Barbara Cully's poetics mix humor with a deadpan delivery, an aching love for all things tiny, the desire to face geology, the surreal, the built environment, and the horrors of human culture-with bravery. A style that treats beauty with elegy and is in love with all things: shoreline, desert, and ocean.Poet Boyer Rickel notes, "Barbara Cully's meditations in Back Apart range widely in subject and temperament: from ambushed troops in Afghanistan to the shorelines of her California youth, from Kristallnacht to our present ecological degradations. Driven by an unstable, seeking impulse, "the desire to look and to look away," the poems remain in flux, animated by a constant reckoning of self in history, in landscape, and especially among others."

Back Apart

Literature & Fiction

Cully, Barbara

Poetry

Jackleg Press

UNDERSEA is Seaton's free-wheeling series of love notes to her transplanted sea-struck self and her salty sidekick--poems that celebrate her signature wit and joy in that wild state of mind called Florida. Author Caridad Moro-Gronlier writes of UNDERSEA: Told with her singular wit and wisdom honed by salt and sun and brine, the poems are besotted with Florida-its superhero pelicans, the rum-macerated retirees baking in the sun, the soundtrack of air-conditioning, and a lover's night terrors playing in an oceanside efficiency. The speaker in these poems is love-laden but clear-eyed, sure that "there is no line between water and sky," the perfect "stark raving" guide for the reader eager to "?proceed until the edge of the cave / or run out of air, whichever comes first." Author Gregg Shapiro said: Poet diva Maureen Seaton's sun- and sea-drenched poetry collection combines all of her strengths: teacher, lover, observer, seeker, reporter, tour guide, singer, naturalist, rover, sibling, and wordsmith. Seaton invites readers to a faulty but irresistible paradise, complete with detailed instructions, and we'd be foolish not to accept. Still playful, still furiously cooking up ways to feed our poetic hunger. Seaton's Undersea is a thirst-quenching series of love poem postcards to and from Florida. Author Julie Marie Wade said: A Novella in Poems says of UNDERSEA: I was flung loose from my body so many times, sailing across the Sunshine State on a cloud of sensuous imagery. In Seaton's rendering of this land we love, "Avocados/fall like big and little bombs," "egrets grow fat on curly fries," and "there is no line between water and sky." Come for the "gibbous moonlight," the "canny pelicans," a "speedboat full of gangsters." Stay for the long-won wisdom of the poet herself, who hearkens Blake's imperative to "see the world in a grain of sand"--literally and figuratively, too. Seaton is the glass and the salt, the sling and the shot, "the blue ineffable" that lingers beyond her most luminous feats of language.?

Undersea

Seaton, Maureen

This is the invitation -- a kind of dare, really -- that Jenny Magnus proffers...In these plays, Magnus asks us to meet her intelligence, her wit, the naked soul of her unknowables with our own because, in her work, the question is the quest. Like Brecht, she uses music, text, broad characters, very few props. Her people are curious and smart and very funny. They are always out on a limb, divulging something terribly embarrassing. They use a lot of words, or very few. Metaphors are often over-the-top, but particulars can be few. The fourth wall, when it's there, is just a flimsy film -- which means the performers who take on these stories must be experienced high-flyers, actors who know the consequences of working without a net. In Magnus' stories, characters have unexplained encounters that are so lively and absurd that it takes a moment to realize they are in pain. There's just no rest for the lazy in these scripts. Here is the work of an artist as courageous as you'll ever experience. Here is the work of an artist, timeless and true. Relish it.--Achy Obejas

Observations of an Orchestrated Catastrophe

Magnus, Jenny

Dramas & Plays

"In Caroline Goodwin's Trapline, nature's flux and torque are embodied in a language that is taut, luscious, and musical. These are poems of rot and salt, dragonflies and kinked reeds, where the world is always with us - raw and omnipresent, beautiful and terrible. Here poems navigate physical and metaphysical landscapes, embodying experience and a world both awful and awe-full: 'when the mind / has grown plumes delicate / as tubeworms in the driftwood / in the sponge and scarlet / blood star tough as tongues / as the sea whip clicking.' Even when examining minutiae, Goodwin's poems retain the largeness of the world they articulate. And like the world, they both describe and inhabit us. This is wonderful, searing, necessary work; we read it and we pause and we see ourselves differently." -- Donna de la Perrière

Trapline

Goodwin, Caroline

The Ars Magna for the Manifold Dimensions of z

De La Flor, Neil

Maureen Seaton's subject is womanhood-an experience she presents as, by turns, a liturgically voluptuous sacrament and the kind of party that prompts the neighbors to call the cops. Her poems always make me feel lucky in my gender, doubly lucky in loving women. ?Carol AnshawIn Genetics, Maureen Seaton traces old roots and recipes and clears space for new ones. The experience of reading these poems is like that of savoring curry, the blending of a thing unto itself, though each spice manifests in its own sweet time. In her daring use of language, Seaton is the seasoned cook--enticing readers first with the scent of cumin and ginger dancing in oil, then the fire of chili, all, in the end, melding into a single flavor that grows and lingers in the mouth. ?Holly Iglesias.

