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Prime Meridian – Connie Post

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Released by Glass Lyre Press on January 3, 2020.

These poems are of a seer – unwrapping time, being, the Change we are igniting. The considerations are hard won- who we are, what is coming upon us in this age, the passage we are entering and the exit -the seer knows it. There are no exhortations, no longings for forecasts, only the seeing and the forthcoming Being that envelopes us more and more “until all that is left of us” . We need this wisdom book, clear elixirs from the Source. True mind-beauty, caved with humanity – beam, everyone must touch this volume in order to traverse the present age, Bravissimo.
Juan Herrera: 21st Poet Laureate of the United States

In “Prime Meridian,” Connie Post’s daring new collection, she writes to “identify/the noises of departure”—those of land engulfed by natural disaster, of family dissolution by abuse, of retreats to safety in the face of suffering.  More importantly, these poems teach us conservation: “we find graceful ways/to slides out of a room/step over a fractured equator/“—holding  things dear in the face of such violation. Remedies come in language: the grammar of ritual, ceremony, and resistance. This is a poetry of incantation against the darkest and most secret types of human depredation and hymns of recovery—all spoken in assured and inventive measure. Connie Post’s strength is her unflinching and virtuous language to redeem a moment or a life.  
Maxine Chernoff: Author of Under the Music: Collected Prose Poems, MadHat Press

“I have been on fire / since the moment I walked / through this door.” Thus begins one of the many burning poems in Connie Post’s Prime Meridian. In fact, the work in this book is so good it is as though Post herself has been on fire since she walked through the door of poetry. In poems both personal and political, Post manages to connect physical and geological ailments by way of her spare but unsparing lyrics. This is an important collection everyone should be reading.
Dean Rader: Author of Self-Portrait as Wikipedia Entry (Copper Canyon Press 2017) and editor of Bullets into Bells: Poets and Citizens Respond to Gun Violence

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From 3rd Wednesday, Fall 2018:

One Minute to Midnight / David Chorlton

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Here is 3rd Wednesday’s poem of the week from the Winter Issue. In his cover letter David wrote: “I’m happy to see print magazines continue in the digital age, as I prefer to hold my reading matter in my hands than to look at a screen! I write because doing so hasn’t lost its meaning to me, and because I feel I’m in good company among (most) others who write.“

All Her Jazz / D.R. James

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The 2018 micro-chapbook All Her Jazz, which is free (and fun!) to download and fold at the Origami Poems Project (click on the cover):

The title poem first appeared in 3rd Wednesday’s December 2017 issue.

D. R. James has taught college writing, literature, and peace-making for 35 years and lives outside Saugatuck, Michigan. His latest of eight poetry collections are If god were gentle (Dos Madres) and Surreal Expulsion (Poetry Box), and a new chapbook, Flip Requiem, will be released in Spring 2020 (Dos Madres).

D.R. James’ Author Page at Amazon.com

Volume XIII, No 1 (Winter 2020)

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This issue includes winning poems and poems of merit from our fourth One Sentence Poetry Contest. We have new poems by Marge Piercy, Leslie Schultz, Gary Wadley, Jane Blanchard, Tiffany Babb, Alan Harris, Lisa Timpf, Terry Allen and many others. The print edition is available now at Amazon.com. Contributor copies will be in the mail next week. For a free digital edition, click Free Issues on the menu.

Monsters in the Rain / Terry Allen

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Monsters in the Rain
Publisher: Kelsay Books
Publication date: November 27, 2019
Available for Purchase: Amazon.com

Terry Allen’s chapbook, Monsters in the Rain, begins and ends with two dream-like lyric poems that reach back in time to explore a particular family legacy through the stories passed down across generations and geographical locations. There are beautiful, heart-rending elegies here; and longer, multi-layered narratives that are deepened and expanded through the use of masterfully placed moments of lyric suspension and contemplation. There are characters and relatives whose humanity is fully revealed; there are ghosts and the interplay of the uncanny—an acknowledgment of the fact that, no matter how much time has passed, the dead step in and out of our lives at will. In several of these poems, there is a dark humor that is handled so well it serves to deepen the collection’s pathos. A moving collection that explores family, loss, memory, and history, and with love informing and guiding all these poems, what more can we ask, or hope, for?
—Jude Nutter, author of I Wish I Had a Heart Like Yours, Walt Whitman, and three other collections.

