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Wednesday, December 19, 2018

Moonrise Press Announces Its 2018 Pushcart Prize Nominations from "Grateful Conversations"

 

Moonrise Press announces its nominations to the Pushcart Prizes for the year 2018, all from the "Grateful Conversations" anthology of Westside Women Writers, edited by Kathi Stafford an Maja Trochimczyk, and published in May 2018. The nominations were selected jointly by both editors, who, obviously, could not nominate each other! 


  • Grateful Conversations Never Had, Millicent Borges Accardi (Page 5)
  • Sophie and Vincent, Madeleine S. Butcher (Page 34)
  • Harp Player, Susan Rogers (Page 18)
  • In that Banat Land, Sonya Sabanac (Page 54)
  • Sweet Fire Dance of Dissent, Ambika Talwar (Page 219)

Borges Accardi's  insightful poem about a tragic injustice and its aftermath gave rise to the title of the whole anthology, Grateful Conversations.  It is based on the prompt for one of the earlier workshops of the group: "Grateful conversations never had, but now taking place."  Butcher's poem from the Van Gogh workshop at the Norton Simon Museum is a delightful imaginary scene of the painter visited by a playful child. There is pure magic in her words. The Harp Player by Susan Rogers brings to life an ancient Greek sculpture over 5,000 years old that was the subject of a writing workshop at the Getty Villa.  Sonya Sabanac often writes about her traumatic experience as a refugee from Serbia, who barely escaped with her life. The selected poem In that Banat Land describes her family history and has a strong anti-war message that is good to hear in our troubled times.  Ambika Talwar is an inspired mystic poet weaving her Indian background into a fantastic design made of powerful imagery and potent words.  You cannot fail but be inspired by her Sweet Fire Dance of Dissent. 



MILLICENT BORGES ACCARDI




MILLICENT BORGES ACCARDI, a Portuguese-American writer, is the author of four poetry books, most recently Only More So (Salmon Poetry). Her awards include fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA), Fulbright, Canto Mundo, Creative Capacity, the California Arts Council, Fundação Luso-Americana, and Barbara Deming Foundation. She’s led poetry workshops at Keystone College, Nimrod Writers Conference, The Muse in Norfolk, Virginia, and University of Texas, Austin. Her non-fiction can be found in The Writers Chronicle, Poets Quarterly, and the Portuguese American Journal. Recent readings at Brown University, Rutgers, UMass Dartmouth, Rhode Island College and the Carr Series at the University of Illinois, Champaign/Urbana.


MADELEINE S. BUTCHER




MADELEINE S. BUTCHER has been writing since 1979.  An actress at that time, she wrote monologues, scenes and plays, later transitioning to short stories, guided by Merrill Joan Gerber.  Poetry was always cropping up on its own, from time to time. She is a graduate of NYU School of the Arts with a BFA in dance and has performed off Broadway and on.  She has taught ballet to toddlers, teenagers and adults. She taught playwriting, modern dance, ballet and improvisation to at risk youth. Besides dance and acting, she worked as an assistant picture and sound editor on features for sixteen years.  She taught Pilates out of her home studio for ten years in Woodland Hills. She has been a member of Westside Women Writers for three years.  Her first piece was published in the West Marin Journal, 2015.She and her husband are retired, traveling and hoping to settle on San Juan Island in the great state of Washington.


SUSAN ROGERS


SUSAN ROGERS considers poetry a vehicle for light and a tool for the exchange of positive energy. She is a practitioner of Sukyo Mahikari— a spiritual practice that promotes positive thoughts, words and action. www.sukyomahikari.org  She is also a photographer and a licensed attorney. Her poems were part of the 2009 event “Celebrating Women, Body, Mind and Spirit,” the 2010 Valentine Peace Project, the 2010 event “Poetry: A Garden to the Human Spirit” held at Cypress College in Cypress, California, the 2010 Poem Flag Installation by Global Alchemy Forum and have been performed at museums and galleries in Southern California.  In 2010 she was Writer of the Week for “Words, Spirit and You,” sponsored by Tiferet Journal. One of her haiku won Honorable Mention in the 2010 Kiyoshi and Kiyoko Tokutomi Memorial Haiku Contest sponsored by the Yuki Teikei Society of Haiku. She was a featured poet at the Moonday Poetry Reading Series in 2011. Her work can be found in the book Chopin and Cherries, numerous journals, anthologies and chapbooks and can be heard online or in person as part of the audio tour for the Pacific Asia Museum in Pasadena, California. She was recently interviewed by Lois P. Jones for KPFK’s Poets Café.

