Category: Contributor Books

The Wild Severance / V.P. Loggins

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TheWildSever_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 

 

At the Driveway Guitar Sale / Buff Whitman-Bradley

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Third Wednesday contributor Buff Whitman-Bradley’s new book, At the Driveway Guitar Sale: Poems on Aging, Memory, Mortality, is available from Main Street Rag Publishing Company. A few of the poems in the book were originally published in Third Wednesday. He podcasts at thirdactpoems.podbean.com

At the Driveway Guitar Sale can be puchased from Main Street Rag.

I’ve read this author in many publications over the years, and listened to his own gently cadenced readings on his podcast, and I love his poetry. Wit, imagination, a perfect ear, and an effortless touch (not to mention knee-slapping punchlines) mark all of Whitman-Bradley’s work, and the poems in this book are no different. The poet is forgivingly and unforgivingly self-aware, somehow finding all the poetry in life’s least poetic moments.  ~Roger Stoll, essayist and poet

For all of us, even though we may continue to climb stairs and eat our vegetables, the ever-expanding past continues to nip at our heels. Buff Whitman-Bradley reminds us in these poems that we are not alone, that we participate in a common project with its pitfalls and distractions. He calls attention to the gifts and graces that accompany a seasoned perspective, and that there is a special liveliness and wise humor that comes with age that is both balm and elixir.  ~Gary Crounse

With his signature grace and economy, Buff Whitman-Bradley tackles the unimaginable; the body’s elemental breakdown and the proverbial leap into the unknown which awaits us all. Never settling for abstraction or platitude, these poems are as rugged and beautiful as the California landscapes humming in the background. And though he may have given up on his plan ‘to be an ancient Chinese poet’, something of their wild humor and gem-like clarity shines on every page. ~Seth Jani, Publisher and Editor of Seven CirclePress, Author of Night Fable

Tidy up

A Zen master of my acquaintance
Once said that when he died
He wished to leave no trace.
All the backpackers I know
Say the same
About their sojourns in the wild.
No messes, no unfinished business.
It’s a good idea to tidy up
Before all of our little departures
And our impending Big One –
Douse the coals, strew the ashes,
Bag any food scraps,
Bits of paper, foil and cardboard,
Erase all footprints,
Be forthright, apologize, forgive –
So that what remains of us in memory
Is not a squalid little campsite
Full of trash and debris
And tangled disputes
That will cause great consternation
Or anguish
To those left behind,
But is instead
An expanse of mountain grasses
Beside a high cold tarn
Where ones who loved us
Might like to pass a little time,
Pitch a tent,
Build a fire.

Sparrows and Dust / Zilka Joseph

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Sparrows and Dust, Poems by Zilka Joseph – The Ridgeway Press

SparrowsDustIs this the bird way? Where is home? What is the fate of wanderers? Have we all been “elsewhere”? Will truths be revealed to us in the end? In this finely tuned chapbook, the poet uses free verse and form to sing her stories, her history, her geography, her experience as an immigrant who finds rest after loss and upheaval with imagination and passion. With deft use of imagery, language and the senses, she travels and shape-shifts. She weaves in science, mysticism, imagination and myth. We fly from India to Michigan and back, from this world to other in-between states where memory, death, loss, the present, the search for home and the self all sing through several voices, and become a miniature symphony. As Attar tells us through his bird characters in his allegorical rendering of Sufism— “the way is long” so we must persevere to find the truth. We are but “water mixed with dust”. The bird-soul can only rest briefly, then it must move on.

ZilkaJZilka Joseph is an educator, editor and a widely published poet. Her chapbooks, Lands I Live In and What Dread, were nominated for a PEN America and a Pushcart award respectively. Her book Sharp Blue Search of Flame (WSUP) and was a finalist for the Foreword INDIES Book Award. http://www.zilkajoseph.com

The poems in Zilka Joseph’s Sparrows and Dust are separate skies—each a wrought song woven with a world of birds: mynah, grackle, swan, sparrow, hoopoe, heron, kingfisher, and dozens of others. From Mumbai and Kolkata in her native India to the yard outside her house in Michigan, this bird-crossed world is made smaller and more beautiful, as Joseph watches the skies and the breadth of her blue heart for the migration of the spirits of her parents and other ancestors. “Leave me a feather to dream on, a map to follow…” one poem sings. As I read and listened to these soaring, gorgeous poems, I felt the dust shake loose; I found myself more open, more buoyant, and more alive.”

