Please join us for the fall 2025 tour for Singing the Forge by G.H. Mosson, published by David Robert Books in April 2025.
Singing the Forge explores the singing of what’s shaped us and what we’ve shaped for ourselves.
Through poems at times personal, plus vignettes from men and women of the past two centuries in the book’s middle section, these poems offer mirrors of becomings.
Readers encounter melodies from diverse lives. Across free verse, meter, and poems of organic form, you might just see yourself.
Advance Praise:
“Through a series of beautiful meditative lyrics, Mosson links childhood and adulthood, journey and reckoning, memory and wonder. A humane and earnest poet, Mosson is as much attuned to ‘songless streets of Baltimore’ as to ‘trees’ unnamed relation to the world.’ He captures this attunement with carefully measured language and impressive precision. Many poems are probing observations of places and people, rendered in verbal landscapes revealing his debt to visual artists. Hans Hofman, Philip Guston, Henry Moore are three invoked in this volume. The poems in Singing the Forge create a philosophy of life centered around the idea of harmony with the universe – even if harmony’s always at the verge of disintegration. They should be paid attention to and cherished for this reason.”
—Piotr Gwiazda, Professor of English, Univ. of Pittsburgh
“Mosson’s poems are magical, memorable and meticulous, speaking to the powerful pull of locales and weathers and loves, yet get pinned to the memories of a reader with lines like these, spoken by a physician in his old age: ‘The nursing home is out there like a shark/ that has swallowed so many of my patients one by one.’ Give a copy to someone you love but be sure to keep one for yourself.”
—Clarinda Harris, Professor Emeritus, Towson University
G. H. Mosson is the author of five prior books and chapbooks of poetry, including Questions of Fire (Plain View Press), Season of Flowers and Dust (Goose River Press), and Family Snapshot as a Poem in Time (Finishing Line Press). Two of the chapbooks are collaborative, Heart X-rays & Simultaneous Revolutions (PM Press). His poetry has appeared in The Tampa Review, California Quarterly, The Hollins Critic, The Potomac Review, Smartish Pace, Lines & Stars, Free State Review, and across the U.S. He has MA from The Writing Seminars at Johns Hopkins, MFA from New England College, and his poetry has been nominated four times for the Pushcart Prize. Mosson is a lawyer, father, writer, and yes, dreamer. For more, seek www.ghmosson.com. He is on X.
Please join us for the spring 2025 tour for Two Tales: Jamali Kamali and ZundelState by Karen Chase, published by Guernica World Editions in May 2025.
These two stories explore love and beauty in the context of fear and threats. Jamali Kamali is a book-length poem about two men who lived in 16th century India. Little about them is known but they are buried together in a small tomb in Delhi. For hundreds of years, the story that these men were lovers has been passed down through the generations. Jamali Kamali is a fictional account of their love, longing, separation, and death. ZundelState, a novella in verse, takes place a thousand years in the future in a repressive land where history is banned, and dreaming has vanished. Joe, a lover of history, is rebellious and secretive. Marianna is a model worker for the State where she works in the HistoryShit Apparatchik Division. They fall in love against all odds. These two tales of outsiders, one from the distant past and the other from the far-off future, echo and reflect upon each other in surprising ways.
Karen Chase lives in Western Massachusetts where she writes and paints. Her poems, stories and essays have appeared in many magazines, including The Gettysburg Review, The New Yorker, The New Republic and Southwest Review. She is the author of two collections of poems, Kazimierz Square and BEAR, as well as Jamali-Kamali, a book-length homoerotic poem which takes place in Mughal India. Her book, Land of Stone, tells the story of her work with a silent young man in a psychiatric hospital where she was the Hospital Poet. Polio Boulevard, a memoir, came out in 2014, followed by FDR on His Houseboat: The Larooco Log, 1924-1926. History is Embarrassing, a collection of essays, is forthcoming in 2024. Two Tales: Jamali Kamali and ZundelState, a hybrid work of poetry, is forthcoming in 2025. To see Chase’s paintings, visit karenchaseart.com.
Please join us for the winter 2024 blog tour for MedEvac by Andrew LaFleche, published by Yorkshire Publishing in December 2024.
