Books
Awkward Scrapes
Awkward Scrapes is a collection of poems that celebrates love, family, fatherhood, and the natural world while confronting grief, violence, memory, and healing. Rooted in Appalachia and Kentucky landscapes, Eric Scott Sutherland's lyrical, music-infused poems seek beauty, tenderness, and hope amid the awkward scrapes of being human. "The poems in Awkward Scrapes are the best kinds of love songs, never sentimental and always powerful. They are meditations on romantic love, on the profound connections we have with our children and the natural world, even on life itself. This book is a celebration of all that makes us human: the awfulness and the beauty, sometimes tangled. Sutherland is one of my favorite poets and I loved every carefully chosen yet organic word."—Silas House
Soliloquy to the Night Sky
The brave poems in this book, Kathleen Gregg's first full-length volume of poetry, tell the deeply moving and sometimes heartbreaking story of a family's struggle with Alzheimer's. " Kathleen Gregg's poignant portrayal of her sister's descent into dementia displays the attentiveness only deep love can bring. In Gregg's deft hands, we experience Nancy's "beautiful exuberance" and the sisters' long tight bond as well as the growing space between them that's like "standing in a cave / hearing the last echoes." These poems transmit grief and fear but also a "rush of wonder" at the richness of natural and human worlds. This collection is an homage, finally, not to loss but to life."—Libby Falk Jones
Open Burning
At times elliptical and surreal, the emotional and psychological landscape of these poems is punctuated by flashes of the real risks and rewards of navigating difficult times with grace and compassion. Through the magic of these well-crafted poems, we become invested in the seemingly inconsequential as well as the life-changing. "The poems in this rich collection are both spare and candid, chronicling the demise of a marriage, even as it nearly coincides with a father's blooming love for his young daughter. One love is lost, but a wholly different love arrives. At times the contrast is inexplicable and the speaking voice in these poems doesn't quite know to whom the poems should be addressed. That is a perspective I find so arresting in this book, a crossroads of grief that has no bottom and love that has no end, weighted with the plain responsibility of somehow going forward.—Maurice Manning
Grief & Other Animals
"Patty Paine's superb new collection arises from the nearly unbearable—a mother's death, but most especially the senseless death of a husband. And, as the crucial elegiac poets know, grieving never truly arrives in 'stages,' and never ends in 'closure.' It is a process infinitely more intricate and nuanced than the platitudes suggest, and it ends, at best, in only a fraught and vexed consolation, what one of her poems calls, 'a sorrow deeper than solace.' Yet even a vexed consolation can be a form of quiet triumph, and these poems—spare, heartbroken, and always utterly precise—arrive repeatedly at such a triumph. Patty Paine has written a book of bravery and consummate artistry."—David Wojahn
Mother, Loose
Mother, Loose was selected by Patty Paine for the Judge's Choice award in the 2014 Poetry Chapbook competition. "Full of ripe, aching music, Brandel France de Bravo's Mother, Loose captures the overlap between what we chant as comfort and what we choose as elegy. Nursery rhymes become impishly twisted: 'Social climber, / they called me,' Humpty Dumpty admits, while Mary and her lamb pick out 'Teat Peach' polish to get their nails done. Deft and heartbreaking, these poems ask us to step out from under the sheltering wing of Mama Goose, and into the arms of Morpheus. Let this collection cradle your heart in its hand."—Sandra Beasley