Someday I'd Write This Down

Lowell Jaeger

Shabda Press

Pasadena Rose Poets Poetry Collection 2019: Reflection. Resistance. Reckoning. Resurrection.

Literature & Fiction

Poetry

"Bunkong Tuon is saying something new and important in The Doctor Will Fix It. Exploring uncharted territory: How to raise his dazzling, bi-racial daughter to her fullest potential in today's America. The infatuated father, himself an outsider, searches for answers in these astonishing and tender poems which ponder gender and racial identity, and create a roadmap of what it means to love. This book is honest, frustrated, tender, and human." - Alexis Rhone Fancher, author of Junkie Wife, poetry editor, Cultural Weekly "The Doctor Will Fix It continues the poet's primary theme: the importance of family. Tuon's previous collection, the heart-rending Gruel deals with the refugee experience, of literally being carried out of Cambodia on his grandmother's back and of his new life in America. And So I Was Blessed follows his new life as a husband, father, and teacher with a revealing journey to Vietnam where he learns about his late father's roots. Now with The Doctor Will Fix It, Tuon explores the vagaries of parenting, the misgivings and joys, the problems of biracialism and small-minded prejudice and how we deal with these realities. Ultimately, the poet's sense is that with love and hope, a better world that has such children as his will prevail. Even impossible dreams may come true." -Alan Catlin, poet, editor Misfit Magazine

The Doctor Will Fix It

Tuon, Bunkong

"Nashon Cook's Communion reads like the most delicate, deepest delving into the mysteries of existence: love and sex, hate and violence, life and death in a transcendent interweaving that can leave one crying and smiling all at the same timeless time. This book evokes for me the mystical poetry of the ancient Sufi poets Rumi, Hafiz, and Lala in which body/spirit are one, where the language of sensual love becomes the language of the holy fire and mystical communion outside any church or condemnation of a man who feels passion for other men as the I-narrator does. Herein also unfolds an exploration of various kinds of love, including friendship and mother-son connection. Like the Sufi poets, Nashon Cook whirls until his words become a whirlwind of naked poetry drawing the reader's heart into a similar ecstatic dance. Poetry doesn't get any better than that." --Susan Deer Cloud "In poems plainspoken and lovely, Nahshon Cook tells the human story: our need for one another and the many ways we hurt and heal, together and alone. History, joy, faith, death, revelation - Communion takes them all on with an understated grace, often through conversation, the human voice itself in relationship, in love. "by the time/I finish a poem//being alive/makes sense," the poet tells us. That's how I felt reading this moving collection." -- Sarah Browning, Director of Split This Rock and author of Whiskey in the Garden of Eden
 "In Communion, Nahshon Cook "enters the silence of the sanctuary", a place made wholly by body and mind, meditation and action. Observant in all meanings of that word, these poems rely on the watchful eye and response of their narrator, a black gay man in the American West, where split-second decisions have devastating impact, where a new relationship hangs in the nave of past and future. Soft-spoken and self-assured short lines and long columns are these poems' form and hymn, a long conversation - or is it lamentation? with a congregation of sinners, sanctified, the dead and undead, dreams, and ultimately wonder, gratitude, and care." --Valerie Wallace, editor with RHINO and author of The Dictators' Guide to Good Housekeeping

Communion

Cook, Nahshon

Altadena Poetry Review 2019

"[A] collection of poems that not only recreates the poet's journey from rural Honduras to the cities of the United States, but, through an ingenious structure using Mayan mythology, the book becomes an urgent archetypal journey of the human life cycle."NKenny Fries, author of "The History of My Shoes and the Evolution of Darwin's Theory."

Pinol: Poems

Pinto, Sayra

"Subdued beauty surrounds the reader from the first breath of Joan Siegel's new book, Light at Point Reyes. If there is a Golden Mean, then Siegel has found it, balancing a realistic vision of a starving, brutal, torn world, and the exquisite joy that comes with small recognitions provided by art and human love. In these poems, I felt the power of Wordsworth, the silky lyricism of Debussy, and the centered presence of an artist, like Georgia O'Keeffe." - Diane Wakoski, author of Argonaut Rose

Light at Point Reyes

Siegel, Joan I.

"What makes us men and fathers? What made our fathers men?  How does experience push our life path without us knowing and what does it mean when we figure it out years later?  David Giver's A Slow Education defines identity through review and training. It's an exploration of understanding that calls us back to our own importance and interpretation of our lives in the most significant ways.  It reminds us that what it takes to BE is what being is - and being saved travels by us on endless tracks that we need to jump on.  The trauma of life laid out in words bare on paper in remembrance of how we are taken and given life at the exact same time - a wash so hard to bare and a merciless love that is defining in its depth. Complete. Important. These words in their honest simplicity become poignant to the rise up and move forward way... you can't help but know even if everything hurts. Everything helps."  - Steven Hazen Williams, Fight for your Frequency

A Slow Education: Poems

Giver, David

"Michael Shorbs poems stand as testimony to all that is noble and lasting in the human spirit. He ranges far and wide over human consciousness, taking his time in lyrical gems that balance intellect and intuition. One feels the humanity in these poems-they resonate with our literary fathers while looking, and looming, far into the future." -Neeli Cherkovski "Cosmic muckraker, whimsical shaman, passionate surreal fabulist, Michael Shorb, walking the backs of whales, trekking ruined rain forests like a new Walt Whitman, herein has charted the maps and kept a keen-eyed, lyrical catalogue of the tragedy of our age....A beautiful, absolutely necessary book..." -Steven Schutzman "Michael Shorbs lyrical voice, fierce and frolicking, gets inside you and lives." -Anne Valley-Fox "Michael Shorbs whimsical voice is so steadfast, so authentic, never flinching in the face of all the desecrating activity around us, it lifts us with a delight that redeems our humanity. It certainly lives up to Pounds guiding motto concerning Literachoor: ut doceat, ut moveat, ut delectet: Let it teach, move and delight. He left behind a light for us all." -Eugene Berson

Whale Walker's Morning

Shorb, Michael

"A warning to the reader: you will need an oven mitt to hold this heart-searing book. Replete with vision, wit, and imagistic precision, the poems in this collection enact glacially inside the reader. They gouge out new landscapes and redefine the emotional interior. Jennifer Clark feeds us our spiritual oats in the form of a toddler, a dying friend, a bat attaching itself to the space shuttle during lift off. She makes everything she touches holy. She dips her paint brush into fire and vision creating such potent undertows, we drown and grieve with her. But wait, she seems to whisper to us in other poems, it's time to get up and dance. She inspires us to bang pots and the lids of pans together like a child and revel in the living. Now open this book and read, become-through the power of her poems-exquisitely human again." --John Rybicki, author of When All the World Is Old "In Jennifer Clark's Necessary Clearings a small girl watching smoke rings "attempts to marry the moment" by sliding one onto her finger, a young mother holding her son admits "even this moment is ending." Everything in this collection bears witness to the disappearing world, and to Clark's desire to stay the moment with words. Graylings, gardening neighbors, even freezers die -- "Fix her, fix, her, fix her," prays the daughter of an ailing mother. Yet death and decaying bones share a world with blueberries and goldfinches and astral nurseries where stars are being born, even if their light will take 22 million years to reach us. Necessary Clearings takes place in the tensions between these truths. These are the poems we need while we wait it out." --Susan Blackwell Ramsey, author of A Mind Like This, winner of the Prairie Schooner Book Prize in Poetry

Necessary Clearings

Clark, Jennifer

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