-
Willow from the Willow
Margaret Young
Margaret Young grew up in Oberlin, Ohio. After graduating from Yale, she worked in a traveling theater company before earning an M.A. in creative writing at the University of California, Davis. She has taught and done residencies in many settings, and earned an Individual Artist Grant from the Ohio Arts Council in 2005. Her first poetry collection, Willow from the Willow, was published by Cleveland State University Poetry Center in 2002. Her most recent collection, Almond Town, appeared with Bright Hill Press in 2011. She teaches at Endicott College and was recently appointed to the faculty of the Global Center for Advanced Studies.
“By turns lyric, sardonic, and elegiac, Margaret Young is always a meticulous observer, learning, Willow from the Willow, as she watches May ‘etch and bloom,’ records the misdoings of a cough that’s a ‘small beast in my chest,’ and mourns a mother whose ghostly presence blesses these pages when she returns in dreams, ‘wet hands shining for me.’ It’s a pleasure to read the words this poet murmurs as she moves sure-footedly toward ‘the sweet white ice of tomorrow’” –Sandra M. Gilbert
“At the center of this wide-ranging and highly engaging and accomplished first collection of poems by Margaret Young is a paradoxical sensibility: one with a girl’s heart and a woman’s breadth of experience. Ms. Young is at ease in the realm of myth as well as in the realm of the pathologies of family life. She embraces loss and death with the same dignity and unselfconsciousness as she embraces joy and discovery. There is one elegant surprise after another as you read through these poems, and in the end there is the clear sense that you have been in the presence of a true lover of words and a spinner of sometimes frighteningly clear tales of who we are and why we are this way.” –Bruce Weigl
“‘What have you got to show for your tears?’ Margaret Young asks herself and everyone. She has a gorgeous new book to show, one filled with places and moments I love, admire, and sometimes envy. ‘Your mother is not there to catch you / again, her face not smiling / from the promised first snow cloud’—I am wounded and healed by these lines and by many, many others. I am grateful that this book exists.” –Franz Wright
More Information:
-
The Dry Season: Q’anjob’ al Maya Poems
Gaspar Pedro González
Gaspar Pedro González is General Director of Art and Culture in the Ministry of Culture of Guatemala. He is President of the B’eyb’ al Cultural Association, and a Professor of Mayan Literature and Oral Tradition at Mariano Gálvez University of Guatemala. He is a writer, painter, and investigator in the field of Mesoamerican culture. As a speaker of Mayan Q’ anjob’ al, his current project is the creation of educational youth centers for the recovery and development of Mayan culture in each of the 21 Mayan ethnic groups of Guatemala.
The translator of The Dry Season, R. McKenna Brown is Associate Professor of Spanish and Director of the International Studies Program at Virginia Commonwealth University. The author of several books and articles on Mayan studies, he has designed and led intensive summer programs focusing on Mayan language and culture in Guatemala for over a decade.
More Information:
-
The Largest Possible Life
Alison Luterman
Alison Luterman is a poet, essayist, and playwright. Her books include the poetry collections Desire Zoo (Tia Chucha Press), The Largest Possible Life (Cleveland State University Poetry Center Press), and See How We Almost Fly (Pearl Editions) and a collection of essays, Feral City (SheBooks). Luterman’s plays include Saying Kaddish With My Sister, Hot Water, Glitter and Spew, Oasis, and The Recruiter and the musical, Links in a Chain. Her writings have been published in The Sun, The New York Times, The Boston Phoenix, Rattle, The Brooklyn Review, Oberon, Tattoo Highway, Ping Pong, Kalliope, Poetry East, Poet Lore, Poetry 180, Slipstream, and other journals and anthologies. Alison has taught at The Writing Salon in Berkeley, the Esalen Institute, and the Omega Institute, as well as at high schools, juvenile halls, and poetry festivals.
