Fiction
 Date Certain
A Medical Thriller
by Reuben Eisenstein M.D.
ISBN 978-1-56474-539-2
80 pages, paperback, $12.95
Set in the 1970s, Date Certain is pathologically spooky. The story’s full of gruesomely fascinating details, with misidentified body parts on display like so much inventory. At the heart is Benjamin Stone, a well-meaning physician who’s been given knowledge he doesn’t know how to deal with, from a source he doesn’t trust or understand. He finds himself in unsettling company: a know-it-all medical examiner, a bullying detective, an unidentified corpse, and a mysterious Middle-Easterner who might know what this is all about but isn’t telling. This is a tale of dreams and nightmares, a fantastic voyage inside the human body and brain, and an exploration of what we might make of the certainty of death.
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 The Crickhowell School for the Muses
A Novel
by Rachel Waxman.
ISBN 978-1-56474-541-5
208 pages, paperback, $14.95
When Awen is kidnapped from her rural village and confined at Crickhowell, her misery eventually fades into relief. She finds a kind music teacher, discovers a new friend, and her only requirement as a student is to study the art of singing—her favorite thing in the world. However, Awen soon realizes that Miss Nina’s goal is not simply to train voices. She is trying to take them away. Determined to escape this fate, Awen becomes swept up into the intrigues of a scheming subordinate teacher, a salacious workman, a quirky artist-patron, and a handsome blond horseman. When both her own voice and the music around her mysteriously fade into silence, Awen's only hope is to turn against the very artist she was commanded to inspire.
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 The Lady of the House
A Novel
by Katherine Elberfeld
ISBN 978-1-56474-538-5
144 pages, paperback, $14.00
Publication Date: March 2013
Faced with the sudden death of her husband Pearce, fifty-two-year-old Annie confronts her childhood and early adulthood through a series of memories of her youth in Georgia. Her brother Cat, her parents, her grandmother, her love Danny Haygood, and her daughter Maggie all play significant roles in Annie’s life. Annie also faces the death of her mother and her grandmother, but nothing has prepared her for the loss of her husband. Trying to cope with Pearce’s death, Annie distances Cat and his wife Lily, but memories help her to reconnect with her brother. Searching her past, she grapples with her young feelings for Danny and the mystery of why she left him behind. At the end of the novel, Annie faces her aloneness and begins to nurture herself as the lady of the house, a role she has never quite known.
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 Oil and Water
and Other Stories from the Windward Shore
by Terry Dressler
ISBN 978-1-56474-537-8
176 pages, paperback, $14.95
Publication Date: March 2013
These well-crafted stories are about love and death, danger and risk, and the strong weather and beauty of the Southern and Central California Coast. They’re also about the people who hang out along and on the Pacific Ocean. They are athletes and heroes, loners and bums, alcoholics and dopers, environmental crusaders and oil industry developers, fishers, boaters, lifeguards, fighters, and most of all surfers. These people, most of them men, but some notably brave women as well, are individual and memorable because of their strength and because of their flaws. They are all, in one sense or another, swimming in the riptides.
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 Eclipse
A Novel
by David Lehner
ISBN 978-1-56474-529-3
128 pages, paperback, $12.95
Based loosely on Petronius’s The Satyricon, Eclipse is a wild, nightmarish adventure. Honest and earnest Tom Jones and his unprincipled stockbroker friend Alex Jenkins rush and wander through a labyrinth of parties and visits to wealthy friends and the parents of wealthy friends, in quest of Sophia Weston, who Tom thinks is virtuous and whom the priapic Alex knows more about. This odyssey, which begins as an escape from academia, becomes a crash course for Tom in the art and science of debauchery, another course Tom does not want to ace. Alex urges Tom on from party to party, from home to home, often in the company of rich wastrels with too much time on their hands and too much liquor in their parents’ cabinets. But in spite of Alex’s infectious passion for amorality, Tom resists the temptations of theft, promiscuity, swindling and falsehood.
