The Cows

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The Cows, by Lydia Davis

Review by S.M. Tsai

One may be jealous of another being licked: she thrusts her head under the outstretched neck of the one licking, and butts upward till the licking stops.

Lydia Davis’s The Cows (Sarabande Books, 2011) brought me back to every instance in which I stared at my childhood pets wondering “what are they thinking about?” Anyone who has spent prolonged time with animals will get a familiar feeling when they read this chapbook: the desire to decipher an animal’s intentions in the absence of a common language (while sometimes projecting personalities onto them). How many of us have monologued in tandem with an animal’s mysterious actions, or held mock conversations with said creature as they went about their business?

This chapbook is not a collection of individual poems, nor does it feel exactly like a standard short story. I can only describe it as a 38-page poetic observation of bovine life—one that is interspersed with photos, taken by the author during her year-long observations.

Davis has written other stories about animals, including cats, mice, and fish. Upon comparing these stories, we see that each type of animal can provide a different viewing experience to the human voyeur, due to their varied habits and needs.

In The Cows the theme of stillness is pervasive. The various incarnations of this stillness are portrayed throughout, for example:

How often they stand still and slowly look around as though they have never been here before,

And,

[. . .] they are so still, and their legs so thin, in comparison to their bodies, that when they stand sideways to us, sometimes their legs seem like prongs, and they seem stuck to the earth.

In a lifestyle marked by stillness, what are the things that bring action to a cow’s daily routine?

As Davis demonstrates, their stillness is set against a changing landscape of seasons (white snow to green grass), disturbance of other animals (flocks of birds, snowball-throwing boys, gaping writers), and the birth of calves. Ever-analytical, Davis also itemizes their forms of play:

[. . .] head butting; mounting, either at the back or at the front; trotting away by yourself; trotting away together; going off bucking and prancing by yourself [. . .]

The Cows thus depicts an ambling, relatively tranquil (but quietly humorous) existence for these creatures, at least through Davis’s eyes. But when we read some of her other stories, we are reminded that other animals may experience a different momentum in their daily lives. In her story “Cockroaches in Autumn,” (from: The Collected Stories of Lydia Davis, Picador, 2009) the featured critter’s activities are marked by speed rather than stillness:

[. . .] when I empty the bag, a crowd of them scatter from the heel of rye bread, like rye seeds across the counter, like raisins. [. . .] he stops short in his headlong rush and tries a few other moves almost simultaneously, a bumper car jolting in place on the white drainboard.”

While I found The Cows to be a thoroughly satisfying read on its own, it was particularly enriching to meet Davis’s cockroaches, mice, cat, and dog along with her neighbors’ cattle. I recommend The Collected Stories as companion pieces to this chapbook.

Lydia Davis is a short story writer, novelist, and translator. She is the author of six collections of short stories, including Can’t and Won’t (2014) and The Collected Stories of Lydia Davis (2009); one novel, The End of the Story (1995); and a collection of nonfiction, Essays One (2019), which was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. Davis is best known for her very short, micro- or “flash” fiction; many of her stories are a single sentence or paragraph long. She has translated novels and works of philosophy from French, including Gustave Flaubert’s Madame Bovary (2010) and Marcel Proust’s Swann’s Way (2003). Her honors and awards include fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the MacArthur Foundation, as well as the Man Booker International Prize. She is a professor emerita at SUNY Albany.
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/lydia-davis

Title: The Cows
Author: Lydia Davis
Publisher ‏ : ‎ Sarabande Books (March 29, 2011)
32 pages
ISBN‎ 978-1932511932
Price: $9.95

S.M. Tsai spent many years doing archival research and writing, then turned to 9-5 jobs for a new learning environment. Her poetry appears or is forthcoming in Ricepaper Magazine, Blue Unicorn, and the chapbook Bubbles and Droplets: 10 Poems of 2020. She lives in Toronto with her plants.

Risa Denenberg is the curator at The Poetry Cafe Online.

The Missing Ones

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The Missing Ones, Poems by Lauren Davis

Review by Risa Denenberg

I’ll start with a disclosure: Lauren Davis and I are friends and often share our poetry with one another. The first review at the Café was my review of Davis’s chapbook, Each Wild Thing’s Consent, and Lauren has been a guest reviewer on this site. In The Poetry Café Guidelines For Reviewers, I say,

I am not at all reluctant to publish reviews of books from poets known to the reviewer, as long as the review is credible.

Reader, I promise, credibly, that I am besotted with The Missing Ones, and would urge you to order one of the limited press run of 40 copies, if any were still available. But it appears they are all gone. Befitting the poems, they have disappeared.

The Missing Ones (Winter texts, Limited edition, 2021) by Lauren Davis,is a tour de force narrative of persons lost at sea. More specifically persons lost in the glacial-fed, crystal-clear body of Lake Crescent, a lake which reaches a maximum depth of over 1000 feet, is algae-free due to the water’s nitrogen content, and has an average temperature of 44 degrees. Davis’s interest in the stories of these lost lives is also compelling to me as we both live on the Olympic Peninsula, near this iconic lake. Davis’s poetry is equally enthralling, and a remarkable lyrical match for the story she tells in these poems.

In the book’s preface the reader learns,

On July 3, 1929, Russell Warren picked up his wife, Blanch … They drove U.S. Route 101 along Lake Crescent towards their home in Port Angeles, Washington. They’d promised to celebrate the Fourth of July with their sons. But the couple did not arrive home. The two boys never saw their parents again.

In the poem, “Seven Thousand Years Ago,” the story’s history opens,

            The earthquake cut a drowned country
            xxxxx for us to rest.
            In these depths, God laid out a marriage bed.

The first poem in the book, “Blanch Says,” starts with the line, “There are dangers / in deep waters no one / speaks of.” The enormity and terror of nature as it unfolded and continues to evolve on the Olympic Peninsula is rendered skillfully in these lines. As humans struggle to stay relevant on mother earth, nature plods on, on her own course. In “The Missing Ones,” Blanch is an iconic symbol of that struggle when her voice says,

There is a stain on the rock
unfolding. I drink the lake,
All of it. I make it mine.

And in “What Makes the Lake So Thirsty,” the plot thickens,

We are not the only mislaid ones.
They rest at separate depths.
//
We are the republic of secrets
and missing person cases.
I wore my least favorite dress to our death.
The lake floor is a reversed sky,

And yet, there is a life in the depths, and in “Things That are Pleasing,” Blanch’s voice lists some of them,

Beardslee trout dancing.
A rainstorm I hear but cannot feel.
The small of winter in hidden splits.
My husband’s eyes in the depths.