“Born again. How many births must one
Endure? How frequent becomings?” – MedEvac
From award-winning author and veteran Andrew Lafleche, MedEvac is a raw and reflective poetry collection. It delves into the harrowing realities of combat in Afghanistan, the anguish of divorce, the loss of a child, and the destructive force of alcoholism. With brutal honesty and unflinching introspection, Lafleche captures the weight of grief and the search for meaning, both in life and in faith. In MedEvac, poetry becomes a vehicle for self-examination and spiritual reflection, making it a powerful read for those familiar with trauma.
Advance Praise:
“I wept. These poems, this pain, has been transformed into beautiful tragedy.” —Gerald Arthur Moore, Flak Jacket
Andrew LaFleche is the award-winning poet and novelist from St. Catharines, Ontario. He served under Operation Enduring Freedom during the Afghanistan War. Following his duty as an infantry soldier in the Canadian Armed Forces, Lafleche received an M.A. in Creative and Critical Writing from the University of Gloucestershire. He is inspired by the philosophy that when young men become readers, they become better men.
Please join us for the fall 2024 blog tour for Faraway Tables by Eric D. Goodman, published by Yorkshire Publishing in October 2024.
Faraway Tables is a mesmerizing collection of poetry that captures the monumental and the mundane with eloquent precision. Written largely during the COVID pandemic, these poems are imbued with a reflective depth that explores the essence of human experience—ranging from the personal to the geopolitical.
Goodman’s insightful observations of life’s transitions, especially in a world reshaped by pandemic isolation and technological shifts, reveal the courage it takes to love a life that’s continuously evolving.
Faraway Tables invites readers to savor the delicate flavors of experience, the tender beauty of other places and other times, and the enduring connections that define our shared humanity.
Advance Praise:
“Faraway Tables carries its readers across boundaries–the personal, the political, and the geopolitical–and into those vital realms of memory and time that recall us to the comfort, the connections, and the love that see us home.” -Sherry Audette Morrow, Välittää
“Faraway Tables is a dazzling collection–a mixture of the mundane and the monumental that travels to marvelous times and places in the world and in the heart, with surprise detonated in many of the poems’ last lines. -Toby Devens, My Best Mid-Life Crisis (Yet)
“Eric D. Goodman writes with such a light hand. He sees endearing details in everyday happenstances–playful, erudite, perceptive. Norman Rockwell in words.” -Hezekiah Scretch, poetry editor, Fleas on the Dog Literary Journal
About the Poet:
Eric D. Goodman lives and writes in Maryland. He’s the author of six previously published books of fiction. More than a hundred of his short stories, articles, and travel stories have been published in literary journals, magazines, and periodicals. Eric’s recent poetry has been featured in more than twenty publications, including Gargoyle Magazineand The Main Street Rag.
Please join us for the summer 2024 blog tour for Knowing by Mark Cox, published by Press 53 in April 2024.
Mark Cox pulls no punches in these poems about loving, drinking, traveling, and screwing up his relationships and parts of his life. “Looking back for a low point marking the worst of my insobriety, it might be that signal moment I put out my cigarette in the holy water font of St. Paul’s Catholic church, right in front of the priest. . .” Sometimes sobering, often times funny, but always honest, the poems in Knowing aim for the heart and soul of us all.
Praise for Previous Collections:
On Readiness
Thrilling prose poems from a cherished writer . . . . Cox gives lie to the common notion that prose poetry is too formless to count as real verse . . . . [He] is as careful with diction, rhythm, and even rhyme as one might be if they were writing strict alexandrines-and yet, his poems are as fluid and readable as Jack Kerouac’s novels. -Kirkus Reviews
On Sorrow Bread
Tony Hoagland has said Mark Cox is “a veteran of the deep water; there’s no one like him,” and Thomas Lux identified him as “one of the finest poets of his generation.” No one speaks more effectively of the vital and enduring syntaxes of common, even communal, life. -Richard Simpson
On Natural Causes
One of the best books I’ve read in years. In a style that’s brash, offbeat, tough-minded and big-hearted, these poems explore the fundamental mysteries of love between parent and child, self and other, self and world. Beyond the inventive language and formal range, what makes this work so memorable is Cox’s refusal to look away from even the hardest facts of “unadulterated sorrow.” -Alan Shapiro
About the Poet:
Mark Cox has authored six other volumes of poetry, the most recent being Readiness (2018) and Sorrow Bread: Poems 1984-2015 (2017). He has a forty-year history of publication in prominent magazines and his honors include a Whiting Writers Award, a Pushcart Prize, the Oklahoma Book Award, and The Society of Midland Authors Poetry Prize. He chairs the Department of Creative Writing at UNC Wilmington and teaches in the Vermont College of Fine Arts MFA Program.
