This is the story of a man feeling his mortality, trying to make sense of his past and possibly his future as he receives the diagnosis of White Matter Disease. It records a year in the life of a writer fixed in history, doing his best to transcend life's challenges and achieve spiritual certainty. Haunted by a glamorous past and the love of his life who has died, it traces his mind's progress as he travels the world and his own internal geography. Along the way, he sustains a man's worst loss, that of his mother, and the next, his beloved dog, and the next, his financial underpinnings. Like everyone, he has his story. Like everyone, he has to work it out. Intelligence and a sense of humor keep him afloat, but ultimately love sustains him. A modest life, at times uncomfortably imperfect, but told with honesty, clarity and an aching desire, like everyone, to do and be more.This beautiful journal, that of a talented and sensitive poet illustrates the value of keeping a notebook as Joan Didion suggests: "I think we are well advised to keep on nodding terms with the people we used to be, whether we find them attractive company or not. Otherwise, they turn up unannounced and surprise us, come hammering on the mind's door at 4 a.m. of a bad night and demand to know who deserted them, who betrayed them, who is going to make amends."

Wmd: A Memoir

Arts & Photography

HARTEIS, Richard

Photography & Video

Poets Choice Publishing

COMES LOVE tells the story of three men caught in love's web as they struggle to share a life together with kindness and mutual support despite their differences in age and culture. The author recounts a decade of compassion and sexual obsession like watching a reality TV show, trying to make sense of their life together as they travel the globe. The three have joined in a love triangle, a kind of new age marriage years before the current flowering of gay life, and they ride that wave till it crashes on the shore. But as the blues song goes, “Comes love, nothing to be done.”

Comes Love

LGBTQ+ Books

Harteis, Richard F.

Biographies & Memoirs

Creating a visual language of free-association and metaphor in the vernacular, Fires Eternal Morning is written to function on multiple layers of allegory, thought, and perception.It is a prose-poem landscape of dreams of the writer 's own childhood, set in a place called "Paradise Green." The schematic follows Dante: 1. the Inferno of a nuclear catastrophe; 2. the Purgatory of emotions and political intrigues; and 3. the Paradise of Mind and Body.
It is "A Corning of Age story of the Cold War," reflecting the anthropology of Margaret Mead, in a modem world in which the undercurrent of fear and expectation of nuclear war, and the immanent ruin of the planet, bred into the world's developmental psychology an innate nihilism, resulting in widespread depression and the perpetuation of aggressive behavior.
A generation which tried to evolve itself to "Make Love - Not War" eventually split into two political camps, one devolved back to the continuity of punitive and intrusive control systems supporting paranoid militarism, privileged exploitation of workers, and social stratification, with a mindset of reductive Behaviorism, trends &amp; entertainments; while another political camp continues to evolve toward a new ecology, environmental concern, universal spirituality,justice &amp; compassion, nutrition, artistic expression, and personal consciousness.

Fires Eternal Morning (Ruta)

Religion & Spirituality

Johnes Ruta

Occult & Paranormal

Elisavietta Ritchie is a woman who has really lived and this verbal rumination on her heritage, the people she has loved, the family recipes for borscht or cherry vodka or bread are filled with such exquisite, well-realized detail, a reader is drawn along with the force of a rip tide on a summer afternoon at the beach. It’s all simply so interesting. And her conversations with the past and recently dead intrigue us: “It tolls for thee,” they remind us, and yes, we all do eventually get out alive according to this wise woman when it comes our time to ponder the great mystery of death. Russia’s nostalgia for its glorious past – its literature, art, dance, theatre could not be extinguished in a century of Communist revisionism. This nostalgia seems worked into the very DNA of the Russian soul right down to the present day as the country seeks to take the world stage once again. At the root of this nostalgia is the ghost of a genteel aristocracy which ended in the forest assassination of the Czar’s family and the Russian diaspora after the world wars that followed. As one of the world’s great cultures, it continues to shape history and art and in this beautiful example, poetry. What we have to learn from the poems of Lisa Ritchie is everything worth preserving and protecting in life: Love, lovers, children, cousins, parents, home, shared meals, the memory of those who shaped us, the courage that won freedom, pride in self and country, an abiding attachment to the beloved dead reaching to us from the other side of life. Here are poems that extol life, sing of its joy, despite the cruelty and entropy that threaten at every turn. Lisa Ritchie is a person you would want to know, whose poetry you have here, life seen through her bright, intelligent, compassionate eyes, what poetry does at its best, give heart. An old proverb has it that “it is in the shelter of each other that we live.” These poems give respite in a world too often in need of such shelter.

Babushka's Beads: New and Selected Poems

Ritchie, Elisavietta

Arts & Literature

Latest poems from a master poet at the height of his powers.One after another, here are poems with unique insight, remarkably, surprisingly, beautifully expressed. Galvin is incomparable, though one thinks of the music of Richard Wilbur, the wit of Phillip Larkin, Phillip Levine’s sympathy for the common man, the Irish lilt of Seamus Heaney.

