Poetry. DIFFICULT NEWS is a physician-poet's collection of observations and reflections, written in the language of the soul--distillations of her inner response to people, events and landscapes, as well as being expressions of her own nature, Artemis. [Her] poems reveal an aesthetic eye and an intuitive perception" - Jean Shinoda Bolen, M.D., author of Goddesses in Everywoman. Variety, compassion, clarity of voice and vision mark this compelling first collection of sensitive responses to difficult and beautiful news, poems that help us appreciate our lives as we go on learning how to live them" - Jeanne Lohman, author of Granite Under Water.

DIFFICULT NEWS

Literature & Fiction

Berry, Valerie

Poetry

Sixteen Rivers Press

Poetry. "Terry Ehret contructs poems that are fearless...No matter how dark her themes, she manages to circle back...to reclaim new and widening patterns of light, as dark hair, antlers, corollas of oaks spring from her canvas. It is how she listens to her subjects and finds their form that ultimately stuns the readers. Like Joaquin Miller in "The Heights," she grips the world so hard she hold it in place for a few moments -- and makes it shine" Fran Ringold, Editor of Nimrod. Terry Ehret's LOST BODY is also available from SPD.

TRANSLATIONS FROM THE HUMAN LANGUAGE

Ehret, Terry

Poetry. Margaret Kaufman's SNAKE AT THE WRIST is a striking collection of contemplative engagement, at once celebratory and elegiac. Rich images convey a fine attention to the natural world and the inner worlds of a variety of speakers, a prairie woman, a nineteenth century physician, an artist's model, Lot's wife. "Psychologically acute," according to Eleanor Wilner, the poems combine "chastened experience with sensuous relish for the garden of the real." David St. John calls the volume "a gorgeous collection"; Joan Aleshire notes "Kaufman's keen eye, insights, and expressive grace give her work an implicit power, akin to that of the book's presiding spirit, the Minoan Snake Goddess with a "snake at the wrist."

SNAKE AT THE WRIST

Kaufman, Margaret

In the title poem of this collection, based on a scene from Jean Cocteau’s 1946 film La Belle et la Bête , Beauty’s father falls asleep in the castle of the Beast, although the room he dozes in is alive with magic. The poems in After Cocteau are testaments to the miracles that surround us, from the natural world to the world of art. The narrative arc of the book moves from California to the Missouri Ozarks and back to the coast again. Along the way, we meet other travelers on the "dark path": Amelia Earhart, an aging cat, Salvador Dali. This beautiful collection ends with a meditation on the water-lily paintings of Monet, and the way that art and nature can reconcile us to the mingled joy and grief of our existence.

AFTER COCTEAU

Miller, Carolyn

United States

Poetry. "This book is life in itself. Here, a close self-regard; there, a wider regard of the world—each poem precise, often scalpel sharp, always keen in its music, always wise. SACRED PRECINCT is a large book, every poem in it earned."—Gerald Fleming

Sacred Precinct

Kudler, Jacqueline

Poetry. "With fabulous images originating from an especially sharp eye, Diane Sher Lutovich bares her longings and losses. She is frank, sensual, and wry. She goes everywhere: wilderness, museum, zoo, bar mitzvah, love bed, grave. A thief myself, I understand why she stole: her hunger and defiance"--Phyllis Koestenbaum. Diane Sher Lutovich, a writer and teacher of writing, lives near an outlet of the Pacific in the San Francisco Bay Area. Her poetry has received several awards and has appeared in reviews and anthologies. She is the author of Nobody's Child: How Older Women Say Good-bye to Their Mothers, published by Baywood Press.

WHAT I STOLE

Lutovich, Diane Sher

History & Criticism

Poetry. "Clear poem by clear poem, FALLING WORLD limns an ever-widening circle of connections: familial, marital, earthly, cultural, political. As woven by Lynn Trombetta's attentive and particular vision, these spun threads become part of poetry's great parachute, which makes our ceaseless falling not only an inevitable fate, but also our unique humanity and art"--Jane Hirshfield. Lynn Trombetta lives and teaches in Santa Rosa, California. Her honors include the DL Emblen Award, an award from Americas Review and three Pushcart Prize nominations. As CB Follett states, "lush with music and imagery, provocative with meaning . this is a succulent collection, and Trombetta's is a stunning voice."

FALLING WORLD

Trombetta, Lynn Lyman

Poetry. "The world is full of things unbecoming themselves," writes Maria M. Benet in Mapmaker of Absences. The poems in this collection chart more than subtractions and absences. They recover scenes of a childhood in Eastern Europe and contemporary life in California; they record the unraveling of preconceptions natural, marital, and familial; they remind us of the intensity of small moments brought into consciousness. "Maria M. Benet is a literary cartographer of memory, of a past dense with meanings that need to be deciphered, of longing, nostalgia, and loss. She has found a way to map the interiors, and she does so with insight, sympathy, and imagination"--Edward Hirsch.

MAPMAKER OF ABSENCES

Benet, Maria M.

The world is always sensuously and immediately present in Swimmer Climbing onto Shore, Gerald Fleming’s first collection of poetry. While these poems question the capacity of language to render the heart of human existence, the poet’s words never fail to praise the transformative power of art in making sense of that existence. Fleming’s long, rhapsodic sequence of poems, “Ars Poetica,” is a brilliant and lively song in the museum of words. Its inventive dialogue brings to life a creation story in which writer and reader join in the making of worlds neither has seen, but both experience fully.

Swimmer Climbing onto Shore

Fleming, Gerald

Poetry. In the opening poem of her last book of poetry, Diane Lutovich writes about moving from one house to another; in the last poem, she writes about how she will soon leave on "a new kind of trip," the kind each of us must take alone. In between, she longs for spring in California, misses Paris, goes swimming in Mexico, remembers the past, treasures the present, prepares to leave behind everything she loves, and cherishes the world she exists in every day. The poems in this brave book are both rueful and triumphant, measured and passionate, and shot through with a wild kind of joy in life's plenitude. As Jackie Kudler writes in the book's foreword: "That art can grace its gifted toilers with immortality remains one of life's most reliable miracles. For here, among these pages, we find Diane again--laughing, complaining, considering, affirming--and always very much alive."

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