How to See the World

Poems by

Paula J. Lambert

How To See The World startles me awake, my vision clearer and my inner clock rewound. Paula J. Lambert’s radical compassion asks us to “Rise up for what you believe in: the sun,/ the moon, the glaciers melting. Ancestors calling our names.” Each poem wakes us to blossom, birdsong, breath. Her work ensures that we are more fully alive, more present. ~ Laura Grace Weldon, author of Blackbird, 2019 Ohio Poet of the Year

Paula J. Lambert’s poetry is always visionary, but visionary on a human scale. She sees with clarity not just the people near us, whom we can touch, but also those out of reach. Sanitizing groceries, we realize everything we do “now extends to something else, every touch, every thought, every / worry, each fond thought.” Still more, she touches people who may be lost to us, or seem so. A dead thrush found in the road is reminder that “The world is a terrible, beautiful / place where those not with us are with us / all the time.” The poet’s vision becomes our vision, and we are stronger and wiser for having seen the world—terrible and beautiful—through her eyes. ~ Richard Carr, author of Our Blue Earth

Quilt Life

Poems 

by Cindy Bosley

The poems in Cindy Bosley’s Quilt Life are con-structed from the fabric of woman—body and soul and heart. Sensual and lush, the language ranges from the everyday—“I fell in love with Father Paul at Sunday mass when I was nine” to the surreal—“My breasts are fat, lipsticked ladies from / the opera: year after year they sing each other//their most famous arias.” Quilt Life takes you into a dry, dusty Middle America and verdant tropics in poems of mystery and longing, desertion and death, poverty and grief. But these are also poems of fortitude, resilience, courage, and faith in love and the things that matter. ~ Diane K. Martin, author of Cry and Hue: Poems

Cindy Bosley

Family Portrait with Scythe

Poems

James Owens

James Owens’ stunning valediction, both for and forbidding mourning, slices with steely memory to the “wet bone.” Stumbling with a boy’s “ignorant gravity,” Owens cannot right the “unbalanced accounts” of his miner father’s sooty lungs, his parents’ exhausted marriage—nor his own professed failings. Yet his keen eye in and of the natural world does lead to the scales balanced, if precariously—in belonging “on the brief earth,” in parsing spring from grief, in “the good story of the body” whose light becomes “the shine of spirit.” A master poet works this crescent blade, a master who embraces life’s whole catastrophe as equally as he farewells it past. ~ Linda Parsons, author of Shaky Earth

These poems have a crystalline economy and startling depths, whether they begin with a “vast autumn flock of birds,” lovers in the rain, or a marriage coming apart. Even as he laments the trials and losses of existence, James Owens insists that if we remember joy, we must “tell it speak it write it.” He invites us to delight in the things of this world, which now include this luminous book.    ~Jeff Gundy, author of Without a Plea

Story Hour

& Other Stories

Robert  Flanagan 

In a voice as lusty as Whitman's, select and just as Hemingway's, yet a voice unmistakably his own, Robert Flanagan tells these fine stories. Flanagan's subjects are Midwesterners. He treats them, their strivings and struggles, their disappointed or fulfilled desires, with humor and compassion meanwhile shining over them a mysterious light of grace and love. There is violence here, and courage and caring, the intense sorrows and joys, the victories and defeats that define the human condition. These stories will entertain you and enrich your understanding of life in the American Heartland. If you read them carefully, they may enlarge your soul. ~Annabel Thomas, author of Stone Mountain Man: A Novel 

Loving Power

Stories

Robert Flanagan

"Robert Fanagan is a writer of originality and force."                     ~Alison Lurie

Robert Flanagan is a novelist and short story writer with fivebooks to his credit, and a series of poetry chapbooks. For three decades He was director of Creative Writing at Ohio Wesleyan University, now retired.

152 pgs. Conetmporary Midwest Fiction and Harmony Series

Thoreau's Lost Journal: Poems by Larry Smith

In this expanded second edition are poems as dramatic projections of the character and spirit of American author and naturalist, Henry David Thoreau. In Smith's poems we get inside the mind and heart of Thoreau and see his life as his greatest work of art. One gains a deeper appreciation of Thoreau as person and as an enlightened spirit of America.

