Bøger udgivet af Moonpath Press

A widow and her white-muzzled dog, a coastal landscape filled with bully winds, characters who relieve the loneliness of being alone: Sue Fagalde Lick weaves these images throughout Dining al Fresco with My Dog in narratives both vulnerable and brave. Whether floating in her hot tub with memories of her husband or fixing a roof, she proclaims: "I am old, but... / warm dog at my fingertips, / I feel light as the alder tree, / rooted here for eternity". This is a touching celebration of life in poetry at its best.--Carolyn Martin, Ph.D., author of The Catalog of Small Continents Sue Fagalde Lick, in her collection, Dining Al Fresco with My Dog, walks us comfortably into her later life where she is "turning butch in [her] old age...now...wife and husband too." She imagines with humor how a cryptic observer would see her, guiding the reader through her daily routine of dog, pellet stove, writing, and reading, and concludes with, "Eats three times a day, keeps warm, still alive." She shares the richness of her solitude in nature (and the solitary nature of the writing life) but with many forays into the music, humor, and warmth she finds in her community. As a reader, I feel included and deeply satisfied.-Rachel Barton, editor of Willawaw Journal and author of This is the Lightness Grief. Brave attitude. Small triumphs. "Dear dead departed husband, / your being dead and departed / is a major pain in the ass." The widow senses her husband everywhere. Wears his shirts. Stacks the logs. Learns to change a spark plug. Sue Fagalde Lick may make you weep, make you smile. And then, of course, there's the dog. This is a strong book.-Penelope Scambly Schott, author of On Dufur Hill

Tangled in Vow & Beseech vows to remember what we lose and beseeches us to embrace every moment. Throughout, McCabe Johnson writes intimately about family, nature, and animals, while also protesting the violences of religion, patriarchy, and racism. The lyricism of these poems carries the speaker into the "clear slipstream of memory" to "river me home. River me home."-Craig Santos Perez, author of from incorporated territory [åmot], winner of the National Book Award for PoetryThrough an array of poetic forms, Jill McCabe Johnson explores a deep sense of interconnectedness. These lyric tangles help us grapple with a life where the ugliest abuses of person and planet occur alongside a mother's love for her son, the grace of childhood innocence, the anniversary of a first kiss, and the understanding that "in this land" of "dogwood blossom, swordfern and fen" is "everything" we need to "believe." -Derek Sheffield, author of Not for Luck, co-editor of Cascadia Field Guide: Art, Ecology, Poetry, and Poetry Editor of Terrain.org

With vulnerability and gorgeous, lush imagery, Sarah Stockton presents a portrait of a life not defined by illness but circumscribed by it; a hybrid life of hospital visits and encounters with crystal healers, coyotes, iguanas. Stockton's poems of simultaneous rage and grace illuminate the realities of the chronically ill. -Jeannine Hall Gailey, author of Flare, Corona (BOA Editions) and Field Guide to the End of the World (Moon City Press) Sarah Stockton's The Scarecrow of My Former Self is a quiet, delicate hymn of the bodymind that both aspires and persists; though the poet confesses she "can't really do much / for... the world," - and yet. This book is a reclamation of visibility not just for Stockton's speaker, but for all who have a chronic illness. These poems create a metaphorical scarecrow, a kind of spiritual scaffold on which to hang some hope. Like a conjurer, Stockton creates a world of desire crafted from "bloodied dancing shoes, a mask // and a sea green bathing suit...." -Jill Khoury, Editor-in-Chief of Rogue Agent, author of Suites for the Modern Dancer (Sundress Publications)

To Walk the North Direction by C.L. Downing is a narrative of a life fully lived, stories of deepening self-awareness and empathy toward the world with a voice free of artifice or self-pity. Downing's writing blooms with energy, wit, and honesty. Through each poem, her integrity as a creator is obvious. With a style all her own, she grants her subjects full reveal without sentimentality, but always through her kind heart which is why she can be trusted. Readers will feel their own life experience expand in Downing's recounting of her time spent paying concentrated attention to the world. -Caroline Boutard, author Each Leaf Singing

