Books by Contributors
Birds in a Storm
John Rutherford
Naked Cat Publishing 2023
This small collection of twenty poems by John Rutherford shows a poet already nearing a serious artistic maturity. The poems all exhibit clear, tight diction, unity of imagery, and plain but convincing rhythm. The poems can really be read as an appropriately titled sequence.
A major theme in these poems is environmental destruction. Rutherford's approach to this topic is not moralistic or didactic. He does not strike a self-righteous pose as so many poets and other writers do when confronting what every intelligent person acknowledges as the major crisis of our age. Instead, he opens up for the reader the experience of an individual who deeply feels the metaphysical isolation of modern humanity from the rest of the existent world but has begun to bridge that gulf through an expansiveness that can best be named as love. This love naturally responds to the continued destruction of the world, on whatever scale, with grief and anger.
John Rutherford deserves a wide readership, and I intently look forward to his future works.
- Bryan Helton
Permission to Relax
Sheila E. Murphy
BlazeVOX Books, 2023
Sheila E. Murphy is the recipient of the Gertrude Stein Award for her book Letters to Unfinished J. (Green Integer Press, 2003). Murphy's book titled Reporting Live from You Know Where (2018) won the Hay(na)Ku Poetry Book Prize Competition from Meritage Press (U.S.A.) and xPress(ed) (Finland). In 2020, Luna Bisonte Prods released Golden Milk. Broken Sleep Books brought out the book As If To Tempt the Diatonic Marvel from the Ivory (2018). Murphy has authored 44 previous books of poetry. Initially educated in instrumental and vocal music, she is associated with music in poetry. Murphy earns her living as a management consultant and researcher and holds the Ph.D. degree. She has lived in Phoenix, Arizona throughout her adult life.
Critical State
B. R. Dionysius
Calanthe Press 2022
Critical State is a collection of poetry about Queensland, articulating concerns about habitat loss and the extinction of local species. The anthology addresses history, loss, discovery and the ever diminishing diversity of our environment with intensity, metaphor, clear-eyed detail and rhythmic language.
B. R. Dionysius was founding Director of the Queensland Poetry Festival. His poetry has been widely published in literary journals, anthologies, newspapers and online both in Australia and overseas.
Through a Sea Laced
with Midnight Hues
Tinamarie Cox
Nymeria Publishing 2025
Through a Sea Laced with Midnight Hues dives into the mentality and emotions that can overtake a person during a depressive episode. This is a journey alongside mental illness via poetry and prose which includes a raw account of the ups, downs, and hopelessness.
Tinamarie Cox finds writing poetry therapeutic for her emotional and mental health struggles. Looking back over her notebooks, she noticed a recurring theme in much of her work. At her darkest, she was describing herself as sinking, drowning, and fighting to swim against the heavy currents. These are the relatable elements described through the poetry in this collection. Travel through a sea laced with midnight hues and find hope on dry land with the sunrise.
If It Comes To That
Marc Frazier
Kelsay Books 2023
Cover Artist: Steven Ostrowski
*Finalist for da Vinci Eye Prize for best book cover design from the Eric Hoffer Book Awards
*Finalist for Best Anthology in its Genre by the Florida Writers Association
If It Comes to That explores an individual’s search for identity within and without the bonds of a relationship. It covers subjects of every kind from the environment and disappeared children to the Boston bomber and a gathering of siblings after family members’ deaths. It is centered on the many manifestations of “narrative” and the relativity of “truth.” If It Comes to That considers what we are prepared for in our honest moments when anything is possible: How ready are we for the unexpected “if it comes to that?”
Connections & Choreography
Jacob Schepers
Bottlecap Press 2024
In Connections & Choreography, Jacob Schepers assembles a textual experiment consisting of poetic fragments—lines and phrases—undergoing transformation across four rearrangements. "This is an example of movable type," one section announces, and while the chapbook’s formal innovative constraint may often seem to fit the bill as the prima donna of this imagined production, what ends up taking center stage is the lasting mystery of how poetic meaning forces its way out of an imposed straightjacket and ends up accumulating lyrical significance and inviting further introspection and interrogation.
Connections & Choreography is, in short, a scene, a spectacle, of imposed constraint and recombination. A tongue-in-cheek yet instructive "Preface as Press Release" introduces the work further within the document itself and establishes each poetic phrase as a fame-starved member of a cast of characters who all seek wider exposure and grander spotlights.
This Sad and Tender Time: Memorial Poems
Sharon Whitehill
Kelsay Books 2023
A former English professor at Grand Valley State University in Michigan, Sharon Whitehill retired to Florida with Jim Meloy, her beloved husband of 30 years and staunch supporter of her every endeavor. Her previous publications include two scholarly biographies and two memoirs, but in retirement she was finally able to indulge her long-deferred wish to focus on her own writing rather than on papers from her English classes. Most recently, poetry has become her favored mode of self-expression, resulting in two chapbooks and a full collection.
Jim Meloy, to whom this volume is dedicated, was that rare creature, a man who could (and did) willingly talk about his and others’ emotions. Though he was diagnosed with chronic fatigue syndrome just a few years after the couple met, and eventually had to give up on his beekeeping business, he never lost his quirky and ebullient manner. Generous, intelligent, funny, and kind, he remained grateful always for what he called “the gift of consciousness.”
The poems in This Sad and Tender Time were written during the year following Jim’s sudden death at age 73, in August of 2021. Whitehill remains (and continues to write) in their house in Port Charlotte, Florida—alone but not lonely, as her daily companions are two big dogs and two cats.
A Short Supply of Viability
Annette Gagliardi
The Poetry Box Press 2022
Annette Gagliardi’s A Short Supply of Viability takes an unflinching look at life and the hard facts of what it means to care for one who is slowly losing touch with life. These poems deftly reach for their subjects in the language of image and metaphor “giving way to a flowering darkness/along with hours lost down the drain of the day.” Gagliardi asks us to not only to attend to what slips away from us in the daily, but to also behold these losses as fragments of song. ~Juliet Patterson, author of Threnody and The Truant Lover
Something To Be
Mark J. Mitchell
Pski's Porch Publishing 2023
Eclogues for the hypermodern work-a-day round, Mark J. Mitchell swims through city streets gathering sensations and folding them into bread, or roses, or most often, both. These are witty poems that do not assume, and refuse to make a show of their intelligence.
Born in Chicago, when he was four when his family moved to Southern California, where he attended Catholic schools in Torrance and Redondo Beach. At the University of California at Santa Cruz he studied writing with George Hitchcock, Barbara Hall, and Raymond Carver, and Dante and Medieval literature with Robert M. Durling.
He has published two novels, Knight Prisoner and The Magic War. Another is on the way. An award-winning poet, he is the author of five full-length poetry collections, and six chapbooks.
The Surveillance: Tales of White Terror in Taiwan
C.J. Anderson-Wu
Serenity International 2021
What is it like living under an oppressive regime? How does an individual survive it? Should one rebel or compromise? What will be the consequences of resisting the power, and what will be the price of obeying it?
Taiwan had been under the rule by Martial Law for 38 years (1949-1987), during this period of time, all publications were under strict censorship, public gatherings must apply for permits in advance, opinions against the ruler were silenced, demands for democracy were repressed. Worst of all, dissidents were persecuted.
The 13 stories in this book are about the lives of ordinary people without freedom of expression or complete political rights, and what decisions they might make while faced with a dilemma. Additionally, these stories investigate the role of literary works in a society with all kinds of political taboos.
Notes from the Void
Ollie Shane
Wild Ink Publishing February 2025