“These poems are crisp, lucid, exact. They keep one hand always in contact with the earth, the other on the skin….I am moved by all of them: the regard for work, for tools, for the turns of phrase, for the legacy of saying and skills.” ~Scott Russell Sanders

See link to book page

Sample of  Thoreau Journal

A House for Last Year's Summer

Poems

by Terry Hermsen

A House for Last Year's Summer shows his uncanny ability to discern eternal verities in the quotidian, and his mastery of colloquial speech makes each line ring with authenticity.  In riddles and prose poems, homages to artists and places here and abroad, elegies and interludes, poet Hermsen finds a local habitation for what propels him through the world: love.    This is a lovely book.              --Christopher Merrill, author of Self-Portrait with Dogwood

 Terry Hermsen’s new poems travel—from Ohio prairie to the Strait of Magellan, from galleries of art to the earth’s “museum of eternity down the spine of the Andes,” through loneliness and loss to deeper capacities for love. And everywhere they go, they bring an observant heart, a bold imagination, and the exacting, expansive voice of a poet in his full power.  “If I could I would lie deep inside the morning/as if it were a sea.// Each day the smallest ripple,” writes Hermsen.  Then in poem after exquisite poem, he shows us how this radiant work is done. 

                                          --Lynn Powell, author of Season of the Second Thought



 Author Terry Hermsen

  Abandoned Homeland:

Poems

Jeff Gundy

If Whitman were born in the Midwest to Mennonite parents, listened to Dylan and the Dead and loved to laugh at himself, he’d sound just like Jeff Gundy. “I want the reader as far inside of my skin as possible,” he writes, in bemused poems that are in love with the productions of matter and time. “How else to describe this absurd, lovely world?” he poses in the title poem of his warm and inviting Abandoned Homeland. Gundy’s poetry reminds us, over and over, that paying attention to the delights and troubles of existence becomes a kind of psalm to this botched and beautiful creation. ~Philip Metres, author of Sand Opera

* * *

Jeff Gundy, long-time professor of English at Bluffton University, has published six earlier books of poems and four of prose, most recently Somewhere Near Defiance (Anhinga, 2014), Songs from an Empty Cage: Poetry, Mystery, Anabaptism, and Peace (Cascadia, 2013), and Spoken Among the Trees (Akron, 2008). His earlier Bottom Dog books include Rhapsody with Dark Matter (2000) and Inquiries (1992).

 A 2008 Fulbright Lecturer at the University of Salzburg, he taught at LCC International University in Klaipeda, Lithuania in spring 2015. He plays 6- and 12-string guitar, and puts in as many miles as possible on his road bike and (with his wife Marlyce) on their Cannondale tandem.

Early Review of Abandoned Homeland

Author Jeff Gundy

Flesh and Stones

Field Notes from a Finite World

Jan Shoemaker

Jan Shoemaker may be the finest crafter of sentences working in the essay today.  Her prose displays remarkable humor and wit, an intelligence that never grows brittle because it is based on a lively reading and teaching life and placed in the service of life’s imponderable questions.  Her probing of our common mysteries and her affection for others opens great depths of feeling as well. In Flesh and Stones heart and mind and words meet. -Steven Harvey, author of The Book of Knowledge and Wonder 

Travelogue and family album, tour of heart and tour de force -- with Flesh and Stones, we are alerted to an astonishing work in words.  Jan Shoemaker crafts essays that tell the rare and contrarian facts of life with apparent ease, uncanny authenticity. 

                Thomas Lynch, author of The Undertaking

 176 pages  $17

                                 Author and Gracie

Jack's Memoirs: Off the Road

A Novel

by Kurt Landefeld

If Jack Kerouac had lived, what might he have done and written? Kurt Landefeld opens the doors on this for us in his remarkable novel.

