A Desk In The Elephant House

Winner of the Walt McDonald First-Book Competition in Poetry "A brilliant, beautiful orchestration of sensuous, intellectual, witty, accessible poetry" that is "most of all . . . a symphony of stunning imagery," says Robert A. Fink of the 1998 Walt McDonald winner. "Cathryn Essinger affirms the middle world, our familiar position between the worlds of intellect and sensation. We are small creatures 'digging skyward, pushing through the roots / of stars, chewing at the webbing of the universe' ("Ropes and Ladders"). Ours is a precarious adventure 'as we grope / for a hold on some steep cliff, hearing / only the whimper of ropes and lines / and the swish of the wind.' Here 'everything is bright / and properly placed.' Everything is 'familiar, so much the same ("Ropes and Ladders"). Light divides the darkness. We know our world and it is not waste and void. It is good."--Robert A. Fink

"Vermilya's poems sum up her reflections on life, love, and marriage; the deaths of friends and family; and, most poignantly, on her own aging and death."--BOOK JACKET.

2009 Poet's Market will give you all the information necessary to research markets and submit your poetry for publication. In addition to market listings, you'll find guidance for preparing and submitting manuscripts, identifying markets, relating to editors, and more. Plus, the book includes additional listings for conferences, workshops, organizations for poets, print and online resources, and the latest trends in poetry writing and publishing.

In the bone-dry land of mesquites and drought, Janice Whittington has found images that allow her to explore woman's place in West Texas and the world from the perspectives of daughter, wife, friend, and mother. Filled with fear and fire, joy and sorrow, dust and water; the poems risk stepping into air, striving to glide like hawks on thermals. "Into a Thousand Mouths is the account of Eve after the fall, after she follows her husband out of the garden and of tilling yield.... It is the account of one woman, of all women--'that female secret of wombs, / the ache that folds into the chest / and stays, a wound / nursed into a jewel ('Daughters'). . . . "The connections between women and a needy world seem to be infinite, as the five sections of the book suggest, orchestrating and developing the connections of women to their fathers, their mothers, their grandparents and great-grandparents, to their heritage of pioneer women, to their displacement from the fecund East and their alienation in the seemingly barren West, to their daughters, and to their husbands." "...[Whittington's] Eve has planted her jungle west, not east of Eden, and like the trumpet vine that 'shares orange buds' ('Rain Forests') and the desert plants that put down roots ('The Roots of Desert Plants'), her jungle just might flourish." --Robert Fink, from the Foreword Woman of the Sea Did she caulk the cabin cracks with bread dough, the dirt too hard to chip into mud? Did wedding quilts drag the floor, capes for one who had packed away her veils? Did her hands bleed from lye scrubbed into shirts, from breaking manure and cactus into chunks for fire? Did she turn her back to the wind or lift her chin and dream of oceans, wearing her hair loose, bits of coral catching wisps in a red comb, inviting men full of salt to sail through dangers to her arms? Did she one day slip pins from her hair and step into waves of the prairie, searching for shore and singing?

Rick Campbell's journey from the banks of the Ohio to the beaches of Florida is a rhapsody, and the music he makes in ordering his world takes us with him, to the headwaters of a new river."Rick Campbell's poems leave some sweet dirt under your fingernails-- proof of hard, honest work when the longing of small-town America is not enough. Setting the World in Order eloquently plots our geographically impossible trajectories. On the way, Campbell can lay down a narrative as spacious as the range of a blues harmonica, every gritty riff dissolving into compassion."--Dionisio D. Martínez"Rick Campbell's poems move with grace and muscle and music from the Catholic working class of his youth, its factories and foundries, along the rivers of Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Florida, and through the lives of the flesh-and-blood characters of contemporary America. Part prayer, part song, part gritty story, they always dance with meaning and significance; they always wholly embrace the idea of individual presence in a terrible, beautiful world."--Frank X. GasparFrom Harmonica LessonGo with the rhythmtill you can't get off the track.Like this. Tight-belly staccato, hands cutting and freeing the air, one hard-held bottom line. Play betweentrains. Keep the wheels in mind.Catch the next one and play all night.In the morning try the whistle. You've earned it.It should sound like Kansas. Setting the World in Order is the tenth winner of the Walt McDonald First-Book Prize in Poetry, selected by Robert Fink of Hardin-Simmons University, editor of the Walt McDonald First-Book Series.

Every River on Earth: Writing from Appalachian Ohio includes some of the best regional poetry, fiction, and creative nonfiction from forty contemporary writers, both established and up-and-coming. The wide range of material from authors such as David Baker, Don Bogen, Michelle Burke, Richard Hague, Donald Ray Pollock, and others, offers the reader a window into daily life in the region. The people, the landscape, the struggles, and the deepest undercurrents of what it means to be from and of a place are revealed in these original, deeply moving, and sometimes shocking pieces. The book is divided into four sections: Family & Folks, The Land, The Grind, and Home & Away, each of which explores a different aspect of the place that these authors call home. The sections work together beautifully to capture what it means to live, to love, and to die in this particular slice of Appalachia. The writing is accessible and often emotionally raw; Every River on Earth invites all types of readers and conveys a profound appreciation of the region’s character. The authors also offer personal statements about their writing, allowing the reader an intimate insight into their processes, aesthetics, and inspirations. What is it to be an Appalachian? What is it to be an Appalachian in Ohio? This book vividly paints that picture. Every River on Earth David Lee Garrison I look out the window and see through the neighbor’s window to an Amish buggy where three children are peeping back, and in their eyes I see the darkness of plowed earth hiding seed. Wind pokes the land in winter, trying to waken it, and in the melting snow I see rainbows and in them every river on earth. I see all the way to the ocean, where sand and stones embrace each falling wave and reach back to gather it in.

Open up this Little Black Box and find the best multi-form, experimental, speculative poetry by twenty-plus Ohio poets: science fiction, fantasy, horror, dystopia/utopia, fairy tale, mythology and myth, the miraculous, alternative histories, cyberpunk, magic realism, occult/paranormal, gothic, steampunk, beast fables, the weird, superhero, and other subgenres . . . this collection will thrill you!

Haven't we all been told how beauty is thin as truth? And don't we believe and disbelieve this "lie we'd carve and starve for. / We'd suck it till the juice ran down our arms"? Skin compels us, repels us. Beauty may be only skin deep, a fine covering--sensuous, at times translucent, almost transparent, and yet so obdurate. Skin insulates, guarding its vital organs just beneath this surface that teases us to peek, to try to penetrate. We call this desire by many names, the best of which is love. April Lindner's sensuously orchestrated collection of poems conveys the beauty and truth of love, how we know it to be paradoxical, obsessive, fearful, rapacious, holy.--Robert FinkFontanelHere's the ravine, a stretch of skinspanning the breach like a footbridge.Canvas-thin, it trembles with the bloodthat runs beneath. Something less tangiblecourses there too, a whitewater flumeof images: the stretching housecat;car keys that sing and catch light;floorboards knotted with dark, animal eyes;the window with its shifting square of sky.All things equal, each thing startling, and everything unmediated by the mind'shabitual grapple with whyand so what. You frown at a fadedwallpaper pineapple, and the membraneflutters harder. I'm carefulwhen I comb your sparse brown hair.When I sing your name I borrow a liltI'd never use in speech. The wordsdon't matter; I'm saying drink me while you can, like milk. Let me be flesh and flannel, hands that loosen your tangled blanket.Know me by scent before you learn my name, before doorknobs turn into doorknobs, before the gates knit shut.