William Carlos Williams is alive and well, living and writing in Crescent City, California. Bright Darkness reveals Ken Letko, as Mr. Williams apparently now calls himself, dancing on the edge of redwood-high enjambments. But that hardly describes his word-magic. A better way to talk about his poems comes from these lines: ". . . always alive / I must navigate / in the never-ending / moment of transport . . . " So his language moves, and thus, so do we. — John Bradley, author of Terrestrial Music “Why have I spent so much of my life trying to be like an ant, nine times stronger than a human?” asks poet Ken Letko, in his full-length debut, Bright Darkness. That’s easy. Because, by striving with such strength, Ken's given the world his unique, big-hearted worldview distilled between the covers of a book. — Rebecca Lawton, author of Steelies and Other Endangered Species

Bright Darkness

Literature & Fiction

Letko, Ken

Poetry

Flowstone Press

"Dear Judith Arcana Not only do I like your book, I love it. Could there ever be a collection more endearing? Great wit, music, and pacing. Vivid passionate hungers, all stitched through the nubby fabric of aging with gorgeous shining threads. We can wrap ourselves right up in these poems for courage and verve. Sincerely yours, Naomi Shihab Nye" 
Announcements from the Planetarium examines aging and changing, wisdom and memory, and includes poems from Arcana’s Mixtape Series and her Speculative Music Theory quartet. 
According to Judith Vollmer, "Judith Arcana’s poems [are] both familiar and refreshingly strange .... jagged elegies on 'time available' and 'the short version,' dazzling crows, lonely streets, and mournful seers, with a hyper-realist eye on the past. Wisdom-riffs earned (wryly) 'perhaps as compensation' counterpoint her portraits of loss: of land, water, and the 'grandmothers [who]/could move like flowers' yet who, “When we came here, […] would not come.” And then: she slips away to an urgent world of 'wind, shining like the flash inside/my skull—' [to] revere and celebrate freedom ...."

Announcements from the Planetarium

Arcana, Judith

Shadows Within the Roaring Fork

Smith, Jared

Coreen Davis Hampson's 'Growing Smaller' is her first collection of poems. Her poems are rooted in the images and rhythms of the natural world. They are personal and experiential, addressing cultural and environmental issues. Whether speaking of hurricanes, family, aging, music, or hummingbirds, her poems map landscapes of memory toward horizons of reflection. Hampson embraces all that it is to be human and leads the reader deep into the present moment.

Growing Smaller

Hampson, Coreen Davis

In Sara Backer's first full-length collection of poetry, Such Luck, you will find yourself on an unexpected journey, charged with visionary and psychological intensities. Her poems are well crafted and highly original. They are sometimes haunting, sometimes playful, and always introspective and intriguing. She explores what it is to be fully alive and aware in a diverse, contemporary, and sometimes surreal world. This is the kind of book you will return to for its ability to stimulate equally your intellect and imagination. A masterful and magical first book of poems.

Such Luck

Backer, Sara

"These lively, imaginative poems make for easy reading. Sometimes whimsical, sometimes profound, but always unpunctuated, they range in reference from Norman Rockwell to Carl Jung and celebrate what one poem's title calls 'Mundane Excitement.' Not all wood-choppers are connoisseurs of firewood, but Ken Letko is."-Clemens Starck, author of Cathedrals & Parking Lots

Chopping Wood in the Moonlight

"Intensely personal, yet effortlessly accessible, every poem is a luminous and unflinching journey through challenging human landscapes." -Sky Island Journal Mark Waldron notes, "In 'unskinned' language, Lorrie Ness' poignant poems remind us our stories/histories are natural elements, root balls of raw nerves we can move and replant elsewhere, in new soil. Ness' visions in vein blue and pale green inhabit writer's groups, gas station bathrooms, autopsies and hospitals, yet faded flowers continue to bloom out of season. Family, here, is the cost of living and not living, but our memories like our DNA, Ness seems to say, are the armature of our presence. Ultimately, these poems of spade and scalpel are complex and beautiful eulogies to our hands." According to Jessica Federle, "The poems here don't flinch. A mother's death by suicide is part of what this collection examines, yet Ness retains a fearless, critical eye throughout. Ness leaves no thread unexamined, teasing out each one without ever cutting it away from its place in the whole. The suicide itself is denied the power to drive this exploration. The poet remains, with rare and intentional exceptions, in charge. This control is masterful. The language is riveting, unafraid of the grittier truths of biology. This collection is a powerful debut."

Anatomy of a Wound

Self-Help

Ness, Lorrie

Death & Grief

"On and beyond the horizon, Wellington's excursions into our body politic, psyche, purpose, and existence are multilayered and multifaceted. Content and craft are given equal time and focus. There is a nuanced reacquaintance with poetry's significance in Psalms at the Present Time. This poet chooses sturdy ethos and empowering authenticity. It is a worthwhile expedition." 
-Uche Nduka, Author of Living in Public and Facing You\nAs a poet, playwright, performance artist, essayist and journalist, Darryl Lorenzo Wellington is a writer of many forms. But even his poetry presents a broad and multicultural aesthetic - spoken word, literary and verse forms, politics, and more. In Psalms at the Present Time, he is at his eclectic best.\n** 
Death yawns stately. 
Death conjoins us. 
- whether we make music 
noise, love, or bourgeoisie war. 
Free assembly and funeral 
rites, these days, symbiotic, interchangeable. 
Siren sounds. We will not disappear 
** 
we proceed like marionettes 
carried along on one string 
crowds of selfsame mouths 
our tongues chant now in unison 
the pitch like a cracked accordion 
then canticle is cant 
and cry.\n(from "Days of Protest")

Psalms at the Present Time

Wellington, Darryl Lorenzo

"Charles Goodrich's poems celebrate the body of the earth from which we come and to which all things return, as well as the power of poetry to raise its fist-full of seeds, its only weapon-against oppression. These poems share the comfort of ravens, "black wings banked around the coals of their hearts, /their bright minds/smoldering," the particular, fleeting tang of whortleberries, and the minerally kiss of cold water drawn from a well. Contemplating the uncomfortable, such as aging, the risk of tsunami, and the self-inflicted erosion of habitat and democracy, these poems nonetheless point our eyes toward the hawks, not the "hawkers of hate." This is poetry wholesome in the best sense, showing us how to preserve our wholeness and the flow of grateful energy amid the obstructions (major and minor) of our worldly lives." - Karen Holmberg

Watering the Rhubarb

Goodrich, Charles

Mostly the Wind is full of far-reaching images and lines that leap. For Harn, himself a "heartbeat explorer," connecting is the point - with the universe, with people here and gone, with the reader... which is, ultimately, nothing less than love. In these turbulent times, I am grateful for the calm moments of delight and the humble tone that permeate these poems. 
-Carol Durak, author of Enter Here\nHarn's newest collection is a calendar of revelations where seemingly mundane events become portals to the sacred. He reminds us to be alert to enigmatic moments. 
-Frank Rossini, author of Last Confession and Midnight the Blues

Mostly the Wind

Harn, John Peter

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