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Susan
Kelly-DeWitt has judged the following poems
winners
THE TUNER
by Lynette Moyer of
Longmont, Colorado
Winner of 2007 Sonnet Contest Honorable Mention
2nd
Honorable Mention
A stranger at my piano pokes and prods
While in another room, I pick at words.
At first, I watched him bend his ear askew
And strike the note, de-dum, de-dum, de-dum,
As if to coax perfection. He turned the screw
A silly skimpy turn, then bom,
bom, bom!
Returning to my work, I sort and toss
My disobedient and discordant verbs.
But then a wave of music washes
Along the hall, up from the living room.
My tuner suddenly pounds a tune --
A rag -- Scott Joplin -- just for fun.
A line that started rubber as galoshes
Begins to jostle on my page and bloom.
My Empty Footsteps by Alegra Silberstein of
Sacramento CA
1st runner up
Honorable Mention 2007 Sonnet Contest
I
slide the panel between sleep and dreams,
that peasant
harvest gathered in the night,
until the old
cock crows. He stitches seams
that piece
dark edges with the morning light.
Awake,
I walk a deeply shadowed road
my ought to’s shout without
a kind reply,
my but I
had to’s just an
added load
that holds me
down when I would rather fly..
The
day drags on, my duties call, but then
they fade
away, the tail of a parade,
for noon
brings me your letter, quiet friend,
It’s
tucked between the bills and pleas for aid.
Your
words of love cross over crooked hours,
and my empty
footsteps fill with flowers.
Confinement by Marie Myers Lloyd
of Kingston, Ontario, Canada
2nd Honorable Mention
I got sick, hung my face over the bowl,
saw a ripplng image, funhouse rose mouth
in the water, and I looked like you, a fetus.
Didn't know you lived inside methen, southward.
My illness stayed, and like a fevered queen
I took to bed, my brain swarming with dreams
and desires collapsing into nothing.
Fact was, I didn't want you, fingerling.
Late, very late, I tried to mend our rift:
a teddy, then a tiny knitted cap.
You showed no sign at all of wanting that-
it was propitiation, not a gift.
Well past your due date, forceps hauled you there
onto my body, a divided pair.
POND
by Holly Guran Holly
lives in Massachusetts Reviews of River Tracks
Order copies of River
Tracks directly at hguran@aol.com
When death comes,
and I am naked,
I tell myself it
will matter that I loved,
watching the deep
blue water dance inside the pond,
once the white
ring of snow has landed.
Now the snow
covers all paths in a thin layer,
and the gray
clouds congregate like tribes
growing heavy with
what they will lose.
I remember you
in the deep blue
waves dancing,
in the string of
lamps along the path,
in the circle of
snow
so white against
the water.
The poems in River Tracks by Holly Guran are written with sensuous lyricism
and a love of narrative. They tell the stories of parents, lovers,
children, mothers, students. Guran is a writer who has the gift of uncanny
wisdom, built on currents of memory, when she write about people. Take for
example, the poem ³Raison Sour Cream Pie², which speaks of the memory of a
cross-country trip, and a lover:
³I¹d grown up adoring the imagined
canyons and Cowboys of the west.
He¹d grown up fleeing the Bolsheviks
then the Germans. Travel
was what you did to stay alive.
Between us there were many coasts.²
Some of her characters embrace, while others must face loss, abuse, or
death. She writes with moving grace of an uncle¹s suicide in ³Cranberry
Harvest², his life on the farm and its hardships, and of a woman who has
just given birth, only to be abused by a doctor in ³Four A.M.²
Each fully realized poem in this collection delves into a profound memory.
Guran is not afraid to look life¹s crises in the eye, nor does she shy away
from the celebrations of lovers, the ebb and flow of mysterious rivers.
Her last poem ³On Peter¹s Hill² says it all in the following lines:
³...in the light of a cantaloupe sunset
that skyscraper on the horizen¹is a gleaming tower of gold.
And how, to our left,
those dark pines are adorned
by a lace of weeping cherries.
Remember, whatever comes next,
we have walked here.²
May we be graced by more of this lyrical poet¹s work.
