The Great Pandemic Book Launch and Frolic; otherwise known as the Marvelous, the Mystical, the Fantastical Saint Patrick's Day Book Party for Marly Youmans's Charis in the World of Wonders

Ethereal Reception to Follow

Place: In your airy, wondrous imagination

Book release date: 17 March 2020 St. Patrick's Day

Time: 12:01 a.m. - 11:59 p.m.

Book Party Saint: Patrick, naturellement!

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available at indies and online outlets
Amazon and bn.com

Lavishly illuminated
by the artful hand
of Clive Hicks-Jenkins
of Wales

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Praise for 
Charis in the World of Wonders

“Charis in the World of Wonders confirms once more Marly Youmans' place among the magi. There is indeed ‘a dark and amazing intricacy in the ways of Providence’, as this spellbinding novel attests.”

—John Wilson, Contributing Editor, Englewood Review of Books

“Charis is a prismatic grace journey that awakens our dulled senses and ignites our adventurous hearts. A seventeenth-century girl pilgrim, with dark shadows of Salem foreboding over her, begins a refractive journey as a faithful exile toward a golden sea.”

—Makoto Fujimura, Artist; Author of Culture Care and Silence and Beauty

“Imagine if William Faulkner had decided to rewrite Last of the Mohicans. What you would have is something like Charis in the World of Wonders—a wild adventure tale written with grace and insight.  Youmans' prose is fluid, sharply witty, and deeply rich in symbolism—the work of a master.”

—J. Augustine Wetta, OSB, Author of The Eighth Arrow and Humility Rules

“Youmans’ magnificent storyteller brings the early days of Europeans on the American continent vividly to life, in all their wonder and sorrow.”

—Emily Barton, Author of Brookland and The Book of Esther

“From the pen of an award-winning novelist and poet comes the story of Charis, a girl who loses everything and finds love and acceptance in an age of fear and uncertainty. This book is that rare thing, a novel containing characters who are both historically accurate and completely relatable.”

—Fiorella De Maria, Author of A Most Dangerous Innocence and The Sleeping Witness

A writer I greatly admire and have sometimes written about, Marly Youmans, has a new book coming late in March from Ignatius Press: Charis in the World of Wonders, with cover art and illustrations by the incomparable Clive Hicks-Jenkins. This novel, set in the Massachusetts Bay Colony, should occasion a piece that tackles the whole sweep of Youmans’s work. She’s not part of any fashionable faction, and much as I would be delighted and surprised to see it receive generous attention in the New York Times Book Review and other such outlets, I am mainly hoping that First Things, Commonweal, Image, and other kindred publications will not let this opportunity pass.  

—John Wilson, "Desiderata," First Things 

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Praise: 
from writers and artists on social media

James Artimus Owen, writer and artist: This book, written by my dear friend Marly and illuminated by one of my great inspirations, my friend Clive, is a great example of What Truly Matters in the world. What keeps me going in a world of seemingly ever increasing darkness? Shining lights. Just like this.

Makoto Fujimura, nihongan painter, cultural catalyst, writer: Ok. Cannot help to tweet. “Charis”, Marly’s next novel coming out, is one of the most beautifully wrought writings of the “burning bushes” all about us that I’ve encountered in recent times.  Absolutely mesmerizing novel. #kintsuginovel #culturecare

John Wilson, editor: Every writer is in a sense sui generis, but some to a greater degree than others--@marlyyoumans, for instance. 

Makoto Fujimura: What a stunning, beautiful story Charis is. I can’t stop thinking of it. Hortus continues to roam in my mind, bringing all of us to freedom.

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Charis

“When I swung over that windowsill, everything changed for me. We are meant to go in and out of doors in civilized style, but my mother bade me climb into woodsy wildness and a darkness flushed with crimson light and torches…” 

Clambering into the branches of a tree, a young woman flees flaming arrows and massacre. She will need to struggle for survival: to scour the wilderness for shelter, to strive and seek for a new family and a setting where she can belong. Her unmarked way is costly, heroic, hard.