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David Lehner, Ph. D. is a high school English teacher and Adjunct Professor of English at CCNY. He is the author of Bright Day and Unwelcome Light.
 Lifeblood
A Novel
by Ann Funk
ISBN 978-1-56474-533-0
288 pages, paperback, $16.95
Sarah Austen, a young English dissenting Mormon, against all odds, succeeds in her goal to become a medical doctor in the wilds of nineteenth-century northern Nevada. This is the story of her harrowing journey with her parents by handcart from Iowa to Great Salt Lake. The family is broken apart when Sarah’s father chooses to take another wife. Sarah and her mother cross the desert to Genoa, Nevada’s first settlement. There, at the foot of the Sierra Nevada, Sarah and her mother forge new lives. Other new arrivals to the area are Walther Rottenburg, an immigrant rancher from Saxony, and Giovanni Corveddu, an immigrant from Sardinia who works for a mining consortium. The ranchers and the miners have a running battle over water rights, and it is water, that substance so precious to desert life, that gives this novel its title.
Ann Funk lived for many years in northern Nevada where the novel is set. She has written for many magazines including Westways, The Nevadan, Sierra Weekender, The Antioch Review. This is her first novel.
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 City of Slaughter
A Novel
by Cynthia Drew
ISBN 978-1-56474-514-9
310 pages, paperback, $15.95
“This richly textured, meticulously researched novel is as expansive as it is exhilarating.… With elegant language and immense energy, Drew creates a world in which hope is never entirely lost.” —Judy Goldman, author of Early Leaving
Left with nothing after the death of their parents in a small Russian town at the turn of the twentieth century, Carsie and the younger Lilia make the journey to America despite dangerous obstacles. Finding relatives on New York's teeming, dangerous Lower East Side, they hope that they will be cared for in this new life. What they find instead are the shock and mayhem of scratching out a living in the most crowded square mile on earth. Like many Jewish immigrants of that time, the girls go to work in sweatshops, Lilia eventually taking a job at the ill-fated Triangle Waist Company, scene of the infamous 1911 industrial fire that claimed the lives of 146 garment workers. Set against Tammany Hall politics and gangland crime, City of Slaughter is a tale of a woman torn by family, faith, and her drive to rise from poverty, succeed in business, and claim her place in New York's world of fashion and society.
Cynthia Drew’s short stories have appeared in many literary journals, including Perigee, Middle English Review, and Taj Mahal. The winner of Rapid River’s Short Fiction Prize, and Mountainland’s Humor Prize, she teaches Creative Writing at UNC/Asheville's Reuter Ctr. She worked for several years in New York’s garment district, where she became keenly aware of the sweatshops that even today are peopled by immigrants.
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 Portrait of a Chair
A Novel
by Marie Krohn
ISBN 978-1-56474-505-7
192 pages, paperback, $14.95
Harriet, a middle-aged, warm-hearted widow, owns an antique store on Main Street in Elm Grove, Nebraska. Into her life walks a young recently-divorced painter named Rachel. Harriet displays Rachel’s work in the shop and also rents her the apartment above the store. But when a treasured vase disappears from the store, Harriet has reason to suspect her new friend. The friendship survives, however, and the true shoplifter is discovered to be Mabel, the bossy town gossip. Meanwhile, both Harriet and Rachel find romance in the form of suitable men. This is a story about small-town gossip and small-town charity; about love of antiques and love of people; and about what it means to be an independent and strong-minded woman.
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 Unwelcome Light
A Novel
by David Lehner
ISBN 978-1-56474-499-9
128 pages, paperback, $12.95
An unnamed narrator learns after his father’s death that this “father” was in fact not his father. The protagonist grew up on the campus of a boarding school, as the son of the headmaster. Now he returns to the school as a teacher in classics, hoping to solve the mystery of his birth. Things go wrong. Natalie, one of his students, is brilliant and beautiful, and there is gossip (untrue) that they are having an affair. He spends time with a former classmate, Elizabeth, now a teacher of art. Gossip spreads (also untrue) that they too are having an affair. A former teacher, who was fired in the past by the protagonist’s mysterious father, shows up with shocking information about the snarled family, a tale of adultery and incest. Elizabeth’s deranged husband goes into a mad rage and wreaks havoc with a shotgun, worthy of classical tragedy, and the protagonist is doomed to a life of blindness and madness. The moral of the story: fate is out of our hands, and the gods are cruel.