SONYA SABANAC


SONYA SABANAC (maiden Zivic) was born and raised in Former Yugoslavia, a country that no longer exists. Disappeared like Atlántida and left its former citizens to carry a heavy burden of constant search for a home.  Sonya was born in the City of Sarajevo, where she graduated from Sarajevo University School of Law.  In the midst of the war that made her country gone, in 1992, Sonya left the county with her family and spent two years in Denmark living as a refugee.  She immigrated into USA in 1994, and landed at Los Angeles, where she still lives. She was a passionate reader all her life and an ardent poetry lover, but she only started writing in her late forties. Sonya is a member of Los Angeles Westside Women Writers Group.  Her poems appeared in San Gabriel Valley Poetry Quarterly, Magnapoets, Poetic Diversity and the anthology about Immigrant Women Shifting Balance Sheets that also published her memoir, How I Decided to Go a Little Crazy. In addition to writing, Sonya is also a photographer. She has many projects in store; one of them is to publish a book that will bond short stories with her photo images. At this point her daily job is seriously interfering with her writing career.

AMBIKA TALWAR

AMBIKA TALWAR is an educator, poet and artist, who has composed poems since her teen years. She has authored and self-published Creative Resonance: Poetry—Elegant Play, Elegant Change; 4 Stars & 25 Roses (poems for her father) and, more recently, My Greece: Mirrors & Metamorphoses, a poetic biographical spiritual journey through Greece. She is published in Kyoto Journal; Inkwater Ink, vol. 3; Chopin with Cherries, On Divine Names; VIA, Poets on Site collections, Tower Journal, St. Julian’s Press, Life & Legends, and others. Interviewed by KPFK, she also won an award in Belgium for a short film. Her ecstatic writing style makes her poetry a “bridge to other worlds.” She resides in Los Angeles/New Delhi, practices energy medicine, and teaches at Cypress College, California. She believes it is through our creativity that we gain self-knowledge and become activators of change. creativeinfinities.com, goldenmatrixvisions.com




Grateful Conversations: A Poetry Anthology 

Edited by Maja Trochimczyk and Kathi Stafford

Paperback, 280 pages, with black and white illustrations
ISBN  978-1-945938-22-1  
Color Paperback, 280 pages with color illustrations
ISBN 978-1-945938-24-5 
E-Book in EPUB format with color illustrations
ISBN 978-1-945938-23-8 

http://www.moonrisepress.com/grateful-conversations-anthology.html


ABOUT THIS ANTHOLOGY


Grateful Conversations, edited by Maja Trochimczyk and Kathi Stafford, brings to its readers a wealth of women's wisdom and talent.  This beautiful book contains poetic self-portraits of nine poets that form the Westside Women Writers group.  The poets selected their own favorite poems that represent their worldviews and experiences; they also provided illustrations - photos of nature and families. A large portion of the volume is dedicated to verse based on shared themes, prompts, or site-visits to museums.  Wisdom comes with age, and all nine poets featured in this anthology are over 50 years old so they have lived through a lot.  While I feel compassionate towards the tragedies they describe, both personal and of others, I particularly like poems about family, the little blessings of daily life that are too often overlooked and should be cherished, with gratitude and grace. Rarely can one find in one place so many deeply moving and inspired poems, about the traumas of the past, the gifts to be cherished in the present, and hopes for a bright future.


                 ~ Marlene Hitt,  author of Clocks and Water Drops  (Moonrise Press, 2015)


I highly recommend Grateful Conversations for every library and poetry class. This anthology, edited by Dr. Maja Trochimczyk, a Polish American scholar and poet, and Ms. Kathi Stafford, an attorney and poet, presents work by Westside Women Writers, a group of nine poets that meet every month to share poems, encourage and learn from each other. As a poetry teacher, I know how important such feedback is, and I appreciate seeing in print the proof of this work in the form of workshop poems written after site visits to local museums. As a Serbian American poet and writer, I'm also very pleased to see the work of my former poetry student, Sonya Sabanac, featured so prominently in this anthology, especially her poems about our war-torn homeland and the trauma of displacement as an emigrant. I am also very happy to read the poems of Dr. Maja Trochimczyk, whose work I have known and appreciated for many years. These two fellow Slavic authors are joined in the anthology by poets with roots in California, whose names are well known in the literary circles of America, such as Millicent Borges Accardi, a Portugese American, Ambika Talwar, an Indian American, Lois P. Jones, or Georgia Jones-Davis.  Some of the poets are Jewish, some are Christian, some are spiritual without a religious denomination. All share the women's wisdom and maturity. All share their talents and poetic inspiration for which all readers should be grateful.