“Alison Luterman’s passionate, original poetry sets my heart on fire. When the heat becomes unbearable, she leads me to the water and puts the fire out. A writer of enormous talent, she embraces the wounded world around her, and reveals herself to be a part of it, prisoner to the same fears and desires as the rest of us. Her poems are acts of mercy.” –Safransky
“The best poems from Alison Luterman’s first poetry collection, The Largest Possible Life, have the feel of having been artfully lifted from precise moments of intimacy and betrayal, and they are imbued with the beautiful impossibility of hope in a world that seems in mourning for its own lost chances. Yet what balances this tightrope walk on the edge of hip nihilism, or clever confessionalism, is a fine and a finely tuned artistic irony. Irony in the old way meant not only a strangely truthful diction turned somehow askew, but an irony of form as well: a music of line and an urgently human way of speaking seamlessly woven together. Even more, this is a book of delight and surprise, and of delicately comic turns of phrase. Out of the corner of her eye, Alison Luterman is a keen watcher of the tangled business of our lives, and in her heart, she is a storyteller whose power resides, as in all good storytellers’ hearts, in her faith in the listener.” –Bruce Weigl
More Information:
-
The Book of Orgasms
Nin Andrews
Nin Andrews’ poems and stories have appeared in many literary journals and anthologies, including Ploughshares, Best American Poetry (1997, 2001, 2003), and Great American Prose Poems. She is the author of several books, including Why God Is a Woman (BOA, 2015); Southern Comfort (CavanKerry Press, 2009), Dear Professor, Do You Live in a Vacuum? (Subito Press, 2008), Sleeping with Houdini (BOA Editions Ltd., 2008), Midlife Crisis with Dick and Jane (Web Del Sol, 2005), and The Book of Orgasms (Cleveland State University Poetry Center, 2000).“There is no other young writer—at least on these shores—whose work even remotely resembles that of Nin Andrews. To find her predecessor one has to look to Europe, to the sly and sometimes erotic zaniness of Luis Bunuel. Nin Andrews’ The Book of Orgasms is hilariously Swiftian and eerily surrealist by turns. Talents as original as hers are rare—and are exceedingly welcome.” –David Wojohn
“What a swell first book this is—sexy, audacious, funny, inventive. Nin Andrews has a deft comic touch that enhances her lyricism. Her commitment to pleasure is a salutary reminder that amusement contains muse. Read this book in bed. I’ m sure it will be as good for you as it was for me.” –David Lehman
More Information:
-
Attendant Ghost
George Looney
George Looney’s first book, Animals Housed in the Pleasure of the Flesh, won the 1995 Bluestem Award and was published by Bluestem Press. His work has also won fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Ohio Arts Council, as well as awards from numerous literary journals, and has appeared in The Southern Review, The Kenyon Review, Denver Quarterly, Southern Poetry Review, Quarterly West and others. For seven years, he served as Editor-in-Chief of Mid-American Review. He currently teaches at Penn State Erie.
“The poems of George Looney speak the language of the dream world. This is a vividly surreal landscape of wind and smoke, crowded with ghosts, angels, drunks, defrocked priests. It’s a haunting, intense vision that will not be denied.” –Martin Espada
“Not since the last books of Richard Hugo have I heard such melancholy and affecting tones as in George Looney’s wonderful new Attendant Ghosts. How can poetry so languid be so tight? How can such action yield such fine, meditative deliberation? Such are the irreconcilable circumstances of our lives, Looney says. Just so, he constructs his complex poems in long, spacious lines, and ironizes the work with crisp syntax and a quick narrative pace. Attendant Ghosts is a passionate, penetrating book.” –David Baker
“These poems luxuriate in the willing melancholy of not-quite-despair in the midst of actual suffering. Something certainly is amiss in this speaker’s exhausted and exhausting locale; so he rouses and, in the spirit of a plain-style prophet, raises his voice to advocate the proposition of hope, lends his breath to its unlikely expression.” — Scott Cairns
“Like Ray Carver and Richard Hugo before him, George Looney serves up a nightcap and a prayer with the poems of Attendant Ghosts. Monks, women and madmen, lapsed Catholics and the collapsed lovers of small towns and small town bars: they’ re all ghosts in this burly, breathless, darkly glowing collection.” –Kathy Fagan
More Information:
-
Short History of Pets
Carol Potter
Carol Potter received her M.F.A. from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst in 1982, and has taught at Indiana University, University of Redlands, UCLA Extension Writers’ program, Antioch University, the Ohio State University, Champlain College, and at community colleges in California and Massachusetts. Brought up on a dairy farm in Northwest Connecticut, Potter lives in the Northeast Kingdom in Vermont. Potter’s most recent book of poems, Otherwise Obedient (Red Hen Press, 2007) was a finalist in the Lambda Literary Awards 2008 for LGBT poetry. Her third book of poems Short History of Pets won the 1999 Cleveland State Poetry Center Award, and the Balcones Award. Previous books are Upside Down in the Dark, 1995, and Before We Were Born, 1990—both from Alice James Books. Potter’s poems have appeared in Field, The Iowa Review, Poetry, The American Poetry Review, The Massachusetts Review, The Journal, Prairie Schooner, The Women’s Review of Books and many other journals.