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 Devora in Exile
Stories
by Barbara Cherne
ISBN 978-156474-848-5; 1-56474-848-1
96 pages, paperback, $12.00
These four stories are about Devora Marcus, an elderly widow in Santa Monica, California. In "The Conversion," Devora, a non-observant Jew, becomes a yoga master's disciple and undergoes a spirtual awakening, only to find out that she is, in fact, rooted in her Jewishness. "Exile" tells of a night Devora spends in her backyard contemplating mortality, time, and space. "A Holocaust in My Breakfast Room" is a chilling tale of elder abuse, with an imposter invading Devora's home and taking advantage of her generosity. "The Countess" recalls Devora's childhood; in it she tells her granddaughter about her childhood in Russia and illuminates a moment of courage and compassion during that tumultuous time.
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Non Fiction
 Mystics Touch the Soul
Inspirational Quotations
by Erline Dessie Goodell
ISBN 978-1-56474-534-7
80 pages, paperback, $14.00
Publication Date: November 2012
Mystics Touch the Soul is a collection of inspirational quotations organized in clusters under common themes. The wisdom comes from Christian, Islamic, and Buddhist traditions, as well as the Tao, the Kabbal, and the meditations of modern sages. The quotations were chosen to represent universal yearnings that go far beyond religious systems, yet are present and powerful in esoteric forms of most major world religions.
Erline Dessie Goodell is a retired teacher of adult education for Santa Barbara City College, where she taught Religious Studies and Women's Studies. She is cofounder and past director of MidLife Zest, Inc., and facilitator of workshops in women's spirituality. She is the author of Journey Toward Bold, Gossamer Ribbons, Seeking Substance, and Explorations.
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 Zoë Dusanne
An Art Dealer Who Made a Difference
by Jo Ann Ridley
ISBN 978-1-56474-505-7
192 pages, paperback, $15.95
This is the first book-length biography of a ground-breaking art dealer, Zoë Dusanne (1884-1972), a highly respected African American woman whose pioneering Dusanne Gallery in Seattle, Washington significantly affected the lively mid-fifties art scene in the Pacific Northwest and elsewhere. Opening the first gallery of its kind in the city, Mrs. Dusanne championed contemporary art, including abstract expressionism, on an unprecedented scale, promoted Northwest art and artists throughout the United States and in Europe, and left her mark on world-known private collections as well as permanent collections in acclaimed art museums.
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 The Return to Judaism
Descendants from the Inquisition Discovering Their Jewish Roots
by Sandra Cumings Malamed
ISBN 978-1-56474-504-0
336 pages, cloth, $32.50
During the Inquisition in Spain and Portugal many Jews were forcibly converted to the Catholic faith. These Conversos, as they were called, were required to give up their religion, their traditions, and in some cases even their names.
During the 1990s, historian Sandra Malamed conducted a series of probing interviews with people of Spanish and Portuguese descent, who considered themselves Christians or even non-believers, but who nonetheless practiced various Jewish traditions—often without knowing where the traditions came from. When she explained to them what these customs were all about, they were fascinated to learn that Judaism might be part of their families’ history. The word spread, and before long people from all around the country and beyond began to contact Malamed.
Included: a brief history of the Inquisition, the interviews with 50+ descendants of Conversos, a survey of Sephardic Judaism worldwide today, lists of Sephardic surnames, timelines, glossary, bibliography, index. Illustrated with black and white photos throughout.
