Bøger udgivet af Press 53

Our World, by North Carolina Poet Laureate Shelby Stephenson, is a love letter to his wife, Nin, and to the homestead where he was born and on which he still lives. Poet Dannye Romine Powell, says, "Shelby Stephenson drags the river of love and memory in this new collection, from sassy-sweet songs to his beloved wife Nin, to the "deep and wide gladness" of being alive, to thoughts of his father's Stetson hats and White Owl cigars, of his mother humming as she cuts cloth for a dress. . . . If poetry gets more visceral than this, quick, show me where."

The core of White Portals by Jennifer Holley Lux is a pair of elegy-sequences, like binary black holes that have captured each other, spinning and emitting energy witnessed from history measured in light years. In one sequence, she elegizes her husband, the poet Thomas Lux, and in the other, her beloved mother Lorraine Pobat Holley. The poet has woven her binary pattern in a web strung with memories and musings in coastal towns, worldwide, that braid together like tissue in our bodies: Positano, Studland Beach, New Guinea, Kazahana, and Lux's Connecticut home. Each elegiac thread in this quilt, woven with the skill of a loomer, goes to create a quilt of death, mourning, and consolation. They all fit into a passionate, beautiful collection, Lux's first. -from the Introduction by Tom Lombardo

Lifting each rock, / we felt its weight in our palms, / closed our eyes / until a name arose…. Even as a child, as the first poem in Beasts of Eden reveals, Michael Beadle took upon himself the joyous burden of naming even the all-too-often unnamable things of this world. In this new collection, Beadle lures us into a realm of fact and fantasy, of history and myth, where we are all-at once-both native and stranger, neighbor and trespasser. With senses so alert to the sounds, the tastes, the textures, the sights, and smells of this world, nothing escapes the fresh wit and seasoned wisdom of this big-hearted poet. Here is a poet who wields a magician's pen that is both worldly and colloquial, as at home in the past as it is in the present. Give yourself-and everyone you love-the gift of this beautiful new collection. -Cathy Smith Bowers, former Poet Laureate of North Carolina and author of The Collected Poems of Cathy Smith Bowers