For Charis, the world outside the window of home is a maze of hazards. And even if she survives the wilds, it is no small, simple matter to discover and nest among her own kind—the godly, those called Puritans by others. She may be tugged by her desires for companionship, may even stumble into a sharp, intense love for a man, and may be made to try the strength of female heroism in ways no longer familiar to women in our century. 

Streams of darkness run through the seventeenth-century villages of the Massachusetts Bay Colony. Occult fears have a way of creeping into the mind. And what young woman can be safe from the dangers of wilderness when its shadowy thickets spring up so easily in the soil of human hearts?

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A note from the illuminator:

Marly Youmans' historic novel 'Charis in the World of Wonders' chronicles the journey of its protagonist on her horseback flight from destruction to sanctuary and from sanctuary to an unexpected madness that had me gnawing my knuckles as I read.

Marly is a peerless writer and at Ignatius she has an editor and team doing everything to ensure that the book's jacket and the illustrations within do justice to her illuminating narrative. Not for the first time with Marly I'm steeped in a world of early American folk art, of embroidered samplers and nature not yet crowded out by man. At its heart, Charis on her courageous Hortus, who must carry her to safety and a new life. The image here is just a tiny corner of the cover artwork. It has been, as it always is in the company of Marly, a revelatory journey.

--Clive Hicks Jenkins, pilfered from facebook

Sally Thomas, Motherland

Motherland

Sally Thomas

Able Muse Press 

Paperback / softback

ISBN: 978-1-77349-043-4

Digital Formats: Amazon Kindle | Barnes & Noble NOOK 

| KOBO | Google Play / Android | Apple iBooks

Publication Date: May 29, 2020

Page Count: 126 Pages

Publisher's Note: 

In Sally Thomas’s Motherland, the poet keenly observes the ephemeral and the everlasting in the lens of time—the daily into seasonal transformations, the gifts and wonders of nature and people. Motherland by turns hails and interrogates in matters of flesh, of faith and spirituality—especially so in the “Richeldis of Walsingham” poem sequence. This finalist in the Able Muse Book Award is a collection abounding in insight, hope, grace, surprises, and yes, love.

Praise for Motherland: 

A core of spiritual knowledge resides in the poems of Sally Thomas’s Motherland— knowledge that might seem strange to the poet herself, in fact, though it definitely resides in her, and radiates throughout this collection. Motherland is the perfect title, since the poet, herself a mother, regards all her human occupations as native and yet mysterious, occurring in a place which is both foreign and familiar.  The final sequence, on Richeldis of Walsingham, includes lines that describe the expression of that knowledge, as “the eloquence/ Of the small river moving always forward to the unseen/ Sea.” Motherland is a book of the presence—radiant, benevolent, challenging—for which there is often no word, except as we find in poetry, like the poetry of Sally Thomas.” —Mark Jarman, author of The Heronry

The poems of Sally Thomas are poems in which the act of looking at the world in all its depth and complexity is just about as close as possible to being fully realized in the corresponding “world” of poetic language and form. And the verses are compelling because in every line something is at stake: our very understanding of creation, the human condition, and the mystery of thought and its language that link us, however imperfectly, to what may be called the given world. As Thomas says in “Frost,” “Tricky winter light and my own eye/ Bend the world, if not to beauty, then/ To strangeness.”

  —David Middleton (from the foreword), author of The Fiddler of Driskill Hill

In her most recent collection of poems, Motherland, Sally Thomas gives us a world we live in but, alas, too often don’t seem to see. So much is lost, these poems tell us, even as they manage to reinstate and re-imagine these losses for us. All poetry is elegiac, even as it can, in the hands of a serious poet, celebrate the very world which for all of us keeps slipping away in the great wheel of time. Then too there is her mastery of poetic form—among these the sonnet, the villanelle, the couplet, and her unparalleled command of rhyme and slant rhyme. What a delight to discover a poet who has found a way to allow the sacred and the sacramental inform her poems in a surprising range of contemporary idioms.