“Short History of Pets is a knock-out punch from the get-go. With captivating power, it reminds us that what claims or appears to be short may also be profound, deep and enduring. Also, how many histories are hidden, and for how many difficult reasons. Carol Potter writes with a magnetically potent instinct for pacing and a stunning originality of style. Her poems pull us into scenes, images, ragged relationships, complicated worlds of adults— you’ll come out voting for children and animals, as well as re-examining every troubled saga you encounter with a more vivid eye and sense of smell. READ THIS BOOK: It’ s as important and indelible as that.” –Naomi Shihab Nye
More Information:
-
Buried Treasure
Dan Bellm
Dan Bellm is a writer, editor, and translator. His first book of poetry, One Hand On the Wheel, launched the California Poetry Series from Roundhouse Press, and his second, Buried Treasure, (Cleveland State University Poetry Center, 1999), won the Poetry Society of America’s Alice Fay DiCastagnola Award and the Cleveland State University Poetry Center Prize. His poems have appeared in Poetry, Ploughshares, The Threepenny Review, The Best American Spiritual Writing, and Word of Mouth: An Anthology of Gay American Poetry. He is also a widely published translator of poetry and fiction from Spanish. He has been awarded poetry residencies at Yaddo and Dorset Colony House, as well as an Artist’ s Fellowship in Literature from the California Arts Council. His most recent book of poetry is Practice (Sixteen Rivers Press, 2008), winner of the California Book Award, and he teaches in the M.F.A. in Creative Writing Program at Antioch University Los Angeles.
“This stunning book is fiercely alive, and awake to the self as both singular and inextricably part of the whole—to the body as one in a field of yearning and failing human forms. ‘Delle Avenue’ is—and I don’t say this lightly—a great poem of city life, of the confluence of memory and history and voice which city streets are. Dan Bellm’s genuine authority and his vulnerable, almost physical presence on the page lead us, somehow, to connection with what is larger, more ongoing, than any single person is; he sings the anxious and lovely story of his place and time.” –Mark Doty
“Whether he is looking at a small town, a hip neighborhood or the inner city, Dan Bellm regards American life with honesty, pity, and acceptance. He invokes the spirits of the poet James Schuyler and the composer John Cage, and the blessing they provide him is that, like them, Bellm scorns nothing. He can make poetry out of the ordinary grief of his parents’ lives or the unlikely details of a shabby city street. He finds a connection between artistic ambition and the evolutionary stubbornness of quaking aspens. He has not forgotten his childhood, even as he struggles with being a parent. These poems range widely, giving us both the big picture of our time and place and the personal situation carrying on modestly within it. This poet’s gift—and I think it is a substantial one—is for heartbreaking accuracy.” –Mark Jarman
More Information:
-
Les Barricades Mystérieuses
Jared Carter
Jared Carter has published three books of poetry with the Cleveland State University Poetry Center, most recently Les Barricades Mystérieuses (1999).
“Carter’s is a poetry of resolute middle distance, firmly of this world: between the dust under the earth and the dust of space there exists the place the poem can illumine.” –Helen Vendler
“These are loving poems, delivered in a quiet, authoritative voice; the reader slips into their flow and partakes of a communion. . . [This] is a remarkable achievement.” –Bruce Bennett
“From beginning to end, this volume has the quiet passion of conviction, the voice of a poet who knows exactly what he wants to say and how to say it. . . Behind the range of styles and approaches, one recognizes a single honest and contemporary voice.” –Dana Gioia
More Information:
-
Hammerlock
Tim Seibles
Tim Seibles is the author of Buffalo Head Solos (Cleveland State University Press, 2004), Hammerlock (Cleveland State University Press, 1999), Ten Miles an Hour (Mille Grazie Press, 1998), Kerosene (Ampersand Press, 1995), Hurdy-Gurdy (Cleveland State University Poetry Center, 1992), and Body Moves (Corona Press, 1988). He is a former NEA fellow and has led workshops for Cave Canem and the Zora Neale Hurston-Richard Wright Foundation. He lives in Norfolk, Virginia, where he teaches courses for Old Dominion University’s English Department and M.F.A. in Writing Program.
