World Palace Press

Easy to call these poems lovely, strange, and beautiful, wonderful to know why—her voice carries music from Paleolithic Chinese shaman-song, gathers refinements from earliest written forms to the present, particularly Su Dong Po, and delivers the gossip of flowers with images and diamond-gleaming language to haunt a lifetime. All gratitude to Yun Wang and Word Palace for a necklace of gems.

Yun Wang's work is surprising and exotic, balanced at the edge of an enormous silence. Many of her lines seem to have been composed off world. Horse by the Mountain Stream is a singularity in the plethora.

Michael Lally was born in Orange, New Jersey in 1942 and published his first poem at age 18. After serving four years in the military, he used the GI Bill to attend the University of Iowa Writers Workshop, and as a result of his political activism there was nominated by The Peace and Freedom Party to run for sheriff of Johnson County, Iowa, in 1968. Since then, Lally has fought for racial justice and the rights of women and minorities, including the LGBT community, while working as a musician, editor, college teacher, book critic (for The Washington Post and The Village Voice), night guard, chauffeur, actor, screenwriter and script doctor. Lally is the author of twenty-eight books of poetry and 
is often associated with the New York School of Poetry. He counts among his influences the poets Frank O’Hara, William Carlos Williams, Bob Kaufman, and Diane di Prima, the jazz singer and lyricist Jon Hendricks, as well as the writer William Saroyan. He is the recipient of numerous awards including two National Endowment for the Arts grants and the American Book Award in 2000 for It’s Not Nostalgia. He currently lives in New Jersey and writes the blog Lally’s Alley.

With a haiku-esque precision of imagery and sound, Teresa Mei Chuc creates a world of beauty and loss, of boat people and survivors, of soldiers and refugees. After we close the last page of How One Loses Notes and Sounds, the voices and images still shimmer in our consciousness as if the surface of a glimmering river.

Michael Hannon is an American original — for fifty years he has been writing a deep, unadorned, almost mythic poetry unlike any other poet. Hannon melds a vision of the inner self and the ineffable world, and does so with such craft and illuminating grace. The effect of his poems can be like looking into a desert vastness at night when the landscape is suddenly lit up by a flash of lightning. Hannon takes us back to an ancient source of what poetry tries to do— explore the enigmas and mystery of being. His is a poetry of revelation and wonder.

Like a great temple bell, struck hard, Hannon’s poems will resonate with quietude and beatitude long after you have read them.

"In the pages of a Rothenberg book - the poems as much as the anthologies - the world has a coherence. Perhaps this coherence is false ... but we cannot deny that Rothenberg, as so few others, has managed to construct a world.

"For us, Jerome Rothenberg played (and plays) the role Picasso and Braque did for the painters, and Leiris and Bataille later for the French poets .... He is a great figure, who stands above and beyond the schools and tendentiousnesses of poetics: ... a body of work that exhibits what I suddenly realize is an ethical purity, a touchstone for the genuine."

Portugés: So, getting back to meditation techniques, they help you...

Ginsberg: Calm down, consider what would be the best way of communicating the simplest elements of facts—unprejudiced by my own anger and resentments. If you package your information in resentment and accusation, people won’t swallow it as easily as if you package it in some kind of, or maybe even unpackaged, neutral, benevolent, indifferent attention. If you package it in attention, it’s much better than if you package it in inattentive resentment. You’re not taking into account the psychology of the other guy.

Portugés: This sounds like the Buddhist stress on the aspect of compassion...

Ginsberg: … It’s really compassion toward yourself—that you’re not tearing yourself apart, banging your head against the wall.

". . . very wonderful lines here— remarkable and beautiful— full of wisdom and strife as well as health of mind and body, [and] completion, if there is any. Just amazing!"

"“Lee Perron is a highly gifted poet, with a fine sensibility for the tones of nature, and the nature of the self as it expands into the world.”"

"Lee Perron's poems have show me the path to the dark forest pool where Psyche terrifies her guests, and the poet is, at last, allowed to surrender his vision. Inexorable death, inexorable life--just as he found them, water mixed with the sun."

On The Stonecutter’s Hand, 1995:

“Tillinghast’s poems range confidently among different cultures. He has a sense of history as a living force. His experiments in meter, rhyme, and free verse . . . are important. He is a wonderfully gifted poet, one of the few.”

On Selected Poems, 2009:

“More outward-looking and international-minded though he is than most contemporary American poets, Tillinghast nonetheless registers his country’s history on his pulse . . . . In sinewy lines and solid stanzas—fruits of a lifetime’s devotion to the craft—Tillinghast’s most recent poems, undoubtedly his finest to date, fuse a sobering sense of mortality with the exhilaration of renewal, indeed rejuvenation, through love.”