Now I must tell you something about Beardslee trout: they are a species of rainbow trout that are endemic to and live only in Lake Crescent. If this piques your interest, read more at The Native Fish Society. It is this detail, among others gleaned from the long history of the lake, that deepen the emotional resonance of these poems.

Blanch also has her complaints. In “Things that Irritate,” she lists some of them:

Candy wrappers that float into my bedroom.
Friends who do not say goodbye after they are found.
Long weeks without rain.
Divers that swim past my outstretched hand.

And there are also “Rare Things,”

Minutes that I do not miss my sons.
Green herons.
Decades without new bodies.

Blanch’s voice tells her story in “I’ll Tell you What Happened,” a narrative of drowning that is precise and terrifying, and yet redemptive at the same time.

This is how it feels to drown:
You’ll try not to inhale, but you will.
Water will fill the lungs. When your beloved drifts by
you will be unable to reach your hands to him.
Just try to move a single muscle. Your eyes will
stay open. Your husband has something to tell you—
you can sense it in the cold. Wait until you are both done
drowning. Then build a new home.

The details here are stunning, make me want to believe in this afterlife of the drowned dead. I grieve for Blanch and the others when she says, in “When the Lady of the Lake Comes to Stay,”

Russell, we have a visitor
and nothing to offer—
no cake, no coffee.
Let us share our home
with its many rooms of water.

These poems are not at all sentimental. I am not a sentimental person. And yet, even at the fifth reading of them, I have cried.

Why would I review a book that is currently out of print? In part because I want you to remember the name of the poet. Lauren Davis. The poet has other books for you to buy and you will find her poems on the internet in many places. You will be hearing more from her, I promise. And, as the first printing sold out, hopefully, a second printing won’t be far behind, so that you can have your own copy!

Lauren Davis is the author of Home Beneath the Church (Fernwood Press, forthcoming), and the chapbooks Each Wild Thing’s Consent (Poetry Wolf Press, 2018), and The Missing Ones (Winter texts, 2021). She holds an MFA from the Bennington College Writing Seminars, and she teaches at The Writers’ Workshoppe and Imprint Books. She is a former Editor in Residence at The Puritan’s Town Crier and has been awarded a residency at Hypatia-in-the-Woods. Davis lives on the Olympic Peninsula in a Victorian seaport community. Her work has appeared in over fifty literary publications and anthologies including Prairie Schooner, Spillway, Poet Lore, Ibbetson Street, Ninth Letter and elsewhere.

Title: The Missing Ones
Author: Lauren Davis
Publisher: Winter texts (first edition, limited run)

Risa Denenberg is the curator at The Poetry Cafe.

Readers and Writers ALERT!

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A few announcements!

Thanks to the ever-on-top-of-it Trish Hopkinson, I would like to refer you to her Daily Digest updated listing of free chapbook contest presses! Support the presses that support you!

I’m looking for some help with The Poetry Cafe Online, in the following areas:

1) Reviewers. I have received so many wonderful chapbooks and cannot review even a small percentage of them. I welcome guest reviewers. You can choose a book from the listings, and I will mail it to you with guidelines for writing the review. Newbies are welcome, I’m happy to mentor you in the art of poetry reviewing! Interested? Let me know!

2) Features. Since the inception of this site, I’ve wanted to feature the wonderful small presses that publish chapbooks, but I honestly haven’t had time to do it. I’m looking for someone who would like to write features of small presses for publication here at The Cafe. Interested? Let me know!

Thank you! Thank you! Thank you!

Diane Elayne Dees

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. . . . in conversation with Randal Burd

Memoirs of a Witness Tree by Randal Burd was reviewed at The Poetry Cafe by Diane Elayne Dees, and, in turn, Dees’s chapbook, Coronary Truth, was reviewed by Burd. These two poets found that they had much in common, as you will see in this interview between them.

[M]y love of formal poetry—which I often write—is probably somewhat inspired by some of the poets, especially the Victorian poets, I studied in school.
Diane Elayne Dees

Randal Burd: I was recently privileged to have the opportunity to interview Diane Elayne Dees via email regarding her latest poetry collection, Coronary Truth (Kelsay Books, 2020). That conversation informed a review of her chapbook, but her answers to my questions are illuminating in their own right.

RB: What inspired you to become a poet; to decide to write poetry and have it published?

Diane Elayne Dees: I always enjoyed writing, but didn’t start doing it seriously until later in life. I did political and tennis writing, and I wrote and published a lot of creative nonfiction and short fiction. Then, suddenly, I went dry—I ran out of story ideas. I began to write poetry because I was frustrated and wanted to write something creative. To my surprise, I took to it almost immediately and have written little else, in terms of creative writing, for several years now. And since I was already a published nonfiction and fiction author, it didn’t even occur to me not to seek publication of my poetry.

RB: Who are some of your favorite poets? Which poets have inspired your writing?

DED: My very favorite poet is Edna St. Vincent Millay. I also like reading Rumi, Emily Dickinson, Matthew Arnold, and Mary Oliver. Two of my favorite contemporary poets are Jennifer Reeser and Allison Joseph. I’m not aware of my own poetry having been directly inspired by any poet in particular, but I think that my love of formal poetry—which I often write—is probably somewhat inspired by some of the poets, especially the Victorian poets, I studied in school.

RB: What is your process for writing poems? Is it deliberate and scheduled or as the inspiration comes?

DED: It’s generally as the inspiration comes. However, I recently participated in two projects which required the scheduled writing of poems, and I was amazed at what that bit of pressure produced. I’ve no doubt that scheduling writing time would be a good idea—I just need to find the discipline.

RB: I notice you draw a lot of inspiration from nature. Do you spend a lot of time outdoors?

DED: I grew up near a lake, with woods right beyond my back yard, and I now live in a natural setting. Just about every day, I go outside to observe the birds and insects and other creatures, and to photograph them. I don’t garden as much as I used to, but I still tend to a number of plants. Also, my house is filled with images of the natural world.

RB: Is the reader wrong to assume many of these poems have an autobiographical element to them?

DED: Many of them are indeed autobiographical.

RB: Do you personally find writing poetry to be a cathartic process?

DED: I do! I find several different kinds of writing cathartic, but the poem—by virtue of its distillation of thought, melded with sound and rhythm—creates a total body experience of satisfaction/relief that is hard to explain to someone who has never created a poem. My hope is that the reader will also experience some of that.

