PRAISE FOR
In A Pasture With Palominos

Joan Stepp Smith's poems renew our faith in the Word Made Flesh at the deepest level. Syncopated, mangled, phosphorescent, squirmy, elegantly and profoundly eccentric—these are the creations of a truly individual mind. A lover of language, an artful channeler of but partially glimpsed emotions and psychologies, this is a continuously surprising writer who truly deserves the title Poet. How many people open up whole new worlds? As a very famous old black man who played a mean guitar would say to me, "Right here." And that's what I feel about this poet. Right here.
— Kris Saknussemm

Joan Stepp Smith is a gifted poet. Her work reels with word play, musical language, allusion, and illusion. It is sensual and sexual. It provokes with startlingly original (often playful) language and leads the reader again and again into dark, intimate, dangerous territory. Beware, all who enter here: this book is riveting and unforgettable.
— Susan Terris

Joan Stepp Smith's In A Pasture With Palominos is a one of the most exciting and original collections of poetry in recent years. Conceptually brilliant, verbally breathtaking and stylistically innovative, Joan Stepp Smith's poetry invigorates and recalibrates all of the complex issues of art and experience. The pleasures of these poems are many, including the discovery of the poet's complex narrative architectures and high-wire verbal antics [calisthenics?] that both surprise us and are able to alter a poem at moment's notice.
— David St. John

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PRAISE FOR
Beyond Waking

Beyond Waking is a stunning book that transcends time in its movement: stripping it down, puncturing the layers of formality of presentation/while at the same time honoring them… It lives brilliantly amid the collecting and dispersing/the intimate and the public, where madness and joy spiral and swirl away — delivering us to the pivot of belief.
— Jan Beatty, author of Red Sugar, Boneshaker, Mad River, and Ravenous

In Beyond Waking, the flower once seen remains on the inner eye, the note once heard diminishes but never disappears. Spend time in Joseph Karasek's world… you'll return with a clearer eye, a deeper heart, for your own.
— Richard St. John, author of The Pure Inconstancy of Grace

Joseph Karasek grew up in New York City. He created school orchestras on the elementary and secondary levels, and taught music composition and music theory at Long Island University. He has lived in Pittsburgh, PA since 1991, and now spends his winters in California. His poetry has been published in Blue Arc West: An Anthology of California Poets (Tebot Bach, 2006) and Along These Rivers: Poetry and Photography from Pittsburgh (Quadrant, 2009).

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PRAISE FOR
Love and the Ten Thousand Things

Love and the Ten Thousand Things is a book full of edges and urgency, the poems slipping gracefully among their many modes of discourse: cautionary wisdom, intimate muttering, incantation, and awe. Things are some things half-said but never half-felt in these poems which bring to mind both the fullness of John Ashbery's world and the simplicity of Li Po's.
— Gail Wronsky, author of Poems for Infidels, Dying for Beauty and The Love-talkers

In his seminal anthology, The New American Poetry 1945-1960, Donald Allen issued a challenge to poets of the future. Joseph Karasek accepts that challenge. Writing in the tradition of Olson and Duncan, he manifests a lyric consciousness poised on the edge between beauty and terror. Love and the Ten Thousand Things is a masterpiece.
— Michael Wurster, author of The British Detective, The Cruelty of the Desert and The Snake Charmer's Daughter

Joseph Karasek grew up in New York City. He created school orchestras on the elementary and secondary levels, and taught music composition and music theory at Long Island University. He has lived in Pittsburgh, PA since 1991, and now spends his winters in California. His poetry has been published in Blue Arc West: An Anthology of California Poets (Tebot Bach, 2006) and Along These Rivers: Poetry and Photography from Pittsburgh (Quadrant, 2009).

