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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.
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and Other Poems "Susan Mesinai's poems are spiritual, inquisitive, and generous—an alchemy of language. With imagistic lines and surprising off-rhymes, their many cadenced voices range from Raoul Wallenberg's isolation cell to Jacob's ladder-totem-pole; Kali's broad sweeping grounds to a mother's mother's healing well; a daughter who "...plants her feet on mine...laughing backwards" to a wife's full moon face 'braver than any war.' I'm grateful for these new connections to this bright, agile world of constantly renewing relationships."
—Christianne Balk, Author of Bindweed and Desiring Flight
"Susan Mesinai, activist, poet, moral conscience, sends dispatches from a spiritual battlefront.... Lyrical, personal, fiercely honest, an American Akhmatova, Mesinai bears witness to the madness of her time, and to hard-won moments of sanity and hope in this incandescent collection of poems."—Marcus Boon, York University, Author of The Road to Excess
At this Spring, you will find me, in all my smiling Invisibility Part of the play of lights and darks dancing on the Waters of a Sacred Well, giving Vision to the Blind & Healing. Here I will dwell, even in this lifetime For I have come Home. —from the poem "Welsh Woman Wandering"2007 | 110 pages
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Reflections on Myth, Symbol, and Story "The Sphinx, the Pyramids, the stone temples are, all of them, ultimately, as flimsy as London Bridge; our cities but tents set up in the cosmos. We pass. But what the bee knows, the wisdom that sustains our passing life—however much we deny or ignore it—that for ever remains."
—P. L. Travers
2010 | 303 pages
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22 Poems This collection of poems was written between 2004 and 2009. Working with various partners Steve Clorfeine developed a form, “moving and writing,” in which one person moves with eyes closed and the other witnesses the movement, after which both write, “free writing” style. Witnessed moving with eyes closed is based on a form called Authentic Movement, pioneered by Mary Starks Whitehouse and later by Janet Adler. They brought to a generation of dancers, educators, and therapists an improvised mindfulness-awareness practice, which Whitehouse called “movement in depth...moving and being moved.” What is revealed when the activity of imagining is primary, when the less visible or invisible becomes visible, when the substance of shapes, sounds, images, stories surfaces, mingles, and compounds and we are drawn deeper into the unknown and directed to mysteries?
2010 | 68 pages
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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
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"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
