Poetry

  • Praise for Steve Clorfeine's work: "I found myself carried by his words...often an unremarkable or extravagantly beautiful list of things and events was made brilliant by the attention paid to their existence."

    —Parabola: Myth, Tradition and the Search for Meaning

    "Clorfeine's day to day experiences read like a series of prose haikus...there is a clarity in his writing...a habit of seeing the ordinary and the extraordinary, the marvelous in the mundane..."

    —Woodstock Times

    2006 | 90 pages
  • An Anthology of Hudson Valley Writers Riverine is a contemporary anthology of memoir, short fiction, and poetry by over seventy Hudson Valley writers. The memoirs reflect Hudson Valley life along with life outside the U.S. Intriguing short stories, both dark and light, explore a wide range of fictional characters. Microfiction (or flash fiction) brings the reader the razor-sharp genre of the short-short story and thought-provoking prose poems. Two poetry sections offer a wide array of styles from a diverse group of poets. "Hudson Valley Views" focuses upon the landscape of the valley that these poets call home. "Other Realms" journeys to the inner mindscape and takes the reader to places both real and imaginary. Riverine is the creation of writer and editor Laurence Carr along with Codhill publisher, David Appelbaum, former editor of Parabola magazine. Riverine celebrates the words of those authors who breathe the air of the Hudson Valley, drink its water, eat the harvest from its rich soil and convert these gifts into the gift of words that reflects our individual and collective lives. As long as a healthy Hudson River continues to flow through this valley (and part of our lives must be committed to its good health), the words of its writers will also continue to flow from lips and pens and pencils and keyboards.
    2007 | 314 pages
  • The poems in this volume are experimental in nature. They came out of a study of the enneagram—a symbol best described in P. D. Ouspensky's In Search of the Miraculous. While looking for a way to experience the laws expressed in the enneagram, Frederick Bauman devised a poetic form of nine verses of three lines each. The poems are presented in the order written and then the stanzas are rearranged in the order 9, 3, 6, 1, 4, 2, 8, 5, 7. Readers interested in the enneagram are referred to Mr. Ouspensky's book and the “Holy Planet Purgatory” chapter of G. I. Gurdjieff's Beelzebub's Tales to His Grandson, which does not mention the enneagram but discusses the laws it symbolizes.
    2007 | 110 pages
  • A Short Piece It must be that the azaleas Bloom at dawn And fall at dusk. Over the low pine grove Behind the rocks in Samchung Dong They droop Whenever the clouds pass. All through April Unnoticed by any This year's azaleas also Must be blooming in the shade And falling in the shade. —Kim Gwang-gyoon
    2007 | 152 pages
  • I pick up thumb-tacks in the street and put them in my pocket. Some I use to stick up times on the corkboard, some I put back in the desk. Once a tack stuck straight through the ball of my foot as I ran straight on it, the ball of the foot came down, the heel lifted off pushing the ball of the foot down full on the tack. Running off I stepped off pulling off blind—leg, hip, spine, neck and tongue like a crack of lightning. If you want to keep time straight, you pick up tacks and put them in your pocket. —from "Thumbtacks, Glass, Pennies"
    2009 | 64 pages
  • Full Moon Tide I want to stop listening.

    I’m tired

    of making sense, of having to listen, of taking the ocean in day after day, of holding on to its labor; you have to let go—and it blanks out lost to the magnification of mind; when I fall asleep the muscle won’t let loose, my back slides, my hip hurries for doorways, my fingers talk as though they were held by a talking hand for an instant that turns off night, and it’s still noon, and the talking ocean just said it, just spoke the words that mean this loss is really here and you can’t turn it away and the doorways are slamming shut, the breakers are slamming down, the magnification of mind slamming down. I’m listening for doorways. —from Shorewards Tidewards
    2007 | 36 pages
  • The poet's eye never misses the incongruity of things that cuts to the bone, "an obsidian scalpel of love" that keeps racing with her in the space between life and death, adoration and hatred. It may be that "balance is axiomatic," but always it is imperiled, a saving grace necessary, and the eye nervously glancing between heaven and earth. "Pamela Uschuk is a political poet, defiant in the face of injustice, as well as a poet of Eros. She's nobody's fool. She resurrects in her poems the brutalized, the murdered, the lost of the world—those who have no voice of their own. She pulls them close. And when she turns to the world's gliding wonders, she does so with a precise eye and everything she sees is absorbed by her uniquely compassionate voice."

    —Dennis Sampson, author of Constant Longing and Needlegrass

    2005 | 44 pages
  • Uchmanowicz's poetry lives in its form and its formalism enlivens the line and space between images "in perpetual flight." Breathless accents, a parade of local color, deep sympathy with existence, the work is a continual reaffirmation of the poet's need for life. "Uchmanowicz portrays a 'year-rounder's' Cape Cod of fickle weather, untimely deaths, and gritty sensuality. Her taut, precise poems are vivid enough to grab a reader at first sight and rich enough to reward a second reading."

    —Chronogram

    2004 | 32 pages
  • Poetry cannot perform search and rescues. Words are not water or food or shelter. Grief cannot put a roof over storm-refugees. Compassion's not a substitute for action. Come in from the wind, let words restore power. Come in under the blue tarp of this Muse.... —from "Hurricane Hymn
    2009 | 148 pages
  • "Winner of the Codhill Poetry Chapbook Award for 2008, Barry Sternlieb’s Winter Crows recalls the directness of Asian master poets, its offerings as deft as calligraphic brushwork, as acoustically sound as birdsong, as defined as avian tracks through newly fallen snow, leading to the house of wisdom."

