Halloween news, treats but no tricks

Probably the biggest news is our own Stuart Kestenbaum is the new Maine Poet Laureate. His titles continue to be popular. This and other news can be found on the new Website.

Other news includes a new review for No Passing Zone also reviewed in the American Book Review, along with Wars Don’t Happen Anymore and links to that review, as well as poems appearing in journals, are on the Website page. Take a look at the new Website with new navigation features like drop-down menus, pages for author’s info and books, and of course free shipping in the US when you order from the Website. In the past 16 months, twelve new titles have been added to the list, so check out the quality work.

Lots of new books from 2015 & 2016: check the site for the latest titles

The Vagabond’s Book Shelf by Dawn Potter

Richard Kostelanetz

Wars Don’t happen Anymore by Sarah White

Descent & Other Poems

The Conversation by Dawn Potter

A Passing by Joan Siegel

Beautiful Day by JR Solonche

Middle of the Night prose & poetry by HC Hsu

Once It Stops by Florence Fogelin Cover photo by Rosamond Orford

Yellow Horses by Martin Steingesser

The Congress of Human Oddities by Teresa Carson

The World Disguised as This One by Mimi White

Advertisement

A poem by Joan I. Siegel

Joan I. Siegel is recipient of:

New Letters Poetry Award

The Anna Davidson Rosenberg Prize

The Poetry Quarterly Rebecca Lard Award

Atlanta’s International Merit Award

She was a finalist as well for the Pablo Neruda Poetry Prize

Joan Siegel’s first book Hyacinth for the Soul, published by Deerbrook Editions in 2009, has had a few poems read on The Writer’s Almanac. In 2012 Joan read at the Dodge Poetry Festival. A poem from Hyacinth for the Soul, On The Night Train to Marseilles, was selected to win the Rebecca Lard Award at Poetry Quarterly, a Prolific Press publication with a focus on modern poetic style.

A Passing, the new book from which this poem is taken, is available  now on Deerbrook Editions Website as well as on amazon.

If you purchase books from the press Website you do more to help the authors as well as press. Thank you.

Published widely in journals and anthologies, Siegel lives in the lower Hudson Valley of New York State. Emerita Professor of English at SUNY/Orange, she volunteers at a local no-kill animal shelter, tends to 10 rescued cats, plants a summer garden and watches it grow.

From the Back Cover

Siegel’s book is a meditation, a held breath, a chord lingered on and released, the silence eloquent as the music. In these poems, memory both preserves and fails, distorts and clarifies. She meets small deaths (a hummingbird, a cat) and large (her own loved ones, and victims of war and the Holocaust) with a steady gaze. But there is also the cherry blooming outside the window, Degas’ dancer, a child’s new language “that sputters off your lips and drops / ripe as a juicy pear in my lap.”

                 —Mary Makofske

The poems in Joan I. Siegel’s A Passing offer startling bardic moments. In a poem’s anguished speaker, a sudden transcendence takes place. In the reader, a sudden awakening ensues from a “window’s shocking brightness,” or a subtle “memory of a window,” or the profound emptiness of “molecules that never touch.”

             —Sandra Graff, author of This Big Dress

Still poetry month

Three new titles for poetry available now on the Website at deerbrookeditions.com all are accomplished poets. They Join the rank of Deerbrook poets, all of whom garner recognition in some way. In the spirit of poetry month (aren’t we lucky, the powers that be give us a full month to wave the poetry flag) I am going to post a poem, and a graph about the author, for as many as I can in the remaining days.

Sarah White’s poems resonate the irony of glory and human love.

Beautiful Day by JR Solonche has delight and sorrow, insights and more.

Poetry is like getting dropped off in New Orleans.

Meditations on what cannot be seen, the music of memory.

The Poetry of Joan I. Siegel

Joan’s first book Hyacinth for the Soul (Deerbrook Editions 2009) was called world-class by one reviewer.

A Passing, her new small but compelling book of verse continues to reach beyond the limits of everyday thought and speech  with Joan’s deft language that flows around perceptions and allows the reader to find themselves in the poetic image as it unfolds. Perhaps Joan can do this in words since she is experienced in playing piano, and often makes reference or will attach music titles to poems.

Here are two poems from the book that are indicative of her skill with language that seems to cross or transport us unknowingly through time and space.

Siegel is recipient most recently of Poetry Quarterly’s Rebecca Lard Award, New Letters Poetry Award and Anna Davidson Rosenberg Prize. A finalist for the Pablo Neruda Prize, she was an International Merit Award Winner in Atlanta’s 2014 International Poetry Competition. Published widely in journals and anthologies, Siegel lives in the lower Hudson Valley of New York State. Emerita Professor of English at SUNY/Orange, she volunteers at a local no-kill animal shelter, tends to 10 rescued cats, plants a summer garden and watches it grow.