Poetry

Named after a workaday knife wielded by shepherds and farmers in the high pastures of the Alps when a tool for paring, shaping, cutting into, scraping out of, or freeing is useful, these poems likewise cleave away the false and deceptive to clarify and reveal a startling and unifying wonder. In language radiant, lovely, and disturbing, Rebecca Kaiser Gibson explores the linkages between the uncomfortable familiar and the curiously intimate strange, making unexpected connections between phenomena. Arranged by association rather than chronology and connected by a sensual intelligence, this collection wanders from Maryland and India to Boston, France, New Hampshire and Ireland from Ezekiel's Flight and the Book of Kells, to the Tamil goddess Meenakshi.

Rebecca Kaiser Gibson is the author of Opinel, a poetry collection, and two chapbooks (Admit the Peacock and Inside the Exhibition). She lives in Marlborough, NH, with her husband Charlie, and teaches poetry at Tufts University.

Frannie Lindsay, of Belmont, Massachusetts, won the 2009 Word Works Washington Prize for her full-length poetry manuscript, Mayweed. 

Jennifer Barber is the author of Works on Paper published by The Word Works, and Given Away and Rigging the Wind, both from Kore Press. 

Carrie Bennett has been teaching in the Writing Program at Boston University since 2004 and currently teaches creative composition seminars on playwriting. 

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Reconnaissance brings together a decade’s worth of Mark Pawlak’s work exploring the nexus of Japanese poetic journals and American observational poetics. These new and selected poems owe allegiance to the early experimental books of William Carlos Williams (e.g. Spring and All) as much as to the Pillow Book of Sei Shōnagan and to Basho’s Narrow Road to the Interior. They join aspects of poetry with the daily, or near daily, “takes” of journal writing, but differ from traditional diaries or journals by emphasizing the act of writing itself in collaboration with the day's account.

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In System of Ghosts, Lindsay Tigue details the way landscape speaks to isolation and personhood, how virtual and lived networks alter experience. She questions how built environments structure lives, how we seek out information within these spaces, and, most fundamentally, how we love.

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Leora Fridman is the author of My Fault, forthcoming from Cleveland State University Press and winner of the 2015 CSU First Book Poetry Competition. She is also the author of the chapbooks Precious Coast, Obvious Metals, On the Architecture, and Essential Nature, and Eduardo Milán: Poems, a chapbook of translations.

Leora attended Brown University, where she was awarded the Pembroke Poetry Prize and graduated with honors in Literary Arts. She also attended the University of Massachusetts Amherst MFA Program for Poets and Writers, where she was awarded a Graduate Fellowship and MFA Thesis Grant, taught College Writing and Poetry Writing, served as Assistant Director of the Juniper Summer Writing Institute and curated the jubilat/Jones Reading Series.

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Sarah Green is the author of ​​Earth Science, ​released March 1 ​by​​​ 421 Atlanta. Of this​ poetry​ collection, Gail Mazur writes, “I’m tremendously moved by the insight and appetite in this eloquent debut.” David Rivard writes, “[Her] poems make [wisdom] sound peculiarly exciting.” ​Her work has appeared in Best New Poets 2012,​ The Incredible Sestina Anthology, Pushcart Prize: Best of the Small Presses 2009, and elsewhere. Her ​2015 chapbook, Skeleton Evenings​ (Finishing Line Press)​, won the​ ​New Women’s Voices prize.​ This is her first full-length collection.​

In this powerful new collection of poems, Martín Espada articulates the transcendent vision of another, possible world. He invokes the words of Whitman in Vivas to Those Who Have Failed, a cycle of sonnets about the Paterson Silk Strike and the immigrant laborers who envisioned an eight-hour workday. At the heart of this volume is a series of ten poems about the death of the poet's father. "El Moriviví" uses the metaphor of a plant that grows in Puerto Rico to celebrate the many lives of Frank Espada, community organizer, civil rights activist, and documentary photographer, from a jailhouse in Mississippi to the streets of Brooklyn. The son lyrically imagines his father's return to a bay in Puerto Rico: "May the water glow blue as a hyacinth in your hands." Other poems confront collective grief in the wake of the killings at the Sandy Hook Elementary School and police violence against people of color: "Heal the Cracks in the Bell of the World" urges us to melt the bullets into bells. Yet the poet also revels in the absurd, recalling his dubious career as a Shakespearean actor, finding madness and tenderness in the crowd at Fenway Park. In exquisitely wrought images, Espada's poems show us the faces of Whitman's numberless unknown heroes.

Martín Espada has received the Shelley Memorial Award and a Guggenheim Fellowship, and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. He teaches at the University of Massachusetts Amherst.

The first English translation of Armenian author Zabel Yessayan's work, In the Ruins, written more than a century ago, and Like Water from a Stone, a new novel-in-verse for young adults about the Armenian genocide.

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Welcome to Boston in the early years of the republic. Prepare to journey by stagecoach with a young man moving to the bustling city; stop by a tavern for food, drink, and conversation; eavesdrop on clerks and customers in a dry-goods shop; get stuck in what might have been Boston's first traffic jam; and enjoy arch comments about spouses, doctors, lawyers, politicians, and poets.

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Mariève Rugo was born in Bucharest, Romania, and arrived at adulthood in New York by way of four other countries, four languages, and seven parents. She graduated from Radcliffe College and later took a graduate degree at Brown, where she also taught for several years. Her first book, Fields of Vision, won the Alabama Prize. Her work has also appeared in Chelsea, The Kenyon Review, The Southern Review, The Georgia Review, and many other journals. She lives in Boston.

Sydney Lea is poet laureate of Vermont, and author of eleven collections of poetry, a novel, and three books of naturalist essays.

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Gail Mazur's poems in Forbidden City build an engaging meditative structure upon the elements of mortality and art, eloquently contemplating the relationship of art and life and the dynamic possibilities of each in combination.

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Gail Mazur is Distinguished Writer in Residence at Emerson College and Founding Director of the Blacksmith House Poetry Series in Cambridge, a weekly poetry reading series she ran for 29 years.