Bøger af Lana Hechtman Ayers

The poems in Lana Hechtman Ayers' The Autobiography of Rain explore the healing powers of art and nature in a world that is as rife with grief as it is as ripe with beauty.

"The Situation & What Crosses It, like any good diviner, can foretell your future or alter it, reveal your path or complicate the way with options. These sonnets are incantatory, articulate. They collide lyrical gambit with foreboding tone, the domestic with all that's wild: 'Desire must be dissected.' Follow the awe-full acuity of Amy Schrader's words, the refolding and gorgeous warning of syntax in every sonnet. She knows what's in the cards for you." -Elizabeth J. Colen, author of Waiting Up for the End of the World: Conspiracies

"The poems in Something Like a River surprise the senses. In this collection, Roberta revisits the rivers of her youth in New York, contrasting them with the landscapes of her adult life in the West. Roberta's similes jump off the page: '[ice]bergs melt like candles'; her lists. 'forget our crass bosses, investment failures, / losing scratch ticket...' are short stories in themselves, and her details, 'the sickle tongues of hummingbirds', almost revelations. But most remarkable are some of her endings, which astonished me." Jana Harris, author of We Never Speak of It

"Matt Gano, whose swagger and soul and verbal dexterity have knocked out spoken-word audiences for years, brings his staggering inventiveness to the page-where he also, and absolutely, belongs. Here are irresistible scenes out of the sagebrush and empty lots of a charmed and timeless boyhood; love from all sides-wild-horse young, and 94 years old; and the moon: brilliant, unexpected, new, 'with ... lemon-meringue peaks/ and eating-contest complexion.' These are beautifully-crafted poems, alive with startling transitions, humor, and the wisdom that lets 'the rhythm in the ride be what I write.' And they're pure pleasure." Kathleen Flenniken, Washington State Poet Laureate, author of Plume and Famous

In Lean House, Marci Ameluxen painstakingly reconstructs the shattered picture of a childhood pervaded by a mother's mental illness. Each poem a shard, fragmentary as shards are-voice and content meld creating a form that is all Ameluxen's own. These lyric poems are woven through with a subtle basting of narrative. Inquiring and without an ounce of self pity, Ameluxen's poems enact the ancient precept of living an examined life. And something more: the mix of anguish, love, and compassion one so near and so dear can provoke in any of us. -- Lorraine Healy, author of The Habit of Buenos Aires

"In this exciting new collection, Laura LeHew gives us poems of the most adventurous kind. Re-purposing the skeletal language and visual constructs of science and math, of computers and banking and even of standardized testing-utilizing, as well, both conventional and invented poetic forms-LeHew's philosophical algorithms are at once both personal and universal: poems of witness and social awareness, of love and loss, of happiness and its limits, of family dysfunction, health care, and a wide range of social ills that stem from the 'arrogant discourse' of those in charge. Willingly Would I Burn expands my horizons and gives me heart." -Ingrid Wendt, author of Evensong

In Impossible Lessons Jennifer Bullis entwines a Stevens like wit and attention to the music of words with a contemplative eye towards both nature and family. She makes the mythic and the domestic sing. Her language is both direct and incantatory circling through the great human paradox of our animal flesh and our spiritual ascensions. These poems give pleasure to the ear and to the heart as their kind and trustworthy voices present the natural world of the northwest, and the possibilities present to an intelligent, engaged mind moving through both "blossoms and smoke." Jeremy Voigt

Living on Orcas Island, Jill McCabe Johnson is a close neighbor to the sea. In her briny poems, she takes us even closer--letting us read the sea's diary. From sea ground to surface, we see the intimate, inside story. Careful observation, precise research, musical phrasing, and active imagining surge through these poems. Ninety-five percent of earth's oceans remain unexplored. What better metaphor for the vast mysteries of our existence--the constant change, the contamination, the resurgence, the essence of life and death. In these elegant poems, forces huge as magma shove up and forces delicate as brittle stars taste changes in sea water. Marvelous. - Peggy Shumaker

And Now This persuades me that we inhale the whole sensuous journey of growing up until the right words come to release it. These poems are a journey with roots in a hollow on Beautys Run Road that needs time and a poet's eye to discover its lessons. They worry that space between past and present, that "fine line between sky and ground," where it is so "easy... to get lost," until they find the "golden light" of "drawing the best out of everything [memory] touches" and "everything it can't touch." These poems offer a painful journey, a man's journey, yet feelings, raw and true, defy gender. -Sarah Zale

In this moving collection, a childhood darkened by a harshly critical family follows the poet into his adult world, persisting like "...winter hanging on/ into spring," its "small hail" stinging every surface. Characterized by a wry wisdom, these haunted, evocative poems collapse the distance between past and present. With a stark, transcending grace, Joseph Green chronicles "Ordinary lives./ Ambitions spilling. Plans failing./ Dreams seeping out through the cracks." Paulann Petersen, Oregon Poet Laureate

