Anthologies
(Finger lakes Anthology)
(Endangered Species Anthology)
(Susquehanna Watershed Anthology)
(Auburn Prison Anthology)
Knocking on the Silence
An Anthology of Poetry
Inspired by
The Finger Lakes
Edited by
Donna M. Marbach
and
Patricia Roth Schwartz
Cover art by Dorothy Harrison
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Knocking on the Silence is a 120 page
hand-sewn book with spine - $19.95
TO ORDER Knocking on the Silence ON-LINE
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The Dire Elegies
59 Poets on Endangered Species of North America
(Ordering Information Below)
Illustartion by David M. Carroll
Karla Linn Merrifield, chief editor, and co-editor Roger M. Weir have assembled a first anthology of its type in the world to inspire readers to take action on behalf of the continent's endangered plants and animals.
"Poets here have left their ivory towers to encourage their neighbors to walk in the woods, observe the world, learn - and act,” said Merrifield, who teaches writing in the New York state university system.
Dr. Edward O. Wilson, world-renowned Harvard entomologist and two-time Pulitzer-Prize winning author, points out in the epigraph to this unique collection of poetry, “…the better an ecosystem is known, the less likely it will be destroyed.”
This is the premise of “THE DIRE ELEGIES: 59 Poets on Endangered Species of North America” and why author Bill McKibben (“The End of Nature,” “Enough,” and “Wandering Home”) says in the book's foreword, “These magnificent poems work as a chant to summon more” of the love to save the endangered from extinction. It's also why writer Susan Cerulean (“Tracking Desire: A Journey After Swallow-tailed Kites”) has called the book an “important manifesto: a must-read for our times.”
Included in the anthology are noted poets William Heyen, Maxine Kumin, W. S. Merwin, Enid Shomer, James E. Smelcer, Gary Snyder, Brian Swann and Lewis Turco among others. The 59 poets are from all across the U.S. and Canada.
The book's cover illustration depicting painted turtles in hibernation was donated by New Hampshire artist and naturalist David M. Carroll, recipient of The Burroughs Award for his Swampwalker's Journal: A Wetland's Year.
Science Meets Poetry
A helpful feature of the anthology is the species notes that accompany the poems each time a new species is introduced.
For example, when readers encounter Minnesota poet Shirley S. Stevens's poem “On Spotting a Pygmy Owl,” they also learn: “The endangered cactus ferruginous pygmy owl, Glaucidium brasilianum cactorum, of the U.S. Southwest and Mexico, numbered only 12 birds when it was listed in the U.S. in 1997. A USF&WS recovery team began its work to rescue the species in 1998, but its fate remains precarious.”
“This anthology is a major advance along a most important frontier: forging compassion for endangered species, and using our human self-awareness to reflect on whether we really wish to travel the road we're on.,” said Carl Safina, author of Song for the Blue Ocean and Voyage of the Turtle, and founder and president of the Blue Ocean Institute.
The Dire Elegies
is a 120 page hand-sewn book with spine - $19.95
TO ORDER ON-LINE
Contributors Order On-Line here:
Send orders to:
FootHills Publishing
PO Box 68
Kanona, NY 14856
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Listening to Water
The Susquehanna Watershed Anthology
Edited by Jennifer Hill-Kaucher and Dan Waber
Cover Art by Christine Goldbeck
Introduction
We were sharing poems our favorite way, among friends, over beverages, within the slow swirl of an autumn breeze, at the dining room table, when Michael asked us if we'd be interested in editing an anthology for him and FootHills Publishing. Sure, we said, what sort of anthology? Michael went on to tell us how he thought it would be appropriate to put together an anthology of poems from the Susquehanna Watershed area, because that's what FootHills' first book had been, almost 20 years ago. Who would dream of saying “no”?
In the process of putting together the collection you now hold in your hands we used several criteria. First, the poems selected had to strike us both as being excellent poems. Second, the excellent poems had to be emblematic of the anthology's area of focus, the Susquehanna Watershed. By “emblematic” we mean that they had to perform the dual function of making residents of the area say “yes, that's us all right” and allowing non-residents to say “oh, now I understand the region better.” Third, the excellent, emblematic poems had to blend organically with the other poems selected. We didn't want to assemble a collection that throbbed with flashpops of disconnected poems. We wanted to assemble a collection that flows, like the Susquehanna herself - an anthology that twists and winds its way, surely, into every aspect of the lives of the people of an entire region.
Here's to 20 years of FootHills Publishing, and here's to 20 more.