  —Paul Mariani, author of Epitaphs for the Journey

Three poems

Jeffery Beam, Spectral Pegasus / Dark Movements

Spectral Pegasus / Dark Movements
Poems: Jeffery Beam
Paintings: Clive Hicks-Jenkins

Kin Press, 2019
92 pp.
ISBN-10: 099892931X
ISBN-13: 978-0998929316

Available worldwide. You may purchase online at retailers such as Amazon.com and Barnes & Noble, or request through your local bookstore. The first 500 purchasers can receive from the poet, upon request, a CD recording of the poems. (Details inside book.)

​

Booksellers: Please contact your distributor or Ingram (800-937-8000, thinkbooks@ingramcontent.com).

"A Hero’s journey 

through death, resurrection, psychological and spiritual trials, and revelations 

into redemptive vision." 

Features twenty-one full color illustrations, sixteen poems, and illuminating essays by Sarah Parvin, Mary-Ann Constantine, and Claire Pickard. Book design by J.C. Mlozanowski.

A note on the book's unusual form

It seems a bit self-serving to say much about this book when I've shared Jeffery's magical comments on my work... but there is a striking issue I may safely discuss without accusation: that is, I think many poets will look at this lovely volume and find in it new ways of thinking about presenting their work in book form. And it's not just because there's an accompanying CD available. And yes, the book is visually ravishing, unlike most poetry books, but it also lets others illumine the works within by introduction and essays. Jeffery doesn't have to simply rely on the poems and art to tell a story but also lets us overhear the thoughts of some rarified readers and viewers. So we have a sort of little library between two covers with poems, introduction, essays, CD, and art: it appeals to eye, to ear, to touch.

Praise

from Dan Barnett, Chico Enterprise-Record:  "Spectral Pegasus / Dark Movements" ($21.95 in paperback from Kin Press, kinpress.org) includes fifteen poems, one song, three essays (including the one by Parvin), and nearly two dozen paintings.

In one sense the Mari Lwyd is Halloween-frightening. "I am Pegasus Spectral/ Pegasus Reversed" the poet writes; "I am your nightmare-longing toward dust/ Be not afraid. // Stop shaking/ Every funeral prophesies resurrection...."

In "Drift," "Mari Mari Lwyd having never spoken your name/ your name becalms me/ Right hand to heart left hand gloved closed holding a secret/ Void's origin waiting to be opened/ for you as you are for me my stalwart."

A secret? Two, actually. In "Pegasus," the words have a particular resonance: "Liberty and Love the two Great Secrets/ Making the Divine Mind smile/ Making Death forget himself and sing/ Paradise regained/ Without contraries is no progression."

“And so, before the totally singular manifestation of this visionary work, I humbly call on William Rossetti, in the 19th century, who said, in his awe before the Illuminated Books of Blake: The genius ‘is not forestalled by predecessors, nor to be classed with contemporaries, nor to be replaced by known or readily surmisable successors.’”  –Poet Kent Johnson. Author of Homage to the Last Avant-Garde and I Once Met: A Partial Memoir of the Poetry Field.

“After Postmodern dismembering, now horribly enacted in the political sphere, comes hope where alienation is addressed and danced into healing by body, ecstasy and myth. The result in this superb work is a shamanic re-membering that renews self, consciousness, being and world. Spectral Pegasus / Dark Movements is an extraordinary and numinous collaboration between a poet and painter that invokes the archaic roots of art itself in the Paleolithic caves where ritual, religion, painting and song were born. Uniting word and paint by reconnecting with pre-Christian rites in Europe, Native American heritage and the intense participation in the collaborative must made possible by the internet, Spectral Pegasus / Dark Movements is soul food; it shapes dark energies into the emerging of new being. Archetypal, Jungian and visionary; this book's amazing art is an inspirational treatment for modern suffering.” –Dr. Susan Rowland Professor, Pacifica Graduate Institute. Author of Remembering Dionysus: Revisioning Psychology and Literature in C. G. Jung and James Hillman and Jung: A Feminist Revision.