- Judy Katz-Levine
ARS
POETICA by
Andrew Fader
Andrew lives in
New Jersey
Order copies of
"Taking Stock"
directly from at AJFader@fdu.edu
One must have a
mind that shines
like headlights
onto a fog in the slough
he senses is
beside the road
and eyes that
stare so deeply
into the haze
surrounding those lights
that they droop
as he studies each
plume of the light
to find just which
line will lead him
safely around the
bend to the next exit
and onto the
straightaway where the lines
are new but
familiar and the road
continues into
fog, but closer to home.
AS IF I
WERE
by Nancy Tupper
Ling Nancy
lives in Massachusetts
Order copies of Character
directly from Nancy at ntupper@finelinepoets.com
a thin
clipped nail, a stray eyelash,
a
speck of ash over Pompei,
yesterday’s
newspaper, replaced and worn,
torn
pages from The
Sound and
the
Fury, a
brown, muddy
milkweed
pod, a dandelion puff
blowing
east over dry, heathered fields
where
a common feather has fallen,
where
a black snake passes
cloaked
in evening’s grass,
vanished
like Brueghel’s Icarus
in
waves of midnight blue . . .
Hegel
for Dummies by Dion
Farquhar Dion lives in Santa
Cruz, CA
Contact
Dion directly at dnfarquhar@sbcglobal.net to order copies of Cleaving
Freedom’s
just another word
for
nothing left to lose.—Janis Joplin
working by day, school at
night
(though more cafeteria
than class)
I didn't know had
not seen
“choice” taxidermied into
trophy--
our wild dreams, cascades
of complaints
(male chauvinist pigs,
bourgeois privilege,
TV-watching pathetic
parents)
heady delusional, talk of
revolution
--we read Baldwin
Ginsberg Malcolm Che
Millett Leary Laing and
Plath--
the sparkle of the not-yet
beckoned big: if it
exists, it stinks
years morphed into
decades
scrambling codes, perfect
night rides
windows down, wind in our
hair
car lapping up the road
carapace of community
living in the center,
Manhattan downtown
round-the-clock friends,
sex, music, drugs
demonstrations, midnight
feasts in Chinatown
after double bills of
French film
evenings of art --Met or LaMama--
leaning over the spiral
balcony
at the Guggenheim (giant
flower pot)
listening to Charlotte
Moorman
play cello (topless)
while someone read Artaud
when what was really
happening...
Reviews of Cleaving:
Dion’s poems take the reader on a roller coaster
ride from
the 1960s to the present day. Like the counter- and cyber-cultures she
writes
about, her words are a frenetic bombardment of images that capture the
spirit
of a world gone awry. This is a wild journey of poetry that dares to
look in
the rear view mirror while careening into the future.
--Patti Sirens, Anartica (Burning Bush Publications, 2000
The
energy in Dion Farquhar’s poems comes from their urgency to express the
thread
unifying their multifarious contents: namely, the unshakable priority
she gives
to direct, person-to-person communication. Her frequent method of
layering
details from different decades and incongruent epistemic registers
always
brings about resolution in the present moment, in which the words are
actually
spoken. This is a woman who prizes not ideas or even experiences as
such but
the relationships her life has brought her, and whose poetics is as
thoroughly
unsolipsistic as it’s possible to be: she knows what she’s talking
about
because she knows who she’s talking to. For Farquhar, even the coldest
political anger is warmed in the alembic of her affinities. Yes, this
planet
can seem like a ridiculous place, but cleaving to the people with whom
we feel
“a solidarity forever / living full the lives we’re in / with all the
horror /
& the beauty / & the loss” makes it anything but.
<>—Jeffrey
Gustavson, Nervous Forces (Alef Books, 1994), Poetry Editor, Ep;phany]
<>At
heart a New Yorker ('America's Europe'), Dion Farquhar resides now in
the San
Francisco Bay Area and embraces East and West, left coast, right coast,
and
points in between. Her words and images come
at us, her readers, traveling at warp speed. Indeed,
"Cleaving" is less a thin volume of poems than an express train run
by an altogether
brilliant and ageless high end wild girl. "Cleaving" encompasses
past, present and, for one reader at least, future. Ms. Farquhar
tackles
subjects like AIDS, cancer, Free Trade, 'education' ('...to smell
languages
charring on the spit of / bellicosity
in the name of education'...). She touches on and does justice to
'Friendship',
'heartbreak," and the history of candy while making the point that
'omnipotent media mastering us', we are--postmodern 'I', postmodern
'Thou'--
'in charge of our own chaos.' She
speaks, in poems like 'Hegel for Dummies,' 'Appleseed,' and 'Empire
Stake,' of years morphed into decades and delivers on that
sensation
--the passage of time--in lines that compel and, indeed, skyrocket off the page.