"This is a moving tribute to Kerouac, whom  Kurt Landefeld brilliantly resurrects in this imaginative triumph. He gives  Kerouac a new lease on life (in more ways than one) in this finely executed novel.  It’s a 'must read' for anyone who values Kerouac, the Sixties, and the created worlds of those whose eyes see what might have been. Bravo.”  ~Dennis Baumwoll, professor emeritus Bucknell  University 

"Against all odds, Kurt Landefeld has located another fold within Jack Kerouac's watery heart. This road loa à gogo jolts us one more time toward a deep, intentional, and moral narrative, which is the perennial kernel speaking simultaneously through Landefeld and all the great American angels that memory honors". ~Kenneth Warren, author of Captain Poetry's Sucker Punch

 290 pgs.  $19.00 (special)

Author Kurt Landefeld

Youtube of author reading from Jack's Memoir: Off the Road

Reviewed by Peter M. Fitzpatrick in US Review of Books

Sept. 2014

The author has provided close to six hundred pages of an extended meditation on Kerouac, America in 1970, and the role and function of literature. This is in concert with Kerouac's own Buddhist leanings and methodologies. He has invented a patchwork of historical introspection, poetic flourish, and psychological investigation reminiscent of Dostoyevsky's "Underground Man." Both are sick men, first person interlocutors who ruthless analyze their moral failings. The character arc is long and engagingly ornate. The language ranges from prosaic to poetic in seductive evocation that drives the reader forward seeking redemption along with the novel's narrator. Like a Kerouac novel, the plot is secondary, but that does not mean drama and interest are absent. This Kerouac is perhaps more friendly, more honest, more accessible than the one so distant in time. The author clearly loves his subject, and his creative effort shows intelligence combined with a gentle handling that justifies the effort. It is courageous, not cavalier. US Review...complete review link

Stolen Child: A Novel

by Suzanne Kelly

A winning novel of a young girl's challenge to come to terms with her family.

Suzanne Kelly’s Stolen Child will steal your heart. This novel captures the intricacies and confusion of religion, politics, and family conflict all through the eyes and logic of a child. Sweet, struggling Lucy is right up there with Scout on my list of favorite child narrators. Warning: this novel will steal your time and all commitment to other obligations, too—once you open it, nothing else will matter but seeing it through to the beautiful, moving end. —Katrina Kittle, author of The Blessings of the Animals

Early Review: "Author Kelly has created a delightful tale of a young girl feeling torn between being All-American, or clinging to the lighter parts of her Irish heritage. Readers will be caught up in the culture of these Irish families as well as the 1960's era and may find themselves humming with toes tapping to the music that embraces the words of this novel. Hopefully, the Irish-American author will keep writing about the people this work has proven she knows so well." -US Review of Books

 338 pgs.   $17.00

Review in US Review of Books

 Author, Suzanne Kelly 

Echo: Poems

Christina Lovin

Christina Lovin is a singer of stories and “of the many ways of leaving, part by part, or head first like the hound too far afield to hear the call and downing dusk….” An elegiac poet for whom the past opens a door to the present and the future, she seeks to preserve the memory of those she loves even as she reinvents herself. “Sometimes it’s wise to do a thing twice,” Lovin says. Echo has found her voice: incisive, compassionate, sorrowful, mysterious, full of anger and tenderness for our flawed world. —Jeff Friedman, author of Pretenders

Harmony Series

114 pgs.  $15

Christina Lovin

The Harmonist at Nightfall:

Poems of Indiana

Shari Wagner

In poems that dazzle with their imagery and music, Shari Wagner conjures a familiar yet mysterious landscape in The Harmonist at Nightfall. Wagner shows us that right here in Indiana, in this particular spot, we are part of the astonishing story of humankind on earth. She makes us lookwe see the wild grapevines or the yellow tamaracks or the unfinished peonies on T. C. Steeles easeland she makes us listento the singing creek, to winds lyrics in wheat, to the old harmony of oars.Nature is the star of this opera, but people cross the stage, tooabolitionists, utopians, the Potawatomi, Lincoln, James Dean, and mournful Pollie Barnett, still a ghostly presence searching for her missing daughter across five counties. This is a thrilling collection full of sleigh bells mixed with thunder. ~Maura Stanton