RB: You have published a “progressive” blog, written for Mother Jones, and authored political essays, yet your poetry does not seem to be overtly political. What do you think of politics as poetic muse?

DED: I write and publish a lot of political poetry, but none of it appears in this chapbook. For me, social/political issues provide an endless supply of topics for poems, and writing about topics important to me is now my way of contributing to the conversation. However, those topics about which I’m the most passionate remain difficult poetic subjects for me to write about; my emotions get in the way. And—to return to the last question—writing poetry about social issues is quite cathartic.

Diane Elayne Dees’s poetry has been published in many journals and anthologies. Diane is the author of the chapbook, Coronary Truth (Kelsay Books) and the forthcoming chapbook, I Can’t Recall Exactly When I Died. Diane, who lives in Covington, Louisiana, also publishes Women Who Serve, a blog that delivers news and commentary on women’s professional tennis throughout the world. Her author blog is Diane Elayne Dees: Poet and Writer-at-Large.

Randal A. Burd, Jr. is an educator and the Editor-in-Chief of the online literary magazine, Sparks of Calliope. His poetry has received multiple awards and has been featured in numerous literary journals, both online and in print. Randal’s 2nd poetry book, Memoirs of a Witness Tree, is now available from Kelsay Books and on Amazon.

Risa Denenberg is the Curator at The Poetry Cafe.

Life, One Not Attached to Conditionals

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Life, One Not Attached to Conditionals by Laura Cesarco Eglin

Review by Nancy Naomi Carlson

A whole body of literature exists that focuses on the body. Indeed, one might make the assertion that all literature does so, in one way or another— enraptured body, dying body, panicked body, betrayed body, and, as in the case of Life, One Not Attached to Conditionals by Laura Cesarco Eglin (Thirty West Publishing House, 2020), body as betrayer.

Because I, too, have gone through, and written about “the cancer experience,” I was particularly drawn to this chapbook. I was curious to see how cancer could be the subject of a collection of poems without it spreading into all aspects of what makes a book cohesive and alive, i.e., a sense of tension between themes, linguistic risks, and tone (to name a few). Cesarco Eglin contrasts her subject matter’s doom and gloom with the urge to live her still-young life despite the ever-present shadows. The dark humor infused in these poems also underscores the seriousness of their themes. For example, in “Articulating the Changes in My Body,” Cesarco Eglin, a fine translator herself, compares her scars to Morse code:

I’m thinking about the Morse code as a
possible alphabet to get through, to get by,
to translate.

She then gives a graphic representation of Morse-code-as-scar.

It’s easy for poems about illness to veer off into sentimentality or self-absorption, but Cesarco Eglin masterfully negotiates the geography of living an unconditional life, despite her multiple bouts with melanoma, and despite the need “to guard [each] new spot ‘like a hawk.’” In this pandemic year, many of us are directly experiencing the need to be extra-vigilant to avoid contracting the virus, which makes this new chapbook of poems particularly relevant. Cesarco Eglin can never escape “the doctor’s voice in [her] head: it will come back.” She reminds us that “there is no vacation from being alert.” Indeed, in an existential stance to confront the absurdity of the human condition, she instructs us on how to take control of the uncontrollable, and writing is her chosen strategy. She offers us this wisdom:

One scar, then another;
that’s two lines already:
a couplet written in five months,
a couplet that promises
to be the beginning of a lifetime
of poetry.

Melanoma, her muse, has provided her with the motivation to be “aware of any little change in color, shape, texture, dimension, state, mode or mood of any mole or stain or spot on [my] body.” Cesarco Eglin, who was born in Uruguay and is fluent in Spanish and English as well as other languages, is open to melanoma teaching her the language of the body—learning it well enough to eventually call herself “a native speaker.” She’s trying to learn to embrace her scars, and compares them to bridges, as she brilliantly transforms the threatening juxtaposition of “bridge” and “attempt” to a life-affirming choice:

Many bridges, an attempt
to keep me in one piece;
an attempt to keep me
alive long enough
to cross them all.

In these days of COVID-19, we could all use something to help us cross these bridges—something to remind us to keep believing there are still “skies and wonders.”

The Reviewer posed some questions to the author about her book:

Nancy Naomi Carlson: What about Life, One Not Attached To Conditionals is uniquely suited to the chapbook form?

Laura Cesarco Eglin: I felt that a shorter form would suit Life, One Not Attached to Conditionals as a way to, at least in language, be able to finish the cycle, end the struggle psychologically, intellectually, and emotionally. Intense, short, and move on to life, one not attached to conditionals.

NMC: I notice that “translation” is one of the themes of Life. How did your work as a translator (and an author who is translated) impact your writing this chapbook?

LCE: Experience translated into language. Poetry as a means to question, challenge, and rearrange thoughts and experiences. Translation as a form of reading deeply, analyzing.

NMC: Writing about illness seems to be a tried-and-true genre, but is also an emerging one, as the landscape of disease is ever-shifting. Were you influenced by other writings on this topic?

LCE: More than influenced on writings on this particular topic for this particular chapbook, I would say that I am always influenced by all the books I read. I think that goes without saying. But there are two books in particular that I’d like to highlight. They deal with overcoming a loved one’s death or suicide: Ghost of by Diana Khoi Nguyen and Instead of Dying by Lauren Haldeman.

NMC: Can you say something about your wonderful title (e.g., how it came about; when, in the process of writing, it came to you…)

LCE: The title comes from a line in “Recovery,” a poem in Life, One Not Attached to Conditionals. I did not set out to write a poetry collection about having melanoma and skin cancer repeatedly and what that meant. I was writing poems and they, understandably, had that focus. The process of editing, rereading, changing, rewriting brings new perspectives, and when I read that line I perceived that it encapsulates the compass, as well as the power I think language has.

TITLE: Life, One Not Attached to Conditionals
AUTHOR: Laura Cesarco Eglin
PUBLISHER: Thirty West Publishing House, 2020
PRICE: $11.99
BUY IT !!