Please join us for the spring 2024 blog tour for The War Queens by Rachel Hazell, published by Tellwell Talent in October 2023.
By the sixth century, the Roman Empire is already lost to tribal invasions, brutal Merovingian Franks have seized Gaul from the civilized Romanized Visigoths, and a dark age has descended across Europe. Now a deadly rivalry arises between two Merovingian queens. Brunhilda and Fredegunda are equals in beauty and intelligence, but opposite in vision and temperament.
When the Franks demand a royal bride, Visigoth Brunhilda marries into a world that despises women. Suddenly thrust into power and repeatedly facing loss and grief, she seeks to revive a new Rome based on justice and prosperity. Her implacable foe, Fredegunda, is a former slave concubine who lives only for personal power. Insanely jealous of high-born Brunhilda, she uses seduction, assassination, war, and even witchcraft in her campaign to destroy her. Can Brunhilda survive this onslaught of evil? Can her vision survive?
Advance Praise:
About the Author:
Rebecca Hazell is a writer and artist whose nonfiction books for children garnered awards and critical praise, and were optioned for a television series. Her historical trilogy – The Grip of God, Solomon’s Bride, and Consolamentum – is still in print after more than a decade. Before entering the world of books, she created educational materials for high schools that were used across the United States. She lives on Vancouver Island with her husband; her grown children and sister live nearby. Find out more by visiting https://www.rebeccahazell.com
Please join us for the spring 2024 blog tour for Night of the Hawk by Lauren Martin, published by She Writes Press in May 2024.
When I have wandered long enough what am I still beholden to?
Ifá. Nature. Illness. Love. Loss. Misogyny. Aging. Africa. Our wounded planet. In this sweeping yet intensely personal collection, Lauren Martin tells the untold stories of the marginalized, the abused, the ill, the disabled—the different. Inspired by her life’s experiences, including the isolation she has suffered as a result both of living with chronic illness and having devoted herself to a religion outside the mainstream, these poems explore with raw vulnerability and unflinching honesty what it is to live apart—even as one yearns for connection.
But Night of the Hawk is no lament; it is powerful, reverential, sometimes humorous, often defiant—“ Oh heat me and fill me / I rise above lines ”—and full of wisdom. Visceral and stirring, the poems in this collection touch on vastly disparate subjects but are ultimately unified in a singular to inspire those who read them toward kindness, compassion, and questioning.
Advance Praise:
“The poems gathered here address themes of survival, chronic illness, shamanism, and feminism against the backdrop of daily life. . . . The diversity of experience examined makes for a collection that is both full and human. A whole life in one volume.” —Kirkus Reviews “Night of the Hawk is a luminous and numinous collection about women and men, about betrayal and forbearance, about endurance, death, and art, and, most essentially, about the search for a sacred path through life. There is so much love in these poems” –Michael Laurence, award-winning playwright “Lauren’s poems drop into your psyche and ripple outward, echoing in the moments of life. Their beauty haunts.” –Sallie Ann Glassman, Head Manbo Asogwe of La Source Ancienne Ounfo
About the Poet:
Lauren Martin is a psychotherapist, poet, and a devoted Ìyânífá. She lives in Oakland, California. Lauren studied poetry at Sarah Lawrence College. She spent years writing without submitting her work due to a long shamanic journey, which led her to both Ifá, and to the writing of this collection of poems. Learn more at: www.laurenmartin.net
Add to GoodReads:
Available on Amazon, Bookshop.org, and Barnes & Noble.
