Eleanor by Gray Jacobik Out Now!

February 3, 2020 By Dimitri Reyes 1 Comment

Publication Date: March 2020

Have your copy on the release date by ordering today!

“Eleanor Roosevelt is a woman we need to hear right now– Gray Jacobik puts a rose inside ER’s ever cogent, necessary thoughts, right in time for the 100th Anniversary of the vote for women.” – Molly Peacock

About Gray Jacobik

Gray Jacobik is a widely anthologized poet and author of several notable collections; 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 CavanKerry Press covers have featured her artwork.

About the Book

In Eleanor, Jacobik presents 58 poems in Roosevelt’s voice told against the backdrop of many of the major national and international events of the 20th century. Included are poems about Franklin, her children, her mother-in-law, and her most passionate and intimate friendships, ER’s evolving relationship to servants and issues of class and human rights, as well as her service to the world community. Jacobik’s monologues constitute a sustained imaginative work that embodies ER’s emotional experience, moral conflicts, fears, losses, desires, and aspirations.

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Truth Has a Different Shape by Kari O’Driscoll Out Now!

January 1, 2020 By Dimitri Reyes Leave a Comment

Publication Date: February 2020

Get your copy by ordering today!

Listen to an Excerpt from Truth Has a Different Shape

“O’Driscoll allows us to see her in the struggle, which will encourage other women to start being honest about their lives too. This is a generous book.” – Shauna James Ahern

About Kari L. O'Driscoll

Kari is a writer and mother 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. You can find her at www.kariodriscollwriter.com

About the Book

A family built, a family lost. This is the story of the power of love and compassion. Growing up in the 1970’s and 1980’s, Kari O’ Driscoll was taught that strength= stoicism and that a girl’s job was to take care of everyone else. For decades, she believed that and did what she could try and keep the remaining parts of her family together, systematically anticipating disaster and fixing catastrophes one by one. Until she broke. Despite trying to escape it, Kari found herself right back in the lap of loss as an adult and had to discover how to truly, profoundly care for those she loves without putting herself at risk.

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Robert Cording’s new book, Without My Asking, is Here!

October 1, 2019 By Dimitri Reyes Leave a Comment

Publication Date: October 1, 2019

“Cording’s poetry is fearless in his choice of subject. Rather than write quiet, domestic works, he expands each poem to effortlessly encompass themes of death, grief, God, and love.” – ForeWord Review

Listen to a Poem from His Collection

About the Book

Without My Asking takes its cue from Psalms 90’s petition– “teach us to number our days.” That biblical sense of limits– of what we can and cannot know– and the mystery of before and after that encloses our existence is the center around which these poems turn. In poems that attend to the events of our lives– from the deaths of patients to hummingbirds at a bird feeder– these poems work to utter “Yes” to all that happens, that “peculiar affirmative” that recognizes, as Elizabeth Bishop says, “Life’s like that… also death.”

About Robert Cording

Robert Cording has published eight collections of poems, most recently, Walking with Ruskin and Only So Far. He taught for 38 years at Holy Cross College in Worcester, Massachusetts, and is a poetry mentor in Seattle Pacific University’s MFA program. He has received two National Endowment for the Arts fellowships in poetry and his poems have appeared in The New Yorker, Poetry, Kenyon Review, New England Review, Orion, and many others.

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Without My Asking – Pre-Order Now!

September 7, 2019 By Dimitri Reyes Leave a Comment

Publication Date: October 2019

Save money by pre-ordering today!

About Robert Cording

About the Book

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Book Press Release: Eating Moors and Christians

June 10, 2016 By CavanKerry Press Leave a Comment

Eating Moors and Christians
poems by Sandra M. Castillo

Straddling two worlds—Cuba before and during its revolution and Miami among its post-flight diaspora—Sandra M. Castillo’s collection of poems, EATING MOORS AND CHRISTIANS (CavanKerry Press; April 2016; $16.00) probes the complicated convergence of memory and truth. Using the metaphor of photography to capture in words the visual power of historical witness, Castillo’s penetrating poems evoke the particularity and universality of the exile experience. Writing in both verse and prose-poem, often shifting into Spanish to capture elusive cultural subtleties, the poet draws on her own—and her extended family’s—life in Cuba, émigré experience, and return visit to a strange, but familiar homeland.

Here, in this landscape of hard edges, perfect sorrow, where I know
who I am, I measure distance with language and guilt as our ghosts,
the black and white faces of the past, spread out against a crocheted
bedspread, ancestors with our last name, people I never knew, relatives
no one recalls, though they have been passed down for generations, the
membrane severed, the connection lost between the future y los acres de
el olvido, marcando mi vida sin pedir permiso.

This is where I come from, a place that exists in photographs I never owned.

(from “Artemisa, Pinar del Rio, Cuba”)

Castillo’s poetry is tropical in its colors and rhythms, yet the story it tells is often shadowed in the despair and uncertainty of turbulent times. It can be a world of decay and forgetting: “I push open the Caribbean windows/to this landscape of sorrows and shadows,/empty storefronts, mildewed tenements/where elderly men bathe on balconies/con cubos of rain water” (“Hotel Ambos Mundos”). But, equally it is about remembering, albeit a memory tinged in sorrow and loss: “I can swim through the oil-black thickness/and come up for air/in Cuba, the country of memory,/but only if I can hold my breath/longer than two minutes, the depth of night (“The Dream”).

The personal history about which Castillo writes—one which she shares with so many exiles and refugees, Cuban and other—is rife with inner conflict, driven by a search of identity. And, yet, in the hands of a powerful, perceptive poet, the individual voice emerges, forging its own place in the world:

Separated by the Caribbean, secret underwater mines,
a revolution, ninety miles of nostalgia, a new language,
I no longer remembered myself.
I had become someone else, the Other,
a stranger, a skeleton of whom I might have been

(from “Unearthing the Remains”)

“[T]he landscape of loss and gain we call exile, seen through the poet’s sharp eye and described in a voice that never wavers from the truth,” said Pablo Medina of Castillo’s award-winning earlier collection, My Father Sings to My Embarrassment. “I felt I was re-encountering Cuba in the light of new imagining, freed of ideology and therefore resplendent and complete.” With EATING MOORS AND CHRISTIANS, a welcome addition to CavanKerry’s Emerging Voices series, Sandra M. Castillo strengthens the elusive bond between past and present, between memory and art.

~~~

About Sandra M. Castillo

Sandra M. Castillo was born in Havana, Cuba, and came to the United States on the Johnson administration’s Freedom Flights. She received her MA from Florida State University. Her poems have appeared in a wealth of publications and anthologies, including: The North American Review, The Connecticut Review, The Florida Review, Cimarron Review, Little Havana Blues, and Paper Dance: 52 Latino Poets. In 2002 she received the White Pine Press award for her collection, My Father Sings to My Embarrassment, selected by poet Cornelius Eady who described Castillo as “a poet who can make Cuban and Cuban-American history link arms and dance.”

~~~

EATING MOORS AND CHRISTIANS by Sandra M. Castillo
Publication Date: April 2016
Price: $16.00; ISBN: 978-1-933880-50-1
Distributed by: University Press of New England (UPNE), 800.421.1561 or 603.448.1533, Ext. 255

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Book Press Release: Tornadoesque

May 12, 2016 By CavanKerry Press Leave a Comment

PlattCover_final_size

Tornadoesque

poems by Donald Platt

Donald Platt’s fifth volume of poetry, Tornadoesque (CavanKerry Press; May 2016; $18.00), takes a candid look at the aftermath left by the inevitable storms—real and emotional—that life places in our paths. In expansive lyrics, many written in this three-time Pushcart Prize-winner’s trademark style of alternating long and short lines, Platt writes with often shocking honesty about tender subjects—his own bisexual yearnings, a beloved daughter’s battle with bipolar disorder, the deaths of aging parents, the turbulence of a society at war. Infused with an inherent pragmatism, the poems draw their power from closely observed day to day life, and from a broader vision of the transcendent capacity of art.

In Platt’s hands, individual experiences spread across larger canvases, illuminated with gravitas. A trip with his wife and daughters to Chartre Cathedral, for instance, turns into a hallucinatory dream of the pain and passing we each endure:

…Rose windows, because you showed me in the dead of winter
         	how my small life
shone through your blacked-out panes forty feet above me, I knelt

         	down in that empty
cathedral. I kissed the old worn stones we walked on. Nothing
          	could have been colder.

(from “Chartres in the Dark”)

A tortured casualty of war in Baghdad becomes a mythic Greek figure in “Man on the Dump.” A visit to the doctor, in “Audade with Irises & Blood Work,” grows akin to the flaying of Saint Bartholomew as depicted in the Sistine Chapel.

Two life-defining realities surface again and again in the poems, leaving indelible through-lines. First, there is the poet’s lifelong bisexuality, never acted upon, and suppressed to preserve a passionate heterosexual marriage. A theme of physical desire and emotional longing, it recurs in many ordinary moments: at a video rental store, on the Washington Metro, when contemplating the paintings of Marsden Harley or the sculpture of Rodin, while witnessing a Good Friday passion play. The second is Platt’s struggle to maintain ideas of order amidst the spiraling moods of his adult daughter, institutionalized for a time with mental illness, and always walking the tightrope between sanity and its shattering alternative. He holds onto a fierce devotion even in moments of despair:

I, awkward father, walk 25 blocks to bring roses, orange as the sunrise that spills every
morning over the East River and sets the Williamsburg Bridge and the abandoned
Domino Sugar factory on the Brooklyn side afire

To you, O my manic motor-mouthing daughter

(from “Litany on 1st Avenue for My Daughter”)

“No one knows his final destination/until he arrives there,” Platt writes in “Western Motel,” and, indeed, the poems in TORNADOESQUE offer a kind of roadmap, ever shifting, for one middle-aged man’s route toward elusive answers. Platt “has a delicate ear,” says Gerald Stern, “and a generous mind that lets the world come in. His range is connected to his generosity, as it is connected to his unrelenting memory and his intense pity and his unforgetting eye. He is a fine poet.”

~~~

About Donald Platt

Donald Platt has published four previous books of poetry, Dirt Angels, My Father Says Grace, Cloud Atlas, and Fresh Peaches, Fireworks, & Guns. He has been awarded two fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and three Pushcart Prizes. His poems have appeared in American Poetry Review, New Republic, Poetry, Paris Review, Kenyon Review, Georgia Review, Southwest Review, Ploughshares, Iowa Review, and Southern Review, as well as in three editions of The Best American Poetry. He teaches in the MFA program at Purdue University.

~~~

TORNADOESQUE by Donald Platt
Publication Date: May 2016
Price: $18.00; ISBN: 978-1-933880-51-8
Distributed by: University Press of New England (UPNE), 800.421.1561 or 603.448.1533, Ext. 255

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Book Press Release: Orphans

March 21, 2016 By CavanKerry Press Leave a Comment

Orphans
by Joan Cusack Handler

ORPHANS (CavanKerry Press; March 2016; $18.00) is an indelible memoir in verse from award-winning poet and psychologist Joan Cusack Handler that explores the intertwined lives of a daughter and her two Irish immigrant parents. Using three distinct voices, the poet probes both the subtleties of her parents’ stories as well as the complexities of her own, boldly delving into memories cherished and truths concealed. Tackling large themes that affect so many—navigating the imperfection of our families, the challenges of watching our parents age and die, the acknowledgement of loss and the acceptance of our own mortality—the memoir unflinchingly, yet eloquently explores our most primal and ambivalent relationships.

“Joan Cusack Handler tackles the big subjects—family history, aging parents, Irish Catholicism, belief and unbelief, and her own impending mortality—with a fierce, wrenching fearlessness,” says Elizabeth Spires. “She creates portraits of her mother and father that are fully rounded, alive, and moving, the central question for the poet not “Who am I?” but “Who were they?” “Our terrors take over pilot us through/this most shaking of times…” writes Handler with force and grace, recognizing that the bright and the dark, love and the absence of love, must always coexist with each other. ORPHANS is a brave, searchingly honest, and compassionate book.”

In a sequence of poems called “My Mother Speaks,” Handler gives voice to Mary O’Connor Cusack, born in Ireland and left motherless herself at a young age. Like many others, she sailed to America and etched a new life from nothing. Devoutly Catholic, a devoted, if complicated mother, she both confounds and compels her daughter:

I’ve spent my life trying to explain
my mother; she lived in two countries—
love and loss—her mother
the center of both.