Laura Cesarco Eglin is a poet and translator. She is the author of three collections of poetry: Calling Water by Its Name, translated by Scott Spanbauer (Mouthfeel Press, 2016), Sastrería (Yaugurú, 2011), and Reborn in Ink,translated by Catherine Jagoe and Jesse Lee Kercheval (The Word Works, 2019). She has also published three chapbooks: Life, One Not Attached to Conditionals (Thirty West Publishing House, 2020), Occasions to Call Miracles Appropriate (The Lune, 2015) and Tailor Shop: Threads, co-translated with Teresa Williams (Finishing Line Press, 2013). Her poems, as well as her translations (from the Spanish, Portuguese, Portuñol, and Galician), have appeared in a variety of journals, including Asymptote, Modern Poetry in Translation, Eleven Eleven, Puerto del Sol, Copper Nickel, Spoon River Poetry Review, Arsenic Lobster, International Poetry Review, Tupelo Quarterly, Columbia Poetry Review, Blood Orange Review, Timber, Pretty Owl Poetry, Pilgrimage, Periódico de Poesía, and more. Cesarco Eglin is the translator of Of Death. Minimal Odes by the Brazilian author Hilda Hilst (co•im•press), winner of the 2019 Best Translated Book Award in Poetry. She co-translated from the Portuñol Fabián Severo’s Night in the North (EulaliaBooks, 2020). She is the co-founding editor and publisher of Veliz Books.

Nancy Naomi Carlson, poet, translator, essayist, and editor, has authored 10 titles (six translated). An Infusion of Violets (Seagull Books, 2019), her second full-length collection of poetry, was named “New & Noteworthy” by the New York Times. A recipient of two NEA literature translation fellowships, she was a finalist for the Best Translated Book Award, and the CLMP Firecracker Poetry Award. An associate editor for Tupelo Press, her work has appeared in such journals as APR, The Georgia Review, The Paris Review, and Poetry. www.nancynaomicarlson.com

Risa Denenberg is the curator at The Poetry Cafe Online.

Interviews: A New Feature at The Poetry Cafe!

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Big thanks to all who have been following The Poetry Cafe Online and reading our reviews of poetry chapbooks. I continue to receive chapbooks from near and far, and am amazed at the quality of what I am reading. I am forever grateful to guest reviewers: Sarah Stockton, Jerri Frederickson, Siân Killingsworth and Lennart Lundh who have written such superb reviews. I’m always on the lookout for new reviewers, so please get in touch if you are interested.

Today, The Cafe is opening a new reading room for interviews with authors of poetry chapbooks. We’re starting with Lauren Davis’s review of Jeff Santosuosso’s chapbook, Body of Water. Take a read and enjoy the winding path through the process and rewards of writing.

This means we are open for your interviews too. Please contact me if you want to pitch an interview with your favorite chapbook poet!

Contact me at: risa@thepoetrycafe.online

A Nation (Imagined)

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10/14/19

A Nation (Imagined) by Natasha Kochicheril Moni
winner of the 2018 Floating Bridge Press chapbook contest

Review by Linera Lucas

A Nation (Imagined) (Floating Bridge Press, 2018) is a lyric poem about love, grief, nature, and graceful endurance. The format is one long poem bookended by two short poems, and the story is a simple one: a man and a woman love one another, he goes off to war, she stays home, he dies and she continues to think of him. But the way Moni tells this story is anything but simple. Just because a book is short does not mean it is not profound.

The opening poem “And what if everything” makes it clear that this is going to be about death and memory. We are going back in time. First we are in a field of daffodils, and then we are in a minefield. The transition is brief and shocking, as if the reader is the one who is blown up. We start with sex and move to death where,

–the pause after love
before love which is–
now     You are in a field
of daffodils
– no –
a field of living            mines

If you bend left, death. If you bend right, memory. This is the prologue, the poem that teaches the reader how to read the rest of the work. Thank you, much appreciated. It’s good to have a guide, even if I’m not quite certain just how much I can trust the poet who is leading me onward. The long poem begins,

Remember the year you forgot to water my jade

and ends with,

Do you remember this?

Next, we are going to have the catalogue of what happened, in poet time, in real time, and in a mix of the two. I feel as if I had been given the chance to open a secret box, to read letters I am not supposed to know about, and I feel a little guilty, but I don’t want to stop reading.

Now the poet writes to her lover, telling him what has happened since he left, how she wishes he would write to her, then I turn the page and she says a letter arrived three years too late, that their tree will be firewood,

Tomorrow
our madrona
becomes a cord
what will keep
(our heat)

And what will keep their passion alive, now that he is dead? This is a poem about coming to terms with grief, also about not coming to terms with grief. She wants to send him his chickens, tries not to weep, gives him a list of what she saw on her daily walk in the woods. She saved a wildflower from a young girl who wanted to cut and press it.

“They” (the ever present outside world), would like her to do various things, to be more like someone else, to behave in a recognizable manner, but she wants her lover to “enter and with care // strike the lantern” . . . taste the apricots,

on your favorite plate              your favorite plate
the one                        chipped
from too much             loving.

This might be my favorite passage in the whole book.

Then there is the bargain she wants to make at the end of this poem: “unwind your voice / from my inner ear and I will ” not steam open the letter written to him, which started this whole story. What is in that letter? I am not going to find out, and I like that.

And now the final poem, the other bookend, “Letter to a Lover Whose Name Spells Dark Bird.” This is, of course, a letter to Corbin, the dead lover. Corbin is a variation on Corbie, which is another name for crow or raven, birds of intelligence connected with death and messages from the dead. This poem has the kind of bargaining that deep grief brings, past pleading and near madness, but such resigned madness. Here’s how it starts,

Look, when you call – bring the basket

and here’s how it ends,

Meet me and we
will forget our bodies were ever anything but
a little salt, water
waiting to be stirred.

and in between is,

the year we spent a lifetime
sailing in the boat of our bed.

So that’s the last poem. I have read the story, and have been changed by it. What makes this chapbook so fulfilling is how real the grief and love are, how tender and fierce the poet narrator’s love for her dead Corbin, and then the ending, with the unopened letter. Because at the last, we never really know another person. We can guess at them, follow the clues from how their lives cross ours, but each person contains many mysteries.

Natasha Kochicheril Moni is the author of four poetry collections and a licensed naturopathic doctor in WA State. Her most recent chapbook, A Nation (Imagined), won the 2018 Floating Bridge Press Chapbook Award. Natasha’s writing has been featured in over sixty-five publications including Verse, Indiana Review, Entropy, The Rumpus, and the recently released Terrapin Press anthology, A Constellation of Kisses. As a former editor for a literary journal, a panelist for residency and grant award committees, and a chapbook contest judge, Natasha loves supporting fellow writers. She owns and operates Helios Center for Whole Health, PLLC, which offers naturopathic appointments, medical writing, poetry manuscript consultations, and writing and wellness lectures/workshops.

natashamoni.com
helioswholehealth.com

Risa Denenberg is the curator at The Poetry Cafe.
She is a co-founder and editor at Headmistress Press and has published three full length collections of poetry, most recently, “slight faith” (MoonPath Press, 2018).