                    ~ Dr. Mira N. Mataric, Poet, Writer, Translator, and Educator, Pasadena, CA


Nine women poets converse, wake us up, send us to higher ground. Grateful Conversations carries us in and out of the emotion of memory, family, spirit, solid things and landscapes. Unlike much modern poetry, the nine writers present life and hope, not death and loss. This anthology gives us abundance, not scarcity, joy, not the grating irritations of guilt, fear and dissolution. There are general portions for each poet: Accardi, Butcher, Jones-Davis, Jones, Rogers, Sabanac, Stafford, Talwar, Trochimczyk each get twenty to thirty pages of poetry with photographs taken by the poets and also there are seven sections of workshop poems. These are poets on quests for spiritual renewal, yet the poems are not sticky with New Age platitudes, but articulate, moving, textured and the reader is grateful, uplifted. “Look at these dogwood blossoms/caught in the act of flying,” writes Lois P. Jones.  We look and we fly.
                      ~ Alice Pero, author of Thawed Stars


Wednesday, November 28, 2018

Poets Hitt, Mataric, and Pero About "Grateful Conversations" Anthology. November 25 Reading



"Grateful Conversations, edited by Maja Trochimczyk and Kathi Stafford, brings to its readers a wealth of women's wisdom and talent.  This beautiful book contains poetic self-portraits of nine poets that form the Westside Women Writers group.  The poets selected their own favorite poems that represent their worldviews and experiences; they also provided illustrations - photos of nature and families. A large portion of the volume is dedicated to verse based on shared themes, prompts, or site-visits to museums.  Wisdom comes with age, and all nine poets featured in this anthology are over 50 years old so they have lived through a lot.  While I feel compassionate towards the tragedies they describe, both personal and of others, I particularly like poems about family, the little blessings of daily life that are too often overlooked and should be cherished, with gratitude and grace. Rarely can one find in one place so many deeply moving and inspired poems, about the traumas of the past, the gifts to be cherished in the present, and hopes for a bright future."

             ~ Marlene Hitt,  author of Clocks and Water Drops  (Moonrise Press, 2015)

"I highly recommend "Grateful Conversations" for every library and poetry class. This anthology, edited by Dr. Maja Trochimczyk, a Polish American scholar and poet, and Ms. Kathi Stafford, an attorney and poet, presents work by Westside Women Writers, a group of nine poets that meet every month to share poems, encourage and learn from each other. As a poetry teacher, I know how important such feedback is, and I appreciate seeing in print the proof of this work in the form of workshop poems written after site visits to local museums. As a Serbian American poet and writer, I'm also very pleased to see the work of my former poetry student, Sonya Sabanac, featured so prominently in this anthology, especially her poems about our war-torn homeland and the trauma of displacement as an emigrant. I am also very happy to read the poems of Dr. Maja Trochimczyk, whose work I have known and appreciated for many years. These two fellow Slavic authors are joined in the anthology by poets with roots in California, whose names are well known in the literary circles of America, such as Millicent Borges Accardi, a Portugese American, Ambika Talwar, an Indian American, Lois P. Jones, or Georgia Jones-Davis.  Some of the poets are Jewish, some are Christian, some are spiritual without a religious denomination. All share the women's wisdom and maturity. All share their talents and poetic inspiration for which all readers should be grateful."

