Titles due to come out this spring.
Stricken; Poems in the Time of Covid by Gail Gauldin Moore. Publication, April 12
Gail Gauldin Moore’s ‘Stricken’ is truly captivating. It’s also perfectly timed for a society shaken by all manner of plagues. “Eternity,” she writes, “is a spasm in a Petri dish.” Everywhere throughout this collection, Moore’s poetry is at once prescient and inquisitive, deftly embodying the beguilement of the day. At it’s heart, however, it is a study of personal loss, a tribute to love’s inevitable wound. “For me, the best thing now / is coping with the worst thing.” There is potent medicine here. Moore is at the height of her art.
—Brendan Constantine, author of ‘Dementia, My Darling’
Gail Gauldin Moore’s new collection of poems, Stricken , takes us to the deepest places grief can touch inside our lives. The death of her son, Michael, opened a chasm of sadness and loneliness that one hesitates to look into, but look into that chasm Ms. Moore does and we look into it with her, one heartfelt poem at a time.
Gail Gauldin Moore pulls us into the embrace of poignancy, and the confusion of disbelief in the demon Mortality.
In the poem, For Michael: 1926-2020 , she says: “The unbearable cannot be borne./The deepest logic is a scream./I stand here beside myself, screaming.”
Moore’s poignancy, her search for comfort during a comfortless time, bids us look into our own fears of death, our own caves of loneliness.
In the title poem, Stricken , Moore delivers to us a feeling we know and now have permission to own: “What was this death they say you had/ My son! My son!/Call for the messenger./Call for the day when you first came.”
Stricken holds us up to ourselves. You’ll think about this book, feel it’s pain, recall the griefs and grievances of our own lives. You’ll go back to this book many times—physically and in your dreams—for a very long while.
—Martina Reisz Newberry, author of Blues for French Roast With Chicory
Stricken is literally breathtaking. Gail Gauldin Moore simultaneously shocks and caresses us. As always with this poet, her sensibility is highly refined but never “precious”–raw, even searing, while still intelligible and keenly thoughtful. Whether addressing the state of our culture during the pandemic or the loss of a grown son, these poems move with the obsessiveness, sorrow, quirkiness and unbounded passion for life that we get from the Argentine Tango. From the title poem: “Someone said you were dancing./ I wanted to be in the dance./ I wanted to bivouac with toy soldiers./ Or sleep forever—just to dream/ that life would come back.”
If I could have only five poetry books, this would be one.
—Marjorie Power, author of Sufficient Emptiness
Chorale; A Poetry Anthology by ten Maine writers. publication April 26th
Details on this titles will be forthcoming, but as the title suggests, this book is a chorus of voices of varied tenor and style.
Endorsed by Maine’s 5th poet Laureate Stuart Kestenbaum
These poets write about passages—their own and our country’s—looking deeply at the world as they find it. They investigate those profound memories that shape us throughout our lives and examine the natural world that can transform us every day. A community of writers, their poems at times become a call and response, voices joined together to create images and stories that evoke and complement each other. At a time in our world when darkness feels omnipresent, these poets remind us there is light in everything.
Glyphs, poetry by Martina Reisz Newberry publication May 10th
Reading these poems is like walking through a city’s neighborhoods…each neighborhood with its own characteristics. You’re on the same walk and you can see the connection as you turn a corner from one poem/page/street to the next, even though the one you’ve ended up on tells a different story, and smells and sounds different.
Martina presents her elevation over this world in a way that resonates with any artist’s filter…or to the common-person who hasn’t yet discovered their inner muse. These poems shine a light for them, and all of us, into realms we are glad to have revealed.
—Rick Lupert, author of God Wrestler: A Poem for Every Torah Portion, and The Tokyo-Van Nuys Express
What pulses in us? asks poet Martina Reisz Newberry in her collection, Glyphs. With a sensibility reminiscent of Nobel Prize winner Wisława Szymborska, Newberry employs a deceptively conversational tone to wield resonant insights about the spirit of nature, faith, aging and mortality, and love. She continually surprises with imagery, juxtaposition, and personification, as in “A Bargain of Earthly Delights”: Boats on dark water…seem to me like beings without a future.
