Loyalty: New and Selected Poems

Literature & Fiction

Braun, Henry

Poetry

Off the Grid Press

In these poems of the moral imagination, Lee Sharkey explores the disfigured psychic landscape of cruelty, violence, and war. Her lyric poems chart a geography that draws its imagery from Israel/Palestine, Somalia, the Balkans, Iraq, and small town USA, as well as from the intimate domains of sickness and birth. Sharkey responds to our endangered post-9/11 world with courage and clear-eyed tenderness. In a political environment that threatens sanity, she has composed a music of daring empathy.

A Darker, Sweeter String

Lee Sharkey

Staircase of Roots

Winans, Janet

Beirut Again

West, Allen

Coyote Bush is a book that pays homage to the earth. It is a paean to the stars and their constellations, the clouds and the wind, to the horses, cows, deer, and dogs, all who blessedly live without language. In these poems of place, Nash traces and retraces his time-worn paths into the hills of Northern California. He is content at times just to watch the light change or lie down in the hollow a pregnant doe has made in the night. But these are also poems of refuge and discovery, poems of love and of suffering. We find relationships, childhood memories, sudden enlightenment, rising to the surface, just as we are ready for them. Nash finds his place among the elements, firmly rooted between earth and sky.

Coyote Bush: Poems from the Lost Coast

Nash, Peter

Poetry. Winner of the 2013 Off the Grid Prize. The latest poetry collection by Whitman Award winner Elaine Terranova is her sixth, and it is breathtaking. In pellucid language the poet walks through a kind of "vale of soul making" by re–visioning hours she spent as a child playing dolls with a friend. Terranova weaves her poetics of space by setting the fragile orders of the dollhouse against the realities of family fiction and the terror of a whole world outside where no shelter can be found—all this in exquisite, minimalist music.

Dollhouse

Crafts, Hobbies & Home

Terranova, Elaine

Crafts & Hobbies

Poetry. The poems in COLD STORAGE are revelations in the fullest sense, uncovering a world at once familiar and rendered new again in resplendent, transformative detail: a halo on the threshing floor, a drop of water on the skin, the nearing dark. Keith Althaus is a poet who walks by the shadow yet thrills with his illuminations, producing lanterns from yucca blossoms, a last breath, or "a plain hospital gown." Here, light is what surrounds a painting or frames a closed door, saturating both the landscape and the interior of the self until "even darkness glows." With spare language and a painter's eye, Althaus delivers poems that are intimate yet gorgeous, effortless yet intricate. This book marks the stunning return of one of America's pure voices in poetry—we are grateful for the light he's cast. "Cold Storage is filled with those enigmas so frequently found at the heart of the real. It possesses a shrewd, sad wonder at how and where we live, and a honed awareness that nothing is quite what it seems, people least of all. It is a book like no other at this crazed, ridiculous moment on our beautiful, sorrowing planet."—David Rivard

Cold Storage

Althaus, Keith

Poetry. Jon Davis's latest book of poems is bursting with signature inventiveness and the nimble lyricism that David Foster Wallace once praised as "off-the-charts terrific." Like the characters of a new alphabet, Davis's creatures form the language of this stunning collection. Some of his creatures vault from the page, playful proxies for his surprising insights. Others encrypt the poems with a supernatural intensity, like "the darkness leaning its black fur against the windows." And from them emerge new meanings for words we only thought we knew—of plumage, of song, of nest.

Improbable Creatures

Davis, Jon

Hayunga, Grant

Winner of the 2022 Off the Grid Poetry Prize, a masterful collection by Donald Platt, "one of the finest American poets working today," writes poet and editor Adrian Matejka In SWANSDOWN, the poet Donald Platt makes a study of lifeís inevitable transitions, from loveís astonishing evolutions, to aging and its attendant losses. With the poem "Cloud Study" Platt brings his own mortality into view. Returning to a painting by Constable, he considers his own perspective, sitting by the Liffey, tending an injured knee. Young mothers, lovers, and runners pass, reminding the poet of who he once was and how quickly life, like weather, shifts. "Two minutes later, // The clouds would have taken on a different cast of light and shape / just like the thunderheads / now piling up above the Liffey." Platt advises: "To approach old age, one needs a new harsher style." And yet these poems are proof of the softness that may follow life's harshest reckonings, like the wisps of hair on his beloved brother's head as he lies dying, "fine / as milkweed silk. / His head a split / dried pod whose seeds / wind will scatter." The poems of Swansdown point us to a "larger landscape," they are the clouds "that scud across the blue escutcheon of sky. . . Sun's blazon through rain rampant." "One of the finest American poets working today," writes poet and editor Adrian Matejka, "A writer of unparalleled lyric and formal integrity." It is indeed these qualities that gird Platt for this masterful eighth collection. Poetry.

Swansdown

Platt, Donald

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