In Angled Light
Selected Poems by Joan Joffe Hall

Joan Joffe Hall's third full-length poetry collection presents a life's worth of writing and reflects the author's feminist stance as well as her humanist concerns and Jewish heritage. The poems are by turns outraged, elegiac, lyrical, and comic.

Read more about this book and how to order it

Stumbling into the Light
Poems by Edwina Trentham

Gorgeously and honestly depicting the author’s passionate and painful youth in Bermuda, the poems of Edwina Trentham’s first book show the compassionate fury and troubled love she felt toward those closest to her. Stumbling into the Light presents “a child who learns to make her way ‘alone in paradise’ into adulthood, where she finally ‘adds up’ the past so it will ‘let her go.’ ”

Read more about this book and how to order it

Poems by Norah Pollard, daughter of Red Pollard, jockey for famed racehorse Seabiscuit, subject of a best-selling book by Laura Hillenbrand, a PBS documentary, and a movie. Many of the poems in this book provide a compelling portrayal of the complex man who was the poet’s father as well as the most renowned jockey of the 1930's.

Read more about this book and how to order it

Learning the Angels
Poems by Rennie McQuilkin

The fifth book of poems by award-winning poet Rennie McQuilkin. Depicting love's labors and delights, the collection moves from sensual delights to more problematic moments in the course of true and untrue love, arriving in the end at a sort of balancing.

Read more about this book and how to order it

Read more about this book and how to order it

Read more about this book and how to order it

Read more about this book and how to order it

Read more about this book and how to order it

Read more about this book and how to order it

Read more about this book and how to order it

Read more about this book and how to order it

Read more about this book and how to order it

This is more than a poetry collection: it is an archetypal tale of paradise lost and regained, or at least glimpsed again. Through the story of her descent into the hell of drug addiction and difficult ascent back to the world from which she’d dropped out, Jen Gates has given us a modern morality tale.

These are tough-minded poems quarried out of a life and a region full of hardship. They show a man and his neighbors — human, animal, vegetable and mineral — that endure and, more often than not, prevail. Quarry will give courage to its readers.

Ranging from her childhood, young adulthood, and marriage to her passionate involvement with teaching the young and the not so young to appreciate the joy of poetry, these new poems by Elizabeth Thomas are strikingly honest, direct and energetic, always instilled by enormous empathy and compassion.

In her first full-length poetry collection, Ellen Rachlin displays a wit, minimalism and passion for particulars reminiscent of Marianne Moore.  Always behind the reticence of these sometimes playful, sometimes anguished poems is a passion for honesty and for a life in which the sensual cohabits with the cerebral. In Rachlin’s verse, Marjory Wentworth finds “objects and landscapes [that] seem suddenly brilliant and suffused with meaning we had never considered.”

In this final volume of his OPENING KING DAVID series, Brad Davis once again celebrates the art of living in harmony with a higher power, whether we call it God, our Better Selves, or the Hope and Charity prescribed by David’s successor. Davis’ meditations on the Psalms (107-150) are, as ever, fierce, joyful, lyrical and witty. They constantly surprise with their unexpected turns of phrase and event.

This illuminated gift edition is devoted to a single subject: Night. It begins in the crepuscular “blue hour” of Civil Twilight, descends into the darkness of nightmare, then ascends to a realm of moon-lit magic and surreal beauty before ending with the risen colors of birdsong dawn.

In his first poetry collection, David K. Leff has created exquisite prose poems ranging from expressions of joy in the natural world to laments for “civilized” degeneracy. His reportorial eye and environmentalist’s knowledge have been conjoined with a philosopher’s wisdom and a poet’s passion for le mot juste. These are poems to savor with delight.

Written in a highly distinctive style, the latter-day sonnets in this volume are as modern as they are traditional, as witty as they are emotional. And their range is enormous: from the highly satirical to the utterly sensual, from absolute joy to philosophical despair.  As John Surowiecki says, they are an absolute delight.

In her second book, Lisa Sornberger presents poems whose exuberance and passion encounter a deep melancholy which the poet fights through in the pages of her book, arriving at a hard-won balancing of opposites. The result is a collection with enormous emotional torque.

This book is devoted to the premise that in the cultural and communal traditions of all peoples, be they Chinese, Jewish or Tibetean, there is what Yeats called a “ceremony of innocence” offering salvation from the “mere anarchy” loosed when the past is forgotten. In poems concerning the classical arts of creation, the value of remembrance, the havoc wrought by war and revolution, and the peace gained by ancient practices of meditation and devotion to the present, the author urges us to hear “the voice within the silence.” 

These poems revel in all the sensual pleasures life has to offer. They also lay bare the injustices afflicting too many of the poet’s fellow townspeople, who respond to the various wars waged against them with the fortitude of survivors and with a love for one another not shown by their persecutors. Susan Allison has done for Middletown, Connecticut, what Williams did for Paterson, New Jersey: she has seen past its pedestrian surface to its mythical underpinnings. She has written a book whose passion, honesty, and visceral style make it an important contribution to the world of poetry.

A compilation of poems written between 1969 and 2009, including about 15 new poems and much revision of earlier work. Ranging from verse steeped in the natural world, to love poems, to reminiscences of the poet’s youth during World War Two, to poems in which epiphanies do battle with the Grim Reaper, McQuilkin’s work comes down on the side of hope and faith, but not without a fight and not without humor. The book ends with a series of lyrics dedicated to the poet’s parents and a sense that after life’s cataracts and hurricanoes, ripeness is indeed all.

