The Awakened Hours by Robert “Jason” Dick

The Awakened Hours

Robert “Jason” Dick

An experience that will remain with the reader long after the book has been closed and tucked away. The Awakened Hours represents a new awakening in American poetry.

From the Publisher

This is so achingly beautiful - I'm still mesmerized by the after-reading effect. Bless you.

Nora Arjuna

The Awakened Hours is available at Barnes & Noble in both hardcover (B&N members pay $16.52) and paperback (B&N members pay $10.48)

With an English degree from Washington State University, Jason has been writing poetry for twenty-four years. He currently resides in Bremerton, Washington.

Author Contact

P.O. Box 4871
Bremerton, WA 98312
robertjasondick@gmail.com

Old Moon by Debra McElroy

Old Moon

Debra McElroy

Debra McElroy lives in a log home in Washington state. She is a prolific writer whose poetry reflects the tenderness in her observations of the joys and sorrows in the world around her.

Old Moon is available for $15.00. To order, contact:

Key Literary Concepts
PO Box 925
Vaughn, WA 98394
info@watermarkwriters.com
253-261-8769

More information: Watermark Writers

Shedding Our Skins by Ronda Broatch

Shedding Our Skins

Ronda Broatch

Ronda Broatch dips into the natural world, Eden, and the landscape of the Northwest to bring us an assortment of gifts: a bear's tracks, a basket of figs, a spider's web. They are held up for us to delight in, with Broatch's talent for language, rhythm, and her metaphoric use of women’s bodies illuminating each one.

Jeannine Hall Gailey

Ronda Broatch's latest chapbook, Shedding Our Skins, is a sensual, meditation study of one woman's evolutionary journey.

Jenifer Lawrence

Shedding Our Skins is a beautifully crafted meditation on the soul, the home and the natural world where transformations abound in lines as crisp, fresh, and earthy as their Pacific Northwest setting.

Annette Spaulding-Convy

ISBN 978-1-59924-265-1 paper, $14. Order online at Finishing Line Press or by sending $14.00 (check or money order made out to “Finishing Line Press”) to

Finishing Line Press
Post Office Box 1626
Georgetown, KY 40324

Order before March 28, 2008 and get FREE shipping. USA only. After March 28 please add $2 shipping

Knots of Clouds by Rosemary O'Hara

Knots of Clouds

Rosemary O'Hara

Rosemary O'Hara is a Seattle poet whose work has been published in local and national journals including Willow Review, Spindrift, and Vox Populi, 2007.

She was born in West Virginia, had a nursing career in New York City and retired after twenty years from a private practice in marriage and family therapy. Rosemary studies piano at Cornish College of the Arts and is a docent at the Seattle Japanese Garden.

The exquisite details in Rosemary O'Hara's quiet poems build in the reader's mind like snowflakes on a mountainside - at once beautiful, deep, and uniquely shaped. Using Seattle as her lens, O'Hara's close observations of the world, matched with her close attention to language, has produced a vivid collection of surpassing beauty.

Sharon Cumberland

With an eye for detail and an ear for music, Rosemary O'Hara's poems remind us of the beauty in everyday acts: cutting fruit, eating squash soup, packing up holiday decorations. Whether in their rich, sensory portrait of daily life in Seattle as the seasons swirl past, or in evocative meditations on moss, Sumi paintings, Gnossiennes and marriage, again and again, these poems help us to see “the lotus landscape" within the "clatter of an ordinary world.”

Holly J. Hughes

Western Images by Clark Crouch

Western Images

Clark Crouch

Published by: Western Poetry Publications

This, the author's third volume of western and cowboy poetry, contains the most recent work of Clark Crouch, a cowboy poet and performer. As in his other two books, Where Horses Reign and Sun, Sand & Soapweed, his poems are reality-based but he has not hesitated to exercise the cowboy’s propensity to embellish the truth as he captures glimpses of both the humorous and serious aspects of life in the west.

He was featured at the 2007 Burning Word Festival and one of his poems, Goose Creek, won an honorable mention at the juried contest sponsored by the Allied Arts of Yakima Valley.

Clark, who lives in rural Snohomish County was born on a farm in rural Nebraska and his viewpoints, biases, and philosophies were shaped by drought, the Great Depression, and his experience as a cowboy in the 1930’s and 1940’s.

Selected poetry is also published on cowboypoetry.com and syndicated to some fifty regional editions of The Country Register, an antiques and crafts tabloid published in Canada and the U.S.

All of his poetry books are available for order from local and internet booksellers.

Text Loses Time by Nico Vassilakis

TEXT LOSES TIME

by Nico Vassilakis

Afterword by Nick Piombino

Part nested Minimalist cubes and part laser light that won't diverge across distance, Nico Vassilakis' poetry seems to ask whether we are primates at play on a baseball diamond of memory and desire beside mural-lined public structures slipping toward infinite regression.

Richly iterative, these pairings and alphabets escape the mirror to thrill us with variation and sting all forms of complacency. Vassilakis extends Oulipian strategies: Perec references, lamellisections, crystalline build-outs and transpositions, a scat of nonrepresentational vocables, lettered whirlwinds giving speed for legibility, -- 'extracting the gem through layers of gauze' and, other times, lowering a gem into a fold.

Can an argument between a machine that produces texts and 'longhand into tiny notebooks' wake us up? In pain, 'the throbbing thumb' makes us 'attend to the living.'