              ~ Dr. Mira N. Mataric, Poet, Writer, Translator, and Educator, Pasadena, California

"Nine women poets converse, wake us up, send us to higher ground. Grateful Conversations carries us in and out of the emotion of memory, family, spirit, solid things and landscapes. Unlike much modern poetry, the nine writers present life and hope, not death and loss. This anthology gives us abundance, not scarcity, joy, not the grating irritations of guilt, fear and dissolution. There are generous portions for each poet: Accardi, Butcher, Jones-Davis, Jones, Rogers, Sabanac, Stafford, Talwar, Trochimczyk each get twenty to thirty pages of poetry with photographs taken by the poets and also there are seven sections of workshop poems. These are poets on quests for spiritual renewal, yet the poems are not sticky with New Age platitudes, but articulate, moving, textured and the reader is grateful, uplifted. “Look at these dogwood blossoms/caught in the act of flying,” writes Lois P. Jones.  We look and we fly.

           ~ Alice Pero, author of Thawed Stars



Maja Trochimczyk, Sonya Sabanac and Susan Rogers


PHOTOS FROM NOVEMBER 25, 2018 READING AT BOLTON HALL MUSEUM

Grateful Conversations anthology was represented by Susan Rogers, Sonya Sabanac and Maja Trochimczyk, with a reading focused on the themes of gratitude, personal history, and life wisdom.



Maja Trochimczyk read her "Ode of the Lost" as well as the Lady with an Ermine" and Ciocia Tonia, about the fate of her maternal great aunt, deported to Siberia by Soviets in 1940/

Ciocia Tonia

~ for my Mother’s Aunt, Antonina “Tonia” Glińska, 
   deported by the Soviets to Siberia in 1940


Only a pear tree
between fields of sugar beets and corn.

Ripe pears — that’s all left from the house, 
barn and orchard. The farm where she raised 
her sons, milked her cows, and baked her bread.

Only a pear  tree. A lone memento 
standing forlorn in an August field.

They ploughed it over— the village church and bus stops, 
the neighbors’ corrals, where their horses used to neigh.
They ploughed it over — her garden of herbs 
and cosmos, its fragile lace of leaves kissed 
by sunlight, a dream of a flower, really — 
she used to so love its ephemeral beauty, 
a ghost of the past.

It was the worst, then, to see her neighbors 
running with news — her husband shot 
in the middle of the dusty village road.

No time for grief, she saved her tears for later.
The orders came at once: a day to pack,
a long train ride to an unfamiliar city, 
near a river she never longed to see.

They said, pack wisely — take only
 the warmest clothes, boots, pillows. 
Bring as much food as you can carry. 

Where you are going, there is nothing, 
except for freezing breath 
and bitter cold. 

It is not painful now, just surprising, 
her whole life gone, and only one tree left.
No trace of her ancestral village on the maps.

Only a pear tree 
in an empty field of stubble.

Only a pearl tree 
in her golden field of dreams. 

(c) 2018 by Maja Trochimczyk







Sonya Sabanac read poems about her immigrant experience as a war refugee from Serbia, who left during the Balkan war. Having lost everything and having left her country in a rush to save her life, she made a powerful anti-war statement in a poem that took over 10 years to write.






Susan Rogers presented five of her favorite poems, including perennial favorites, The Origin is One, Grass, and Longing for October, as well as the Grateful Conversations title poem of the entire anthology.


Susan Rogers

Grateful Conversations 


Everything we have we’re given
in love to use in love, in grace.
There is nothing we alone have written.

We are but a conversation
of light. Through this exchange we trace
everything we have. We’re given

sour and sweet, lemon, raisin
and grain to bind them into place—
There is nothing we alone have written.

We eat cakes but have forgotten
their origin. We have erased
everything. We have; we’re given.

We look. We laugh. We love. We listen.
We welcome gifts we embrace.
Yet there is nothing we alone have written.

Watch sunset turn to a ribbon.
Remember honey and its taste.
Everything we have we’re given.
There is nothing we alone have written.

(c) 2018 by Susan Rogers

Sonya Sabanac

Poets from Nov 25 reading. L to R seated: Sonya Sabanac, Andrew Kolo,
Susan Rogers, Konrad Tademar, Liliana Tademar. Standing: Mira Mataric
Maja Trochimczyk, Joe DeCenzo, Marlene Hitt, Phil Larsen, Pam Shea, and
guitarist Mark Achuff, special guest musician.



Friday, October 12, 2018

Readings from "Grateful Conversations" Anthology on November 25, 2018 and February 15, 2019


"Grateful Conversations" Group Reading, October 7, 2018


Grateful Conversations anthology is going places... A college professor in Australia wants to adopt this anthology for her course on gratitude. The anthology made it into the hands of famous poet Dana Gioia..