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 Valley Animals
True Stories about the Animals and People of California's Santa Ynez Valley
by Brooks Firestone
ISBN 978-1-57464-500-2
208 pages, paperback, $14.95
Twenty-five years in the making, this book is a collection of true stories about the animals and the people of California’s Santa Ynez Valley, in the heart of wine country, farm country, and animal country. The animals Brooks Firestone and his neighbors have lived with, worked with, played with, and otherwise associated with include horses, cattle, dog, cats, elands, alpacas, bobcats, mountain lions, coyotes, deer, ostriches, parrots, geese, ducks, and even an Elephant at Michael Jackson’s Neverland Ranch. This book is a tribute to a beautiful valley, with all its landscape in both town and country. Most of all, it is a celebration of that magic that happens when human beings and their animal neighbors interact.
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Memoir
 Late Discoveries
An Adoptee's Quest for Truth
by Susan Bennett
ISBN 978-1-56474-513-2
176 pages, paperback, $14.95
Susan was forty-three years old before she ordered a DNA test and learned the truth that she had long suspected: that she was adopted. By this time, the woman she had always called her mother, who had kept the adoption a secret, was dying, so Susan never got to talk with her directly on this important matter of identity. Then came the long, involved search for her half-siblings and her biological family roots, a roller-coaster of emotions that uncovered secret after secret, revealing truth after truth. At the climax of the book, she visits the building where she was born (when the building was a facility for unwed mothers) and makes a remarkable, almost magical connection with her deceased birth mother. She discovers, still stuck to a wall, a painting of a Christmas tree signed by her eighteen-year-old mother. The most important truth Susan learned from her quest was that she had been wanted and loved by both her mothers.
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 Tolstoy in Riyadh
A Story of a Teacher and Her Muse
by Chris Cryer
ISBN 978-1-56474-517-0
160 pages, paperback, $14.95
In 1982, Chris Cryer spent a year in Saudi Arabia, teaching English to women at King Saud University. Accompanied by her fourteen-year-old son, and a few books by and about Leo Tolstoy, Chris found a sense of connection where she least expected it. The fast-moving, slightly comic, always fascinating adventure pulls us directly into the journey. We come to respect and love the mother-son duo for their unprejudiced outlook and their cool-headed survival of matawas (moral police), strict laws, and customs. This book is one of very few based on true events, written from the inside out, that show the Arab side in the Islamic world, a place long held in mystery under the dark images of Western media. The author presents the Saudi culture at that time with a sensitivity to their need to preserve values and traditions in the face of modernity.
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 The Lapp King's Daughter
A Family's Journey Through Finland's Wars
by Stina Katchadourian
ISBN 978-1-56474-498-2
160 pages, paperback, $14.95
This is the story of a Finnish family during World War II, combining a gripping correspondence between the author's parents, who were separated by the war, with the interspersed memories of the author, who was their youngest child. While her father was at the front fighting the Soviets, her mother moved the family around the country, ending up on a farm on the Arctic Circle, trying to keep her daughters safe from Russian bombs. Finland sued for peace with the Soviet Union in 1944, which made them enemies of the Germans, who had a standing army of 200,000 men in Finnish Lapland. War broke out with Germany, and the author's family managed in the nick of time to flee to Sweden. Throughout this historic drama are a tapestry of letters and family stories, along with the touching voice of the little girl Stina, whose observations, reflections, and worries move the reader along to the dramatic conclusion.
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 Twenty-Five Missions
A Bombadier's Story
by Charles R. Wayman & Candace R. Wayman
ISBN 978-156474-479-1
ISBN 156474-479-5
80 pages, paperback, $14.00
This first-person account of World War II is a father-daughter collaboration. Charles’s contribution is the material he left behind: a nostalgic introduction about his youth and adolescence during the great depression, entries from the journal he kept after he joined the army and went through training in the Army Air Corps, and his flight log, a record of the 25 missions he flew over Europe from November 1943-1944. Interspersed between and among Charles entries are annotations by his daughter, Candace, who comments on the events in Charles’s journal and gives historical background information about what was going on in the war effort at that time.
