Ordinarily a poet should avoid abstractions but, when handled with great skill, an abstraction can produce something as wonderful as this short poem. Great title, great ending, perfect word choices throughout, Fruition apprears in the summer issue of 3rd Wednesday. Thank you, Carolyn Russell, for showing us how it’s done.
Stream on consciousness can make for interesting (and fun) poetry if it is handled well, as it is in our Poem of the Week by Kelly White. This is from the summer issue of 3rd Wednesday. The free e-edition is up now on our website and print edition is on sale at Amazon – just $8.
Home and Away by Ruth Holzer is a collection of short prose poems combined with haiku in the Japanese form of haibun, originated by Basho in the 17th century, and now becoming more widely written in the English-speaking world. These poems, reflecting a range of emotions, trace a personal journey and hopefully will also resonate with a reader’s experiences.
The 36 page chapbook is available for $7.00 from dancing girl press at:
https://dulcetshop.myshopify.com/collections/dancing-girl-press/products/home-and-away-ruth-holzer
or directly from holzerruth@yahoo.com
Bio: Ruth Holzer is the author of five previous chapbooks, most recently, A Face in the Crowd (Kelsay Books, 2019) and Why We’re Here (Press Press, 2019). Her poems have appeared in Third Wednesday, Poet Lore, Faultline, Connecticut River Review, Southern Poetry Review, Journal of New Jersey Poets, The South Carolina Review, Blue Unicorn and other journals and anthologies. She has served as a co-editor of Haibun Today and as an associate editor of tinywords. A multiple Pushcart nominee, among her awards are the Edgar Allan Poe Memorial Prize from the Poetry Society of Virginia and the Tanka Splendor Award.
Digital Collage by Lisa Yount from the summer issue of 3rd Wednesday
Room by room and roof by roof, the poems of Lynn Pattison’s Matryoshka Houses open up those dwellings in which the speaker has lived, and lost, and loved, where the soup contains everything from hard knocks and thorns to the divorce decree, and rooms are “flooded pink with sun through the crabapple.” These are poems that have emerged from a life not only fully lived, but fully seen. The world, here, comes in through the eyes and is sifted through the imagination: “Wide white wings / bloom from either side” of a plow blade, she writes, “as if some/commanding angel sweeps across / the prairie in moonlight delirium.” Pattison’s is a worthy voice to guide us through these disorderly, “illogical days,” this “understory world,” where still the houses of memory sing, in “Calls that reached to the pasture / if they had to”—Here I am.
—Diane Seuss, author of Four-Legged Girl and Still Life with Two Dead Peacocks and a Girl
Lynn Pattison writes, “Here,” the house sings, “Here I am.” In Matryoshka Houses, she deftly explores how her homes have served not only as vessels for loved ones and the tangle of objects a family accumulates—like records playing on a Victrola and jewelry boxes decorated with dancers—but are also containers for deep emotions and memories. In these graceful poems, she blends her many houses together seamlessly, until, distilled, they become the essence of home, which stands, “steadfast / no matter the weather,” and to which she returns, again and again.
—Kathleen McGookey, author of Instructions for My Impster
Time collapses in this wistful and shimmering collection by Lynn Pattison, in which all the rooms and houses her speaker has lived in become layered like double exposures, a palimpsest, nested Matryoshka dolls. Whether lived in for days, like a hotel room in Cancun that becomes home to a seasick tourist; or decades, like the family homestead where “my father / remembers his father setting logs at dawn,” these lost homes and their furnishings take on mythic significance, resonating with the reader’s own memories. Easily read in one sitting, this chapbook is an ideal introduction to Pattison’s fine work.
—Julie Kane, former Louisiana Poet Laureate and author of Mothers of Ireland
Lynn Pattison’s work appeared, most recently, at Ruminate and Moon City Review. It has also appeared in Smartish Pace, Pinyon, The Notre Dame Review, Mom Egg Review and elsewhere. Previous collections include : tesla’s daughter (March St. Press); Walking Back the Cat (Bright Hill Press) and Light That Sounds Like Breaking (Mayapple Press).
Lynn Pattison’s chapbook, Matryoshka Houses, debuted June, 2020 from Kelsay Press. It can be ordered from the Press or purchased from Amazon or Kelsay Books.
3rd Wednesday’s poem of the week is the 50/50 contest winner from the summer issue of the magazine. David Prather won half the voluntary entry fees and a one year subscription to the print magazine for his poem, Casual Gospel. The summer issue is available free in PDF format at our website or in print at a nominal price from Amazon.
3rd Wednesday’s Poem of the Week is a preview of our summer issue due out in a few days. It comes to us from Ellie Anderson of Bellevue, Washington, a hotbed of contemporary poetry.
The Wild Severance delivers on its title. Pelicans, crows, gulls, fireflies, robins, cardinals, bluejays fly from its pages messaging time, illuminating our lives “in the falling darkness.” But it’s not only the natural world this poet loves: he writes of literary and mythological figures, elevating them to existence with language. There are people to remember, too: where a second child fits; how coffee brings a mother and father back from memory; present-day family encounters, “while I watch from my chair I see five generations.” This is a book rich with what is true and what lasts; V.P. Loggins makes us believe that there’s sanctity enough in this cold world to make poetry that honors the glorious.
— Grace Cavalieri, Maryland Poet Laurate
With his newest collection of poems, The Wild Severance, V.P. Loggins startles us like crows taking flight after a gunshot. This book wraps around the human heart in all of its moods, reflecting the melancholy of late in the day, when “The sky beyond is changing violet,” the unease of “night / when the moon is burning,” and the hope that comes when “light / outside the window hardens / the black morning into blue.” The poetry here is astonishing. Light spreads throughout these poems like sunrise through opened curtains. They are written with the meticulous and patient gaze of a birdwatcher.
— Stephen Roger Powers, Author of All Seats Fifty Cents
V. P. Loggins is the author of The Green Cup (2017), winner of the Cider Press Review Editors’ Prize, The Fourth Paradise (Main Street Rag, 2010) and Heaven Changes (Pudding House Chapbook Series, 2007). He has published one book of criticism on Shakespeare, The Life of Our Design, and is co-author of another, Shakespeare’s Deliberate Art. His poems and articles have appeared in The Baltimore Review, Crannog (Ireland), The Dalhousie Review, First Things, The Hampden-Sydney Poetry Review, The Healing Muse, Poet Lore, Poetry East, Poetry Ireland Review and The Southern Review, among others. He has been a finalist for the T. S. Eliot Prize, the May Swenson Award, and the Tampa Review Prize. His work has been featured in A Universe of Dreams, poetry and music performed nationally by Neal Conan of National Public Radio and Ensemble Galilei. V. P. Loggins holds a Ph.D. in English Renaissance literature from Purdue University and has taught most recently at the United States Naval Academy.
Title: The Wild Severance – Genre: Poetry – $16 – Author: V. P. Loggins
Publication Date: April 20, 2021 – Publisher: Bright Hill Press – Product Number: 9781892471949
ISBN: 978-1-892471-94-9 – Binding: Paperback – Pages: 92 – Weight: 10 ounces
Available From: Bright Hill Press Books Small Press Distribution Baker & Taylor Barnes & Noble Amazon
Third Wednesday Magazine 