(from “No Day was Brighter”)

“My Father Speaks” presents the parallel story of Eugene Cusack, also an economic refugee from Ireland:

The day I left my father went with me
on the train to Cavan Town. We smoked
a cigarette together…

He lit my cigarette and his own
and we sat there saying nothing for quite some time.
We could buy that small field that abuts our pasture, he said.
But I said nothing.
He understood
I don’t know where he thought
he’d find the money for more land.
When we got off the train and said goodbye,
he handed me the pack of Players.
That was the last time I saw him.

The family story that Handler weaves in ORPHANS is at once familiar and unique. It is at center a love story—not only the quiet love story of her parents, but the larger, messier story of family love—that resonates with telling details of childhood and beyond. As the parents inevitably age, and die, the poet herself grapples with what it means to be the orphan herself.

When did it happen
that the future started
to darken,
shrink,
pick up speed in that
final sprint that will wipe out all
love from my life?

(And I face what’s left helping us die.)

(from “The Poem”)

In ORPHANS, Handler continues to play with the signature use of visual form that has long marked her poetry. Heralded for “both honesty and balance” (Baron Wormser), this five-time Pushcart Prize nominated poet is working at the peak of her powers, writing with clarity and sentiment, while eschewing sentimentality.

~~~

About Joan Cusack Handler

Joan Cusack Handler is a poet and memoirist, editor, and psychologist in clinical practice. She has published 3 books—2 poetry collections (GlOrious and The Red Canoe: Love In Its Making) and a memoir (Confessions of Joan the Tall). Recipient of 5 Pushcart nominations and a Sampler Award from The Boston Review, she is the Founder of CavanKerry Press. A Bronx native, she currently lives in Fort Lee, NJ and East Hampton, NY.

~~~

OPRHANS by Joan Cusack Handler
Publication Date: March 2016
Price: $18.00; ISBN: 978-1-933880-56-3
Distributed by: University Press of New England (UPNE), 800.421.1561 or 603.448.1533, Ext. 255

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Book Press Release: The Baby Book

November 2, 2015 By CavanKerry Press 1 Comment

The Baby Book
Poems by Robin Silbergleid

With raw candor and lyric poignancy, Robin Silbergleid transforms the psychological and physical pain of a journey through infertility into transcendent poetry in THE BABY BOOK (CavanKerry Press; November 2015; $16.00, paperback). Silbergleid decided to become a single mother, but that brave choice was thwarted by biological realities. She turned to assisted reproductive technology, but despite the advances of science, she would endure high-risk pregnancies and repeated miscarriages in her quest for a child.

“This is how it goes: say you want a baby/say you are twenty-seven & alone,/as in uncoupled, there is no father/in this equation,” Silbergleid begins “Infertility Sestina,” which ends, “This is how it goes. You wanted to be a single mother/but there is a black hole in your uterus, not a baby.” One by one, the poems in The Baby Book tell the powerful, cumulative story through a chorus of voices: the prospective mother, the doctors and nurses she encounters—never shying from the clinical, yet always grounded in the emotional ups and downs the patient endures.

There is repeated loss, but the poet/patient tries to hold onto perspective through the pain:

There is no poetry
in loss, I refuse

to indulge, to shimmer
half-light of Texas winter

where glass sparkled the floor
like precious gems. No—

the language of loss
is silence, heavy

as the forty-second week of pregnancy

(from “Metaphor”)

In a series of poems that appear throughout the collection, the poet turns to the life and art of Frida Kahlo, who transformed her own physical and psychic pain into transcendent art. Although Silbergleid fictionalizes certain incidents, Kahlo’s paintings provide great impetus for the visual and visceral poems.

The sound filled the room like a newborn’s cry.
Frida, what I wanted to say is that I understand
why you come back to this room, a hospital in Detroit,
why the paintings pin you there to the bed like a bug on a nail,
because you’re still there.
You left pieces of yourself behind—
a blot on a sheet, some tissue in a jar—& you want them back.

(from “An Open Letter to Frida Kahlo”)

The arduous journey to conception, and the triumphant passage to motherhood after many struggles, will speak to anyone who has traveled this road, and to many others who have wrestled with their own frustrations. It speaks, too, to the doctors, nurses, and caregivers who work with those grappling with infertility, facing the daunting, often heartbreaking path to a miracle.

~~~

About Robin Silbergleid

Robin Silbergleid is the author of the memoir Texas Girl and the chapbooks Frida Kahlo, My Sister and Pas de Deux: Prose and Other Poems. Born and raised in Illinois, she holds both an MFA and PhD from Indiana University. She is currently an associate professor of English and Director of the Creative Writing Program at Michigan State University. She lives in East Lansing, Michigan, with her two children.

~~~

THE BABY BOOK by Robin Silbergleid
Publication Date: November 2015
Price: $16.00; ISBN: 978-1-933880-58-7
Distributed by: University Press of New England (UPNE), 800.421.1561 or 603.448.1533, Ext. 255

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Book Press Release: Only So Far

October 2, 2015 By CavanKerry Press Leave a Comment

Only So Far

Poems by Robert Cording

ONLY SO FAR (CavanKerry Press; October 2015; $16.00, paperback), the eighth collection of poems from Robert Cording, once more probes what Baron Wormser has identified in this poet’s work as “the rich borderland between spirit and religion.” In poems that find their poignancy and grace in the inevitability of loss, Cording seeks explanation and solace in the everyday miracles that both surround and sustain us. At once lyrical and uncompromising, these poems are about the humility of the human experience in the face of something greater that we can only try to understand.

Cording launches Only So Far with the reflective “Kafka’s Fence”:

In a drawing by Kafka, a man stands behind a fence,
looking out. He could easily step over
the fence—it is that low—yet we imagine him
pacing back and forth like a prisoner.

The man could have just come to this boundary,
or been here his entire life. Call him Moses, and call
the land on the other side of the fence, Canaan,
and it doesn’t matter how small the fence is, does it?

And you and I?—surely, we’ve spent a lifetime
arriving precisely at this fence. Haven’t we
always known we’d reach an end we couldn’t complete,
the promised land a step away, still unreachable?

This notion of reaching the Promised Land, of some paradise that may exist beyond our challenging lives, permeates the collection. A number of poems chronicle a father’s death, first the ignominy of the descent, then the passing—and later, a mother’s death, too. The memories of them survive in dreams, in nature, in their very absence. An inexplicable death, of a young nephew, prompts thoughts of the painter Constable, whose “canvases record what occurred/each day, as if there were nothing more/he could do” (“Reconfiguring”).

The natural world is never far in Cording’s work, and in Only So Far it once again illuminates our own, human, position in the greater scheme of things. A sojourn in Florida opens new vistas, as the poet explores new terrain that proffers both revelations and recognition. Life—and poetry—is always about discovery for Cording, about elusive truths gleaned from the ordinary manifestations of the extraordinary:

The tide’s going out, and the sand,
washed clean, could be a Zen garden plot
ready to quiet all thought in silence.
The fisherman has broken down his rods
and carries them off now in an empty bucket,
happy enough, it seems, with his few hours
of meditative practice. I used to worry
about running out of words for things.
Now I worry I won’t use up all the words
I’ve been given. Here, in my ill-lit cabin,
shadows moving across the walls,
I live for that poem or two that seem
to gather from the world, or my mind,
or both, what they have to give.

(from “Studio”)

Cording also shares a deep affinity with those who have come before, and his poems here are tied to Emerson and Thoreau, to Camus and Kafka, to Anne Ferry and Wallace Stevens—fellow seekers all, who “lived for that poem.” Often steeped in religion, Cording’s poems also spur philosophical ruminations from the Bible, from St. Augustine, and from the language of faith. In the final poem, “No-name Pond,” he writes, “I’m mostly a restorer, putting back/a few stones tumbled by time, /and thinking of the people who, like myself, /might have enjoyed an afternoon like this one—“

~~~

About Robert Cording

Robert Cording teaches English and creative writing at College of the Holy Cross where he is Professor of English and Barrett Professor of Creative Writing. He has published seven collections of poems: Life-list (Ohio State University Press/Journal award, l987); What Binds Us To This World (Copper Beech Press, 1991); Heavy Grace (Alice James, l996); Against Consolation (CavanKerry, 2002); Common Life (CavanKerry, 2006); Walking With Ruskin (CavanKerry, 2010); and A Word in My Mouth: Selected Spiritual Poems (Wipf and Stock, 2013).

~~~

ONLY SO FAR by Robert Cording
Publication Date: October 2015
Price: $16.00; ISBN: 978-1-933880-49-5
Distributed by: University Press of New England (UPNE), 800.421.1561 or 603.448.1533, Ext. 255

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Book Press Release: Unidentified Sighing Objects

August 24, 2015 By CavanKerry Press Leave a Comment

Unidentified Sighing Objects

Poems by Baron Wormser

In his tenth collection of poems, UNIDENTIFIED SIGHING OBJECTS (CavanKerry Press; September 2015; $16.00, paperback), Baron Wormser continues a poetic journey begun more than three decades ago—a journey that has traversed the quotidian and the unexpected with equal measures of insight, emotion, and lyric grace. Through the formal features of odes and villanelles, Wormser here delivers his own brand of everyday realism, shaped by the wisdom gained from a lifetime viewed through an expectant eye. Man falls, Wormser tells us. But, he also rises.

From sports to art, from childhood to death, Wormser’s poetic purview is all-embracing and ever curious about the world we inhabit. Whether writing of Diane Arbus or Andy Warhol, the Nuremberg trials or the fall of the Berlin Wall, Jazz or the Dave Clark Five, he lends humor and wisdom to the quest for meaning each of us endures.

If I could add the days and make a sum
Of moments—faces pulled, unpulled, peas
Pushed around a forlorn plate, jokes
Gotten, ungotten, the taking in of each tree,
Building, chair, strand of hair lying
In the bathroom sink—I wouldn’t be human
In the sense we use that word as a form
Of gauze over a large but approximate wound,

A gesture of dismissal and acceptance
Adding up (there is that notion again!)
To bludgeoned wisdom dispensed too free of charge
To all and semi-sundry. “I can’t do the math,”
I told the teacher and left the room, though
At once I looked about and started counting.

(“On Narrative”)

By working in established forms, Wormser is consciously hitching his wagon to those poetic stars who have come before and inspired: Shakespeare, Keats, Donne, et. al. “Night comes full of stars and not greatly concerned about us,/A line to quote not about a human beginning or end,/But the seemingly steady middle,/The place that placidly looks backwards and forwards,” he writes in “Poem Beginning with a Line by Hölderin.” He turns to the ode to contemplate a range of subjects: Arbus and her photographs, ghost dancers, speech, a character in Easy Rider, and even basketball—

She knew once how she loved him and how he never got off his ass
Even though he could leap through the air and seem to fly but there
Was no place to fly to no homeland no wheelchair no nothing only a ball

There is an elegiac temper to many of the later poems in the collection, which touch on aging and death — the passing of a former lover, a long distance call to make amends, a paranoid FBI agent wielding a gun, a funeral for a young schizophrenic, a school friend killed in Vietnam, a witty eulogy for a beloved editor. And yet, Wormser’s is not a dark voice, finding instead the joy, the compassion, and the acceptance that must come with living.

Not to be here anymore, not to hear
The cat’s fat purring, not to smell
Wood smoke, wet dog, cheap cologne, good cologne,
Not to see the sun and stars, oaks

And asters, snow and rain, every form
I take mostly for granted, makes me sad
But pleased to be writing down these words,
Pleased to have been one more who got the chance

To participate, who raised his hand although
He didn’t know the answer or understand
The question. No matter. The leaving makes me sad;
So much was offered, so freely and completely.

(“Leaving”)

UNIDENTIFIED SIGHING OBJECTS is the culmination of an estimable career spent studying, teaching, and writing poetry—an exquisite collection that finds Baron Wormser working at the peak of his powers.

About Baron Wormser

Baron Wormser is the author/co-author of fourteen books and a poetry chapbook. Wormser has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, Bread Loaf, and the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation. From 2000 to 2006 he served as poet laureate of the state of Maine. He teaches in the Fairfield University MFA Program and is Director of Educational Outreach for the Frost Place in Franconia, New Hampshire.

