Initially, the poems in Subhaga Crystal Bacon’s fine book show her keen eye for delivering the natural world. It’s tempting to think of her as a naturalist, but as her book progresses it becomes clear that, more broadly, she’s a human nature poet; poems of love and loss and community occur with the same acute precision.

Grounded in the beloved Pacific Northwest, Blue Hunger is an account of a soul’s journey, “empty of longing./Luminous, lambent.” In this world where grief merges with love, so does the poet merge “with that great distance.” Each moment and season in a life is carefully observed, “What I remember most was the flavor of those words, scented with lost possibilities.”

Bacon seamlessly marries the self with the world . . . of wild rivers and dark trees, of coyotes and hawks, of snow and summer grasses— or the human body, with its love, its aging, and its griefs… Bacon sings of our human hungers— “diligent, defended, devout”— with wild consciousness.  

Subhaga Crystal Bacon the author of two volumes of poetry, Blue Hunger, 2020 from Methow Press, and Elegy with a Glass of Whisky, BOA Editions, 2004. A cis-gender, Queer identified woman, she lives, writes, and teaches on the east slope of the North Cascade Mountains in Twisp, WA.

Available at https://confluence-poets-products.company.site/Blue-Hunger-by-Subhaga-Crystal-Bacon-p199293740

Picture Alaska—her braided rivers and Arctic tundra, her tidal shorelines and thrashing salmon. Imagine flying over the Yukon-Kuskokwim Delta with an inexperienced pilot, charging into an ever-changing rodeo of sky, clouds so thick it’s like flying through milk. Imagine Yup’ik elders whose humble behavior and reverence for their homeland teaches you more about living with intention than formal education ever could. Imagine learning that to practice deep listening is to practice silence. Imagine spending 21 days on a 42-foot trawler boating the Inside Passage.

Monica Devine’s new collection, Water Mask, captures these experiences alongside stories of New Mexico deserts, Wyoming horses, and family, making accessible through lyrical essays this remarkable American landscape.

In Water Mask, Monica Devine maps out a life in Alaska that explores issues of the human heart: fear, spiritual longing, memory, perception, loss and wonder. She skis woodland trails with her baby on her back, navigates sea ice with Beaufort Sea whalers, negotiates the deaths of her parents and endures the near loss of her cabin on the shape-shifting Copper River. In these captivating stories, Monica reflects on family, the importance of place, her work in Alaska Native villages, and more…all told against the background of a cold northern landscape that both rejects and beguiles.

To order, CLICK HERE.

Known for her exceptional translations of medieval French poetry and as an instructor of medieval French and English literature at major universities, Dorothy Gilbert, of Richmond, California, now presents her first poetry collection. Fox Woman is filled with the beauties of nature and encounters with the natural-wild, as well as philosophical meditations on mathematic formulas, art, and the mysteries of human relationships. The title poem was inspired by print artist Tsukioka Yoshitoshi’s depiction of an ancient Japanese myth about a shape-shifting woman who transforms herself into a fox.

A lyrical, earthy feast. . . these delicious poems lift us into a vivid world with their sensuous embrace.

The world becomes magical and often mysterious in Dorothy Gilbert’s poems. Landscapes, cityscapes, ordinary domestic settings, and above all, the presences of nature show forth in a fresh light. The language of the poems is vigorous and musical, its diction bracingly compact, and abounding in little revelatory surprises. This is a book that readers who care about poetry should cherish.

To order, CLICK HERE.

From Berkeley to Bolivia, from New York to New Mexico, our social-change movements have textured the 1950s through the present. The history makers presented in this “generational memoir” transformed the political/spiritual landscape of the U.S. and beyond, laying the foundation for contemporary thinking about equality and democracy.

Through 43 biographical sketches and memories of her personal friendships with each of them, the author creates a collective portrait of some of the rebels, artists, radicals, and thinkers who raised many of the issues of justice, ecology, feminism, and imperialism we are now familiar with.

Chellis Glendinning has written a memoir evoking the lives of women and men she has known. From Susan Griffin to Daniel and Patricia Ellsberg, Suzan Harjo to John Ross, they are some the most creative and courageous geniuses of a generation…. In the Company of Rebels is one of the most profoundly moving books I’ve read in years.