--Robert Sward, The
Collected Poems, 1957-2004, (Black Moss Press, 2007, now in its
second
printing).
Order
copies of "Locust Bloom" directly from Charity at cck24ster@gmail.com
Sheen
by
Charity Ketz
Charity
just received an MFA from Cornell
was
a finalist for Bellingham
Review’s 49th
Parallel Poetry Award
Do
I
have to mean everything I say,
dangle
in all of that
parsible
air?
You
look past my ear, at the corn, no, wind
making
itself heard in the husks. I tell you these things so I can
vanish
into my foreground. The sky
pours
behind, between, and we pour
over
the rot-clung ears’
stiff-woven
silt—
empty
ourselves this way.
It
could be hair between us,
like
the smell of horses after the stable,
lingering.
As if sun
bent
words too, spread them on the ground
over
stubble. And we compared places to be:
the
sharp caw from the branches,
there,
there. Where I ran toward
the
mirror, hall bulb
like
a flash, my brother
squealing,
room to room
away
from my mother, who knelt carefully
on
him wriggling like a moth
to
tickle with her hair. And so what
if
his blue superman pajamas clumped
drunk
with pee before she let him up
to
slink down the hall, close himself in his room.
She
heaved herself up, said,
He
likes it, can’t I have a little
fun
with my son?
I
want to tell you, not how slipped piss
gleams
and sours an afternoon,
but
how we lord ourselves over the vinegar-colored
carpet,
gold-painted mirror hung
between
dried palms in the hall.
How
my brother howls
when
my mother finally shears off and styles her hair.
Listen,
snow massed behind the sun
leaves
this part of the state
under
a false impression.
What
do you know about a bleach-cradled kitchen,
taped
lists curling off the walls?
You
see the hawk chased
from
tree to tree by those crows
squalling,
in the lower branches, ratting
it
out, losing their own chance
to
tweak the bloody
remainders.
You’ll never be beautiful, my mother said,
With
my hair. Imagine Absalam mounted,
his
glossy hair in the wind—
whatever
he won’t cut down—
Squat
on your girlfriend’s hair
and
you get her whole body?
Hold
the scissors’ rusty
breath
like a crow bobbing at her crown
for
the glare streaking
between
us, which is a veil, which is a place
to
hold on, hold your tongue, hold it right there—
|
It’s unusual to see
such sophistication of craft in a first book of poetry, but the poems
of Charity Ketz’s first collection are remarkably accomplished and
mature. Although the pathology of family life is the primary
focus of this book, these poems are never simply self-referential
family portraits, and instead rise above that convention through her
almost obsessive focus on the interiors of family life; she tells the
stories most of us are afraid to tell. There is also a careful
attention to a broad range of diction so that at practically every
turn, these poems surprise us into strikingly new ways of seeing our
old world. These are strong, moving poems, worthy of our
attention.—Bruce Weigl
|
Jeanine taught
at American River College for32 years, Anthropology,
Sociology and Psychology and was a Gratuate
Research
Assistant at CSUS
HATCHER PASS,
caught in clouds by Jeanine Stevens appeared in Tiger's Eye Journal
Order
copies directly from Jeanine at stevensaj@yahoo.com
When I feel we’ve
made a mess
of things and what
is lovely seems
far away as a
black hole, I remember
the hike up
Hatcher Pass, Alaska,
the abandoned
bunkhouse, corrugated
metal roof bright,
but soft to the eye
in clouds. We sat in grass, woven tight,
fine as green
wires tucked along
the slope, midst
clover and pine,
studded with fairy
colored flowers,
artful as any
Axminster carpet.
In my breaths
memory, I hear the highest
notes—Samson
and Delilah, the voice,
the heartbeat
thrust through the delicate
paper-thin layer
where paints, pastels,
canvas, ink, and
parchment wait
to sketch the
other world we know exists.
