Erudite but not divorced from the deepest wells of emotion, the poems of Joseph Spece’s Roads take the reader on a splendid journey.

Roads

Literature & Fiction

Spece, Joseph

Poetry

Cherry Grove Collections

Marcene Gandolfo's poems find many angles on, and many departures from, loss into presence, memory and experience into a shapely art.

Angles of Departure

Gandolfo, Marcene

Butterfly is a book-length single poem divided into three sections, each section containing untitled segments. Although the book is meant to be read in order, Butterfly is not a straight narrative; rather it is a lyric sequence grounded in the narrative circumstance of the deaths of a twin brother and mother. As such, the poem is an elegy, an exploration of grief within the particulars of both the twin dyad and the triad of mother and twins. Like all elegies, Butterfly is as much about the bereaved as the lost beloved, exploring family memories and mysteries of loyalty, conflict, love, and identity within the context of one family member's tragic self-destruction.

Butterfly

Kerr, Diane

Bird Watching at the End of the World by Lisa Mangini explores the consequences of living in a body, the psyches of philosophers, and the tenuous nature of human connection. Using a range of poetic styles from formal verse to sprawling prose, this collection returns again and again to the persistence of doubt--even toward those we love the most.

Bird Watching at the End of the World

Mangini, Lisa

Holding the dark at bay, the dreamlike poems of Gay Giordano's Waking From So Rich A Nightmare stand against the unknown, intuiting with wit and vision that which we can perceive, even if only fleetingly.

Waking From So Rich a Night Mare

Giordano, Gay

Gayl Teller's Hidden in Plainview is a celebration and an interrogation of our mortal world, seeking glimpses of the larger truths shrouded in the earth's lovely and disturbing particulars.

Hidden in Plainview

Teller, Gayl

In October House by Bonny Barry Sanders, we discover a sequence of memory segments that flash back and haunt us—sometimes with the fantasy of allegory, sometimes with painful realism—but with all segments united through the many years and between the four walls of an old house.  The architecture of the house serves to suggest both an actual place and a conscious, mental construct of qualities. It evokes a transcendence. Bird song, musical structure, and strong assonance underpin this work. The architecture of the book, like the old house, is defined as well as fluid. Like the architecture of an orchestral piece, it begins with the tonic chord, moves, digresses, modulates, presents variations  upon  themes, and finally returns to the tonic chord. The book explores the ways we must find strength to return home, not necessarily to a place, but to "the language we would speak again."

October House

Sanders, Bonny Barry

Some years ago, when a young filmmaker made a documentary about a poetry group—four women midway in a decades-long journey together—the poets came up with a name: In the Margins. In the margin of professional lives and friendships, in the margin of births and deaths and raising children, in the margin of war and resistance to war. The poets don’t mean to suggest that the writing of poetry is peripheral, but rather that it is integral to those narratives.

In the Margins

Higgins, Christine

O'Toole, Kathleen

Mysko, Madeleine

LoLordo, Ann

The poems of Rita Satz' There You Are never lose sight of the humanity behind their subjects, people of flesh and bone and heart, nor of their grounded specificity.

There You Are

Satz, Rita

Allen Lee Ireland's LONERS AND MOTHERS explores the complicated psychology of loners within a variety of contexts, their obsession with family, and their many means of escape from what they perceive as a dark and frightening world. Like the woods in Frost's famous poem, Ireland's verse is "lovely, dark, and deep." Yet, through it all, there is respect for existence and an abiding concern for the individual life."LONERS AND MOTHERS is a collection of poetry short enough to be read in a single sitting, but powerful enough to stay with the reader for far longer. Ireland has the gift, at his best, of capturing a brilliant image in a few words, and then imbuing that image with a deeper, more profound meaning and purpose. This is a graceful and thoughtful collection of poems, a bright example of what can be done with a few short lines and a gift for phrasing and imagery."--IndieReader"Ireland's collection proves him to be a poet's poet. His techique is carefully deployed without being flamboyantly displayed, proving him to be a craftsman of real subtlety. It's hard to read through without thinking of Robert Frost, but Ireland's tact prevails, and the influence is only a haunting echo. There are many treasures hidden throughout the book, and it will be a pleasure for astute readers to seek them out. This is a vibrant compilation that will appeal to poetry aficionados and amateurs alike."--Kirkus"In LONERS AND MOTHERS we are presented with quiet poems that work to illuminate the inner life cast in stark contrast to the outer world we all see. The title for this collection seems to this reader to be wistful and intriguing, setting up a kind of relation that the collection will explore. The poems here are not broken into sections, which makes for an immersive and continuous reading experience but misses a chance to strengthen the collection through thematic divisions. The first line of a poem is a chance to immediately set an arresting scene or pivotal image, to establish the overall dynamic of a poem. I noticed many poems here where this was handled with great dexterity, where the first line was compelling and immediately absorbed me in the world of the poem. A poem like 'The Woman in the Window' is a good example of what this collection does well. Objects and moment are invested with more than average power, going deeper than description." --Writer's Digest

Loners and Mothers

Ireland, Allen Lee

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Books by Cherry Grove Collections