UNIDENTIFIED SIGHING OBJECTS by Baron Wormser
Publication Date: September 2015
Price: $16.00; ISBN: 978-1-933880-47-1
Distributed by: University Press of New England (UPNE), 800-421-1561 or 603-448-1533, Ext. 255

This project is supported in part by an award from the National Endowment for the Arts. To find out more about how NEA grants impact individuals and communities, visit www.arts.gov.

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Book Press Release: Esther

May 5, 2015 By CavanKerry Press Leave a Comment

ESTHER
A Novel in Verse
by Pam Bernard

Fusing a poet’s voice with a novelist’s narrative craft, Pam Bernard’s ESTHER, is an affecting novel-in-verse that tells the harrowing and transcendent story of a young woman’s struggle against violence and loneliness. Set before a vividly-drawn backdrop that sweeps across the American landscape and recreates a particularly vibrant time in our history, this daringly original work—from an acclaimed poet whose work has appeared in TriQuarterly, Spoon River Review, Prairie Schooner, Salamander, and many other journals—is about family, place, incest, love, hate, survival, and salvation.

“Rather than rely primarily on plot to tell this story, I have developed characters who embody the failings as well as the beauty of the human spirit,” explains Bernard. “ESTHER begins in the early 20th century on the American prairie, and follows the journey into adulthood of a young girl who, in order to endure the dangers of family, escapes early on into the mysterious world of words. And in the broader sense, human time set against geological time serves to frame Esther’s extraordinary experience—stark human reality recast against Steinbeck’s sentient earth, where wind cried and whimpered over the fallen corn.”

Esther is raised on a farm in Kansas, the eldest child of a troubled marriage. When she is still a child, her angry father, Aaron, begins to molest her as her helpless mother, Bessie, turns a blind eye. The country girl accepts her hardscrabble existence, getting lost in her own head, taking refuge in the natural world that dictates the rhythm of life, as well as the pages of the encyclopedia. Her life is sequestered. Then, Aaron announces that he has accepted a temporary job at a logging camp in Colorado. He will take only one member of the family with him: Esther.

As they travel by train across the Prairie, Esther discovers a wondrous landscape. And in the mountains, so discovers something new—love — in the guise of Raymond, a shattered WWI veteran who is haunted by his experiences as Esther is, in her way, by her own. Together, they vow to escape Aaron’s grasp, and when they dare to take flight, unimaginable events unfold. En route to California, Esther disappears into the desert for two days to expunge her body of the vestiges of Aaron’s sins, finding a mystical form of healing along with a devastating sense of loss. In Los Angeles, bustling with nascent possibilities, Esther and Raymond begin to mend, but the fates prove unforgiving. Only by confronting the past will Esther find comfort in the future.

Exquisitely wrought and profoundly moving, ESTHER is a singular book-length poem about memory, loss, and redemption, and how language, incremental and pure, can hold the key to the truths that help us live.

~~~

About Pam Bernard

Pam Bernard, a poet, painter, editor, and adjunct professor, received her MFA in Creative Writing from Warren Wilson College and BA from Harvard University. Her awards include a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in Poetry and a MacDowell Fellowship. Ms. Bernard lives in Walpole, New Hampshire, and teaches at the New Hampshire Institute of Art and Franklin Pierce University.

~~~

ESTHER – A Novel in Verse, by Pam Bernard
Publication Date: April 2015
Price: $18.00; ISBN: 978-1-933880-48-8
Distributed by: University Press of New England (UPNE), 1-800-421-1561 or 603-448-1533, Ext. 255

This project is supported in part by an award from the National Endowment for the Artso find out more about how NEA grants impact individuals and communities, visit www.arts.gov.

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Book Press Release: Love’s Labors

March 25, 2015 By CavanKerry Press Leave a Comment

LOVE’S LABORS

Poems by Brent Newsom

Like interconnecting stories that form a novel, the poems in Brent Newsom’s debut collection, LOVE’S LABORS, coalesce into a narrative of an indelible place and its people. A southern community marked by family, work, violence, passion, patriotism, faith, and skepticism – that is to say, all that makes us human – is brought to singular life in these penetrating poems, some of which have appeared in such journals as Southern Review, Tar River Poetry, Louisiana Literature, and The Oklahoma Review. These poems are about our relationships, corporal and spiritual, and about the everyday miracles we encounter in our lives.

“Miracles will always be questionable, of course,” writes Sydney Lea in his foreword to the book, “yet we can’t help but believe in the author’s wisdom, finding in his work a scope and resourcefulness that do feel miraculous, even as they feel non-miraculous, in the sense that Newsom pays the keenest and ultimately the most loving attention to the quotidian lives of his collection’s creatures….The vigor and resourcefulness of Brent Newsom’s language and his varied formats—from the most strictly conventional to the most wide-open free verse—would be enough to command our applause; marry these to the wisdom I mentioned at the outset, and to a fellow-feeling that far transcends mere toleration, and you have, as you will soon see, a work not only artful but also, if we attend to its example, morally improving. One can’t ask much more of poetry.”

These characters come alive through their interactions: a G.I. carrying the weight of the Iraqi war; a widow, freed from the ties of husband and children, discovering new aspects of life; a redneck auto mechanic with a dangerous sexual energy—each harbors surprising sensitivities in a complex heart. And then there is another, perhaps the poet himself, who chronicles his wife’s pregnancy (love’s most miraculous labor) and the apprehensions of the coming of fatherhood with keen-eyed wonder:

We’ll take you home to four small rooms,
one just for you: your name brilliant
in bubbled letters, glass balloons
like buoys in the corner. Your mother
pressing you to her breast, we’ll step
into our asthmatic old apartment,
an April wind rushing in behind,
fresh oxygen borne in our blood.

(from “Ode to the Heart”)

A central concern in Newsom’s poetry, faith lives comfortably alongside the secular affairs that fill these small town lives. Another character, a minister’s wife, has her doubts as she sits respectably in the pew and listens to her husband’s sermon. Prayer sustains the anxious father-to-be. The damaged army private finds grace in the silences of home that offer the possibility of something larger, and more mysterious. Even the town’s name, Smyrna, gently nods to the Book of Revelation that guides both Catholics and Protestants in the Bible Belt community.

This poet’s voice, honest and unvarnished, forever seeks simple, universal truths: “I learned that faithful care/for what’s not yours, and pride in your labor (like a father’s/in his son), and light enough to finish what you start/are each a kind of grace” (“Inheritance”). Marked by formal control and emotional range, the poems in LOVE’S LABORS are deceptively straightforward and profoundly moving.

~~~

About Brent Newsom

A native of southwest Louisiana, Brent Newsom has also lived in Oklahoma, Texas, and, for briefer stretches, China. His poems have appeared in journals such as The Southern Review, The Hopkins Review, PANK, Cave Wall, and Birmingham Poetry Review, as well as several anthologies. Currently he lives in Oklahoma with his wife and two children.

~~~

LOVE’S LABORS by Brent Newsom
Publication Date: March 2015
Price: $16.00; ISBN: 978-1-933880-52-5
Distributed by: University Press of New England (UPNE), 800-421-1561 or 603-448-1533, Ext. 255

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Book Press Release: Places I Was Dreaming

February 5, 2015 By CavanKerry Press Leave a Comment

PLACES I WAS DREAMING

Poems by
Loren Graham

A singular childhood experience—rural, poor, often precarious—is at the center of PLACES I WAS DREAMING (CavanKerry Press; February 2015; $16.00, paperback), an autobiographical sequence of poems by Loren Graham. And yet, these snapshots—alternately poignant and comic—exquisitely evoke universal truths about growing up, about family, and about the place where we originate. “Loren Graham may have grown up poor in Broken Arrow, Okla.,” says the Helena Independent Record, “but his was a childhood rich in stories and memories. And it is the colorful characters and vivid language of his past that inspire his critically acclaimed poetry.”

Central to these poems is the art of storytelling, an oral tradition that informs this rural boy’s everyday experience—in the kitchen, in the fields, in the classroom. Graham crafts a unique technique of overlapping voices in some poems, at times capturing the joyful cacophony of family gatherings, other times countering what’s said with what is left in the mind unsaid. It is this ancient art form that sustains the boy, and his large, extended family—through tornados, through winter, through hardscrabble poverty—and serves as a shield against a sometimes incomprehensible, unfeeling outside world.

The poet as child struggles with his status as a “Country Boy,” mocked by classmates and condescended to by teachers:

Country boy: their leader chanted it, dropping
his tongue to the floor of his mouth to mock
my accent and make it obscene, cuntra boa,
cuntra boa, until I learned that words could make me

obscene, till I calculated daily whether I had the strength,
if I caught him off guard, to slam his face
into the metal bar on the back of the bus seat,
to pay him for those weights, that name that was my fall.

He feels the weight of their scorn as he waits in line with his “high-hoping/and sober father” for sacks of free beans and cornmeal, endures his teacher’s correcting the way he speaks, refuses to wash his hands in the smelly water of the school cafeteria fountain. But the truth is more complicated. The boy’s parents harbor hopes that their intelligent son will stay in school and break out of the cycle of poverty that has trapped them: “Your job is to show us/what we all coulda been/if we’d a-knowed what to do.” In the affecting “Episode of the Encyclopedia Salesman,” the parents make the unimaginable financial sacrifice to buy a set of Collier’s for their son:

The room got quiet.
I waited for Uncle Fred to say something like Hell,
if he reads all them, he’ll be purt near smart as me.
But the silence held, a first in that house,
so I just mumbled Yessir, I spect I could,

as though I had no idea, even at seven,
of what my yessir meant to everyone present:
another month of beans, less coal for the fire,
my father’s spending his winter evenings with a drop light
in the unheated barn he used for a garage—
the real price of privilege, its great black bulk.

Still, there is much joy, too, to be found in the poems—memories of a rustic childhood spent attuned to nature and the changing seasons, wonder-filled nights looking at the stars, the rhythmic, “tinny sounds of the first streams of milk/to hit the galvanized bucket.” “Through the perspective of a seemingly personal, but private, persona, Graham traces the formative stages in the life of a boy growing up in the depressed and depressing environment of the American southwest in the late twentieth century and of finding himself in places he was dreaming,” says William V. Davis. “These are themes and poems that will resonate with many readers.”

~~~

About Loren Graham

Loren Graham was raised in and around Broken Arrow, Oklahoma. He studied as a writer and composer at Oklahoma Baptist University, and he earned an MA in English from Baylor University and an MFA in Creative Writing from 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. He currently lives in Helena, Montana, with his wife, Jane Shawn.

~~~

PLACES I WAS DREAMING by Loren Graham
Publication Date: February 2015
Price: $16.00; ISBN: 978-1-933880-45-7

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Book Press Release: Misery Islands

November 3, 2014 By CavanKerry Press 1 Comment

Misery Islands

Poems by January Gill O’Neil

In her second collection of poems, MISERY ISLANDS , Paterson Poetry Prize finalist January Gill O’Neil probes the rocky landscapes of family and marriage, as well as the struggle to get by in our troubled times. These poems, some of which first appeared in such prestigious publications as Ploughshares and North American Review and were twice nominated for the Pushcart Prize, delve lyrically into the experiences of a woman, wife, and mother as she navigates the turbulent waters of transition with reflection, flashes of ironic wit, and ultimately, acceptance.

“O’Neil candidly writer about family…of single-motherhood and of love, and in doing so penetrates the exquisitiveness of the everyday while highlighting the challenges of living as an artist and mother,” says Major Jackson. “Indeed, there is fine balance of imagery and story and song that makes this a fine collection to own, to read back one’s own solitariness, one’s own joy.”

MISERY ISLANDS takes its name from a cycle of poems that uses the two islands off the coast of Massachusetts—Great Misery and Little Misery—as a metaphor for the “unforgiving terrain” of the beleaguered heart: “Two islands,/one shadowing/the other,/both untouched.” Visits to these islands, real or in memory, trace the trajectory of a hopeful love affair and a marriage unraveled.

We were never of one body.
You said wind. I said water.
And whatever connected us has all but disappeared.

I was the reedy weeds clinging to the bottom edge of everything.
I was the red algae rotting on the shore in the summer heat.
I was the stinging salty air, the air around your tongue.

Out of your tongue you carved a boat.
Out of the boat you sailed to a new life.
Out of your lifeboat I was wrecked.

No man is an island but it lives inside of you,
adrift in you like a rupture, a fault,
magma rising from your ocean floor
as you become whoever you are becoming.