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PRAISE FOR
By All Lights

Bruce Boston often places his poems at a balance point between what is and what's left. The tenses here are purposeful: the measure is not nostalgia but a carefully nuanced reckoning of the view. "I gather what I can," he says, beginning with "the lesson of the seed," and this immediacy, this urgency to name and hold against the slippage of Time is characteristic of his work. By All Lights is simply a pleasure to read and to savor.
— Peter Everwine

The Art lies in hiding the art, Horace teaches us, and B.H. Boston is a master of such concealment in poems that are spare and tight, that speak to us without patronizing of things that matter most in this life. I love the delicacy, tenderness and intimacy of pieces such as "I am Reading," the faith and incantation of poems like "Processional," and the mystical realism of "Apiary". This book is about remembering and paying attention and healing and praising. Ultimately, it is about the human spirit—and it soars.
— Ilya Kaminsky

In Boston's poetry we hear "the train / that bluffs its way through snow / in the night Sierra" and with a subtlety beyond measure, "the fronds of podocarpus stirring / their cups of wind". In the spiritual urgency of these poems, a world is brought forth in its fecundity, the indissoluble blue world, radiant and fragile. Boston is a visionary naturalist, rescuing moments that will not recur with a lyric force harnessed only by the wisest of poets.
— Carolyn Forché

Equally at ease in describing the natural world or the freeways of San Diego, Bruce Boston brings to both his exquisite love poems for his wife Marsha and his profound poems of cultural lament an unerring sense of music. With his lyric grace and rapier vision, Bruce Boston is a troubadour for our time.
— David St. John

B.H.Boston received his BA in English from Cal State University, Fresno, and his MFA in Creative Writing from the University of California at Irvine. Nominated for a Pushcart Prize in 2006, Boston’s work has appeared in numerous magazines and anthologies over the years. A book of his poems, Only the Living, was published by Helix House Press. He is currently Poetry Editor and Consulting Managing Editor for Poetry International at San Diego State University and Curator of the Master Author’s Residency Program at La Jolla Country Day School. He lives in San Diego with his wife, Marsha.

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PRAISE FOR
Beauty's Tattoo

Here's a book you will not put down. Like climbing "a fiery stairway," or finding the unlikely "encounter between a piano and a Rothko" in a garden, like entering "Kafka's garage" or "floating down the highway/ in a snowstorm" Cathy Colman's stunning second poetry collection, Beauty's Tattoo enters a place of fearlessness. Her contemporary range of topics excites the gallery of possibility, and there, emerging from a "fugitive kind" of exile, the body's wild card is played against the mind in a kind of self-reflecting dissonance and philosophical insight that can only belong to beauty and its many incarnations. Edgy and simultaneously elegant, Colman's language is always musically and imagistically alive like a snake at both ends: it works like consciousness overhearing itself. Beauty's Tattoo is moving and funny. One thinks of Andre Breton's concept of passion (Colman's "passion like water" floods these poems and carries them far into our memory), with its wild magnificent eyes having to "mix in the human struggle" in order to be authentic, to be troubled by beauty, to be known and known again.
— Elena Karina Byrne

I've been an admirer of Cathy Colman's work for over 15 years now: her intoxicating blend of stop-in-your-tracks imagery, her lettuce-crisp diction, the mixture of Eros, imagination, and longing. These new poems courageously step into the darkness and emerge with beads of light.
— Jeffrey McDaniel

Although the realms of dream and desire permeate the poems in Cathy Colman's ravishing new collection, Beauty's Tattoo, it is the way experience itself marks us that this book so powerfully envisions. Cathy Colman shows us how living leaves the evidence of its passage along the lengths of our bodies, both without, and within. The many poems cast as letters in this collection are emblematic of one of the book's central ambitions—to establish a potent, rock-solid bridge of intimacy between the poet and her readers. Cathy Colman's exquisite poems are epistles to the past, reflections upon the future, and heart-breaking meditations upon the metaphysics of daily transcendence. This is a book to treasure.
— David St. John