—Terry Wolverton, author of Ruin Porn and founder of Writers at Work-a creative writing center
One delightful feature of this collection is that Martina Reisz Newberry can sing to the wind, the sea and the stars then turn around and write a tribute as strikingly specific and sharply observed as “Small Spring on the Property,” which tells the tale of “Hazel,” who resided in “a trailer in Bentonia, Mississippi/on an acre of land owned by a great-uncle…” where she hid “…from her ex/who threatened to kill her if he ever found her/for taking their big screen t.v. with her/when she left him for the last time,/while he showered.”
Whether shadowed by doubt or traced with a feminist sense of injustice, whether wistful or exultant or humorous, however various the subject matter, the poems of Glyphs have this in common: a sense of wonder at existence and Martina Reisz Newberry’s generous and forgiving passion for life.
—Suzanne Lummis; lives in Los Angeles where she is the director of the Los Angeles Poetry Festival, award-winning teacher with UCLA Extension Her most recent book is “24 Hours.”
Publication May 20th
In addition to her marvelous craft and her patent relish of language, Dawn Potter impresses by the sheer range of her enterprise. She can write about Paganini and Otis Redding, compose wrenching narratives (“Mr. Kowalski”) and witty conceits (“Love Poem from a Tiny Husband”), terse, almost haiku-like lyrics (“Dooryard”) and gritty realist observations (“Walking into Town”). But whatever her approach, the poet is marvelously and rightfully self-assured, and the reader is immeasurably schooled in what our world is about in all its facets. A brilliant collection!
—Sydney Lea, Vermont poet laureate (2011–15)
In Accidental Hymn, Dawn Potter masterfully demonstrates how opposites can be counterparts and how poetry can rise from that tension/partnership. Potter bends syntax into distinctive harmonies and bangs songs loose from the everyday world, as if it were a can she’s playing with the stick of her resolute gaze. This is a fascinating and engaging collection, full of immediate pleasures and the deferred joys that visit a reader long after reading such a book as this. Accidental Hymn is a serious delight, virtuosic and welcoming at once.
—BJ Ward, author of Jackleg Opera
I’ve long been familiar with Dawn Potter’s work, and I knew this collection would showcase her careful tending of the poetic craft, would express the singular view that is present in all of her books. What I was not expecting was this explosion of power—all of it contained, just enough, to keep the covers of the book in place. This is the poetry collection I have been waiting for. As Robert Frost said, “No surprise for the writer, no surprise for the reader.” Accidental Hymn is alive with power and surprise and thrums with the energy of complex life in the time of the pandemic.
—Maudelle Driskell, author of Talismans view a preview of Accidental Hymn
Metamorphosis, Book XVI by Teresa Carson, the second book in The Argument of Time series. June 9th publication.
There is information on Deerbrook Editions Website about this book
View a preview of this book here.
In case you haven’t noticed, three great titles from last Autumn
First out in August, view a preview
Indebted to Wind, the new poetry collection by L. R. Berger had a successful launch at Main Street Bookends of Warner, N.H.
L. R. Berger’s work has been supported by The National Endowment for the Arts, The PEN New England Discovery Award and The New Hampshire State Council on the Arts. She was Visiting Artist at The American Academy in Rome, and has been granted residencies at The MacDowell Colony, The Blue Mountain Center, Hedgebrook, Wellspring House and The Hermitage. Her collection of poems, The Unexpected Aviary, received the Jane Kenyon Award for Outstanding Book of Poetry.
From the back cover
The wind in these eloquent, elegant, tensile poems is present as spirit, of course; as spirit it can manifest as the longing or fate of the body (it expires), as intellectual momentum (it inspires), as power for social justice (it aspires). In all these modes, L.R. Berger both controls the energy as form, and honors the charge of the moment—perception by brilliant perception, breath by mortal breath.
—Stephen Tapscott
In this beautiful new book, words are unusually alive and active in the poet’s capable hands. A whispered finale meaning finally, a riff on up, an exploration of the letter P : these are among the linguistic players that address both personal loss and political realities, which L. R. Berger explores with searing honesty, emotional depth, and lyric grace. No precious word is wasted here; you will read carefully and gratefully, and want to read again.
—Martha Collins
Also in August, preview this book
Poisons & Antidotes, a new poetry collection by Andrea L. Fry. On October 7, there was a reading at the Grolier Poetry Bookshop in Cambridge. Andrea read with Sarah White, author of Iridescent Guest, also from Deerbrook Editions.
