Jacqueline Joan Johnson has been awarded the Gregory Millard Fellowship for the New York Foundation for the Arts and Mid-Atlantic Writers Association Creative Writing Award in Poetry. Her poetry has appeared in numerous journals and magazines. She is th e author of Stokely Carmichael: The Story of Black Power for children and contributed to UpSouth: African American Migration and Streetlights: Illuminating Black Urban Tales.

Selected by Pattiann Rogers as the winner of the Sixth Annual White Pine Press Poetry Prize, these lyric poems convey the emotional life of the artist and show him as deeply human: flawed, burdened, sympathetic, and desperately honest about himself and others. Stephen Frech has published widely in magazines and journals. He lives in Chicago.

 “In Ansie Baird's debut collection In Advance of All Parting, the winner of the fourteenth annual White Pine Press Poetry Prize, formal feeling and Baird's own grief-tempered voice lead us from the fissures of legacy and marriage, through the epiphanies of art and the sorrows of loss, to the "wild interiority" of her own spirit. Although Baird has been one of the Buffalo area's most highly regarded and widely published poets over the past three and a half decades, In Advance of All Parting is her first full-length collection. Half a lifetime in the making, this book is well worth the wait.”

—RD Phol - The Buffalo News

Ansie Baird is Poet in Residence and a part-time English teacher at The Buffalo Seminary, a non-sectarian secondary school in Buffalo, where she has taught for the past thirty-one years.  She has also taught for Just Buffalo Literary Center in their Writers In Education program for the past twenty two years, conducting workshops in elementary, middle and high schools in the Buffalo area. 

“The speaker of the poems in Angie Baird's remarkable first collection is besieged by angels, messengers bearing often bitter, sometimes comic, always complicated home (and broken-home) truths.  Hers is a various, well-stocked world inflected by elegiac understanding and a brisk, unflinching willingness to encounter the hard facts of a life marked by sadness, loss and disappointment, yet never losing its skeptical willingness to see the  absurd, the comic, the ridiculous side of it all. Whether engaging in “bitter battles with the past,” handling the shocks of betrayal, or celebrating the pleasures of the sensuous life, the sharp-tongued yet always in their own way well mannered, astringently honest poems in Ahead of All Parting play out a wonderfully self-aware drama of an eye, a  nervous system, and a heart-all endlessly vigilant, missing nothing. What I especially like and admire is how Baird's language-tuned to lyric, comic, satiric, and elegiac frequencies-manages to write a scrutinised life, an embattled consciousness, into an alive, essentially  entertaining presence that, as she says of the heart, will “hold out.””

—Eamon Grennan

“Hard sorrow,” “dozing old bones,” narrators “besieged by angels,” berating letters from Hayden Carruth, the many sorrows of divorce, family history, love good and bad and painful -- these are only a few of the many  elements of grief and ardor to be in this overdue first book by a poet of intelligence and passion. Ansie Baird has made herself and us wait a long time but In Advance of All Parting is well worth the wait.”

-Philip Schultz

“In Advance of All Parting is a tough, unsentimental examination of marital grief. Musically elegant and inventive, understated and passionate, the poems give us a profound glimpse into how the events of a life can form a center of gravity that fixes the self in its force field. There's a cold, truth-telling clarity about them that makes them as unsettling as they are beautiful. Ansie Baird has created a richly-drawn world in which this elemental drama plays out, and the result is vivid, startling poems in which pain has left its indelible tracks.”

  —Chase Twichell

"It is surely a mark of a fine poem when it comes back unbidden, long after you've left off reading, as though to elucidate some otherwise indescribable phenomenon in the world. This I find happening with Ansie Baird's poems. In Advance of All Parting is composed of flashes and facets of a life as seen through the prism of older age, clear-sighted and sardonic. But beyond this,

her best work possesses a high degree of that intimate strangeness (part living voice, part an attentiveness to formal properties) that is at once rare and essential to the art."

—Roo Borson

“These are poems of remarkable liveliness.  In their wide-ranging wit and passion for language, their surprising juxtapositions of the ordinary and the exalted, and their willingness to foreground doubt in a search for meaning, they show a fellowship with the work of Dickinson that is deep without ever being solemn.  Here is a fresh, distinctive voice that is consistently engaging and surprising.”

  —Carl Dennis 

“Kelli Russell Agodon writes, "When God knew the gifts He had given me / He said, No givebacks. " She asks, "Still, what can we substitute for childbirth? Bamboozle?  Inferno?  Divinity? "  

A black bra takes on the power of a celestial body--"no light can escape from it."  Playful and tormented, rich in wit, this poet questions the misunderstandings and the miracles all around us.   A wonderful book!”

— Peggy Shumaker

“Letters From the Emily Dickinson Room is a bright, funny, touching meditation on loss, love, and the power of words. Agodon's genius is in the interweaving of God and Vodka, bees and bras, astronomy and astrology, quotes from Einstein and Emily Dickinson, a world in which gossip rags in checkout lines and Neruda hum in the writer's mind with equal intensity. Self-help mantras resurface throughout as a reminder of the ways modern society chooses to deal with today's tragedies, a reminder that a cup of tea and a positive attitude are not always enough when struggling with life's bigger problems. Part of the book deals with the speaker's ambivalence towards marriage and religion, part with the death of the speaker's father, and part with the same themes that Emily Dickinson dwelled on: the natural world and its mysteries and ability to serve as a spiritual guide. This is a book that will linger in your mind with its humor, its honesty and insight, and its fervent belief in poetry and play.”

