks
in the bushes in front of
the courthouse, bones
of a food that couldn’t
nourish, that couldn’t
be saved or sold. Our mother
thought of our poorness
then, of when we were little
of letting us eat the rolls
from the go-go bar dumpster
the guava jelly and quail eggs
and cans of soup
that showed up on our steps
one Thanksgiving weekend
and gratitude came over her
like an ecstasy, gratitude
came off her like steam
for her gorgeous job
her restaurant lunches
thank you thank you thank you.
She all but curtsied when a pill cup
of macaroni appeared unbidden
next to her pastrami.
She brought home pastries
window-boxes like orchid corsages
clipped recipes, warmed up pot pies
bought cream, fruit, nuts
an electric knife
thank you thank you thank you.
At her metal desk in the corner
she filed her frauds
and on payday rushed to the bus
as we ran from our jobs
to meet in her yellow kitchen
to tip back our graying heads
to be healed with fatness.

"The Doctor" by Howard Levy (From A Day This Lit)

After days of healing,
he would get away to fish.
Curator of fluff and feathers,
he tied his own flies,
designed his own waders
and up to the lake country
for trout and walleye.

I would ask him, what is it
out there on the water,
and he would say, all week
I swim lead for my school of patients,
take this, take that,
don’t eat this, don’t eat that,
I tell them swim away from the hook,
don’t take that bait, that bug there
has sharp metal innards,
that worm glints steel,
but we are such dumb fish,
such sorry things that we all get pulled
from our lives.
So, weekends,
I choose to be the redresser of balances.

I know that he hid behind this facile
diagnosis because I went with him once
and as we stood thigh-deep
in the cold and clear lake,
he began his meticulous detailings,
the striations of the bottom rocks
and how each different sediment
reflects the light, the distribution
of firs along the shore,
the speckling of the speckled trout
and each thing, he said,
is a symptom and so a clue
into the fevered chemistry of beauty.

"Elvis" by Nin Andrews (From Southern Comfort)

Dad used to say, most men are good-for-nothings, but don’t think about that. Think about the men who are good for something because you are where your thoughts are, and he was right. That’s why I’m with Elvis so many nights. I can’t help it. I’ve been with him so long, I feel him deep inside me like an ache or pang I can never get rid of.

I mean right now there’s Elvis playing on the radio. He’s singing gospel, and I’m remembering the first time I heard him sing. Dad played his album on the stereo. I was a girl, maybe five or six years old. Mom was out of town, so Dad fixed me a whiskey or two—sweet drinks, he called them—an inch of sugar with whiskey, water, and lemon on lop. He said it would give me a cultured taste for booze, something important to have for the future, and anyway, he didn’t like to drink alone, and I liked whiskey, as my dad said, just like an ant likes sugar. It was in my blood before I knew what it was, this feeling Dad called whiskey love, and I call Elvis, the two of us sipping cocktails together, loving it together, with him on the flowered couch, reading the paper, eating Triscuits, me cross-legged on the floor in front of the fan, letting the wind fool with my bangs, humming, and when my dad stopped reading, he announced This guy is great, and he sang along, Are you lonesome tonight?

And I was. Suddenly I was so lonesome, I was drunk with it, lonesome for Elvis singing, and my dad, lonesome for the fan blowing in my face and the cicadas outside, and the tree frogs, lonesome for that dusk that was all around me, the daylight fading so fast, I knew nothing ever lasts, not him, not Elvis. I was so lonesome, I was afraid I’d bust. That’s when I thought of Terrence. I had to do something, so I thought of Terrence Jones, this kid at school who gave me a black eye. And when I thought of him, Elvis went away, and so did my dad. And the urge to cry. It was nice. I knew everyone’s good for something. Even Terrence. Because I couldn’t be there with my mind in that place where lonesome stays. And Elvis sings long after he’s dead, and my dad too, now that he’s gone, he just croons, Does your memory stray to a bright summer day? And my heart fills with pain when he comes back again and again, oh yes it does, too, until I think of someone else, some guy who’s a real asshole, and I think, at least he’s good for something. Look on the bright side. They can’t all be Elvis. Except when I close my eyes.

