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Betty Superman
By Tiff Holland
Winner of the Fifth Annual Rose Metal Press Short Short Chapbook Contest, with an introduction by contest judge Kim Chinquee
Paperback, 44 pages, letterpressed covers
August 2011
ISBN: 978-0-9846166-2-6
$12.00
One of them is recovering; one of them is not. Consequently, they’ve ended up spending more time together. They have “adventures,” as Betty calls them. They inexplicably find themselves in Betty’s red PT Cruiser driving around to Walgreen’s and Cracker Barrel, selling gold for cash, and pumping gas. In unsentimental and percussive prose, Holland examines Betty as character, dragon lady, and mother pictures that speak to one another, developing the angst and sympathy of the relationships between these family members into a complete whole. Each time I read this collection, I find more to love. From the humorous to the serious, each word speaks to me in a way that leaves me satisfied, with just enough wanting.”
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“From beginning to end, Holland’s stories layer, offering colorful —Kim Chinquee, author of Oh Baby.
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Tiff Holland is the author of Bone in a Tin Funnel, poems about Ménière’s, available through Pudding House Press.
Her work has been thrice nominated for the Pushcart Prize. Her stories have been included in Wigleaf ’s top fifty and her story “The Boys” was one of storySouth’s top 100 in 2008. She has taught at Kent State University and now teaches at Austin Community College and lives in Round Rock, Texas. Her poetry, fiction, and nonfiction have appeared in over one hundred literary magazines, e-zines, and anthologies. She is a stroke survivor (2008) and one hell of a shot.
Amy Huffman, The Difference Between Shadows And Stars,
In this collection of poems, A.J. Huffman invites you to step outside of your own preconceived notions of what is and what is not and allow yourself to borrow the vision of a very different set of eyes . . . The Difference Between Shadows And Stars is a collection about the progressive journey every one of us has taken through the varying steps of confrontation, identification, differentiation, and ultimately acceptance of the shapes and shades of darkness, both internal and external, we encounter everyday. It is our individualized perceptions of these interactions that form our memories and scars, and essentially, make us who we are.
Anthony Owen, The Dreaded Boy, Pighog Press.
http://www.pighog.co.uk/
Poetry for children and the young at heart:
Antony Owen is from Coventry, England. His first collection My Father’s Eyes Were Blue, was published in 2009 by The Heaventree Press.
Owen was a finalist in the Shine Journal 2010 poetry competition and in 2009 was selected with Michael McKimm by Heaventree Press to tour Ireland, giving readings at numerous festivals and venues, and a recorded performance at the Seamus Heaney Centre, Queens University Belfast.
In April 2011 Owen’s second collection The Dreaded Boy was published by PIGHOG PRESS and was chosen to inaugurate Crawley’s first ever word festival.
Both collections have been described by Patrick Kavanagh Award Winner Joseph Horgan as ‘two of the strongest collections of poetry in the past few years’.
For more information and to order his latest pamphlet The Dreaded Boy visit www.pighog.co.uk
Ruth Sabath Rosenthal, Facing Home and beyond, Paragon Poetry Press Inc.
pagargonpoetry@aol.com
Facing Home and beyond is a 104 page book of poetry, divided into 8 sections — in total, 68 poems in the book, plus 9 pages of black and white illustrations, and miscellaneous pages, such as table of contents, acknowledgments, alphabetical index. Here is some praise for the book:
Ruth Sabath Rosenthal’s book Facing Home and beyond is bursting with life, teeming with vibrant portraits of grandparent, mother, father, sister, husband, red-clad women—and more. Poems skillfully focus on birth, sex, marriage, aging and death, while others—often done with rich humor—center on food, animals (including, parrot and porcupine), dreams, Whitman, Yeats, and more. Here is poetry that throbs with vividly presented human experience.
— Robert K. Johnson, Consulting Editor,
Ibbetson Street magazine
Ruth Sabath Rosenthal’s poems reach back into the past relating important history, while mindful of the significance of the present. Her work covers a multitude of subjects, each given special attention. I hope you will be, as I was, filled and completely satisfied with Ruth’s storm of images.
— Tammy Nuzzo-Morgan, Suffolk County Poet Laureate
In Ruth’s poems, life is often a riddle or at least a source of puzzlement and
paradox. Ruth’s keen perceptions help us better comprehend ourselves.We come to see life in a different
light—enlightenment, that allows us to find and face our own “home” and go “beyond.”
