Bøger udgivet af White Violet Press

Wickedly clever Julie Kane is our 21st-century Dorothy Parker. Boldly upbeat, sassily downbeat, she's laugh-out-loud funny. In Paper Bullets the wry Kane serves wit to the lugubrious and fun to the platitudinous. There's a bon mot here for every sophisticate and rich humor for all who've forgotten that poetry knows how to tap the funny bone. Molly Peacock My ideal Ladies Poetry Group (if there were such a thing!) would consist of Emily Dickinson, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Dorothy Parker, and Wendy Cope. Non-participating onlookers might include Mary McCarthy, Pauline Kael, Gilda Radner, and Roseanne Barr-no guys allowed. Oh, to be a fly on that wall! Comes now Julie Kane, with full credentials and a bag of tricks ranging from couplets to limericks to triolets, with enough left over to feed the multitudes who have long been starved for a book of poetry that combines humor with wisdom, acid wit with a spoonful of sugar, and such a large portion of good will towards all that it makes me want to celebrate. Brava! R.S. Gwynn

Poetry with a Vengeance, received an honorable mention from the Aldrich Press Book Award, 2013.

Whether one is nimble and supple enough to actually practice the fifteen yoga positions that form the subjects of the poems in Robbi Nester's Balance, one will discover that these poems do what both yoga and the best poetry have always done: take one deeply within the confines of an experience while simultaneously expanding one's awareness of the limitlessness of that very same experience. Balance is both deeply moving and truly enlightening. R. H. W. Dillard

The poems in Jan Schreiber's remarkable new collection enter through the ear as well as the eye, but they quickly capture the mind and the heart. Subtle and multi-layered, sensuous, witty, and often deeply moving, they enlist the reader as an ally, one able to share the poet's sense of wonder, his probing curiosity, and his wry astonishment at the quirky eccentricities of humankind. Jan Schreiber's new book of poems is full of people: Scoop (too drunk to fight), Buddy's daughter (due in May), the Reverend Charles Colby, the storekeeper's wife, the senior psychoanalyst (who dances like a dervish), the aging lover, the man of the world (eying a balcony covered with vines), the artist Moses Soyer, the stone mason, the wasp-girl, Vermeer's singer (the light is in her eyes), the grifter at Heaven's Gate, the poet's wife (a painter), Adam, Zeno, Death, Calypso, a bunch of teenagers on the back of a yellow pickup truck. His Human Comedy is much like Balzac's for its wealth of characters, humor, and bitter wisdom, though since Schreiber is a poet the narratives are washed and submerged, like islands, by image and melody-the glinting surface of the verse-that still reflects them clearly when the tide is high. -Emily Grosholz As King Duncan learned the hard way (and more than once!), "There's no art / To find the mind's construction in the face," but then he'd never read Jan Schreiber. Schreiber possesses an uncanny gift for seeing past "the common guise many have learned to wear." Whether it's the brave face put on by a dying friend, the shucking of a small-time con man at the Pearly Gates, or the thoughts of a figure in a stolen Vermeer, Schreiber goes beyond the subterfuge of surfaces into the very life of things. He is as incisive in lapidary "short takes" (à la J. V. Cunningham) as he is in sinewy sonnets and mazy pastorals of rural Maine, exposing by turns our peccadilloes and our more serious infractions: "And to what hell in time are they consigned - / the instants when in rage or carelessness / someone destroyed a lovely, hard-won thing?" Fortunately for us, the familiar foibles catalogued in Jan Schreiber's glorious collection are amply atoned for, again and again, through his poet's grace. -David Yezzi

Amytis Leaves Her Garden is a lovely, lyrical collection. I particularly admire the musicality of your indvidual lines. You write with an admirable density. comments from Dana GioiaKaren Kelsay's distinct poetic voice descends not from the modernists, but from the 19th-century "poetess" tradition that is being rediscovered by feminist scholars. Kelsay is the editor of Victorian Violet Press poetry journal, and like flowers pressed within the pages of a Victorian album, her poems translate memorable experiences into compressed visual images, and vice versa. Lush passages of description and hard-earned lines of wisdom lodge in the reader's mind. Julie Kane, Poet Laureate of Louisiana 2012 Studying this collection, "Amytis Leaves Her Garden," I am captivated most by author Karen Kelsay's confidence in her audience. Hers is a verse to respect the reader at every turn - beauty without blind, trap, or land-mine, as secure in itself as it is in its reader. "I read my thoughts on some far distant night..." she writes in the poem 'Quiet Flame' - an apt epithet for the collection - "...green willow trees with soft Parisian light." And, seated in her audience, I feel as though not only is that light my own possession, but -"far and distant" - the thought, as well. Jennifer Reeser