“I can think of no other poet than the true bard, Jeffery Beam, who so elegantly, so riskily, layers into his language plain-speak and grandeur. Spectral Pegasus marshals with palpable force the library that is Beam’s heart, the garden that is his imagination, distilled through the maestro’s ear and the provocateur’s wit. He folds language into an entirely new province, something all its own, wholly original, yet gathering the tribes and kin of its influence, of its own making. When he writes in ‘The Quickening,’ ‘My daily urge walks a land without similarity teeming,’ I can only rejoinder with Amen. This is a gorgeous book by a simply splendid poet.” –Former North Carolina Poet Laureate Joseph Bathanti. Author of Half of What I Say Is Meaningless, The 13th Sunday after Pentecost, and co-editor of the forthcoming The Anthology of Black Mountain College Poetry.

“Beam’s is a startled and startling, all-body, all-spirit response to the gift and terror that rode roughshod and wondrous into his creative life like an annunciation, in the form of Hicks-Jenkins’s numinous, luminous horse.” –Poet Damian Walford Davies. Head, School of English, Communication and Philosophy, Cardiff University. Author of Alabaster Girls and Docklands.

from an interview at ekphrastic.net:

TER: How do you approach ekphrastic writing? Do you contemplate a random image until words come together, or do you wait until a work of art speaks to you and find your way in from there? Do you research the background of a painting or photograph, or the biography of the artist, or do you let the image alone spark your words?

Jeffery Beam: [Laughter].  All of the above.  It has been different every time, although I would never say any image has been random.  I come across an image that perhaps I just simply love, or an image uncovered in research about an artist or place I am drawn to, or perhaps the Universe sends me an image [as when a friend sent me the image of Andrea del Sarto’s John the Baptist, although this friend didn’t know that for years I had been fascinated by the Baptist’s story and the many works of art of him]. I think generally the discovery of an inspiring image has come out of my readings and studies of art and art movements or visits to museums, and less frequently biographies. Once the image has me the response can be very different.  On some occasions the poem births immediately.  Other times I have returned to the knowledge base about the work or the artist or the subject and then let the poem come. Always, though, a moment arrives when you have to let the image speak. I have been fortunate in that throughout my writing life I have seldom had much revision to do after the first draft; what revision needed is accomplished aloud.

The new book, Spectral Pegasus / Dark Movements, as mentioned above, came out of a sympathy and love for the work of Hicks-Jenkins.  He was working in subjects that beguiled me, and in that case, Clive chose the subject, and I became its captive. It was the first and only time I have written ekphrastic work that was chosen for me.  The essay in the book, "I Dreamed a Dream," by Sarah Parvin explains how I entered the project thinking I was going to be writing in my customary distinctive style “often elegant, sometimes aphoristic, Objectivist, concisely crisp, Gnostic and Zen-like.”  I quickly realized the poems weren’t flourishing. I gave myself over, as a result, to a sort of automatic writing, much like my youthful surrealist work. Meditating in front of an image for hours and waiting for it to speak.  It always did and each poem, every time, gobsmacked me … I can’t think of a better term. The encounters were great fun, and each time felt like becoming a child again. Those unexpected visions.