Please join us for the spring 2024 blog tour for It Will Have Been So Beautiful by Amanda Shaw, published by Lily Poetry Review in March 2024.
With urgency and compassion, humor and wonder, Amanda Shaw’s It Will Have Been So Beautiful examines the many dimensions of what it means to call anything “home,” including the earth as we know it. In a manner reminiscent of Eugène Atget, who wrote “will disappear” on his photographs of turn-of-the-century Paris, Shaw captures the unique melancholy of living in a time of unknowable change.
As she explores the line between love and loss, Shaw implores us to find a more profound commitment to life in all its forms. At times playful and ironic, the poems celebrate language’s sonic capacities, probing art’s potential to move us from mourning to joy.
Advance Praise:
Alan Shapiro, acclaimed author of “Life Pig,” describes Shaw’s debut as “a beautiful and troubling book.” Shaw’s intelligence breathes life into every line, offering a rich, complex, and startlingly vivid exploration of the impact of the “enlightened” West juxtaposed with a poignant portrayal of the best and worst aspects of humanity.
Nathan McClain, author of “Previously Owned,” praises Shaw’s collection, noting that it is as interested in language itself as what language can create. With an “ear attuned to silences,” Shaw navigates the complexity of human interactions, addressing topics such as illness, home, love, and loss. The energetic collection uses a rich, musical dialect that resonates with the reader.
About the Poet:
From the time she learned to read her first word — “Boom!” — Amanda Shaw has been in love with literature and language. She earned a BA in English from Smith College and has advanced degrees in education and writing. Equally at ease in a high school classroom and a World Bank boardroom, she is an expert teacher who continues to share her belief in the power of words with students of all ages.
Amanda began her career at a public high school in Brooklyn, where she was committed to student-centered curriculum and staff development as part of NYC’s small schools movement. After nine years in the city, she moved on to teaching ESL internationally and domestically, first in Rome and now in Washington DC. Witnessing poetry’s unique impact on students’ intellectual and emotional development galvanized her own writing. In 2020, she received her MFA from the Warren Wilson Program for Writers.
In addition to actively participating in local and online writing communities, Amanda is the book review editor for Lily Poetry Review Books, where she supports emerging writers. Lily Poetry Review Books will publish her debut collection, It Will Have Been So Beautiful, in March 2024. The poems, written over 15 years, explore love and loss in personal and global contexts. For the past four years, Amanda has divided her time between New Hampshire, where she was born, and Washington, DC. Follow her on Facebook and Instagram.
Please join us for the winter 2024 blog tour for Universally Adored and Other One Dollar Stories by Elizabeth Bruce, published by Vine Leaves Press in January 2024.
In Universally Adored and Other One Dollar Stories, Elizabeth Bruce gives readers 33 ways of looking at a dollar. Her empathetic, humorous, and disarming embrace of plain-spoken people searching for a way out, charms and provokes. These are bittersweet stories of resilience and defiance.
In “Universally Adored,” a color-obsessed artist draws a facsimile of a dollar—a masterpiece universally adored—to win her girlfriend back. While checking for spare change in the laundry, in “Bald Tires” a Tennessee housewife with a malcontent husband finds an unused condom in his Sunday trousers. In “The Forgiveness Man,” a runaway teen with a newborn follows a vagabond healer absolving the bedraggled godless through hugs of forgiveness. And in “Magic Fingers, a ladies’ room attendant tracked down by her abusive ex finds refuge in a cheap motel with a 1970s era bed massager.
Riffing on the intimate object of a dollar, Bruce’s humane short fictions—from a great mashed potato war to the grass Jesus walked on—ring with the exquisite voices of characters in analog worlds.
