The poems in this collection have a level gaze. We smile at the foibles of people and relationships exposed here-the church organist, Snow White, the carefully balanced "un-couple"-yet finally we're sympathetically implicated with them. Spare, quick-moving narratives carry us along for a day at the beach, a family reunion, a last ferry ride, each of which is more-is a key to the meaning of a life. Foos is particularly appealing when writing about flawed but loving families. These are deeply compassionate poems. Even a searing political poem-and it's a knockout-gets its power as much from sorrow as from anger. After all, as Foos says, we're just happy mutts, "looking for crowns for our efforts." "These poems open with the relentless push of small flowers. They grow in a tight corner plot bright with iris, marigold, and brave truth." -Michael R. Brown, author of The Man Who Makes Amusement Rides "I simply can't resist a poet whose prayer is 'Give us this day our daily bread/in the form of toast'-or who gives drowned virgins a second chance to 'tread the mucky earth.' Ellen Foos' work combines startling candor with effervescent wit. She makes being human seem breathtakingly easy, a difficult task in a world as complicated and cluttered as our own. Read her and you can't help but be refreshed. This is a book of small, big, and offbeat pleasures." - Elaine Equi, author of The Cloud of Knowable Things

Little Knitted Sister (Ragged Sky Poetry)

Literature & Fiction

Foos, Ellen

Poetry

Ragged Sky Press

Grief, disruption, anger: these themes emerge in tightly crafted poems that evoke empathic images through precise diction and roughened rhythms. Taut stanzas and calculated rambles offer the hard pleasures one wants from poems whose speaking 'voice' contemplates social violence, conflicts between cultures. Poems about death and love are simultaneously embroiled in struggles with race, colonialism, Jewish identity and patriarchy. Impersonations of Moses caught in a cleft, or of the nude in a Manet painting, give historical density to individual utterance. Whether about later-life sex and marriage, or family dramas recalled to be reworked, these poems have an edge, a tough energy that comes from the drive to find an intelligible self-knowing--even as they also seek, more elusively, justice and healing in times of war and torture.

Loose Parlance: Poems

Daniel A. Harris

EATING HER WEDDING DRESS: A COLLECTION OF CLOTHING POEMS brings together one hundred celebrated and distinctive voices, including internationally acclaimed poets such as Kim Addonizio, Margaret Atwood, Billy Collins, Elaine Equi, Jorie Graham, Maxine Kumin, Paul Muldoon, and Charles Simic, to speak about clothing as object of desire, as memento, and as metaphor for the body. Arranged into four parts, this anthology includes poems of self-presentation and identity, poems of alteration and transformation, poetry about the woven word, and poems invoking the talismanic quality of clothing.

Eating Her Wedding Dress: A Collection of Clothing Poems (Ragged Sky Poetry)

Guiding us through the ancient wisdom of the I Ching, A Hymn of Changes provides elemental context, as well as personal direction, for accessing the deeper pathways made evident through this ancient diviniation modality... the gift of confirmation from your own insight and wisdom of a more than 3000 year old sage before you.

A Hymn of Changes

La Chapelle, David

Religion & Spirituality

Miss Plastique was a finalist for the 2014 Next Generation Indie Book Award in poetry. Miss Plastique, the fourth full-length poetry collection by Lynn Levin, invites the reader into a world of female bravado in which Miss Plastique and her many selves rant, fret, joke, fall in love, dress up, and do their hair. Poems in this collection first appeared in Boulevard, Artful Dodge, Hunger Mountain, Connecticut Review, Knockout, Nerve Cowboy, and other places.Lynn Levin, a poet known for her eclecticism, humor, and range of poetic styles, is the author of the previous poetry collections Fair Creatures of an Hour, a Next Generation Indie Book Awards finalist in poetry; Imaginarium, a finalist for ForeWord Magazine's Book of the Year Award; and A Few Questions about Paradise (all from Loonfeather Press). Her craft of poetry book, Poems for the Writing: Prompts for Poets (with Valerie Fox) was published by Texture Press in 2013. Lynn Levin is also a writer and literary translator. She has received nine Pushcart Prize nominations, two grants from the Leeway Foundation, and Garrison Keillor has read her work on his radio show The Writer's Almanac. Born in St. Louis, Missouri, Levin has lived in the Philadelphia area since 1980. She currently teaches at Drexel University and the University of Pennsylvania. Advance praise for Miss Plastique: "Miss Plastique is a busy girl: giving it to her enemy in stiletto heels, giving it up to an Elvis impersonator, thumbing a ride across Texas. She has turned from the mirror and can't look back. She's sexy and seductive and refuses to be pinned down; she's silk so fluid you could drink her-read her instead, but watch she doesn't explode in your hands." -Meg Kearney, author of Home By Now "The poems in Lynn Levin's Miss Plastique hold their tension between fantasy and devastation." -Jill Alexander Essbaum, author of Necropolis "This book is just as explosive as plastique and packed as tightly and with the impeccable craft you'd expect from a good detonation expert. Lynn Levin has the perfect timing and sensitive touch of one who works with volatile materials-an Elvis impersonator, the Beav and Eddie Haskell,Gaspara Stampa, Eve and Lilith at Macy's. We are better for the aftershocks of this verse." -Christopher Bursk, author of The Improbable Swervings of Atoms