"In My Daughter's Kitchen" by Susan Jackson (From Through a Gate of Trees)

As if cleaning could make things right
I take down the small glass bottles
blue, green, rain-water, one by one
from the window ledge
where chimney soot has settled
with the dust rising up from
the street here to the 20th floor
while steam and sun streak the sky
with color in this undulating afternoon.

My daughter’s leg will heal
we feel sure of it
even though she’s groggy with pain
and fitful right now.

As I rinse the sponge in the sink’s
soapy water, soot blackens the porcelain
reminding me how mangoes
planted next to coffee fields
take on a coffee flavor.

I wish I had mangoes to offer her today,
I think, as I watch the shining cars
stream down 2nd Avenue
their flow mesmerizes me in the moment,
this day captured like a photo on her wall,
this photographer daughter

and maybe when she wakes
I will ask please one day
when you feel better
take a picture of all this
the lights, the cars, the darkness,
somehow our life.

Before closing the curtains
I stand by the lamp,
momentarily framed, arms
raised to the invisible sky,
silhouetted in a window of light.

"The School Bus" by Christian Barter (From The Singers I Prefer)

In the dream I was getting on the school bus
from the back of the bus for some reason, only this time
instead of jeers and everyone sliding over
to the aisle-side so I couldn’t sit down, someone said,
“There’s a seat up here, Chris.” It was

next to Mary Jo Stillwell, pretty as she was
in eighth grade, who had slid to the window
to let me sit, and when a kid put me in a headlock
I simply lifted him over my head and set him
in the seat in front of me, said, “Stay there,”

and a little boy had grabbed a little girl
by the hair, only this time I pulled him off
and sat him down, saying, “You don’t ever grab a girl,”
and sat her down, too, and asked her if she was all right.
No one jeered at this, or swore at me,

or threatened my life for disrupting the way things
were supposed to be on the school bus going to
Mountain View Middle School in Sullivan, Maine—
if that’s even where we were going—
and when I sat back in my seat, Mary Jo leaned forward

in a very serious manner, and I kissed her
as though it were the most natural thing to do
with Mary Jo—short, serious kisses—on that
school bus that was nothing like any school bus I had ever ridden,
that was exactly like every school bus I have ever ridden,

and when she started kissing my neck in a way that tickled,
I woke up exactly in my life.

"Buddy Holly" by Baron Wormser (From Impenitent Notes)

We’re driving to town to buy groceries (brown rice,
Baking powder, raisins, safflower oil), flashlight
Batteries, sunflower seeds so the blue jays can continue
Lording it over the smaller birds that also want to eat,
And we start talking about how the U.S., which started
Out as the bravest promise the human spirit
Had made so far, the light of William Blake’s
And many another’s enraptured eye, became a homage
To vehicular motion: commoners having been freed
From the yokes that princes placed upon them
To transpire the vapors of octane desire.

“Invention overrules intention,” my wife mutters
While fiddling with the car radio.
I begin to sputter my own homily
When suddenly Buddy Holly starts singing,
His voice twenty-one years old and staying there
As long as machines can play recordings.
“Ooh, ooh, ooh, Peggy Sue,” he warbles
And so, simultaneously, do we, plus some finger popping
And rhythmic squirming within our seat-belted confinement.
He lights up another minute; then he’s spent.

We keep tingling—savoring the pure thrall
Of foreshortened American joy.
He’s the incalculable voice of poetry.
Our beautifully engineered beast rolls on.

"Crossing" by Jeanne Marie Beaumont (From Letters from Limbo)

In a city that was not my own I crossed

a bridge over the river and wandered a long while.

Later, I crossed another flowers had been

woven around. Something was going on today

in the city. It rained. Stopped raining. Rained again.

I found a gallery of lost women, their dresses shrunk

to doll-size, their non-names engraved on plaques.