O’Neil begins the collection with a series of poems that explore the daily reality of the working poor: A stout man tries to obtain unavailable funds from an ATM, another clears out the detritus of poverty and steam cleans away the stains of despair from rent-to-own sofas. Other poems find the poet in the company of women—bathing her elderly mother, laughing over coffee “as Billie Holiday croons above our heads,” baking a cake: “We let things rise the way women do/to make something near perfect.” Newly divorced, she haunts home improvement stores in search of capable, reliable men. Her sometimes anger is verbalized in a forbidden four-letter word or wielded in the sharp blade of a cleaver. She gives tentative advice to a biracial son about to face the world, shampoos her daughter’s hair, and wonders what her kids will write about her in years to come.

Afaa Michael Weaver has said, “O’Neil praises life with subtle wisdom wrapped inside the most delicious language.” Denise Duhamel calls her work “substantial, playful, and compassionate—even when dealing with difficult themes.” MISERY ISLANDS is a brilliant—and much anticipated—follow up to this rising poet’s highly acclaimed debut, Underlife, that journeys further down the road of one contemporary woman’s life.

~~~

About January Gill O’Neil

January Gill O’Neill is the author of Underlife, published by CavanKerry Press; She is the executive director of the Massachusetts Poetry Festival and an assistant professor of English at Salem State University. Her writing has appeared in Ploughshares, Rattle, MiPoesias Sou’Wester, JMWW, North American Review, The MOM Egg Review, Crab Creek Review, Drunken Boat, Crab Orchard Review, Callaloo, Literary Mama, Field, Seattle Review, and Cave Canem anthologies II and IV, among others. O’Neil runs the blog, Poet Mom.

~~~

MISERY ISLANDS by January Gill O’Neil
Publication Date: November 2014
Price: $16.00; ISBN: 978-1-933880-46-4
Distributed by: University Press of New England (UPNE), 800-421-1561 or 603-448-1533, Ext. 255

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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: The Bar of the Flattened Heart

July 2, 2014 By CavanKerry Press Leave a Comment

The Bar of the Flattened Heart

Poems by
David Keller

A poet of everyday wonder, David Keller finds the kernels of larger truths in the small details of the ordinary. In his new collection of poems, THE BAR OF THE FLATTENED HEART, Keller explores past and present, from boyhood aspirations and disappointments to the complexities of marriage and the unavoidable passages of life. “David Keller’s poems have the freedom of age,” says John Richardson. “They don’t need to impress, they have no case to make, they don’t even insist on being right: their wonderful last words are, ‘What the hell do I know?’ With their genial frankness and amused curiosity they remind us over and over how surprising our ordinary days are, how interesting and touching it is to be alive.”

More disposed to acceptance than regret, Keller writes:

I wanted to be a charm-maker, a magician, wanted
to make spells and such, much more than just
poetry. Things that had true power,
protection. What a child I was;
poetry makes nothing happen, and yet…

And his poetry does cast a spell with a quiet power that belies the ephemeral essence of the word. “I can walk upon the surface/of a piece of paper, leaving/sparks that look like stars/and more stars,” he writes, marveling rather than bragging. Keller uses his poetry not to settle scores from the past, but to commemorate and honor. He writes poignantly, but without judgment, of his father’s ambiguous guilt over having worked on the atom bomb, or of his mother’s guileless Midwestern trust. He learns the fates of long forgotten friends with heartfelt regret at the ways in which we grow apart from our past.

As Alice Ostriker has observed, “Keller’s voice mingles melancholy and wit, the prosaic details of life and sheer wonderment at things.” Yet, while often laced with nostalgia, the poetry is never gloomy, soaring above sadness with it lyricism and musicality. Indeed, music plays a central role in a number of poems, including “Letter to Howard Levy,” in which he says to his fellow poet: “Mostly the rest of us go on playing and re-playing/the same small songs we thought would help, but there’s/hardly any real music in hours of that.”

In “My Blue Heaven,” his elegy to another poet, William Matthews, Keller writes:

With him seemed to go whole jazz recordings.
Nights of music he liked to think of
himself as part of, playing chorus
after chorus on one number or another,
suddenly ceased to exist, vanished
as if he’d only conjured them up, while we
thumb through his books, hoping to find traces of them.

This then becomes the essence of Keller’s poetic voyage—the delving between the melodic lines on the surface to locate the notes that truly come to shape our lives.

Combining a deceptive simplicity with an unabashed puzzlement at all that makes a life out of living, David Keller’s voice becomes like our own. THE BAR OF THE FLATTENED HEART is a tour de force without pretense, as precious as all we have come to take for granted.

~~~

About David Keller

David Keller is the author of five collections of poetry. He has taught poetry workshops in New York and has served as Poetry Coordinator for biennial poetry festivals, on the Board of Governors for the Poetry Society of America, and as a member of the Advisory Board of The Frost Place. He lives in New Jersey.

~~~

THE BAR OF THE FLATTENED HEART by David Keller
Publication Date: May 2014
Price: $16.00; ISBN: 978-1-933880-42-6
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 Crooked House

June 3, 2014 By CavanKerry Press Leave a Comment

My Crooked House

by Teresa Carson

Foreword by Randy Frost, Ph.D.

House and home, with all their literal and figurative meanings, are the central tropes in Teresa Carson’s intensely candid second book of poems, MY CROOKED HOUSE (CavanKerry Press; May 2014; $18.00, paperback). Part of CavanKerry’s Laurel Books imprint, which explores the many poignant issues associated with confronting serious physical and/or psychological illness, Carson’s autobiographical collection probes the poet’s journey from metaphorical homelessness to homesickness to homecoming. From a fractured childhood as the youngest of ten children in a large New Jersey blue-collar family, through years of emotional isolation and perceived marginalization, to a later-in-life discovery of self, Carson chronicles a particular story that is nonetheless far-reaching in its struggles, fears, and small victories.

“These poems weave a tapestry of several lives, the life of a house, the life of a family, and the life of a poet,” writes Randy Frost, Ph.D., professor of psychology at Smith College and co-author of Stuff: Compulsive Hoarding and the Meaning of Things. “They also offer a template for resilience following a lifetime of suffering at the hands of a dysfunctional family and a destructive and manipulative psychiatrist. The author’s house does not become a home until she does the thing she cannot bear. She must experience the pain she has avoided for so long. This lesson is clear for the rest of her life as well. She must embrace the fear to conquer her panic. She must relish in uncertainty to surmount her perfectionism….Bad things happen, but these poems are good things.”

From the ashes of a childhood spent with a mentally-ill mother and a much loved father who frequently abandoned the family, Carson crafts poems of dark beauty and incessant yearning, inventing poetic forms as she turns the literal into the metaphorical. Academic failures, despite intelligence, and years of “settling” for a life and career that are beneath her once golden aspirations, are refracted through a story that finds her living a semi-reclusive life, surrounded by dozens of homeless cats. As she suffers from panic attacks and ignores the ring of the doorbell, her deteriorating house becomes a symbol of her own declining place in the world. Only finally through therapy and the understanding grace of her second husband does she begin to repair the structure she lives in—both her hundred-year-old house and her own wounded psyche:

Nobody else, I think
while roaming your top floor
in darkness, can do this.
Nobody else, I think
while up and down your flight
in darkness, can do this.
Nobody else, I think
while roaming your first floor
in darkness, can do this.
I know you well enough
to walk around what’s solid.
I know you well enough
to walk into what’s shadow.
House, I know you like a book.

“To My House”

“Carson’s search for a house to call home is a personal quest that becomes epic in the classical sense,” says Jeanne Marie Beaumont. “Beginning with calamity, MY CROOKED HOUSE circles back to origins, then passes through several harrowing perils and challenges on its way toward a more stable, if not perfectly straightened, present. It’s a house full of frank confession, brave excavation, obsessive lists, and hard reckonings. That the individual life, honest and recounted and accounted for, can be so thrillingly spun into gold is only the latest of this poet’s heroic triumphs.”

~~

About Teresa Carson

Teresa Carson, poet and playwright, holds an MFA in Poetry and an MFA in Theatre, both from Sarah Lawrence College. She is the assistant director of the Frost Place Conference on Poetry and Teaching and associate publisher at CavanKerry Press. She continues to live in the crooked house in Union City, NJ, with her husband, John.

MY CROOKED HOUSE by Teresa Carson
Publication Date: May 2014
Price: $18.00; ISBN: 978-1-933880-43-3
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: Spooky Action at a Distance

April 9, 2014 By CavanKerry Press Leave a Comment

Spooky Action at a Distance

Poems by Howard Levy

“I sometimes, and unoriginally, surmise that the affiliation of poets with the academy has deprived too many of us of a wider world to render. Howard Levy, poet, but also a businessman, shows awareness of realms less confined than those of much current verse. He can be heartbreakingly tender… and truly cosmopolitan. But it’s not a matter or either-or: the private poems have a salty dose of the worldly, just as the poems of apparently broader scope have the bittersweet, mixed savor of personal dejection and aspiration…. a mastery that Levy exerts as if without effort.” – Sydney Lea

Connection and isolation are the twin poles between which Howard Levy navigates in the luminous poems in his second collection, SPOOKY ACTION AT A DISTANCE (CavanKerry Press; April 2014; $16.00, paperback). A poet grounded in the real world and tethered to landscapes both earthly and temporal, Levy here explores the human need for emotional and physical bonds, and the journey from loneliness and seclusion to attachment and fulfillment. “Howard Levy’s remarkable second book chronicles the human struggle to overcome the often vast emotional distances between people, between the self and the world, and even between oneself and one’s own life,” says Jefffrey Harrison. “The collection’s final poems not only glimpse the world’s splendor but ‘offer it up as the heart and grace of love.’”

Levy’s masterful use of imagery and razor-sharp perception guide the poems—which, fittingly, begin with rain and end with light arriving through a break in the clouds, “pouring into all five senses.” En route they visit the shared stuff of human experience: dreams and wakefulness, illness and death, “morning’s squadrons of fog” on the ocean or moonlight illuminating the pictures in a child’s nighttime sanctuary. With poignancy he traces the arc of time, remembering his father—

when I find this picture after his death,
I am thrilled and proud,
drinker of élan,
impresario of life,
sexy man.

— or his son, at four, asleep at the circus: “So confident, he works without a net.” He writes, too, of the cycle of seasons along the coast, or a northward journey across Europe, underscoring the inevitable, unstoppable forward motion of life’s passage.

The title poem takes its name from a phrase coined by Einstein in a critique of the Copenhagen theory, here deftly transformed into a central metaphor for the love between two people and the connection that impels us to embrace both joy and pain.

It is this way: men and women
spin. Hundreds of miles apart, thousands
of miles, the speed of light, it will make no difference….

And Einstein, could he admit
that love would be fast enough,
that this “spooky action at a distance”
is not necessarily paradox,
that these two influence simply in their being,
taken in to each other and separate,
separate and taken in.

An accomplished collection of exquisitely wrought, deceptively quiet poems, SPOOKY ACTION AT A DISTANCE reaffirms Howard Levy ‘s talents, and underscores the words Baron Wormser wrote of his first collection, A Day This Lit: “The common note threading the poems is an unabashed humanity, a willingness to look scrupulously and yet rejoice in the small and large mysteries.”

~~~

About Howard Levy

Howard Levy is the author of CavanKerry’s first book, A Day This Lit. 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.

~~~

SPOOKY ACTION AT A DISTANCE by Howard Levy
Publication Date: April 2014
Price: $16.00; ISBN: 978-1-933880-41-9
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: "Same Old Story" by Dawn Potter

March 6, 2014 By CavanKerry Press Leave a Comment

Same Old Story

Poems
by Dawn Potter

The need for stories, and the myths we tell ourselves—individually and collectively—in order to persevere, informs the poems in SAME OLD STORY (CavanKerry Press; March 2014; $16.00, paperback), the new collection from two-time Pushcart Prize nominee Dawn Potter. Whether working in sonnets, long narrative, or free form verse, Potter seeks to identify the commonalities hiding in the tales we formulate and pass on. From Ovid to Shakespeare and the great poets that have followed, from folklore to the symbol-infused banality of our daily lives, the poet finds the threads that bind us as humans to each other and to the world around us.