— David B. Axelrod, Laureate and Fulbright Poet
Praise for chapbook Facing Home
(all poems in chapbook Facing Home appear in
the full-length book “Facing Home and beyond”)
It’s with passion and humor that Ruth Sabath Rosenthal dives into the complexities of family life in her shining debut chapbook Facing Home. Forthright and fearless, vulnerable and tender, each poem illuminates an emotional moment between human beings. There is purity of purpose and daring here. Rosenthal’s boldness, insight, and lived earned wisdom embrace her readers with every line.
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— Molly Peacock Judith Skillman, The White Cypress, Cervena Barva Press, |
The White Cypress by Judith Skillman
Cervéna Barva Press: www.cervenabarvapress.com.
ISBN 978-0-9831041-2-4
$15.00
In Judith Skillman’s new collection, The White Cypress, vivid imagery combines with raw emotion to investigate the seven deadly sins: gluttony, fornication, avarice, anger, vanity, sorrow, pride, and discouragement. There is wiggle room within and across these categories—the categories themselves have been revised by history. Skillman organizes her quest for both the causes and effects of human sin under three headings: “Lustful Appetite,” “Irascibility,” and “Intellect.” In poems ranging from domestic to ekphrastic to naturalistic, human nature is explored. The natural world plays a substantial role; poems rich with the pastoral are woven into the exploration of sin, including “Golden Pheasant,” “The Goats and the Blackberries,” “Washington Harbor,” and “The Plow Horses.”
According to John Amen, editor of Pedestal Magazine, Skillman writes “narratives, portraiture and commentaries infused with palpable images…” Katherine Soniat comments: “Skillman’s world is strangely fluid, yet layered with complexities that complement one moment and subtly contradict the next. The White Cypress asks us to ponder the residual problems of naming (our) ‘sins.’”
The White Cypress is available from Cervéna Barva Press and The Lost Bookshelf: www.cervenabarvapress.com. For review copies, please query Gloria Mindock, Editor and Publisher at editor@cervenabarvapress.com, or Judith Skillman at judith.skillman@comcast.net.
http://www.saltpublishing.com/
http://www.saltpublishing.com/
I Sing of Bricks
Angela Topping has the knack of making the reader see things anew, of
reinventing lyrical forms, and of disarming sceptics like myself with
the 'unexpected love' which occurs throughout this carefully ordered
and original work.
- Rupert Loydell
'These are poems that come alive as they negotiate the
small details that make meaning in a life, meeting the end of love and
lives with compassion and feeling.'
Deryn Rees Jones
"A husband abandons thrift in a small, sudden gesture of love. Two people swim together for the last time, but the unspoken back-story stays under the surface. In a basement kitchen, a cook creates a world of sensual colour.
Poems that start in places like these are sometimes dismissed as "anecdotal", but that is a mistake. Most unforgettable, transcendent moments happen in quite commonplace surroundings, which is just as well, since that is where most of us live. We need to find our meanings, our significance, in just such places, and it is one of the things poems like these can help us do."
Sheenagh Pugh
“Angela Topping sings of bricks and cups and perfect grapes. She sings of the concrete, the power of objects, like a spell to ward off loss.”
Helen Ivory
'Angela Topping's poems are deceptively simple, singing modern lullabies to the bottomless hole left in hearts by death and absence, by the failure of speech and love. Her work examines hurt without flinching, in a poetry that does not prevaricate or make pretty patterns with language where only straight-talking will answer.'
Jane Holland
Strands -- —Patrick Williamson
Palores Publication
www.enitharmon.co.uk
Strands is a 28 poem stapled pamphlet exploring the sea, the landscape of Cornwall and music. We start with a poem about a war-time orphan arriving in Penzance, and end with musicians stumbling into a sunrise. The collection explores seascape, fishermen, and entrancing musicians.
‘Strands’ is the centre-piece of the collection, a sequence of six poems with echoes of the sea and the past. There’s a tentative emotional presence here… a father perhaps, or man/men who used to inhabit this landscape: “His skeletal hand and imprint/ on the window.” These were my favourite moments in the book, the ones that looked back on traditions and the men living and working in the area.
Annie Clarkson
