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Praise for The Body Dialogues

Miriam O’Neal’s The Body Dialogues is rich in detail that engenders psychological insight into her multifaceted world. O’Neal observes with a calm clarity that makes one hover over her exquisite diction, as when she writes, “her hand curved like a whelk shell,”  “..the red bottle—trapped among us / like a hornet caught between panes of glass,” or “the smoky, tin-foil strip of lake.”  This book overflows with memorable lines written with wonderful precision and depth.

~Alan Britt, author of Lost Among the Hours

About the Author

Miriam O’Neal’s first collection of poems, We Start With What We’re Given, was published by Kelsay Books in 2018. She is a 2019 Pushcart Prize nominee and was named a Notable Poet for the 2018 Disquiet Literary Prize. Her translation of Italian poet, Alda Merini’s, Poema Della Croce, was recognized in 2007, by the American Literary Translators Association (ALTA). Her poems and reviews have appeared in AGNI, Blackbird Journal, North Dakota Quarterly, Passager Journal, Southern Poetry Review, and elsewhere. She lives in Plymouth, Massachusetts.

 

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Praise for Little What

The poems in ‘Little What’ map a sustained devotion to small details that, under the poet’s attentive scrutiny, blossom repeatedly into surprise and wonder. Jeff Oaks understands the longing and distance that persist even in close physicality and the mystery that can arise from the familiar. Take, for example, the poem “Sunflower”: the transfer from it to us is gorgeous yet careful, as in full of care. I’ve waited so long for this book to arrive in the world. Savor it.

— Ron Mohring, author of Survivable World

About the Author

Jeff Oaks is the author of four chapbooks, The Unknown Country, The Moon of Books, Shift, and Mistakes with Strangers. This is his first full-length collection. He has published poems in several literary magazines, including Assaracus, Best New Poets, Field, Georgia Review, Missouri Review, Superstition Review, and Tupelo Quarterly.  A recipient of a Pittsburgh Foundation Grant and three Pennsylvania Council of the Arts fellowships,  he teaches writing at the University of Pittsburgh.

https://jeffoaks.wordpress.com/

 

The Acute Avian Heart by Joey Gould

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Joey Gould is a writing tutor from a town originally established as a utopian society. Since 2011, they helped orchestrate each iteration of the Massachusetts Poetry Festival in Salem, MA. In addition, they have written articles for Masspoetry.org & traverse MA as a workshop leader for Student Day of Poetry events in schools. They volunteer for The New York City Poetry Festival & perform as Izzie Hexxam in The Poetry Society of New York’s Poetry Brothel. Always willing to entertain, they have joined a poetry circus, improv comedy/poetry events, & a poems-to-order art gallery event. They curated a special issue section of Soundings East as a returning fellowship alum of & generative workshop leader for The Salem State University Summer Poetry Seminar. A poetry editor in their own right (formerly of Golden Walkman & presently at Drunk Monkeys) their poetry can be found in issues of Five:2: One, Lily Poetry Review, District Lit, Memoir Mixtapes, & The Compassion Anthology, amongst others. They have been a Mass Audubon member since 2008.

Praise for The Acute Avian Heart

The grand motif throughout this stunning debut is what Yeats called “a terrible beauty,” and Gould undergoes transformations—grief, loss, gender, love, sex—in that dangerous place where the human and the terrifyingly endangered non-human worlds overlap.  ‘The Acute Avian Heart’ is a brutal multitude of new, ancient voices, a feast before which Gould examines the guts of their past and present like a haruspex, searching for the precise configurations to carry grief into a  celebration, an impossibility of doors, a world behind each.  Gould is the future songbird, “the robin’s antimatter aloof eye,” through which, for once, the future looks good.

Sam Witt, author of Little Domesday Clock.