Leaning over my coffee, I listened as story led to

story. I bought a movie ticket and waited in a red seat

for the feature presentation. In the film a woman

set herself afire. Two patrons walked out. After,

I browsed spices and baking supplies—enticing

but I didn’t bite. I crossed the river and searched

through moldering books in a back room. I viewed

an ancient scroll that stretched for yards, each episode

rolling to the next. I knew the city was a repository

I had only begun to tap. I knew the bridges sutured

the river, that I kept crossing between the dead and

the living. Much digging was underway. I recalled

the phrase from an old tale predicting the bright sun

will bring it to light. Walkers every day tamped down

with their feet what squirmed again to the surface

demanding to be recognized. One day of wandering

was coming to an end. It was the inescapable labor

of time—the city would unearth my secret name

and soon be summoning me back. When my cup

was served, a heart steamed toward me from the foam.

"Letter to My Nieces on Their Birthdays" by Jack Wiler (From Fun Being Me)

Good day to my favorite nieces.

All joy and luck to two wonderful young women.

This is a note from your uncle.

Your silly and foolish uncle.

You probably have never had anyone write you a poem.

May you have many more.

From young men who love you

and write passionately of your charms.

That will come.

But for now you’ll have to take this as your gift.

I want to tell you about where you came from,

where you are, and where you can go.

You’ve spent your young lives in South Jersey

like your parents, and their parents and like me for a while.

You’re two white girls in a world that is changing.

I’m an old man from a very different world.

When my father was young, he had negro maids

and cooks and a man brought milk each morning

in bright, glass containers.

Milk and cream and chocolate milk,

all fresh and pure and right from the farm.

He had a gardener come and trim the bushes.

He had a cook make everything they ate.

Roasts and turkeys and casseroles,

rich in cheese and meat and milk

When I was young, we ate Thanksgiving Dinner

in the kitchen with the colored folk.

When I grew up, colored people could only

be janitors or porters on the railroad.

Now no one rides a railroad except as a treat.

I remember when I was ten, seeing young negro men

dancing to wild music and wishing I could dance like that.

They were up on a stage, legs all pumping, arms strong and wild

and I wanted to jump up and join them.

But I didn’t

It was South Jersey and you didn’t do that in 1964.

The world spins, girls,

and changes all the time.

You have to be ready to spin and change with it.

You have to jump on the stage with the colored men

and dance with them.

You have to watch how the world spins and grab it

when you can.

It’s easy to do just what the world expects.

When I was young, the world expected

you to hate negroes.

The world expected a black woman would clean your house.

That she would do it for next to nothing.

The world expected that you would grow up and get married

and have a couple of kids and love your children

and you would never have to work.

The world never expected women to work

or negros to have real jobs

or white folks to dance to negro music.

But that music has always been America’s music

and it makes us dance.

The world is a wild dance

and you have to jump in.

The world isn’t South Jersey.

The world isn’t the USA.

The world is a wild mix

of horror and joy.

One day you’ll fall in love.

Your heart will be an untamed beast

and you should never,

never,

tame that beast.

The beast made you.

The beast held you to its heart and said, I love you.

The beast mows your lawn

and cooks your dinner.

The beast watches you ride your bike and is terrified you’ll die.

The beast is your parents and the beast is you.

Don’t be scared.

Get up and dance.

Don’t be afraid of what your friends say.

Don’t worry about your grades.

Don’t be stupid and listen to the voice that says,

what will my friends say?

The moon rises up tonight, wild and huge and it’s asking you to dance.

Reach out and take its hand, my beautiful girls.

Dance across the lawn and feel your feet wet with dew.

And while you’re dancing, think about me,
asleep and dreaming of girls dancing in the dew.

"Entering the Light" by Elizabeth Hall Hutner (From Life With Sam)

Nobody in New York ever has light.

In every apartment I looked at,

I always asked, “Is there enough sun

to grow anything?” I chose our last place

in Brooklyn because of all the windows,

three in the living room alone,

but we were surrounded by buildings.

The plants I bought at the hardware store

did not all survive.

The first time we went to the hospital,

I bought a basket of African violets.

My mother had had one when I was born.

The last, I found a Swedish ivy plant.

We started your last three months in a room

full of light. As the doctors tried the final

experimental treatments, I put toys

away at night, tucking them on the shelf

in front of the windows just as, at home,

I picked up toys after you went to bed.