The poems in
Jeanine Stevens’ latest collection resemble the monoliths she writes
about—they are beautiful in both their singularity and as a group. She
addresses philosophical questions on the nature of beauty and meaning.
From disparate worlds—the birthplace of Cubism and a modern
café—she
finds the hidden doors between them and conjures history out of stone
using what she calls the poet’s “gift of reclamation.” Painting striking
images for the reader, she doesn’t lose sight of the metaphysical, “the
meaning of starlight,” and as an anthropologist, anthropomorphizes
objects—“the moonscape… like a salty crust, an old man dying of thirst. In
a poem about Chagall, she likens the act of sketching to prayer.
Reading these poems is an act of worship—for what still remains, and
what is gone, and most of all for that unseen god of creativity shining
through all these pages.—Rebecca Morrison
In “The Meaning of
Monoliths,” Jeanine Stevens brings us vivid images from her travels to
places near and far—Nevada’s Black Rock Desert, ice-age caves in the
Dordogne, a coffin ship in County Mayo. She
looks closely at a world were grass is “fine as green wire,” the
Northern Lights are “a gentle rubbing, silk on silk,” and the childhood
memory of a homeless camp smelling “of old urine, like peaches in
tins.” Traversing place and time, this engaging collection of poems
results in a heartfelt expression of wonder at the mystery of it
all.—Shawn Pittard
|
Juanito at the Border Crossing by
Lauren Hersh
I am
in the third coffee house in three days
buzzing
and making the fluorescents flicker.
This
time I am drinking chai at a table for two by the window
crowded
with myself, my muses, my poetry.
A
man eyes the empty chair but I look him dead on
he
walks away defeated and in search of another spot to sit.
So
here I am, caffeine buzzing, knowing that I must practice patience
despite myself.
Two
days ago it was you and I on an overstuffed couch, watching an
overstuffed goldfish named Juanito
Fattened
on more than the pastry you suggested
but
juicy conversations, growing intimacies.
His
white underbelly is filled with secrets of hands held, barely touching
quivering knees, the gossip of a border leapt.
Addendum-
I wonder if he would like to stick his fin
in his fish throat and disgorge himself of all
that
makes him bulge. We could sell it on Q Street as performance art.
The
Sequoia
Shape
by Tom Goff
Calaveras
Big Trees State Park, California
for
Nora
Cold
groves of sequoias. Your hand in mine,
ensuring
our
icily spiral climb turns by slow footfalls.
Upended,
the odd giant victim-tree, whose root ball’s
all
snowburst spike: can blasts freeze into enduring?
Truer,
more secret endurance instills the live trunk.
A
narwhal strength-of-tusk stability
(“unicorn”
horn-swirl torsion) nulls fragility.
Sequoias
in skyward spiral designs can link
sunbeam
to soil by long thoughtlike chains. Intrinsic
twists
drink in a great dark that dispenses light.
O’Keeffe
with her vulviform flowers, mystics, eccentrics…
Such
sequoia-like seekers envelop our quest for insight:
my
whirling-out, restrained by your deepening-down
—the
transparent aspiring kind of dark suction down.
Love Song in a
Different
Key
Kate Delany
-for my
sister
to order copies of Reading Darwin
directly from Kate e-mail her at kdelany@camden.rutgers.edu
Bright green stark
against impending
gray—
Kate lives in New
Jersey and teaches at Rutgers
slowly the storm moves
in, still without
words,
Cover Praise
while a new leaf, a small hand on such
an unsteady branch is
unyielding in the wind--
the rain is always at
bay, the clouds collecting
and darkening, the
winds whispering
their dire warnings. Or
am I just imagining this?
I am the only speck of
the landscape cowering.
You weather on, wait
out the rain,
measure by other, your
own, barometers--
you are the sunflower
outside my door
after a night of rough
gales
almost drenched in its
pot, neck bent,
head bowed, but in the
morning, still living.
“Concerned
with elemental things, the poems in Reading
Darwin show
us the debt and connectedness of generations: earth of the stone-like potato,
air of the excruciatingly conflicted breathing of a sister, fire and
water in the lightning and deluge of storm. Ultimately we are all
connected by these things. The poems are aware of the certain knowledge
of mortality even in the midst of the sorrows and happiness of a young
life. Delany’s is a voice that takes its
place in her own family and the larger family of man, stitched in place
by the thread–like strings of blood and celebrating living a life freed
by the liberating power of art.”