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PRAISE FOR
Follow Me Down

"15th century painter Cennini spoke of the art of 'unseen things hidden in the shadow of natural ones Like 'a sea turning in on itself' Kate Buckley’s poems speak to this, moving together, folding and unfolding the echoes of a voice in place, a voice out of place, 'salt licking salt—/coming home.' Follow Me Down maps out the geography of longing where sometimes 'you walk the yellow fields,' sometimes 'the moon sets itself on fire,' lighting up the distances between the past and the future. Buckley’s parenthetical considerations, her ache and intellect coincide in a sensuous, revelatory motioning toward that inspired sanctuary of who we are."
—Elena Karina Byrne

"Vivid, passionate, pulsing with life in the face of loss and pain, these incantations bravely seek to void The Void. They are poems to conjure with."
— Charles Harper Webb

Kate Buckley, a ninth-generation Kentuckian, was educated at Transylvania University and the University of Kentucky, and is currently an MFA candidate at Spalding University in Louisville. She is also the author of A Wild Region (Moon Tide Press, 2008). Her poems have appeared in such publications as Bellingham Review, North American Review, and Shenandoah. She is the recipient of the James Hearst Poetry Prize, the Gabehart Prize for Imaginative Writing, and was a 2008 Pushcart Prize nominee. She lives in Laguna Beach, California.

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Deity-Alphabets

Deity-Alphabets,Carroll Kearley’s luminous first book of poems, gives testimony to Keat’s knowledge that humanity’s certainty resides in "the holiness of the Heart’s affections." Plain-spoken yet naturally resonant, Kearley’s poems of witness "unravel threads of tortured talk" inherent in the lives of the homeless. He reminds us that language, our common bond, offers the vivid grammar of the spirit, the "fractured syntax" of seeing ourselves in others, and that "each bearer of a name/ has an irreplaceable impress." The poet, "his voice, a second violin" brings the beauty of these "common flowers" to our attention, and we are so very grateful for it.
—Elena Karina Byrne

Carroll Kearley has spent years stopping by an outdoor market in Santa Monica where homeless men and women gather to beg, sell, or entertain. He does not go there to understand or report on their "plight."His aim is not that of a sociologist or journalist or documentarian. He is just interested in them as people, each with distinctive tastes and a personal story. It is a labor of love and admiration. The poems voice not only dreams deferred or hopes broken, but tiny victories, affordable vanities, and survival strategies.
—Garry Wills

Carroll C.Kearley was born in a farmhouse near Buhl, Idaho July 6, 1930. In 1948, three years after the end of World War II, he entered the University of Santa Clara. He graduated with a degree in English Literature. In 1963 he was awarded the Ph.D. in Philosophy by the University of Notre Dame. He followed the profession of university teacher. He completed that career by teaching at Loyola Marymount University from 1966 until 1995. Deity-Alphabets is his first collection.

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Story

"Keep your feet moving/and surely/the music will follow." Surely it is the music that sustains master poet Marcia Cohee. In her long-awaited collection, Story, Cohee gives us luminous lyricism and brilliant, unsparing vision. Passionate and tightly woven, the poems make their way cautiously and with abandon, in bitter winds.
—Joan Bauer

Marcia Cohee’s Story is an elegant examination of loss, the shape-shifting a person endures over a lifetime: the things we lose, the knowledge we gain. These poems carry us with the speaker on her journey to make sense of illness and suffering—even unto confronting death and the inevitable orphaning of us all: "When the seed splits the world/ and it falls like a feather".
—Kate Buckley

When writing "is an act of worship," when "the sentence ends with a comma and will not let go," a terrible courage finds its way in the dark of Marcia Cohee’s book of poems, Story. We come here to Rilke’s notion that "beauty is the beginning of terror," where the ignited, often unexpected awe inside of reverence takes hold. "Seeking magnetic north" her poems are unflinching and target their subjects at point-blank range. "Believe what you will," she instructs, knowing we do. So, there’s also a sudden, inarguable beauty we discover in each poem’s truth, especially the one which wakes us from sleep: "You are not/who you are." We have never been so alive, even in the face of death. Former Poet Laureate Stanley Kunitz’s phrase, "The thing that eats the heart is mostly heart," seems to haunt Cohee’s language, line for line, beauty for terrible beauty.
—Elena Karina Byrne

