Rhododendron Shedding Its Skin is full of shaman poems and Goddess mythology. This book has sharper edges than her first collection, but they open to a new level of vision. The poet depends on touch rather than vision to see the real world; often the eyes are used to look beyond reality.

Rhododendron Shedding Its Skin

Frank, Diane

Blue Light Press

The Houses Are Covered In Sound

Literature & Fiction

Ludwig, Helen

Poetry

Winner of the 2021 Blue Light Poetry Prize\nGary Young's most recent books are That's What I Thought, winner of the Lexi Rudnitsky Editor's Choice Award from Persea Books, and Precious Mirror, translations from the Japanese. His books include Even So: New and Selected Poems; Pleasure; No Other Life, winner of the William Carlos Williams Award; Braver Deeds, winner of the Peregrine Smith Poetry Prize; The Dream of a Moral Life, which won the James D. Phelan Award; and Hands. He has received grants from the NEH, NEA, and the California Arts Council, among others. In 2009 he received the Shelley Memorial Award from the Poetry Society of America. He teaches creative writing and directs the Cowell Press at UC Santa Cruz. 
ENDORSEMENTS 
"Since the 1970s, Young has been publishing almost unbelievably intimate and precise poems. . . Young writes with a unique combination of wisdom and terror, engendering a kind of sad calm, a hard-earned acceptance of life's difficulty and openness to its beauty."- Publishers Weekly"There's glow, wonder, in all his writing, even the poems of terrible pain, where wonder bathes the strangeness of the circumstances themselves, bathes the strength of spirit that allows those circumstances to be survived. . . He's become one of our most piercing, luminous prose poets."- Richard Silberg, Poetry Flash

Red Cedar, Red Pine

Self-Help

YOUNG, GARY

Relationships

Winner of the 2022 Blue Light Book Award\nFlorence Weinberger was born in New York City, raised in the Bronx, educated at Hunter College, California State University, Northridge and UCLA, and has worked as a teacher, legal investigator and consumer advocate. She is the author of five published collections of poetry, The Invisible Telling Its Shape, Breathing Like a Jew, Sacred Grafitti and Ghost Tattoo. Five times nominated for a Pushcart Prize, and for Best of the Net, her poetry has appeared in a number of literary magazines, including The Comstock Review, Antietam Review, Rockvale Review, Nimrod, Poetry East, Solo, Rattle, Baltimore Review, The Los Angeles Review, Cultural Weekly, Calyx, Miramar, The River Styx, December, Another Chicago Magazine, North American Review, The Los Angeles Review, Salt, Epoc hand Shenandoah.\nENDORSEMENTS\n"Some poetry simply must be written. It has an urgency that stops us and makes us reflect about our lives, our collective histories, our pain, our joy. Florence's poetry has that quality. Her narrative voice seems effortless, filled with compelling images that magnify her thoughts and emotions. Her poetry grabs us because it's informed by a life fully lived, with all of its hardships and pleasures."- Stewart Florsheim, author of Amusing the Angels (forthcoming from Blue Light Press) It is called "Agapanthus, Jacaranda, Bougainvillea," and it is one of the most beautiful love letters to a city, in this case Los Angeles, that I have ever read. I don't mean "beautiful" as in a touching sentiment - a "beautiful" thought. I mean beautiful as in gorgeous. It's also one of many poems in this collection that I find so fresh, vibrant and consummately skillful it rather depresses me - that a poet can write so well for so long and not be more widely appreciated. I hope These Days of Simple Mooring will get the attention it deserves.- Suzanne Lummis In the poem Whole Grains and Hard, Harmonious Ways Florence Weinberger writes, I take the measure of time. /What's mine was my mother's first/ and asks, How do I spend these final years? Her collection of new and selected poems shows us her answer. We follow her journey of flesh, bone and spirit into the anguish of history which animates the present because her artful amalgam of humor and fierce attention, compassion and hard earned wisdom pulls us from whatever might lull us into mere existence. These poems are gifts that break your heart and fill it with light often in the same stanza, sometimes in the same line. Florence's life work shines with clarity that springs from her piercing vision and fearless voice in which human experience becomes music. I fold darkness into the light, a song I heard sung/ in an ancient tongue.- Mary Kay Rummel, Ventura County poet laureate emerita