Kubra Nazir

December 1, 2025 ~ Risa Denenberg ~ Leave a comment

Kubra, a seeker of stories, has completed her Bachelor’s and Master’s in English Language and Literature from Kashmir University. Her work across corporate and teaching spaces has enriched the clarity with which she reads and writes. She has taught English Literature at the postgraduate level and contributed to research and editorial projects. In addition, leading a team of creative writers, gave her the fulfilling experience of guiding a diverse group of writers from across the world. Rooted in Kashmir and deeply in love with writing, she dreams of crafting a book someday—one that carries her voice, her memories, and the stories that have shaped her.

Qasida for When I Became a Woman

November 30, 2025December 2, 2025 ~ Risa Denenberg ~ Leave a comment

Qasida for When I Became a Woman, by Huma Sheikh

Published by Finishing Line Press, 2026
Reviewed by Kubra Nazir

Our Homeland, Kashmir, has a peculiarity about silences. Tales and tragedies rarely culminate there; they return in memories, in flashbacks, in whispers. Among those screaming silences, I once heard the story that lies at the heart of Huma Sheikh’s life, the loss of her father, the tragedy that shaped her becoming. While I was reading Qasida for When I Became a Woman, it felt like stepping into a realm where long-kept silences resurrected as an elegy of endurance. The poems, like a phoenix, emerge from the crevices of memory, transforming grief into poetry and memory into resistance.

As a fellow Kashmiri, I understood how she carried that ache all these years— an ache of a homeland that teaches its daughters to speak through absence. She doesn’t mourn alone, rather she crafts word by word what the past tried to blanket. Qasida, a classical Arabic poetic form of praise or elegy, has been turned into an instrument of invocation here, an unburdening where womanhood emerges through memory and silence.

The title of the poetry collection suggests a transformation of what it means to be a woman, and a reclamation against the silencing of women’s voices. It shows what it truly means to inherit both language and silence.

Each line is layered with so much depth and feels like a threshold between the personal and the collective. It reminded me of how writing poetry becomes the very act of witness not only of suffering but of survival. In the poem, “For Kashmiris, war an everyday meal,” she writes,

How to rebuild
a sense of refuge when hope beans spill and death blooms
for the kin of the slain, memories of dear ones, the
endless crackle of a flesh storm?

In Sheikh’s hands, the Qasida becomes an instrument of dialogue between what was taken and what refuses to be silenced. Throughout the poems, she goes back and forth to that memory of her father that changed the entire course of her life. She remembers her father, not as a figure lost to time but as a presence that still inhabits her silences. Her father, a renowned singer of Kashmir, somehow lives in the cadence of her lines as she pays tribute to him and his memories, echoing his songs through the collection like refrains. In the poem, “Qasida for a woman on a train,” she writes,

A Brooklyn subway’s screech like Father’s last Ghazal
Kam yaar sapidh khwaab jammed into a cassette
recorder. …

Throughout the poetry collection, the past peeks into the present, drifting between temporal planes; moments of childhood arise in her present voice, showing how a woman’s silence is the loudest cry. The inheritance of silence is portrayed as imagery that fuses the domestic with the divine. Sheikh’s silence becomes a prayer; her body becomes a landscape of remembrance. Each line is an instrument of reclamation, showing the way for women to respond. Every word feels earned and every pause deliberate.

As I read through the poems, I could sense a quiet ache in the depths of each line. Her poems are a reminder of how survival sometimes lives quietly in long-kept silences. These poems are more of a collective elegy, a shared act of remembrance, where one woman is speaking on behalf of a those who are still in the journey to find a voice.

In this quiet act of gathering sorrows of many, the solitary transforms into a wound others can feel too. A gathering of voices of those who have endured, remembered, and kept speaking even when the world turned away.

Huma Sheikh is an author, poet, and scholar. Drawing from her Kashmiri roots, her work blends personal narrative with political history. Her writing has appeared in Kenyon Review, The Journal, Consequence Magazine, Cincinnati Review, and Prism International, among others. A finalist for multiple literary prizes, she holds a PhD in English (Creative Nonfiction) and teaches writing at George Mason University. Her poetry chapbook, Qasida for When I Became a Woman, was a finalist for the New Women’s Voices Chapbook Competition (Finishing Line Press) and shortlisted for the Own Voices Chapbook Prize by Radix Media.

Qasida for When I Became a Woman, by Huma Sheikh
Forthcoming from Finishing Line press in January 2026
Price: $17.99

Kubra Nazir, a seeker of stories, has completed her Bachelor’s and Master’s in English Language and Literature from Kashmir University. Her work across corporate and teaching spaces has enriched the clarity with which she reads and writes. She has taught English Literature at the postgraduate level and contributed to research and editorial projects. In addition, leading a team of creative writers, gave her the fulfilling experience of guiding a diverse group of writers from across the world. Rooted in Kashmir and deeply in love with writing, she dreams of crafting a book someday—one that carries her voice, her memories, and the stories that have shaped her.

Risa Denenberg is the curator at The Poetry Cafe Online.

Lisa Hall Brownell

September 21, 2025 ~ Risa Denenberg ~ Leave a comment

Lisa Hall Brownell is a writer and editor. Her novel “Gallows Road” was published by Elm Grove Press in 2022 and has been featured in Kirkus Review, the Historical Novel Review, Connecticut Magazine, and elsewhere. She is finishing her second novel Vee’s Bracelet and a collection of short stories, Sidetracks. Lisa earned an M.A. in English with a concentration in creative writing from San Francisco State University and edited SFSU’s literary magazine Transfer. She is a graduate of Brown University where she wrote poetry and plays and worked in the university bookstore.

ROUNDHOUSE CLOCK

September 21, 2025September 24, 2025 ~ Risa Denenberg ~ Leave a comment

ROUNDHOUSE CLOCK, by Ronald Scully
Yavanika Press, 2025
Review by Lisa Hall Brownell

Whenever my brain is on overload, I crave simplicity – a new pathway of words to follow. That path could be down a river, along a garden path, or through Grand Central Station, as in the poems of Roundhouse Clock.