Victor David Sandiego's The strange and beautiful life of Daniel Raskovich, an imagined biography of an odd everyman character, is darkly funny and strangely poignant. Sandiego offers a frank take on contemporary society with verse that is clean, clear and direct, and tantalizing enough to keep us wanting more. Episode after bizarre episode leaves the reader feeling off-balance, hopping on one leg (the good one) like Daniel, but perhaps this is the precise vantage one needs to view our lives more candidly. The starkly lovely, sometimes mysterious, graphical images throughout from photographer Ethan Hahn provide visual texture and figurative subtext to the Raskovich tale. As alarming or reassuring as it may seem, Sandiego's collection reveals that there is a little bit or quite a lot of Daniel in every one of us. -Lana Hechtman Ayers, series editor, author of A New Red

What moves me most about Cinders of My Better Angels is how it illuminates our ordinary lives, how it depicts that illness makes us not less ourselves, but more so. In this incisive collection, direct, smart, darkly humorous poetry mines the gems of our fragile mortality with courageous, resolute spirit. Through Michael Magee's superb mastery of craft, the speaker of the poems and the readers become as one, all of us united under the same moon's watchful eye, afflicted yet determined, ailing yet healing, "hoping for rescue to come along / in the shape of a period." -Lana Hechtman Ayers, author of A New Red

Taking its title from graffiti on a now landmark boulder in Newbury, New Hampshire, the book observes, in exhilarating language, that despite the failings and inscrutability of human nature, the possibility for transcendence abounds. From love to war, from history to pop culture, from the mundane to the famous, from the ineffable workings of society to the plaintive yearnings of the individual soul, poem after poem, Ayers delivers the craft of a mature poet.

"In one of the most powerful poems in this collection of powerful poems, a young widow at the after-funeral reception for her deceased husband speaks of 'undigested grief.' The nearly insurmountable charge at the core of these poems is to confront and attempt to digest such grief. M's penetrating voice is both authentic and unforgettable as she maps the unwelcome territory through which she must journey To That Mythic Country Called Closure." Andrea Hollander, author of Landscape with Female Figure, Woman in the Painting, The Other Life, and House Without a Dreamer

The poems in Where Good Swimmers Drown are love poems. But love poems that defy the divisions between emotion and intellect, private and public, life and art, writer and reader. To read Elbe's poems is to discover not only what it means to be in love, but what it means to be alive. Jesse Lee Kercheval, author of Cinema Muto and The Dog Angel

In the lava flows of Vesuvius and on the slopes of the volcanic range of Oregon, Chuck Carlise maps out the history of personal loss in such evocative detail and with such tender regard for the fragility of the present, that we, too, are caught unaware and overwhelmed by the 'nervous erasure' of grief. What does one unearth from such a Pompeii? Objects of beauty, shards of hope. Obsidian. Paintings on the brothel walls. A bouquet of lace. Reminders of the way in which memory endures. 'An unbroken field of blue.' -D. A. Powell, Kingsley Tuft Award Winner for Chronic: Poems

“Celebrated poet Ayers reveals the true-life story of Red Riding Hood, recounting with tenderness—and a new erotic candor—both the anguish and hidden pleasures of straying from the well-worn path. Epic in scope but delivered with striking intimacy, the poems move us from the innocence of girlhood through the pulchritude of adolescence, the mendacities of marriage, the transgression of infidelity, to the complexities of adulthood. With whom will Red tango in the dark of the woods: the strapping Huntsman or the artful Wolf? The answer is transcendent.”—Jeff Gomez, CEO Starlight Runner Entertainment“Not since Edward Dorn’s Gunslinger have I found a poetic persona with this range, depth, insight, and humor. Ayers’ collection reminds me of Leonard Cohen’s songs: while they are often narrative, they never lost their essential connection with melody. These very human poems are built of angelic music, and ask serious questions of the world.”—James Bertolino, author of Ravenous Bliss“Sharp, vivid poems allow a modern Red Riding Hood, an artistic wolf, and characters like Baba Yaga to spring to life. A meditation on the choices a woman makes in her life, in her relationships, and in her art, this book maps the journey through the trials, wonders, and frustrations of a love affair.”—Jeannine Hall Gailey, author of Field Guide to the End of the WorldThe poem "The First Story" won 3rd place in the 2010 Rhysling Awards for Best Long Poetry."Ayers' "The First Story" is likewise impressive, but on an entirely visceral level through the evocation of women's lives and transformation using the darkest of fairy tale tropes."—Deborah J. Brannon, Stone Telling