Bøger af Diane Kistner

In these poems, Melanie McCabe traces the disintegration of a marriage and the loss of a house lived in for decades. The poems explore not only the end of a relationship, but also the deep and personal attachment that people form with the home they live in. Here also are poems about a childhood home and of days spent as a young mother in the house that must now be sold. Throughout this profoundly honest collection are love poems-written not only to a husband, but to a parent, a child, and even to a beloved house itself. In the title poem, McCabe alludes to the limited view, the fragmented and incomplete stories our neighbors form as they bear witness to only a part of our lives-and never to the complete truth. Here the reader glimpses that truth, sees beyond the blinds, the closed curtains, to find a woman living a life that many will recognize as their own.

As the title poem suggests, delays arrive exclusively on a personal level. (Not that some collective surface hasn't been scratched; it has, but that surface is relatively inconsequential.) We must follow such scars; it's who we are. This volume begins and ends just beyond the delays, far enough outside our souls to allow us to discover new ways to return. As these poems insist, the return is crucial. Bishop describes a few of his own reappearances, hopeful that the unusable track he leaves behind might remind readers of a few of their own delays and how their own expectations have been transfigured. Hidden among the ordinary images, Bishop carefully places a pair of eyes that, if engaged, assure readers a most unusual journey.

In his debut poetry collection, Stephen Longfellow reveals a strange world of shifting images dwelling just below the surface of the ordinary. In this world, familiar objects-a mailbox, a fire hydrant, a battered recliner, our houses-lead lives unknown to us. Other things morph unexpectedly-the autumn wind becomes the rattle in his mother's throat; a cloud, a bored fisherman; a tree branch, a phonograph arm; a wastebasket, a fish. Throughout this journey in which the unexpected lies just around every corner Longfellow guides us surely with wit, humor, and eloquence to a satisfying landing place we might even recognize as home.

Jane Blue's BLOOD MOON is a book of passionate poems: passion in the usual form, of love lost and love found, or of a saint's passion, surprisingly, perhaps, not so different; of a passion for words and the tearing apart of words to strip them of euphemisms and the ordinary, the taken-for-granted; of passion for family and the myths of memory. The impulse to write comes from the poet's reading, responses to art, to nature found not in exotic places but in the backyard or the neighborhood. They are thoughtfully crafted and urge the reader to live.

This collection of narrative poems is a meditation on the life and music of one of the truly great artists of the twentieth century and an impressionistic exploration of the connection between personality, identity, celebrity and art. There are deliberate rough edges here and third-rail examinations of sex, race, gender, addiction and psychological dysfunction. Billie Holiday made no apologies for who she was or how she lived. In these poems, Joel Peckham, evokes her rich and vibrant personality with a music and passion worthy of his subject.

Rebecca Seiferle describes DAZZLING WOBBLE as "a whirling dervish-a love poem" written "with the ecstasy of a postmodern Rumi." Veronica Golos calls the work "a lush and lavish glossolalia." Hill has been described as "shamelessly ecstatic and exclamatory, proclaiming her unfettered joy in being alive" (Sam Hamill); "a poetic transformer whose work lights up the reader's whole body/mind power grid" (Joseph Hutchison); and a "Doorway Woman" (Gary Lawless).

Scott T. Starbuck's THE OTHER HISTORY puts the poet's lens on the real buried underneath suburban legends of Christopher Columbus "discovering" America and making it a better place, the illusion that hard work in society will commonly be rewarded with material and spiritual success, that corporate and political leadership will figure things out for the common good, and that modern capitalist culture's onslaught on wild places and wild animals is sustainable. His book refutes these lies by blending news reports with the deeper poetic flow of human feeling that has been "unreported, underreported," or silenced in popular media and textbooks.

What would we know if we didn't know anything? M. Kaat Toy's flash fiction book Disturbed Sleep asks. The answer? More than we do now. These fifty-four stories overheard, transcribed, experienced, invented, and inspired by myths, tales, literature, history, and research provide original perspectives on the facts of everyday life and the possibilities of alternate realities. Grouped in six themed sections, they depict the natural world, relationships, and spirituality in lyrical prose.

Winner of the 2011 FutureCycle Poetry Book Prize. In MOSSLIGHT, Kimberley Pittman-Schulz invites readers on a walking meditation, a crooked path through loss and longing where solace shimmers in the shadows, rooted in the rhythms of the natural world. Each poem is a small epiphany offered by unlikely mentors-decaying redwood logs and indifferent ravens, "the golden gel" of a banana slug and a blur of wet bees, tiny fish caught in a shoe, a dog's black face leaning from a truck window, even "eight rusty ants dragging a dead wasp through the grass" that challenge us with, "Who are you, anyway?" Like a lost explorer-part-naturalist, part-Buddhist-the voice in this collection leads the reader deep into the present moment, "stark and lush," reminding us that while "alone each foot burns/into cold layers" there is a larger interconnectedness, as "even in wet snow falling, /the wren sings.