Ron Scully has found a way to be heard above the chaos and noise of our lives. He builds his short form poems with the lightest, almost airy structures, yet they are strong enough to support the heaviest meditations about time and space. Their simplicity is a ruse, however. They are complex puzzles, weighty but never static; sometimes they split in half or tumble down a page, as in this poem, titled, “Grand Central.”

in the concourse’s opal glass clock

it is a roundhouse

of the mind
where space/time arrives/departs

the early/late trains on track where endtime starts

I crossed paths with the poet many years ago when he was a bookseller in New England and also a scholar of philosophy. A few decades later, I discovered his recent poetry and chapbooks published online. I was intrigued by the variety of his chosen subjects, and the many forms his poems take, including haiku, haiga, origami poems, micro-poems, and even an homage to Wallace Stevens’ “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird.”

Poems in Scully’s collection titled the river: a suite of micro poems are shaped like swirling eddies, as seen in this haiku:

it takes the river
to keep the rocks quiet
time’s sluice

Although Scully distills many complex ideas and loves Latin phrases, his poems are certainly accessible. Many are also free to download online or available for a nominal fee, such as his recent chapbook about chess, master pieces, with witty illustrations that underline that this poet likes to play with words — seriously.

With Roundhouse Clock, Scully appears to be a clockmaker at work, a mechanic of momentum. In the spirit of wordplay, I’d say that Roundhouse Clock strikes the right note. If you’re looking for a reset or a rewind, it just might tick all the boxes.

Ron Scully is a very retired bookseller. After half a lifetime on the road, an authentic Willy Loman only funnier, he relocated from New England and settled in the Pacific Northwest to read and write. He practices haiku daily and has published widely in short form journals. He is the author of over half a dozen chapbooks, most recently needful things (Buttonhook Press, 2024), bureau of weights and measures (Half Day Moon Press, 2024), and the river: a suite of micropoems (Origami Poems Project, 2025). Currently, he is working on the play of his lifetime and researching the possibility of a sports literature anthology. Otherwise, his grandchildren help keep the neurons firing.

ROUNDHOUSE CLOCK
Author: Ronald Scully
Yavanika Press, 2025

Purchase a copy!
22 pages; $3.00

Risa Denenberg is the curator at The Poetry Cafe Online.

Ellen Miller-Mack

January 19, 2025 ~ Risa Denenberg ~ Leave a comment

Ellen Miller-Mack is a poet, nurse practitioner, & blues lover. “Hot Tamale Blues” can be heard Tuesday afternoons at WMUA 91.1 FM (www.wmua.org.) Ellen has an MFA in Poetry from Drew University. Her reviews and poems can be found in Lavender Review, Lily Review, Rattle, Rumpus, MER, Affilia, Valparaiso Poetry Review and others. She co-authored The Real Cost of Prisons (PM Press). She co-hosts “Poet Talk” which is broadcast live from WMUA on Thursday evenings . “Poet Talk” is also a podcast on Spotify. Ellen lives in Western Massachusetts.

That’s the very nature of Saturn

January 19, 2025January 19, 2025 ~ Risa Denenberg ~ Leave a comment

That’s the very nature of Saturn, by Michy Woodward

Published by Bottlecap Press
Review by Ellen Miller-Mack

Welcome, Michy Woodward, on behalf of women poets from the ‘70s who wrote poems about their lives and sexualities with honesty and clarity. The energy of That’s the very nature of Saturn got me thinking about a poem by Pat Parker (1944-1989) titled “For Willyce” and the poetry of feminist poets Diane Wakoski (b. 1937) and Alta (1942-2024).

The chapbook opens with “We used to be a society,” a litany of well-crafted arrows aimed at Tesla, Ozempic (“America’s least politicized needle”), and targeted direct-to-consumer botox ads, interspersed organically with ideas that are more interior, serving the poem with moments of acute self-awareness and wry humor, stating, for example, that lesbian dating is so fraught with “… the fallacy of the top shortage [it’s] as if I don’t exist.”

There are many deft leaps and delightful surprises in this collection. The poems are trustworthy and left me wanting to know where they were going. In both “monday and then tuesday” and “it’s 2 am on a Wednesday,” I catch a whiff of Joanne Kyger (1934-2017) who wrote wonderfully quotidian poems that may appear at first to be journal entries. Woodward offers a kindred poem beginning with “and I don’t have health insurance/but I feel lucky to be alive “ and ending with,

kissing the morning with laziness
the gorgeous possibilities
of tomorrow
which is already today.

I am enchanted by “your blue subaru,” a tender love poem in which Subaru rhymes with (the singer) Erykah Badu. It’s a small poem, nine short lines, beautifully crafted.

Woodward’s poem “hot girls” appears in the June 2024 issue of Lavender Review. It led me, with great enthusiasm, to this chapbook. In “hot girls,” Woodward laments “ i just keep trusting hot girls who are hot enough to make me trust them.” The hot girls are ravishing and ravaging stand-ins for the perils of love and lust. This poem is expansive, honest and funny, the kind of funny where you know the goddesses are laughing at you so you have to laugh along. It’s a love poem to our susceptible selves. It’s also a young lesbian poem. I wonder if young lesbians would be surprised to know that the longing, lust, love, and desire dip into unrequitedness and even kaleidoscopic sex as they grow older. Lesbian or not, follow Michy Woodward; she is a talented and sure-footed poet.

Curator’s note: Ellen Miller-Mack compares Woodward’s poems with past work of important lesbian and feminist poets. You may not have heard of these poets, and links are included to encourage you to check out their work. –Risa Denenberg

Michy Woodward (she/her) is a queer, mixed-race, Asian American Brooklyn-based writer and artist from Miami. She loves exploring intimacy, sensation, and the relationship between interiority/exteriority through her writing. Her work largely indulges in the softness of everyday life. Her poetry has been published in Bullshit Lit, Queerlings, Lavender Review, Roi Faineant Press, Silly Goose and The Amazine. You can find her on instagram @michywoodward. She loves Sundays, her cat Kimi, and being near bodies of water.

That’s the very nature of Saturn
Michy Woodward
Bottlecap Press, 24 pages, $10

Ellen Miller-Mack is a poet, nurse practitioner, & blues lover. “Hot Tamale Blues” can be heard Tuesday afternoons at WMUA 91.1 FM (www.wmua.org) Ellen has an MFA in Poetry from Drew University. Her reviews and poems can be found in Lavender Review, Lily Review, Rattle, Rumpus, MER, Affilia, Valparaiso Poetry Review, and others. She co-authored The Real Cost of Prisons (PM Press). She co-hosts “Poet Talk” which is broadcast live from WMUA on Thursday evenings . “Poet Talk” is also a podcast on Spotify. Ellen lives in Western Massachusetts.

Risa Denenberg is the curator at The Poetry Cafe Online.