“This is not a poetry of the highfalutin violin nor the somber cello, but a melody you heard somewhere that followed you home. Elegant and silly, irreverent, fun and funny, Tim Seibles’ poetry celebrates the spirit’s little moments of holy joy.” –Sandra Cisneros
“Tim Seibles will get you in his hammerlock and won’t let you go till he has taken you into the center of American politics and pop culture, the minds of birds, the Tao te Ching, your body, your so-called color, your so-called race. He lights up everything he touches like the candle at the heart of the lantern. A houseful of voices speaks through him in language so tenable, you’ll at times feel bruised, at times made love to. I read a lot of poetry. I’ve never read poetry like this.” –Reginald McKnight
“Tim Seibles’ version of our changing and growing American speech range widely, from anguish to comedy, from transcendence to earthly bewilderment. The joy of reading these poems is like overhearing a very smart, crazy neighbor’s thoughts as they move between philosophical inquiry and praise for the everyday.” –Li-Young Lee
More Information:
-
The Obsidian Ranfla
Anthony R. Vigil
Anthony R. Vigil was brought up in Denver, Colorado. He earned a B.A. in Spanish and English from St. John’s University. In 1994, he won the Associated Writing Program Intro Award, and in 1997, while completing his M.F.A. at Colorado State University, he won the Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Award for academic excellence and humanitarian activism.
“Rising out of the life of a man born into a Denver Mexican-American family, this poetry reels with pain and glows with tenderness for the struggles, defeats, and, finally, the pride of la raza.” –Mary Crow.
“This is the poetry we’ve been waiting so long to hear, as well-crafted as the face of Pedro Infante, with a voice you’ll never forget.” –Lorna Dee Cervantes.
“Chicano Dante has taken us down to Varriomundo rings, in a tear-gas drenched window-tinted psyche, a neo-urban offering in nightsticked cycles of collapsed time and convex space. . . The obsidian ride is magical as the sorcerer’s looking glass. . . A sacred book without a bible, brown boyz prophecy and holy graffiti without antecedents.” –Juan Felipe Herrera
-
The Catastrophe of Rainbows
Martha Collins
Martha Collins is the author of Day Unto Day (Milkweed, 2014), White Papers (Pitt Poetry Series, 2012), and Blue Front (Graywolf, 2006), a book-length poem based on a lynching her father witnessed when he was five years old. Collins has also published four earlier collections of poems, three books of co-translations from the Vietnamese, and two chapbooks. Both White Papers and Blue Front won Ohioana awards. Blue Front also won an Anisfield-Wolf Book Award, and was chosen as one of "25 Books to Remember from 2006" by the New York Public Library. Collins' other awards include fellowships from the NEA, the Bunting Institute, the Ingram Merrill Foundation, and the Witter Bynner Foundation, as well as three Pushcart Prizes, the Alice Fay Di Castagnola Award, a Lannan residency grant, and the Laurence Goldstein Poetry Prize. Collins founded the Creative Writing Program at UMass-Boston, and for ten years was Pauline Delaney Professor of Creative Writing at Oberlin College. She is currently editor-at-large for FIELD magazine and one of the editors of the Oberlin College Press. In spring 2010, she served as Distinguished Visiting Writer at Cornell University.