As the only species aware of its mortality, people have always had a morbid preoccupation with death. Our agrarian forefathers anthropomorphized their fear into the Grim Reaper, whose swipe symbolized the unexpected moment of life's end. Few of us own a scythe or know how to use one, but that swish still represents the surprise of hearing about someone's death and makes us tremble at the thought of how quickly we will pass into nonexistence. The now familiar Grim Reaper figure has outlasted four or five centuries, making appearances at costume balls and in New Yorker cartoons. He's forever here among us, maybe even sorting his socks, while providing fodder for black humor and verse. Both playful and somber, these poems improvise a traditional symbol, mocking the Reaper's mocking of our mortality.

In her debut collection of poetry, Katherine Riegel explores the secrets that lurk in the wide-open spaces of the Midwest, images of prairie as ocean never far from the surface-as James Wright wrote, "Where is the sea, that once solved the whole loneliness/Of the Midwest?" Here are fairytale doors that lead to horses and clover, sensuality and regret. Here, among the drifting leaves, are sketches of a family as ecosystem, complex and competing. In these poems, songbirds sing of loss and remembrance. Castaway is an homage to a childhood, a family, a place. It is a book about memory and mourning, yearning, and just how far words can take us in the effort to reclaim what we've lost.

With consummate skill, subtle and exacting artistry, and fierce passion, Tania Runyan's first collection, Simple Weight, brilliantly unveils the mysterious ties tethering heaven to earth [and] explores the painful and troubling journeys of a soul in search of the divine.... Hers is a voice brimming with a palpable humanity and beautiful pathos--complex, wise, mutable, and wholly original.--Maurya Simon, author of The Raindrop's Gospel__________Spiritual without being in the least bit preachy, Runyan deals in matters of the heart, letting us experience the ineffable through a variety of subjects, often commonplace objects: a dead goldfish, a broken dishwasher, dust mites.... Runyan uses deeply infused language throughout: "I chew the name God, God like habitual / gum." God, "the holy / singularity." "God who buries // his miracles in the soil." [These] poems have weight--emotional, spiritual, political--but are anything but simple.--Barbara Crooker, author of Radiance, Line Dance, and More__________Tania Runyan claims she does not concern herself with things too marvelous for her. Well, she's lying. Simple Weight ponders and illuminates cicadas emerging from the earth and martyrs merging their bones with dust. In Runyan's world--which is our world--the human intrudes upon the holy, making it more holy still. These poems, like the Psalms themselves, will fall through the years "like a muscle of water." Drink deeply. --Paul Willis, author of Rosing From the Dead: Poems

The poems that make up Lost in the Telling present a scene change from the southern gothic narratives of Williams' previous collections. These surreal little poems, most of them looser in form, explore dreams (both the day and night variety) and those worlds in which they are set. The would-be rock and roller longing for his suburban home, for peace and quiet in the day-to-day. Or the middle-aged office worker reminiscing over his past life-its smoky, blurry late nights on the road, its backstages and broken-down vans, its overdriven guitars and hangover cures. But more than being just a journal of dreams (a well-mined theme for poets since time immemorial), Lost in the Telling strives to translate these hazy hallucinations, and then inform the reader/fellow traveler of what he or she has seen, and of just what might be waiting around the next highway bend.

Winner of the 2010 FutureCycle Poetry Book Prize. STEALING HYMNALS FROM THE CHOIR is a collection of poems about the outward pull of the forces of history, the inward tugging of the human heart, and the intersection of the two. Its subjects are some of the impersonal events that have swept us into the present day, and the precarious intimacies that try to steady us and give us strength to endure within that present. It is a book about mourning, meditation, and finally the inevitability of celebration.

To celebrate the fifth-year anniversary of the press's first poetry chapbook publication, COLMA has been released as a full-length edition with new content and photos of the massive city of 18 graveyards that is Colma. The original chapbook of the same name was printed on a laser printer and hand-bound and trimmed on a kitchen table by now-director of the press Diane Kistner, who says "We've come a long way, baby!"

SWIMMING THIS is a touching and moving account of a woman's personal journey toward self discovery and wholeness. Weaving together memory, myth, dreams, and folklore, these poems chronicle a woman's family of origin, her experiences as a young mother, her harrowing encounters with an unscrupulous doctor, and the hard-won peace that comes through art and love.

The title says it all. These are clearly written, luminous poems about nature and relationship and love.