I watered the ivy from a paper cup

I brought with your dinner from the Chinese

restaurant down the street.

Our old doctor went to Boston

and the new doctor sent us home

too soon. When we came back the next day,

we had to take a different room

with fewer windows, and they were blocked

by buildings, so the room was dark.

I had left the plant at home, of course.

The doctors tried more treatments while I looked

for a brighter room, and your stepfather

put together a small wooden helicopter

with a solar panel.

By the time I found a sunnier room,

you no longer ate the meals I brought you.

We moved across the hall anyway,

and the blades on the helicopter

spun all day long as you sat in the big, blue chair

or lay in your bed, eyes closed, resting.

While you slept, I read a book about children

who have almost died and have seen the light.

They said it was beautiful, and they said

they did not want to come back.

After you died, I moved to New Jersey

to the house we had planned to live in together.

It had eight windows in the living room

and was so full of the November light!

I hung our plants or set them on the bookshelf.

I put our couch by the windows too,

so I could lie there under your comforter

with its soft cover of clouds and stars,

and watch the blades of the helicopter
spin day after day in the sun.

"Zona Viva" by Peggy Penn (From So Close)

Mexico City Market

Something about the day of the night-before-leaving

teases the yellow smog into a dream light;

I walk in a gaslit dusk, breathless,

through the Zona Viva, to find a souvenir.

Now, almost disappeared beneath the shops

that sell their artifacts, sit soft mounds

of Indian women, working in their office

of children and rags. Whirling children,

tied by invisible strings, are learning

the subtracted gravity of the Zona Viva:

the strings cannot rappel them over the fell

of poverty’s edge. They are hostage tops,

caught in the hands of their holders, blurring

in an exudation of women and myrrh.

Within the flags of paper lace, cut-out fish,

birds and braided dolls, a woman weaves in a strand

from her own shawl, not distinguishing

person from place. Watching me,

she opens her flower hand stirring

the sleeping baby in her skirt: begging,

her dropped petal fingers curl toward me,

arrowhead eyes fly toward me as I reach down

with a coin for her hand. In the gaping yellow night,

I feel my own child’s hand pull me down.

“Am I going to die?” she asks, nearly grown,

I count to twenty.

Paris. An ovarian cyst after midnight

twists her to the floor; she is yours,

and mortal, avoid the hospital.

We lock in two curves, her back against my front,

between my knees, rocking, counting,

our breaths timed with her pain . . .

twenty seconds, and we rest in between . . .

helplessly, I am chanting, “in – be – tween,

. . . there is a small space between the pains

where we rest . . .” wet as seals, our
holds slip,

counting, the small space comes.

we rest in long breaths.

“Ma, am I going to die?“

“Not while we breathe, no one dies . . .

count, it is time to count!“

We count again twenty . . . and the hours slip,

even, now subsiding, you fall to my side.

I pull the sheet down to cover you,

my long lovely daughter, sleep in this bough

of arms and legs, while we wait

for some act of reinstatement,

until the fever breaks,

or the ancients return to the Zona Viva.

The Indian woman’s eyes never leave my face

as I kneel down to her baby.

I buy a painted tin votive,

thanking God for a miracle. Permissibly,

we gaze at each other’s hammock bodies,

listening to the script of origins,

seeing volcanoes overturn or spare the pyramids,

begin the tops or stop their orbital spin.

Inhale, suppose there is spirea in the air,

where the women sit, twilit, watching the day close,

a book held fast in the hand of a sleeper,

where it is written: in this place of accidents,
we are innocent. Inhale.

"Walking Home Late after Practice" by Jack Ridl (From Losing Season)

Walking home late after practice,

Scrub kicks the snow, imagines

each flake a phony word, a lie,

a promise he believed, floating

up off into the air, mixing

in the wind, melting. Scrub

keeps walking, passes

under the streetlight across

from his house, sees the light on

in the kitchen, pauses, looks

back, suddenly starts to dance,

dance under the long deflected pass

of the moon’s light. His feet

slide softly over the layers

of snow, piled and trampled hard

by schoolkids, teachers, people

heading to a friend’s house. Scrub,

the dancer, whirling himself