About Jeffery

Jeffery Beam's many award-winning works include The Broken Flower (Skysill Press, England), Gospel Earth (Skysill Press, England), Visions of Dame Kind (The Jargon Society), An Elizabethan Bestiary: Retold (Horse & Buggy), The New Beautiful Tendons: Collected Queer Poems 1969-2012 (Spuyten Duyvil-Triton), Light and Shadow (Aperture), and The Fountain (NC Wesleyan College Press). His spoken word CD with multimedia What We Have Lost: New and Selected Poems 1977-2001 was a 2003 Audio Publishers Award finalist. Beam's latest works are Jonathan Williams: The Lord of Orchards (co-edited with Richard Owens, Prospecta Press, 2018), and a virtual chapbook Don't Forget Love (Dispatches from the Poetry Wars, 2018, dispatchespoetrywars.com/virtual-chapbooks/2018/04/ dont-forget-love-by-jeffrey-beam). The song cycle, Life of the Bee (composer Lee Hoiby) continues to be performed on the international stage and can be heard, along with a Beam reading of the texts, on Albany Record's New Growth, a recording of the Carnegie Hall premiere. Limited fine editions include An Invocation (Country Valley Press), On Hounded Ground: Home and the Creative Life (Bookgirl Press, Japan), MountSeaEden (Chester Creek Press), and Eno Crow (Horse & Buggy Press). A number of young composers have worked and are working with his poetry. Steven Serpa premiered the cantata Heaven's Birds: Lament and Song (based on three New Beautiful Tendons poems) on Boston's World AIDS Day 2008. His tone poem An Invocation premiered for string quartet in 2014 (Spartanburg, SC) and in 2016 as a symphonic piece (Austin Symphony). Serpa premiered The Creatures: A Bestiary Retold (Austin, 2016) and also plans a song cycle of gay love poems. Holt McCarley premiered an instrumental piece, The Hyena, from the Bestiary (St. Louis, 2015) and is working on two cycles based on Beam nature and love poems. 2015 also saw the premier of a Daniel Thomas Davis chamber opera Kith & Kin: Seven Portraits with song texts by several North Carolina writers, including Beam (restaged with North Carolina Opera premier in 2018). Tony Solitro's song Love's Astronomy was completed in August 2018 and by the time of this printing will have had its first performance. Forthcoming is Beam's first of several projected children's books The Droods with British artist Phil Cooper. Other projects include Bee, I'm Expecting You (bee poem anthology), and Blue Darter - Jonathan Williams: A Bibliography of the Publications and Ephemera, 1950-2008. He continues to work on the poetry collection Life of the Bee; Bee, I'm Expecting You-an anthology of bee poems, facts, and folklore through the ages; and They Say: A Commonplace Book on Poetry and the Spirit. Beam's poems and criticism have appeared in many anthologies and magazines. Poetry editor emeritus of the print and online literary journal Oyster Boy Review, Beam retired in late 2011 from many decades as a UNC-Chapel Hill botanical librarian. Born in Kannapolis, North Carolina he lives in Hillsborough with his husband of 39 years, Stanley Finch. You can learn more about, read and hear more of his poetry at his website: www.jefferybeam.com

Jeffery, again--

For more of Jeffery Beam, go here.  It's a three-part reading!

Lisa Mangini, "Bird Watching at the End of the World"

Bird Watching at the End of the World

by Lisa Mangini

Paperback; 96 pages

ISBN 978-1625491015

Order from Barnes and Noble, Order from Powells, Order from Amazon

Find out more about Lisa here.

4 sample poems here.

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"Fabulous in their diction, the poems of Lisa Mangini present a world of sadness and grace, particle and wave. Victims of the body, shadowed by the eighth Deadly Sin--not to be loved--these lovely vessels stuffed with philosophical gleanings and lyrical meditations make possible a future for poetry, and thus, for us."
- Alan Michael Parker

"...Mangini crafts a world that is uncertain and violent, that is made more so by the people in it. In the face of this violence... the speaker hones her keen skills of observance. These poems are Picasso'ed birds - they contain and are the brokenness of our world. If we are brave enough to pick them up, to hold them, we will know a terrifying beauty. This is all we have. 'This will have to do.' "

-Leah Nielsen

"By having the courage to confront disorder and chaos, Lisa Mangini reminds us that even though we live without closure, we must stay open to moments of communion by learning to live with 'quiet unfulfillment'...Mangini's vivid collection is compelling because the poems are hard edged, are solid because they are true."

-Vivian Shipley

"When we spend a lot of time reading poetry, I know we can become critical of the pursuit of love and the defining of boundaries in poetry—but sometimes, a poet chooses to address these exact topics, and they get everything right: they create something new, something meaningful, something entirely worth reading, whether it is within the context of poetry or not. Lisa Mangini makes this exact achievement in her premiere full-length collection, Bird Watching at the End of the World, as she addresses danger as it relates to the body, various forms of physical awakening, and hope, and the complications that come along with it. These poems are incredible, and unique, and lovely, and they invite us with such great ease to consider questions of our reality, of our awareness, and our consent."