Nadja Maril

October 13, 2024 ~ Risa Denenberg ~ 1 Comment

Nadja Maril’s chapbook Recipes from My Garden, a compendium of poems and short essays centered around herbs, a kitchen garden, and family memories, was published by Old Scratch Press, in September (2024). Maril’s prose and poetry has been published in literary magazines that include, Lunch Ticket, Spry Literary Review and Across the Margin. A former journalist and editor, Nadja has an MFA from Stonecoast at the University of Southern Maine. To read more of her work and follow her weekly blog posts, visit Nadjamaril.com. https://nadjamaril.com/

Song of North Mountain

October 13, 2024October 13, 2024 ~ Risa Denenberg ~ Leave a comment

Song of North Mountain by Morgan Golladay
Published by Old Scratch Press, 2024
Reviewed by Nadja Maril

Writers begin their journey towards publication at very different times in their lives, some in high school, others after retirement. Is there a right time to begin sharing one’s poems with the world? Perhaps the answer can be found in the quality of a writer’s first poetry collection.

The Song of North Mountain, a debut chapbook by Morgan Golladay, demonstrates the combination of wisdom and excitement of a new guest at the literary dinner table. Golladay takes us on a journey through seasons and times of her childhood home in Virginia, located between the Blue Ridge and North Mountains in the Shenandoah Valley. Golladay’s poems transport us to the foothills of Appalachia, a region that is rapidly changing as our planet warms. Her poems capture the stark beauty and breathtaking colors of the valleys, meadows, rivers, and ridges, as seen in the poem “Spring on the Mountainside.”

Out on the Devil’s Throne
careful briars show green,
warming, like me, in the heat of the sun. Redbuds languish,
eagerly waiting to erupt,
to be first, to show true color
to this mountain.
I trust in their uncompromising cycles, that spring follows winter
as night follows day.
The redbuds beckon me up the mountain.

Black and white images found throughout the book are original drawings by Golladay, who began the formal study of art in her fifties, preceding her launch as a poet. Expressing oneself in more than one art form is not unusual for poets; her work makes me think immediately of William Blake who so skillfully combined art and poetry in his nature-focused work.

Recently, I had the opportunity to interview Golladay who expressed great enthusiasm for trying new artistic practices. She described an experiment she conducted ten years ago with a friend she met in an acrylics workshop. Both artists had completed seventy-five black and white sketches in seventy-five days and they challenged each other to add poetry to those sketches. Golladay said she decided to combine the two art forms to learn whether the sketch informed the poem or vice versa. “Black and white sketches require a lot of different elements to be effective,” she explained. “Think of the illustrations of Rockwell Kent, the engravings of Durer, sketches of Michelangelo, Picasso, Mayer. For me, it was a steep learning curve.”

The Song of North Mountain is divided into four sections each aligned with one of the four elements: Fire, Air, Water, and Earth. In the fifth century BC, the Greek philosopher Empedocles proposed that the opposing forces of love and conflict upon these four elements create the diversity found in nature. Golladay has chosen these elements as the structure for her poems, highlighting these opposing forces rather than the seasons, which are more typical in nature poetry. Here, the cycle begins with Fire where most of the poems have a connection to light, brightness, and sometimes drought. This section is followed by Air, Water, and Earth.

The home of her ancestors, Golladay’s North Mountain is rich with history and memories. Many of the poems are informed by the changes wrought by time and aging. This poem, found in the Earth section and titled “Family Lines,” begins:

The lots are overgrown with weeds, brambles, saplings jutting through loose stones
that mark lost foundations.
Someone once lived here.

Someone planted those surviving daffodils, that stray lilac.

Sunday dinners, visitations, funerals,
jam-making, weddings, and scrubbed floors celebrated the families that lived here.
(Their footprints are found
when the yard is tidier.)
But the rubble remembers the sweat and the labor, the daffodils recall the hands that planted them.

“Under the Locusts,” found in the Air section, zeroes in on a particular farm. The sense of loss and resignation in this poem is poignant as it documents how the land changes as small farms begin to disappear.

Long after the farm was abandoned,
the evidence of thousands of hoof-falls showed among the locusts. Roots
stood stark and barren, surrounding dirt worn and blown away. Strange shapes, mystical and druidic in their formation,
reared from the dirt, submerging, reappearing several feet away.

There are many poems here about animals, some include humans as well. The poem, “Little Swimmer,” found in the Water section, portrays a venomous snake; another poem in this section is about a stodgy turtle. In our world of cellphones, computers, fast moving cars, and technologies that link global industries and people within seconds, I enjoyed the opportunity to retreat to basic relationships between a harmless reptile and a human. The poem, “A Moment of Grace,” is one of my favorites. It ends with the lines:

We spoke in silence,
thanking each other for dappled sunlight, ripe berries, and a moment of grace.

When writing about the loss of her own ability to climb a tree or the cutback of train service to the region, Golladay accepts her changing world with pensive resignation. She more often focuses on wonders that still exist and can still be found if you closely watch, smell, touch, and listen. Song of North Mountain conveys the rhythm of place that is clearly close to the poet’s heart, a sense she ably shares with her readers.

Artist and poet Morgan Golladay’s first published poem was awarded Third Prize in the 2021 Delaware Press Association Communications Contest. Much of her work is reminiscent of her native Shenandoah Valley, its people and places. A graduate of the University of Mary Washington, Golladay’s career included almost 40 years as a volunteer and staff member for several non-profit organizations. In 2024, the Delaware Press Association awarded her the first and second prize for short stories and an honorable mention for poetry. Her first book of poetry, The Song of North Mountain, is a National Book Award nominee. Golladay currently resides in Milford, Delaware. She is tall, left-handed, and blue of eye. Everything else is subject to change.

The Song of North Mountain
Morgan Golladay
Published by Old Scratch Press, 2024

Risa Denenberg is the curator at The Poetry Cafe Online.

Make Me Your Love Song

September 8, 2024September 9, 2024 ~ Risa Denenberg ~ 1 Comment

by Peggy Schimmelman
Published by Kelsay Books
Review by Julie Orvis

I have been a fan of Peggy Schimmelman’s poetry since we took a writing class together many years ago. I have loved and followed her work as she has grown as a poet and has become the local poet laureate of Livermore, CA.

Peggy Schimmelman’s chapbook, Make Me Your Love Song, is a collection of finely crafted poems that offer impactful reflections on life. Peggy’s work shows intelligence, depth, and accessibility in each poem, exploring the range of human emotions from loss and regret to the joy of living and loving deeply. These poems bear witness to the fact that love is about being human: sometimes romantic, sometimes two people simply connecting, sometimes enduring, other times fleeting. Peggy’s employment of language, line breaks, musicality, and the use of white space are consistently elegant. What I love most about the poems is the feeling that they are paying tribute to that which is human in all of us.

