"Flicker is a memoir in verse of a life well lived. Lynn Hansen rightly names the collection for her favorite bird, and for the flickers, or moments, of happenings caught in words, illustrating phases and interests of a lifetime. She carries us through childhood’s joys of “forest humus, thick moss / and a bouquet of wild orchids” and woes, “the word move was profane because it frees the rat of anxiety that gnaws on the tight knot in my gut.” She rejoices when she declares, “When I retire I’m going to write poetry.” Then for a decade or more, that’s precisely what she has done. Lynn was determined to be a scientist in a time it was regarded as impossible for women; her thirty-three-year career of teaching biological sciences at the college level has proven her right. Her keen naturalist’s eye, her awareness and love of all life on this planet, and beyond, show in her poems. She even celebrates the lowly zucchini and rutabaga, though she does sigh toward the end of summer, “Zucchini manna again?” These observations are woven into the sum of time, the treasure of relationships, “just as our lives gathered out of jumble, then cemented with a matrix of mutual respect.” Lynn’s lone robin “lifts his bugle beak to call up morning,” and so lifts us all." —Patricia Wellingham-Jones, Los Molinos, California "This collection by Lynn M. Hansen is an excellent read. While each poem is intensely personal, moving from childhood experiences to motherhood to traveling the world to growing older, Hansen generously takes us along on all her journeys, creating poems that welcome all comers. Her close observations of the natural world, of lands both distant and close to home, create a landscape at once scientifically clear and poetically imagined, and her poems about growing up and getting older and the joys and losses that come with those parts of our lives, will make readers laugh and cry, sometimes all at once. In reading this book, I grew to even more deeply appreciate our world, our Great Central Valley, and Lynn Hansen's poetry, and I suspect the same will be true for all who read this celebratory work." —Gillian Wegener, Poet Laureate of Modesto, California. "Lynn Hansen's gorgeous book of poems is a testament to a writer who loves life and fully embraces living every day. It's rare that a trained scientist will turn to poetry to reflect on the natural world and even rarer that those written poems would be this wonderfully lucid, evocative, and heartfelt. Filled with keen-eyed wonder and amusement, these poems will teach readers about life and how to live." —Sam Pierstorff, Editor, Quercus Review Press

Flicker

Literature & Fiction

Hansen, Lynn M.

Poetry

Quercus Review Press

Gravity, U.S.A.

LaMon, Jacqueline Jones

Literary

"Paul’s poetry is planted in the order of the earth but stretches, grows organically to enfold the ripened fruit of wife, child, friend. His is the grace of honesty without brutality, deep feeling without sentimentality. His work wears well – and abides within his reader." —W.H. Ryan "Paul Neumann’s poetry engages both intellect and feeling with a subtle blend of nature’s many moods and settings, rendered in rich, vivid detail; each poem culminates in a stunning perception of the unity pervading all nature, a unity that includes both poet and reader. Neumann’s art is so subtle that his poems become a kind of invisible glass through which the reader seems to be looking into the poet’s innermost being, seeing what the poet sees, feeling as he feels. Neumann’s awareness of life’s final days, symbolized by the setting sun, and his acceptance of it as an inevitable part of human existence, leaves the reader uplifted in spirit. From Neumann’s perspective, life flows from and through nature, and this union brings a deep sense of the rightness of all that he sees, and has seen." —Bernard Morris "Paul Neumann’s contemplative poems are tender and wise, humble and celebratory. Here is a father, husband, son, and friend who chronicles human relationships and a life well-lived in California’s Central Valley and on its Central Coast, a true poet in tune with the natural world like few poets have ever been. I love this book. This Valley is a generous gift from a poet at his best. It is our good fortune to enjoy it again and again." —Lee Herrick

This Valley

Neumann, Paul

Parenthood and partnership dwell in Taylor Mali's poems in addition to a "tender gloom" that comes from having lost a father years before finally becoming one, a late father. Mali's signature playful eloquence and poignant observations are still at work here, but in these poems, Mali tells us, "all the smallest parts of me . . . can let down their tiny burdens all at once" ("My Sister Asks if She Can See More Grey"), and a wiser, more magnanimous voice emerges, a father's voice, gently offering up a new invocation: O, lightning, if you're listening, disregard my former invocations. And rain, please bless my simple little poems; they're plenty hard to write, and the world needs them no less. Let my family if not my other works outlive me. And to those who have survived the storm, forgive me. (from "Sonnet on My Former Invocations")

Late Father and Other Poems

Mali, Taylor

With his remarkable first collection 'No Elegies,' Lindsay Wilson is working that old, necessary literary alchemy: in speaking so beautifully, so honestly about the world he inhabits, he inhabits us. “You are,” Wilson writes, “what the paltry thief has left.” Though Wilson is talking to himself—listing his own betrayals, mis-rememberings, and griefs—we can't help but take stock of our own selves, our own souls. That's not a word I use lightly. From front to back, 'No Elegies' is a soulful book, suffused with death and jazz, sugar and stars, “lupus and low pines, / heat and transience.” —Joe Wilkins, author of The Mountain and the Fathers and Notes from the Journey Westward Lindsay Wilson’s 'No Elegies' reads like a dreamscape that coaxes the reader further and further into the wild lands of place, love, loss and sorrow. As quintessentially American as this book may be, the overall effect evokes the Japanese concept Wabi Sabi, the poignant loveliness of transient existence. The delicate/powerful presence of these poems perches on absence and the dark matter of one poet’s life, especially his mother’s death. Given that the greatest writing alchemizes vision and beauty out of raw reality, this poetry is pure metaphorical magic. To riff off Lindsay’s poem “No Elegies,” your heart will fly in response and never return tame to its cage. —Susan Deer Cloud, author of Hunger Moon and Fox Mountain Linguistically nimble, unfettered by sentimentality or melodrama, Lindsay Wilson’s poems manage to be mournful and ironic at once, completely modern without sacrificing feeling. When writing about death, as he often does in this collection, Wilson lightens his dark materials with a subtle wit and a voice that is, by turns, serious and sly, brooding and skeptical. Witness the scene of the grief-stunned son having a beer with a garden gnome, or leaning down to the carpet to measure the distance between the sunlight and a splotch of his dead mother’s blood. Loss is everywhere in the book, but never familiar, never static: the turned earth of the dead has “no locks to pick,” the backlit Sierras are “a jagged cardiac line.” The end result is a collection that is chiseled and refined by loss, but nonetheless leaves us feeling both satisfied and renewed. —Steve Gerhke, author of Michelangelo's Seizure and The Pyramids of Malpighi

