Poetry. Winner of the 2007 Cider Press Review Book Award, selected by the Editors of Cider Press. The poems in ABUNDANCE richly mine often overlooked details of the natural world, wisely juxtaposing them with daily life. Like a landscape photographer, Chapman conveys the narrator's story by the views witnessed, until the collection becomes a celebration of the lost art of leaving the house. She interweaves the personal with the objectively experiential so carefully that we lose sight of the "boundary" between the prairies, marshes, woods and rivers and the lives of those people fortunate enough to be immersed in these landscapes. The narrator ceases to be a mere observer of the natural world; instead she comes to occupy her rightful place as another integral element. So much of life is consumed and occluded by the very process of living that we miss the abundant world around us because we forget to reckon it, to open our eyes. The impetus of this collection is simple: Chapman would have us all remember to "pay attention, pay / attention, pay attention."

Abundance

Literature & Fiction

Chapman, Robin

Poetry

Cider Press Review

Magazine. Poetry. Reviews. CIDER PRESS REVIEW, a journal of contemporary poetry, seeks to discover and publish the best of new poetry written in English. CPR actively seeks new original work and translations into English from both established and emerging poets. Our only criterion is excellence. This issue features work from 86 authors, including Susan Allen, Andreas Avelino, Edward Beatty, Meghan Brinson, Kevin Burris, Thomas P. Feeny, Marc Harshman, Keetje Kuipers, Ed Madden, Philip Memmer, Michelle Moore, Arlene Naganawa, Kathryn Nuernberger, Geri Rosenzweig, Doug Ramspeck, Eric Paul Schaffer, Tim Suermondt, Paul Willis, Matthew Zingg and more.

CIDER PRESS REVIEW, VOLUME 10

History & Criticism

Poetry. "The voice that calls over time distinguishes this shining debut book of poems, ACETYLENE. Moving through centuries, through other languages, through myths and stories, Carol Quinn's work gathers emotions and events that call to the reader, making us aware of how difficult is it to connect, and how necessary. The poems carry a quiet charge that releases over their entire span"—Molly Peacock.

Acetylene

Quinn, Carol

Poetry. Winner of the 2010 Cider Press Review Book Award, selected by Patricia Smith. "Liz Robbins's poems are smart, savvy, dangerous, and as bold as the big hoop earrings her characters are fond of wearing. Robbins does not shy away from the provocative or mischievously formal. By turns elegiac and political, poppy and poignant, PLAY BUTTON reconciles the good girl with the bad girl in us all."—Denise Duhamel

Play Button

Robbins, Liz

Poetry. Winner of the 2011 Cider Press Review Book Award, selected by Jeanne Marie Beaumont. Beaumont writes, "Somewhat indescribable, as original things often are, the poems of Joseph Fasano feel hunted, gathered, built like fires, brewed like storms. Elemental and feral, FUGUE FOR OTHER HANDS is full of disturbing deeds and haunted rituals. At once mythic and specific, these poems are blood-stained, grief-scarred, providing their solace only from their commitment to art's depths. 'Say you were the wild gift,' one poem states; Fasano has such a gift, and therefore with his bare hands and torn heart makes poems worth living in."

Fugue for Other Hands

Fasano, Joseph

Poetry. Winner of the 2012 Cider Press Review Book Award. "I am dazzled by PHRASEBOOK FOR THE PLEIADES and humbled, and gladdened, for these are works of strong polyvalence and resonance. They ricochet about the brain and cause that singing linguistic frisson I think of as intellectual beauty, one of poetry's most scintillating gifts to the life of the mind... Each has the intractability of the ideal: the ideal rider on the ideal horse, the poet knowing when to pull in the reins and stop. I felt my pulse quicken reading these poems and my desire to have written them myself was quickly extinguished by gratitude that Lorraine Doran has. They're here: they're in the world: you can read them! Oh please read them. If you care at all about what's going on in contemporary poetry, you will, and if you don't care, these poems may cause you to care."—Gray Jacobik, contest judge

Phrasebook for the Pleiades (Cider Press Review)

Doran, Lorraine

Poetry. "Joseph Fasano's stunning second collection of poems, INHERITANCE, offers us poem after poem of fierce beauty and visionary power, work whose subtext is always the vigilance of a restless dialectic, a kind of music that listens, that longs to transfigure suffering without violating its factual heartbreak."—Bruce Bond

Inheritance (Cider Press Review)

Poetry. "Lovely and urgent in their strangeness, the poems in Laura Donnelly's Watershed conjure spaces to dwell in and return to, spaces of astonishment held by a deft ear for inner experience and a numinous power to sense back toward the ancestral, never 'forgetting even our not-knowing,' and calling upon us 'to grasp / barefoot the breakwaters / and fossil ourselves to that wall.' To read these lyrics is to want to flesh out and stay here, woven into her artful and sensitive music—'to move through this world in waves, my love—it's a wonder we cross paths at all'—and yet WATERSHED leads us to the precipice of that wonder again and again."—Jennifer K. Sweeney "These poems by Laura Donnelly—clarity, yes. Grace absolutely. And desire's long shot. But it's their edge that fills us with past unto future and dread's empathy, how a dark brilliant Botticelli hangs in an old-world hospital 'where typhoid once / lingered below the good angel,' or that 'the first half / of the film...sets you up / to feel worse in the end.' Maybe poems are omens, maybe not. But you don't feel worse. You deepen instead, reading this work. Like the fine musician she is, Donnelly makes us listen hard to Bach, to everything because 'the theme / is only the starting point.' Amid stars and birds, there's complication. 'And I think / I too fear,' she tells us."—Marianne Boruch "In this book Laura Donnelly explores 'the principle of flickering:' how, if we look at anything—or each other—closely enough, we might just detect a being in motion, a thing or a soul in the process of changing. If, as Donnelly argues, 'we move through this world in waves... / it's a wonder we cross paths at all.' And yet this is a book of crossings and encounters, observer with painting, musician with elusive notes, cloud shadow with wharf, lover with lover, the flickering of change—nothing holds still—and the loss and the beauty and sometimes the wonder of that. What an exquisite debut collection!"—Nancy Eimers

Watershed

Donnelly, Laura

Poetry. "Authorities say a man was stabbed to death, decapitated and partly cannibalized in what appears to be a random act of violence on board a bus that was en route to Winnipeg late Wednesday." With these starkly haunting words from a 2008 Canadian news report, Joseph Fasano begins VINCENT, a book-length poem based on Vince Li's killing of Tim McLean on a Greyhound bus near Portage la Prairie, Manitoba. Using a fictionalized first-person narrative from the perspective of the killer, Fasano explores the inner workings of a disturbed mind trying to come to terms with a horrific act that even its perpetrator cannot fully comprehend. "Have you smelled the rose oil / in the shoes of the dead... have you woken / and woken / and woken," the speaker asks us. And the poem will not let us say no.

Vincent

Poetry. Winner of the 2013 Cider Press Review Book Award, selected by Charles Harper Webb. "Pain, love, regret, joy, longing, loss, humor, and an earthy sexuality all find memorable expression in these poems. Ash has a gift for reversing reader expectations in illuminating ways, as well as for coining metaphors that startle with their aptness and their ability to refresh the world. I congratulate Amy Ash on having written this book, and you, reader, for the journey you are about to make."—Charles Harper Webb

The Open Mouth of the Vase

Ash, Amy

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