If Vassilakis revises the rock lyric 'meet-the-new-boss, same-as-the-old-boss' to 'meet the solipsistic era. same as the old solipsistic era,' is treatment to be had in a bar, a science lab, or will it reach us over the radio? Try a road trip, so 'you can't afford to blink, to be blind for even a second' going through a colander out where dust is breeding and 'glass traps lighting' like no scene you've seen in quite this way. Through crevices, perforations, punctures, piercings, pinholes, see neighborhoods as 'that place where organized sleeping happens.' So, look for a faceted colony that 'sometimes congeals.'

Deborah Meadows

Contact and Ordering Information

ManyPenny Press
1111 E. Fifth St.
Moscow, ID 83843

$15.95 + $3 postage, make checks payable to Crag Hill.

You can also order online. To read some online reviews, see here and here.

Nico Vassilakis was born in New York City in 1963. He has co-written and performed a one-man play about experimental composer Morton Feldman. Vassilakis is co-founder and curator for the Subtext Reading Series and editor of Clear-Cut: Anthology (A Collection of Seattle Writers). He has been a guest-editor of WOS#35: Northwest Concrete and Visual Poetry and his visual poetry videos have been shown worldwide at festivals and exhibitions of innovative language arts. In 1998, Vassilakis co-produced, with Rebecca Brown, a 24-hour “Gertrude Stein-a-thon.” His work has appeared in numerous magazines, including Ribot, Caliban, Aufgabe, Chain, Talisman, Central Park and Golden Handcuffs Review. He works for Fantagraphic Books and lives in Seattle with his son, Quixote.

Fifty Years by Knute Skinner

Fifty Years

Poems 1957-2007 by Knute Skinner

Born in St. Louis, Missouri, Knute Skinner has had a home in Ireland since 1964. He has taught at the University of Iowa and at Western Washington University, where he was a Professor of English. Retired from teaching, he lives in Killaspuglonane, County Clare with his spouse, Edna Faye Kiel. This book collects fifty years of published work, beginning with poems which first saw serial publication in 1957 and continuing through thirteen books.

To purchase a copy of this book, please visit Salmon Poetry.

Laughing out Clouds

William Scott Galasso

William Scott Galasso's new book Laughing out Clouds contains 174 new poems, on 112 pages, plus color photography. It's haiku/senryu/short poems. You can purchase it now from Galwin Press by sending $15.00 U.S. (or equivalent), check payable to William Scott Galasso, to:

Galwin Press
c/o William Scott Galasso
10129 NE 113th Pl.
Kirkland, WA 98033

Case Walking by Julene Tripp Weaver

Case Walking

Julene Tripp Weaver

Julene Tripp Weaver's first chapbook, Case Walking: An AIDS Case Manager Wails Her Blues, is scheduled for release August 2007 from Finishing Line Press.

There is much to behold and admire, much to be moved by, in these passionate and engaged poems that-individually and collectively-comprise a report from the front in the valiant war against AIDS, a report delivered by a poet with an unflinching heart and all-seeing eye.

Roy Jacobstein, M.D., M.P.H.

The authenticity of Julene Tripp Weaver's experience as an AIDS case manager-and her commitment to doing what she can-form the resolute backbone of this collection. She acknowledges all that is outside her power to heal or hold, and so asks the necessary question: what can we offer each other at the too-soon end of life?

Elizabeth Austen author of skin prayers

Decalmaker

Sheri Harper

Sheri Harper's chapbook Decalmaker was recently published by Pudding House Press. Decalmaker contains 18 poems dealing with the community of workers that she was a member of while working for the Boeing Company as a decalmaker. Some of the titles in Decalmaker are:

• Filing Circuit Boards
• In the Rain
• Hot Stuff
• Silk Screened Heart
• Job Security
• Broken Heat
• My Other Mom
• The Painter Forgotten
• Will the Last One Out, Please, Turn Out the Lights

Love is a Weed by Lana Hechtman Ayers

Love is a Weed

Lana Hechtman Ayers

Lana Hechtman Ayers' first chapbook, Love is a Weed, was published by Finishing Line Press this Fall.

I can think only of a very few poets who are able to bring life on a page with a sensibility that is both explosive and insightful, erotic and, yes, laugh-out-loud funny, in the way Lana Hechtman Ayers' poems are in Love is a Weed. She has got a native gift in her blend of the erotic and the humorous, as she delivers poetry where lyrical joy is to be found in the most fleshy and (sometimes) melancholy of moments.

Ilya Kaminsky

The women who speak in Lana Hechtman Ayers' poems have learned to spike old romantic yearnings with the salt of experience. I want to cheer when Eurydice steps out of the confines of myth and tartly declares her independence: "Me, I'm a solo act now and I've got plans." I love the offbeat, original combination of lush sensuality with wry wit in these tough, truthful poems.

Joan Larkin

Sadie & Mendel by Anita Feng

Sadie & Mendel

Anita Feng

Who would have thought the industrial Midwest could be the source of so much fine poetry? In another story of slight rise and long decline, Anita Feng's Sadie & Mendel does for a Jewish mother and son in Detroit what Rita Dove's Pulitzer Prize-winning Thomas and Beulah did for an African-American couple in Akron. In a variety of voices, and with crisp narrative lines, Feng unfolds a tale that begins with Sadie's life in a peasant village near the Black Sea and ends with her death, “the other shore.”

It is a saga of ambition and disappointment, from one generation to the next. At Mendel's birth, the question arises, "Can one be born/ with a flair for misfortune?" And an answer seems to come when Mendel, in middle age, looks around and sees "a raw thing diminished/ to the size of regret." But the reader will not regret-nor forget-Anita Feng's powerful poems that open up this failed family, the "big American dreams" and the deep American sadness.

Elton Glaser