“From the mythos of antiquity, to fairytales, to nineteenth-century novels, to relief when ‘the plow guy’ shows up on Valentine’s Day, in a world where ‘newsmen/chant wind-chill rates and hockey stats,’ Potter marries the quotidian and the sublime pretty much line by line,” says Gray Jacobik. “That pairing is dictional, syntactical, rhythmical, and often conceptional as well, but always, always, the scope is sweeping and the affect—in this reader’s experience—unparalleled. In her ‘Notes from a Traffic Jam,’ the poet exclaims, ‘Oh, sometimes I fear I’ve lost the will to imagine/this comedy, this ugly beauty, this moving-picture world,’ but Potter doesn’t have to imagine it. She sees it clearly, and how brilliantly she has shaped her craft to capture it and give it back to her readers illuminated and writ large. Potter’s sustained acts of synthesis and transformation are an astonishing achievement.”

The poems, some of which first appeared in such prestigious publications as Sewanee Review, Green Mountains Review, and U.S. 1 Worksheets, are wrapped by a prologue and epilogue that reinvent the story of Phaeton, the son of Helios, who drove the chariot of the sun too close to earth. Phaeton’s recklessness and fear—“Phaeton no longer knew if he gripped the reins” – comes to embody our own earthly anxieties, played out in everyday occurrences. Another archetypal story, inspired by a Scandinavian fairy tale, is the basis for “The White Bear,” a long narrative poem that anchors the collection and explores the fragility of love when forced to conform to the confines of the world’s expectations and demands.

Many of Potter’s poems, though, are modern in their concerns, taken from contemporary experience and often rooted in a strong sense of place—in most cases the beautiful, unsparing New England landscape she calls home. In “UglyTown,” the poet writes,

The sun is under no obligation to shed its optimistic beams
on the ugliest town in Maine—not now, not in March
when I’ve steeled myself for gravel-picked mud and despair,
for broken branches and a plow-scarred dooryard
rimmed with a winter’s worth of dog turds, pale and crumble
among the pale remaindered weeds.

She always searches for the story, but is forced to contemplate, “That’s the point to remember about writing./It doesn’t solve anything.” The real world Potter observes is anything but mythic: “Trailers squat by rusted plow trucks;” “Cold wind blusters under a second-rate sun;” fathers “armor/themselves against loss, hawking phlegm/into coffee cans.“ Yet it is this very imagery of the ordinary, richly and uncompromisingly displayed, that imbues the poems with timeless power, that brings fresh insight to the same old story.

“Variously delightful in their strategies and shapes, the poems of SAME OLD STORY know that merely examining life cannot make it worthy,” says Robert Farnsworth. “Dawn Potter evokes the fragile poise of our longings. Her deft formal skills, her self-questioning wit, and her brave infiltrations of ordinary experience with poetry’s cumulative resources illuminate every page of this memorable book.”

~~~

About Dawn Potter

Dawn Potter directs the Frost Place Conference on Poetry and Teaching held each summer at Robert Frost’s home in Franconia, New Hampshire. The author of three collections of poetry, she has twice been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. Potter sings and plays the fiddle with an acoustic band and lives in Harmony, Maine, with photographer Thomas Birtwistle and their two sons.

~~~

SAME OLD STORY by Dawn Potter
Publication Date: March 2014
Price: $16.00; ISBN: 978-1-933880-40-2

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Book Press Release: “Same Old Story” by Dawn Potter

March 6, 2014 By CavanKerry Press 2 Comments

Same Old Story

Poems
by Dawn Potter

~~~

About Dawn Potter

Dawn Potter directs the Frost Place Conference on Poetry and Teaching held each summer at Robert Frost’s home in Franconia, New Hampshire. The author of three collections of poetry, she has twice been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. Potter sings and plays the fiddle with an acoustic band and lives in Harmony, Maine, with photographer Thomas Birtwistle and their two sons.

~~~

SAME OLD STORY by Dawn Potter
Publication Date: March 2014
Price: $16.00; ISBN: 978-1-933880-40-2

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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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Book Press Release: Primary Lessons

September 10, 2013 By CavanKerry Press Leave a Comment

Primary Lessons

A Memoir

by Sarah Bracey White

As an African-American child growing up in the segregated pre-Civil Rights South, Sarah Bracey White pushed against the social conventions that warned her not to rock the boat, even before she was old enough to fully understand her urge to defy the status quo. In her candid and poignant memoir, Primary Lessons, White recalls a childhood marked by equal measures of poverty and pride—formative years spent sorting through the “lessons” learned from a complicated relationship with her beloved, careworn mother and from a father’s absence engendered by racial injustice and compromised manhood.

Although born in Sumter, South Carolina, Sarah spends much of her first five years in Philadelphia in the care of her bighearted Aunt Susie and her husband, Uncle Whitey. As her parent’s fourth daughter, she has been sent north to ease her family’s financial burden, freeing her mother to work as a schoolteacher. Young Sarah loves her life in Philadelphia, and is devastated when her mother comes to retrieve her and take her back to a “home” she has never known. There, she is shocked and confused to encounter strange signs that read “colored only” and to be told for the first time that black people must behave a certain way around white people and accept their lot as second class citizens.

Still too young to attend the public school, Sarah convinces her mother to enroll her in the Catholic school, where the nuns arrange a scholarship. Sarah’s embrace of Catholicism rankles her mother, who finally transfers her to the public school—yet another disruption in the young girl’s life. Life at home is tough, the family living hand to mouth, especially during the summer when her schoolteacher mother does not get paid. Sarah’s father, once the principal of the local school, took the fall for his co-workers when the NAACP tried to challenge unequal pay for black teachers. His dismissal was a monumental blow to his self-esteemed that deeply affected the trajectory of his life. He has been absent from the family, seeking manual labor, and Sarah does not lay eyes on him until she is ten—and then only for a very brief period.

As Sarah’s mother struggles to support her five children on her own, she clings to her pride. But her acceptance of her fate infuriates Sarah, who believes her mother should seek some pleasure in life and not shrink from the nascent rumblings for civil rights that are beginning to sound in the South. Sarah comes into her own as she enters high school, discovering a talent for journalism. But life at home continues to be a challenge as her mother’s health worsens. With her older sisters out of the house and her brother still young, Sarah becomes her mother’s keeper. Deep tragedy will prove oddly liberating, however, opening up a world beyond Sumter for a young woman ready to take on the world.

Narrated in the present tense, White’s singular childhood story unfolds with the expectancy of life as it happens. “The point of any successful memoir is to discover what the speaker learns on their journey,” writes Kevin Pilkington, author of Ready to Eat the Sky and The Unemployed Man Who Became a Tree in his foreword to Primary Lessons. “[I]t is a trip worth taking when it teaches and enlightens and encourages me to revisit and solidify profound truths I already know to be true. Sarah Bracey White’s journey is a continuous struggle to find her way, a struggle I found both difficult and inspirational. Martin Luther King, Jr. said that ‘injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.’ Young Sarah becomes aware of this at an early age, realizing being born poor and black is not the measure of a person’s value.”

~~~

About Sarah Bracey White

Sarah Bracey White was born in Sumter, South Carolina. She is a writer, teacher, arts consultant and motivational speaker. The author of a collection of poetry, Feelings Brought to Surface, her creative essays are included in the anthologies Children of the Dream; Dreaming in Color, Living in Black and White; Aunties: 35 Writers Celebrate Their Other Mother; and Gardening On A Deeper Level. Her essays have been published in many regional newspapers and on the internet. She lives with her husband in Westchester County, NY.

~~~

PRIMARY LESSONS by Sarah Bracey White
Publication Date: September 2013
Price: $21.00, ISBN: 978-1-933880-38-9
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: door of thin skins

April 10, 2013 By CavanKerry Press Leave a Comment

door of thin skins

by Shira Dentz

As a young woman, the narrator underwent psychotherapy and became ensnared in a nightmare scenario of seduction and abuse perpetrated by her highly regarded therapist. This dark passage and the struggle to free herself from this psychological bondage forms the basis of door of thin skins (CavanKerry Press; April 2013; $16.00), Dentz’s harrowing narrative, rendered through a visual kaleidoscope of poetry and memory.

“door of thin skins is a riveting pastiche of dramatic lines, rhythmical poetry, graphic poetry, typographical poetry and prose poetry, as well as metaphors that shock and bloom, all in the unexpected risk-taking that is art,” says Molly Peacock. “The poet’s clever innovation of an edgy and oddball brand of avant-garde song-and-response tells this tale by replicating a psychological mix of thought, feeling, fact, history, and personal history. Dentz triumphs in her dazzling and fractured narrative. door of thin skins startles and astounds.”

At twenty-one, the narrator put her trust in Dr. Abe, nearly three times her age, and a former president of the psychoanalytic division of the A.P.A. among other professional distinctions. Before long, the doctor has crossed the line of his profession, mingling the personal with the clinical, until finally embarking on inappropriate sexual relations with his patient. For the young analysand, this encroachment into “the gray airy-a/of boundaries between patient and therapist” has devastating psychological effects, as she grapples with the meaning of this false manifestation of transference.

He splayed his fingers apart, their movement a Japanese pure, make-a-vacuum style, allowing them to twitch in all directions, implying cherry blossom petals dangling from boughs. He was a tall and fat man, his fingers incongruously refined, long and sculptural. Of course the fingertips flipped up. I say of course because even at rest he gave the impression that he covered everything; above and below.

How the very signal of that gesture enveloped to the point of obfuscating my senses This is why it is nearly impossible to communicate, to hand over the experience.

(from “10. Hands”)

Confused by her therapist’s colliding signals, she will turn both inward and outward to assuage her uncertainty and guilt. Seeking recourse at last by reporting Dr. Abe to the powers that be, the protracted process proves as arduous and psychologically dangerous as the initial transgressions, until the poet discovers she can never fully leave the fever dream behind:

Two trees compete for the same spot, twisting around each other.
Dense woods, Dr. Abe
vapor

(from “?”)

And emotionally raw and visually innovative work, “Shira Dentz’s door of thin skins is not only an intimate narrative of seduction and abuse, but a tour de force of assemblage,” says Karen Brennan, author of The Real Enough World. “Each gallery-worthy page is meticulously arranged, prose overlain with lyric sequences, visual space with visual density. From every angle, door of thin skins is a chilling and exquisite document.”

~~~

About Shira Dentz

Born and raised in the New York City area, Shira Dentz has lived and taught during the last ten years in Iowa, Utah, and Florida. She is the author of black seeds on a white dish, a book of poems that was nominated for the PEN/Osterweil Award, and a chapbook, Leaf Weather. Her writing has appeared in many journals including The American Poetry Review, The Iowa Review, New American Writing, and Western Humanities Review, and online at The Academy of American Poets, NPR, Poetry Daily, and Verse Daily. Her awards include an Academy of American Poets’ Prize, The Poetry Society of America’s Lyric Poem and Cecil Hemley Memorial Awards, Electronic Poetry Review’s Discovery Award, and Painted Bride Quarterly’s Poetry Prize. She holds an M.F.A. from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and a Ph.D. in creative writing and literature from the University of Utah. She is Writer-in Residence at The New College of Florida and is Book Review Editor at Drunken Boat. In addition to writing and teaching, Dentz is a freelance graphic artist.

~~~

door of thin skin by Shira Dentz

Publication Date: April 2013

Price: $16.00; ISBN: 978-1-933880-36-5

Distributed by: UPNE, 1-800-421-1561

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Book Press Release: Where the Dead Are

March 5, 2013 By CavanKerry Press Leave a Comment

Where the Dead Are

Poems by

Wanda S. Praisner

In Wanda S. Praisner’s poignant new collection of poems, WHERE THE DEAD ARE (CavanKerry Press; March 2013; $16.00), the latest in CavanKerry’s Emerging Voices series, travel and time struggle to assuage the lingering memory of unthinkable tragedy. The poems, some of which first appeared in such prestigious publications as Atlanta Review, Prairie Schooner, and Journal of New Jersey Poets, are imbued with unvarnished emotion, and captured with a clarity of image and observational honesty that underscores the depth of their perception.

“These poems are beads gathered from around the world and threaded on the singular, haunting death of a college-aged son by drowning—so that, in them, grief itself becomes a country that can have no boundaries at all,” says Renée Ashley. “The poems embody both memory and absence, rendered emotionally raw and yet invariably, indelibly elegant. Praisner knows how to wield a resonant image without hysteria or hyperbole; through her restraint, her images seem an outgrowth of a natural decorum.”

From the first poem, “At the Exhibit,” the poet invites the reader along on her quest to make sense of all that has come before and what may lie ahead:

We’ll step into the forest, its pale sepia fog,
journey together along the path—
a path I’ll mention narrows in the distance.

