Ranging from the humble and poignant to the humorous, Sylvia Woods' poems explore her personal experience as an educator, as well as her own transition from daughter to mother and eventually to grandmother. Throughout Woods' work, the landscape and culture of Appalachia is a driving force. So too is the memory of family and the myth of family history.\nThe poems in What We Take With Us are, as acclaimed poet Maurice Manning says, "as true as a river fork and as durable as the hills above." He continues, "They are also, like the many people and voices here recalled, humble and hard-won. The grit and humor walk side by side with grief and spunk, but isn't that what we ask of poetry, this lofty air?"\nKentucky Poet Laureate George Ella Lyon praises Sylvia Woods' work with these words: "Like switchback roads in the mountains she hails from ... Woods' poems are going to take you places, and you don't want to miss the ride!"\nAuthor Darnell Arnoult describes What We Take With Us in this way: "Sylvia Woods 'captures' the reader in a vault of rich images, layers and layers of ideas to mine and gorgeously crafted moments of recognition for the poet and for us her readers. This may be a debut collection, but Woods is no novice to poetry. Each poem is a gem crafted by an experienced hand, strung together jewel after jewel."\nWhat We Take With Usis published by EastOver Press. (www.EastOverPress.com)

What We Take With Us

Literature & Fiction

Sylvia Woods

Poetry

EastOver Press

Whether set adrift in a marsh or canal, traversing battlefields or beaches, or wading the disorienting streams of adolescence and male identity, readers of Surface Fugue will engage with questioning poignancy and imagination the layers of history stifled by modernity. Plunging us through the ambiguous surfaces of time into the proximities of water-borne violence, predation and occupation, Sneeden maintains perspective and scale with timely anchorages in the coves of elegy and personal memory. Vivid and experiential, these poems deliver reverie and threat with equal power; as the poet's description of refraction suggests, "...a dipping oar /is able to inhabit both worlds."Ralph Sneeden's poems and essays have appeared in AGNI, The Common, Ecotone, Harvard Review, The Kenyon Review, New England Review, The New Republic, Ploughshares, Slate, Southwest Review, The Surfer's Journal, and many other magazines. His book, Evidence of the Journey (Harmon Blunt 2007) was a finalist (in previous forms) for the Walt Whitman Award (Academy of American Poets) and The Yale Series of Younger Poets. Poems in it have been featured on Poetry Daily and received the Friends of Literature Prize from POETRY magazine. The title poem of Surface Fugue was nominated for a Pushcart Prize, and the book, in earlier forms, was a semi-finalist for the National Poetry Series, and finalist for the Lena-Miles Wever Todd Poetry Prize and the May Swenson Poetry Award. Sneeden has received fellowships from MacDowell, Columbia University Teachers College and the American School in London. He was born in Los Angeles but has lived for many years in New England, currently in New Hampshire where he teaches at Phillips Exeter Academy.

Surface Fugue

Ralph Sneeden

"The lines in this book are vespers, a prayer to the broken hearted. We are swept up in the beauty of form, the spaces in between, the images of a red-tail hawk and a cantering horse. The book masterfully hones the sounds of grief, gutteral and raw, flowing through a body, a mouth, a soul." 
--Sarah Sandman, author of The Sinew of 47 Years\n"Out of grief, out of longing, out of her ravishing gift for noticing, comes this numinous and memorable debut by Erica Anderson-Senter, whose sensibility has been born out of her gift for surviving. I adore the rough music of this book, its candid appraisals, and this poet's fearless descriptions of the sources of fear, sadness, love, life." 
--Mark Wunderlich, author of God of Nothingness\n"These poems root us deep in Midwestern landscapes as we encounter litanies, psalms, and a lush unsentimental tenderness that sings out "that swift, / startling joy" in the same breath as gutting loss. This is an extraordinary, courageous debut collection." 
--Emily Mohn-Slate, author of The Falls

Midwestern Poet's Incomplete Guide to Symbolism

Erica Anderson-Senter

John Davis Jr.'s fifth collection of poetry, The Places That Hold, praises the dusty morning light of citrus farming and the pleasures of fatherhood as it explores the darkness of places like the infamous Dozier Reform School in Florida's panhandle. Intertwining past and present with rural life, social justice, and the value of family, The Places That Hold offers readers a glimpse into the lesser-known corridors of the Sunshine State.

The Places That Hold

John Davis Jr.

WINNER OF THE EASTOVER PRESS PRIZE FOR NONFICTION\nThe essays in More or Less explore the degree to which we are defined, and confined, by what we own. 
In 2017, novelist Ann Patchett wrote in the NYT about planning "a year buying nothing" other than what she would consume-and Susannah Q. Pratt took the hint. In 2018, after some convincing (that included a family PowerPoint!) Pratt and her family decided to buy nothing, too: "We undertook a 365-day moratorium on the purchase of new clothes, toys, games, books, electronics, gear, furniture, housewares, and other things that fall in the general category of 'stuff.' For twelve months we purchased only essentials - food, toiletries, light bulbs, and a few pairs of shoes for my growing boys. We stayed out of stores and off of online shopping sites. We fixed things. We made things. We went without."\nThe twenty-one essays in More or Less are much more than the story of that year. Pratt thoughtfully considers what might bring someone to step outside the usual American consumerism, coming to examine the ways in which what we buy and own can change who we are or want to be. Intertwining scenes of homelife with sustained reflection on notions of utility, disposability, and community, the book addresses the central question of how to live well in a culture of consumerism from which there is no meaningful exit.