In How Strange It Is To Be Anything At All,  Hell is where you find it and Joe Riley (a twenty something writer) is your guide. There is authority in his sparse direct language no matter the ambivalent situation.

A new voice is in the offing that suggests Fitzgerald, as well as the hard prose of Bukowski. His stories' contemporary resonance makes one also think of Junot Diaz. One senses that Mr. Riley may indeed become an important voice of his up-and-coming Generation @--or as Mr. Riley characterizes it: "The Generation of Lost, Found, and Lost Again."

"Sam Hamill has reached the category of a National Treasure though I doubt he'd like the idea."

"The shape of Sam Hamill's mind is the shape of both a revolutionary and a monk at work. His sacred text is poetry."

No one—I mean no one ever—has done the momentous work of presenting poetry better than Sam Hamill... [his poetry] is no less than essential.

When Kevin Patrick Sullivan reads, you hear Celtic courage, ageless and refreshing, singing in the lines. Kevin's voice reflects acuity of vision, vitality, honesty. His work ethic is inspiration for all poets, young and old. He is director of the nationally respected "Corners of the Mouth" readings at San Luis Obispo's venerable and beloved mecca of the arts, Linnaea's Café."

"Kevin Patrick Sullivan wakes up every day in love with the world. He is an ecstatic descendent of Rumi, but his poems illuminate the roots of joy growing in a more difficult terrain. These spare light-filled hymns sing the praises of a sweet journeyman's everyday life- from working on the assembly line at Ford Motor Plant in Detroit to simply acknowledging the sacred act of breathing. These poems prove that the mystic still walks among us, works with us side by side – mining exuberance in beautifully muddy boots."

"To listen to Kevin Patrick is to awake into the original astonishment of the poetic word. His verb stems like a flash from a hidden mystery which is beyond heart, brains and intellect. The good fortune of my destiny has made me the witness of this miracle."

My body has been hostage to an idea," cries Leslie St. John, and even though this charismatic woman never loses touch with the physical fact of the body in the world, she is at her essence a metaphysical poet. "I'd like to rename every body part," she insists in the first poem here, in the hope that doing so may bring her "one day nearer to what is unnamable." It's a brave imagination that can face the body it lives in as both vehicle and obstacle, and a strong mind that can transcend that dualism. But having lost one eye in an absurd accident ("She Washed My Hair" tells the harrowing story), Leslie St. John has let the poet in her see with a unique third eye, one that sees with an accurate, compassionate, wisdom-inviting gaze. Her language is contemporary, precise and warm with breathing; her poems offer a music that sounds intimate even when one read aloud alone. Of special note is the heartbreaking "Elegy for John Mark, 2002-2004," a sequence on the death of a nephew that turns at the end toward an unearthly lyrical beauty. But in Leslie St. John's world, beauty is like a rope: it can rescue or kill.

Leslie St. John writes lyrical, entrancing poems.

Leslie St. John's poem, "Things that Bend," arrested me, made me eager to keep reading (Is that not part of the writer's obligation to the reader?) the poem from its first line, in which there is a lot of strong but subtle music: inch/window/sill are assonantal half-rhymes, curl/worm half rhyme, and worm/window add a little consonantal rhyme. By the fourth line, after establishing a place, she takes us to another place, the past, I believe, and an other enters the poem. It's a love poem, a poem about time and its damage, I loved the lines,

What bends short, bends long—
Doesn't break. Neck of tulip, waning
Clothes rod. And, yes, the rules.

That the heart "splinters into tributaries" is an original way of saying something all of us come to learn if we live a conscious life.

Michael Hannon’s poems are full of the resonance that comes only from an understanding of silence. His poems are self-revelatory, humane, and seamless, good in the ear like a kiss that brings the blush of understanding, the kind of poems one wants to lift out of a book and into memory.

He writes a fine longer lyrical poem and is equally master of the short. His tone is the heart, the warm praise of inevitable and appalling things.

"Nagai has a voice and vision to be reckoned with .... These stories will change you, change what you know, change how to imagine the lives of people around you."

"Peter Dale Scott combines his politics with his poetics, and we are richer for it. The poems are deceptively simple. One run-through is generally enough to crack their intention and meaning, but their brilliance comes after several readings. I travel past the obvious to the subtle interconnectivity of things in Scott's world, while he travels as a senior citizen through the world with his sensitivity and wisdom up front..."

"Not since Robert Duncan's Groundwork and before that William Carlos Williams’ Paterson, has New Directions published a long poem as important as Peter Dale Scott's."