Maja Trochimczyk with Dana Gioia and Grateful Conversations. Photo by Dawn Jenkins

The very first appearance of this anthology in public was during the "Gathering of California's Poets Laureate" - an event hosted by Dana Gioia, organized by the California Arts Council and held on October 6, 2018 at the McGroarty Arts Center in Tujunga.

Maja Trochimczyk with "Grateful Conversations" and Robin Coste-Lewis, Photo by Dawn Jenkins

Maja Trochimczyk read her poem "In Morning Light" and presented copies  of the anthology to Dana Gioia, California Poet Laureate and former chair of the National Endowment for the Arts, Robin Coste Lewis, Los Angeles Poet Laureate, and Anne Bown-Crawford, Executive Director of the California Arts Council. The reading was filmed so hopefully the book will make it into the documentary about Poets Laureate.

Stage and audience at McGroarty Arts Center

McGroarty Arts Center, former home of California Poet Laureate John Steven McGroarty.

The first public presentation of the "Grateful Conversations" anthology was supposed to take place on Sunday, October 7, 2018 at 5 p.m. at the Flintridge Bookstore and Coffeehouse, in La Canada - Flintridge (1010 Foothill Blvd).  Now it is the second. The reading was free and books were available to purchase and have autographed by the poets. 


Seven poets  presented their work (Lois P. Jones, Susan Rogers, Madeleine S. Butcher, Maja Trochimczyk, Kathi Stafford, Ambika Talwar and Sonya Sabanac) but all poets will be  represented, as work by Georgia Jones-Davis and the group's founder Millicent Borges Accardi will also be read.

Photo by Lucyna Przasnyski.


You can explore the anthology's poems and find out about the poets on Moonrise Press Blog http://moonrisepress.blogspot.com/2018/06/sample-poems-from-grateful.html

Photo by Lucyna Przasnyski

You can read the introduction with the table of contents on Moonrise Press Blog http://moonrisepress.blogspot.com/2018/05/grateful-conversations-poetry-anthology.html

Photo by Lucyna Przasnyski

The paperback is available from Amazon.com
https://www.amazon.com/Grateful-Conversations-Anthology-Maja-Trochimczyk/dp/1945938226

Photo by Lucyna Przasnyski

 The ebook with color photos is available from kobo.com
https://www.kobo.com/my/en/ebook/grateful-conversations-a-poetry-anthology


The following readings are planned:

1) at the Bolton Hall Museum (Sunday, November 25, 2018, Sunday after Thanksgiving, with Marc Achuff, classical guitar and Krak Poetry Group Celebrating the Centennial of Poland's Regained Independence),
2) at Beyond Baroque (Friday, February 15, 2019 at 8 pm),
3) at the Rapp Saloon in Santa Monica (hosted by Elena Secota, date TBD),
4) in Ventura, hosted by Phil Taggart (4 April 2019).

California poetry journal, Quill and Parchment will post a preview and a review of the book in coming months.

The poets will also appear on Poets' Cafe hosted by Lois P. Jones and other promotional activities are in preparation.


Monday, September 3, 2018

Announcing New Poetry Volume by Margaret Saine, Gardens of the Earth: According to Nature


Moonrise Press is pleased to announce its newest poetry collection, Gardens of the Earth: According to Nature, by Margaret Saine (September 2018).  This exploration of nature tamed and shaped by humans, nature that in turn shapes the gardeners and gives them a purpose, a cause for action, and a reason for reflection.  Saine's trip to the garden includes the seasons, rain and sunlight, and lots of birds. She shares her delight in gardens and gardening with a host of her contemporary poets and friends and the renowned gardeners of the past. The book includes a separate section on trees, and is richly illustrated by Saine's own photographs, with the characteristic interplay of light and shadow, water, clouds and mists.

ISBN 978-1-945938-25-2 (paperback), $18.00
ISBN 978-1-945938-26-9 (color  paperback), $40.00
ISBN 978-1-945938-27-6 (ebook in ePub format)​, in preparation




ABOUT THE POET

Margaret Saine lives in Los Angeles. After a doctorate in French from Yale, she taught Spanish at universities in California and Arizona. She writes poetry, haiku, and short stories in five languages and also translates other poets. Her books are Bodyscapes,Words of Art, Lit Angels (Moonrise Press, 2017), and five haiku chapbooks.