Bethany Reid's The Pear Tree: elegy for a farm is more than a haunting elegy for a farm; it's a powerful evocation of childhood and a vanished way of life. In poems lush with detail, Reid renders the beauty and suffering of bygone days, not with nostalgia but with clear-eyed honesty, as each poem reveals its hidden facets. Under the watchful eye of a pear tree planted by a grandmother on homesteaded land, we witness the pleasure of day-to-day life rooted in the earth, the heart-wrenching loss of a brother, a father "who taught us to choose what matters and put a fence around it," a devout mother who can still play the piano when words have flown. "Who will gather what we leave behind?" one poem asks. Moving freely back and forth in time, this well-steeped, finely-honed collection offers a complex, satisfying answer. -Holly J. Hughes, author of Hold Fast

"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

Mexican-American Raúl Sánchez raises his poetic voice in languages twice removed from the indigenous language of his ancestors, but with well more than double the fervor. Language is embodied in the essence of personal and political struggle, as evidenced in these lines from the poem "My Father Was a Bracero": "He didn't want me to live / by my strong back, strong arms / but by my words". This ardent inaugural collection by Sánchez is filled with poems of identity-cultural, familial and personal. All Our Brown-Skinned Angels is part civil protest, part personal celebration, completely impassioned.

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

"In You Can Call It Beautiful by Debra Elisa, readers encounter a unique style as idiosyncratic as Emily Dickinson's with poems flaunting 'breath and tiptoe glory and Clover.' Elisa celebrates a world of simple pleasures, kind acts, and fertile moments, moments when 'deadheads/take their own sweet time to fall and reseed the garden.' In this hefty array of resonant poems examining nature, travel, technology, pop culture, or social justice, the result is the same: quiet experiences lead to wisdom."-Allen Braden, author of A Wreath of Down and Drops of Blood"Debra Elisa moves joyfully, with gratitude, respect, and generosity in the vast world she creates in You Can Call It Beautiful. She welcomes us into 'the circle of friends 'who gather/in praise of poetry.' In this collection, Elisa travels mindfully through the natural world where she lives, and where she sojourns, to bear witness to 'the 'young/roaming streets of blood,' and to the creatures whose names we praise with her-'Yellow-Billed Cuckoo,' 'Malone Jumping Slug.'"-Willa Schneberg, Oregon Book Award recipient; author of The Naked Room

"The fundamental forces in our lives might include parents, siblings, husbands and wives, lovers, the rain and the sun. As Guns & Roses once sang every rose has its thorn. In this stunning new book, Pattie Palmer-Baker delves deep into these forces with a narrative and lyric force of her own. The poems here are generous, vulnerable, grown-up, and a joy to read. Palmer-Baker is a poet of witness, and this book is a balm for any prick of a thorn you may have suffered in your life."-Matthew Dickman, author of Husbandry"There's something elemental about this collection and its concerns woven through with the colors of mountains and motels. Here's a reckoning with the past told in sparkling imagery, always heartfelt yet never sentimental, 'My husband writes me love notes/on the shells of hardboiled eggs.' Pattie Palmer-Baker plays with space, reflecting the ways in which memory can be fractured and re-made on the page so as to create an alchemy which makes this collection one that remains in the mind long after the first reading."-Samantha Wynne-Rhydderch, author of Banjo

"David Hecker's Dream World is a magic carpet ride with poets and artists. Through illuminating landscapes, enjoy Whirling Dervishes dancing to drums and string instruments, along with his tribute to Pablo Neruda's La Chascona, 'The sections of his home were like the stanzas of a poem.' Of Denise Levertov, he writes 'We both laughed when I told her I was a "retired" catholic, a faith she had just joined.'"-Sue Hylen"David Hecker's Dream World transports readers to landscapes both far away and close to home, across the borders of territory, time, and the heart. Images illuminate and reflect the poet's experiences and those of the characters who inhabit these poems, leaving us homesick for places we may have never been."-Kristen Gard Hotchkiss

"The poems in this award-winning collection reveal a bold voice that brings us on a tour through emotional and literal landscapes as fluid as the tides."-Rena Priest, Washington State Poet Laureate and American Book Award Winner for Patriarchy Blues (MoonPath Press)"Rhythms, images, and juxtapositions in these poems flow like waves filling and emptying, from past to present to what might be-all while glorying in occlusions. Sati Mookherjee's lively word play questions our definitions, boundaries around spaces, and leads to fresh and original epiphanies...With extraordinary detail, this poet illustrates myriad 'ways of being.'"-Sharon Hashimoto, 2022 Washington State Book Award Winner for More American"A wonderful evocation of the sea, fresh and experimental use of language...the poems breathe."-Alice Derry, author of Asking and Sally Albiso Award Judge"Ways of Being exposes the spaces in which we 'wait for something to begin or for something to end' and evokes the hours, yearning and 'stuttered rain' that fill them. These are visceral, wonderful poems."-Susan Landgraf, author of What We Bury Changes the Ground

