Table of Contents
Adams, Terry
Adam’s Ribs
Poems by Terry Adams
In “Adam’s Ribs,” from Off The Grid Press, (Grid Books) Adams stakes his claim to be the new American Adam.
These are
“…poems that etch themselves into our minds by virtue of their powerful and sometimes astonishing images, their often-risky subject matter, their angled approach, their tone of contemplation and yearning.”
— Chitra Divakaruni, author of Mistress of Spices
Terry Adams
Terry lives with his wife, Eva, in La Honda, California, in Ken Kesey’s former house. His poems have appeared in Bellowing Ark, College English, Ironwood, Poetry, The Sun, Witness, and other journals.
Anfang, Sandra
Road Worrier: Poems of the Inner and Outer Landscape
Finishing Line Press, 2018
“Sandra Anfang’s new collection, Road Worrier, carries the reader across an atlas of lyric landscapes—a series of explorations, both literal and mind-shattering. From a Bedouin wedding in Tunis to the Arizona deserts, from an ancient Hopewell site in mid-America to adventures in Costa Rica to nighttime kayaking on the Pacific coast, her poems marry risk and thrill, true terror, sheer pleasure. She, too, grows into her landscapes. As a young visitor to the Ozarks, she writes, “the world/inside my head/was about to open/like the Red Sea.” By the end of this splendid volume, she’s found her compass and the comforts of her Promised Land, “Our eyes ignite and hold; a light both momentary and eternal.”
Peter Neil Carroll
Author of The Truth Lies on Earth: A Year by Dark, by Bright
Xylem Highway
Main Street Rag Publishing Company, 2019
“In Xylem Highway, Sandra Anfang takes us into the very juices of the natural world, leads us with her subtle language and urgency of life force, to travel the inner byways of flora and fauna, where she clearly feels at home. From there she can view her life, and we ours, with fresh perspective, even to the schoolyard bully and the remembrance of the Holocaust. Here is a poet whose understanding, and questions, are cellular.”
Vilma Olsvary Ginzberg–Healdsburg [CA] Literary Laureate, 2008/2009, author of making noise, and 90 is the new
Sandra Anfang
Sandra Anfang is an award-winning poet, poetry teacher, visual artist, and editor. Her poems have appeared in numerous journals including San Francisco Peace and Hope, West Trestle Review, Spillway, and Rattle. Her two chapbooks, Looking Glass Heart and Road Worrier, were published by Finishing Line Press in 2016 and 2018, respectively. Xylem Highway, a full-length collection, was published by Main Street Rag in 2019. Sandra teaches with California Poets in the Schools and hosts Rivertown Poets, a monthly reading series, in Petaluma, California.
Bruck, Julie
“She is the poet laureate of aftermath, of what we do in the wake of things. She picks up the broken pieces of what’s left, and these she patches together, as she can, into beautifully-wrought poems that bear eloquent witness to what remains.”
HOW TO AVOID HUGE SHIPS (Brick Books, Sept. 2018)
$20.00, 104 pages
—Finalist for the 2019 Governor General’s Literary Award
—Long listed for the Raymond Souster Prize
—Washington Independent Review of Books, Poetry Exemplar
—Quill & Quire, Editor’s Pick
—An SPD bestseller
"I have long considered Julie Bruck to be one of our most committed and humane voices. Bruck sees everything we do; she just seems to see it wiser. Her poems sing and roil with everything complicated and joyous we human monkeys are."
MONKEY RANCH (Brick Books, 2012)
$19.00, 88 pages
—Now in a 4th printing
—Winner of The 2012 Governor General’s Award for Poetry
—A Globe & Mail 100 Best Books of 2012.
—San Francisco LitQuake’s “Summer Reads” pick, 2012
—Finalist for the 2013 CAA Award for Poetry
—Finalist for The 2013 Pat Lowther Memorial Prize
—Salty Ink’s Dozen Best Poetry Books of 2012
“...both her craft and worldview have grown, acting like a lens, magnifying and focusing ...into a mature, white-hot point, the kind kids might use to kill ants or set newsprint ablaze.”