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Poetry
 Red Thread
Poems
by Teresa Mei Chuc
ISBN 978-1-56474-528-6
80 pages, paperback, $14.00
Publication Date: October 2012
This collection of poems is largely autobiographical, telling the turning points in a life that began in war-torn Vietnam. Somehow, unlike many, Teresa and her family survived, although her parents were separated for a long time. She and her mother escaped Vietnam in a ship crowded with hungry, sick, and frightened immigrants, and in time they settled in California, bringing with them their nightmares, their memories, their history and culture. Family is a recurring and insistent theme in this book. Teresa devotes her art to her grandmother, her mother, her brother, her sons. Especially important is the relationship of mother and daughter.
Teresa Mei Chuc, a native of Vietnam, escaped with her family to the United States when she was two. She earned her MFA in Creative Writing from Goddard College and teaches English. Her poems have appeared in a number of magazines and anthologies. She lives with her three children in Southern California.
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 Crossing
Poems
by Dean Olson
ISBN 978-1-56474-535-4
80 pages, paperback, $14.00
Publication Date: November 2012
The term “crossing” is used here to imply passage, and the passages these poems describe are many. The poems are full of the passage of time, from the past to the present and into the future. Of course that means the passage of personal time, from childhood to adult life and into old age, with the great other passage to look forward to. These poems also celebrate the passage of the seasons, and of the hours of the day, the changes in the weather, changes in the Skokomish Valley (in Washington state) landscape over the years, and the passages that happen in the family, as lore, wisdom, and spirit are passed from generation to generation.
Dean Olson is a retired professor of economics, cultural studies, and maritime history. He taught at universities in Hong Kong, Alaska, and Canada, and is emeritus faculty of The Evergreen State College. He has sailed the Galapagos Islands, the Pacific Ocean, the Gulf of Alaska, and spent months with students on the Salish Sea. His poems have been published in numerous journals, including Cascade #2, Prairie Schooner, Minotaur, Rattle, Atlanta Review, and The Innisfree Poetry Journal; and he is the author of eight published poetry collections.
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 You Can See Me From Here
Poems
by Jack Moser
ISBN 978-1-56474-536-1
128 pages, paperback, $14.00
Poet Jack Moser writes of our relations: with ourselves, with each other, and with Whomever we call God. In this new collection, he reflects on his own aging, and the adjustments he has had to make in a life that hasn’t always been easy. But he celebrates the joy and love he has felt. He notices and appreciates the details of daily life, like the birdfeeder outside his window. But he’s painfully aware of death—his own, and also the waste of war. He keeps his faith and believes in the divinity of life. He devotes much of his attention to family: his grandparents, his parents, his children, including and especially his special-needs son Brian. As Moser’s fans will applaud, he has devoted a section of this new book to his beloved Ireland.
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 Hello, House
Poems
by Phyllis Hoge
Illustrations by Maxine Hong Kingston
ISBN 978-1-56474-524-8
80 pages, paperback, $14.00
The poems in Hello, House describe in small, significant detail what goes into daily chores, like making beds, doing laundry, cooking, cleaning, straightening. Phyllis Hoge lavishes attention on favorite things around the house and home, and in the process she examines her self, and learns that living in a house involves compromise: with pets, with clutter, with imperfection, and with loss. Many of these poems are written in formal verse, with rhyme and meter, but the poet works well in free verse as well. All the poems are strong, honest, and friendly.
Each poem is illustrated with a black and white line drawing by Maxine Hong Kingston.
Phyllis Hoge is a retired Professor of English at the University of Hawaii. She was awarded the Hawai'i Award for Literature from the Hawai'i Literary Arts Council. Hoge's poetry has been widely published in periodicals, including Hudson Review, New Yorker, and Prairie Schooner. She is the author of eight previous poetry collections.
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 Triage
Poems
by Jane Elkington Wohl
ISBN 978-1-56474-520-0
80 pages, paperback, $14.00
The poems in Triage are inspired by the Iraq war, a war that targeted civilians, even women and children. It is a war fueled by the false notions that winning is what matters and that winning is even possible. All the warriors can accomplish is to make sure there are losers all over and under the rubble.
