Torn Apart (Dechirures)

Mansour, Joyce

Gavronsky, Serge

Bitter Oleander Press

Poetry. "As a poet, Barfield is an alchemist distilling language from calla lilies, port wine, and skulls. Indeed, he approaches a wide range of subjects with extreme care, in the manner of a terrestrial saint on pilgrimage toward a visionary existence. His poems celebrate the unknown in the known with such subtle intensity that mystical life is achieved. With each poem, it seems, a sacred language emerges until the poem's very bones vibrate organic sounds. What radiates from these linguistic bones are brilliant waves of consciousness"-Alan Britt.

Festival of Stone

Literature & Fiction

Barfield, Steve

United States

Poetry. "Nicomedes Suarez-Arauz, Amazonian poet extraordinaire, has fashioned a collection of poems unique in the poetry of Latin America. Upon entering the poems of EDIBLE AMAZONIA the reader encounters abundant images, enticing flavors and, even more remarkable, a path brimming with fauna, trees, flowers and symbols that exhort us to the possibilities of delight that is the domain of true poetry. These texts are exquisite and enthrall the senses and palate with their allusiveness. In them, imagination and poetry conjoin to create a disturbing, graceful and mysterious language that ushers us into magic, myth, and dream"-from prologue by Marjorie Agosin.

Edible Amazonia: Twenty-One Poems from God's Amazonian Recipe Book

Suarez-Arauz, Nicomedes

Steven Ford Brown

Poetry

Poetry. "The imagery in Britt's poems connects itself to an idea or an emotion and is, therefore, deeper and more meaningful than embellishment or decoration. In this manner, a linguistic experience is born, one that is palpable to the five senses. No accent pieces needed-Britt does more than get close to the bone-he gets to the heart of the thing itself and makes it resonate with something deeper than exactitude. His images are painted as if vibrating, as if his letters were tuning forks. Britt's imagery, therefore, evokes a mood and meaning simultaneously"-Dr. Maura Gage, from her introduction.

Infinite Days

Britt, Alan

Teaching Bones to Fly

Christine Boyka Kluge

Poetry. Winner of the 2016 Bitter Oleander Library of Poetry Award (BOPLOPA).Call Me When You Get to Rosie'sby Austin LaGrone is a small package of poems which exudes a swollen intensity towards life and how it's immeasurably encountered the poet. Everything is in play for LaGrone, as in the back- cover comment by the poet Ronnie Yates: "These poems an efflorescence of rogues, carnies, workers and mystics, all brandishing the ordinary talismans of the last junk shop in the Marigny, poems, which, as Austin once told me, he writes then whittles down to chicken bones--speak in the tongues of men and angels and strumpets in kimonos patrolling sun-lit prison yards, poems which radiate, rot and stink sweet among their reedy contemporaries. Austin tells us where we can find him, he's with her 'in the back pocket of the Oldsmobile.' 'I want to poke her with a cheap umbrella, ' he admits, 'beneath a mutual communion of stars.' He'll poke you and you'll look up to receive the bread of the body and sidereal wine."

Call Me When You Get to Rosie's

Austin Lagrone

Poetry. Translated from the French by John Taylor in a bilingual edition. This book offers a representative selection of Pierre Voelin's poetry, ranging from his early books Sur la mort breve / On Brief Death (1984) and Les Bois calmes / The Calmed Woods (1987) to recent works such as Y. (2015) and Des voix dans l'autre langue / Voices in the Other Language (2015). In other words, since La Nuit osseuse (The Bony Night) section of On Brief Death was written during the years 1976- 1980, this SELECTED POEMS spans four decades and reveals the Swiss poet's recurrent themes of amorous exaltation (and loss), an individual's relationship to nature (and especially to a rural environment), the possibilities of a spiritual quest in the contemporary world, as well as the writer's role (or vulnerability) with respect to political iniquity or persecution. Up to now, Voelin has remained very little known in English-speaking countries. Yet he is one of the most important figures in contemporary Swiss francophone poetry. Born in 1949 in the village of Courgenay and then raised in the nearby small town of Porrentruy, both of which are located in the hilly Jura region of Switzerland, Voelin is a key poet in a generation that also comprises Frederic Wanderlere (b. 1949), Francois Deblue (b. 1950), Jose-Flore Tappy (b. 1954), and Sylviane Dupuis (b. 1956). It is a generation that has sometimes chosen thematic directions differing from those taken by their Swiss mentors, namely Anne Perrier (b. 1922), Philippe Jaccottet (b. 1925) and Pierre Chappuis (b. 1930), and that has conceived new poetics to continue to question man's place in the cosmos.