Julie Bruck
Julie Bruck is a Canadian poet who has lived in San Francisco since 1997.
You can find more information and links to order these or other books by Julie, at juliebruck.com.
Carroll, Peter Neil
Something is Bound to Break (Main Street Rag, 2019)
This sixth collection of Carroll’s poetry addresses simple questions that surround all our lives: memories of childhood, heritage, identity, and issues of current society that we should, at least, be aware of. Something is Bound to Break, writes the poet Lee Rossi, “will leave you laughing, enlightened and asking for more.”
An Elegy for Lovers (Main Street Rag)
Carroll’s Elegy for Lovers explores the tentativeness of relationships, how affairs of the heart are always contingent. “Peter Carroll knows about love and so do his poems,” writes poet Esther Cohen. “Elegant elegies, unexpected puzzle pieces and many moving parts form this unforgettable and surprising collection.”
Peter Neil Carroll
Peter Neil Carroll is currently Poetry Moderator of Portside.org. His sixth collection of poetry, Something is Bound to Break, (Main Street Rage Press) late last year. Earlier titles include Fracking Dakota; Riverborne: A Mississippi Requiem; An Elegy for Lovers; and A Child Turns Back to Wave which won the Prize Americana. His poems have appeared in many print and online journals. He lives in northern California with the photographer/writer Jeannette Ferrary.
He is also the author of a memoir, Keeping Time (Georgia) and many works of history.
Cottonwood, Joe
Foggy Dog: Poems of the Pacific Coast
With a keen eye and a big heart, Joe Cottonwood writes of the small towns and driftwood beaches of the coast. As a working carpenter, he speaks with special appreciation of trees: the giant redwoods, the powerful fir and redolent cedar. From pelicans to pumpkins, from earthquakes shaking the house to seals giving birth on the beach, come for the humor, stay for the wisdom — all served with a generous helping of dogs.
Random Saints: Poems of Kindness for an Unkind Age.
Joe Cottonwood is a natural story teller whose poems remind you that the risk of feeling this world, even the painfulness of it, is sweeter and richer than trying to keep yourself safe. In his worklife as a carpenter he builds good solid places to live in. So do these poems, equally crafted with down-to-earth practicality and surprising tenderness, clearly written, full of gentle humor, engaging and interesting and truly musical in their rhythms and use of language.
Joe Cottonwood
Joe Cottonwood has built or repaired hundreds of houses to support his writing habit in the Santa Cruz Mountains of California. His latest book is Random Saints.
Goodwin, Caroline
Custody of the Eyes (dancing girl press, 2019)
A poetry chapbook that explores grief and disconnection, with a few bits of dialogue from the film Taxi Driver thrown in for good measure.
The Paper Tree
A full-length book from Big Yes Press (San Luis Obispo) 2017. The collection explores family, long-term friendships and losses based in Sitka, Alaska, and historical trauma. The book contains the near-sonnet sequence Text Me, Ishmael, which was published as a chapbook in Pontypridd, Wales, UK in 2012 by the Literary Pocketbook Series.
Books can be ordered by emailing me here [email protected]
The Paper Tree: $15
Custody of the Eyes: $10
Caroline Goodwin
Caroline Goodwin served as the first Poet Laureate of San Mateo County from 2014-16. A former Stegner Fellow at Stanford, her books are Trapline, Peregrine and The Paper Tree. She lives in Montara with her two daughters and teaches at California College of the Arts and Stanford Continuing Studies.
McClung, Kathleen
A Juror Must Fold in on Herself
In Kathleen McClung’s new prize-winning chapbook, all the elements of form and function, freedom and sentences come together in a distillation of the poetic elements—a bliss of plainspeak that listens and sees. And there’s humor, the banality of common ironies and evils too small to fail us, or inspire us to move forward.
