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

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New food coming off the presses

A Passing by Joan I. Siegel may be atonal and therefore a well seasoned feast.

News update: These authors will be reading  January 28.
Time is 7 pm.
Place is Morrison Hall, Orange County Community College, 115 South Street, Middletown, New York.

Deerbrook Editions announces

A Passing by Joan I. Siegel, coming soon in 2015.

“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

Siegel is recipient most recently of Poetry Quarterly’s Rebecca Lard Award, and previously 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.

Jaon is also the author of  Hyacinth for the Soul (Deerbrook Editions, 2009)

 And 

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

 

Beautiful Day by JR Solonche, also coming soon. A new author to Deerbrook Editions, JR Solonche’s Beautiful Day is a delight as well as it may be conundrum, for JR’s skillful introspection plays with the commonplace while illusively serving up poetic truism.

Preview some poems  that appear in Beautiful Day on Mudlark

“The spirit of Horace, the melancholy of time slithering away and turning all to dust, tempered with art, wit and good grace: Solonche’s is the Horatian spirit for our time and place.”

                —Ricardo Nirenberg, editor of Offcourse

“When his daughter poses a most difficult question, the father in one of the poems in A Beautiful Day, responds, I’ll have to get it right. / I’ll have to clear my throat, sigh as wise people / sigh before I say . . . Solonche the poet, like Solonche the father, neither sidesteps the crucial questions of the day, nor pretends to have the perfect answers. He sighs and crafts his way with words of care, of wit, of artistry.”

                                   —James Penha, editor of New Verse News

“Solonche possesses a deadpan delivery that delights in unexpected twists and word play that can turn deadly serious. He’s equally expert at both narrative and lyric, and the ghazals alone are worth the price of admission.”

                                                     —Mary Makofske, author of Traction, winner of the Snyder Prize

News and titles from 2012-2013

Thank you for your support; whether you have bought books, made donations, or written a review—everything you do helps.

And Welcome to this update on titles.

Deerbrook Editions
A small literary press publishing deserving authors in well-designed trade books
Deserving Authors • Good Books

Find books here deerbrookeditions.com

distributed by Small Press Distribution spdbooks.org

Visit our new sample page online to view sample book pages and the beginning of our catalog. All remarkably presented by ISSUU in better than ebook form.
News from Deerbrook Editions 2013

New books are in the works. This year, 2014, as of this letter, new books will be coming out by Dawn Potter, Stuart Kestenbaum, and Martina Reisz Newberry. And More.

Over the past year and a half Deerbrook Editions has brought out six new books:

Learning by Rote, poems by Martina Reisz Newberry
The Thinking Heart: The Life & Loves of Etty Hillesum by Martin Steingesser
Memory Won’t Save Me: a haibun by Mimi White
No Passing Zone, poems by Donna Reis
The Irresistible In-Between, poems by David Sloan
Freeing the Hook, poems by Peter Harris

All books available from the Website deerbrookeditions.com
Available now: Freeing the Hook, poems by Peter Harris.

White Waves on Sand, Maine by John Marin

Petter Harris is Zacamy Professor in English at Colby College in Waterville, Maine where he founded a mentoring program. Currently, he chairs the Art Department. He has taught at Colby College since 1974.

He has been a fellow at the MacDowell Colony, the Virginia Center for the Arts, Red Cinder House, and the Tyron Guthrie Center in Ireland, and has been awarded a Martin Dibner Writing Fellowship.

He is co-founder of a mentoring program (Colby Cares About Kids) that in 2012-13 matched nearly five hundred College students with primary and elementary students in ten communities.

He holds an BA from Middlebury, a Ph.D. from Indiana University. And a MFA from Warren Wilson.

———————-

David Sloan received the 2012 Betsy Sholl award for the poem Bad Math, and the 2012 Maine Literary Award for Poetry in the Short Works Competition.
The Irresistible In-Between by David Sloan, is available at the Website deerbrookeditions.com.
David not only teaches at Maine’s Waldorf school he trains teachers in Waldorf theory.

The Irresistible In-Between cover features a photo by Chris Darling.

