The author, Piotr Gwiazda, comments in the interview contained in this book on the title Messages: "The first association will be - perhaps inevitably - with the phone, email, and text messages we send and receive on a daily basis. Also the messages that "pour out of various devices" (as in Muriel Rukeyser's poem): news stories, speeches, alerts, warning labels, traffic and weather reports, TV and radio commercials, those targeted ads on Google and Facebook. Communications overload - but with a touch of magic to it. Again, we are both consumers and producers of messages: we post, we blog, we update, we upload. But I was also thinking about the broader connotations of the word. After all, messages can be exchanged in the course of a simple conversation."

Messages

Literature & Fiction

Gwiazda, Piotr

History & Criticism

Pond Road Press

For the first time in one book, Jack Gilbert's poems of Pittsburgh may be read together, showing a continuity of feeling and theme over five decades. The beauty and severity, the lushness and irresistible power that is Pittsburgh runs through these poems by way of Mr. Gilbert's distinctive poetic manner of absolute authenticity. They show, time and again, the stamp of place on the body and soul of one of America's truly genuine poets. This small collection, a limited edition, will be seen in the coming years as indispensable to lovers of Jack Gilbert's poetry.

Tough Heaven - Poems of Pittsburgh

Jack Gilbert

Parts & Labor is poet and playwright Gregory Hischak's new book, which contains poetry, a play, and an author interview. Here's an excerpt from the interview. "Pond Road Press: Parts & Labor sparkles with insight about the intersection of artist endeavor and getting a living. You earn your living as a graphic artist. Could you comment on the balance, or lack of balance, between your artistic life and your work life?  "Gregory Hischak: Well right there you've cut to the bone. So much of the work in this collection, and across all my work in general, is about the seeking of that balance. These disparate, rather jarring elements of my life are seeking some sort of harmony, or at least a place where they won't kill each other-and there's the origin of my writing."

Parts & Labor

Hischak, Gregory

Familiar at First, Then Strange, Meredith Holmes' first full-length book, introduces readers to a voice in which intellect and image vie for position, a voice of constant surprises, of startling honesty and intensity. The voice is rooted in nature, in the "vaulted bones" of trees. "I was fostered by an American Sycamore," she tells us. She "body surfs a blue biography of Luther Burbank," as "locusts harmonize in the tulip trees." We learn of a double life: "the tone and timbre / of everything flowed through me." Holmes pulls the quotidian down to the mysteries that silence holds. Ancestered by New England, nurtured by a small town in the East, the poet found herself in a city "soaked in immigrant grief." There, in Cleveland, she forged poems into an American voice of scope and originality. And, it must be said, of great beauty.

Familiar at First, Then Strange

Holmes, Meredith

Poetry

Read Sid Gold's new book cover to cover at one sitting. Your brain will be exhausted but also exhilarated and accelerated. Note Gold's passion for words, wordplay and how the way words sound is contagious. Cannily alternating between poems in traditional poetic structures and prose poems set as blocks of type, Crooked Speech keeps you jumping intellectually, emotionally, rhythmically. The poem-poems are lyric, often narrative, their measured lines growing out of one another clearly. The prose poems on the other hand are a wild ride--nothing linear about their logic, leaping through snippets of history, philosophy, legend, show biz, etc., etc., interspersed with comments snatched out of ordinary conversations in all their mundane nuttiness. The Gold mind is a goldmine--an amazing place to be, and to borrow one of his oft-used constructions: not capricious but capacious. For a good time, go there.
--Clarinda Harriss, Professor Emerita of English, Towson University
In CROOKED SPEECH, Sid Gold helps us grasp "the inevitable lurking beyond the reach of our words." In this mix of conventional stanzaic poems and prose poems linked together by skillful use of wordplay, sounds, wisdom, and glimpses of a personal narrative, Gold reminds us that even though we may be able to tell what some things are and others are not, much in this world still eludes us. You'll want to read this book more than once to capture all its subtleties.
--Nancy Naomi Carlson
Think of these poems as abstract paintings, as works of art, as jazz and blues, as mythological
creatures, as history and all the great literature blowing in on the wings of language.
The allusions are here, the dualities of alone/together, rural/city, dream/reality all is "seduced by
beauty." Kafka-esque, I love the mind of this poet who reminds us that "language is a difficult
but necessary medium," and that "the tongues of the field" are like "fireflies under the skin."
--Joy Gaines-Friedler, author of Dutiful Heart, and Capture Theory

Crooked Speech

Gold, Sid

Linda Blaskey, Gail Braune Comorat, Wendy Elizabeth Ingersoll, and Jane C. Miller have this to say, by way of preface, about their group activity as poets who come together twice a year at Ingersoll's old family farm to share their writing, talk, critiques and togetherness on long weekends. 
"The cover photo of Walking the Sunken Boards is of Betsy Ingersoll, Wendy’s mother, in 1944, posed in front of the small farmhouse she and Wendy’s dad, Gil, built at Shipping Creek Farm, their property on the Chester River on the Eastern Shore of Maryland. Over the years since, the house has been expanded and revised to take full advantage of its 360 degree view of river, cove, fields, meadows, orchard, and creek. 
"For the last few years we four poetry-writing friends have met there biannually for a long weekend: writing, reading, revising, giving feedback, doing poetry-exercises, taking long walks, lying in the hammock, gossiping, eating, and laughing. We call the house and our weekend there The Muse. And when we are not in residence, we are looking forward to our next gathering. 
"Walking the Sunken Boards is a compilation of poems written by the four of us, all of which were begun, revised, and/or finished at The Muse. The house is what holds us to look out and look in." 
The result of their efforts together, Walking the Sunken Boards, is a group book that reads not like an anthology, but like what it is: a book by one entity, they themselves, together. This is a special achievement that could never have been planned ahead of time, but happened naturally over the course of their many years together.

Walking the Sunken Boards

Blaskey, Linda

Comorat, Gail

Ingersoll and Miller, Wendy and Jane

Guest of Time

Biographies & Memoirs

McBride, Greg

Professionals & Academics

Canticle for Remnant Days

Self-Help

Miller, Jane C.

Relationships

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