These Days of Simple Mooring

Weinberger, Florence

Finalist, 2022 Blue Light Book Award Pat Underwood grew up on an Iowa farm, married her high school sweetheart, and together they raised two sons on a country hillside northwest of Colfax, Iowa where the plentiful wildlife inspired many of her poems. After receiving her college degree at the age of 44, she worked in early education and retired in 2017 from her employment with the State of Iowa. Former publications include two poetry chapbooks - Portraits (Finishing Line Press 2017) and Gatherings (Celestial Light Press 2007). Her play kit The Last Supper (Meriwether Publishing Ltd.; Contemporary Drama Service 1997) travels the nation. Underwood's poems received a 2001 Pushcart Prize Nomination, a 1996 Founder's Award, and a 2002 Founder's Award from the National Federation of State Poetry Societies. "These poems of quiet contemplation and gentle celebration of life carve their images out of an understated language elegant in its directness and radiant in its clarity. Whether remembering her childhood, commemorating beloved family members, reliving the loss of a husband, or observing the landscape of her rural home, Pat Underwood welcomes us into kinship with where she lives. Her precise attention to the natural world and her calmly passionate response to her surroundings help to illuminate the caterpillars, wood ducks, cattle, cottonwoods, and characters she reveals to us. Of earthworms, Underwood writes, they resurrect the holy ground. The same might be said of these poems. Each one revives in us the very act of seeing."- Jeanne Emmons, author of The Red Canoe"Reading Pat Underwood's Where I Live is like sitting with the poet on a porch swing at her home in the country and letting the beauty of her warmth and tenderness cascade over you in a healing wash. These poems are honest, perceptive, deeply felt, and superbly articulated with crisp imagery that resonates long after you've read them. They deal with the sadness and joy of family, love and nature, even tragedy with the calmest and clearest of hearts. She speaks as if she knows you, as if you and she are friends, as well you will be after venturing deep in the heart of where she lives. It is well worth the visit."- Michael Carey, author of The Holy Ground"Pat Underwood's voice is one singing out from the fields of Iowa. Embrace her words and listen to the melodies of rural America."- Loretta Diane Walker, author of Day Begins When Darkness Is in Full Bloom"Anyone who's read Pat Underwood's poems knows her clear and lyrical images of rural Iowa life: Snake grass, wild and outstretched/slithers along the creek bank (Country Road). But the poems in her new book live in the wider world, too, of family and travel, of love and grief, of doubt and acceptance. Not even mosquitoes, she says in The Dinner Party, can spoil/my sense of being a woman - /this place of our beautiful selves. Where I Live is Pat Underwood at the top of her game - a beautiful, lyric book."- Keith Ratzlaff, author of Who's Asking?

Where I Live

Underwood, Pat

Just Outside the Tunnel of Love

Witte, Francine

Winner, 2022 Blue Light Book Award In this richly diverse mélange of human lives, many actual and many imagined, Stewart Florsheim embraces the light and the dark much as his beloved Rembrandt employed chiaroscuro to reveal the complexity of a single individual, and thus, all individuals. Florsheim's vision is encompassing, with room enough for the emotional convolutions of family, Holocaust survivors, spiritual seekers, intimate partners, world travelers, artists, and even total strangers. Taking his cue from Aristotle, and perhaps from the painters he admires, he approaches life from theparticular. Pulsing through the array of details is the tempered passion of someone who considers desire as "the trembling to be whole." - Thomas Centolella, author of Almost Human Here, as in his previous collections, Stewart Florsheim combines closely observed detail with moments of transcendence-sometimes metaphorical, other times supernatural-that conjure the lost world of European Jewry, the intimate sphere of his family life, and the lines of blood and spirit that connect the two. He steps into famous paintings as if through a looking glass and renders public events with evocative brushwork. Having read his poetry for more than thirty years, I am impressed by how consistent his body of work is and grateful for the rich worldview it provides. - Scott Norton, author of Developmental Editing: A Guide for Freelancers, Authors, and Publishers, Second Edition (forthcoming 2023) In his third full-length poetry collection from Blue Light Press, Stewart Florsheim wrestles with the possibilities and contradictions of what it means today to be a man. The child of a Holocaust survivor, he lends his poetic voice to the lost and dispossessed, "amusing the angels," perhaps, by evoking his forebears, with insight and tenderness, in all their flawedhumanity. Many of these poems can be read as prayers, as when he recalls his adolescent terror at facing the high jump in gym class, "hoping my wings won't get mangled/as I ascend above the trees/into the incandescent light." Without ignoring any of the familiar impulses orvanities of a husband, father, and successful man of the world, he nonetheless embraces the vulnerability of his anima. Making pesto with his daughter, he confides how much he loves the smell of basil, evoking Italian landscapes he hopes to share with her someday. His ekphrastic poems could be a volume all of their own, filled with the color, light, and stories of the paintings that come under his knowledgeable and imaginative gaze. Everything in daily life, from taking out the trash to sexual desire -"the trembling to be whole" - comes under the poet's lens as he strives to "discover the pleasures of being vigilant."- Barbara Quick, author of The Light on Sifnos and What Disappears