Genetics

Exquisite and precise, Caroline Goodwin's newest poetry collection, Old Snow, White Sun, begins like "a catkin [making] its way through the cracks... A coolness over the throat." It traverses various terrains with grace and a commitment to astonishment. Here, Goodwin brilliantly gathers mothlight, herbal lore, psychedelia, heavy metal, and old charm to capture a world that is bountiful, magnificent, and impermanent. "Look now for a thin page / with very light ink, or a pelican feather / or, better yet, a creature long extinct hatching / from the mouth of the old mine." Ferocity and decaying bodies populate these poems, but also tenderness and rhythmic hope. Find in these poems a heron, a river, a hurricane, a floodgate, a levee, a story. "The one where the girl is strong enough. The one where she survives." Where she dwells and how she rises.\n-Aileen Cassinetto, author of The Pink House of Purple Yam Preserves & Other Poems, Academy of American Poets Laureate Fellow\nCaroline Goodwin's latest work invited me in to hear of intimate things, of how she's met with others, of lives and deaths, and being around humans, plants, and creatures in this world. It gave me glimpses of her experience: journeys, visions, moments of everyday life with friends, companions, grandmother, mother, loss, and all that difficult stuff, with Love at the heart of it, all the while incantating things and powers("thoughts are things") in a way she has made her own.\nThese energies are born of an urgent, implicit questioning- not just about where we are these days with the great non-human planet, but given that dislocation and an overwhelming yearning for the old connection - how do we get on with it? Get on with one another? Nowadays, a Heron is at once a beautiful bird, an addictive drug, and a high-tech warplane: these poems say: okay then if you really want to listen, this is how that feels.\n--Graham Hartill, author of Rhapsodies and Cennau's Bell

Old Snow, White Sun

Christine arrives at her family's farmhouse near Florence, needing respite from personal sorrow and the quiet to work, only to find the cistern dry. Without water, she will be unable to stay, so, determined, she begins an immediate search for a solution. She knows the hills are veined with rubber tubes carrying precious trickles from springs higher up. Illegal taps and diversions are common, but as she tries to restore the flow to her house, she finds herself drawn ever deeper into the patchwork community of locals and foreigners, who know more than they admit. A potential solution opens up yet another puzzle as human dramas emerge from the seemingly tranquil landscape. Though water is restored, the mystery is ultimately not solved. Instead, lives are discovered to be as mysteriously connected and entangled as the water system. With a sleuth's eye for details, sometimes poignant, sometimes funny, the novel offers an almost anthropologically precise portrait of a time and place that makes for addictive reading.\nMegan Weiler's The Spring is the haunting account of a young woman's return, alone, to her family's house in the Tuscan hills and of the locals and foreigners who jostle around her in uneasy community. Subtle, intense, and elegant, Weiler's novel evokes rich experiences and essential themes. 
-Claire Messud\nWhat an insightful and spellbinding novel Megan Weiler has written. The Tuscan countryside, beautifully rendered in vivid detail, is infused with mysteries that are pursued with patient, inexorable attention. The Spring is richly, deliciously rewarding." -Joanna Scott

The Spring

Weiler, Megan

Literary

Blue Boy tells the story of an art historian with gargantuan ambition and hubris. A greedy tyrant, Gabriel Rhab regards most of the people around him, family and colleagues included, as existing to serve him, though, unfortunately, they have their own ambitions and appetites, which sometimes get in the way. Though a satire, the story offers both fun and empathy, as the intensely inward-gazing world of academic rivalry, the sadness of art history, the futility of theory, and the ludic aspects of domestic life are explored from various points of view with hard intelligence and psychological depth.

Blue Boy

McGarry, Jean

Humor & Satire

Framed as a job application, and bounding with associative leaps and surrealist underpinnings, Dear Selection Committee is a subversive, sexy love song to an endlessly messy self and the burning world it inhabits. Full of apostrophic power, these poems shift among registers of loss, desire, and joy as they wrestle with issues such as climate change, addiction, modern distractions, gender presentation, religious questioning, and the nature of pain. Dear Selection Committee attests that although life can feel like a bumpy cab ride to interview for a job you feel uniquely unqualified for if you lay aside the anxieties of self just long enough to peer out the window, you'll see great beauty amidst the chaos.

Dear Selection Committee

Humor & Entertainment

Studdard, Melissa

Humor

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