A vivid and varied collection that addresses family loyalties, dysfunction, violence, and differences, Hurrah's Nest is White's imaginative and emotionally honest exploration of growing up the second oldest, first daughter of seven siblings. Childhood experiences are looked at with rawness, sensitivity, and crafted with precision: be it the cutting of her dreadlocks, mother's abortion, drug trafficking, or her sister's developmental disability, the language is tender and startling. Hurrah's Nest--from the confusion of our lives--asks us to make meaning and good from what we've bargained and haven't bargained for.

Hurrah's Nest

Literature & Fiction

White, Arisa

Poetry

Virtual Artists Collective

In the spirit of the old Shaker hymn, the poems in Steven Schroeder's new collection turn and turn &#8211; from a question Laozi raises to Woody Guthrie's holy ground, from Chicago to Texas to Shenzhen to Macao, in conversation with poets and philosophers from Euclid and Thoreau to Emily Dickinson, John Donne, Gertrude Stein, Buddy Holly, Lyle Lovett, and others encountered &#8220;everywhere there is // an edge. And / everywhere there is // an edge...&#8221; Sick and tired of being sick and tired, they take off their shoes, say &#8220;amen&#8221; to birds and the sympathy of cats, marvel at a red moon in Oklahoma in July, hope &#8220;it stays / a long long time // long enough for all that light to fill us with all the madness we need to remember...&#8221; They &#8220;sing the silences, wait,&#8221; stop &#8220;for coffee and a moment / of Monk under other / people's conversations...,&#8221; rejoice &#8220;in collisions that make light possible / in a world where matter, mostly / dark, mostly passes through / what matters to us, undetected&#8221; where &#8220;every poem is a dance, / every spring daisy a resurrection&#8221; &#8211; dancing on the page, &#8220;where / fiber and fiber embrace to make // a plane surface on the edge / of the holograph world / we think we / occupy.&#8221;

Turn

SCHROEDER, Steven

In these poems David Breeden explores the paradoxes of time and language as they stand in for the eternity and silence at the heart of human religious and spiritual experience. e e cummings said, "they played for timelessness with chips of when." The poems in this collection attempt to call time's bluff by laying all the cards on the table.

They've Played for Timelessness (with Chips of When)

Breeden, David

Winding Paths Worn Through Grass offers a meditative experience but also invites the reader to step off the page and walk a summer meadow or stand beside a running mountain brook in winter. This is graceful, elegant poetry, controlled, engaging, marked by lyric simplicity, filled with wisdom and gentleness of vision. Swist pays homage to his roots in Eastern spirituality by his tribute to the Katha Upanishad in the book's initial poem, and he includes a sequence of free-verse tanka written after attending a performance of the Japanese percussion ensemble Kodo. Often honoring European poets such as Attila Jozsef or Giuseppe Ungaretti, or American poets such as Bert Meyers and Robert Francis, these lyric poems focus on the evocation of precise images rooted in the natural world, through which the reader, stopping to listen here, now, may be transported by something as simple and concrete as the wind snapping a branch of white pine into a realm of spiritual transcendence, "going further, further."

Winding Paths Worn Through Grass

Swist, Wally

Donna Pucciani's fifth collection of poems, Hanging Like Hope on the Equinox, explores the strength and fragility of life and moves through journeys both geographic and spiritual. With the power of strong personal voice, Pucciani details seasonal images which convey the harshness of winter and the promise of spring's resurrection. The reader becomes traveler, through illness, surgery, aging and dying, from small towns in the north of Spain to the Ferris wheel at Chicago's Navy Pier. The poet is fearless in her juxtaposition of love and grief, witnessing the human spirit in relentless confrontation with adversity. In the final poem, the graces of the present moment emerge in "little fireflies of dreams... a letter from an old friend...meteors with their long hair flying." The writer leaves us "hanging like hope on the equinox," making peace with the inevitable change of seasons, seeing a vision of a world half-lit, half-dark, and choosing the light.

Hanging Like Hope on the Equinox

Pucciani, Donna

Think the pinched aren't polysyllabic?" You've never heard from Mexico in this register. Nor moved through the East Village and Jerusalem, Syria and Lebanon, with a guide who spies "what grows in broken concrete." Ben-Oni takes us along borderlands and scenes we rarely hear of in the news - to the very fringes of places like Sal Si Puedes ("Leave if you can") with its sandals, jellyfish, beer bottles and narcotic wires, then into the marketplaces of melons and catcalls, with the tongue of a Gypsy "incapable of candor."  This is exploration and revelation via the road less traveled... Where she finally lands pales beside how she sees the world through her tongue.  The journey is all. And if you find yourself "unborn again... twitching in sin" or 'tasting toadstools' and singing the 'discordant dark', then you too may revel in that forbidden space of SOLECISM, reaping poetry from "what remains of the unruly wilds. - Amy King, Author of I Want to Make You Safe and I'm the Man Who Loves You

Solecism

Ben-Oni, Rosebud

Uncle Ernest

THOMAS, Larry D.

Poetry. Verse and prose. A mysterious Emperor observes that while dreaming and living curve toward each other, dreams tend to curve away from one another. Dream Diary is a poetic exploration of this claim. There is a dog called Euclid in the non-Euclidean world of the book. There is a young woman, Zena, with Blake's "fearful symmetry" tattooed on her arm. There is a flight over Patagonia, to the end of the world, on swan's wings. Wild strawberries play the role of the Tree of Knowledge. Pairs of semi-opposites starting with the letter "B" appear like coded messages throughout the book. "The eyelids of darkness quiver with colors, foresee a thousand and one paths. All can be taken tonight..." reads the last poem in this collection. Following the thousand paths of Dream Diary is a feast for the imagination.

Dream Diary

Mitova, Katia

Wild Symmetries

Friedrich, Paul

The poems in Velocity continue to develop themes Wally Swist explored in a recent Timberline Press limited edition, Blessing and Homage. These poems offer a distinct sense of gratitude and tribute: the spiritual connectedness experienced in constructing stone sculptures or in stacking a cord of wood; and the simplicity found in the shine of a Shaker wide-plank oak floor or the experience of loss in a favorite dog's death. There are several poems addressed to other poets, such as New England poet Leo Connellan and Canadian lyric poet anne mckay. Other poems pay homage to Denise Levertov, Pablo Neruda, Jack Spicer, and Walt Whitman. Other tributes include a haiku sequence dedicated to the late internationally-respected editor Robert Spiess and to the electroacoustic contemporary composer, Elainie Lillios, who has set a number of the author's poems to music. Often presented through the matrix of natural images and the ethos of an active spirituality, the poetry in this collection addresses the velocity of life experience and the practice of living in the present moment, either in witnessing one's own true nature pool within oneself, as in the rush of a brook; or what is a kind of iconic transcendence found in Butoh, an innovative form of Japanese dance, where we all may "begin again."

Velocity

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Books by Virtual Artists Collective