More or Less: Essays from a Year of No Buying

Politics & Social Sciences

Susannah Q Pratt

Social Sciences

Crow Funeral is the end result of intention and design gone off script. What began as fascination with a phenomenon of crows congregating in overwhelming numbers around one of their fallen, eventually became a collection that merges an interest in the neurological wiring of birds with a mother's battle with postpartum depression and anxiety.\nWe as humans have the tendency to anthropomorphize what we have deep need for-ritual, spectacle, and ceremony, and above all, meaning. If crows can orchestrate an event to mourn their own, then perhaps it is proof that even birds have a built-in urgency to center themselves inside of life's chaos. And yet, it's likely that crows do not mourn at all, and instead they simply reflexively react to something potentially dangerous. There is no deeper significance to the event at all, profound as it may appear.\nHow do you raise children, pray, or write poems in a world with no meaning? Crow Funeral dismisses meaning as a construct concluded from a certain set of metaphysical "signs," and instead simultaneously accepts and rejects God and meaning in search of an exactness that only language can create.

Crow Funeral

Kate Hanson Foster

Parenting & Relationships

THE CUTLEAF READER VOL. 1 collects short stories, essays, and poetry by some of the best established writers of our time as well as exciting work from emerging writers.\nHere you will find poems by Maurice Manning, E. Ethelbert Miller, Lauren K. Alleyne, and Kari-Gunter Seymour; short stories by Joan Wickersham, Jazmin Darznik, George Singleton, Ron Rash, Douglas Bauer, and Amy Wright; and essays by Greg Bottoms, Chris Arthur, and Carter Sickels, among others.\nPerfect for the college and graduate classroom as well as for readers who prefer printed editions, this collection exemplifies the best work of contemporary writers and gives readers a chance to sample a broad variety of approaches to fiction, nonfiction, and poetry in current literature. CUTLEAF has been celebrated by the online community in its first year of publication, and now an anthology of the inaugural year of the journal is available in print form.

The Cutleaf Reader: Volume One

Literary

Intimacies in Borrowed Light: Poems is Darius Stewart's first book-length collection of poems drawn from his three previous chapbooks in addition to new poems not collected in those volumes. The result is a book that is more than the sum of its parts, but one that coalesces around themes of love, addiction, violence, sexual identity, and the corporeal body to betray the intimate moments that illuminate, especially, Black gay male experiences.\nDiscovering the self is fraught enough, let alone under the ever-present threat of HIV and AIDS. Ranging from the private to the confessional, the lyrical to the narrative, the elegiac to the celebratory, Stewart's writing is gritty, often blunt, but always beautiful as he strives to understand the grief of lost love and lost youth without losing hope.

Intimacies in Borrowed Light: poems

Stewart, Darius

Author of Mrs. Rossi's Dream, a 2019 Foreword Reviews INDIES Silver and Bronze Winner (War & Military Adult Fiction); and A Mother's Tale & Other Stories, a Foreword Reviews INDIES Bronze Winner\nFrom Vietnam to America, this story collection, jewel-like, evocative and layered, brings to the readers a unique sense of love, passions and the tragedy of rape, all together contrasting a darker theme of perils. The titular story captures a simple love story that transcends cultural barriers. The opening story "A Woman-Child" brings the shy eroticism of adolescence set against a backdrop of the seaside with its ever present ecological beauty. A youthful love affair between an older American man and a much younger Vietnamese girl has its poignant brevity in "All the Pretty Little Horses." In "The Yin-Yang Market" magical realism and the beauty of innocence abounds in deep dark places, teeming with life and danger. "A Mute Girl's Yarn" tells a magical coming-of-age story like sketches in a child's fairy book.\nBringing together the damned, the unfit, the brave who succumb by their own doing to the call of fate, their desire to survive never dying, it is a great journey to inhabit this world where redemption of human goodness arises out of violence and beauty to become part of its essential mercy.

All The Rivers Flow Into The Sea: and other stories

Ha, Khanh

United States

The Cutleaf Reader Volume 2 collects short stories, essays, and poetry by some of the best established writers of our time, as well as exciting work from emerging authors. Perfect for college and graduate classrooms and for readers who prefer print editions, this collection exemplifies the best work of contemporary writers, giving readers a chance to sample a broad variety of approaches to fiction, nonfiction, and poetry in current literature. Cutleaf has been celebrated by the online community, and the journal is annually anthologized in print form.

The Cutleaf Reader: Volume Two

Essays & Correspondence

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