- McKenzie Tozan

Maryann Corbett, "Mid Evil"

Winner of the Richard Wilbur Award

from Mid Evil,

A Trenta-Sei of Mixed Feelings at the Early Onset of Winter

at Poetry Daily

Mid Evil at Amazon

• Hardcover, 86 pages
• University of Evansville Press; First edition (January 1, 2015)
• ISBN-10: 0930982746
• ISBN-13: 978-0930982744

Learn more about Maryann Corbett here

***

Praise for Mid Evil

Reading Maryann Corbett’s wonderful new collection, Mid Evil, I was reminded of Keats’ equation of beauty with truth. Suffused and haunted by history, Corbett’s poems derive their beauty and power from their fidelity to what is true, in the poet’s life and in ours. Among the truths these impeccably crafted poems witness and affirm is the continuing presence of the past....The journey of Mid Evil—into midlife, mortality, motherhood and medieval history—is one I highly recommend.

—Catherine Tufariello

This new collection of poems by Maryann Corbett will confirm what her fortunate readers already know: that she is a poet and translator of remarkable accomplishment, whose poems are ‘worldly’ and ‘knowing’ in the best senses of those words. They offer us the delights of their wisdom with an openhandedness for which the only possible response is gratitude.

—Charles Martin 

There are poems about forces of nature, musings and cautions, aging and mortality, what it takes for us to have come this far, what it will take to go on. But many are about the mundane, the events of day to day. I think the use of meter and form makes us see things anew; they provide a structure that that confers significance on our daily preoccupations. (I'm hearing Blake: "Everything that lives is holy.") This poet sees life, in all its complexity and variety, as worthy of all the praise we can summon. 

—Toni Clark

Maryann Corbett is an extraordinary poet. From “Teacup”’s delicate tracing of an object’s origin (“crushed bones are its essence”) to meditations on pop culture’s appropriation of Tolkien (“the fabled rights//of bard and makar, geste and fabliau, give place to rendering and CGI”), Corbett’s poems are both historically attentive and absolutely up to date. Her unique perspective blends a feminist outlook with a scholar’s interests—Anglo-Saxon and medieval literature, or the intersections of verbal and choral music—yet a deep compassion always animates her work....

            —Ned Balbo

Maryann Corbett is a medievalist and a singer of sacred music, but her poetry will not settle in the rare book room or the choir loft.  An imp of instability, a demon from a Germanic forest, is forever lurking at its edges.  She is like the monk who goes on transcribing while the door is being battered down by Vikings.  Can high culture survive in America? Corbett, in Mid Evil, confirms that it can. She confirms it not only with elegance and vivacity but with the Midwesterner’s natural aversion to affectation. Hers is a plain-speaking lyricism that, buttressed by formal dexterity, can “sing, against the winds of history,/ that even now our darkened hearts might burn.” 

—George Green

As soon as it arrived I read half of it, unable to stop myself, though I had other things I should have been doing.

—Susan McLean

Mid Evil starts with scholarly study and ends in a wish for religious exultation; it begins with writing and ends in song, becoming a prayer for inspiration, confidence, purpose, and grace. Whether that prayer can or will receive an answer remains, for Corbett, an open question, but she comes to a conclusion I gladly endorse....

—Jeff Sypeck

...really a cracking good read. To say I enjoyed it is an understatement. I've waited years to come across a fellow female poet this good, in fact any poet this good!

—Olivia Byard

Dear friends of Lady Word of Mouth,

As this is a blog for friends with books, rather than one about my books, I will simply point out that if you go here, you can find out about Glimmerglass, published in September 2014. Or you can read about Maze of Blood, September 2015...

Thanks,
Marly

Robbi Nester, "A Likely Story"

Cover art by Mary Bullington

Robbi Nester: It’s important to note that A Likely Story, my first full collection of poetry, is a first book. Yes, it’s true that I’ve published a chapbook—Balance (White Violet, 2012). But a full collection is different, especially since I waited my whole life to publish one.

I’ve been writing poetry as a serious pursuit (as serious as any play can be)since I was a teenager, so why not before now? I just simply knew the work was not ready. I was not ready. I got two degrees in writing—the first at Hollins University (then, Hollins College), where Richard H.W. Dillard taught me the craft and he and Dara Weir set me off on the right path, and then, after a few of the brief turns life threw my way, an MFA at UC Irvine, where I studied with Charles Wright, Heather McHugh, and James McMichael. 

