Titles in Print

Simple Weight

Wed, 01 Sep 2010 00:00:00 GMT

Praise for Simple Weight

With consummate skill, subtle and exacting artistry, and fierce passion, Tania Runyan's first collection, Simple Weight, brilliantly unveils the mysterious ties tethering heaven to earth [and] explores the painful and troubling journeys of a soul in search of the divine.... Hers is a voice brimming with a palpable humanity and beautiful pathos—complex, wise, mutable, and wholly original.
—Maurya Simon, author of The Raindrop's Gospel

Spiritual without being in the least bit preachy, Runyan deals in matters of the heart, letting us experience the ineffable through a variety of subjects, often commonplace objects: a dead goldfish, a broken dishwasher, dust mites.... Runyan uses deeply infused language throughout: "I chew the name God, God like habitual / gum." God, "the holy / singularity." "God who buries // his miracles in the soil." [These] poems have weight—emotional, spiritual, political—but are anything but simple.
—Barbara Crooker, author of Radiance, Line Dance, and More

Tania Runyan claims she does not concern herself with things too marvelous for her. Well, she's lying. Simple Weight ponders and illuminates cicadas emerging from the earth and martyrs merging their bones with dust. In Runyan's world--which is our world--the human intrudes upon the holy, making it more holy still. These poems, like the Psalms themselves, will fall through the years "like a muscle of water." Drink deeply.
—Paul Willis, author of Rosing From the Dead: Poems

Luminous Dream

Thu, 12 Aug 2010 00:00:00 GMT

Praise for Wally Swist's Poetry

"What a gorgeous book this is! Wally Swist writes of passionate love with a quiet grace that stirred this reader's heart. Each individual poem moved me deeply; as a whole, Luminous Dream simply knocked me out. Shades of Pablo Neruda, Mary Oliver, and Gary Snyder abound, yet the poet's voice is uniquely his own. This is a book I will return to again and again with deep pleasure."

—Lesléa Newman, author Nobody's Mother and Still Life with Buddy; Poet Laureate, Northampton, MA 2008-2010

"These poems are a beautifully perceptive reading of both the natural world and ourselves as its necessary testament and witness. If 'seeing is believing,' then Wally Swist can make believers of us all."

—Robert Creeley

"Wally Swist's poems are full of clean perceptions and clear, proportionate feeling. They are easy to read in the sense that they are continually rewarding. They have a fine balance, doing justice to the natural, the human, and the divine, and treating none of these as refuge from another. As a grateful reader, I applaud him."

—Richard Wilbur

Stealing Hymnals from the Choir

Tue, 10 Aug 2010 00:00:00 GMT

Winner of the 2010 FutureCycle

Poetry Book Prize

Stealing Hymnals from the Choir is a collection of poems about the outward pull of the forces of history, the inward tugging of the human heart, and the intersection of the two. Its subjects are some of the impersonal events that have swept us into the present day, and the precarious intimacies that try to steady us and give us strength to endure within that present. It is a book about mourning, meditation, and finally the inevitability of celebration.

A Love Letter to Say There Is No Love

Mon, 02 Aug 2010 00:00:00 GMT

Maria Williams-Russell's debut chapbook is a dark and sometimes surreal collection where domestic life is not only lonely but buzzes with potential harm. Disillusioned, the poems offer language and images of home, motherhood and romantic love that come out of a resigned duress and which include bees, bats, car accidents, war, and strangers knocking at the door. Even so, the speaker of the poems finds ways to cope: "... when the men walk through the house/ I pretend my body is the frame/ and they a flock of birds/ caught for a moment in the rafters."

The Secret Life of Hardware

Sat, 17 Jul 2010 00:00:00 GMT

FutureCycle Poetry #4, 2009

Fri, 25 Dec 2009 00:00:00 GMT

Contents

Debrenee Adkisson
Rane Arroyo
Keith Badowski
Marcia Black
Jennifer Campbell
Susana H. Case
Kathleen Dale
Janann Dawkins
Alan Elyshevitz
Rupert Fike
Taylor Graham
John Grey
Peggy Heinrich
Dianna Henning
Michael Henson
Paul Hostovsky
Joseph Hutchison
Michael Lee Johnson
Diane Kistner
Joy Ladin
Sean Lause
Jack Lindeman
Joanne Lowery
Iain Mcdonald
Timothy Martin
Catherine McGuire
Brad Rose
Jim Scutti
George Seli
Noel Smith
Amanda Strand
Wally Swist
Gina M. Tabasso
Rhian Waller
Kathleen Worrell
Charles Wyatt
Cami Zinzi

Beyond the Bones

Thu, 06 Aug 2009 00:00:00 GMT

Poems by Neil Carpathios, 2009 FutureCycle Poetry Book Prize finalist.