Psychologist/writer Chellis Glendinning has penned eight nonfiction books exploring psychological interfaces with social issues, as well as hundreds of essays in newspapers and magazines, a poetry book, and a bilingual opera. Off the Map and Chiva both won the National Federation of Press Women Book Award in nonfiction. She lives now in Bolivia where she wrote her first novel, Objetos, and is working on a second about three women in the Chaco War (1932-35).

To order, CLICK HERE. (Orders received before the end of December receive 30% off with a HOLIDAY30 code.)

Joanne Jagoda of Oakland California, grandmother of seven, used the shelter-in-place weeks to put together a book of seventy of her best poems, My Runaway Hourglass, Seventy Poems Celebrating Seventy Years. Joanne writing journey began when she retired in 2009 and started taking classes and workshops exploring the world of creative writing. She has widely published her poetry, short stories and creative non fiction.

It was during these crazy weeks of the pandemic, as the world turned upside down, that she was hit with a sense of urgency to put together her book. She knew first-hand from recent health issues she and her husband weathered, that life can be fragile and uncertain while time keeps flowing like sand in a runaway hourglass.

Her book is compelling and different than most poetry books. Many readers have reported they could not put it down and stayed up all night reading it. You will laugh and cry with Joanne.

Joanne Jagoda’s poetry gives us the opportunity to reflect on our own lives by opening the doors to hers. Soul-crushing and breath-halting, but uplifting and life-affirming.

Joanne Jagoda takes us on a journey through many different stages of her life and we become addicted to her highly readable poetry. It feels like she is sitting right next to us, telling us stories of beauty and fearlessness, sadness and courage and, always, with unflinching honesty.

For purchase information: https://mypoetry.gift/purchase-my-book/

The Full Moon Herald By Phyllis Klein is a book of poetry in newspaper format filled with real news stories, and personal news stories. It travels the ground of trauma, grief, empathy, and hope.

From Minder-Binder Review of Books:
This exceptional first book of poems should be required reading for anyone who 1) appreciates poetry as a meaningful way to explore who we are in this beautiful and troubling world; 2) is willing to open themselves to the honesty and intimacy of our shared and connected lives; and/or 3) wishes to mine the deeper nature of the news without the noise and nonsense of talking heads. 


”Phyllis Klein’s remarkable poems make hidden wounds visible as she digs into the Breaking News. Entering this world, you breathe in the fresh air of honesty. You fume, you weep with her along the treacherous paths she travels, to finally understand we are ‘relatives in the fields of trees, beauty and devastation we call home.’ Such good news.”

“Phyllis Klein is a poet of great courage. She brings what Ezra Pound called poetry: ’the news that stays news.’ Her determination to see and name what we are afraid to face powers the headlines of this startling debut collection.”

Available for purchase on Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/Full-Moon-Herald-Phyllis-Klein/dp/1733556826/

When Ida and her daughter Bessie flee a catastrophic pogrom in Ukraine for America in 1905, they believe their emigration will ensure that their children and grandchildren will be safe from harm. But choices and decisions made by one generation have ripple effects on those who come later—and in the decades that follow, family secrets, betrayals, and mistakes made in the name of love threaten the survival of the family: Bessie and Abe Weissman’s children struggle with the shattering effects of daughter Ruby’s mental illness, of Jenny’s love affair with her brother-in-law, of the disappearance of Ruby’s daughter as she flees her mother’s legacy, and of the accidental deaths of Irene’s husband and granddaughter. 

A sweeping saga that follows four generations from the tenements of Brooklyn through WWII, from Woodstock to India, and from Spain to Israel, How to Make a Life is the story of a family who must learn to accept each other’s differences—or risk cutting ties with the very people who anchor their place in the world.

2020 Best Book Awards Finalist in Fiction: Women’s Fiction

A moving novel of four generations of an immigrant family whose characters are so real I cannot forget them.


An engaging and heartfelt portrayal of intergenerational trauma and hope.


A wonderful gift for the holidays and great for book club discussions.  Author will Zoom at no cost with book club meetings. 

For ordering information, CLICK HERE.
 

An ode to the Egyptian Land, to its inhabitants—humans or spirits—and most of all to its mothers, magicians and nurses.