—Robert Fanning, author of Severance, Our Sudden Museum, American Prophet and The Seed Thieves

Song and flight, which all poets aspire to achieve, are evident here, there, and everywhere, in this collection of Zilka Joseph’s poems. Her language sings. Between bird-beat and heart-beat, it’s an instrument exquisitely attuned to her love of depths and flitting surfaces. In poem after poem, we return with Zilka to who we are—a gift, a mystery, a wound seeking salve, light-bearers, dipping and swerving through passages of open air, sky and soul, in and out of memory and loss, anxiety and joy, arrival and parting, to settle and nest in the now.

—Ralph Nazareth is the author of Ferrying Secrets; Between Us the Long Road; & Dropping Death. He is the Managing Editor of Yuganta Press and the President of GraceWorks, Inc., an international nonprofit.

When I look up from these poems, I agree with Zilka Joseph that “I have been somewhere else,” perhaps in the mind of a bird. In these remarkable pieces, she explores the dust baths of sparrows–indeed, the behavior of many “life-birds”– as symbols for existence and wonder. Her words wing through family ancestry, migration, and the journey to a place called Michigan where the metaphors shift—hawks overhead, loss and death, but the dust still may, and finally does, shimmer. These are poems of memory and insight the color of saris and feathers, of meaning that rises from origins and resilience and high-flying beauty.

—Anne-Marie Oomen is author of Uncoded Woman, a tale in poems, and Love, Sex and 4-H, winner of the Next Generation Award for Memoir, among others. She teaches at Solstice MFA at Pine Manor College.

Zilka Josheph Poems published in Third Wednesday:
The Geese Who Came to Nest—Winter 2021
Once Upon a Snow Bunting

Purchase Sparrows and Dust from Small Press Distribution.

Infinity Standing Up / Drew Pisarra

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Infinity Standing Up by Drew Pisarra

A DELIGHTFUL COLLECTION OF LOVE SONNETS

Infinity_Standing_Up_Final_Front“A stunning collection of unique and eclectic observations of modern love which I’m sure Shakespeare himself would be pleased to see is ‘holding a mirror up to life.’ If Wes Anderson and Miranda July had a Queer love-child, they’d write like this.”
– Anna Girvan, Creative Fellow with the Royal Shakespeare Company

“Rhyming and skipping his way through jaggedly sexualized and playful, formal sonnets with serendipity and style (“Devour me! Think me not some crazy nut.”), Drew Pisarra has written a rousing and unusual collection of poems that respond with see-saw emotion to a lover who comes and goes, with difficulty and love. Puns abound; titles tease. These sonnets will knock you out, and you’ll return to them again.”
– Diane Mehta, How to Write Poetry (2005)

“These poems navigate the rapids of desire in a form that was made for twists and turns of feeling, from the derangement of lust to rueful self-reflection. Drew Pisarra honors the Shakespearean sonnet’s tradition of wit and economy, while simultaneously delivering the pleasurable shock of 21st-century idiom.”
– Joan Larkin, Cold River (Lambda Literary Award)

About Drew Pisarra: The author once toured his monologues around the country and even had a ventriloquist act but has since retired from the world of dummies. His short story collection Publick Spanking was published by Future Tense some time ago. More recently as part of the installation art duo Saint Flashlight (with Molly Gross), he’s been finding inventive ways to get poetry into public spaces.

About Capturing Fire Press: This independent publishing house was founded by Regie Cabico and seeks to promote politically charged performance and experimental poetry of the highest quality by diverse queer poets from around the globe.

For more information, contact capfirepress@gmail.com or email the author directly at mistermysterio@hotmail.com

When You Get Here / Shutta Crum

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0a92fa35-586f-4ba9-a087-405af0575a11Here’s everything you want in poetry. Understandable language—check. Interesting, inventive use of words—check. Topics that reference matters of common interest—check. Insights way beyond the usual—check. Don’t skim this collection. You’d miss way too much that makes our lives meaningful. Enter and walk “unafraid in this new topography.”

—Sharon Scholl, Professor emerita of humanities. Author of Music and Culture, Death and the Humanities, and three chapbooks of poetry

WHEN YOU GET HERE is a celebration of the small, precise details that accumulate, like snowflakes, into a life. It’s a map, guiding us though a landscape of grief, wonder and sensuality, touching all the delicate connections in between. We peek in cupboards, wrestle with lovers, walk on thin ice, followed by a wolf. Every poem reminds the reader to breathe, sense, and feel what it is to be alive.