“The Catastrophe of Rainbows is that rare thing, a book which is mysteriously familiar even on a first reading and new and surprising on each successive encounter. . . As the subtle inter-connections among the poems clarify and expand, it is as if one inhabits a seamless arc of color. And also sound. . . But it is the poet as story-teller who most amazes me. Like a magician, she tells us what she is about to do and, as she tells it, it happens.” –Peter Klappert
“I admire the fierce purity of Martha Collin’s language and, more, the sardonic imagination with which she explores and elaborates alternative—and sometimes sinister—fictions about the world. . . Her Catastrophe of Rainbows is an enlightening event.” –Sandra Gilbert
“Martha Collins is a poet whose command of craft rises beautifully to meet the needs of her vision. . . The content which informs, which forms, these poems doesn’t sound like someone else’s. . . Her diction and images often have a dense, close woven texture, as of tapestry. In the long title-poem this is especially true.” –Denise Levertov
More Information:
-
In Joanna's House
Bonnie Jacobson
A native Ohioan, Bonnie Jacobson studied theatre at Kent State University and illustration and design at the Cleveland Institute of Art. After pursuing a career as a commercial artist, and raising two daughters, she returned to college at Case Western Reserve University, graduating magna cum laude with a major in English. In 1981 Bits Press published her chapbook On Being Served Apples, and in 1990 her full-length collection Stopping for Time appeared from GreenTower Press. Meanwhile she has served as an editor and illustrator for the Bits Press Light Year series and as president of the Poets’ League of Greater Cleveland. She lives in Beachwood, Ohio.
More Information:
-
Book of Snow
Mary Moore
Mary Moore grew up in Southern California and earned a Ph.D. in English from the University of California, Davis. She is author of a chapbook of poetry, As to the Trees That Blossom at Night (White Bear Books) and a scholarly book, Desiring Voices: Women Sonneteers and Petrarchsm. Her poems have appeared in Field, Negative Capability, Nimrod, Poetry, Prairie Schooner and other magazines and journals. She now lives in Huntington, WV, where she teaches at Marshall University. She has one daughter, Damara.
“The reach and range of Mary Moore’s aesthetic ambition are breathtaking, sometimes heart-stopping. Alternating sonnets of dazzling magnitude, brief meticulous incantations, and mellifluously extended meditations, The Book of Snow introduces us to a poet who peers uncannily through the crust of things to ‘the under-mother, matter’s plum-red magma, / enigma’s very oven even while, with elegance and eloquence, she celebrates the riches of a surface world that is ‘blooded. . . like fruit / whose globed flight the fluted / white bowl catches, and holds.’” –Sandra Gilbert
“With a coast-to-coast American vision, the sensibility of pioneering botanists and painters, Moore makes discoveries that are not infrequently frightening. Her poems are full of light and motion. To read Moore’s poems is to ride the. They are completely exhilarating.” –Sandra McPherson
More Information:
-
Out of Eden
Frank Paino
Frank Paino was born in Cleveland, Ohio, in 1960. He holds a B.A. in English from Baldwin-Wallace College and an M.F.A. in creative writing from Vermont College. His first book of poetry,The Rapture of Matter, was published by Cleveland State University Poetry Center in 1991. His work has appeared in many magazines and journals including The American Voice, Antioch Review,Crazyhorse, Indiana Review, Iowa Review, Prairie Schooner, and Quarterly West. He has won a number of awards including the Missouri Review’s Tom McAfee Discovery Feature, a Pushcart Prize, and the 1992 Cleveland Arts Prize for poetry.
“Seductive, edgy, gothic and sublime, these poems haunt the body as much as the soul. Paino’s Out of Eden quickens with the articulation of votive flames. The shadows they cast become, in his skilled hands, earthly pietas of a new transfiguring gospel which declares, ‘We / will never turn back toward any paradise where there is no fire and we have nothing, nothing to lose.’ Paino makes us feel how marvelously everything’s at stake in a world where our desire to know is both tragic and redemptive.”–Beckian Fritz Goldberg
More Information:
-
The Door Open to the Fire
Judith Vollmer
Judith Vollmer is the author of four full-length books of poetry including, most recently, The Water Books, Autumn House Press 2012. Her previous books are Reactor, University of Wisconsin Press 2004, nominated for the National Book Critics Circle Award and featured in the Los Angeles Times Book Review; The Door Open to the Fire, awarded the 1997 Cleveland State University Poetry CenterPrize and finalist honors for the Paterson Prize; and Level Green, Brittingham Prize, Wisconsin 1990. Vollmer has received poetry fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts, and residencies from The Corporation of Yaddo, the American Academy in Rome, the Centrum Foundation, and others. Her poems have appeared in Poetry International, Agni, The Women’ s Review of Books, Poet Lore, Cerise Press, Prairie Schooner, The Fourth River, The Great River Review, and many other journals and anthologies. Vollmer teaches in the undergraduate Writing Program at the University of Pittsburgh at Greensburg and in the Low Residency M.F.A. Program in Poetry & Poetry in Translation at Drew University.