With consistent dignity, Marcia Cohee explores several worlds in her new book Story: nature, mythology, and personal experience—especially the realm of serious illness, which elicits from this poet a large and ferocious maturity. Cohee’s beautifully observed imagery, her highly-polished craft, her emotional depth belong to a seasoned poet who earns our respect on every page. This new book is a remarkable effort, worthy of reading—and re-reading—for a long time to come.
—Holly Prado

Marcia Cohee received her MFA from the University of Massachusetts, where she studied under James Tate. She is the author of six chapbooks as well as three previous collections: "Sexual Terrain" (1986), "Laguna Canyon Was Once a River" (1991), and "Bonefire" (1996). More than 250 of her poems have appeared in various literary magazines and anthologies. Active in the Southern California poetry community for many years, Marcia has taught workshops in both poetry and fiction, has read at numerous veunes throughout California. With her husband Pat, Marcia co-hosted the Laguna Poets readings and edited the Laguna Poets chapbook series, known for nurturing the careers of many talented Southern California poets.

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An Urgent Request
by Sarah Luczaj

A Fortunate Daughter Book
An Imprint of Tebot Bach

"Sharp, dramatic, funny and shocking poetry."
—Yuri Andrukhovych, Ukrainian poet, novelist and essayist. Co—founder of the popular literary performance group "Bu–Ba–Bu" (Burlesque—Bluster—Buffoonery).

"I read An Urgent Request with enormous appreciation. The mix of emotion and imagination, the near side of the domestic juxtaposed with the wrenching human questions, without the scaffolding of overt autobiographical narrative, immediately brings to mind some of my very favorite poets: Akhmatova, Radnoti, and Rosario Castellanos. Beautiful poetry."
—Jeffrey Greene, poet, memoirist and nature writer. His latest book, The Golden Bristled Boar, is forthcoming from University of Virginia Press, 2010.

"From the tenderness and breathlessness of "oh my girl" to the irony and humor of "How to Take Control of Your Own Life," Luczaj’s sensitive and daring poems invite the reader to follow her and to heed her urgent request — no, no, let’s swim a little further."
—Heather Hartley, Paris editor of Tin House; author of the poetry collection Knock Knock, forthcoming from Carnegie Mellon in 2010.

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Polaroids

In Polaroids, Steven Paschall develops his meditation on vision, building from snapshots of the second-sighted to a serial narrative of an artist, the poet's alter-ego, as he stitches the singular moments of perception into a totalizing vision of the world seen so purposefully it may become a kind of blindness. Like the photographs that provide the title, here are so many moments of light or enlightenment that will never come again. So here is a new voice, a young poet who evidences his own uniqueness again and again.
— Jake Adam York, author of A Murmuration of Starlings, editor of Copper Nickel

Polaroids is a collection that both questions and undermines all of our assumptions about how we choose to "see" our world. This is always the highest ambition of art. As we question the stability of what moves in and out of vision in our material world, how can we help but to look ever more deeply within? The poems of Steven Paschall’s Polaroids are like images from a deck of blackened Tarot cards, a sequence of which begins foretelling our futures now hanging in the deepest of mists, futures we can only viscerally sense but never completely apprehend, never entirely bring into focus, never in our lifetimes finally—truly—see.
— David St. John

Steven Paschall holds a bachelor’s degree in English Literature/Creative Writing from the University of Colorado-Denver. He lives in France, working or not as a translator/teacher/volunteer counselor,, and is currently writing new books, recording a fourth album of music and working on a second photography collection.