To Each Unfolding Leaf, Selected Poems: 1976 - 2015

Pierre Voélin

Born in 1915 on July the fourth, Christine Thonhauser (Lavant) was the ninth child of a miner, Georg, and his wife, Anna, and grew up in poverty. While the poetry she was later to write contained the language of spirituality, the pain she described in it came from actual conditions which she suffered: scrofula and tuberculosis of the lungs. Being disadvantaged in health also meant she could not complete her education as intended. Unable to do hard physical work, she earned a living with knitting and weaving until she gained a reputation as a writer. Along with these health problems, she had depression to endure. Poor hearing or blindness in her poetry were not conjured metaphors for a general condition. For example, the first stanza of a poem from Spindel I'm Mond: 
 Shatter the bell in my ear, slash the knot in my throat, warm my strangled heart and ripen my eyeballs. 
Writing sometimes in rhyme, sometimes in free verse, Lavant employed directness in her language. I have chosen more of the free verse poems to translate and when there is rhyme I find it preferable to hold on to tone and meaning than attempting to replicate the echoing sounds. The use of sun and moon and stars would easily become a cliché were it not for the unusual slant in the work. So strong was Lavant s connection to the commonplace elements that moon and stars become symbols illuminating her particular, troubled road to Heaven. Even glancing at first lines in several of the poems here displays this tendency: The moon s halo was never so large . . . I hear the heavy moon approaching . . . Ever closer to the Milky Way s edge . . . The moon s signal light

Shatter the Bell in My Ear: Selected Poems of Christine Lavant

Christine Lavant

David Chorlton

Translator

Tappy by no means abandons the deceptively simple, vivid, arresting imagery that has always characterized her poetry: here, the front of the house that becomes a gash in the darkness, the wall of nails, the keyboard of heads, the black-petal eiderdown, and the ladder of waves. Because of the suggestiveness of such symbols and word-pictures, one senses between the lines or behind the words something much deeper than that which can be summarily designated or described: the mystery of death itself, of course, but also certain aspects of this obviously intimate yet otherwise undefined relationship, which ever remains before words and yet becomes palpable, imaginable because of the poems. ---John Taylor, from his introduction

Sheds / Hangars (English and French Edition)

José-Flore Tappy

JOHN, TAYLOR

Poetry. Translated by David Keplinger. "One of the first Carsten René Nielsen poems I translated, now almost twenty years ago, was a little gem called 'X-Ray': 'She uses the tail of a fish skeleton as a fan. Musical tones pour out of her ears and float through the air like droplets; it is a room with no gravity. She dances slowly in place with her three most important tubes: the spine, and the windpipe, and the arms, which work as a balancing rod. Together they form three white lines in the dark. Her face is not seen.'"--from David Keplinger's introduction"The collaborative act is one of simultaneous engagement and removal. While you are the vehicle for this work in the new language, you have to be like the skin of the woman in 'X-Ray,' where only the barest bones of influence shine through. And your face must not be seen. There is something beautiful about the unexpected returns of this work. It would seem that the more invisible one tries to be, the more the benefit to one's own art and one's own life."--from World Cut Out with Crooked Scissors (New Issues, 2007)

Forty-one Objects

Carsten Rene Nielsen

History & Criticism

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