“Vollmer is a city poet—and her city is Pittsburgh, blue collar, homely, well loved—who nonetheless lies under bushes and looks to see the colors of flowers in the dark. She is a poet of righteous rages and bad moods, hilarity and tender griefs. She can be rough or elegant. . . She has done for the city of Pittsburgh what William Carlos Williams sought to do for Paterson, what O’ Hara did for New York, and Baudelaire for Paris.” –Liz Rosenberg
“Judith Vollmer evokes the City in all its grit and fire and seaminess, its chains and enchantments, its dreams and rude awakenings. No one has written more movingly, more affectingly, about Pittsburgh; or, for that matter, about America, about the world. Whitmanesque in their plentitude, their open-eyed embraces, these poems are the grand gesture, the soaring meditation, the expansive observation, the real thing.” –Ronald Wallace
“Someone observed that what was remarkable about Gertrude Stein was not that she was ahead of her time, but that she managed to be so much of her time. The same could be said of Judith Vollmer’s remarkable new book, The Door Open to the Fire. The subject—the obsession—of this book is place; the particular focus of both its rage and its love is the American city. What is amazing is the book’s exemplary originality. The Door Open to the Fire is a book about the city as an idea, about the city as a body. The writing is stern and gorgeous, wry and mournful.” –Lynn Emanuel
“Vollmer’s embrace is so wide, her enthusiasm for participation in the streaming variations of life so evident, that these poems sweep us up in their energies, their flesh-and-blood longings, their deeply human sense of helplessness and hope. This is a citizen’s testament, as passionate and complicated as a great city demands.” –Mark Doty
More Information:
-
Fresh Kills
David Breskin
David Breskin is the author of a three books of poems, Fresh Kills (Cleveland State University Poetry Center, 1997), Escape Velocity (Soft Skull Press, 2004), and Supermodel (Soft Skull Press, 2006); a novel, The Real Life Diary of a Boomtown Girl (Viking, 1989); a play, “Kids in the Dark”; a collection of interviews with film directors Francis Coppola, David Cronenberg, David Lynch, Spike Lee, Oliver Stone, Clint Eastwood, Robert Altman and Tim Burton, Inner Views: Filmmakers in Conversation(Faber and Faber, 1992) and reprinted in a new and expanded edition by Da Capo in 1997; and a book and CD collaboration of poems and paintings and music with Ed Ruscha and Wilco’s Nels Cline, Dirty Baby (Prestel, 2010). His poems have appeared in many periodicals, including The New Yorker, The Paris Review, DoubleTake, TriQuarterly, Parnassus, Salmagundi, Quarterly West, andBoulevard.
“David Breskin is a contemporary town crier, a businessman-bard, an ironic prophet who goes for the jugular in these canny and acute renderings of our American moment, our postmodern world. He has given us a fresh sound—a new sounding—in American poetry.” –Edward Hirsch
“James Wright said he wanted to ‘write the poetry of a grown man.’ Breskin has done this, and more. What Breskin has is narrative drive, a sense of the subject, and a beguiling, disruptive wit, which is often deadly; because his tropes come from anywhere he informs his reader with a brash honesty hovering near eloquence, and still grounded in our world, sport, cyberspace, the off-tempos of family: and he has serious intentions to speak for most everybody, which is less a question of voice, and more a responsibility of humanity. This is not tokenism, or hopefencing; it is artistry, sometimes at fever pitch: lend your ears and the eyes will follow.” –Michael S. Harper
“The work of David Breskin is political, lyrical and funny. In poems like ‘Smart Money’, a denunciation of money’s arrogance, his intelligence has the power to sing. A classic of its kind, ‘Da Hood’ contains all the virtues of his writing: compression, conceptual energy, humor; ‘Town Crier’ displays his edgy lyricism. A poet of concentrated language, Breskin is also an astute cultural critic. At his best, he is among the finest younger poets now writing.” –Paul Hoover
More Information:
-
Almost Home
Susan Grimm
Susan Grimm is the author of Lake Erie Blue (BkMk, 2004) and the chapbook Almost Home(Cleveland State University Poetry Center, 1997). Her writing has appeared in such publications as the Plain Dealer, Rattapallax, and Spoon River Poetry Review. From 2004-2007 she served as Series Editor for the Cleveland State University Poetry Center. Born and raised in Cleveland, Susan Grimm received an M.A. in English from Cleveland State University in 1992. In 1996 she was awarded an Individual Artist Fellowship from the Ohio Arts Council.