Terry Allen’s poems feature tightly-constructed narratives of family and rural life placed in an American landscape that has been nearly obscured by social media and technology. The settings are concrete and certain: small essential dramas that play out upon the ironing board, the stove, the sidewalk, the barn, in bushel baskets and body bags, with conclusions invariably unforeseen. The tone ranges from whimsical to poignant, occasionally chilling, juxtaposing the casual violence of rural life against the horror of murderous excess. Monsters in the Rain left me with awistful recognition of the ways people vanish from our lives, and what remains
—Bridget Bufford, author of Cemetery Bird and Minus One: A Twelve-Step Journey.

Monsters in the Rain is a collection that resists an easy footing. Allen offers us what initially seems to be fond memories of childhood, thoughtful reflections on family history, but the deeper we go in the poems, the clearer it is that Allen has worked for that thoughtful fondness. He well represents the darkness that shadows the family scenes he presents, but he isn’t ruled by it. Neither bitter nor sentimental, Allen gives us a book that, in its best moments, compassionately exposes the complicated reality of loving and losing.
—Marta Ferguson, author of Mustang Sally Pays Her Debt to Wilson Pickett

Terry Allen was born in Brisbane, Australia in 1946. He is emeritus professor at the University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire, where he taught theatre arts. His poems have appeared in numerous journals, including Popshot Quarterly, Into the Void and Main Street Rag. He lives in Columbia, Missouri with his wife Nancy.

Terry’s Poem “Larry” was a winner in 3rd Wednesday’s One Sentenence Poetry Contest. It appears in Volume XIII, No 1.

All The Dead are Holy / Larry Levy

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Larry Levy

In this collection, not only are all the dead holy, but all the living as well, including “the one-legged veteran, the toddler with doll and comb.”  There are echoes of those who perished in the Holocaust and those still laboring to make a life in the modern American landscape.  In Levy’s tightly crafted poems, we glimpse what is both familiar and human:  teachers, immigrant brides, a lost father’s shirts and ties, the sidekick brother, the dying mother.  The message is clear and powerful:  “You must remember.”

— John Jeffire, author of Motown Burning and Shoveling Snow in a Snowstorm (Finishing Line, 2016)

Larry Levy is the best kind of writer.  His poems–with their honesty and intimacy–invite you in, ask you to sit at the table of his life, and listen to his heart tell you the stories that you need to hear about the past that is never past, the wars that will not end, the people who loved him and who continue to touch him even though they are gone.  Hearing his stories, you begin to wake to your own stories, your own losses and loves, and finally you want to take his hand and thank him for what he has given you.

— John Guzlowski, author of Echoes of Tattered Tongues (Aquina Polonica, 2016)

All The Dead Are Holy – it is, at once, a prayer, a history and a family album.  Levy unlocks secret passages into the past and unearths the artifacts of not just an extended family but whole generations of people doing their best to be who they are in a world that often wishes they were otherwise.  Delivered in skillfully wrapped packages of prosody, All the Dead Are Holy is a wide-awake walk down memory lane in the city of what it means to be fully human.

— JodiAnn Stevenson, author of The Procedure (March Street, 2006)
and Diving Headlong Into A Cliff Of Our Own Delusion (Saucebox Books, 2010)

The Rules / James Scruton

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The Rules is the latest from Third Wednesday contributor, James Scruton, author of two full collections and five chapbooks of poems. He is the recipient of many awards for his work, including the Frederick Bock Prize from Poetry magazine, the Grayson Books Chapbook Competition, and the Finishing Line Press Prize in Poetry.

See more about Mr. Scruton and read a sampling of his poems at The Poetry Foundation.

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