The poems in this third book by Norah Pollard display the wild joy and savage despair that mark her earlier books. The poet revels in the physicality of the animal world she finds in man and beast; she also suffers the anguish of loss and death, especially that of her beloved brother. Like her father, Seabiscuit’s jockey, Norah Pollard rides the wild currents of a world that takes her where it will, takes her dangerously and deleriously.

Younger and older readers alike will relish these poems, which are often written in a traditional style and arise from the very New England soil that has nurtured the poet, who operates a small horse farm. She sings of the natural world and farm life, of living in the present moment, of growing up unbridled. The book is enhanced by a series of lovely illustrations.

In this, her second poetry collection, Elizabeth Kincaid-Ehlers gives us work seasoned with her unique brand of humor and laced with rage, rue, nostalgia, and unstinting love. Much of that love springs from the marriage of her children and the advent of grandchildren, about whom the poet has no mixed feelings at all, simply sheer joy.

There is much pain and sorrow, much loss in these brilliant, energetically formal poems; but there is also a faith that in wilderness and in the young lie possibilities of preservation. Don Barkin’s work presents a metaphorical parallel as well, suggesting that although dark lakes of the spirit threaten to drown us and all our attachments, there is deep down in us, in the wilderness and forgotten innocence within, a countering mystery.

Jean Sands has written a book that chronicles one woman’s victory in a struggle for survival against all the odds. Beginning with poems about a childhood sometimes happy, sometimes threatened, the poet goes on to describe abuses, betrayals, and losses that she has been able to survive, displaying remarkable courage and understanding in the process. The book ends with a series of loving tributes to sons and friends. Its coda is a memorable song of triumph.

Alexandrina Sergio’s first full-length poetry collection presents a wide range of feeling, from depths of profound sorrow to heights of raucous humor. Marked by utter honesty, its ascents and descents are sheer and enormously invigorating. This is a book to cherish.

In his photographs and poems, Jake Anderson shows powers of empathy that remind one of Walker Evans and James Agee. It is no wonder that the homeless people he came to know during his time with them were willing to reveal so much in their faces and in the commentary each of them wrote. The author will donate 30% of all proceeds from the book to organizations supporting the homeless.

In her second book, Marilyn Johnston again focuses on family, but this time turns from the men of her family to the women, in particular to the way she and her mother have grown emotionally in their relationship to one another and in their own lives. Other women in the poet’s family also make important appearances in a book that will open the hearts of its readers.

In this collection distilled from a lifetime of poetizing, the author deftly and vividly describes his early life, his joy in the natural world, his darker meditations, his continuing delight in childhood pleasures, and his abiding love for the woman he married.

Nancy Daley’s finely wrought debut collection runs a gamut of emotions from delighting in love, to mourning its loss, to a hard-won letting go – with an assist from the Pacific – to feeling the stirrings of new departures, and in the end, new love.

These are poems that defy easy categorizing. They are full of high spirits and mischief, and they are haunted by the spectre of vacancy; they are by turns earthy and surreal, filled with the joy of the natural world and the possibilities of love, but also keenly aware of what gets lost. Always, however, they blaze with verbal pyrotechnics and wit. Be prepared for a wild ride.

As the title of Polly Brody's third book suggests, the poet portrays both the darkness of life and its heart-stirring beauty. Dire death and a variety of other cruelties are graphically described in Stirring Shadows, but equally vivid are the possibilities of love, redemption, mercy, and resurrection.

In her second book of poems, Peggy Sapphire again shows herself to be one of the most humane, honest, generous-hearted poets now writing, and one of the most spirited. In the End a Circle will give the rueful heart a change of mood.

Seth Steinzor has written a latter-day version of Dante's Inferno. In this, the first of his three-part transformation of the Divine Comedy, contemporary sinners are treated to contemporary variations on the torments of the original Nine Circles of Hell.

In her first poetry collection, Mollie Pilling draws upon her many years of living, journeying, and teaching in foreign lands. In these intelligent, visceral, sometimes rambunctious, sometimes heart-breaking poems, the author’s journeys are emotional as well as geographical. She glories in the joys of motherhood and all varieties of love, but she also mourns the losses that follow unleashings of the heart.

In this remarkable collation of poems by fellow classmates of Yale’s Class of 1955, Donald H. Werner has assembled and edited work showing that 1955 was a very good year for sending poets out into the world, at least in New Haven.

In his first book of poetry, Paul Scollan has distilled a lifetime of observation, some of it joyful, some of it rueful. We are treated to vivid characterization and description, an unflinching look at the worst life has to offer and an ebullient presentation of its shining moments. Scollan embodies Shakespeare’s definition of the poet as one who “gives to airy nothing a local habitation and a name.” In this case, the local habitation and name are those of Meriden, Connecticut.

In this memoir depicting her days as the wife of an undercover CIA agent on Cyprus just before and during the bloody civil war between Cypriot Greeks and Turks, Arlene Swift Jones has written a page-turner that describes the beauty and barbarity of landscape, customs, and ethnic duality on an island that has long been regarded as the Jewel of the Mediterranean but descends into a paradise lost when hostilities begin in 1963.

In her third chapbook, Mary Leonard gives us the lowdown on life. Though it turns out to be less than savory at times, she shows its sweets as well as its sours. There is loss and yearning here, but there is also a rising into new life through the energy of color, zest, and most of all, love.