But following that second degree, I didn’t write poetry again for 20 years. Instead, I got a PhD in Comparative Literature at UC Irvine, writing a dissertation on Vladimir Nabokov’s literary games, and thereafter settled in to teach writing and literature as an adjunct in a few different places, as well as being a mom and a caretaker daughter to two elderly parents. In 2011, I found myself free—my son pretty much grown, my job gone, and plenty of time to write.

So write I did. I turned out the three books you see above in as many years, and also have a manuscript of ekphrastic poems, Together, in my back pocket. I hope it will be published by next year or so.

A Likely Story is composed of poems written during many different geological layers of my life, but I found in all of them a common thread of narrative. So this is the theme that I have used to construct the book, which is composed of nine different sections related to the elements or themes relating to narrative, from “Tall Ones,” to “A Cast of Thousands,” “Location, Location,” etc.

Some poems seemed to belong in a couple of different sections at once, and so I made these the ones to open or close a particular section.

The book went through eight different versions. Then a publisher who almost took version seven told me that many of the poems’ endings were weak. And though it stung, I realized she was right, especially after another reader told me the same thing.

They may have believed I was not up to the task of doing anything about this, but I did. In a matter of a month or two, I rewrote many poems, threw some out, put in new, stronger poems, and created the collection that now exists.

A funny thing happened during that twenty years I was not writing poems. I guess all that pent up poem energy made me a better writer, more confident, more willing to try new things because I have never looked back.

And I am thankful that people like my friend Marly Youmans, a writer whom I very much admire, who has been a guide and model for my doings as a writer, encouraged me to keep on going since I would never be happy unless I was writing and also very pleased that the poetry community has embraced me so generously and wholeheartedly.

Sometimes, even when it seems unlikely, a story can have a happy ending.

Moon Tide on Robbi's new book:  Moon Tide is proud to announce the release of its 22nd book, Robbi Nester's A Likely Story. The book, which consists of 59 poems and features a wrap-around cover painting by Mary Boxley Bullington, is Nester's first full-length collection. Coincidentally, it follows the first full-length collection by her husband, Richard Nester, whose Buffalo Laughter came out from Kelsay Books in February. 

Robbi’s past credits include the chapbook Balance (White Violet, 2012) and the anthology The Liberal Media Made Me Do It! (Nine Toes, 2014), which she edited. A longtime fixture at Orange County open readings, she lives in Lake Forest and has had poems published in Broadsided, Qarrtsiluni, Prompt & Circumstance, Poetic Diversity, Edwin E. Smith Publishingand elsewhere. 

Robbi's book will have its official launch at a private party July 10, with public readings July 27 at Gatsby Books in Long Beach and July 30 at the Ugly Mug in Orange. In the meantime, you can click here to order a copy or check out two of her poems on our Poet of the Month page.

And Moon Tide on Moon Tide: Moon Tide Press, founded in 2006, is a publisher dedicated to showcasing the finest poets in Southern California. The press has released books — many of them first collections — by national award-winning poets, Pushcart Prize nominees, longtime reading hosts and gifted up-and-comers. Authors published by Moon Tide have featured across Southern California and out of state, been covered in numerous publications, read their work on KPFK 90.7 FM and starred in the press' own reading series at the Muckenthaler Cultural Center in Fullerton.

NPR/PBS-inspired anthology

Nine Toes Press, an imprint of Lummox Press

Featuring Poets:

Martha O. Adams, RD Armstrong, Anne Baber, Sally Ball, Kris Bigalk, Lavina Blossom, Allen Braden, Kirstin Bratt, Julie Bruck, Mary Bullington, Sheryl Clough, Michael Colonnaise, Barbara Crooker,  Donna Decker, Barbara Duffey, Blas Falconer, Jennifer Flescher, Rupert Fike, Deborah Gang, Howie Good, Rick Hamwi, Kenneth Hart, Juleigh Howard-Hobson, M.E. Hope, Kate Hutchinson, Luisa Igloria, Tim Kahl, Marie Kane, Deda Kavanagh, Elizabeth Kelikowske, Kathryn Kopple, Judy Kronenfeld, Jane Rosenberg LaForge, Ron Lavalette, Christina Lovin, Amy MacLennen, Joan Mazza, Kelly Nelson, Robbi Nester, Barbra Nightingale, Hal O’Leary, Susan Blackwell Ramsey, Penelope Schott,  Brittney Scott, Patricia Scruggs, Martha Silano, M.E. Silverman, Susan Snowden, Nina Soifer, Onna Solomon, Robin Stratton, Lisa Stonestreet, Meryl Stratford, Marly Youmans, Kit Zak.

