Bøger udgivet af Middle Creek Publishing & Audio

These poems are about relationships - their tenuous beginnings, their midpoints - somewhere in between, their resolutions or ending. Some poems are loving, mystifying, sad, uncontrollable, and even a bit sarcastic or funny. These poems hold emotions that run the gamut of relationships. May you find one that especially speaks to you. Carol's poetry flows onto paper and into your senses with the clarity, skill, and nuanced rhythm that few poets master. However, it is her bravery to explore what is innermost within us all, that brings one to read, reread and remember her poems." Gary Morgan"Carol explores relationship from inside out, looking back on a life well lived, even as she wanders through a maze of ups, downs and sideways. Her poetry is magical, moving and mysterious: enjoy!" Susan Bassett"In Carol Fortino's Somewhere Between "Love... like a fine architectural drawing" opens her latest volume of poetry. Family, friends, and landscapes that she inhabits, here and abroad, are the glue that holds these poems together. The collection resolves with "I regret that I must inform you...." and A Journeys End. A fascinating read about one woman's journey." Kyle Laws, poetess author of So Bright to Blind

Bengt O Björklund left his native Sweden bound for India to seek his hippie dreams in 1968, but ended up in a Turkish prison for possession of a small amount of hashish. A portion of this story was creatively represented in the movie Midnight Express. During his imprisonment Bengt wrote his first poems and songs and also began painting. After his release he resettled in his homeland and began to paint and write, play music and perform his work. "Time is a lake fed by the moon." Well within the tradition literary scope of experimental language employed by beat poets, Bengt uses what might be described as an avant-garde non-fiction, stream of consciousness in this long poem series. "I see that you are another me I / that holy is such a very short time" Employing a combination of narrative, culturo-generational commentary, and shifts in source perspective, he has created a wide field in which to better paint the scope of impression, sentiment, lament, wisdom, woe and philosophy gleaned from the span of a lifetime. "Hear! War is not a language" Instead of the poems in I standing as solitary trees in a field, they more resemble a grove of aspen trees having a complex underground root source from which each individual poem sprouts and grows. What at first seems reminescent of Joyce's Ulysses becomes, through engaged reading, something more closely resembling Gilles Deleuze's concept of a Plane of Immanence. "There is a final blessing / it is so human."

In his fourth collection of poetry, Parker is a disc jockey spinning fossil records in defense of conscious science and common sense. His no-nonsense attitude gets to the gravel and grit of political and environmental issues, and at the same time glides in the tenderness of love for the children of his mountain community and the awe and reverence he feels towards things imbued with natural power and beauty, whether it be a woman or a mountain or losing a lifelong friend to cancer. In several activist poems Parker puts the fist back in pacifist, becoming a ballsy bubble-hashed buddhistic bean-spiller to the shameless sprawl of the military industrial complex, from the creeping resurgence of fascist corporate oligarchy and the quietly quarantined contaminants at the Rocky Flats nuclear superfund site to outcroppings of viruses such as Ebola, Zika, xenophobia and bigotry. Tackling contemporary issues such as war refugees, immigration, climate change, Parker unleashes a barrage of rhythmic rants in a punk poetic whack-a-mole response to the conflagration of hate wherever it pops up with the sheer fire, flare and brevity of an iron-nickel meteor shower. With sitting meditation and frequent mountaineering as his personal path of heart & hailstones, he continues to be a mentor to working poets and a voice for the working poor. "Michael Parker's Kimono Mountain transports the reader to remote Colorado mountains and introduces a sexy spring rhubarb, a stalker cougar, and the well-worn snowshoes of life. He harkens back to NYC days in a tragic story about artist Jean-Michel Basquiat and a chance encounter with fellow conscientious objector Muhammad Ali. Parker's epic love poem for his wife and daughter, How to Make Your Own Kimono, is heart warmer. But Mike always returns to his roots, his core, reminding us, that 'treason is in season.' Plutonium pollution hides under the spotless mountain, 'homeless hole in America's shoe' and there's an 'OxyMoron in the White House.' He never lets the peace and isolation of the mountains distract him from the struggle against economic disparity and injustice, 'rich get richer, poor almost get paid.' " Emily Armstrong "In Kimono Mountain Poems, one quickly sees Mike, the far-reaching humble poet pushing his gift into stronger and sharper cadences, beats and zen-jester-wit. The wide curragh of themes which his pen encapsulates: breath, equality, dismay, loss, friendship, grief, earth-glory, home - all reach kindredship with Mike's taut lines of verse. Like currachs tied tightly at the dock, Mike's poems are bound by his artistic sensibilities and his deeply human connection to all that is embedded in his heart. I am a better man for having read these offerings." Brian Buckley, Co-Proprietor of Innisfeee Poetry Bookstore & Café, Boulder, CO. "Seething with life, Kimono Mountain grabs poetry by the throat and shakes words till they tumble out with lust, beauty and clear eyed honesty. Michael Parker writes about nature, politics and love with passionate simplicity and a complicated desire that you feel in your body as well as your heart." Pat Ivers