The path leads far afield: to Germany, where the stump of Goethe’s oak tree rests in the shadow of Buchenwald, to the cold waters of the St. Lawrence where the wreckage of a once-mighty ship lies, to Johannesburg, the Caribbean, the Galapagos. Each encounter carries a measure of grief, but also the possibility of hope. The journey is not just of place, but of time, too, as the poet ventures back to childhood, to both happy and sad times—and expands beyond the personal to embrace the experiences of sandhogs working in tunnels beneath New York waters, a screen goddess adrift in an artificial world, or a Chinese tour guide in the Forbidden City.

The tragic event that permeates these poems, however, that the poet returns to again and again, refracted through different prisms of incomprehension, is the death of her son.

A bell tolls the death of another hour

and thoughts of my child return.
On a night blacker than this,
he went away and never came back.

His face emerges from the dark;
no need for lighted candles.
Unbidden, the past arrives,
sits so close I can feel its breath.

from “Anchored Off Korkula, Croatia”

Praisner’s “language, poetic and precise, makes us feel and share emotions described and events visited in these fine poems,” says Jean Hollander. WHERE THE DEAD ARE is a work of unabashed honesty, of stark truths—and of quiet redemption.

~~~

About Wanda S. Praisner

Wanda S. Praisner is a recipient of a poetry fellowship from the New Jersey State Council on the Arts and fellowships from the Geraldine R. Dodge Foundation to the Provincetown Fine Arts Work Center and the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts. Praisner was a finalist in the MARGIE Strong Medicine Contest, the 2012 New Jersey Poets Prize, and placed second in the Allen Ginsberg Competition. She won The Devil’s Millhopper Kudzu Prize, the Maryland Poetry Review’s Egan Award, First Prize in Poetry at the New Jersey Writers’ Conference, and the 2011 Princemere Prize. She was a featured reader at the Governor’s Conference on the Arts and the Geraldine R. Dodge Poetry Festival. Her work appears in Confrontation, Lullwater Review, New York Magazine, Slant, and elsewhere. A poet in residence for the New Jersey State Council on the Arts, she lives in Bedminster with her husband.

~~~

WHERE THE DEAD ARE by Wanda S. Praisner
Publication Date: March 2013
Price: $16.00; ISBN: 987-1-933880358
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: Waiting Room Reader II

January 9, 2013 By CavanKerry Press Leave a Comment

The Waiting Room Reader

Volume II

Words to Keep You Company

Rachel Hadas
Guest Editor

In 2009, CavanKerry Press, in association with The Arnold P. Gold Foundation for Humanism in Medicine published THE WAITING ROOM READER, an anthology of poems meant to entertain and inspire patients and visitors in medical waiting rooms. To this end, more than 10,000 copies have been distributed to hospitals and physicians’ offices. Building on the success of this unique project, CavanKerry and The Gold Foundation team up once again for THE WAITING ROOM READER, Volume II (CavanKerry Press; January 2013; $18.00), compiled by guest editor Rachel Hadas.

“When I think of people in waiting rooms, including myself, I picture us rifling restlessly through battered magazines,” writes Hadas, an award winning poet, professor, essayist, and translator. “No doubt the image is out of date; these days, we’re more likely to be texting or talking on cell phones or playing solitaire on some tiny device. No matter: the nervous impatience of the mood in that room doesn’t change…our minds are busily engaged in a dance of avoidance and dread. It’s hard to focus on anything….Paying attention to one particular thing rather than flipping pages or scrolling text prevents us from being distracted and thus, paradoxically, can successfully distract us—can move our minds, if only briefly, from the claustrophobic space and the repetitive scenarios in which we may feel trapped.”

The sixty-three poems and fourteen prose pieces in THE WAITING ROOM READER, Volume II, are not meant to uplift or console, but to engage. Hadas sought writing that is an act of reclamation, rooted in themes that poets (and readers) have always visited: memory, family, love, loss, nature. There is work by well-established writers, such as Maxine Kumin, Molly Peacock, Rosanna Warren, and Reeve Lindbergh, as well as many rising talents, and also fresh writing from students pressed against the starting blocks of their careers. Contributors include writers who are also doctors, teachers, have worked on Wall Street or as corporate counsel—many walks of life, as befits the universality of the experience.

“Patients and their families will discover an unexpected blessing in this collection of poems and short prose,” says Jack Coulehand, M.D., author of Medicine Stone and Bursting With Danger and Music. “The poems are warm and inviting. They sparkle with wisdom. The stories are little gems of insight and humor. The most beautiful thing about THE WAITING ROOM READER is its respectfulness. Medical waiting rooms are fraught with uncertainty, fear, fatigue, boredom, discomfort, and suffering. This unobtrusive collection acknowledges these feelings, while respectfully nudging the reader toward a poem or story that might well offer a moment of relief and, hopefully, leave the reader with a small dose of healing.”

About Rachel Hadas

Rachel Hadas studied classics at Harvard, poetry at Johns Hopkins, and comparative literature at Princeton. Between college and graduate school she spent four years in Greece, an experience that surfaces variously in much of her work. Since 1981 she has taught in the English Department of the Newark (NJ) campus of Rutgers University, and has also taught courses in literature and writing at Columbia and Princeton, as well as serving on the poetry faculty of the Sewanee Writers’ Conference and the West Chester Poetry Conference. She has received a Guggenheim Fellowship in Poetry, an Ingram Merrill Foundation grant in poetry, and an award in literature from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters. She teaches in the Narrative Medicine program at Columbia Medical School.

She is the author of numerous books of poetry, essays, and translations, including the poetry collection The Ache of Appetite (Copper Beech Press 2010), and the prose work Strange Relation: A Memoir of Marriage, Dementia and Poetry (Paul Dry Books 2011). Her newest book of poems The Golden Road was published by Northwestern University Press in the fall of 2012.

~~~

THE WAITING ROOM READER, Volume 2: Stories to Keep You Company
Publication Date: January 2013
Price: $18.00; ISBN: 1-933880-34-1
Distributed by: UPNE, 1-800-421-1561

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Book Press Release: Confessions of Joan the Tall

November 13, 2012 By CavanKerry Press Leave a Comment

Confessions of Joan the Tall

by Joan Cusack Handler

Channeling the indelible voice of her 11-and-three-quarters year-old self, poet and psychologist Joan Cusack Handler travels back to her Irish-Catholic Bronx childhood, circa 1954, in her candid, poignant, and witty new memoir, CONFESSIONS OF JOAN THE TALL (CavanKerry Press; November 2012; $21.00). Told in a series of diary entries-cum-devotions to God, this account of growing up amid the tandem comfort and anxiety of the Catholic faith explores young Joan’s adolescent growing pains, yearnings, and questions against a finely-wrought backdrop of family, religion, self-image, and blossoming sexuality.

“A truly remarkable book,” says Roland Merullo, author of Breakfast with Buddha and The Talk-Funny Girl. “ It captures both the complex emotions of an adolescent in an ethnic, working-class neighborhood, and the unwritten social and spiritual rules of 1950s American Catholicism. Somehow, though told in the voice of a young girl, the story has about it a psychological and emotional subtlety and complexity that is fully mature. It’s impossible not to like Joan, impossible not to feel for her in the depths of her coming of age struggles, and impossible for anyone raised in a devout Catholic family to keep from smiling and nodding at the author’s insights into the Roman Catholic mindset.” “The narrator is beautifully alive to the endless hazards, complications, and indignities of growing up,” adds Baron Wormser, author of Impenitent Notes and The Poetry Life. “So much of the wisdom of childhood lies in the strange blend of endurance and enchantment.”

Young Joan lives with her Irish immigrant parents and her three siblings in a small house in the Edgewater section of the Bronx. Daily life is circumscribed by the strictures of Catholic school and the deep-seated sense of morality and faith that dictates every aspect of home life as well. Joan’s father, a plumber, is a thoughtful, devout man whom she adores. Her relationship with her volatile mother is more complex. Joan also looks up to her “glamorous” sixteen-year-old sister, Catherine, and forges a companionable alliance with younger brother, Jerry. It is brother Sonny, just eleven months older than she, with whom she has the greatest strife. A talented artist in his own right, Sonny nonetheless resents his bookish younger sister, and he retaliates with cruel torments, much of it targeted at Joan’s inordinate height—nearly six feet tall before she is twelve.

As young Joan navigates her singular—and yet universally familiar—passage through puberty, she struggles not only with her height, but with other issues that we would today call “body image,” but which had no name back then. She wrestles, too, with faith, relishing the enveloping embrace of the Church, yet worrying that God might ask the ultimate sacrifice and call her to the religious life. She wishes nothing more than to make God happy – and her pious earthly father, too – yet she craves the trappings of the material world: poodle skirts and Cadillacs and shopping trips to Manhattan. Slowly, she begins to come to terms with her sense of self, to face her nascent sexuality, and to understand the peculiarities of her beloved, if flawed family, as she recognizes that every journey to Heaven makes a stop in Purgatory.

“CONFESSIONS OF JOAN THE TALL is a splendid book, and Joan the Tall is a splendid girl—brave, effervescent and vulnerable,” says Molly Peacock, author of The Paper Garden and The Second Blush. “She flubs the rules of the Catholic church, she flubs the rules of family life, and amidst the quandaries, sins, punishments, and totally divine greedy moment in this story of her Irish American family, she grows into what tallness can mean—the ability to see from a mountaintop.”

~~~

About Joan Cusack Handler

Bronx native, Joan Cusack Handler has two published poetry collections—GlOrious and The Red Canoe: Love in Its Making, and two anthologies that she’s edited: The Waiting Room Reader: Stories to Keep You Company and The Breath of Parted Lips: Voices from The Robert Frost Place, Vol. 1. Recipient of five Pushcart nominations and a Sampler Award from The Boston Review, her poems have appeared in Agni, Boston Review, Poetry East and The New York Times and her prose, including chapters from Confessions of Joan the Tall, in Indiana Review, Tampa Review, and Southern Humanities Review. In her other lives, she is the founder/publisher of CavanKerry Press and a psychologist in clinical practice.

~~~

To purchase, click here

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Book Press Release: Darkening the Grass

October 10, 2012 By CavanKerry Press Leave a Comment

Darkening the Grass

Poems by

Michael Miller

“I read Michael Miller’s poems with great pleasure in their accurate seeing, their assured phrasing, their true and proportionate feeling.”

—Richard Wilbur

Michael Miller’s new volume of poems, DARKENING THE GRASS (CavanKerry Press; October; $16.00), plumbs timeless issues of love, aging, war, death, and memory with lyrical language and emotional candor. The poems, some of which first appeared in such prestigious publications as North American Review, Ontario Review, Commonweal, and Chariton Review, display the full measure of this acclaimed poet’s talents, coupling spare and precise writing with haunting images and unadorned sentiment.

“No other poet I know writes so beautifully about seasoned love – love within the context of a life-long marriage,” says Stephen Haven. “In writing about people and the places they share, Michael Miller achieves in his poems a deep sense of emotional integrity. His poems value clarity, understatement, love in the context of its turbulence, and the accuracy of each detail. As a man living in his eighth decade, as a man long married, and as a former Marine, Miller is a poet of the present tense. In his poems, in every present moment, informing one another, death and the possibilities for love tangle around each other.”

The collection is divided into six sections. The opening and closing groupings of poems are drawn form the everyday, winnowing from common occurrences the essence of life.

And then we consider
The divisions we live with,
The distance between
The soul’s requirements
And the other life
That the day demands.
(from “Into Light”)

Next follows a cycle of thirteen poems, “Each Day”– reminiscent of Yeats’s Crazy Jane poems – which traces the quotidian doings and inner life of Old Bill, a “ninety-year-old man/Who fought in three wars,/Married twice, fathered/Seven, and dismisses/His doctor’s advice.”

The third section gathers eleven poems that speak to a soldier’s experience – the poet’s own experiences in Vietnam, the World War II vet, battle-scarred troops in Iraq and back home, in one piece or not. The specter of death haunts the next group of poems – “Its sweetness, its bitterness, its aftertaste” (“Hunger”). A long poem that makes up the fifth section, “The Alien Begins His Day” explores how in life and love we can at once feel connected and disconnected from our own beings.

To begin each day with the tentative
Fumbling efforts rooted in shyness and shame
That will bring him closer to love,
To all that appears alien, like the bones
In the earth, like the fugitive notes
Of the full-hearted bird beginning to sing.

Startling in its clear-sighted directness, the poetry of Michael Miller is at once carefully considered and heartfelt. DARKENING THE GRASS is a moving exploration of the lives of each of us and all of us.