Advance Praise:
“Elizabeth Bruce’s stories have that rare quality of feeling as though they have always existed, the way the best stories always do. In a lesser writer’s hands, the conceit of beginning each story with ‘one dollar’ might seem like a gimmick, but here they echo Wallace Stevens’ ‘Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird,’ and I found myself eager for what came next, curious to see how each new story amplifies the previous story while also diverging from it, often in dramatically different points of view and styles. These are exquisite short stories that give me hope.” –John McNally, author of The Book of Ralph and The Fear of Everything (USA)
“This collection contains inventiveness, voice, and vivid characters grappling with life and love, pouring forth on each new page. Together the stories weave a remarkable tapestry around a theme with a shockingly familiar starting point. By the end, we see in how the author guides our attention, new ways of seeing ourselves and the constellations of our closest relationships. It’s breathtaking.” –David A. Taylor, author of Success: Stories and Soul of a People: The WPA Writers’ Project Uncovers Depression America (USA)
“I’ve been eagerly awaiting this collection of one of a kind short-shorts from the author of And Silent Left the Place. Keen-eyed and with a great gift for stand-out narratives at whose heart is a profound appreciation of the particular, Bruce takes us on a magical realist journey through the lives of ordinary people whose lives turn on a dollar. A gifted storyteller, Bruce is at her best here. The stories sing with ingenuity and keep us in her spell. Just how far can one dollar take a person? You’d be amazed.” –Naomi Ayala, author of Calling Home: Praise Songs & Incantations (USA) Winner, Martin Luther King, Jr. Legacy of Environmental Justice Award
“Elizabeth Bruce’s stories shine a light on the conflicts–big and small–that we face in life and our struggles to resolve them. She writes thoughtfully and elegantly about the pain and beauty of being alive.” –Eric Stover, author of The Witnesses: War Crimes and the Promise of Justice in The Hague (USA)
About the Author:
Elizabeth Bruce’s debut story collection, Universally Adored & Other One Dollar Stories, is forthcoming in January 2024 from the Athens, Greece-based Vine Leaves Press. Her debut novel, And Silent Left the Place, won Washington Writers’ Publishing House’s Fiction Award, ForeWord Magazine’s Bronze Fiction Prize, and was one of two finalists for the Texas Institute of Letters’ Steven Turner Award for Best Work of First Fiction. Bruce has published prose in the USA, UK, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Israel, Sweden, Romania, India, South Korea, Malawi, Yemen, and The Philippines, including in FireWords Quarterly, Pure Slush, takahē magazine, The Ilanot Review, Spadina Literary Review, Inklette, Lines & Stars, and others, as well as in such anthologies from Paycock Press’ Gargoyle series, Weasel Press’ How Well You Walk through Madness: An Anthology of Beat, Vine Leaves Literary Journal: A Collection of Vignettes from Across the Globe; Madville Publishing’s Muddy Backroads, Two Thirds North, multiple Gargoyle anthologies, and Washington Writers’ Publishing House’s This Is What America Looks Like. Follow her on Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn.
Please join us for the winter 2024 blog tour for Civil Twilight by Anique Sara Taylor, published by Blue Light Press in April 2023.
Book Synopsis:
Anique Sara Taylor’s chapbook Civil Twilight is the winner of the 2022 Blue Light Poetry Prize.
As the sun sinks 6 ̊ below the horizon at dawn or dusk, it’s 5:30am/pm someplace in the world. In thirty shimmering poems (30 words/5 lines each), Civil Twilight probes borders of risk across a landscape of thunderstorms, quill-shaped mist, falcons that soar, the hope of regeneration, a compass to the center. Tightly hewn poems ring with rhythm and sound, follow ghosts who relentlessly weave through a journey of grief toward ecstasy. Spinning words seek to unhinge inner wounds among sea shells and hostile mirrors, eagles and cardinals––to enter “the infinity between atoms,” hear the invisible waltz. Even the regrets. The search for an inner silhouette becomes a quest for shards of truth, as she asks the simple question, “What will you take with you?”