—Joe Meredith, author of “Hunter’s
Moon”
“Whatever
Kate Delany is writing about, she approaches it with disarming modesty
and deep respect for how it contributes to the life of her mind and
art. "I can't pick my own face out / of this peopled landscape--," she
writes of Breughel, "I am everyone / at the village
wedding." Her
empathy for her subject never entirely distracts her from her job as a
preserving, recording and controlling lyric intelligence. Her visual
power, moreover, disciplined by the study of art history, is
joined to
strong formal instinct and a great sense of humor, and the present
result is Reading
Darwin,
which is as much an act of creative interpretation as it is a homage to
all the influences that the book records, from Van Gogh and Courbet to
great grandparents preserved in family snapshots.” —J.T.
Barbarese, author of “The
Black Beach”,
“Under
the Blue Moon”
and “New
Science”. |
Addict
by
Lynn Veach Sadler order copies of
America directly from Lynn at
lvsadler@alltel.net
Withdrawal doesn’t make
her
Cover Praise
the bundle of nerves
they prepare you for.
Lynn
lives in North Carolina and is a former
It’s worse. She’s a river of emotions.
president
of the University of Vermont
Raw emotions. Crying, laughing.
Yawning.
Begging,
offering herself and
whatever might tempt
you.
Nausea.
Chills and sweating.
She’d kill me or you or
her own child for a shot.
Everything inside her
grinds and tears.
She’s besieged by
cramps and muscle spasms.
Her fingers jump and
lurch.
She can’t breathe, or
she exhales,
then forgets to take in
more air.
When she does come to
the surface for air,
everything is muddled,
all balled up and gray.
She’s “fried,”
“ossified,” every nasty term for
every nasty thing you
can be.
Crabs crawl all over
her,
taking off bites as
they go
and packing sand in the
holes.
She’s locked inside a
kaleidoscope
that never stops
churning,
only the color’s died
long since.
Her brain dissolves
into angry worms.
Her bones walk inside
her skin.
They say there’re no
atheists on battlefields.
Well, she has no God
inside her.
The bones that walk
have ground God into
chalk.
“A pithy, clever,
endlessly inventive, funny volume of poetry from an original voice. The reader never knows what is going to come
up next as he/she is taken on a roller-coaster ride through Lynn Veach
Sadler’s America.”—Rebecca Swift,
formerly of Virago Press, Poet, and
Director of Britain’s Literary Consultancy
“A real page-turner, a one-sitting wonder with a
great dynamic range. I
laughed over and over, gave nods of assent, and applauded the serious
conclusion.”
—David Humphreys, Managing Editor and
Publisher Poets
Corner Press |
It
is more than half a century since the American poet, William Carlos
Williams, instructed us how difficult it is to get the news from poetry
and, then went on to alert us that we, "... die for what is
found
there". The poems in Nancy Wahl's Proof
of Life
are
just that: proofs. They are the residue and
distillation of
ordeal--joyous and otherwise. Read them for sure-handed evidence of how
we live and, what Williams meant by 'news'.
—Julia Connor, Poet
Laureate,
Sacramento, CA
sample poem
order copies of Proof
of Life diectly from Nancy at Lomarishi@aol.com
|
The Last
Refuge of the Bengal
Tiger Nancy Wahl
The
gynecologist speaks softly, telling her
her
daughter is pregnant—
The
thirteen-year-old girl, excited,
scared,
and oblivious to reality,
giggles. Being Britney Spears,
or
so she wished, asks
if
they would have cameras.
The
White Bengal tiger has icy blue eyes.
Blind
at birth, the delicate cubs
are
fiercely protected
by
their mothers.
Their
fathers, the males,
maintain
the territory,
know
the best places to hunt,
seek
the safest spots for breeding,
and
know the danger spots:
unfriendly
tigers and man.
Revered
in the epic Mahabharata
and
sculpted on sacred seals
of
ancient civilizations,
the
tiger, now near extinction,
wanders
between the protected areas
of
India and Bhutan
and
still is poached everyday.
For
tiger bone
for
man’s arthritis—
Don’t
you feel the danger?
The gynecologist
thinks the mother