No Loneliness

Fri, 31 Jul 2009 00:00:00 GMT

Colma

Wed, 15 Apr 2009 00:00:00 GMT

About the Author:

John Laue, a native of New Jersey, won the Ina Coolbrith Poetry Award at the University of California, Berkeley, and was Editor of Transfer, San Francisco State’s literary Magazine, and Associate Editor of the national literary journal San Francisco Review. He is the author of three books of poetry. In 1997, Laue won the Poetry World contest sponsored by Chatfield Software and published the chapbook Paradises Lost (Northstar Press). His poems have appeared in numerous literary journals, anthologies, and a poetry textbook, Snapshots of Planet Earth, published by Oxford University Press.. The anthology Grow Old Along With Me (Papier Mache Press), released as an audiotape read by Ed Asner and Ellen Burstyn, was one of five finalists for 1997's spoken word Grammy Award, won by Hillary Clinton. Since retiring from teaching in 1992, he has been a coordinator of the National Writers Union Reading Series in Carmel, California, and of Local 7's yearly national poetry contest. Recently he became Advisory Editor of the new journal, The Monterey Poetry Review. In addition to poetry, his main interest is mental health. Laue has served as co-chair of the Santa Cruz County Local Mental Health Board; presently he serves on the Board of the Mental Health Clients’ Action Network (MHCAN). Recently he won an essay contest sponsored by Outsider Press, which will soon publish his memoir, My Mother and Me.

From the Book:

Yet perhaps we could sing with some assurance

that with or without glib promises of heaven,

we all become as children

under the eyelids of our nights;

that we now can reach past far horizons,

letting our sweet and bitter anthems flow,

as everywhere, with swift, consistent rhythms

dark precisely balances light.

FutureCycle Press is pleased to announce publication of Colma (including City of the Dead and Elegy for Skeptics). For more information about the author and a sample from the book, see below.

Please support American poetry and order your copy today! All sales revenues go directly to the support of this press.

An excerpt from the book is shown on the bottom left.

Comments on the Work:

In Colma, John Laue embarks on an inner journey, both "to better know” himself and to find peace within his "questing brain.” He sifts Colma’s landscapes, winnows its terrain, trying to confront the city’s "mute finality,” trying to come to terms with the "inescapable net” of death. In exploring the above-ground world of the living and the grave-bound world of decomposing flesh, the poet is torn between images of chaos and images of order, between the cyclical world of nature and the rigid world of the mind, until a voice inside him advises to "Forget the fallow dead./You have another life to live.” Then, the "grave” of his mind opens to the natural cycle of death and life. Although we may not share Laue’s experience of having worked in a city of the dead, we do, through the force of his poetry, share in his journey, these poems well-kept pathways to understanding.

—Elliott Ruchowitz-Roberts

Mr. Laue opens a cemetery gate and guides us through Colma with vivid description and fascinating details of the many cultural communities within the city of the dead. As one who knows his subject well, he writes with both humor and dignity. As I ended this collection of poems, I felt closer to the great mysteries of life and death and understood better the reverence with which we mourn for those who lived and loved before us, those who created the foundation for our own lives.

—Bernice Rendrick

In this small and extraordinarily poignant collection of poems, John Laue masterfully calls upon each one of us to examine not just our relationship to those who have passed before us, but—more importantly—our relationship to our own lives. He shows us with clarity and confidence how even among the cemeteries of Colma where "the poor lie tended” and "the grass is watered by tears,” honeybees in their proper season, nonetheless, "enter every hollow blossoming/fertilizing, scraping pollened knees.” He assures us of an eternal "law of energy:/endings always mean beginnings,” and reminds us of the verities and cycles through which our own lives will ultimately pass, calling upon each of us to remember, "you have another life to live/a little movement bolstered by your bones./One small cycle, but it is your own.” In that regard, Colma is most assuredly a precious collection for the living and a poetic call from Laue’s "city of crystal” for all of us to remember, in the time we have, to be alive.

—George Lober

The Porous Desert

Wed, 15 Apr 2009 00:00:00 GMT

Proofreading

This is the detail work

of flossing between the letters.

