Mendi Obacike pares her poems down to the stark, dark places where self and selves unfurl, confront, and recombine. She understands the art of distillation, both formal and emotional. Yet there is nothing reserved in these rich poems, which emanate from a deep understanding of unsentimental, polyphonic human complexity." Elizabeth Alexander
"These cleanly-wrought poems turn the world upside down, inside out. They confirm that nothing is simple. Flesh is complex, relentless in its appearances and changes. Like language (and the glad amazement in the sweat and tears of others) flesh could not long survive without the intricate armor of luck, imaginations, and grace, which are the poet's special province." -Houston A. Baker, Jr.
"Language clean as a scalpel opens you to worlds of mysterious, powerful, terrifying life like a surgeon opens the body and reveals the great rivers inside." -Toi Derricotte
Peggy Ann Tartt, Among Bones
ISBN: 0-916418-90-1 69 pgs. (paper) $15.00
In this first collection, Peggy Ann Tartt succeeds in lifting the pall of death and loss with the delicate hand and voice of familial love. In spite of the subject, the poems are not morbid. The reader is rewarded with the poet's sensitivity, turn of phrase, and vivid imagery. One does not expect to find the work of a native New Yorker permeated with references to the natural world, but in these poems they ring true and bear witness to the poet's keen observation and insight.
From the opening poem, "Medium," this volume attests to the continuity of life, moving toward the conclusion, "Bones," which affirms the theme: "Even the husk of your voice levitates, / a hummingbird pulsing in midair."
This new and original voice sings through sorrow, and its music demands to be heard. Though personal, the poems are universal in appeal, linking us to our own experiences that are a necessary part of being. This is a fine and compelling collection that calls the reader back to the poems again and again. Among Bones is the 2002 winner of the Naomi Long Madgett Poetry Award.
Nagueyalti Warren
Margaret
Winner of the 2008 Naomi Long Madgett Poetry Award ISBN:978-0-9797509-0-8 76 pages (paper)
$18.00
The story of Margaret Garner, a slave who murdered her young daughter to spare her from growing up in bondage, has been told in fiction, opera, and visual art. This inter- pretation in poetry, told through the imagined thoughts, memories, and words of Margaret herself, adds an important new layer to out understanding of the slave experience.
"Margaret offers its readers the experience of a captured people in close-up. Poem by poem documents the reality of enslaved Africans on American soil, a reality that its author conjures with a specificity that does not allow that moment in history to slop from our view. When Margaret testifies, we understand-especially when when she tells us her slave songs were traded for a butcher knife." -Elena Georgiou Author of Mercy Mercy Me
"What an extraordinary view. or rather, way of approaching history. all the imagery and emotion of poetry with all the bitter facts of history. Everyone should read Margaret." -Nikki Giovanni, poet
Jerry Wemple, You Can See It from Here
ISBN: 0-916418-86-3 87 pgs. (paper) $13.00
Jerry Wemple grew up in central Pennsylvania, the locale of these poems, and southwestern Florida. He served in the United States Navy and worked as a newspaper reporter in Massachusetts. After an absence of many years, he has returned to the Susquehanna Valley. This collection is the winner of the 2000 Naomi Long Madgett Poetry Award.
"In his first book, Jerry Wemple writes from that vast space on the map between Pittsburgh and Philadelphia. This region of forests, coal mines, farms, and small towns can be as hard and silent as stone, yet in his departures and returnings, Wemple makes even its bars and bigots sing. I am glad for these sometimes troubled, sometimes joyful songs. And I won't soon forget what they've taught me about a place I once thought I knew." (Julia Kasdorf)
"Arriving on the scene with wisdom, subtle craft, cool surveillance and immense heart, YouCan See It from Here introduces a new poet who shows all the signs of becoming an essential voice and necessary messenger, or perhaps a recording angel --one who's been in all the wars and measures our human ways with acute magnanimity." (Dara Wier)
James R. Whitley, Immersion
ISBN: 0-916418-89-8
78 pgs. (paper) $15.00
"Haunting, sharply observant and aesthetically brilliant, this collection chronicles the journey we all make: this journey of building a life of meaning in a world where the truth is often not as it should be, or what we want to believe, but nevertheless, in front of us. Full of pathos and beauty, Whitley's poems resonate." (Amy Wilson)
"Leading the reader in a matador's dance between victimizer and victim, artist and subject, heroism and betrayal, James Whitley's imaginative personae and resolute energies help us locate the possible light despite the often dark 'chore of breathing.' These poems offer a welcome immersion in complexity, a highly original voice." (Terry Blackhawk)
Immersion is the 2001 winner of the Naomi Long Madgett Poetry Award. More recently Whitley won the 2003 Ironwood Press Poetry Prize. One of his chapbooks was a finalist in several competitions, and his poetry has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize.
Carolyn Beard Whitlow
VANISHED
ISBN: 0-916418-96-0 109 pgs. (paper)
$18.00
“In Vanished Carolyn Beard Whitlow is, as she says, ‘Seeking the heal of words—some self-assembly required.’ Whether she uses a sestina or a villanelle, Whitlow croons the blues of a strong-hearted woman singing herself out of the past. Vanished performs magic—it gives voice to the voiceless, body to the vanished. I love the nakedness of the love poems and those about family. There is no false turn in this book.”
-Toi Derricotte
We have a siren who lives by metaphor, all the neighborhoods she’s occupied, traversed, transcended . . . . This is a poet with fluency and cadence in prosody, an inclination toward Motown and the blues, but feints in sestina and villanelle for both circularity and word-play. She attends to organization, in units, as increment, as progression: so many losses, frustrations, but beneath the gloss of voicings ‘within the veil,’ a prideful storytelling in oragami detail: all in her own idiom. In her world one can become one’s own parents and kinfolk, the ancestors singing.” — Michael S. Harper