    —Pauline Uchmanowicz, final judge

    2009 | 42 pages
  • "Winner of the Codhill Poetry Chapbook Award for 2009," Elizabeth Rees's Tilting Gravity shimmers like moonlight on tidewater, illuminating the ebb and flow of brokenness and recovery with rippling imagination and lyrical elegance."

    —Pauline Uchmanowicz, final judge

    2010 | 36 pages
  • ODE TO DOGS I am tired of hearing about dogs used as metaphors for the uncivilized. Imagine a world in which humans possessed at least twenty times as many olfactory receptors, able to distinguish the tang of cancer rising musk-like from the bedsheets next to a smoldering ash tray, able to detect that one drop of blood in every five quarts of water, to know what you did last night no matter how many times you soap-scrubbed the evidence. It does not take savagery but more love than we can muster to lick the hand you've sniffed, to love despite the perfume of sins we wear each day like a halo.
    2008 | 38 pages
  • "Final Finalist for the Codhill Poetry Chapbook award for 2008, Sibyl James’s Pistols and Hearts captures the beauty and ruggedness of daily life in Mexico through inventive lyricism. Oscillating between English and Spanish, between declarations of love and regret, between the oracular and the ordinary, a transcontinental vision emerges, both deeply personal and fiercely public."

    —Pauline Uchmanowicz, final judge

    2009 | 36 pages
  • Poems Searching for Things to Worship Sorting through fluttering debris of thick boyhood days, tangle of jungle browned with our absence, I remember how you cupped water at Cedar Creek, your hands a chalice. And flowers you planted near the bank to make it your church, somewhere to sit in the greening comfort of a private prayer. A place one might see God and not be surprised.
    "Winner of the Codhill Poetry Chapbook Prize for 2006, Patrick Carrington's Thirst reads like a novena, a plea for understanding and mercy." —Pauline Uchmanowicz, Final Judge
    2007 | 32 pages
  • Microfiction set in, around and under the mythical town of Wytheport Sometimes angst-ridden, sometimes whimsical, sometimes meditative, these short "biographs" depict the life and times of a unique place and its haunting residents. The Wytheport Tales draws inspiration from a range of authors: Dante, Carroll, Joyce, Eliot and Masters, as well as fantasists such as Cabell, Eddison and MacDonald.

    " 'Time is warping in the palace,' Laurence Carr observes in The Wytheport Tales. And our nights and days are warping in these sly, canny (or are they uncanny?) poems. Most interested in the world when that world is changing, and by turns in-flected, de-flected, and re-flected, here fanciful, there matter of fact, Carr's tales summon twilight presences from the edges of experience, dark, restless, playful, and urgent."

    —Robert Polito, Director, New School Writing Program

    "Though it seems to begin in the land of Dylan Thomas's Nightwood, it extends beyond that into wonderfully evocative, mythic worlds that strike me as utterly original in its language and pace."

    —Robert H. Waugh, The Monster in the Mirror: Looking for H. P. Lovecraft

    "With The Wytheport Tales, Laurence Carr gives us a work that shimmers and twists, that undulates across the mind's eye like a tapestry. At times homely, at others baroque, at still others nightmarish, the collection fits multitudes between its covers. I'm eternally grateful to have been introduced to a sampling of Wytheport's denizens, and look forward to many return visits."

    —John Langan, Mr. Gaunt

    2006 | 54 pages
  • The ambiguity of snow Dog wishes, buried in squinty sun may never sprout deeper dreads down under may deface even terror’s stun gun before bright dawn pours on white cloth buffered over white strain and shows no blood on the collar— but the dead ground, bone’s crypt, dazzles, unwinds a drape to hide a corpse stuffed in.
    Read a review of Window with 4 Panes, from the May 2009 issue of Chronogram magazine.
    2009 | 78 pages
  • "Winner of the 2012 Codhill Poetry Chapbook Award, Heather Cousins's Freeze, as sparse and elegant as winter branches, illuminates how time is both fixed and divisible, the human paradox both archetypal and mutable."

    —Pauline Uchmanowicz, Final Judge

    2013 | 30 pages
  • A Hudson River Anthology This anthology of contemporary poetry and memoir celebrates the Hudson River and its environs in all of its breadth and depth. It brings together sixty Hudson Valley writers who explore what it means to be part of one of America’s great river systems: to live near it and sometimes on it, to travel it by sail, steam, oar and motor, to swim it, to gather food from it, and to have it as a constant in one’s ever changing life. The book was created as part of the Hudson 400 Celebration, but we hope that it will stand for many years as a testament to those native people, explorers, immigrants turned locals, and visitors who made the river part of their lives, and ultimately, a place to call home.
    2010 | 131 pages
  • "These poems require us to approach with an uncorrupted humanity. The poems insist on dignifying us. They have an almost theological ambition in that they love us, not in spite of our imperfections, but because of them and in so doing they shock us into our better selves and guarantee us salvation. This is a book to be grateful for. Its generosity elevates us."

    —Vince Cioffi Winner of the 1999 Stegner Fellowship in Poetry

    Ben Mitchell's "Only the Sound Itself" reminds us to think about the experiences that made us who we are. This poetry acts as a wake up call to make us realize how hectic and crazy our lives have become. The theme of nature throughout the collection allows one to see the peace and serenity that used to exist and how the simplicity of life is lost as we take on responsibilities, fall in love, and eventually grow into adulthood.
    2010 | 45 pages
  • "Comfort, fathers of nostalgic rue? I'm charged to deliver the new, but change has shifted the shape of me; pain has twisted the make of me from all I thought I knew. Nomadic mappers of the land, I'm lost. Am I the message, messenger, or the one who heeds what calls?"
    2010 | 64 pages
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