Poetry manuscripts ready for publication include The Five Senses, Reading Your Lips,Words of Winter, and While Alive, as well as Paesaggi che respirano [Breathing Landscapes], to be published in Italy. She has recently completed As You Were Saying, a dialogue with American poet William Carlos Williams.





FROM THE INTRODUCTION BY MARGARET SAINE

ACCORDING TO NATURE



Gardens. All humans love gardens. They exemplify human well-being in nature, a nature made by plants that is evidently joyful and at ease, and eminently pleasing to the eye. My title may be ambiguous to some, those who perceive gardens as cultivated alone, and nature would then be the antithesis.But I want to stress gardens as the synthesis they are, of ambient nature and of human nature.  Gardens represent a nature cultivated and beautified to human tastes, they are nature on a human scale, in a human measure. 


But one learns with regret that gardens don’t last forever. First they grow and are arranged, with large empty spaces still in between small growing plants and trees; then they have their heyday; but soon they may almost imperceptibly fall into neglect and alteration. They may go wild, haywire, go to seed, during one of those long trips one takes, or they may be downright abolished by others, the authority. Bulldozed, paved over.


[...]


My garden is my sky lab, made up of star dust. It is an adventure that does not entirely depend on me, but has its own—always surprising—dynamic. After I set it up, give it the basics, it begins to follow its own rules and laws and continues to surprise me. Each interference by me—ripping out and putting in, weeding, pruning and shaping, coaxing and tying up, lowering and stretching—is minor compared to what looks like the garden’s own will, and which is none other than the interaction of all elements of this ambience according to nature. Including the plants themselves, who affect other plants and the environment, and are affected by them in return.


I like it when my garden does so much better than I had thought, or at least when it does unexpected things, in an intriguing, overall good way. But when the emperor vine or morning glory, which blooms on its white shelf when I wake up, begins winding across the stone path like a snake and crawling over other plants and strangling them, I have to interfere and strangle the strangler, so to speak, limiting her to her place.


I live, we live, on this earth. Flowers are a gift, they seek and elicit beauty in us and from us. Gardens are always “according to nature,” environmental nature as well as human. There are no human beings who don’t like gardens. And all gardens like and welcome humans.  After all, we and the plants are each other’s fondest breath.

                                                                                                            ~ Margaret Saine



ABOUT THIS BOOK


“All humans love gardens.” With this observation Margaret Saine shares her lifetime of poems about plants. The beauty of flowers is what ties us to the earth, here turned into poetry, with our gratitude.
                                                                                                     ~ Agnes Rosenblüth


Gardens, as always in poetry, are pretexts. In this new book, Margaret Saine attempts to reveal to us, simply and purely, their mystery. Nature and poetry are unified in a symbiotic song of life. “Gardens of the Earth” is a peaceful symphony of beauty that pulses with the chords of human existence: the garden as metaphor of our condition of transient beings on this earth.
                                                                                                             ~ Eliécer Almaguer


The growing of plants, their enticing being explained by a kind gardener aunt to a lonely girl. Plants, flowers, paragons of life, as recipients and keepers of personal memories. Plants, trees of the world, here seen with the oceans, as giving breath, oxygen, to human beings. And plants, reciprocally breathing the carbon dioxide humans exhale: a true terrestrial symbiosis.
                                                                                                              ~ Sibilla De’Salici

When the trees forget /that I am there/
I have truly arrived/ in their midst, says Margaret Saine.  And so I felt, reading Saine’s latest book, “Gardens of Earth”, that I had arrived in the midst of poems, as unselfconscious as the trees she inhabits. How does a poet bring a reader into the middle of gardens without becoming precious or mundane?  Saine invites us with her natural rhythm, color and the interweaving of several languages, enveloping us completely in beauty before we know what has happened to us. The poet reminds us that we are spirits, that this garden, as she says, is our entrance into matter, l’entrata in materia. If paintings could be poems or poems paintings, this book would be the avatar.
                                    ~ Alice Pero, author of “Thawed Stars”, founder of Moonday Reading 
                                        Series  and Windsong Players Chamber Ensemble