“Susan Grimm’s Almost Home is a tightly weaved collection in celebration of the doggedness of life. Again and again, these poems offer a hand, insisting on seasons, on fevers, on dentist appointments, on the giddiness after lovemaking, ultimately on ‘the old names and their desires.’ With unabashed intimacy, her stunningly lyrical voice directs us away from the darkness, home.” –Claudia Rankine
“Ordering the Storm empowers readers to see the poetry collection as an artistic medium in itself, and offers diverse perspectives on the subject. Experienced writers and beginners alike will find inspiration and encouragement in the words of exceptional poets such as Maggie Anderson, Wanda Coleman, and Beckian Fritz Goldberg. This book should be required reading for all graduate student poets, even those who are still in the process of writing their first collection, because it includes essential information on poetic sequencing and useful strategies for examining a manuscript’s possibilities. One of the most exciting aspects of the book is the sense of community that readers feel upon exploring each essay. Ordering the Storm transforms the task of arranging poems from a solitary undertaking to a collaborative adventure.” –Mary Biddinger
More Information:
-
Chicks Up Front
Sara Holbrook
Sara Holbrook is a performance poet, appearing frequently at schools, conferences, and other venues across the country. As a member of the Cleveland Slam Team, she has competed at The Slam Nationals. Sara is the author of several books for children. She lives in Bay Village, Ohio.
“Sara Holbrook continually works miracles by giving substance to steam—in these keepsake poems she is matriarch, mojo, and mind-bender, guiding us toward insight with an unerring hindsight. It is not important whether you discover Sara through her electrifying performance work or through these gems of humor, heart and lyricism. What’s important is that you discover her, this wondrous wordsmith, one of the reasons poetry has a pulse again.” –Patricia Smith
More Information:
-
Warscape With Lovers
Marilyn Krysl
Warscape with Lovers is Marilyn Krysl’s seventh book of poetry, (her second, More Palomino, Please More Fuchsia, was published by the Cleveland State University Poetry Center in 1980); she has also published two volumes of fiction. Krysl’s poems and stories have appeared in many journals and anthologies and have won various prizes including the 1994 Negative Capability Award for fiction and the 1995 Spoon River Poetry Review for poetry. She has been the recipient of a residency at Yaddo, and grants from the Colorado Council of the Arts and Earthwatch. She has taught ESL in the People’s Republic of China, served as Artist in Residence at the Center for Human Caring and worked as a volunteer for Peace Brigade International in Sri Lanka and at the Kalighat Home for the Destitute and Dying administered by Mother Teresa’ s Sisters of Charity in Calcutta.
“Marilyn Krysl has found balance in places shaken by deprivation and injury. This is a beautiful book of poetry, not because it is lyrical (though it is), but because it treats suffering with love. It embraces what devours us. It instructs us by example in the way that poetry can be centered, conscionable and intimate. I feel in this book the power of open eyes and open arms.” –Marvin Bell
More Information:
-
Troubled By an Angel
Elisabeth Murawski
Elizabeth Murawski was born and raised in Chicago and currently lives in the Washington D.C. area where she is employed by the U.S. Census Bureau. She is a graduate of De Paul University and the M.F.A. program at George Mason University. A recipient of four writers’ grants from The Helene Wurlitzer Foundation, Murawski’s first book, Moon and Mercury, appeared in 1990 from Washington Writers’ Publishing House. Her poems have appeared in The New Republic, Grand Street American, American Poetry Review and numerous other journals.