Poet Laureate of Indiana

Sample poem on American Life in Poetry     

                                                                     114 pgs.  $15

 Shari Wagner

On the Flyleaf
Poems

Herbert Woodward Martin

The ingenious conversational mode of On the Flyleaf  yields many variations of style and mood, yet Herb Martin’s wit and wonder shine through them all. Martin is as generous as any poet I know, and this book is exacting, troubling, and exhilarating in its tracings of the human predicaments that force us to “believe in the catastrophe of love.”   ~Jeff  Gundy author of  Spoken Among the Trees

 It isn't easy to write with a gentle voice that's also     stiletto sharp, but Herb Martin has done it here.  He is a national treasure.  On the Flyleaf is filled with gems, ones you'll want to share with loved ones.
     ~Ralph Keyes, author of The Courage to Write

106 pages   $15.00

Also as Amazon Kindle Book $7

Herbert Woodward Martin

Ariadne & Other Poems

Ingrid Swanberg

"Ingrid Swanberg’s  work has great range and versatility. Her poetry is scrupulously clean, with the sharp definition of cut glass and a complete lack of pretense, useless ornament, posing or posturing. As a lyricist, she has a purity uncommon in North American poetry, and her work is perhaps more closely analogous to that of Juan Ramon Jimenes and Federico Garcia Lorca.” -Karl Young                                  

                                        120 pgs. $16.00

                                 Ingrid Swanberg



The River's Daughter

Poems

by Terry Hermsen

“From luminous evocations of childhood and place, to riddles so beautifully, lucidly obscure that they crack my mind open like an egg, to explorations of ink-blots and loves old and new, Terry Hermsen’s The River’s Daughter is filled with pleasure, challenge, and nourishment. Hermsen is a subtle, bold lover of both words and the world…in these deftly woven, deeply imagined poems.” - Jeff Gundy

112 pages   $14



EVENSONG: CONTEMPORARY POETS

ON SPIRITUALITY

Eds. Gerry LaFemina & Chad Prevost

The book contains profiles, statements, and 5 poems from each poet. The contributors include Francisco Aragon, Robin Behn, Christopher Buckley, Chris Bursk, Todd Davis, Travis Denton, Camille Dungy, Stephen Dunn, Stuart Dybek, Angie Estes, Annie Finch, Patricia Goedicke, Dennis Hinrichsen, Richard Jackson, Mia Leonin, Timothy Liu, Denise Low, Shara McCallum, Alicia Ostriker, Eric Pankey, Tim Seibles, Ravi Shankar, Vivian Shipley, Elizabeth Socolow, Cathy Song, Gerald Stern, Marc Straus, Michael Waters, Claude Wilkinson, Sholeh Wolpe, Charles Wright. 

 240 pages   $14

Painting Bridges: A Novel

Patricia Averbach

Painting Bridges is a lovely exploration of the ways we grieve, and the ways we heal.     -Ann Hood, author of The Knitting Circle

Pat Averbach's Painting Bridges is a graceful debut novel of grief and redemption. Part memorial, part love story, part coming-into-one's-own, it is a classic narrative that reaches out to every kind of reader.
               -Liz Rosenberg, author of The Laws of Gravity

 Harmony Series 234 pgs. $17.00

The author, a Cleveland native and winner of several prizes for poetry, also shows a gift for the structure of a novel. She creates vivid, believable characters, but keeps them humanly complex--no one is totally good or bad. Sam is heartbreaking and likable; we understand her grief and forgive her selfishness when she often forgets that Sheila is grieving, too. Sam's parents could have been cliches of rich, elitist parents--which they are--but they're also sincere in their love and concern for their depressed daughter. Other characters also spring to life, with sharp descriptions and insights. The book ends on an entirely satisfactory, if predictable, note and makes one hope that Averbach has plans for another novel soon.

                                                                        --Michele Ross (Cleveland Plain Dealer

See Full Review in Cleveland Plain Dealer

Author Patricia Averbach