If your soul is on a quest to balance the myriad minutia of life in the 21st century, then poet Jenny Bates' third collection, Visitations, is a must read. Bates' answers lie in the forest surrounding her home where by night the master vocals of the Barred Owl always call her to a portal of growth. By day, the Red Shouldered Hawk beckons to complete the summons, "Observe." Whether plant or animal, wild or domesticated, Bates' communion with all that is not human, leads to a forgotten realm of holistic knowledge. Divided into four sections - Trust, Serve, Wait, Hope - seventy-four poems explore the red clay of her Carolina home and the bones it holds (Be Still, Red Clay (eulogy for a homeless dog); searches for the voices of wild geese and kestrals (Jabber Walk through Wonder-land ); and "mimic compelling anthropoid gestures" in the title poem, Visitations. Through the pages of this idiomatic, metaphysical collection, a gentle relationship between the mirror selves of naturalism and fantasy charm the unfeigned reader.

Visitations

Sports & Outdoors

Bates, Jenny

Field Guides

Hermit Feathers Press, LLC

DONNA LOVE WALLACE'S debut poetry chapbook, Between the Stones, takes the reader on a journey 1 in 8 women will experience sometime during their life: invasive breast cancer. With candor and a full range of emotion, WALLACE navigates her way through disparate places and the people that occupy them: the biopsy suite, the grocery store, her closet and a tattoo parlor 350 miles from home. With sparse eloquence and artisanal attention to her craft, DONNA LOVE WALLACE is a poet's poet. Readers of Between the Stones will cry, laugh and celebrate a voice that chooses stoic analysis over panic; positivity in the face of pain and uncertainty; and resolute courage over defeat. Whether or not invasive breast cancer has touched your life, great inspiration lines these pages

Between the Stones

Health, Fitness & Dieting

Wallace, Donna Love

Diseases & Physical Ailments

Collection of poetry set in North and South Carolina. Janet Joyner's fourth collection. No Come Hyacinth spans observation of nature, both human and plant as well as offering social commentary on current issues. In the Piedmont region of North Carolina, wild hyacinth is one of the first signals for the return of spring, and the new growth it signals. In legend, the flower supposedly sprang from a drop of Hyacinthus' blood that fell from his brow when hit by a discus thrown by his lover, the god Apollo. Poets, like Eliott and Whitman, have often used flowers with slender racemes or roots as images of maleness. Janet Joyner's fourth collection, Now Come Hyacinths, celebrates both the resilience of the natural world and natural human connections, but registers possible failure of each. While much of this volume's fauna is distinctly midland, the poet's native low country South Carolina is evident in such poems as The Salt Marsh and Swamp. This is Joyner at the top of her game.

Now Come Hyacinths

Janet Joyner

If the world's humanity had the same love, respect and connection to the animal kingdom as author Jenny Bates, 2020 would be a much different year. In Slip, Bates smiles bravely at the night because she has written a book that speaks of ignorance, happiness and exhaustion beneath a delicate light shining on empty ruins. It is an exercise in finding what Camu reveals in his own writing, (to speak) "...with a lipless mouth...learn one last time what I know." If one were to say this book is about love, sorrow, letting go, even letting go of change, the critique would be incomplete. Instead, it is about a little deaf, black pup who taught Bates, "I am Nothing. (and) By becoming this, his true eyes became a solid ground to walk." We would say to each other "There is Nothing like you, there was Nothing like you, and there shall be Nothing like you." When I slipped, he let me fall then took that solid ground with him to place under another's steps. Yet he left me able to see in that dark. ' Slip joins Bates 2019 publication, Visitations (Hermit Feathers Press) as a work of profound observation of two souls joined, though parted, will never truly slip eternal bonds.

Slip

Literature & Fiction

Jenny Bates

Poetry

In more than fifty poems, Nancy Dew Taylor's Showing Face can be compared to a powerful film about the Jim Crow era in South Carolina. This seamless series of episodes merges flawlessly researched state history with aching personal confession. Part memoir, part local history, part heartfelt apology, Showing Face tells a vital story that our nation would rather forget. As the poet imagines the separate-but-unequal worlds of Mabelle Hanna McCray (her family's black maid) and Joseph Armstrong De Laine (a black minister driven out of Lake City, South Carolina after his church was burned), she knows that what she offers is "too little, too late." But she also knows that she must "show face" to honor "two amazing individuals" who might otherwise be unremembered. This powerful book will make Americans of a certain age ask themselves, "How did we not see? Or if we did see, why did we not speak? Or if we did speak, why did we not act sooner?"

Showing Face

Nancy Dew Taylor