In Poisons & Antidotes, life is inhabited by things that kill us and things that save us. But it’s never black and white, because poisons exist on a continuum, each increment representing some gradation of toxicity. Sometimes poison is clearly recognizable; other times it sits side by side with the innocuous and the borders are blurred. In this collection, poison is a metaphor for the degree of human connectedness to the world. The delirious voices in the poems are trapped in their own subjectivity, unable to see beyond their own strange stories. Just as poison becomes less virulent across the continuum, the poetic voices acquire a gradual awareness of themselves in relation to their world. By the end of the collection, it is as if human experience also exists on a kind of continuum. The expression of this vast range of experience—with all its subtleties, contradictions and ironies—is the antidote to human disconnectedness.
From the Back cover
Many of the poems in Andrea Fry’s new collection Poisons & Antidotes elicit a frisson as the poet, clear-eyed and with precise description, depicts plants, situations, people where the extremes of beauty and toxicity, allure and danger mingle and test us. As a practicing oncology nurse, she looks at life without sentimentality but with intense compassion, knowing that while there are no simple choices, it is the ambiguity of life that makes us fully human. Using her medical training as well as her extensive knowledge of the natural world, Fry with deft language creates pictures and tells stories that provoke our emotions and linger in the mind.
—Peggy L. Fox, President and Publisher Emerita, New Directions Publishing Corp.
Caution: this book may upend your expectations about what is fit subject matter for poetry. From mothballs to toxic machismo, Fry takes on the perils that lurk in the dark corners of the world and brings them into the light of frank consideration. These poems have their “arrows of truth” aimed straight at you. They will reshape your thoughts. They may deepen your insights. With larger doses, your imagination may experience an expansion. You may feel yourself craving more and more of the poetic artistry of Andrea L. Fry. You’ve been warned.
—Jeanne Marie Beaumont, author of Letters from Limbo, Burning of the Three Fires
Many of Andrea Fry’s poems have become my favorites, e.g., “The Renderer” and “The Secret.” I don’t know if these are the Poisons or the Antidotes of the collection. I just know they are poems—startling, fluent, and precise. They avoid overdosing us with sweetness, but they are deeply heartening. This poet seems to think (and I agree) that accurate observation is better for us than sweetness. So is humor. So is love.
—Sarah White, author of Iridescent Guest and Wars Don’t Happen Anymore
In September preview this book
A new title of short fiction by Jefferson Navicky, could be prose poetry—here is what Jefferson Navicky says about his book: “Antique Densities: Modern Parables & Other Experiments in Short Prose is a collection that flickers between the surreal and the recognizable, between poetry and fiction, between this world and another.”
From the back cover
Among the many delights awaiting the lucky reader of this book, perhaps the greatest is the utter unpredictability of its language. In these pages, one encounters a diverse array of familiar figures, from pop singer Justin Beiber to legendary literary critic I.A. Richards. Like the elements of a dream, these personages are both themselves and not themselves, and as one reads one begins to wonder if one isn’t also becoming not-oneself, but someone wholly else, perhaps a character in the book’s pages. Antique Densities is a joyful counter-spell to the curse of disenchantment, a long, beautiful string of unforeseeable sentences. And as Gaston Bachelard asks in The Poetics of Space, a book that bears some secret kinship with this one, “if we render speech unforeseeable, is this not an apprenticeship to freedom?”
—Kristen Case, author of Principles of Economics and Little Arias
Antique Densities is a wild story-map of glowing imaginations, surreal hallucinations and timeless contemplations. There’s a dream-sequence to these winding narratives, one that reveals itself in layers of strange and beautiful meaning. In creating this collection, Jefferson Navicky has done that magical thing that so many writers and artists fear: he’s let his deepest literary influences wander rampant through the pasture of his consciousness, and the result is a stunning alchemy of authenticity and homage.
—Jaed Coffin, author of Roughhouse Friday
Antique Densities, short prose poems, “parables and other experiments,” are rarely more than a page in length, yet there is nothing miniature about them. First, there is the beauty of the writing: page after page of the coziest, most unsettling characters and situations thus far found, in Maine, in the 21st Century. Libraries open their doors on each page of this slim volume. You’ll see what I mean…These pages interlock, like ancient paving stone…all stories here will be found to serve each other, deeper and finer than I have known. Jefferson Navicky mentions writers he admires – Kafka, Borges, Cortazar, Yourcenar – “elders of influence.” They are no longer merely his models. With Antique Densities, Jefferson Navicky is their peer.
—Stephen Petroff, author of Philosophosphorescence
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