No Elegies

WIlson, Lindsay

"Brenna Lemieux's a wonder—and it is her sense of wonder for both the natural and intellectual worlds, those slippery worlds we all inhabit, both in our heads and out of doors, that make her poems so profoundly satisfying. Her poems are tender and whimsical, but never precious or cute—her lines are confident and easy, thrilling in their embrace of the off-balance world we all walk through. She's a poet who goes beyond the mere noticing of detail to the delicate labor of seeing all the colors in the many swaths of her experience. The Gospel of Household Plants is a book to immerse yourself in, to revel in, and find yourself changed by." —Allison Joseph "'The thumb, then, is the dragon, / clamped in the wet dungeon so he can't / ignite the palace,' explains 'Thumb-Sucking,' from the marvelous opening section of The Gospel of Household Plants. I can't remember the last time I read a collection so abundant in stories, whether closely remembered or boldly imagined. The poet's craft is always apparent in her pitch-perfect phrasing and her eye for symbols organic to the scene, as when 'The roadside crows swarm the cornstalk, / and church-spire upward, thick and black / as blown cinders.' These lyrics celebrate and interrogate in turn, as our protagonist comes of age, falls in love, and dares to ask: What now? Given Brenna Lemieux's fierce intelligence—'You tell me / I'm crazy, but the right kind of crazy'—her readers can always look forward to the answer." —Sandra Beasley "In this chilling debut, Brenna Lemieux conjures a set of private mythologies, punctuated as the most compelling myths are, with bursts of violence. These poems offer a deep awareness that nature is rarely human sized, even if we can only see it from our anthropocentric perspective. Insects and plants hold a special place for Lemieux because they are unconcerned with the questions of obedience, obligation, discipline, and decorum that recur throughout these poems." —Jason Schneiderman "In Brenna Lemieux's powerful poems, precise and compelling images draw us deep. We witness the succession of generations, the grief of what the poet calls the 'perpetual withdrawal,' the inescapable letting go of this life. This is a striking debut collection." —Peggy Shumaker

The Gospel of Household Plants

Lemieux, Brenna

In his debut poetry collection, "Chad Sokolovsky writes poems that stay inside you long after you’re finished reading them. In Prophecy Mechanic, he explores the industry of memory-making in work that juxtaposes love, music, and art with the casual tyranny of religion, capitalism, and family legacy. Here, human landscapes are revealed click by click as through a View-Master: an oppressive classroom decorated with a teacher’s model military airplanes; the bleak rooms and shag carpets of childhood; a tableau of kids transfixed at the television, absorbing gender roles via Saturday-morning cartoons. Tension between the individual imagination and those structures which seek to constrain and distort is enacted frequently in visions of the post-war industrial; the emotional life of the poems is marked by dissociation and drift. Sokolovsky’s book marks the debut of a steady voice of witness whose poems serve as thoughtful elegies for the hopes of children, lovers, believers, and for all of us living in the shadow of late capitalism.” — Stella Beratlis, author of Alkali Sink

Prophecy Mechanic

Sokolovsky, Chad

Kiss, by Julie Lechevsky, is the 2004 recipient of the Quercus Review Poetry Series Annual Book Award.

Kiss

Julie Lechevsky

Poetry. Kevin Young says of GRAVITY, U.S.A.: "With her debut, Jacqueline Jones LaMon graces us with a collection both introspective and out of body, her poems taking on the weight of the everyday world, and the extraordinary within it. GRAVITY, U.S.A. is not just a book filled with subtle, sorrowful, and ultimately brazen power, but a place where you'll want to visit, and stay," and Dorianne Laux writes, "LaMon's poems are packed with sharp detail, street parlance and jazzy riffs. The stuff of real lives. Greetings to a bright new voice." Jacqueline Jones LaMon is currently Assistant Professor of English at Adelphi University, New York. GRAVITY, U.S.A. is the winner of the Quercus Review Poetry Series, Annual Book Award, 2005.

Magazine. Poetry. Fiction. A Journal of Contemporary Poetry & Fiction with a Pulse. The 2007 issue of Quercus Review (QR) includes a wide variety of new poetry and prose from all over the U.S. All works are highly accessible, sometimes gritty, sometimes humorous, but always full of life. The Featured Poet(s) include the Guerilla Poetics Project (GPP), a subversive group of poets who believe that "poetry is a hoarse cry `against the dying of the light,'" and they have devised the perfect, albeit devious, plan to put real poetry directly into the hands of real people. Featuring GPP poems, their manifesto, and a candid interview that pits the small press against the large.

Quercus Review #7

History & Criticism

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

Books by Quercus Review Press

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

Flicker

Gravity, U.S.A.

This Valley

Late Father and Other Poems

No Elegies

The Gospel of Household Plants

Prophecy Mechanic

Kiss

Gravity, U.S.A.

Quercus Review #7