—Joyce Sweeney, author of Impermanence and Wake up, Finishing Line Press

Here Shutta Crum’s love of language takes us on a fascinating journey, gives us Driving Directions, promises the road knows the way. She opens Father’s Cupboard, lets us see what held his world. She studies A Philosophy of Luminescence in a confining marriage and offers new light. In You Can Have It Back she wants to return the rib taken from Adam and given to woman, for it no longer holds her aright after the death of a poet friend. In What I Bequeath, Shutta says one day her bones will speak a language we will understand. We are fortunate—in this beautiful collection, she speaks clearly to us and we understand.

—Chris Lord, author of Field Guide to Luck and What We Leave, founder of Word’n Woman Press

SCrumShutta Crum’s poems are in Typehouse, Stoneboat, Southern Poetry Review, Beyond Words and 3rd Wednesday. Forthcoming: Main Street Rag. She was nominated for a Pushcart Prize by Typehouse. When You Get Here (2020) won a gold Royal Palm Literary Award. For more info or to book as a speaker: www.shutta.com

Purchase From:
Kelsay Books / Indybound / Amazon

Wrinkles In Time and in Love / Nancy Jo Allen

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allen_frontNancy Jo Allen proudly announces the release (March 20, 2021) of her first collection of poetry through her publisher Kelsay Books and Amazon. The book is entitled Wrinkles in Time and in Love, and includes the poem “Art” first published in Third Wednesday’s Vol.XI, No. 4 edition.

“Allen’s poems take us on a journey through the difficulties of relationship and identity: daughter, wife, mother, ex-wife, friend, and wife again. At each stage, we’re asked to reconsider our preconceptions and ideals in favor of the lived experience of those realities—a thoughtful and polished collection.”
—Marta Ferguson, former poetry editor for The Missouri Review, and author of Mustang Sally Pays Her Debt to Wilson Pickett

 

“Nancy Jo Allen’s poems are deeply felt and well crafted. She has an excellent ear and eye.”
—Bruce Taylor is the former Poet Laureate of Eau Claire and host of Off the Page a reading series at the Local Store Gallery.

“Like the haiku, Allen’s poetry captures small moments of life with images from nature. And like a haiku, the collection is perfect in word, rhythm, and line. Through her poems, we travel through the landscape of memory and vicariously touch grief and let it go. We recognize defeat and replace it with contentment. We love again.”
—Lori Younker, author of Mongolian Interior: An Expatriate Experience and Sioux Beside Me, former Columbia Chapter Missouri Writers Guild president, and author and founder of World So Bright.org, a collection of cultural essays.

Nancy Jo Allen was born and raised in Minneapolis, Minnesota, and now lives in Columbia, Missouri, with her husband Terry and their pup Jayden. 

Her poem, Art, is from the Autumn 2018 issue of 3rd Wednesday.

 

An Honest Hunger / Robert Lowes

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Lowes.AnHonestHunger“Robert Lowes addresses with wit and compassion topics we recognize: the body’s betrayals, unfulfilled desires, nostalgia, loss. Lowes’s love of words is apparent in his masterful soundwork and the equal skill with which he depicts the delicate beauty of a butterfly or slams home a devastating judgment on our human failings. A wide-ranging cast of characters wanders through these poems: a woman who keeps chickens, a Neanderthal buying an ax, a man with a fresh haircut, God. An Honest Hunger opens to us a world that is humorous and deeply serious, filled with signs and wonders, mischief and memories, unanswerable questions and unexpected redemptions–our world, the whole, sweet ‘slapstick ballet.'”

–Marjorie Stelmach, author of Walking the Mist and Falter

“If more poets wrote like Robert Lowes, more people would read poetry. In An Honest Hunger, his debut collection, Lowes never holds the reader at a distance. Here, the poet speaks with straightforward intelligence and acumen–and a pitch-perfect natural friendliness–without a scintilla of sentimentality. And his imagery is sublime. . . . An Honest Hunger appeals to humanity’s better self and reminds us that we are united not so much by our strengths as by our woundedness.”

–Robert Nazarene, Editor-in-Chief, The American Journal of Poetry, author of Empire de la Mort

“In poems that range from elegiac to exuberant, Robert Lowes’s An Honest Hunger is a joyful dance with everyday life. It is a book full of faith and doubt, anger and suffering, but one still laugh-out-loud funny. Lowes’s hunger for God, for meaning in life, makes this book the one to read now, when this hunger is more universal and pressing than ever.”