A captivating tale that moves from street to street . . . from era to era . . . a world where Jews and Arabs lived together…

Set in Cairo’s old Jewish Quarter in the first half of the twentieth century, A Land Like You follows the lives of Jewish Zohar and Muslim Masreya, “milk-twins” bound by an earth-shaking love. Part fantastical fable, part realistic history, the novel draws on ethno-psychiatrist Tobie Nathan’s Jewish Egyptian heritage and deep knowledge of North African folk beliefs to create a bewitching tapestry where spirit possession and religious mysticism exist side by side with sober facts about the British occupation of Egypt and the rise of the Muslim Brotherhood and the Free Officers’ Movement.

From the dingy hovels of the city’s poorest residents to the glittering palaces of the wealthy international aristocracy, A Land Like You exists in visual and auditory splendor.

Tobie Nathan is professor emeritus of psychology at Université-Paris VIII and the author of a dozen novels and numerous psychoanalytic studies.

Joyce Zonana, writer and literary translator, is a regular contributor to the blog, Feminism and Religion, and the author of a memoir, Dream Homes: From Cairo to Katrina, an Exile’s Journey.

To order, CLICK HERE

What is a diary and why do we keep them? WHITE SNAKE DIARY explores the diary as a literary genre. Uniquely, WHITE SNAKE DIARY is also a diary, offering a timely #MeToo profile of growing up female. Jane pulls on the allure of the repurposed with found photos, school assignments, diary entries, letters, essays, and professional reports, writing with humor and attention to the little moments most people miss. Released during our global pandemic, WHITE SNAKE DIARY highlights the diary’s documentarian and reflective functions in this time of tragedy and cocooning.

Jane P. Perry is a retired Researcher and Teacher from the University of California, Berkeley’s Harold E. Jones Child Study Center and an expert in outdoor play. Since sheltering in place, Jane has been interviewed by Paula Whitacre, featured in Hidden Timber Books Small Press Author Reading Series, and has diary-related pieces published in Persimmon Tree, McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern, Women Writers, Women’s Books and The Oaklandside. 100% of the return on purchase price goes to Ohlone sovereignty through Sogorea Te Land Trust, an urban Indigenous women-led 501c3 organization facilitating the return of SF Bay land to Indigenous stewardship, healing from the legacies of colonization and genocide, promotion of a different way of living, and the continuation of the work that the ancestors and future generations call us to do. To find out more about Jane go to janepperry.com, where you can read an excerpted review of WHITE SNAKE DIARY from her author reading.

Purchase through your local bookstore or here.

In Hilda Raz’s dazzling List & Story, a pencil waits for us in every room, a bride and bridesmaid hold a trashcan between them, and April is recast as “a beautiful automaton” that lights peach blossoms on fire. These kaleidoscopic poems whipsaw between love and grief to create raw, unflinching elegies. Raz’s exquisite formal control is paired with associative leaps in these stunning explorations of identity, mortality, and the threshold between language and speechlessness… Bristling with brutal truths and sudden tenderness, Raz reminds us that, despite our losses, language and love will return in this life and the next.

”Here then is my life in letters. A great weight,” writes Hilda Raz. This harvest—of art, of ripe heirloom tomatoes, of bobcats and lightning—nourishes us body and soul. This poet wants “to know how women sound in their heads.” These poems offer that, plus the beauty of “the glow we can’t see by,” the great mysteries of time and love and the night sky. Here is a poetry in the company of nature and art, saying YES out loud. Here is a poetry that acknowledges death, its nearness, then invites it to the table, where we feast. Thank you, Hilda Raz, for a masterful, profound collection.

To order, CLICK HERE.

To order visit: https://triayarts.com/books

In the driest, harshest corner of the Golden State, along Route 86, sits the Green Lantern Autocourt. There lives Delia, a lonely girl, with her pessimistic, phobic, depressed tyrant of a father, who, despite his neurosis, loves and protects his daughter. In this uncompromising environment, Delia and her father bond and thrive.

Ariel Smart was born at the Green Lantern during the peak of the Great Depression, when characters like the Joads from John Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath stopped for gasoline and supplies on their westward movement.

To order, CLICK HERE.

To order, CLICK HERE.