View a sampler of poems on ISSUU.COM

ISBN 978-1-929878-72-7
154 pages; Perfect Bound; 6 X 9 inches
$20 Retail – 25% off to Lummox Customers

About the anthology - Robbi Nester, editor

  Art is made from the substance of our everyday lives.  Anything that occupies us is fair game, from our relationships to the places we inhabit, the ideas we entertain.

  For those of us who live with radios and televisions pre-set to our favorite public media programs, these stories become an integral part of our lives, the stories we share with our friends at dinner parties, the tidbits of information we stash away for safekeeping.   

  On any given day, news programs alone provide a wealth of tantalizing angles on events. Then there are documentaries, scientific, and cultural programming, making for an almost endless array of subjects writers can draw on in their work.

   I had been writing poems about the stories I was hearing on public radio for years when a conversation with poet and publisher R.D. Armstrong alerted me to the fact that I might not be the only person engaged in such an activity.

  Sure enough, it turned out that many poets out there were writing work inspired by public radio and television, spanning national shows like All Things Considered, Nightly Business Report, RadioLab, and Prairie Home Companion as well as local and regional shows aired on individual public stations.

  The work came in every variety—topical and  political, humorous, narrative, and personal, having in common only that they were all based on these stories and were written by poets from nearly every corner of the United States.

  This diversity delighted me, but I found that writers returned  especially to a few chosen programs, like RadioLab, which merges science with story-telling in a particularly vivid way.

  I had myself written a poem, “Fistulated Cow,” inspired by a RadioLab story, “Holey Cow,” in which science writer Mary Roach explored the innards of a cow with a fistula as a way of discussing digestion. So I was not surprised to see that other writers chose to focus on other RadioLab stories, like the one about Lucy, the chimp raised as a human child by a benighted psychologist in the 1950s, and the two poems inspired by the “Seeing in the Dark” episode of the program, about a man who, after he lost his sight entirely, stopped trying to envision the people and things he was now no longer able to see.

   Kris Bigalk’s poem “Seeing” explores the story from the perspective of the blind man himself, examining his motivations for embracing the new limitations he experiences  rather than denying them, and the consequences that arise from this change in perspective.

  In contrast, Christina Lovin’s poem  “The Forest of Her” approaches the subject in a very different way, from  the  third person rather than first. The poem creates a resonance by offering an epigraph within an epigraph.

  Lovin reminds us of other blind men in the tradition, citing Marvin Bell quoting from The Gospel of Mark, a line that suggests that the sight Jesus restored to the blind man was perhaps not as complete as we might assume. Following this, she offers Bell’s own assertion embracing blindness: “ truly, one must close one’s eyes to see.”

  Bigalk’s poem retells the story told on the radio, capturing its rhythms of speech and details. At 15 lines, the poem retains the compactness of a sonnet, though it lacks a sonnet’s formal elements, its turn or meter.

  Lovin’s poem too dallies with form by repeating lines in each succeeding stanza, a pattern that fits nicely with its epigraph, echoing a theme.

  As this formal element suggests, Lovin’s poem takes on a less personal tone than Bigalk’s, applying the blind man’s situation metaphorically to our own, while Bigalk’s poem hews closely to the radio story itself.

  These are only two poems of several written about the same stories.  Reading them together reminds us that our lives are made, after all, of the same elements,  but that what we make of those, out of the stuff of our own characters and experience, makes all the difference.

  I have probably not responded here to Marly’s question about my objective in compiling this anthology. What purpose, aside from the “purposeful purposelessness” of all art, does any volume of poetry have?

  By way of excuse I can offer only the desire to meet others engaged in the same pursuit--to discover the work of writers I have not as yet discovered, and to introduce them and their work to the world.