–Jesse Lee Kercheval, author of America that island off the coast of France, professor of English at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

BNLogoamazonlogoAn Honest Hunger by Robert Lowes was published by Resource Publications, an imprint of Wipf & Stock Publishers, in April 2020. It’s avialable now from Amazon and Barnes and Noble.

White Storm / Gary Metras

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1_white_storm_front_cover

White Storm by Gary Metras, (Rockford, MI: Presa Press, Feb. 2018)

ISBN 978-0-9965026-9-6; 88 pp. $15.95

Two poems included in White Storm were first published in the Summer 2010 issue of Third Wednesday:


Short Listed for the Massachusetts Poetry Book of the Year, Mass. Center for the Book, 2019

“There is always something enthralling about Gary Metras’s poetry. Perhaps it is the optimism within the pessimism. Perhaps vice versa. Maybe it it the accessibility to his work. Whatever it is, White Storm is readable and enjoyable, worth a place on your bookshelf.”

—Zvi A. Sesling, Boston Area Small Press and Poetry Scene. 

“The 48 poems in White Storm are written in an accessible, descriptive style; sometimes foreboding, sometimes a bit rueful, as though the narrator is chuckling to himself….Metras finds meaning in the natural world and offers a thoughtful meditation on life’s mysteries.”

—Steve Pfarrer, The Daily Hampshire Gazette

“In White Storm, Gary Metras has given us a poetry of reflections….His poems often have a classic, lyric and almost mythological bearing as if he sometimes channels ancients, but without losing direct contemporaneity of language….but how words travel off the page to carry us beyond ourselves for others, a legacy of sounds we may savor and hold close in our lives. I highly recommend this collection by a poet young in his upper years.”

—David Giannini, Wilderness House Literary Review

“The poems in White Storm create perfectly crafted worlds from carefully chosen details. Like a wise and patient teacher, Gary Metras takes us from wherever we are at the moment and drops us into the world of these poems, guiding us through a place full of love and light that is still never quite what it seems.”

—Erica Goss, Sticks & Stones #19, Posted October 1, 2018

Orders:

http://presapress.com/books/white-storm

https://www.amazon.com/White-Storm/dp/0996502696/ref=sr_1_1?dchild=1&keywords=White+Storm+by+Gary+Metras&qid=1616183726&s=books&sr=1-1

GaryMGary Metras’s new book of poetry is River Voice II (Adastra Press 2020). The Author of twenty books and chapbooks of poetry, his poems have appeared in America, The Common, Poetry, Poetry East, and Poetry Salzburg Review. He lives in Easthampton, Massachusetts, where, in April 2018, he was appointed as the city’s inaugural Poet Laureate.

Red Stilts / Ted Kooser

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RedStilts_Red Stilts finds Pulitzer Prize-winner and former U. S. Poet Laureate Ted Kooser at the top of his imaginative and storytelling powers. Here are the richly metaphorical, imagistically masterful, clear and accessible poems for which he has become widely known. Kooser writes for an audience of everyday readers and believes poets “need to write poetry that doesn’t make people feel stupid.” Each poem in Red Stilts strives to reveal the complex beauties of the ordinary, of the world that’s right under our noses. Right under Kooser’s nose is rural America, most specifically the Great Plains, with its isolated villages, struggling economy, hard-working people and multiple beauties that surpass everything wrecked, wrong, or in error.

Mr. Kooser’s poems have graced the pages of 3rd Wednesday six times and two of those poems appear in Red Stilts. Here is “Ohio Bluetip” from our Winter 2019 Issue. In this poem Mr. Kooser demonstrates that much can be accomplished with a single sentence.

Unmapped Worlds / David Chorlton

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Unmapped Worlds by  David Chorlton

Unmapped_WorldsThe Unmapped Worlds in this book extend from history to a way of life centered on European villages to the marginally surreal experience of our own times. The poems are previously uncollected ones enjoying their rediscovery. Whether through the visions of a medieval mystic or the routines that defined existence in a small town on the free world’s edge, David Chorlton reaches for what brought the mind to life in the course of living from day to day. The desert emerges as it appeared to early missionaries and conquerors in the Southwest and comes to bear multiple cultures today. Writing is a journey to the poet, and the work here follows some occasionally surprising side roads for Chorlton. 

Available from the author, $20.00 includes postage and packaging. Checks to David Chorlton. Send address to DavidChorlton@centurylink.net