Faces of Fishing Creek is a novella in poems in the voices of two characters, Clara and Joseph, who developed an isolated section of Southern New Jersey as a summer resort for Philadelphia residents. "There is a delicious complexity in Kyle Laws' Faces of Fishing Creek. On the surface, these poems tell the story of Joseph and Clara, a Russian husband and wife in flight from the Bolshevik Revolution, who come to America and eke out a living on the shores of Delaware Bay. But in the depths of these poems, other currents are work: the forces of history, social prejudice, conflicting ambitions, and thwarted desire. These two vivid voices and their tutelary spirits-Joseph's Pushkin and Clara's Akhmatova-articulate parallel lives that never manage the kind of open communication on which love depends. Except, of course, within the imagination of Kyle Laws herself, where their story and her own come together through the redemptive power of art." -Joseph Hutchison, Colorado Poet Laureate "These poems are like whispers in the night, the intimate and uneasy thoughts of Clara and Joseph, "two twined against nor'easters, /roots deeper than reeds in the runoff." What poignant pleasure to spend time with them on the edge of things-the sea, a new world, a questionable business venture, the coming modernity, each other-here in Fishing Creek, "where the wind off bay roars not far from the Atlantic, /over the deep channel off a cliff of shoals." Kyle Laws has created a whole world in these poems and these characters that tangles us thoroughly in its tides and its winds in the saltgrass." -Marilyn McCabe, author of Perpetual Motion and Glass Factory "Faces of Fishing Creek is a beautifully crafted novella in verse about the deep history, racial politics, and changing ecology of the author's childhood village in Southern New Jersey. Kyle Laws tells this story through the heartbreaking lives of Clara and Joseph, whose voices echo across the landscape long after the book ends. This is a haunting work about migration and dreams, love and loss, memory and belonging." -Craig Santos Perez, author of From Unincorporated Territory [Lukao] and From Unincorporated Territory [Guma'] "Here I learned grief./I came to know it to be as deep/as the artesian well/at the top of New Jersey Avenue./There is nothing I cannot imagine/being done in its name." In Kyle Laws' historically-based novella in verse Faces of Fishing Creek, the reader follows Clara and Joseph's journey from the streets of Old World Odessa to the wind-whipped shoreline of New Jersey's Wildwood Villas. In pared down verse-reminiscent of Akhmatova's Acmeist sensibilities-Laws invokes the beauty and terror of the natural world and the shifting cultural landscape of the United States in the first half of the twentieth century. Unflinchingly, these poems document one immigrant family's survival story and a lineage of oppression and segregation as the speaker, the poet herself, grapples with her family's complicity in a Caucasian-only land covenant. Faces of Fishing Creek is a brave and necessary collection, attempting to own one small corner of America's murky, racist history." -Emari DiGiorgio, author of Girl Torpedo and The Things a Body Might Become

