SHE RETURNS TO THE FLOATING WORLD (Second Edition) is a book about transformation that examines two recurring motifs in Japanese folk tales and popular culture: "the woman who disappears" and the "older sister/savior." Many of the poems are persona poems spoken by characters from animé and manga, mythology, and fairy tales, like the story of the kitsune, or fox-woman, whose relationships are followed throughout the book. Gailey's abiding interest in female heroes and tales of transformation, love, and loss bristles to life with a cast of characters including wives who become foxes, sisters who become birds, and robots with souls. "I deeply admire the skill with which Jeannine Hall Gailey weaves myth and folklore into poems illuminating the realities of modern life. Gailey is, quite simply, one of my favorite American poets; and She Returns to the Floating World is her best collection yet." --Terri Windling, writer, editor, and artist ("The Year's Best Fantasy and Horror" series, "The Armless Maiden," "The Endicott Studio")

She Returns to the Floating World: (Second Edition)

Literature & Fiction

Gailey, Jeannine Hall

Poetry

Two Sylvias Press

Guidebook to accompany The Poet Tarot deck. Deck not included.

The Poet Tarot Guidebook

Fire On Her Tongue: An Anthology of Contemporary Women's Poetry is the first electronic collection (now in a print version) of poems by women writing today. Poets Kelli Russell Agodon and Annette Spaulding-Convy, Co-Editors of Crab Creek Review and Co-Founders of Two Sylvias Press, have collaborated on this ground-breaking literary project. Featuring over 70 of the most extraordinary poets from a variety of backgrounds and whose ages span from thirteen to ninety-one, Fire On Her Tongue showcases superbly crafted poems exploring the contemporary woman’s experience. Fire On Her Tongue: An Anthology of Contemporary Women's Poetry includes poems by Kim Addonizio, Nin Andrews, Madeline DeFrees, Patricia Fargnoli, Annie Finch, Kate Greenstreet, Lola Haskins, Jane Hirshfield, Keetje Kuipers, Dorianne Laux, Aimee Nezhukumatathil, Alicia Ostriker, Natasha Sajé, Peggy Shumaker, Patricia Smith, A.E. Stallings, Rachel Zucker, and many other accomplished poets. Fire On Her Tongue is an amazing resource for any reader or student who wants to explore an in-depth selection of work from some of today’s strongest women poets.

Fire On Her Tongue: An Anthology of Contemporary Women's Poetry

Agodon, Kelli Russell

Spaulding-Convy, Annette

The Cardiologist's Daughter is the debut poetry collection of poet and medical student, Natasha Kochicheril Moni. Praise for The Cardiologist's Daughter: Lovingly rendered and tenderly drawn, Natasha Kochicheril Moni's poems pulse with wonder and compassion as she examines the concerns of the heart. ~ Kim Barnes, author of In the Kingdom of Men Natasha Moni is the poet who comes to us "from the clan of butterfly watchers.” I love her poems in this book, I suggest you open it to a poem such as "As in Dutch, As in You" or her sequence of the "Cardiologist's daughter" and you will find a voice which is able to find lyric in moments of each day, to find music in medicine, to find strange clarity in each of us. This is a beautiful debut. ~ Ilya Kaminsky, author of Dancing in Odessa This doctor's daughter sings of the literal as well as the figurative heart, in poems that are haunting and elegiac. Moni’s love of the language of medicine and anatomy, as well as a deep respect for her Indian and Dutch family roots, are evident throughout these delightful poems. Though her life path may evolve differently than her Cardiologist father's, they both bend toward healing as art. ~ Peter Pereira, author of Saying the World Natasha Moni writes with unflinching honesty and subtle surprise. The Cardiologist’s Daughter is both cryptic and conversational, self-deprecating and transcendent – a tender homage to her Indian and Dutch family roots and an intense reflection on the quest for personal identity. ~ Anjali Banerjee, author of Haunting Jasmine and Enchanting Lily

The Cardiologist's Daughter

Moni, Natasha Kochicheril

Winner of the 2014 Two Sylvias Press Chapbook Prize (judged by Aimee Nezhukumatathil), Earth is the sixth book by poet Cecilia Woloch. Praise for Earth: In Earth, Cecilia Woloch writes with the wonder and resilience that are essential, not only to empathy, but to transformation. Woloch weds us to the natural world through language that is both straightforward and particular. A “river’s lifting dress” comes to represent history; branches swaying “like the arms of a woman waving goodbye” come to represent mortality. These remarkable poems are hymns and requiems; they are made of "blood mixed with earth." —Terrance Hayes These poems reflect a mature writer, a woman unflinching in both love and craft. The love is unabashed; the language boldly lyrical and image-rich. As a devoted reader of Cecilia Woloch's writing, I relish anything she offers, so I welcome Earth, this book of passionate, vigorous poetry, in which grandeur of spirit always redeems sorrow. As Woloch writes in the gorgeous prose poem "Afterlife": "I want to be fierce and joyful and a meadow when I'm dead." May we all be meadows with you, Dear Poet. —Holly Prado These poems gel together beautifully with a musical sense of foreboding and epiphany inhabiting the lines. These pages give us a terrain where a "honey of birdcall in our mouth" seems equally at place with a landscape populated with a willow that leaves the speaker "half afraid that the tree would fly." I want to return to Earth again and again. —Aimee Nezhukumatathil

