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Jim Schley's first full-length collection of poetry, As When, In Season, was released in 2008 by Marick Press. However, he is no stranger to poetry. Schley is the former executive director of The Frost Place, a museum and poetry center based at Robert Frost's former homestead in Franconia, New Hampshire, and he's currently a managing editor at Tupelo Press (which publishes some of my favorite poetry titles).

As When, In Season is a wonderful collection that includes nine odes for female muses. Read more ...
Blue City by Sean Thomas Dougherty: ... The Blue City sounds like a euphemism—a tour of various locales that blend the old and the new, the fantastic and the actual, the good and the evil. A reader might sense that she could parallel the Blue City to Istanbul or Prague or Budapest, or apply those cities to the realms of other chapters, with titles like “The Red City,” “In the City of the Bare Bulb,” “The City of a Hundred Angers,” “The Black City.” But Tomas is no ordinary protagonist, and the walk we take with enigmatic narrator Josef is no ordinary journey. The Blue City isn’t a travelogue but rather a thoughtful meander through the geography of self. Josef forces us to confront innocence, freedom, opportunity, fear, and honesty within these locales. “This is where childhood stutters and sings,” he tells us of the Black City. ... read more ...
Never Night by Derick Burleson: ... the book delivers on the promises made in these opening lines, offering well-crafted poems filled with all kinds of rewards: lush sounds, muscular lines when they’re called for; controlled pacing, a marriage of sound and sense, and more. Never Night includes poems of place and family, youth and memory, written with surprise and with overt nods to the masters (Shakespeare, Milton, Homer, etc.) and out of what many would call the Northwest tradition (Hugo, Stafford, and Wagoner). For those who appreciate tightly woven sections making a tightly woven book, this is for you ... read more ...
The Catfish by Franz Wright: The very first obvious thing in this chapbook is a celestial quality. The poetry has a level of abstraction variant from earlier books. It is like someone who has gone to the edges of seeing and is “without margins.” Approaching the edges of seeing means to come to abstraction, as in the poem, “Unwriting,” where the opening line, “The universe is mostly made of thought,” is analogous to later Wallace Stevens around the time of “The Planet on the Table.” Notice the word “planet” in Steven’s title, while in Wright’s poems we have cold stars, the heavens, black holes, galaxies – high, far and wide words, analogs of the soul, that bright thing “without margins,” and at times frighteningly distant. read more ...
The Fortunate Islands by Susan-Kelly-DeWitt: Susan Kelly-DeWitt’s first full-length book is glossed by a quote from Dava Sobel in reference to the Roman Egyptian mathematician, Ptolemy, who was “free to lay his prime meridian, the zero-degree longitude line, wherever he liked. He chose to run it through the Fortunate Islands…” With this kind of an epigraph, I had expected Kelly-DeWitt to expose her own longitudinal line in the guise of her spiritual philosophy, or the path that her life has wandered. The blurbs on the back cover of her book also presuppose issues of a tough childhood, father-issues, and a deeply impacted voice. Read more in THE GREAT AMERICAN PINUP
The Seed Thieves by Robert Fanning: Homestead Review
The Seed Thieves by Robert Fanning: Metrotimes Review
The Seed Thieves by Robert Fanning: These poems resonate with a most exquisite sense of longing and visceral intensity. Through his poetry, we appreciate the significance of memory and loss, while marveling at his uncanny ability to resurrect, in the most immediate sense, those occasions once relegated to obscurity. There is an underlying urgency within Fanning's poems that compels the reader to indeed take note. Tim Monaghan, Editor-in-Chief and Publisher, The Ledge Magazine and Press
The Seed Thieves by Robert Fanning: Robert Fanning's music is percussive, meticulous and darkly funny. Like a night watchman, this poet shines a fiercely concentrated light on the weird beauty of the material world—he's like Diogenes, that other cynic who was also on a quest for the truth. Sherry Fairchock, author of "The Palace of Ashes"
The Boy Who Killed Caterpillars: Read the insightful review of Joshua Kornreich's book in The Meridian.
The Sleeping: Professionally, I've known Caroline Maun for several years; maybe five years, as long as there has been a ChickenBones. The first poem she shared with me and that I posted on our website is Faceless, a poem about a lynching, inspired by a postcard. It was a good poem, well executed with the right sympathy and perspective, the right tragic irony. I did not think much of her outside of that. I knew she was a professor at Morgan State University (MSU). I saw her numerous times at conferences sponsored by literary societies based at MSU. And I saw her more frequently when I became a member of Mid-Atlantic Writers Association (MAWA). I had lunch with her once in Charles Village at an outside cafe when she was planning a website for MAWA. At that time, I believe she was also up for tenure; she had been at Morgan for almost six years (1998-2004). read more ...
The Witness of Music: A few weeks back I had the pleasure of attending a reading with Alexander Suczek former president of Pro-Musica Detroit and author of The Witness of Music: 50 Years of Pro-Musica Detroit published by Marick Press. Pro-Musica is a national organization dedicated to stage up and coming musicians and composers. Pro-Musica Detroit has been up and running in this city for 81 consecutive years. read more ...

Upcoming Events

Sept 29Poets Follies Reading with RAUL ZURITA
Sept 29, 2011
6:30 pm to 9:00 pm
Grosse Pointe Artists Association located on 16900 Kercheval St, Grosse Pointe, MI 48230

Raúl ZuritaRaúl Zurita is winner of the Chilean National Poetry Prize and is arguably the most powerful poetic voice in Latin America today. He will be reading from his Marick title "INRI" and other works.

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Sept 30Calypso Editions publishes Seattle-based author Elizabeth Myhr’s debut collection
Sept 30, 2011
Elizabeth MyhrElizabeth Myhr is a Seattle native. She grew up playing jazz piano and attended Garfield High School where she was a member of Garfield’s acclaimed jazz band. She completed her undergraduate degree at The Evergreen State College with a B.A. in English, and began writing poetry in her twenties. She has published in many journals and literary reviews including Alaska Quarterly Review, Knock Magazine, LBJ and Poetry International. She received her MFA in poetry from Seattle Pacific University in 2009 and went on to become a founding member of Calypso Editions. She currently works as an editor for several print and online publishing companies and journals, including Marick Press, Web Del Sol Review of Books, and Raven Chronicles. Myhr works as a freelance product development manager and managing editor and lives in Seattle with her family.

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Oct 1Calypso Editions releases contemporary Romanian poetry in English translation
Oct 1, 2011
Seattle, WAThe finest voices in contemporary Romanian poetry are now available in an English translation from Calypso Editions. Of Gentle Wolves: An Anthology of Romanian Poetry brings together an eclectic collection of writers, from dynamic young poets such as Radu Vancu and Chris Tanasescu to venerable masters such as Ana Blandiana and Gellu Naum. Calypso is thrilled to bring these fresh translations, featuring a number of authors appearing in English for the first time, to an American audience.br />
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