In this resource for beginner poets who need help finding inspiration for their writing, Dr. Houston provides practical advice through prompts, sample poems, and information about literary journals and online writing resources.

The Poet's Playground: Writing Exercises For Beginners

Literature & Fiction

Houston, Dr. Lynn Marie

Poetry

Five Oaks Press

The Adventures of Willy and Billy is an exciting yet educational tale about the misadventures of a pair of young fish who inhabit the ?Magic Lake'. We learn that the young fish in the lake attend school in the old church that lies submerged on the lake bottom. A large catfish by the name of Chester is responsible for ringing the church bell each morning to call the young fish to school where Mrs. Carp teaches her young students all the important things young fish need to know.During summer vacation, Willy coaxes his best friend Billy to swim too close to the water intake for the power turbines at the dam, with predictably disastrous results. Willy survives his hazardous trip through the turbines but ends up in the river a hundred feet below the dam with little hope of ever seeing his family and friends again. But through resourcefulness, and a miraculous series of events, Billy manages to return to the Magic Lake and is reunited with his family and his friend Willy to live happily ever-after, or at least until their next misadventure.

Adventures of Willy and Billy

David Klett

Book Two of the Lake Lure Chronicles. Children's picture book story set in the Lake Lure area of North Carolina. Illustrated in full color watercolors.

THE LAKE LURE CHRONICLES BOOK 2 Rachel and the Wizard of Lake Lure

Brendan Walsh’s Make Anything Whole is crafted from the best facets of both travel writing and the poetry of place. Among these pages, readers find the estranged familiarity of coming back to one's home and country after traveling abroad. Taking us on the road as he experiences Laos, Korea, and then re-experiences the United States, Walsh chronicles the characters he meets along the way and ultimately discovers that you can take home with you wherever you go. His life-affirming experiences are set against a backdrop of interactions told through the sociological poetic eye.

Make Anything Whole

Walsh, Brendan

In this work, Rosemarie Dombrowki's poetry dwells between the verbal and the nonverbal through her creation of gripping symbols to represent the everyday life she shares with her autistic son. The result is a lyrical, visceral dance that entices the reader into a music-world of language to sway together with Dombrowski and her son as they navigate the hostilities of medical specialists, the ignobilities of the body, and discover a makeshift communication of sounds and images, where we hang precariously, along with her, between the good days and the bad ones.

Book of Emergencies

Dombrowski, Rosemarie

In J.R. Solonche’s short collection of poems centered around his experience of a heart-attack and subsequent recovery, we find a turning inward to the experience of consciousness as its existence is threatened by the failures of the body. He broaches dying with a matter-of-factness, as one of many wounds to his sense of self. The poems in Heart’s Content are meditations on perspective as mediated by the body’s senses. They confront, in sometimes playful style, the mind-body split that undergirds Western culture from at least the time of Descartes’s slogan “I think therefore I am.”Through a radically fresh understanding of his own mortality, Solonche radiates hope in equal parts with regret. He does not go gently into an old age of austerity and physical deprivation brought on by doctor’s counsel about how to live in the wake of a heart-attack. The loneliness and solitude of cold, white hospital spaces is tempered with hopeful images of the afterlife as “a long nap out of doors / some afternoon at the very end of summer, / the first Sunday of September say, perhaps / in the outsized hammock slung between/ the two black birch trees out back.” Heart’s Content is a memento mori grounded in the arteries and organs, the movement of the body’s blood. It is the reflective voice of the poet as he makes ready for the grave. But not yet. Above all, in Heart’s Content J.R. Solonche reminds us to live.

Heart's Content

Solonche, J.R.

SHE, a quintet of wind-swept poems, is a compact memoir tracing the steps of a diffident child as she becomes a confident woman who simultaneously follows the rules and pushes the boundaries. She chooses a man who deals in the “uncommon currencies” of bear hugs and laughter, recalls the rumbly-tumbly of her now adult children, shoulders an array of civic duties, accepts—bewildered—widowhood. Love comes again, almost stealthily, then rooted like the trees she celebrates. The fifth poem, a prayer, leads the reader toward the future, acknowledging fear and affirming joy. Lucky reader. ~Paula Bevington, Attorney, civic and business leader, AtlantaEve Hoffman, in SHE, offers us the gift of a rich and deeply-experienced life, a woman’s life seen through the prism of the poet’s craft. In language that’s both lyrical and accessible--the direct language of the everyday lifted to the level of song, of praises--she creates a vibrant and meticulously interwoven narrative that pulls the reader along, and further along, and ever more deeply into the world and the life that this generous poet shares with us. SHE is a work of sustained beauty and creative energy, the kind of beauty and creative energy that can sustain us all.~Cecilia Woloch, Award-winning poet, Los Angeles and ParisEve Hoffman, SHE, invites us to take a journey into a life unfolding, lovingly experienced with the full range of human emotions. No road maps are needed as we move along her journey, drawn in and moved by the depth and vulnerability of her personal exploration. SHE is a celebration of a complex life shaped by events that define our generation and inform our humanness. ~Dr. Shimon Waldfogel, Psychiatrist, Philadelphia