Temporary Kin
"Kathleen McClung possesses an extraordinary gift for story-telling in verse—even in patterns as complex as the sonnet crown and the villanelle, both notoriously difficult to pull off convincingly. Using familiar registers for a wide variety of personae, McClung delves into the motivations of characters as dissimilar as Willy Loman is to a sinister psychopath—all accompanied by a nuanced narrative voice that surfaces throughout. It's a splendid group of character studies, skillfully woven into challenging poetic forms."
Kathleen McClung
Kathleen McClung is author of The Typists Play Monopoly and Almost the Rowboat. Her poems appears widely in journals and anthologies including Southwest Review, The MacGuffin, Mezzo Cammin, Ekphrasis, California Quarterly, Atlanta Review, Third Wednesday, Forgotten Women, Sanctuary, Last Call, Fire and Rain: Ecopoetry of California, and elsewhere. Winner of the Rita Dove, Morton Marr, Shirley McClure, and Maria W. Faust national poetry prizes, she is a Pushcart and Best of the Net nominee. Associate director and sonnet judge for the Soul-Making Keats literary competition, she teaches at Skyline College and The Writing Salon and directs Women on Writing: WOW Voices Now on the Skyline campus. In 2018-2019 she is a writer-in-residence at Friends of the San Francisco Public Library. www.kathleenmcclung.com
Moomey, Diane Lee
Figure in a Landscape
At times this poet is all knees and elbows with her world. At other times she merges almost seamlessly with its hills and valleys. In this collection of poems, written over the past ten years, Diane reflects on the interface between “self” and “other”.
Nothing But Itself
Recent poetry by Bay Area Poet Diane Lee Moomey.
Diane Lee Moomey
Diane Lee Moomey is a painter and poet living in Half Moon Bay, California, where she is co-host of Coastside Poetry, a monthly reading series; her work has appeared in PoetryMagazine.com, Mezzo Cammin, Caesura, California Quarterly and others. Please visit her at www.dianeleemoomeyart.com
Ybarra-Garcia, Rosemary
Blue Maze
In BLUE MAZE, the poet uniquely reveals, through palpable experiences and fresh imagery, critical symbiotic relationships in nature. The journey weaves in and out of connections as in the poem “Blue Marble” where the poet, as a child, swallows a blue marble, symbolizing the earth, while riding on a fast moving wagon, accepts that the earth is ever changing and symbolically on a fast moving wagon itself. In the poem “Ocean,” the poet realizes that the ocean and she have something in common: they both devour, as do all living things. Humans, described as nematode-like creatures, are tilting the earth’s axis, thus destroying the world as we know it.
Weaving
Weaving is a book of poems in which the author searches for identity among the many, sometimes conflicting, vestiges of colonization, hybridity, immigration, and transformation.
The author shares introspective thoughts in colorful vignettes as she introduces the reader to cultural and spiritual influences from her Mexican heritage. Poems like “Basket Weaving,” “Trenzas,” and “Branches” interlace, intertwine, and braid identities—all teetering on a temporal fence in this liminal space of tension, rejection, and acceptance.
Rosemary Ybarra-Garcia
Rosemary is an educator and a lifelong poet who has been a featured poet for several years at coffee shops, book stores, women’s study classes, and special venues such as “Women and the Muse” in Santa Cruz, CA, 1988; “Floricanto in Xochitle in Cuicatle, Flower and Song” at the De Young Memorial Museum in San Francisco, CA, 1993.
Her poetry has been included in several publications, among those: Lighthouse Point: An Anthology of Santa Cruz Writers, M PRESS, Santa Cruz, CA; New to North America: Writing by Immigrants, Their Children and Grandchildren, Burning Bush Publications, Santa Cruz, CA; California Quarterly, A California State Poetry Society Publication; Poetry Quarterly, Prolific Press Publication; Calyx Journal, CALYX Press; River Poets Journal, Lily Press; Minute Magazine, Minute Press. She has published three books of Poetry: House of Song, Weaving, and Blue Maze.