~~~

About Michael Miller

Michael Miller’s 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. His previous books are The Joyful Dark and The Singing Inside. Born in New York City in 1940, he served four years in the Marine Corps, and now lives in Massachusetts.

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Book Press Release: The Laundress Catches Her Breath

September 26, 2012 By CavanKerry Press Leave a Comment

The Laundress Catches Her Breath

Poems by

Paola Corso

A thematic collection of poems that reveals the inner life of a working class woman in steel-town Pittsburgh, THE LAUNDRESS CATCHES HER BREATH (CavanKerry Press; September 2012; $16.00), by acclaimed poet and novelist Paola Corso, is the latest in CavanKerry’s “Notable Voices” series. Unfolding as a impressionistic narrative, and mixing prose poems with free verse, the story Corso tells is one of hard-earned subsistence, conveyed through metaphor and with unbounded wit.

“Paola Corso’s THE LAUNDRESS CATCHES HER BREATH focuses like a Leica on the details of daily urban working class life from a fiercely rendered narrative perspective,” says Sandra M. Gilbert, author of Belongings. “Pioneering a mode of tough yet poignant documentary verse, Corso draws us into the grainy, grimy world of factory and clothesline, diner and lung disease and filthy water with extraordinary skill.” The “laundress” who gives voice to these poems, a part-time waitress who still lives with her father and washes his clothes, made filthy by mill work, has an indefatigable spirit, which ultimately comes to its fore in a mystical vision.

The poems are gathered into three distinct sections. The opening Inhale finds the laundress trapped in a relentless cycle of drudgery and ever-stifled hope.

She swore off cigarettes, thinking

the cost of the carton she’d save

every week would be enough

money to rent a room, move

out of her father’s house.

But then Stubby cut her hours

again and the Maytag suds

saver broke the same day.

(from “The Laundress Catches Her Breath”)

Her bellowing father, whom she calls Twenty Horns, is quick to anger. The college-educated uncle she revered is dead. The air she breathes is fetid with industrial pollution. And yet, she holds onto the promise of something more.

In the second section, Hold for Ten Seconds, the laundress is visited by the Black Madonna of Tindari, who speaks to her from the Maytag, telling her, “The circle of darkness is pure Spirit. It will never disappear no matter how many times you wash this.” (“One Thousand Ten”). The final section, And Exhale, nurtures some hope, as “She dreams she flashes a union card and her middle finger then leaves her father’s house” (“A Well-ventilated Basement Apartment”). The laundress’s story culminates with a lengthy poem, “Heiress to Air,” that recounts a smoke-induced dream after a work accident, a startling vision that straddles reality and an apocalyptic landscape.

“THE LAUNDRESS CATCHES HER BREATH makes me think of William Carlos Williams and his Paterson—at least his politics and mythic strange bits,” says Julia Kasdorf, author of Poetry in America. “This is a song of lament for all labor and the earth made outrageous with a magical imagination. It is a crazy, gorgeously-crafted romance of the American worker.”

~~~

About Paola Corso

Paola Corso was born in the Pittsburgh area where her Southern Italian immigrant family found work in the steel mill. A New York Foundation for the Arts Poetry fellow and Sherwood Anderson Fiction Award winner, she is the author of Catina’s Haircut: A Novel in Stories on Library Journal’s notable list of first novels in Fall 2010, Giovanna’s 86 Circles And Other Stories, a John Gardner Fiction Book Award Finalist, a book of poems, Death by Renaissance, and most recently, Once I Was Told the Air Was Not for Breathing.

~~~

THE LAUNDRESS CATCHES HER BREATH by Paola Corso

Publication Date: September 2012

Price: $16.00; ISBN: 987-1-933880-31-0

Distributed by: University Press of New England (UPNE), 1-800-421-1561 or 603-448-1533, Ext. 255

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Announcing CKP’s First E-Book!

April 11, 2012 By CavanKerry Press Leave a Comment

CavanKerry Press has published its first e-book!

Judith Hannan’s Motherhood Exaggerated is now available in Kindle (Amazon) and NOOK (Barnes & Noble) formats.

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Book Press Release: The One Fifteen to Penn Station by Kevin Carey

April 4, 2012 By CavanKerry Press Leave a Comment

The One Fifteen to Penn Station

Poems by

Kevin Carey

THE ONE FIFTEEN FROM PENN STATION, (CavanKerry Press; April 2012; $16.00), a debut collection from Pushcart Prize-nominated poet Kevin Carey, celebrates life, loss, and the intangible, quotidian experiences that linger well beyond their initial significance. Stretching back to a middle class Boston childhood and forward to middle age disappointments and compensations, Carey’s poems percolate with humor, gratitude, and grace.

“Carey’s poems, firmly rooted in the American landscape of the city and its surrounding towns, bring these places and people alive for us in poetry that is specific, clear, and unflinching,” writes Marie Mazziotti Gillan in her foreword to the collection. “Whether he is describing the scene he sees outside the train window in all its gritty, surprising beauty or working-class Revere Beach, the town where he grew up and where his mother still lives, or the thirty-five foot Madonna on a hill in East Boston, his observations are precise, his humor sardonic, his eyes are the window through which we observe the world he knows so well.”

Time is not the enemy in Carey’s work, but rather an inevitable force that brings with it nostalgia, yes, but also acceptance.

I turned fifty this year and a half
a century seems like a history
lesson, like someone should be
answering an essay question about
my childhood for extra credit,
or scanning my homework written in
longhand as some withered yellow parchment,
and wasn’t it true that the trees
grew taller then in my backyard
and we built snow forts as big
as apartment buildings….

(from “Running”)

The poet writes with unbridled bemusement about typical, mostly mild, boyhood indiscretions, eulogizing those less fortunate friends who did not make it as far. His memories revisit the classroom, the playground, the old neighborhood, old girlfriends—but rarely with a strong sense of regret about what was or might have been. Instead, there is often humor, as when a dislodged spitball lands on his teacher’s green high-heeled pump (“Seventh Grade”) or his mother offers him some frank advice about his private parts (“Mother Told Me”).

Small triumphs on the basketball court that brought him closer to his father resonate years later with bittersweet honesty. The father-son continuum plays out in time enjoyed with his own son, often at the movies, where “ninety minutes turns into years,/but like in Narnia we are still the same,/not getting older too fast,/not getting to the point/where we don’t need each other… (“Movies”).

Kevin Carey’s “poems celebrate the ride of life, real life—and its twin, real death –with wit, precision, and a brave and unmistakably tremendous heart,” says David Daniel. THE ONE FIFTEEN TO PENN STATION is a masterful debut from an exciting new voice.

About Kevin Carey

Kevin Carey teaches Writing at Salem State University. His work has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize, recognized with an Allen Ginsburg Poetry Award, and been nominated for Best of the Net 2011. His co-written movie script, Peter’s Song, won Best Screenplay at the New Hampshire Film festival in 2009. Other screenwriting awards include The Massachusetts Film Office Screenwriting Competition and The Woods Hole Film Festival. His one-act plays have been staged at The New Hampshire Theater Project and at The New Works Festival in Newburyport, Massachusetts. Carey is also a seventh grade basketball coach. He lives with his family inBeverly,Massachusetts.

THE ONE FIFTEEN TO PENN STATION by Kevin Carey

Publication Date: April 2012
Price: $16.00; ISBN: 978-1-933880-29-7
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: Carole Stone's American Rhapsody

March 7, 2012 By CavanKerry Press Leave a Comment

American Rhapsody

poems by Carole Stone

Carole Stone’s new collection of poems, AMERICAN RHAPSODY (CavanKerry Press; March 2012; $16.00), is a rhythmic cycle that explores themes of our imperfect national history, collective and individual identities, and sometimes amnesiac sense of nostalgia. The poems, some of which first appeared in such prestigious journals as Southern Poetry Review, Chelsea, and New Jersey Journal of Poet, are at once personal and communal, drawing on the poet’s own family heritage, but linked to the broader world through vibrant references to music, popular culture and shared memories.

Many of the poems hearken back to the 1920s—the Jazz Age with “tasty booze/flowing from kegs, basement jugs./”In bathtubs, in stills—“ (“Invocation/Intoxication”). We come to learn that the poet’s father was a rum-runner who made a sizeable living bootlegging, but died when the poet was a young girl, leaving her with hazy, somewhat conflicted recollections. “My father is/a roller coaster, a grey fedora,/cut glass decanters with silver tags/engraved: Scotch Gin Rye. (”Homecoming”). Her mother also died young, leaving so much clouded, like the identities of strangers in old photographs. Recalling an upbringing overseen by a colorful collection of relatives, all vividly portrayed with the poet’s gift for concision, Stone paints a portrait of childhood in a less complicated age.

The poet’s ken extends well beyond the personal, though, as she recreates the world that shaped her—New Jersey in the 1930s and 40s: Days spent in darkened movie houses watching gangster movies, learning in a classroom under the watchful gaze of FDR’s portrait, summers at the Jersey shore or eating Sunday dinner at the local Chinese restaurant. She imagines, too, the landscape before it was settled, paved over, choked by bad air. Hers is an American experience that speaks loudly of the ordinary things we cherish, sometimes disregard, and in the end yearn to regain.

Despite its wide-angled lens, though, at its heart this collection focuses most acutely on a daughter’s need to clarify a relationship that remains shrouded in the haze of the past and perhaps unanswerable questions:

Here I am again, Father, searching
Sloppy Joe’s souvenir photo for the man you
were. Cigar between two fingers,
face forever handsome and tan,
the only likeness you left me. Again I wonder,
as you leaned against the bar,

beer bottle half-full, one foot on a bar-
stool rung, did you miss me?

(from “A Daughter Returns to Her Habana Fantasy”)

“AMERICAN RHASODY is a charming, witty, musical portrayal of American life in the 1920s and ’30s and of its larger impact on the nation today,” says Grace Schulman. “Stone evokes the sublime of Le Jazz Hot and the seediness of rum-runners, marathon dancers and racketeers. Through it all she muses on the hope and destiny of the American dream, elegizing believers who ‘live/as language/in my inky heart.’”

~~~

About Carole Stone

Carole Stone is the author of two books of poetry and seven chapbooks as well as many critical essays on writers, among them George Eliot, Edna St. Vincent Millay and Sylvia Plath. A recipient of fellowships from The NJ State Council on the Arts and residencies at Hawthornden Castle International Retreat for Writers in Scotland and Chateau de Lavigny inSwitzerland, she is Professor of English Emerita, Montclair State University. She divides her time between New Jersey and East Hampton, N.Y.

AMERICAN RHAPSODY by Carole Stone
Publication Date: March 2012
Price: $16.00; ISBN: 978-1-933880-28-0
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: Carole Stone’s American Rhapsody

March 7, 2012 By CavanKerry Press Leave a Comment

American Rhapsody

poems by Carole Stone

beer bottle half-full, one foot on a bar-
stool rung, did you miss me?

(from “A Daughter Returns to Her Habana Fantasy”)

~~~

About Carole Stone

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Book Press Release: Motherhood Exaggerated

February 27, 2012 By CavanKerry Press Leave a Comment

Motherhood Exaggerated

Judith Hannan

Foreword by Alan M. Dershowitz

Introduction by Leonard H. Wexler, M.D

“The dramatic language, both highly descriptive and emotional, rings with the unforgiving pain and fear of this terrifying disease…The amplification of the lives of Judith and her daughter, Nadia, are felt as you read this deep and loving book.” —Carly Simon

In her emotionally uncompromising memoir, MOTHERHOOD EXAGGERATED (CavanKerry Press; February 2012; $21.00), Judith Hannan recounts the ordeal of her young daughter’s battle with cancer and how the frightening medical journey tested and strengthened a mother’s reliance. This latest volume from LaurelBooks, CavanKerry’s Literature of Illness imprint, takes readers from diagnosis to remission as eight-year-old Nadia Hannan endures the nightmare of potentially terminal bone cancer, and the entire family weathers the dire interruption in their lives. Told with grace and candor, Judith Hannan’s fierce depiction of an unwelcome trial of motherhood is, in the words of novelist Mary Gordon, “a moving, engaging retelling of the complex bonds and tensions every parent experiences in our relationship with our children.”