“Liz Murawski writes with both emotional candor and mental acuity about the contradictory impulses contained in such words as ‘love’, ‘resignation’, and ‘revulsion’. Without giving in to self-pity or self-exploitation, she tells the painful truth. In these graceful, musical poems, she achieves a tone which is at once serious, bemused and sympathetic.” –Peter Klappert
“These poems are brave, both in the honesty of their pain, and in the new images chosen to represent it. Troubled by an Angel is an absorbing and original new book.” –Linda Past
More Information:
-
Enough Light to Steer By
Steven Reese
Steven Reese teaches literature and poetry writing at Youngstown State. His poems and translations have appeared widely in journals such as Poetry Northwest, West Branch, and Asheville Poetry Review. He is the author of two collections of poems: Enough Light to Steer By (Cleveland State University Poetry Center) and American Dervish (Salmon Press, Ireland), and a selection of his poems translated into Spanish has been published in Cuba, entitled Andando bajo el rumbo de la luz (Arte y Literatura Press). As translator he has published two collections of poems: Synergos: Selected Poems of Roberto Manzano (Etruscan Press) and Womanlands, Selected poems of Diana María Ivizate González (Verbum Press, Spain).
“Steven Reese explores a wide range of quotidian mysteries in language that puts on such a performance—vigorous and surprising, punctuated by leaps like a dancer’s—the poems never settle down or settle for less: they keep moving and pushing. Some passages explicitly pay homage to silence and listening, the great parents of true voices, and the result is that everything here counts. But the boon for us is that, while acknowledging those sources, Reese unflaggingly spiels his lovely spiel, too delighted with the gift of speech to turn minimal on us. The mode here throughout is what I’d call High Palaver, the tongue both at play and deadly serious. The combination makes for a debut that leaves the reader persuaded there’s definitely enough light to steer by but surely not yet near enough of Reese’s poetry to read.” –Philip Dacey
More Information:
-
Cocktails With Brueghel
Sandra Stone
Sandra Stone’s poem “Snow Whippets” was named the 2010 winner of the Lucille Medwick award for a single poem on a humanitarian theme by the Poetry Society of America, as well as the 2010 winner of the Campbell Corner prize for Distinguished Entry in the philosophic lyric and the 2008 winner of the Dana Award for linguistic invention. Her work has appeared in The Hudson Review, New Republic, SW Review, among other publications.
“Here is a real discovery—the secret book like the secret room one dreams about. Sandra Stone’s is that rare original voice which seems to come from an awareness so unusual it can’t help but be true to itself, its only real model. Brought to light out of a mother lode of language, Sandra Stone’s poemscreate, never merely receive them. This is generous and vibrant poetry.” –Sandra McPherson
More Information:
-
You Find Yourself Believing in Things
Deborah Gilbert
Born and raised in Cleveland, Deborah Gilbert received a B.A. from the College of Wooster and an M.A from Cleveland State University. Her literary activities include being editor of The Black River Review and coordinator of the Ohio Poetry Day Association’s Poet-of-the-Year Award.
“Her wisdom, wit, humor, mystery, and agile techniques will instantly attract readers to Deborah Gilbert’s poems. But what will intrigue them most is her intensity: ‘Ice at her center,’ ‘You have seen how she claws her way. . .,’ ‘Nothing to say. To No one. Never,’ ‘Truth seeks no answers, because truth permits no questions.’ Readers will be jolted alive by such poems. I look forward to Deb Gilbert’s next book.” –Alberta Turner
-
The Work of the Bow
Robert Hill Long
Robert Hill Long, raised and educated in North Carolina, was the founding director of the North Carolina Writers’ Network in 1984. He has taught at Clark University, Smith College, and the University of Hartford, and now teaches at the University of Oregon. His first book, The Power to Die, was published by the Cleveland State University Poetry Center in 1987.
“Robert Hill Long’s poems have the feel of land and history seen in moments of personal definition, seen through the lens of a family. His voice speaks in long fluent lines with both freedom and formal assurance, of the experience of war, and of the war and peace of human affection. It is a voice that praises the voluptuous body of earth and incorporates the sad flotsam of a family, of mortality. At times wickedly funny, at others haunted by the legend and landscape of America, his poems are always politically informed and alert, and our poetry is the richer.” — Robert Morgan
“The Work of the Bow is intense, edgy but at the same time serene; it builds and moves like a river. There are poems here that are so human and alive they will break your heart and end up leaving it better. This is a beautiful book.” –Thomas Lux
More Information:
Printing is not supported at the primary Gallery Thumbnail page. Please first navigate to a specific Image before printing.