"Catchments is a very powerful and emotionally vulnerable collection that moves the reader through a collection of passages in a brief but deep arc, like the curve of a bow, or more aptly that of a knife, suddenly razor sharp and drawn through the reader, such as in the poem "Island," with ease, "When you descended from my body, / there was a moment your head crested/ between contractions/ and the doctor said/ Wait./ A moment when the room turned away/ from me/ and I was set adrift from the continent of family." Many of these poems are heart-sundering masterpieces, antidotes against the snap-shots taken and developed in the darkest rooms and solutions, by the poet's own hands . . . so many small words within each poem connect to, and enhance, other poems . . . akin to the coupling rod or side rod connecting the driving wheels of a locomotive which transfer the power of drive to all wheels." -David Anthony Martin, author of Span, Deepening the Map, Bijoux, and The Ground Nest. "A catchment is something that captures water, a measure of that water, and the act of catching it. E. A. Lechleitner's Catchments, draws on all three meanings. These poems gather and hold the water of life-the rivers, lakes, and oceans of it-and the tsunamis. The rain, the flooding, the sinking and the floating. In these poems, deep losses are balanced by love, intense longing leavened by insight, the mortal and ephemeral known by what lasts, for a while-all in precise and often surprising images and fresh, unexpected language. In "Your Longing," for example, the speaker as a child aches to hear "at least the timbre of your voice / when you tucked me into bed / and announced my name to sleep." In "Falconry," the sustained imagery illuminates the mystery that is family. The poem opens with "My mother would be a falconer," and ends with these lines: "But always I return to her gloved hand / because when I would be a falconer, / she will come for me." Reading Lechleitner's Catchments, ignites our deepest level of attention to the world, as only poetry can." -Veronica Patterson, Poet Laureate of Loveland, Colorado and author of Sudden White Fan, Thresh & Hold and Swan What Shores? "E.A. Lechleitner's poetry walks through the seasons of grief accompanied by the seasons of nature, all the while trying to make sense of loss beyond comprehension. Her poems look for answers to unknowable questions and she admonishes, we keep asking the wrong questions. She celebrates commonplace things, like riding bicycles and fly fishing, which become beautiful emblems of life. In this elegiac tribute, she tells us, "we are all alone and surrounded by water/without so much as a palm tree." By dealing with absence, and moving through grief, she paints a beautiful portrait." -Kathleen Willard, author of Cirque & Sky ABOUT THE AUTHOR E. A. (Beth) Lechleitner has lived in Northern Colorado her entire life, traveling far from home whenever she can, even if only in her mind. She thinks she wrote her first poem as a pre-teen while driving past the Tetons in a white Chevrolet station wagon on a road trip with her mother, father and brother. Her career has been split between high tech marking and education. She currently teaches writing at Colorado State University and owns Second Letter, an editing, writing and creativity coaching business. She irregularly muses about writing and promotes local writing events on her blog: Second Letter Writing Salon. She has two children and four grandchildren.

"Among the Zen handbooks or primers out there, none fit your hand so simply as these sixty-four poetry-like chapters of Hoag Holmgren's No Better Place. Like the sixty-four hexagrams of the I Ching, each widens into a far-off state of mind. Turn them over in your thoughts though, and they prove to be guides to where you are standing. Ten in particular, which refer to the 12th century Chinese Oxherding Pictures, point North American Zen back to a mythic world of ancestors. Old-time buddhas, those ancestors. They are our brothers and sisters in the ecology of mind. Thanks to Holmgren's book, you can stand eyebrow-to-eyebrow with them.". -Andrew Schelling Editor of The Wisdom Anthology of North American Buddhist Poetry .."No Better Place is a penetrating and affecting presentation of the Buddha Dharma cast in a thoroughly Western idiom. Hoag's simple, clear prose invites entry in this very place, now." -Danan Henry Roshi.."Hoag Holmgren writes from the depths of his own understanding in this profound and simply expressed primer. These words will touch and inspire readers to surrender to a joyful experience of compassion for all.". -Jiun Hosen, Osho Abbess, Bodhi Manda Zen Center.."While No Better Place may seem like a slight book, it's actually a wide-open doorway-into the essence of Zen! It says so much so succinctly and insightfully, that reading its brief chapters brings real "Aha!" delight. I look forward to sharing this book with my own Zen students. Many thanks to Hoag Holmgren!". -Rafe Martin Sensei, Award-winning author, founding teacher and spiritual director, Endless Path Zendo.."No Better Place is simple, clear, and beautifully written. I highly recommend it for anyone (new or experienced) interested in the path of Zen. This book captures the heart of this journey and beckons one to step in.". -Peggy Metta Sheehan Sensei, Zen Center of Denver..