Margaret Saine’s Gardens of the Earth is an exceptional exploration of gardens not only as a small patch of land that bring gardeners peace, but as part of a larger biosphere, connected forever to the larger world. She might start in a plot of land on the earth, but her poetry reaches out to discuss the atmosphere, an encroaching urban world, and life and death itself. Her microcosm explores the macrocosm of this world.
                                                                                                              ~ John Brantingham




TABLE OF CONTENTS



According to Nature               ix

Garden  3
Playing with Shadows 5
The Bird  7
Midwinter Early Spring 8
Planten un Blomen  9
Cactus  10
Heads or Tail  11
After the Monsoon   12
Dopo il Monson    14
Wind  15
Once Upon a Wind   16
January Rose   18
Garden Borders  19
Carnation  20
Clouds   #1  21
Clouds   #2  22
Clouds   #3  22
Lifetime Guarantee 24
Garden Sketch 25
Forest for the Trees  26
Short Poems 27
Bearded Iris   28
Birds  29
Bird of Paradise 30
Herbstzeitlose~~~Colchicum 32
Philodendron  33
In the Winter Garden  34
Narcissa  36
Narcissus by Caravaggio #2 38
Rose   40
Climbing Rose  42
Peony 43
Black Pansies and Forget-me-nots   44
Transporting the Euphorbia  45
Daylilies Daily  46
Pollination 48
River Voices  49

NINE TREE POEMS 50
Ginko 51
Wind in the Pepper Tree 52
The Fig Tree  53
The Ear Tree 55
Tree as a Book 56
Klimt’s Tree of Life 57
The Tree Outside  58
Tree  59

Amor sacro amor profano   61
In Each of Us 63
Life 64
Rose-Red Flower Woman  65
So Many  67
Random Light Spots of Time: An Almanach   69

About the Poet 77

Saine's previous book published by Moonrise Press was Lit Angeles, described on its website here, and available from lulu.com and from Amazon.com. 




LINKS TO LULU.COM
Paperback, ISBN  978-1-945938-02-3, $15.00
Color Paperback, ISBN 978-1-945938-04-7  , $35.00
EBook, Apple Books, iTunes, Nook, etc., ISBN 978-1-945938-05-4, $10.00

EBOOK ON KOBO: 
https://www.kobo.com/ph/en/ebook/lit-angels




Support independent publishing: Buy this book on Lulu.

About Saine's Lit Angels, on this blog:



And on Village Poets blog: 


Wednesday, August 15, 2018

First Reading from Grateful Conversations Anthology - Flintridge Bookstore, 7 October 2018


The first public presentation of the "Grateful Conversations" anthology will take place on Sunday, October 7, 2018 at 5 p.m. at the Flintridge Bookstore and Coffeehouse, in La Canada - Flintridge (1010 Foothill Blvd).  The reading is free and books will be available to purchase and have autographed by the poets. 


Seven poets will be present (Lois P. Jones, Susan Rogers, Madeleine S. Butcher, Maja Trochimczyk, Kathi Stafford, Ambika Talwar and Sonya Sabanac) but all poets will be  represented, as work by Georgia Jones-Davis and the group's founder Millicent Borges Accardi will also be read.

You can explore the anthology's poems and find out about the poets on Moonrise Press Blog http://moonrisepress.blogspot.com/2018/06/sample-poems-from-grateful.html

You can read the introduction with the table of contents on Moonrise Press Blog http://moonrisepress.blogspot.com/2018/05/grateful-conversations-poetry-anthology.html

The paperback is available from Amazon.com
https://www.amazon.com/Grateful-Conversations-Anthology-Maja-Trochimczyk/dp/1945938226

The ebook with color photos is available from kobo.com
https://www.kobo.com/my/en/ebook/grateful-conversations-a-poetry-anthology


There are planned readings at the Bolton Hall Museum (November 25, 2018, Sunday after Thanksgiving, with Marc Achuff, classical guitar), Beyond Baroque (Feb 15, 2019 at 8 pm), the Rapp Saloon in Santa Monica (hosted by Elena Secota, TBD), in Ventura (4 April 2019), and other locations.

California poetry journal, Quill and Parchment will post a preview and a review of the book in coming months.

The poets will appear on Poets' Cafe hosted by Lois P. Jones and other promotional activities are in preparation.