Victor David Sandiego’s The strange and beautiful life of Daniel Raskovich, an imagined biography of an odd everyman character, is darkly funny and strangely poignant.  Sandiego offers a frank take on contemporary society with verse that is clean, clear and direct, and tantalizing enough to keep us wanting more.  Episode after bizarre episode leaves the reader feeling off-balance, hopping on one leg (the good one) like Daniel, but perhaps this is the precise vantage one needs to view our lives more candidly.  The starkly lovely, sometimes mysterious, graphical images throughout from photographer Ethan Hahn provide visual texture and figurative subtext to the Raskovich tale.  As alarming or reassuring as it may seem, Sandiego’s collection reveals that there is a little bit or quite a lot of Daniel in every one of us.  —Lana Hechtman Ayers, series editor, author of A New Red

The Strange & Beautiful Life of DANIEL RASKOVICH

Literature & Fiction

Sandiego, Victor David

Poetry

Moonpath Press

Living on Orcas Island, Jill McCabe Johnson is a close neighbor to the sea. In her briny poems, she takes us even closer--letting us read the sea's diary. From sea ground to surface, we see the intimate, inside story. Careful observation, precise research, musical phrasing, and active imagining surge through these poems. Ninety-five percent of earth's oceans remain unexplored. What better metaphor for the vast mysteries of our existence--the constant change, the contamination, the resurgence, the essence of life and death. In these elegant poems, forces huge as magma shove up and forces delicate as brittle stars taste changes in sea water. Marvelous. – Peggy Shumaker

Diary of the One Swelling Sea

Johnson, Jill McCabe

In Impossible Lessons Jennifer Bullis entwines a Stevens like wit and attention to the music of words with a contemplative eye towards both nature and family. She makes the mythic and the domestic sing. Her language is both direct and incantatory circling through the great human paradox of our animal flesh and our spiritual ascensions. These poems give pleasure to the ear and to the heart as their kind and trustworthy voices present the natural world of the northwest, and the possibilities present to an intelligent, engaged mind moving through both “blossoms and smoke.” ~ Jeremy Voigt

Impossible Lessons

Bullis, Jennifer

“Matt Gano, whose swagger and soul and verbal dexterity have knocked out spoken-word audiences for years, brings his staggering inventiveness to the page—where he also, and absolutely, belongs.  Here are irresistible scenes out of the sagebrush and empty lots of a charmed and timeless boyhood; love from all sides—wild-horse young, and 94 years old; and the moon: brilliant, unexpected, new, ‘with … lemon-meringue peaks/ and eating-contest complexion.’  These are beautifully-crafted poems, alive with startling transitions, humor, and the wisdom that lets ‘the rhythm in the ride be what I write.’ And they’re pure pleasure.”  ~ Kathleen Flenniken, Washington State Poet Laureate,  author of Plume and Famous

Suits For the Swarm

Gano, Matt

“The Situation & What Crosses It, like any good diviner, can foretell your future or alter it, reveal your path or complicate the way with options. These sonnets are incantatory, articulate. They collide lyrical gambit with foreboding tone, the domestic with all that’s wild: ‘Desire must be dissected.’ Follow the awe-full acuity of Amy Schrader’s words, the refolding and gorgeous warning of syntax in every sonnet. She knows what’s in the cards for you.”   —Elizabeth J. Colen, author of Waiting Up for the End of the World: Conspiracies

The Situation & What Crosses It

Schrader, Amy

“For more than four decades, James Bertolino has been writing love poems, poems of bliss so musical and urgent, so nuanced and bold, they’re ravenously ecstatic. These love poems ‘…draw nectar/ from the fractures….’ They join ‘…all small and large lives with what lifts/ us toward the sun….’ What a boon to have Bertolino’s love poems—both selected and new—in this one luminous collection.” ~ Paulann Petersen, Oregon Poet Laureate and author of Understory

Ravenous Bliss: new & selected love poems

Bertolino, James

"With conversational language and stripped-down wisdom, Tim Sherry's One of Seven Billion is at once intimate and anonymous, revealing and evasive. In a time when many poets seem to value irony and wit, Sherry offers poems that are intelligently solid and emotionally honest. The speaker in many of these poems strikes me as a modern-day relative of William the Poet from the long, allegorical, Christian narrative Piers Plowman of the Middle Ages. He questions without finding answers then accepts that the act of questioning is what each of the seven billion of us must do to exist meaningfully. Posing such impossible questions can be a solitary process but despite the poet's "instinct for loneliness," he creates a community where Claude Monet, John Wayne, Lana Turner, and The man Upstairs meet at the center of the universe to celebrate life, love and the imagination."  --Allen Braden, author of A Wreath of Down and Drops of Blood

One of Seven Billion

Sherry, Tim

"Some people get up every morning and go out into the world looking for God. Ronda Brotach does this and gives us her field reports in poems that make us want to believe that faith and survival are one and the same. She is a poet to be thanked." -Rebecca Wells, author of Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood, Little Altars Everywhere, Ya-Yas in Bloom, and The Crowning Glory of Calla Lily Ponder

Lake of Fallen Constellations

Broatch, Ronda

Not Aloud presents some 30 plus years of Christopher J. Jarmick’s marvelous poetry. Jarmick’s thematic territory is expansive-- family, relationships, the art of writing, philosophy, his patented poem starters, and much, much more. His language is musical, approachable, and memorable. His refreshing turns of phrases stand clichés on their heads: “The clouds/are not metaphors at all./ They hide the sky,/they get fat,/sometimes they burst,/but not with tears,/Mr. Tambourine Man,/just with rain.” Full of humor, acute observation, and deep emotion, Not Aloud is a collection you’ll want to return to again and again. --Lana Hechtman Ayers, author of A New Red, editor MoonPath Press.

Not Aloud

Jarmick, Christopher J.

"These poems tell stories of the place where I live and the place I love. These are poems that will touch you and make you think. Many you will read over again." --Marty Sherman, former editor of Flyfishing magazine,  and salesman for ClackaCraft Drift Boats "Norman Maclean wrote that, 'Under the rocks are the words, and some of the words are theirs.' This is the ancestral place from which Scott Starbuck dipped his hands and brought us poetry. This is the human condition diffused like sunlight through water. Starbuck has shown us brightly colored flashes of life that appear and vanish in the blink of an eye like a trout rising then gone." --David Joy, author of Where All Light Tends to Go "Scott T. Starbuck's Lost Salmon, a collection of seventynine short poems, also reads like one long poem given the ways in which it accumulates toward a single clear-eyed vision or meditation on time and memory. And which is to say that each moment recorded enacts that lovely-sad mix of elegy and celebration." --Jack Driscoll, author of Fishing the Backwash "Starbuck is a poet who has fished and is still looking for that perfect fish--and poem. Always happily searching like a good steelheader to the end of the day." --Frank Amato "Scott Starbuck has a way of defining the world in these calm and graceful poems capturing the rhythms of water and sky. There is grace and light in his words. A charming collection of poetry you will return to again and again." --Larry Gavin, author of Stone & Sky

Lost Salmon

Starbuck, Scott T.

See the best price to sell, buy or rent books by the Moonpath Press publisher. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Moonpath Press