Dan Waber & Jennifer Hill-Kaucher
Editors
Listening to Water
is a 100 page hand-sewn book with spine - $16.00
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an anthology from
the Inmates' Poetry Workshop
of Auburn Correctional Facility
Auburn, New York 2001-2009
“Listen, America! These poems are the best of what Robert Pinsky's Democracy, Culture and the Voice of Poetry, describes as an attempt to balance our national Memory. Open your eyes, mind, and hearts to the simple, frank, unsettling beauty.”
-Vincent F. A. Golphin, PhD, poet, author of Like A Dry Land: A Soul Journey Through the Middle East
"Hearing of my writing class at Albion, well-meaning friends would say, 'How great to be helping imprisoned women find their voices!' Just as Pat Schwartz has, I've met instead inmates with pages of writing, much of it already astounding. In this anthology, one poet asserts, 'No, I am not voiceless...' Indeed! So give these men what they really want to find: not their voices-but your ear, or, in this case, your eye!"
-Karen Anderson, poet and prison volunteer
Monday Night Poetry is special because it's the only place in this petrified world where we can gather round the campfire of our souls and give life to our joy and pain.
-Michael Rhynes, co-facilitator of the Inmates'
Poetry Workshop at ACF and author of
Guerillas in the Mist, and Other Poems...
This unique collection gives voice to those individuals who have been shuttered away. Their voices in turn open a dialogue we all need to think about.
-Dale Davis
Executive Director, The New York Literary Center
Reading the poems in this anthology felt freeing. The fiery, raw, raven-eyed honesty of its incarcerated men's work made me feel less locked inside whatever bars of ignorance, anger, fear, and stereotypes I'm peering through. I am grateful to these poets for the brave dignity of their words-for being my teacher. A dark night of the soul journey, indeed, but one which guides the reader out into a shock of transcending light.
-Susan Deer Cloud, poet, editor
and author of The Last Ceremony
From the Forward by Janine Pommy Vega:
Reading Doing Time to Cleanse My Mind, I realized the poems were created
in the supportive environment of a writing workshop. After ten years and
thousands of manuscripts read for the PEN Prison Writing Awards (PEN stands
for Poets, Editors & Novelists, an international association of writers), I
have learned to recognize poems from whatever confined corner of this nation
someone or some group is actively working on his/her/their craft. The nuts
and bolts are hidden, but the images are nailed in place, and the
imagination leaps out in an arc that touches the reader.
Week after week the writers of this anthology gathered in some corner of
Auburn Prison, brought together by the arrival of a visitor, the poet
Patricia Roth Schwartz. The whole premise and requirement of weekly writing
sessions brought about the inspiration, formulation, creation, sharing, and
thereafter the editing of these poems. They are the works of writers
concerned with the big questions: Who am I? What am I doing here? What is
this society I am part of? What about my loved ones, how can I serve them?
. . . . .
Having read through the contents of this anthology several times these
past weeks, I have earmarked my personal favorites-both writers and
poems-which I will not share with you. Rather I urge you to pick your own.
Novelist Bernard Malamud, who once served as president of PEN American
Center, said, and I'm paraphrasing, that his belief in a fellowship of
writers had to do with fostering “literature as a civilizing force in an
unstable world; a literature that gives flesh and bones and perhaps a brain
to the politics that assail us; a literature that entices us to understand
and value life.” That pretty much describes the book you're holding in your
hands
From the Introduction by Patricia Roth Schwartz:
What's it like for a teacher to enter the school where she plans to
teach, not through ivy-covered arches into a sunlit book-lined classroom,
but by passing under a hulking stone entry worthy of a medieval fortress,
then submit to a metal detector, a search of her briefcase, having
previously had a mug shot and fingerprints taken? Then she walks, not
across a grassy campus, but over an asphalt-surfaced walled yard, escorted
by armed guards, past towering turrets manned by gunmen, into a building
sparsely stocked with only basic furniture, no supplies, and peeling paint.
Intimidating? Fearsome? Perhaps… Yet what's it like to find her students pouring into the meager
classroom brimming with eagerness and enthusiasm, clutching sheaves of poems
and stacks of manuscripts they've been working on for years, many
self-educated in subjects ranging from mythology to history to world
religions? Thus began my experience as a volunteer facilitator of an
inmates' poetry workshop inside Auburn Correctional Facility, a maximum
security men's prison first built in 1821, with most of its original
forbidding architecture still intact.
Proceeds: The editors of this book are donating all their profits from book sales to the Raven's Wing Fund, which provides free copies to the poets' families and friends and to present and future members of the Inmates' Poetry Workshop at ACF, as well as helping to make possible future publishing projects.
doing time to cleanse my mind
is a 76 page hand-stitched paperbook with spine
$16.00
TO ORDER ON-LINE
From the US or Canada
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