Earth

Woloch, Cecilia

landscape/heartbreak (Two Sylvias Press, 2015) is poet Michelle Penaloza's first book. Praise For landscape/heartbreak: Peñaloza's poignantly beautiful landscape/heartbreak is more than a suite of breakup poems, its own veritable tradition in American poetry. Hers is a sequence that plumbs the meaning of what it means to love, sacrificing to secret away bits and pieces of one's self whose other parts remain scattered on corners, in parks, and bridges. This collection is about the business of reconciling memories and ghosts, the toughness in learning how to breathe again. —Major Jackson I’ve been in love with landscape/heartbreak since before it was written, from the moment I first learned of Michelle Peñaloza’s wild idea: to map heartbreak. What if strangers told their stories while wandering the avenues and backstreets of a city? What if trauma could be healed one footfall at a time? Peñaloza enacts an urban alchemy, transforming the walkers’ personal struggles into art and thereby coming closer to her own persistent ghosts. A collection for anyone who has ever had her (or his) heart stomped on. This means most of us. A powerful and exciting debut. —Susan Rich The question—"What hurt you into poetry?"—lies at the center of Michelle Peñaloza's landscape/heartbreak. And her poems urge us to seek the answer, following Peñaloza's speaker on her sojourn where walking and breathing create the meditative cadence to lull the body into the ecstatic state necessary for conjuration. From the beauty of these poems emerge the ghosts of those loves that have splintered us into jagged pieces. As we traverse Peñaloza's lyrical landscape, the "sueded/beads of unopened wild poppies" and "renegade ferns/growing upon the stumps of old docks" smooth over the serrated edges of what cuts us deep. This is a marvelous and haunting collection. —Oliver de la Paz As you read this remarkable collection, you might think that each poem begins with two people walking through a city. But then, dear reader, you realize that it's no longer two people in the distance, for you've been invited on the journey as well. These poems will transport you like that, and then they'll walk beside you through a landscape of heartache and longing. While there, "You can look back," Peñaloza writes, "remember the stories beneath all this shine." And these stories do shine. And you will remember them. —Matthew Olzmann

landscape/heartbreak

Penaloza, Michelle

Martha Silano's new book What The Truth Tastes Like, (Two Sylvias Press, 2015) is a second edition of her original, award-winning collection published in 1999. This revised book includes twenty new poems, a Foreword by David Kirby, and an Afterword by Martha Silano. Praise for What The Truth Tastes Like: From clear-eyed attention to the ordinary world, Martha Silano makes poems that instruct, startle, and give pleasure as only a great poem can. –David Kirby  Martha Silano reveals that she invented the perpetually grieving Linzer torte and the self-effervescing catbox lid and I believe her. Her poems are full of good stuff—sausages and Oklahoma villages and dreams of parrots. Even when love has gone sour and the lover has gone south, the energy and inventiveness never flag. We know she'll be right back, offering more truthful tastes. Take a big bite, this is a strong first serving. –Robert Hershon Martha Silano writes with wit and intelligence, and she is equally at home naming the birds on a beach and the arcana of the yellow pages. It is her love of language that distinguishes these poems and makes them so full of startling awareness, and this not only at the level of the word, but also in the syntax, which reveals the mind's continual approach and avoidance of its emotional home. –Alison Hawthorne Deming The truth tastes like these succulent poems. Their refrains will form on your lips and ring in your heart. In these rich, elegant--and wickedly witty--pieces, Martha Silano has captured the rhythms that percolate, unheard by the rest of us, just beneath the surface of everyday life. –Laura Kalpakian

What The Truth Tastes Like

Silano, Martha

Created by poets for poets, The Daily Poet Companion Journal is designed to be used in conjunction with The Daily Poet: Day-By-Day Prompts For Your Writing Practice. Comprising over 370 pages with prompt titles, this journal provides space for poems, creative ideas, inspired doodles, and monthly writing goals.
 The Daily Poet Companion Journal will become a poem diary of your year, capturing and organizing what you’ve been inspired to write. In a world of smart phones and computers, this journal is a reminder of the importance of pen to paper—your poems are waiting to be released on these pages and sent out into the world.
 Now, write on. . .

