Bøger udgivet af Kelsay Books

M. B. Powell's poems surge with salty waves, plunge into the perilous fathoms of love and rock the reader with a steady, rhythmic cadence. Powell harnesses the power of rhyme and repetition to illustrate the push and pull of the natural world and the inner self. In Relation to the Surface is a collection that highlights quiet female struggles beneath cool exteriors. Girls and women populate these poems-Shirley Temple, Ovid's Daphne, Mrs. America, widows, and dolls with "their hard little eyes." Readers of this dynamic book will have a sense of standing on a swaying ship deck, contemplating the past, "the tide dissolving to zero speed, /no silt rising from a roiling seabed, /soon . . . slipping into slack water."-Paige Riehl, author of Suspension (Terrapin Books, 2018), Poetry Editor of Midway JournalIn Relation to the Surface guides us on a tour below, near, on, and above many places-the sea, the earth, a Siberian lake, I-5, slack water, and our own psyches-and depicts women as far-flung as Shirley Temple, the mythological Daphne and Diana, "women on beaches," and the Mona Lisa. On every page, M. B. Powell rewards her readers. The images and ideas are fresh, and the word choice startlingly perfect (most notably, the "crucifixion underwear" a young girl remembers from the Easter celebrations of her childhood). This is a collection you will want to read again and again. Powell is a master of language, and these poems are delightfully complex; readers will spend time below the surface and rise to new heights of delight in this gorgeously crafted poetry of our age.-Susan Delaney Spear, author of Beyond All Bearing (Wipf and Stock, 2018), Managing Editor of Think: A Journal of Poetry, Criticism, and Reviews

In Winthrow and Salvage, Randall Freisinger shifts his always engaging voice to a minor key to focus on aging and loss, on our place in the universal entropy. There is much here about human fallibility, suffering, and sorrow, always examined with insight and empathy. But there are recuperative moments as well, for instance in a small-town slow- pitch tournament with its little world "closed and precisely composed of forgiveness/ and second chances." There are also seriocomic ones, like when the Fisher King ends up at the Mayo Clinic. In the closing poem, the poet, to his wife's bemusement, breaks into a dance at breakfast, to an inner tune that has "great lyrics, a good beat/you can really dance to, better now, / if only for knowing the score." This is a book for those who know the score-and for those still learning it.William Trowbridge, author of Vanishing Point and Put This On, Please (Red Hen Press)As its evocative title suggests, the poems in Windthrow & Salvage name & attend to many kinds of damage & repair - physical, climatic, psychic, emotional, generational & cultural. The ampersand is a pivotal hinge here in these vignettes of loss & discovery, grief & reclamation. Both the past and present are vivid, alive, haunting. Freisinger's poems teach us how to live within "the infinite, fugitive moment." It's a specific, personal journey as well as a collective one - mythologized by such astute attention to details. These are poems of resilience, and not without some stunning moments of reflective humor along the way. Laurie Kutchins, author of Slope of the Child Everlasting and The Night Path (BOA Editions Ltd) Randall Freisinger's poems are witty, poignant, and lyrical, full of good stories, apt metaphor, and well-wrought sentences. Whether he writes about John Wayne movies, deaf students "shipped" to his elementary school, or finding evidence that his parents actually had sex, Freisinger's poems celebrate the trials and triumphs of being human. Windthrow & Salvage is a book that you'll be glad to own. Charles Harper Webb, author of Sidebend World and Shadow Ball: New And Collected Poems (Pitt Poetry Series)

It's said that poetry can be a key into our world, and in these luminous poems, Bill Mayer has unlocked a door into the Mystery, into what matters in our lives. I'm not jealous, I'm envious - what marvelous, wondrous poems, poems to be thankful for. Poem after poem in this astonishing book reveals the healing power language can have in the hands of a master poet. These are poems to keep coming back to, and as with all good writing, they reward rereading.Joseph Stroud, Author of Of This World, New and Selected PoemsThere is so much beauty here, a beauty of intimacy, which arrives in even the darkest times, a beauty that comes from going with the moment, opening eyes to it, not running from it. So many of these poems communicate an intimacy with human suffering that is courageous. The poems recount how one person might traverse even the worst shocks of life, and scale them to reach a higher vantage point, where this speaker finds ways to not only deal with life's challenges, but to turn a crisis into a means of self-transformation. It is a collection that offers a sense of a life well-lived, with pleasure at times, and with wryness at times, with heart always.Rusty Morrison, Author of five books of poetry, most recently Beyond the Chainlink