Everything can change in an instant. “It is Halloween and Nadia is still dressed in her angel costume after an evening of trick-or-treating, when the cancer finally shows itself,” Hannan writes. “I look and see the lump. I am more curious than concerned, as if I have been give a puzzle to solve. It is still 36 hours before we are being prepared for a cancer diagnosis. Nadia will have one gymnastics session with her new coach, one swimming lesson with Gaby and then her violin will be put away permanently. She will be stripped of her wings and confined to a chrysalis woven of chemotherapy. I am the one who will grow wings. My flight will be clumsy at first, but I will remember all those dragonflies. How could I have not recognized their strength, their certainty, their agility? If I fly like them, I will learn what I thought I should have known but have always struggled with—how to be Nadia’s mother.”

Nadia is diagnosed with Ewing’s sarcoma, a malignant bone tumor, and undergoes a grueling six month of chemotherapy that will devastate her body and disrupt her young life. As Judith, and her husband John, struggle with the harsh, persistent demands of this treatment, they deal with their own issues and fears. Nadia’s older sister, Frannie, and twin brother, Max, handle their sister’s illness in their own often-surprising ways. For Judith, her daughter’s illness also rekindles emotions that had lay dormant since her mother’s battle with terminal cancer, and reawakens, too, a yearning for spiritual answers long suppressed in her secular Jewish life. In MOTHERHOOD EXAGGERATED, Hannan never whitewashes the truth about this arduous medical journey, detailing the negative and, yes, positive steps along the way. Without pity, she admits to her own insecurities, missteps, and moments of weakness, but also takes pride in the small victories won as she battled for her Nadia’s very life.

“Judith Hannan has performed a valuable service by publishing this remarkably honest account of the crisis she and her family went through as her daughter—now a brilliant and beautiful young woman—dealt with a rare form of cancer,” writes Alan M. Dershowitz in his foreword to MOTHERHOOD EXAGGERATED. “She takes us with her on her journey through the valley of the shadow of death and then back to the sunshine of life….Judith’s willingness to share intimate feelings and to discuss difficult moments is a gift that will help so many, as it has already helped me, to deal with the past as well as the future.”

About Judith Hannan:
Judith Hannan has been a writer for over 25 years; 10 years ago she began exploring personal narrative. Her essays have appeared in such publications as Woman’s Day, Twins Magazine, The Martha’s Vineyard Gazette, Mom Writer’s Literary Magazine, The Healing Muse, and the anthology On The Vineyard III. She teaches writing about personal experience to homeless single mothers and to at-risk adolescents. Ms. Hannan has a long history of involvement in children’s education, health and welfare. She served as Director of Development for the 92^nd Street Y and then for the Children’s Museum of Manhattan. She serves on the board of the Museum as well as on three boards affiliated with the Mt. Sinai Medical Center in New York—the Adolescent Health Center, the Children’s Center Foundation and the new Global Health Initiative. Ms. Hannan lives in New York City with her husband and three children.

MOTHERHOOD EXAGGERATED by Judith Hannan
Publication Date: February 2012
Price: $21.00; ISBN: 987-1-933880-27-3
Distributed by: University Press of New England (UPNE), 1-800-421-1561 or 603-448-1533, Ext. 255

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Publication Date: March 2020

Have your copy on the release date by ordering today!

About Gray Jacobik

About the Book

Publication Date: February 2020

Get your copy by ordering today!

Listen to an Excerpt from Truth Has a Different Shape

About Kari L. O'Driscoll

About the Book

Publication Date: October 1, 2019

Listen to a Poem from His Collection

About the Book

About Robert Cording

Publication Date: October 2019

Save money by pre-ordering today!

About Robert Cording

About the Book

Eating Moors and Christians poems by Sandra M. Castillo

About Sandra M. Castillo

EATING MOORS AND CHRISTIANS by Sandra M. Castillo Publication Date: April 2016 Price: $16.00; ISBN: 978-1-933880-50-1 Distributed by: University Press of New England (UPNE), 800.421.1561 or 603.448.1533, Ext. 255

Tornadoesque

poems by Donald Platt

TORNADOESQUE by Donald Platt Publication Date: May 2016 Price: $18.00; ISBN: 978-1-933880-51-8 Distributed by: University Press of New England (UPNE), 800.421.1561 or 603.448.1533, Ext. 255

Orphans by Joan Cusack Handler

About Joan Cusack Handler

~~~

OPRHANS by Joan Cusack Handler Publication Date: March 2016 Price: $18.00; ISBN: 978-1-933880-56-3 Distributed by: University Press of New England (UPNE), 800.421.1561 or 603.448.1533, Ext. 255

The Baby Book Poems by Robin Silbergleid

About Robin Silbergleid

THE BABY BOOK by Robin Silbergleid Publication Date: November 2015 Price: $16.00; ISBN: 978-1-933880-58-7 Distributed by: University Press of New England (UPNE), 800.421.1561 or 603.448.1533, Ext. 255

Only So Far

Poems by Robert Cording

About Robert Cording

ONLY SO FAR by Robert Cording Publication Date: October 2015 Price: $16.00; ISBN: 978-1-933880-49-5 Distributed by: University Press of New England (UPNE), 800.421.1561 or 603.448.1533, Ext. 255

Unidentified Sighing Objects

Poems by Baron Wormser

About Baron Wormser

UNIDENTIFIED SIGHING OBJECTS by Baron Wormser Publication Date: September 2015 Price: $16.00; ISBN: 978-1-933880-47-1 Distributed by: University Press of New England (UPNE), 800-421-1561 or 603-448-1533, Ext. 255

This project is supported in part by an award from the National Endowment for the Arts. To find out more about how NEA grants impact individuals and communities, visit www.arts.gov.

ESTHER A Novel in Verse by Pam Bernard

About Pam Bernard

ESTHER – A Novel in Verse, by Pam Bernard Publication Date: April 2015 Price: $18.00; ISBN: 978-1-933880-48-8 Distributed by: University Press of New England (UPNE), 1-800-421-1561 or 603-448-1533, Ext. 255

This project is supported in part by an award from the National Endowment for the Artso find out more about how NEA grants impact individuals and communities, visit www.arts.gov.

LOVE’S LABORS

Poems by Brent Newsom

About Brent Newsom

LOVE’S LABORS by Brent Newsom Publication Date: March 2015 Price: $16.00; ISBN: 978-1-933880-52-5 Distributed by: University Press of New England (UPNE), 800-421-1561 or 603-448-1533, Ext. 255

PLACES I WAS DREAMING

Poems by Loren Graham

About Loren Graham

~~~

PLACES I WAS DREAMING by Loren Graham Publication Date: February 2015 Price: $16.00; ISBN: 978-1-933880-45-7

Misery Islands

Poems by January Gill O’Neil

About January Gill O’Neil

MISERY ISLANDS by January Gill O’Neil Publication Date: November 2014 Price: $16.00; ISBN: 978-1-933880-46-4 Distributed by: University Press of New England (UPNE), 800-421-1561 or 603-448-1533, Ext. 255

How They Fell

Poems by Annie Boutelle

~~~

About Annie Boutelle

~~~

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

The Bar of the Flattened Heart

Poems by David Keller

About David Keller

THE BAR OF THE FLATTENED HEART by David Keller Publication Date: May 2014 Price: $16.00; ISBN: 978-1-933880-42-6 Distributed by: University Press of New England (UPNE), 1-800-421-1561 or 603-448-1533, Ext. 255

My Crooked House

by Teresa Carson

Foreword by Randy Frost, Ph.D.

~~

MY CROOKED HOUSE by Teresa Carson Publication Date: May 2014 Price: $18.00; ISBN: 978-1-933880-43-3 Distributed by: University Press of New England (UPNE), 1-800-421-1561 or 603-448-1533, Ext. 255

Spooky Action at a Distance

Poems by Howard Levy

About Howard Levy

Howard Levy is the author of CavanKerry’s first book, A Day This Lit. 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.

SPOOKY ACTION AT A DISTANCE by Howard Levy Publication Date: April 2014 Price: $16.00; ISBN: 978-1-933880-41-9 Distributed by: University Press of New England (UPNE), 1-800-421-1561 or 603-448-1533, Ext. 255

Same Old Story

Poems by Dawn Potter

About Dawn Potter

SAME OLD STORY by Dawn Potter Publication Date: March 2014 Price: $16.00; ISBN: 978-1-933880-40-2

Eating Moors and Christians
poems by Sandra M. Castillo

EATING MOORS AND CHRISTIANS by Sandra M. Castillo
Publication Date: April 2016
Price: $16.00; ISBN: 978-1-933880-50-1
Distributed by: University Press of New England (UPNE), 800.421.1561 or 603.448.1533, Ext. 255

TORNADOESQUE by Donald Platt
Publication Date: May 2016
Price: $18.00; ISBN: 978-1-933880-51-8
Distributed by: University Press of New England (UPNE), 800.421.1561 or 603.448.1533, Ext. 255

Orphans
by Joan Cusack Handler

OPRHANS by Joan Cusack Handler
Publication Date: March 2016
Price: $18.00; ISBN: 978-1-933880-56-3
Distributed by: University Press of New England (UPNE), 800.421.1561 or 603.448.1533, Ext. 255

The Baby Book
Poems by Robin Silbergleid

THE BABY BOOK by Robin Silbergleid
Publication Date: November 2015
Price: $16.00; ISBN: 978-1-933880-58-7
Distributed by: University Press of New England (UPNE), 800.421.1561 or 603.448.1533, Ext. 255

ONLY SO FAR by Robert Cording
Publication Date: October 2015
Price: $16.00; ISBN: 978-1-933880-49-5
Distributed by: University Press of New England (UPNE), 800.421.1561 or 603.448.1533, Ext. 255

UNIDENTIFIED SIGHING OBJECTS by Baron Wormser
Publication Date: September 2015
Price: $16.00; ISBN: 978-1-933880-47-1
Distributed by: University Press of New England (UPNE), 800-421-1561 or 603-448-1533, Ext. 255

ESTHER
A Novel in Verse
by Pam Bernard

ESTHER – A Novel in Verse, by Pam Bernard
Publication Date: April 2015
Price: $18.00; ISBN: 978-1-933880-48-8
Distributed by: University Press of New England (UPNE), 1-800-421-1561 or 603-448-1533, Ext. 255

LOVE’S LABORS by Brent Newsom
Publication Date: March 2015
Price: $16.00; ISBN: 978-1-933880-52-5
Distributed by: University Press of New England (UPNE), 800-421-1561 or 603-448-1533, Ext. 255

Poems by
Loren Graham

PLACES I WAS DREAMING by Loren Graham
Publication Date: February 2015
Price: $16.00; ISBN: 978-1-933880-45-7

MISERY ISLANDS by January Gill O’Neil
Publication Date: November 2014
Price: $16.00; ISBN: 978-1-933880-46-4
Distributed by: University Press of New England (UPNE), 800-421-1561 or 603-448-1533, Ext. 255

Poems by
Annie Boutelle

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

Poems by
David Keller

THE BAR OF THE FLATTENED HEART by David Keller
Publication Date: May 2014
Price: $16.00; ISBN: 978-1-933880-42-6
Distributed by: University Press of New England (UPNE), 1-800-421-1561 or 603-448-1533, Ext. 255

MY CROOKED HOUSE by Teresa Carson
Publication Date: May 2014
Price: $18.00; ISBN: 978-1-933880-43-3
Distributed by: University Press of New England (UPNE), 1-800-421-1561 or 603-448-1533, Ext. 255

SPOOKY ACTION AT A DISTANCE by Howard Levy
Publication Date: April 2014
Price: $16.00; ISBN: 978-1-933880-41-9
Distributed by: University Press of New England (UPNE), 1-800-421-1561 or 603-448-1533, Ext. 255

Poems
by Dawn Potter

SAME OLD STORY by Dawn Potter
Publication Date: March 2014
Price: $16.00; ISBN: 978-1-933880-40-2

Poems
by Dawn Potter

SAME OLD STORY by Dawn Potter
Publication Date: March 2014
Price: $16.00; ISBN: 978-1-933880-40-2

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

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

PRIMARY LESSONS by Sarah Bracey White
Publication Date: September 2013
Price: $21.00, ISBN: 978-1-933880-38-9
Distributed by: University Press of New England (UPNE), 1-800-421-1561 or 603-448-1533, Ext. 255