Meanwhile, the poet remains at home waiting for news. She seeks beauty where she can find it, in the call of owls, the colors of poppies, and her students’ eagerness to understand.
Jane Elkington Wohl is an English and Creative Writing Instructor at Sheridan College in Sheridan WY. She has been the director of the Sheridan Young Writers camp for thirteen years. She has won two Wyoming Arts Council Literary Fellowships. Her poems have appeared in numerous anthologies and journals including Tap Joe and Women's Review of Books among others.
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 Writing on Your Toes
Poems
by Enoch Dillon
ISBN 978-1-56474-523-1
96 pages, paperback, $14.00
Enoch Dillon had a way with words. His poems are wise, funny, and surprising—all at the same time. When he chose to write with rhythm and rhyme, he did so without a hitch, and when he chose to write free verse, his verse was free but not sloppy. He used his words wisely and economically. He clearly loved language, and had great fun with it.
The poems in this posthumous collection are full of family and full of American scenery and history. They display a jaundiced view of the state of the world, particularly as it marches to the drum of technology and pauses for political squabbles, but his message is leavened by wry, wise humor and by style.
Enoch Dillon, 1925–2008, was an economist for the for the Federal Government until his retirement in 1980. His poems were published in literary magazines, and he was the author of two poetry collections, The Bicentennial Blues: 200 Years of the American Presidency, and Love, From the Ends of the Earth. A native of Oregon, Mr. Dillon lived in Bethesda, Maryland, where he and his wife raised their six children.
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 As If Words
Poems
by Jeanne Lohmann
ISBN 978-1-56474-522-4
104 pages, paperback, $14.00
With tender fidelity, the poems in Jeanne Lohmann’s new collection chronicle the years of her marriage. The book is a page-turning love story alive with humor, sensuality, and delight, as well as the inevitable tensions in the relationship. There is grief here, too, in the death of the beloved, and the survivor’s work of going on. What endures is the astounding strength of this marriage, evoked in the vivid language of love that, even as it speaks, knows the limits of words
Jeanne Lohmann's poems have appeared in many literary magazines and anthologies, most recently "Good Poems, American Places" edited by Garrison Keillor. She is a graduate of the creative writing program at San Francisco State University. This is her tenth published poetry collection.
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 Creatures Who Smell the Wind
Poems
by Linda Levitz
ISBN 978-1-56474-521-7
104 pages, paperback, $14.00
These poems are full of danger (of knives, of boiling water) and attraction (to honey, to the insides of flowers). Food is important: oysters, mushrooms, roots. Family is important, with dreamlike childhood recollections and collected lore, the presence of the past (parents, grandparents), and the recurring appearance of the poet’s lively granddaughter, Ella. The poet draws on culture, too: myths (selkies), Americana (Fiesta ware), Native American lore, not to mention painters (Hopper, Cross, Hiroshige, Hokusai) and a number of poets and writers. Especially effective are the narrative poems, including stories inspired by paintings, by the Garden of Eden, by the assassination of Julius Caesar.
Linda Levitz lives and writes in Ardsley, New York, where she also works in the Special Education department of the local elementary school. She has worked for the French Embassy Cultural Services and was the New York editor of "French News" magazine. Her poems have appeared in numerous journals. She is the author of three previous poetry collections, including Directions to My House.
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 I Love You to the Moon
Poems
by Jack Moser
ISBN 978-1-56474-516-3
112 pages, paperback, $14.00
These poems display a fine narrative and autobiographical style, remembering moments of the poet’s life, from his Brooklyn boyhood up to the present, that have changed him and opened him to new ideas about love, war, disability, childhood, religion, and the human condition. The recurring presence of his disabled son in the poems has a haunting quality; he is clearly not only the poet’s son, but also his friend and teacher, even when he is “the son from hell.” The poems also display a sense of humor. Anger too, when they concern the tragedy of war as he experienced it in Vietnam. He offers brave new thoughts about religion, reconciling his disappointment in God’s seeming unfairness by balancing in the presence of Shekhinah, the feminine, compassionate side.