The Daily Poet Companion Journal: A Creative Notebook to be used with The Daily Poet: Day-By-Day Prompts For Your Writing Practice

Religion & Spirituality

Diagnosed with breast cancer, Natalie Serber did the only thing she could: she wrote her way through the confusion and fear. In this fierce and good-humored memoir, she maintains her sense of gratitude and grace. Praise for Community Chest: I loved Natalie Serber's smart, funny and bittersweet report from the Land of Breast Cancer. Fear and grief take turns with an "almost normal day"; kindness and honesty collide with "irrational" rage. While generously detailing the unique aspects of her personal journey, she also manages to honor the collective experience so many (too many!) of us have shared. Now we have this story to share too. —Elizabeth Rosner, author of Electric City, Blue Nude, and The Speed of Light Natalie Serber is the kind of friend you long for when things get hard—tough enough to see how dark things can get, but with enough pluck and fortitude to show you how to thrash through it. This perfect memoir is not just a tale of surviving a diagnosis but of truly experiencing it, observing it, and feeling all that it brings—gravity, absurdity, craziness, fury, tenacity, and love. —Robin Romm, author of The Mercy Papers and The Mother Garden What I loved about this book: the honesty, the unadorned reality, the bitter, the sweet, the surrender—the lucidness, and lyric grace that touched these pages, calling you friend, whispering secrets, helping readers grapple with their own struggles with the fear and pain and shame that comes from a diagnosis of Cancer. Natalie Serber is a born writer, braiding past, present and future into a story that is both vulnerable and strong, witty and filled with insight. —Naseem Rakha, author of The Crying Tree Natalie Serber’s Community Chest closely describes and considers her experience of breast cancer—from diagnosis through surgery and chemotherapy and recovery to the lovely abyss of remission. Serber's prose is totally stunning, is both clipped, compact and capaciously expansive. The writing reveals Serber’s varied emotional, bodily experience with great precision and complexity. She especially writes deeply about the experiences of loneliness and anxiety (Anxiety is imagining forward, imagining the worst.). The knockout sections here are “Pierced” and “#Baldunderneath.” Both describe what underscores any day of illness (any day of wellness too)—loss of body, decline of the body amidst other bodies in decline, in fruition, and even though Serber experiences (and endures) bodily loss, the prose forms into its own beautifully fecund body regaining itself. —Jay Ponteri, author of Wedlocked and Darkmouth Strikes Again

Community Chest

Biographies & Memoirs

Serber, Natalie

Community & Culture

Dr. Sharon Estill Taylor has written a highly readable and illuminating account of her experience as a birthmother in the sixties. With a keen eye for detail and a wry sense of humor, she vividly recounts the ways the no-questions-asked cultural forces of the time swept her toward the surrender of her son. Though steamrolled by a process that gave her no say, Dr. Taylor persevered and found her voice as an early champion of sensitive search and reunion. —Jim Gritter, author of The Spirit of Open Adoption, Lifegivers, and Hospitious Adoption Praise for Phantom Son:: In Phantom Son, Dr. Sharon Estill Taylor tells her own story of being an unwed mother at age 18 in the early 1960s. It bridges a time when unwed women endured devastating discrimination and pressure to give up their parental rights to a time when searching for and finding these children was more accepted and facilitated by society. There are smaller sub-stories, including one about the author’s loss of her father who was killed in World War II, and how that event affected her family over the decades; and another about her experience of sex and identity-formation in the 1960s. These sub-stories are fascinating and contribute to the gripping nature of this book. Beyond all, this is a story of grief, courage, and redemption. The lives of most people are filled with issues and complexities that only can be addressed by storytelling. Taylor does that with grace and eloquence. —John Harvey, Editor of the Journal of Loss and Trauma, and Professor of Psychology, Emeritus, University of Iowa Dr. Sharon Estill Taylor's account of her unintended pregnancy and her subsequent traumatic adoption process in the 1960s is an important reminder of how far we have come as a society in terms of the acceptance of out of wedlock births. Instead of the rampant shaming and secrecy surrounding these pregnancies, these commonplace events are now tolerated and even celebrated. This is how it should be as the impact of societal and religious silencing and shame heaped upon these mothers in the 1960s was nothing short of traumatic abuse, as Dr. Taylor tells us in her book. This is an important read for anyone, but I particularly recommend this book for those whose lives have been affected by the disenfranchised grief of coerced adoption. —Deborah Stokes, PhD, Director of The Better Brain Center, Washington, DC In Phantom Son, Dr. Sharon Estill Taylor shares her journey as an unwed mother in the 1960s and her courageous search for the son she had to give up. Her grief and loss give way to the formation of wonderful familial relationships. In the tradition of the Irish story teller, Dr. Taylor gives her readers a powerful gift that will resonate in their own lives. —Fr. Kilian J. Malvey, O.S.B., Professor of Theology, Saint Martin's University As a reunited adoptee, I never tire of reading about reunions. In Dr. Sharon Estill Taylor's Phantom Son, the reader experiences the author’s journey from love-struck teenager to expectant mother to powerful advocate for other birthmothers. Dr. Taylor vividly describes how she was forced to physically separate from her son and how she kept the emotional connection alive in her soul. Dr. Taylor’s writing is raw, open, and honest; important qualities when dealing with such emotional subject matter. —Christine Murphy, author of Taking Down the Wall:

Phantom Son: A Mother's Story of Surrender

Taylor, Sharon Estill

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Books by Two Sylvias Press