Hoffman, Eve

With wry humor and poignant contemplation, Breakup/Breakdown provides readers with excellent company, whether recalling breakups of their own or simply witnessing the narrative of the book’s hero. In the poem “Disruption,” our speaker advises that, “Love, my friends, should never / be entrusted to the heart, whose job // is to push away the only thing / the world will ever offer it.” In the midst of loss that is both personal and universal, Jensen conjures familiar figures, from literature to film, to offer another dimension of insight on the path from sorrow to empowerment. This chapbook has all the emotional heft of a full-length collection, and every line glistens with truth.-- Mary Biddinger, author of Small Enterprise

Breakup/Breakdown

Jensen, Charles

The poems in Hard Inheritance are set firmly in the poet’s “ancestral terrain” of small-town Florida. The landscape is lovingly but unsentimentally brought to the page, and it is peopled by the poet’s family, friends, neighbors, and fellow parishioners, with “the calm assurance of traveled/trails with familiar footholds.” These truly are “songs sculpted by home’s hard structures.” ~Andrew Hudgins, National Book Award Finalist and author of The Joker: A Memoir and American Rendering: New and Selected Poems and other critically acclaimed worksWhat is architecture, without its inhabitants? “In our heart pine handmade farm house, / my grandparents were window weights: // cast iron bars tethered in country wood, / plumb and place-holding pendulums.” What is a field, without the hands that tend it? In Hard Inheritance, John Davis Jr. recognizes the potent ecosystems of everyday life, as in “What the Grove Knows”: “Stirred soil lifts its secrets to the sky. / Revealed and overturned crickets / invite snowy egrets who eat them.” Readers will enjoy taking a joy ride on an untethered dock, hunting down poisonous white frogs, harvesting worms before a father and son’s angling expedition, and hand-nestling one newspaper section into another before the morning’s delivery. Yet these poems resist mere nostalgia; the author's voice is attentive, conversational, and wise to how class shapes the landscape at hand. Given graceful and balanced stanzas, consonance of word choice, and the unexpected glimmer of a pantoum, I admire both Davis's rigors of craft and vitality of spirit. ~Sandra Beasley, author of I Was the Jukebox and Count the WavesJohn Davis Jr.’s Hard Inheritance offers us a fine collection of well-built poems. Vivid images drawn from Florida’s flora and fauna, the pressures and rewards of family life, and work ranging from the orange grove to the printing press balance Davis Jr.’s heart-breaking restraint and precise diction. Heir in part to Seamus Heaney and to Claudia Emerson, Davis Jr. has made of his literary and literal ancestry a singular twenty-first century voice.~John Hennessy, author of Coney Island Pilgrims, poetry editor of The Common

Hard Inheritance

Davis Jr., John

Furious beating. In many ways that is what great poetry is, and that is what we find in KT Landon’s marvelous first book. Furious beating because poetry is always fighting against a world that is not what we thought it could be. And so here, it is inevitable death that seems at first to haunt the poet, from the Dead who occasionally make their cameo appearances to reminders to the poet’s husband about mortality, and a kind of worry, a wondering “if words could save anything from anything.” But the plain and marvelous fact is that simply facing it is a way of understanding and then transcending it, and this Landon does superbly in poems that rise like the birds in one poem “mastering the air—a furious beating / of wings and hearts, an insistence / that gravity is not the last or only law.” It isn’t, as we learn here, and that is the essential gift this book brings. ~Richard Jackson, author of Traversings (with Robert Vivian) and RetrievalsAt once colloquial and elegant, Orange, Dreaming illuminates questions of love, the afterlife, the nature of God, and the nature of knowledge with refreshing clarity and never a hint of abstraction. It offers instead crisp, surprising gestures, gathering elements of childhood obsession and memory, along with daily images—vegetables left in the fridge past their prime, an effort to free a crane fly from the dishwasher—into meditations that bloom with intelligence and carry the reader gently, often with humor, always with empathy, into realms philosophers and theologians inhabit more doggedly. It is a true pleasure to ride the waves of observation, image, and insight in this gem of a book. ~Leslie Ullman, author of Library of Small Happiness (essays) and Progress on the Subject of Immensity (poems)

Orange, Dreaming

Landon, K.T.

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