Winner of the 2009 FutureCycle Poetry Book Prize, No Loneliness is a collection of lyrics and narrative poems written about the confusions and attempts at order in the poet's life. It is a book about work and sweat, the lasting effects of physical violence, the spiritual grace that comes from nature, the strange communion of love, and the many heartbreaking ways the world we live in tries to redeem us.

In this lyrical chapbook of poetry, Kathleen Brewin Lewis writes of a hunger to know and connect with the natural environment, to "crack the botanic bones of this evergreen world, pry ripe marrow." Her subject matter includes moths, hawks, herons, sumac, daylilies, brown trout and brown pelicans, blue crabs, coyotes, camellias, sunrises and sunsets. Whether writing about growing up in coastal Georgia or fly-fishing in Utah, shucking corn or pruning trees, Lewis is mindful of the beauty around her and feels the pull and tug of the tide of memory. Fluent in Rivers is rich in language and longing.

Maria Williams-Russell's debut chapbook is a dark and sometimes surreal collection where domestic life is not only lonely but buzzes with potential harm. Disillusioned, the poems offer language and images of home, motherhood and romantic love that come out of a resigned duress and which include bees, bats, car accidents, war, and strangers knocking at the door. Even so, the speaker of the poems finds ways to cope: "...when the men walk through the house/ I pretend my body is the frame/ and they a flock of birds/ caught for a moment in the rafters.

THE POROUS DESERT is an extraordinarily rich collection of poems from the Arizona desert.

Employing a clear, unflinching eye and a wry, affirmative humor, Robert J. Levy's "All These Restless Ghosts" unfolds in a series of discursive meditations and vignettes - written in a mix of both free and formal verse - that seek to unearth the large in the small. With a meticulous intimacy and resonant music Levy mines the quotidian events of daily life, finding in the smallest of moments the most luminous of epiphanies. In lines tinged with gentle humor, he crafts poems that are at once refreshingly conversational and profoundly meditative. He engages our affectionate attention, leading us to wonder, astonishment and awe. In this volume Levy tackles the most monumental of concerns with a humane deftness, revealing an incomparable soul and a large, large heart.

This collection of prose poems and flash fictions imaginatively explores moments of hesitation and celebration. In the tradition of the Latin American microcuento as practiced by Julio Cortázar, Eduardo Galeano, and Augosto Monterroso, these short prose pieces are at turns fabulistic and true to life, making hard statements on unemployment, race, and obsession through characters out of fairy tales and religion as well as history and nature. Through persona and personal revelation, these pieces present the storyteller as world-maker with all the darkness and joy that can be accessed through language.

Jane Ellen Glasser's fifth poetry collection begins and ends on the metaphor of the title's image: "I will wear gratitude like a red coat, / forbearing the shifting/ seasons of hope and doubt." The book consists of six sections, beginning with an affirmation of a good life despite-or perhaps because of-the challenges and difficulties inescapable when one has lived a long time. Loss is the natural consequence of enduring, and Glasser does not shy away from exploring themes of loneliness, illness, and death, transmuting what is painful into art. Her words open a little door for the reader to enter and say, "Yes, I've been here." In one section, she addresses life's other big theme-love, its intoxication and heartache. In a hallmark grouping of ekphrastic poems, the lines are inspired by the works of artists as diverse as Ingres, Botero, Seurat, and Manet. Another series explores the weird deaths of famous writers. We also find signature Glasser stuff: lyrical poems suffused with imagery of birds, trees, mountains, rivers-nature as mirror into a deeper understanding of human nature. In circular design, the collection closes on affirmation. This is Glasser at her best

"A Chevy up on blocks is only an eyesoreto the faithless."-from "Husks"In GOD'S BICYCLE, Joel Peckham's fifth collection of poetry, he offers a spiritual road mix for 21st-century America. In poems that travel from the heartland through Appalachia to New England, he sings a song crafted from his own strange brew of off-kilter, irreverent psalms, prayers, hymns, aubades, and elegies in praise and homage to a fragmented but beautiful landscape and people. Drawing as much from rockabilly as Whitman, these poems are always intense and often exuberant, even in their struggle for the kind of hope that can "rise green and leafy from a bitter soil."

"A volume of poetry by Tom Laichas about the streets and neighborhoods of Venice, California"--

"A volume of poetry by Kristen Staby Rembold on rural themes"--

Seth Jani's Field Music is composed of fifty lyrical dispatches from the wilderness. Not just the wilderness as geography, but as an alternative psychological and spiritual framework outside the orderly arrangements of waking consciousness. Informed by Buddhist Metaphysics, Archetypal Psychology and the Western Romantic Tradition, the poems in this short collection seek to be a conduit for "the wonderful little ghosts of the trees and rivers."