Advance Praise:
“Taylor’s award-winning collection is mesmerizing. 30 poems, 30 words each shimmer with a refined intensity at once both taut and expansive … her emotional richness is as lyric as it is restrained.” ––Leslie T. Sharpe, Author of The Quarry Fox and Other Critters of the Wild Catskills
“Experience each poem, woven [with] great intimacy and rare musicality … Read all 30 poems aloud in sequence and feel yourself transformed.” ––Sharon Israel, Host of Planet Poet, Words in Space Radio Show and Podcast
“Civil Twilight is a stunningly crafted sequence of small poems … keenly attuned to the language of the natural world and all the mysteries that come with it.” —Sean Nevin, Author of Oblivio Gate
About the Author:
Anique Sara Taylor’s book Civil Twilight is Blue Light Poetry Prize 2022. Where Space Bends was published by Finishing Line Press 2020. A Pushcart Prize nominee, her chapbooks chosen Finalist in 2023 are: When Black Opalescent Birds Still Circled the Globe (Harbor Review’s Inaugural 2023 Jewish Women’s Prize); Feathered Strips of Prayer Before Morning (Minerva Rising); Cobblestone Mist (Long-listed Finalist by Harbor Editions’ Marginalia Series). Earlier Chapbook Finalists: Where Space Bends (In earlier chapbook form 2014 by both Minerva Rising & Blue Light Press.) and Under the Ice Moon (2015 Blue Light Press). She holds a Poetry MFA (Drew), Diplôme (Sorbonne, Paris), a Drawing MFA & Painting BFA (With Highest Honors / Pratt) and a Master of Divinity degree. Follow her on Facebook, X, Instagram, LinkedIn, and her blog. Sign up for her newsletter.
These two stories explore love and beauty in the context of fear and threats. Jamali Kamali is a book-length poem about two men who lived in 16th century India. Little about them is known but they are buried together in a small tomb in Delhi. For hundreds of years, the story that these men were lovers has been passed down through the generations. Jamali Kamali is a fictional account of their love, longing, separation, and death. ZundelState, a novella in verse, takes place a thousand years in the future in a repressive land where history is banned, and dreaming has vanished. Joe, a lover of history, is rebellious and secretive. Marianna is a model worker for the State where she works in the HistoryShit Apparatchik Division. They fall in love against all odds. These two tales of outsiders, one from the distant past and the other from the far-off future, echo and reflect upon each other in surprising ways.
About the Author:“Born again. How many births must one
Andrew LaFleche is the award-winning poet and novelist from St. Catharines, Ontario. He served under Operation Enduring Freedom during the Afghanistan War. Following his duty as an infantry soldier in the Canadian Armed Forces, Lafleche received an M.A. in Creative and Critical Writing from the University of Gloucestershire. He is inspired by the philosophy that when young men become readers, they become better men.Faraway Tables is a mesmerizing collection of poetry that captures the monumental and the mundane with eloquent precision. Written largely during the COVID pandemic, these poems are imbued with a reflective depth that explores the essence of human experience—ranging from the personal to the geopolitical.
About the Poet:Mark Cox pulls no punches in these poems about loving, drinking, traveling, and screwing up his relationships and parts of his life. “Looking back for a low point marking the worst of my insobriety, it might be that signal moment I put out my cigarette in the holy water font of St. Paul’s Catholic church, right in front of the priest. . .” Sometimes sobering, often times funny, but always honest, the poems in Knowing aim for the heart and soul of us all.
About the Poet:By the sixth century, the Roman Empire is already lost to tribal invasions, brutal Merovingian Franks have seized Gaul from the civilized Romanized Visigoths, and a dark age has descended across Europe. Now a deadly rivalry arises between two Merovingian queens. Brunhilda and Fredegunda are equals in beauty and intelligence, but opposite in vision and temperament.
Please join us for the spring 2024 blog tour for Night of the Hawk by Lauren Martin, published by She Writes Press in May 2024.
About the Poet:With urgency and compassion, humor and wonder, Amanda Shaw’s It Will Have Been So Beautiful examines the many dimensions of what it means to call anything “home,” including the earth as we know it. In a manner reminiscent of Eugène Atget, who wrote “will disappear” on his photographs of turn-of-the-century Paris, Shaw captures the unique melancholy of living in a time of unknowable change.
About the Poet:In Universally Adored and Other One Dollar Stories, Elizabeth Bruce gives readers 33 ways of looking at a dollar. Her empathetic, humorous, and disarming embrace of plain-spoken people searching for a way out, charms and provokes. These are bittersweet stories of resilience and defiance.
About the Author:
Book Synopsis:
About the Author:
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