Grateful Conversations: A Poetry Anthology
Edited by Maja Trochimczyk and Kathi Stafford
Paperback, 280 pp., black/white illustrations,
ISBN 978-1-945938-22-1 ($24.80)
Color Paperback, 280 pages with color illustration
ISBN 978-1-945938-24-5 ($98.00)
E-Book in EPUB format with color illustrations
ISBN 978-1-945938-23-8 ($10.00)
The ebook with color photos is available from kobo.com
https://www.kobo.com/my/en/ebook/grateful-conversations-a-poetry-anthology
You can read the editors' introduction with the table of contents on Moonrise Press Blog http://moonrisepress.blogspot.com/2018/05/grateful-conversations-poetry-anthology.html
A sample poems can be found on this blog:
Kathi Stafford, Susan Rogers, Sonya Sabanac and Lois P. Jones at the anthology reading in Ventura.
MOONRISE PRESS BESTSELLERS IN 2018
Moonrise Press sold 334 books in 2018, with three poetry bestsellers - "Grateful Conversations" in the top position with over 100 copies sold, followed closely by "The Desert Hat" by Ed Rosenthal with over 60 copies, and "Gardens of the Earth: According to Nature" by Margaret Saine, with over 40 copies. Congratulations to the poets!
The Desert Hat by Ed Rosenthal
Published in October 2013, in paperback and e-book formats.
ISBN 978-09819693-7-4, paperback, 74 pages, $15.00
ISBN 978-098-19693-9-8, e-book in e-Pub format, 1.2 MB, $10.00
The “poet-broker” Ed Rosenthal was inspired by surviving alone in the Mojave Desert for six and a half days. The lyrical result of his ordeal, "The Desert Hat," consist of 36 poems illustrated with 12 photographs of his hat and Salvation Canyon where he spent most of his time. Rosenthal’s poetry does not recount his experience in detail; it is not replete with maps, photographs, and a day-by-day account of his adventures. Instead, we gain an insight into what it means to be truly lost and found, to survive the strangest of desert nights and return to the heart of the city… with a newly found wisdom and zest for life. With an introduction by Ruth Nolan and photos by Maja Trochimczyk, and Ken and Wendy Sims. For more information visit a post about this book on the Moonrise Press Blog.
ABOUT THIS BOOK
Ed Rosenthal’s The Desert Hat not only recounts an incredibly vivid story of survival, but maps out the dangerous journeys of the heart and the imagination in that hallucinatory place between mind and body, between nature and man, between the past and the future. Like poet James Wright, Rosenthal ”goes/ Back to the broken ground” of the self and finds a stranger there trapped in the cosmology of an endless, unpitying desert. As the stark “sun burns holes/ into the sky” the psyche’s true-north compass finds salvation’s shade. Rosenthal climbed out of “the busted monster’s mouth” with a beautiful, moving book.
~ Elena Karina Byrne, Executive Director of AVK Arts
In "The Desert Hat," Los Angeles poet/real estate broker Ed Rosenthal presents the mythopoetic journey through his real-life experience of being lost for 6 days in remote canyons of the Mojave Desert's Joshua Tree National Park in September, 2010. "The Desert Hat" delves deeply into the wildest and unpredictable heart of the Mojave into a storied landscape that Rosenthal renders as both recognizable to the reader and also deeply specific to his solitary and unanticipated experience, and in these poems, creates an empathetic and spiritually-affirming desert landscape that resonates within all of our desert hearts.
~ Ruth Nolan, Professor of English @ College of the Desert
Gardens of the Earth by Margaret Saine
Published in September 2018 in BW and color paperback formats,
as well as an ebook, in E-Pub format.
as well as an ebook, in E-Pub format.
More information: http://moonrisepress.blogspot.com/2018/09/announcing-new-poetry-volume-by.html.
"Gardens of the Earth: According to Nature" by Margaret Saine is a poetic 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 inspired trip to the garden includes the seasons, rain and sunlight, multi-colored blossoms, and lots of birds. She shares her delight in gardens and gardening with a host of 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, clouds and mists. Certain poems are translated into French, German, and Italian.
ABOUT THIS BOOK
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/ 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.
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, Professor of English, Mount San Antonio College