The poem, “Cozumel Moon” captures memories of youth:

… in one of those memories, I wonder, a girl
green-eyed and wild, just this side of crazy
Corona-tipsy and starlight-stoned.

“The Last Lullaby” explores the political realities of our time:

Selam and Adonay, hush now and sleep.
Boat man don’t like it when little ones weep.
Ahead, Europe waits to shelter and feed us—
to welcome us. Children, now listen to me

“Push Through the Night” is a story of facing challenges:

Soon dawn will arrive
in a river of light.
Float into the morning.
Push through this night.

“A Poem in Three” is a romantic ditty that starts with the book’s title:

Make me your love song
in three-quarter time
conjure me, count me in
one-two-three-one-two-three
whisper me whistle me
dance me romance me
woo me infuse me
with rhythm and rhyme.

Peggy Schimmelman is the poet laureate of Livermore, CA. Her work includes the poetry chapbooks Make Me Your Love Song, Crazytown, and Tick-Tock, as well as the novels Insomniacs, Inc. and Whippoorwills. Her poetry and short fiction, heavily influenced by her musical interests and her Ozark roots, have appeared in the North American Review, Naugatuck River Review, Peregrine, WinningWriters.com, the Aleola Journal of Poetry and Art, Pacific Review, Comstock Review, Wild Musette, 100wordstories.org, and other journals and anthologies.

Available at Kelsay Books Website and Amazon.com
Kelsay Books (August 16, 2024) ‎ 68 pages
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-1639806126
$20.00

Reviewer Julie Orvis says: “While I have many interests in life, reading and writing have been favorites. I belong to a local writing group, Wild Vine Writers, and have enjoyed writing and contributing to their publications Long Stories Short and Two Truths and a Lie. I’ve also received award recognition for short prose pieces at Pleasanton Poetry and Prose.”

Risa Denenberg is the curator at The Poetry Cafe Online.

Landsickness

July 14, 2024 ~ Risa Denenberg ~ Leave a comment

Landsickness, by Leigh Lucas
Published by Tupelo Press, 2024
Winner of the Sunken Garden Chapbook Prize
Selected by Chen Chen

Reviewed by Risa Denenberg

Your pain is the breaking of the shell that encloses your understanding.
–Kahlil Gibran

Leigh Lucas, in her chapbook Landsickness, embodies these words of Kahlil Gibran in her response to the death of a lover by suicide. Her world breaks open and makes no sense to her. She shuts down; refuses to change clothes or bathe; crawls under covers; dreams and fantasizes about her lover; and hoards small keepsakes and details about him. None of these behaviors are unusual in someone newly bereaved; but the intensity of anguish in these poems feels urgent and disquieting. The first line in the first of these untitled poems is: “In my new life, I must learn everything again.” There is no going back, no living with the reality of the death. Everything is undone.

There is a certain mood of unreality in the face of any death (“how can the world go on as if …”), but in some situations, there is no capacity for resolution, for moving on. Lucas dwells in a space that is sometimes referred to as “complicated grief,” i.e., grieving that continues to be intense, persistent and debilitating. To offset the collapse of faith caused by the death, Lucas lands in a deeply creative place: in poems.

I seasick between: I knew this would happen (rock). And how could it have (rock). Between: I knew him as well as I could know someone. And I didn’t know him at all. (Rock, rock.)

I identify with Lucas’ predicament, both as a poet and as a woman who has lost her best friend. Grief can be endless; if it ends, the relationship with the deceased is entirely broken. Lucas says, “The final note I hold’s unending.” It changes with time, but the nature of the loss colors the grief forever. There are so many unanswerable questions. In this case, the never-to-be answered question is: Why? And, could I have done something? Lucas gets no certain answers from a grief therapist.

Q: Can suicide be prevented?
A: It depends.

Q: Should suicide be prevented?
A: It depends.

And yet, she fears that in fact, she will forget: “Here’s the rub. Fickle memory, swirling time, debilitating seasickness.” This leads to obsessive behaviors, “My own complex system of ordering his belongings and memorizing minutia […] mental tests of recalling exact details of his poems, drawings and letters, of his feet, palms, and the curve of his back.”

Lucas searches deeply for answers, for comfort, for a way to understand if not accept. She digs deep searching for some explanation, some theory to account for the loss. She reports findings from a study of rats that offers an eerily cogent explanation:

Scientists study depression in rats.

How we tell they have it and how bad they have it:

we drop them into a bucket of water and see how long they paddle.

This only circles the question of why wasn’t this death prevented? And how was I to know the depth of his depression?

Does facing fact help? Lucas mulls over the raw facts:

The man I love

Jumped off a bridge on September 30^th at 4 in the afternoon.

//

The man I love

taught poetry

to college students and kids at the Y.

And then she distances from the facts with the tiniest of minutiae: “The object // descends // leaving air in its wake.” And, “Kerplop.”

Finally, Lucas adds details from the funeral: “Sitting in front of me, and behind me, and also to both sides, are more former girlfriends.” Readers, I never thought of Lucas as a former girlfriend, despite this addendum. She is all in from the moment of his death, to the end of time with her promise (threat): “The world will be unsettled. // I will unsettle them.”

Leigh Lucas is a writer in San Francisco. Her chapbook Landsickness (Tupelo Press, 2024) was selected by Chen Chen for the 2023 Sunken Garden Poetry Chapbook Award. She has been awarded residencies at Tin House, Community of Writers, and Kenyon, and has been recognized with AWP’s Kurt Brown Prize, as well as with a Best New Poet nomination, Best of Net nomination, and multiple Pushcart Prize nominations. Leigh’s poems can be found in Academy of American Poets’ Poem-a-Day, Poet Lore, Smartish Pace, and elsewhere. She holds a BA from Stanford and an MFA from Warren Wilson.

Landsickness, Leigh Lucas
Winner of the Sunken Garden Chapbook Prize
Selected by Chen Chen
Tupelo Press, 2024

Risa Denenberg lives on the Olympic peninsula in Washington state where she works as a nurse practitioner. She is a co-founder of Headmistress Press and curator at The Poetry Café Online. She has published eight collections of poetry, most recently, Rain/Dweller (MoonPath Press, 2023). She is currently working on a memoir-in-progress: Mother, Interrupted.

Risa Denenberg is the curator at The Poetry Cafe Online.