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Scenes From a Good Life

These big-hearted, all-embracing poems are a celebration of life—of Paul Tayyar's deeply felt connection to the world around him and his sense of kinship with all humanity—from family and friends to the homeless and downtrodden. In Scenes from a Good Life, Tayyar gives voice to a generation that grew up in Orange County—where buildings are torn down and rebuilt every ten years, "The strawberry fields...buried like old Indian/ Gravesites..." He is not, however, speaking of privilege and wealth—"the good life" promulgated by the media and popularized by The O.C.—but of a better life, filled with intelligence, humor, and insight, and an enduring sense of wonder.
- Marilyn Johnson, editor of Pearl Magazine and author of A Necessary Fire

Paul Tayyar's poems fulfill all my poetry needs: as a publisher, I want to publish them; as a poet, they make me want to be a better poet; and finally, as poetry lover, they place me dear reader on a fabulous ferris wheel to spin over rivers of love that honor belief and affirmation of a Good Life of family, baseball, art, music and a hopeful humanity that includes mermaids and Bigfoot while "we live in the marrow of the colors we create."
- Joan Jobe Smith, founding editor of Pearl Magazine and Bukowski Review, author of The Pow Wow Cafe and Jehovah Jukebox

Paul Kareem Tayyar’s first book of poems, Everyday Magic (West-Coast Bias Press) was released in 2007, and he is a two-time nominee for the Pushcart Prize. His forthcoming book, Postmark Atlantis (Level 4 Press), will be released in 2009. He is also the Founder and Editor of World Parade Books, an independent press located in Southern California that has published books by Gerald Locklin, Edward Field, and Donna Hilbert.

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Monkey Journal

If Holly Prado didn't exist, the Muses would have to invent her to fulfill the imperatives of the imagination. Monkey Journal, her chronicle of small and large events over the course of a year, reveals a very important and often neglected truth. In order to live a creative and ethical life, one must do it rather deliberately. Prado has worked tirelessly, as she says, "to tell what can't be told." Focus is the fact and font of all creativity and it has always been Prado's gift as a writer--absolute focus and attention to where she is and who she's with. She is also patient enough to wait for the absolute defining moment. Like the moon, her guardian spirit, Prado never forces anything. Her work is, simply, all the forms of light.
- Eloise Klein-Healy

In this exquisite and lyrical journal, acclaimed poet Holly Prado, long responsible for some of our most searching, deeply felt, and beautifully articulated explorations of the soul, plumbs the mysteries of the ordinary, seeking to "tell what can't be told," looking for the "the ineffable, the truth under the truth." Alive with vividly rendered details of daily life in Los Angeles, filled with a sense of inexhaustible wonder and curiosity, illuminated by a deep reverence for the natural world, brimming with compassion and generosity, Monkey Journal is nothing less than a contemporary book of hours a twenty-first century Book of Changes, a daybook of the modern soul in conversation with the world. Reading it, we are both replenished and reminded how enter each day -- and our own lives -- more deeply, more attentively, and with more passionate engagement.
- Alison Townsend

After Holly Prado’s majestic selected poems, These Mirrors Prove It, it’s an added delight to encounter her in the more casual and playful setting of Monkey Journal. In this intimate chronicle of her days and nights, Prado keeps her own rock-solid, good-humored and frequently musical counsel. She’s a treasure.
- Aram Saroyan

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One Breath

Whatever the discipline or craft, a close study of the work at hand is necessary. Neither practitioners of medicine nor poetry can afford to wing it "like to the lark at break of day." As carefully arranged as a tray of surgical instruments, Clark-Sayles’ poems in One Breath lead us from youth to maturity in two practices: medicine and poetry. She writes of early awareness of threats to life: Anne Frank’s as well as the lives of school children in her elementary school practicing "duck and cover" in Colorado near the military air base where their fathers worked. Her poems are full of confidence and tact, even when describing medical school training: the cadaver’s truths, and a comprehension of facts as "the doctor’s art seeps in unseen."
--Margaret Kaufman