After a hundred days without rain

it feels like looking at an unblemished sky

in the hope of a cloud. Twenty pages

set correctly. Another dry night,

and a sunrise so clear

it spells out a spring with no wildflowers.

After forty pages not even

a missing period. I look outside

to clear my eyes. Bright sun.

A cough in the atmosphere. The light

between lines of print

is dazzling me. My mouth is dry.

I can taste a summer of fires

as I pause before reading

the final page, and scribble

with my red pen in the margin

just to test the flow of ink

and leave a mark to show

that someone was here, and that reading

this page felt like

raking dry leaves from the sky.

FutureCycle Press is pleased to announce publication of a new title by poet David Chorlton, The Porous Desert. For more information about the author and a sample from the book, see below.

This is an extraordinarily rich collection of poems from the Arizona desert. Please support American poetry and order your copy today!

About David Chorlton

An excerpt from the book is shown below.

FutureCycle Poetry #3 2008

Wed, 15 Apr 2009 00:00:00 GMT

Contents

Taylor Graham
• Urban Rhapsody
• Dear H,
• Seeing Her Off

Sholeh Wolpé
• Confined

Richard Fein
• Corvine Metaphor

Don Thackrey
• Windmill

Tovli Simiryan
• An Old Man's Kiss

Iris N. Schwartz
• Presbyterian Hospital Emergency Room . . .

Roy Scheele
• On Hemingway's Famous River

Penny Harter
• Walking on Water

Kelly Clayton
• Aleutian Island Recipe

Duane Locke
• Yang Chu's Poems 503

Rupert Fike
• Why Reading Anna Karenina Takes a Long Time

Catherine Chandler
• Irène: A Portrait

Burt Kimmelman
• Blackeyed Susan

Rachel Hadas
• White and Black
• A Crack of Light
• Bench, Broadway, April Afternoon
• The Watcher
• Drift

Leo Yankevich
• Ultima Thule

Claire Bateman
• Phyla
• Luminal

Diana Pinckney
• Butterflies
• Creek House
• Solstice
• What News Swallows the January Sky

FutureCycle Poetry #2 2007

Wed, 15 Apr 2009 00:00:00 GMT

Contents

Jack Lindeman
• Dissenter

Judith Barrington
• How You Open the Door

George Drew
• After a Morning

James R. Whitley
• A Surrogate for Blue

Wendy Taylor Carlisle
• Off the Square

Larry D. Thomas
• Near Pecos, Texas

J. P. Dancing Bear
• My Yeriho
• Every Dog Is Two Dogs

Elizabeth Volpe
• Dog

David Brendan Hopes
• In a Summer of Almost Too Much Light
• Late Snow: For the Enthronement of Benedict XVI

Carol Carpenter
• Diary of the Night Watchman
• Midnight Shift at the GM Body and Assembly Plant

Allan Peterson
• Just Saying Alaska

Robert W. King
• The Subway Mistake

Dixie Salazar
• Fiberoptic Angel

Roy Scheele
• One More Time

Susanna Rich
• Interview

Doug Martin
• Moonshine, Illinois Confronts the Afterlife with Ease

Elsie Pankowski
• Cleaning Windows in November
• Last Road

David Chorlton
• The Stages of Darkness

Marc J. Sheehan
• The Fishermen
• Detour Outside Walhalla, Michigan

Mark Saba
• Driving Away from New York City

John Allman
• Key West
• Rapture
• Journal

L. B. Sedlacek
• Taking a Breath

Gary Lehmann
• Baseball Bus Tumbles over Embankment

Lee Passarella
• Instinct

Ellen Bass
• Your Hand

Pamela Uschuk
• Flying Through Thunder

FutureCycle Poetry #1 2007

Wed, 15 Apr 2009 00:00:00 GMT

Contents

Greg Kosmicki
• Riding Home
• I Awoke Today Thinking of Ashes

Donald M.Hassler

• Touched by the Webbed Feet of Geese

Lee Passarella
• November Where He Grieves
Instinct

Mindy Kronenberg
    • River Bottom

Sean Kilpatrick
    • popular theory

Paula Brancato
    • There Is Peace that Exists in Sky

Taylor Graham
    • Through the Louvers

Gary Fincke
    • Plummeting

Jennifer Lagier
    • Magic Mountain

Clarinda Harriss
    • Mistress

Rustin Larson

• My Father's Hernia

Juliet Cook
   • Ovarian Follies

Alexander Oliver
   • One of These Days

William Doreski
  • Binary System
• The Didactic View of Art

Joseph Hutchison
   • One Clear Moment in August