New Poetry

This story is a seasonal treat, a modern, lyrical retelling of the Charles Dickens classic, A Christmas Carol. Eb is a spoiled child who really is not one for caring, and he certainly hates sharing. He is watched over by a very special guardian - the family’s ancient longcase clock, who is bestowed with magic. His name is Grandfather Time. On Christmas Eve, Grandfather Time decides he must teach the boy a lesson.

This collection of poems invites you to step away from the whirl of modernity and into the eternal rhythm of the land. With plow and seed, with sweat and dream, the farmer scripts his life upon Earth's broad canvas, leaving behind furrows of perseverance and fields ripe with hope. Through verses as unpretentious yet profound as the soil they celebrate, we explore the daily miracles and seasonal cycles that define a farmer's world.

Drawing from his experience as a translator, Forrest Gander includes, in the first powerfully elegiac section, a version of a poem by the Spanish mystical poet St. John of the Cross. He continues with a long multilingual poem examining the syncretic geological and cultural history of the US border with Mexico. The poems of the third section - a moving transcription of Gander’s efforts to address his mother dying of Alzheimer’s - rise like hymns, transforming slowly from reverence to revelation.

In a more romantic era, I never would have been allowed to marry my wife. She would have married into land and wealth and I would be awaiting my trial for heresy somewhere. But before her wedding and before my outbursts against the power structure, I would have nightly dipped a quill into ink and scribbled out my feelings in long, poetic tomes. And on the gallows, as her nobleman husband pulled the lever, my wife would have held tight the letters against her chest, feeling my last thoughts comfort her.

H. R. Stoneback's prose-poem Hemingway's Paris: Our Paris? constitutes a masterpiece of both appreciation and analysis by a scholar whose knowledge and love of Paris is as deep, profound and genuine as his knowledge and love of Hemingway.

Dylan cannot sleep without his Cosydoze, but it goes missing on a visit to Granny’s house. Where has it gone? And can Mum and Dad get Dylan to sleep without it? A funny, heart-warming story for very young listeners told in rhyme.

Some Contemplative Writing students have spoken about the contemplative writing process as a "river of words" or a freeing of the writing processes. Contemplation is the mental easing of something that often results in the release of more inner workings than initially expected. I find when writing becomes less of a course of nature for me, painting and letting out imagery and color can itself ease up the processes of writing. These past few years I have been deeply studying and practicing meditation, which shares something with contemplation.

A reading by Jay Parini of thirty-three of his most celebrated poems. Jay Parini's readings are always an event, but too rare. For the first time, Parini has recorded his best known and most recent poems in an audiobook that welcomes the listener to enter his universe, which revolves around his...