BOOKS

WRITING FROM THE BROKEN PLACES: Northern Hope Poetry 3

Mentored & compiled by Jim Bell

This essential poetry anthology by people at the Northern Hope Recovery Center bears witness to the dignity and struggle of those in recovery—and the courage of writers who write to live.

2019 SRP Glass Prize Broadside Contest

Jendi Reiter, Northampton, MA, won our Franklin and Hampshire county competition with "Psalm 55.21." Armen Davoudian, Palo Alto, CA, won the nationwide contest with "Ararat." To read their Slate Roof Press limited-edition letterpress broadsides and order, click here.

Everything Begins Somewhere

by Amanda Lou Doster

Her questions are the big ones: identity, language, memory, motherhood, fidelity. “Think of what you are meant to do,” Doster’s speaker implores. Luckily for us, Doster was meant to write these generous, insightful, terrifically human poems.

—Amy Dryansky, author of Grass Whistle and How I Got Lost So Close to Home

Then & Again

by Catherine Stearns

The poems in Then & Again thread the act of remembering and its attendant questions (“why else love what we love?”) with meditations on the present made possible by the past.

From the Other Room

by Anna M. Warrock

These elegiac poems approach profound loss as one might a new language, awed at first by its strange idioms and later by their beauty. I am reminded, reading Warrock, of the heartbreaking wit of Szymborska.

- Frannie Lindsay, Author of If Mercy

Small Ceremonies

by Cynthia Snow

The book itself works a kind of sympathetic magic, telling stories of everyday encounters in ways that reveal their essential strangeness.

- Patrick Donnelly, author of The Charge, and Nocturnes of the Brothel of Ruin

Frozen Rope

by Dennis Pollock

The poems in Frozen Rope are set in 1804 in Hadam, a fictionalized western Massachusetts town, and capture the life of the village and the voices its people, from incorporating the town, to a village murder, to the loss of a child, among other events and visions.

Say Dance, Say Night

by Abbot Cutler

Abbot Cutler's poetry is so fresh and clear as to be transparent.
Radiant . . . passionate, grieving, with a good bite
about the public stuff.

Coleman Barks
author of Hummingbird Sleep

In the Provincelands

by Janet MacFadyen

It’s a rare consciousness that can both absorb and express how daily life and the fantastic continually coexist. Within a world full of otherness, Janet MacFadyen remains unflinchingly open, even porous, so that her poems blast, twist, or softly seduce the reader into completely joining her. This is a beautiful book which deepens on rereading.

-- Pamela Stewart

All We Can Do Is Wait

by Ed Rayher

The End

postponed again: a shortage of Plague, delivery problems with Brimstone, Pestilence out sick & Calamity must get some sleep.

All around the garden rabbits can be heard sharpening teeth, winding springs.

All we can do is wait --

What Sleeps Inside

by Paula Sayword

In What Sleeps Inside, Sayword deftly illuminates places of loss as well as places of tremendous beauty and hope. Sensual, redemptive, sorrowful, wise, and full of magic.

-- Carol Potter, author of four collections, the most recent, Otherwise Obedient

The Body Alters

by Janine Roberts

Janine's handsome poems plummet into life; births and deaths collide in both intimate moments and far-flung adventures. They are full of hope for all of our changing selves.

-- Mary Clare Powell, Things Owls Ate, Academic Scat, and In the Living Room

Seed Case of the Heart

by Susan Middleton

Susan Middleton's poems burst from their careful "seed case," blown by passions of desire and betrayal, into the clear air of forgiveness, solitude, and hope.

-- Patricia Lee Lewis, A Kind of Yellow

blonde, red Mustang...

by Art Stein

...a life-loving poet--one who lives his pleasures, not a mere observer. One fine book!

-- Larry Kimm

Quickening

by Susie Patlove

Susie Patlove writes timeless lyrics both flooded with light and rooted in many kinds of dark.

-- Ellen Doré Watson, Director, The Poetry Center at Smith College

Walk Through Paradise Backwards

by Trish Crapo

Trish Crapo's work possesses the clarity, passion, and strong natural imagery that create the genuine presence of life.

-- Barry Sternlieb, Editor,
Mad River Press

Crossing the Bar

by Jim Bell

Jim Bell's poems wake up your senses and remind you to pay attention. They shock you back to life.

-- Jan Frazier, Jan Frazier's Greatest Hits