From the back cover:

W.H. Auden said poetry is a clear statement of mixed emotions, and that’s the great gift of David Sloan’s poems. The Irresistible In-Between gives us a series of lenses, each clarifying the rich complexity of contemporary life and relationships. There is an exactitude of eye and ear here, and an unassuming confidence that makes the speaker an indispensable guide through relational thickets, where, as he says, ‘I do what I can to be near the commotion, the danger.’ I would describe all these poems the way the speaker describes his sons’ carpentry skills: ‘the casual exactness of lines/ measured out like music.’ These are indeed beautifully rendered poems.
—Betsy Sholl, author of Rough Cradle

Good books from 2012

No Passing Zone is a fine book of poems by Donna Reis who teaches at The Northeast Poetry Center, College of Poetry, in Warwick, New York. More can be seen at donnareis.com.
Donna has a review: reviewed-by-john-bellinger/10152085658697318  which is posted as a note on our Facebook page.

From the Back cover:

Lyrical, wry, biting—Reis uses all the tricks in her deck to show how to survive the pain and healing of the body, the crumbling and restoration of houses, the razing and rebuilding of love. There’s serious word play here, and a sharp eye for detail. Reis explores not only her own experience, but the lives of others—Dorothy Wordsworth ministering to her brother, Mary Lamb, whose “Kitchen rattled / toward me, its knives hissing . . .” Readers will rejoice at the perseverance of this poet, who “stayed because [she had] more stories to tell.”
—Mary Makofske

 

 

 
Martina Reisz Newberry is a California writer now, once again, living in LA. Learning by Rote has gotten some attention and reviews can be read here: Martina’s blog. I have posted a number of descriptions and the like on Facebook https://www.facebook.com/learning.by.rote

A photo by Brian Newberry

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Martin Steingesser is as active as ever with readings and performances of The Thinking Heart. The ensemble has been raising money in performance to make a trip to Europe for Etty’s birthday. You can learn more information here: http://www.pilgrimagetotheheart.org

“A Red Anemone” , pastel by Katharine Whild

The book is based on the performance and contains the text and an introduction to Etty Hillesum, her writings, and how they touched and inspired Martin.

Read a review in the Press Herald.

“Etty Hillesum’s remarkable voice and The Thinking Heart ensemble’s stirring simplicity… make this an intimate and profoundly moving meditation on how…to love.” —The Portland Phoenix

 

 

 

 

 

Cover art: Sculpture “Wheel of Time” by Kerryn Forster of Australia

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Memory Won’t Save Me by Mimi White is best described by this endorsement:

When the Japanese poet-monk Basho invented the haibun, the alternating haiku and prose in which he documented his travels, he certainly never imagined what a poet could do with the form in twenty-first century American English. Mimi White’s Memory Won’t Save Me is an ingenious, fascinating appropriation, an account of both physical and emotional travel. The geography is the weeks leading up to the death of a father. Shifting easily between direct observation and layers of memory, she turns what might have been a familiar kind of elegy into a work of great depth and power.
—Chase Twichell

Other news is not so new but to perhaps some of you.

(Since keeping up with blogs, Websites, marketing, mailings, design, editing, etc. I yearn to be able to make more frequent newsletters.)

For the past couple of years Deerbrook Editions has had a Fiscal Sponsorship with Fractured Atlas in NY which allows “Project Deerbrook” to receive tax deductible donations to help us with our mission of making books and helping undiscovered authors reach a wider audience in well designed trade books.

We need your help to develop marketing and promotion strategies for new authors books. The press needs to raise money to expand beyond break even economics, in order to get help with the business of running the press, and to try to land a grant.

If you know and like the press books, please show your support by making even a small donation. If 20 people donated 10 dollars (the price of a bottle of wine or a six pack) it becomes 200 dollars; if 20 people donated 25 dollars it becomes 500 dollars. 500 dollars would help launch an authors new book or keep a couple of books on the list in print.

Deerbrook is a sponsored project of Fractured Atlas, a non-profit arts service organization. Contributions for the purposes of Deerbrook must be made payable to Fractured Atlas and are tax-deductible to the extent permitted by law.

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