Miss Plastique (Ragged Sky Poetry)

Levin, Lynn

The poems in Charlotte Nekola's collection, Della Who, have both power and grace, a rare combination. They delve into the past but remain firmly anchored in the present, in the poet's time and place. I love their formal restraint and their freedom of spirit. I love above all the truths they tell. -Pablo Medina, author of Cubop City Blues Though they are not in the least dreamy, the poems in this astonishing collection compel like vivid dreams. They have the mystery of classic foreign films-if when you left the theater you could taste salt on your lips and smell the scent of sassafras root. The title poem, "Della Who," gives us a true woman of mystery-who is and is not Della Street, Perry Mason's secretary. She is a savannah, a river, mud on an apron-a street. A street with red lips and white gloves, "the minimum qualifications." -Arlene Weiner, author of Escape Velocity

Della Who

Nekola, Charlotte

What's your temptation? Fifty-two poets entice you with poems about chocolate and coffee-and so much more. Poems guaranteed to melt in your mouth. Or burn it. This diverse selection of established and emerging poets stirs the pot, to brew and temper thoughts about desire, metaphysics, politics, and the afterlife into a delicious book of poetry treats. Dark as a Hazel Eye: Coffee &amp; Chocolate Poems includes a poem by Nobel Prize winner Tomas Tranströmer, along with the work of Elaine Equi, Tony Hoagland, Naomi Shihab Nye, James Richardson, Charles Simic, Virgil Suárez, and many others.

Dark as a Hazel Eye: Coffee & Chocolate Poems

A espaldas de dios

Kanyadi, Sandor

"Reading Arlene Weiner's poems is like walking down a long hall opening doors. Behind each door is a tableau: two girls sit on a bed eating chocolates; a bird moves like a flamenco dancer; a mother and daughter cut radishes; two women in an Automat are overheard talking about sex; an old woman makes an entrance, belting out a song like a showgirl. But as we move from room to room, strange questions occur to us: Does the bird move like a flamenco dancer, or does the flamenco dancer move like a bird? And why is God lounging on the sofa while nations are at war and Terror tap-dances down the stairs? Weiner's poems seem like bits of stories from her past, but they won't stay in their pretty containers." -Michael Simms, founder of Autumn House Press and Vox Populi

City Bird

Weiner, Arlene

Born in 1910, György Faludy lived through almost all of 20th century and witnessed many of its major events. In the 1930’s he was already an established poet in Hungary, but at the advent of WW II he had to escape Budapest because of his Jewish origin and socialist politics. Traveling through France and North Africa he eventually ended up in the US where he joined the Army and served in the Pacific. After the war he spurned the offer of US citizenship and went back to liberated Hungary; an ardent socialist, he was eager to help build a new, democratic country on the rubbles of the War. But soon the Stalinist regime arrested him as an American spy and kept him at the infamous Recsk forced labor camp until Stalin’s death in ’53 when the camp was dismantled. During the 1956 Hungarian Revolution he fled the country again and started a new life of exile, first in England and then in Canada until the collapse of Communism in 1989 when he was finally able to go back to Hungary where he was showered with prizes. He continued to write and give public readings till he died in Sept, 2006, which doesn’t stop his poetry from remaining as contemporary and relevant as ever. Even the New York Times observed his passing in an obit.
Faludy was an overnight sensation at the age of twenty-five with his very personal take on Villon in his Hungarian translations, especially when he expanded on them with his own Villon pastiches. His masterly use of traditional forms filled with contemporary language and up-to-date social concerns remained the hallmarks of his poetry for the rest of his long creative life. It is impossible to convey the spirit of his poetry in a translation that totally ignores the form, the armature for his poems, but concentrating on form alone can easily distort the message.
The latter was always a focal point of his poems, and in that he was an unusual modern poet: he always had something to say. He was not a purveyor of mood pieces, a builder of images for their own sake; neither was he an uncritical preacher of political positions like many of his contemporaries who sought to discharge their perceived obligation to society by brandishing the latest slogans and conspiracy theories, East and West. And whenever he found himself drawn by a poem into any of those genres, he would always manage to raise his head above the poetic flow and reach for the life preserver of a critical comment. He let himself be overwhelmed by passion only in his torrid love poems, but even there his mind remained an interloper peeping in the window.
This selection of Faludy’s poems offers a little journey of discovery in his poetic landscape which takes us from Faludy the realist thinker with a critical view of history—and whose desperate tone is tempered by unflagging humanism—to Faludy, the poet, animated by his irrepressible spirit, who lived life to the fullest to his last day, marrying at the age of ninety a woman sixty years younger, eating and drinking and smoking as he liked, and most of all, writing his poetry that combined his love of life and all humanity with historical depths and a sense of wonder. His ability to resonate with his and other cultures of all ages lent a transcendental quality to his poetry, and now that he’s dead it puts him among the immortals of world literature.

Silver Pirouettes: Selected Poems

Faludy, György

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Books by Ragged Sky Press