Throughout, from its start in gross anatomy’s "scent of wintergreen" to its "last red bead of pomegranate," Catherine Clark-Sayles’s One Breath immerses us in the sensuous world of her lived life. Whether from the vantage of the geriatrician she is or the patient she has been, of the observer or the observed, in poem after accomplished poem she makes her daily rounds, compassionate, lyrical, alert, practiced in the poet’s art—and we are fortunate to be by her side, our own breaths invigorated and enriched.
--Dr. Roy Jacobstein

After a military-brat childhood, medical school, and 20 years as a geriatrics physician, Catharine Clark-Sayles recovered a childhood love of poetry as a way to find meaning in the stories presented by her patients. Over the last two decades she has worked to undo the habits of dry clinical reportage for a more lyrical narration while finding the beauty of medical language. She is published widely in medical journals and anthologies. One Breath is her debut collection.

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A Café in Boca

Reading Sam’s poems is a little like falling down a magic rabbit hole:  the world you thought you knew gets rearranged and what you’re likely to encounter is “pain or the funniest thing in America,” often both in the same moment.  Sam has a certain dead-pan way of inventing stories in a lingo that makes them all the more remarkable.  He’s an original.
--Peter Everwine

When I think of languages combining like blood and milk, resulting in surprising lyric changes across someone's poetry, I think of Sam Pereira's work and a rural background of Portuguese fishermen. He moves from the female oratory to a punk idiom as skillfully as anyone half his age just now beginning to write poems. There is a shyness in Pereira's work that insists on invented lives that arrive in the morning, a heavy deliberate and as flabbergasted as the rising sun.
--Norman Dubie

I’ve been an admirer of Sam Pereira’s poetry for thirty years now, marvelling constantly at his intelligence and humor, his bravado and high style. Sam Pereira’s poems are often both disarming and alarming, or perhaps, first alarming, and then tenderly disarming. There is a fantastic American swagger to these poems, part John Berryman and part Richard Hugo, part Hemingway and part film director David Lynch (if you don’t understand what I mean, check out “Cat Galaxies”). The hyper-real intensity is mediated by the irreal, or the surreal, as public histories and private histories collide and send showers of sparks across the page of every poem.
-- David St. John

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Swagger and Remorse

Richard Fox weaves lyrical magic in his Swagger & Remorse, a book-length series of poems at once intimate (I’d rather be a river than anything else.) and richly metaphysical (Trees look inside the houses, see all the wood & cannot look away.). There are gorgeous lines absolutely everywhere. They help us to consider grief—I’ll always/think of you as I pretend to eat the living air or pull/an origami swan out of nowhere/or out of someone’s ear—with humor and mystery and an elegant humanity. They show us our crazy world of war and moonrises, they hold paradox, they gift us with truth. (A rainbow/raptures down/freighted with pain.) I recommend these distilled and powerful poems, with their birds and trees and houses and fires and rivers and hands and salt and blood to anyone who would like a fresh pair of eyes—Once a year the flowers on this very porch take wing/as if they just remembered something.—and a whole new landscape to marvel over.
-- Maureen Seaton

Richard Fox's collection Swagger & Remorse is a stunning volume of poetry. A book length sequence of speculative meditations upon faith and man's trust in human possibility -- and the potential loss of both -- these poems are philosophically protean, stylistically adept, and constantly shifting in their perspectives and attitudes. The authority of voice here is startling. Working at times with parable and fragment, Richard Fox often places us in the context of the natural world even as we are asked to question the stability of any "place." Swagger & Remorse is elliptical, gestural, and elegant in all of its observations and methods. These are the mature poems of man in the middle of fierce and powerful reckonings with experience and the residue of hope, a man recognizing that he may look to the constellations above yet will always walk the earth beneath. These fragments of prayer, ecstasy, and regret make Swagger & Remorse an unforgettable collection of poetry.
-- David St. John
Judge, The Patricia Bibby First Book Award, 2007