A Way to Home: New and Selected Poems

Literature & Fiction

Galvin, Martin

Poetry

Like a recent hotel commercial featuring nervous, would-be bridesmaids and young businessmen contemplating a trade show, “Should I stay or should I go,” was a snappy little tune that played out all summer long on TV. I had been bombarded by emails from old classmates asking if I were going to return to Fribourg, Switzerland for the 50th reunion of our Junior Year Abroad from Georgetown. At the Courtyard opening last night, Dave pointed out that the surprising thing about reunions was how much older the OTHER people looked. Nancy Frankel said that when she went to her 60th reunion, people had to have name tags with photos of what they looked like all those years ago so you could identify them. But as Gertrude Stein has pointed out, “We are always the same age inside.”

Reunion: A Spiritual Travelogue

To Begin With, Feel Fortunate was written in part in the chaotic year running up to the election of the new president and is a passionate analysis of how we got to where we are as a nation, and what may be in store for us. As Peter has said in an interview, “You have to remember that even the poets who live in garrets are citizens, and I urge them to use their voices and partake in the actual goings-on of our country.” Like William Meredith, who was a good friend in the old days, Meinke’s work is not written from the ivory tower. Like Meredith, he feels writers and intellectuals have an obligation to speak the truth and shame the devil. And if poetry and prose are to be useful in our lives, they must first of all be honest or otherwise risk being merely window dressing in a fancy American living room. Critics have argued that poetry fails to the exact extent it attempts to be didactic. And though he is a teacher and has lived to see much change in this country, Meinke’s work does not attempt to preach. It’s the voice of a really nice guy you’d like to have a beer with at the local pub to hash out whatever you have on your mind: the world series, the future of the stock market, the state of the union. He would never consider his fellow citizens “deplorable” and admires the hardworking, middle-class as well as poets who celebrate their life, like Philip Levine and yes, Bob Dylan.

To Start With, Feel Fortunate

Meinke, Peter

Essays & Correspondence

In Robert Fagles’ translation of Vergil, Aeneas, contemplating the Trojan War cries out, “The world is a world of tears, and the burdens of mortality to touch the heart.” Laura Brylawski-Miller intuits  the  lacrimae rerum, the tears in things throughout her poetry,and it is not only a result of the classic education she received in her native Italy, but a guiding insight that directs her view of the world,the shape of her soul. Like the Buddha of Sokkuram, she is stunned by the suffering she sees in the world and is left with the only possible response, compassion for the human condition. Compassion in her, however, is not naiveté. This intuition is perhaps what first led her to medicine,the sensitivity for the pain of others, the need to heal, even when that healing process means debriding dead tissue with her poetic scalpel. “First, do no harm,” the Hippocratic oath demands, but sometimes it requires severe measures as every surgeon knows. 

First, Do No Harm

Brylawski-Miller, Laura

Poet's Choice Publishing is proud once again to bring you the poetic musings of Elisavietta Ritchie.  HARBINGERS follows the peripatetic mind of a woman writing at the height of her power,  making concrete all the stuff of a life lived fully and worth living: lovers, family, professional achievements; the joy of being part of it all, despite the challenges of aging, and the inevitable conclusion of winter. Here is a poet caught between "heaven and hell," who nevertheless takes it all on with great pluck and vigor, who  leads the way with courage, dignity, and self assurance, a harbinger of what it means to be a talented human being in a troubling,  but luminous world, a model of someone who doesn't give up on any front, burgeoning yet again.

Harbingers

Elisavietta, Ritchie

Here is a poet with spirit large enough, and a history deep enough to do justice to the rich and sprawling continent of Africa. His is no heart of darkness, it is rather, a heart filled with light and love for the creatures, and the people, and the beauty of this land. ELEPHANT CAKE WALK is a jewel, with exquisite photographs from the Amboseli Game Reserve by Cynthia Moss and others to highlight and polish every facet of Oerke’s checkerboard vision. As William H. Banks, Jr. tells us from Harlem, " Andrew Oerke's superb collection of poetry stands tall and strides majestically through to the very heart of Africa, while guiding the reader on an unforgettable literary journey."
Never before in the many books and published poems has Andrew’s environmental ethic, his insight, his intense attachment to nature, his comprehension of the ancient aspects of the earth and her living animals and plants been explicit. His multiple other poetry books and single poems seen at Andrewoerkepoetry.org hint at his strong attachment to a healthy earth. Elephant Cake Walk was oneof the final manuscripts Andrew pored over, and worked on during his last weeks, with grandfatherly desire that his grandchildrenCashen and Odin would love the animals he wrote about.

Elephant Cake Walk

Oerke, Andrew

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