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 Up From the Marsh
Stories and Poems
by Phyllis Binkley
ISBN 978-1-56474-512-5
128 pages, cloth, $15.00
These stories and poems, written by a woman in her eighties, look back over a long real and imagined life, and deal with big issues: redemption, family love, the haunting past, the bonds of friendship, the importance of what remains of life on earth, and the dignity of aging and dying. The stories are told with plain, clear style, a graceful narrative arc, a fitting climax, and a satisfying resolution. The poems are skillfully crafted, whether in free verse or formal, whether the mood be whimsical or somber, about the folly of progress, the wisdom of simplicity, nature, love lost, and the presence of the past.
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 Crane Creek, Two Voices
Poems
by Robb Jackson and Vanessa Furse Jackson
ISBN 978-1-56474-511-8
96 pages, cloth, $14.00
This collection tells the story of the first year in a relationship between two poets. The antiphonal voices describe their adventures exploring the natural world of northern Ohio, specifically Crane Creek, on the shore of Lake Erie, and sometimes also on the banks of the nearby Maumee River. One poet, Robb grew up in and near this setting; the other, Vanessa, is from England, and hence experiences many of the natural wonders of New World for the first time. At the heart of the narrative lies the shared experience of falling in love, against and within the changing seasons, and among the wide, wild varieties of birds, mammals, insects, and plants. The poems form a nature guide, to an area and to the wild territory of new love.
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 Love Like Snow
Two Decades of Snow Poems
by Natalie Safir
ISBN 978-56474-507-1
48 pages, paperback, $10.00
LIMITED EDITION
These poems are full of both weather and nature, especially human nature and the weather of the heart. Natalie Safir has an eye for white, now and then accented by black crows, a red house, a blue shadow, a yellow sled.… The natural world in her poems comes alive when it intersects with civilization (a street scene in Moscow, steel barges on the Hudson, a typewriter, schnapps by the fire) and with a range of human emotions from exhilaration and joy to loss and sorrow, with the awareness of the fragility of relationship. These poems, both moving and playful, filled with sensual imagery, welcome winter with a wise respect.
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 The Dust Catcher
And Other Poems
by Marjorie Sparkman Jackson
ISBN 978-1-56474-501-9
96 pages, paperback, $14.00
These poems are haunting in two senses of the word. They beg to be read aloud, because for the beauty in their sounds. The poet is a master of her craft, working well in various rhyme patterns, various meter schemes. Sometimes her rhymes are exact, sometimes provocatively just off, just enough. More haunting than the poems’ technique, however, is the magical, romantic atmosphere throughout the collection. Reminiscent of Poe, the poems are full of gothic, wondrous tales, populated by witches, mermaids, agents of death, ghosts, devils, angels both light and dark, faeries, sweet demons, and spirits of the unborn. Some of these narratives are moral tales, dispensing supernatural justice. But the poet also does a fine job with landscape, weather, descriptions of small towns, graveyards, houses, and nature let loose and running wild.
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 Shaking the Tree
Poems
by Jeanne Lohmann
ISBN 978-56474-493-7
96 pages, paperback, $14.00
This brave collection of poems focuses on what is to come and what remains, and how the two interact. Many of the poems are about nature—trees, of course, but also wildflowers and gardens with weeds, birds in flight, horses and dogs, the sea, the mountains. The hours of the day, from morning to night; the seasons of the year, from spring to winter and back to spring. And running throughout is an acknowledgment of time passing, the end approaching. The poet bravely accepts what is coming, even celebrates the coming of what will change us all from body back into nature. Meanwhile, until we greet that day, we greet each day. Jeanne Lohmann works with nature and listens to nature’s lessons, a lifelong practice. The lessons seem to say that each moment is to be appreciated as unique, even if the whole process is recurring and dependable. Permanent and transitory, Nature stands for our well-being. So do trees.
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