Amusing the Angels

Florsheim, Stewart

Winner, 2022 Blue Light Poetry Prize Charles Rammelkamp is Prose Editor for BrickHouse Books in Baltimore, where he lives with his wife, Abby. The two are retired from federal government service. Rammelkamp is the author of several collections of monologue. &#65279;&#65279;There have been many biographies of Harry Houdini but nothing quite like A Magician Among the Spirits, a nod to Houdini's own book by the same title. Charles Rammelkamp gets right under Houdini's skin to create a first person poetic autobiography of sorts that brings the world's most famous escape artist to life. A Magician Among the Spirits is a fast moving, deeply engrossing story of magic, transformation, drama, mystery, travel, and trauma in 55 poems that trace the course of Houdini's life, from his first dabblings in magic to his slightly mysterious death described in the coda by bereaved wife Beatrice. A striking portrayal of Houdini, as richly lyrical as it is engrossing. - Magdalena Ball, Editor-in-chief, Compulsive ReaderCharles Rammelkamp's engaging book of poems, A Magician Among the Spirits, presents the life of America's best-known magician, Harry Houdini. Escape becomes obsession, motif, and metaphor in this astonishing book. A Magician Among the Spirits, which appropriately takes its title from Houdini's own account of his campaign to expose fraudulent mediums, is a series of autobiographical monologues in Houdini's voice, with his wife, Bess, providing a coda after his death. These well-researched poems incorporate a wealth of detail, and reading this book is like listening to an entertaining raconteur. A Magician Among the Spirits will fascinate and delight both magicians and readers with a casual curiosity about Houdini. Rammelkamp is an impressive writer - both accomplished poet and masterful storyteller. - Miriam N. Kotzin, author of Debris Field. (David Robert Books 2017)

A Magician Among the Spirits

Biographies & Memoirs

Rammelkamp, Charles

Historical

All In Measure - A Book of Hours, 2020-2022

Saunders Estes, Heather

Praise for Shy LandsThere is a subtle and proficient music in Diane Jarvenpa's poems. They derive their power from how deeply she sees and listens to herself and to the earth. In Shy Lands she welcomes us into a world quite similar to her description of her mother's garden, its "precision of beauty, intricate storytelling, a knowledge of what blends, what harmonizes, what stands alone." And we become aware that despite the sorrow and anguish we might feel about the hell that humans have made of much of our natural world, we can still immerse ourselves in what has not been lost. Her poems remind us that we can find solace and belonging in that "light" and "articulate wonder" which can "fit so completely into the grooves of all our shadows." We can both celebrate and grieve earth's wonders, those which are extinct and those which are gloriously still with us - if we immerse ourselves in the natural world and "let it enter and grow in our bodies."- Freya Manfred, author of Loon in Late November WaterWhile Diane Jarvenpa is a self-described shy person from a shy family in a shy land, she is a fierce poet. Jarvenpa's new book, Shy Lands, describes an imaginatively-animated world, a quiet family in the background, all the elements of nature which the poet has observed, consumed, and returned to the reader in another form through some exercise of magical alchemy. As I was reading her manuscript, I made notes in the margin - "Beautiful!" - "Beautiful! - until I figured I should come up with a word other than - "Beautiful." So here's the word - "Transformational". I have been transformed by these poems which is what great poetry does. Praise and Transform. Jarvenpa praises everything within her considerable range - "stamps, maps, lily pads, " "a comet or a wild fire." The old dog - "She is your teacher now./Scholar with tail, /Athena with canines." Shy Lands, the country Diane Jarvenpa inhabits, the country we all inhabit, is ravaged and threatened, but still, with her power to convert the observed into a "cold wild song," she finds for all of us some kind of inspired redemption.- Tim Nolan, author of LinesDiane Jarvenpa's latest collection, Shy Lands, teaches us how to engage the natural world with the careful listening of an introvert, "pushed by the wind...hearing the drops of dew." Her attention draws us to the tiny things that make up a whole landscape, and that, she tells us, "is where the village of [her] mind has brought [her]." She uses words the way an impressionist painter deploys color, "know[ing] how all this works, the close and the distant, / the heap and faded, / the swoop and the click." This new beauty is only possible in a shy and quiet land, the one she creates for us here.- Joyce Sutphen, author of Carrying Water to the Field

Shy Lands

Jarvenpa, Diane

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