"What a beautiful, tender collection of poems Victoria Wyttenberg has written. Commingling longing, desire, and wonder, she creates an aura of comfort in the face of existence's beauties and miseries. With an eye for the upsurges of emotion that come from looking closely at daily life, and with an ear for poetry's affirmation of the music of experience, she affirms in her poems something profound about humanity: we endure because we love. Throughout A Bird Watching, I find a fresh joy in what poetry can accomplish-from a poet who has devoted her lifetime to the hooks that enter the heart."-David Biespiel, author of Republic Café"What happens to the life of the boy hunting frogs, the father off at war, the mother alone in her kitchen cooking a French dish for the first or hundredth time? And what happens when one's own mother, father, sister, brother, husband, daughter and son are all, as the poet writes, lying tucked in the dark, alone in their graves? Victoria Wyttenberg gives us a Master Class on how to live and how to grieve in these beautiful narrative poems. Nature is present, family and the death of family, trauma and love, all! Life is hard. What a privilege to be guided through it, at least within these pages, by such a thoughtful, talented, and dynamic poet."-Matthew Dickman, author of Husbandry

The Arborists studies paper ephemera-the notes, letters, and artwork that particular lives leave behind; and also the sensory ephemera of a life-the taste of pie, the depths of flowers. The book visits with family and friends, "our chairs blipping their white seats / like tabs on a chart," and wants to know what "map we would make / if you attached a flame to us and filmed us in the dark." In The Arborists, hornets eat the wood of the house while the people in the house continue making themselves as best as they can into mattering. Moments and memories collage into an elusive definition of love."Rilke wrote, 'The things of this world... seem to need us.' Molly Tenenbaum, better than any poet I know, hears the call of things-banjos, clematis, paintings of chickens-and translates for us their happiness and pathos. She brings this genius to The Arborists, set in a time of great personal loss and romantic discovery. This is that rare and wondrous collection that takes my breath-deeply moving, effervescent, utterly original and alive."-Kathleen Flenniken, Poet Laureate Emerita of Washington State, author of Post Romantic¿¿"Tenenbaum's poems are lyrical, tightly woven, at times whimsical. They are powerful poems of a mother's passing, of a brother's face, of a dad's collapse. The natural world of vines, trees, flowers, pawed creatures is strongly present, as is domestic life, and the poet's life as a banjo playerand teacher. In this work images are stacked, stitched, and intertwined, making each poem a mesmerizing read, a piece of music."-Priscilla Long, author of Holy Magic and Crossing Over: Poems"With a deep, underlying music, the poems in The Arborists reflect the world's detail. Tenenbaum calls hornets 'little cartographers,' writes a biography in banjo, and remembers 'how we used to lose our nozzles.' This is a world to be richly lost in-where a friend says, 'Can I quit my job yesterday?' and the cat is a 'weather report.' The Arborists asks what to do with the artifacts of a life, and answers: Craft them into poems."-Kelli Russell Agodon, author of Dialogues with Rising Tides

"In Chaos Theory for Beginners, Ronda Piszk Broatch turns quantum physics into a surprisingly accessible lens through which we can better grasp not only our relation to the larger universe but to ancestry, interpersonal relations, and the unconscious. Characterized by an affective echoing of sounds throughout myriad associative insights, the poems in this book confirm Broatch as an inimitable no-nonsense romantic who intuits the dialectical advantage in examining doubt and secular revelation...Whether rendering the implications of the night sky, the love of partner, the history of a discovery, the absurdity of contemporary politics, or the blood-links to our past, Broatch is in fact that affirming observer."-Kevin Clark, author of The Consecrations"Smart and spirited, playful and intimate, Ronda Piszk Broatch's Chaos Theory for Beginners probes the patterns and uncertainties of our daily lives for the vast solar systems within us, inviting, into our human relationships of grief, wonder, and desire, the cosmos, 'tumbling/ its spent fireworks, blowing confetti/ under our door.' Reading these poems, I am re-ignited with possibility, reminded how the matter and movements of our lives, small as they are, are as exquisite as the complex galaxies, as brilliant and limitless as the stars."-Jennifer Elise Foerster, author of The Maybe-Bird