—Jeannine Hall Gailey, Author of Becoming the Villainess

Being Called Back

Nevertheless its steps can be heard. . .

            —Pablo Neruda, “Nothing But Death”

In case of accident, call a priest,

or so reads the back of

my Saint Christopher medallion.

And I want to engrave:

Or 911. Or an ambulance,

but not just the priest. 

I know the priest would come,

offer everlasting life and pray

over my body, but I’m betting

on the medic, the EMT, the blonde girl

            who works weekends at the fire station 

to keep her daughter in private school. 

I put my faith in the hands of these saviors

before I’ll kiss the white collar

of the man who loves God the same way I love life.

I’m not ready to be called back.  Not now. 

Maybe when my body begins to crumble

and needs every speck of energy to leave

a chair or revise a poem, then I will say:

Just the priest please. 

But for now, call anyone

you think could help, anyone

who could pull me from the land of afterlife

where “eternal bliss” sounds lovely,

roaming the clouds with dead relatives

or wandering a white fog

near the wings of a friend who died too young.

I imagine yards of cotton unrolling.

God is remodeling the space

for the eighty million new souls

who will visit this year, souls climbing

the new spiral staircase.

It be enchanting to encounter people

who have passed before me.  I’ll make a point

to ask Neruda about death

dressed as a broom, as I keep believing I’ll be swept up. 

Preparing Lucky Pea Soup in the New Year

She dices the peppers.  Forty

degrees and falling.  Last night,

her birthday and the woman she was

raised her pen to the moon,

crossed out another year, wrote loss. 

She sees her body in the curve

of letters and not the words.

She sees the letters

she never wrote in the chili powder. 

She places bacon in the skillet

and the pop of grease

surprises her; a celebration of heat.

She cannot tell you why she cried

in the spice aisle of the grocery store,

why she turned away

when she saw a friend she knew.  

It’s easier to suffer alone,

with a cold night and diced tomatoes. 

It’s easier to suffer when the moon

is your best lighting, when fine lines

appear near an open window. 

She cannot imagine her life

without black-eyed peas, without

someone to share them. 

She knows her husband

will return soon.  She knows

she cannot push away what’s already lost.

She adds a dash of cumin

because it keeps the chickens

and lovers from straying. 

All of this, she stirs.

From the Handbook For Emergency Situations

When we were in love

I read you How to Survive

If You Fall Through the Ice.

You were determined not to

listen.  You plugged your ears when I read,

Face the direction from which you came.

You told me love could be confused

with drowning.  I said, Use your elbows

to lift yourself onto the edge of the hole.

You never wanted to live

that coldly.  You moved close, drank

peppermint tea. I read, Reach out

onto the solid ice as far as possible. 

You said our chances were slim,

we lived in a temperate climate.

What if you knew then

that later we’d find reasons to dislike

each other’s sentences,  how many times

I’d look away when you wanted most

to meet my glance?  What if we knew

the instructions—Kick your feet

as though you were swimming and pull yourself up

—could be useful when we were breaking up? 

Or later, when we tried to reunite

how we should have listened—

Once on the icy surface, stay flat,

roll away from the hole.

Kelli Russell Agodon was born and raised in Seattle and educated at the University of Washington and Pacific Lutheran University's Rainier Writers Workshop where she received her MFA in creative writing.  She is the author of Small Knots (2004) and Geography, winner of the 2003 Floating Bridge Press Chapbook Award.  

Her work has been appeared in literary magazines and anthologies such as the Atlantic Monthly, Prairie Schooner, Notre Dame Review, North American Review, Image, 5 a.m, Meridian, Crab Orchard Review, Calyx, The Seattle Review, Poets Against the War edited by Sam Hamill, as well as on NPR’s “The Writer’s Almanac” with Garrison Keillor and in Keillor's second anthology, Good Poems for Hard Times (Viking Press).

Kelli is a recipient of three Washington State Artist Trust GAP grants, the James Hearst Poetry Prize, the Dorothy Rosenberg Poetry Prize, the William Stafford Award, the Carlin Aden Award for formal verse, a Soapstone Writer's Residency, and a grant from the Puffin Foundation for her work towards peace and as a poetry editor for the broadside series: The Making of Peace.

Currently, Kelli lives in a seaside community in the Northwest with her family.  She is the co-editor of Seattle’s literary journal, Crab Creek Review.  Visit her website at: www.agodon.com

“...the landscape of loss and gain we call exile, seen through the poet’s sharp eye and described in a voice that never wavers from the truth. I felt I was re-encountering Cuba in the light of new imagining, freed of ideology and therefore resplendent and complete.” --Pablo Medina

Selected by This remarkable first book begins with Castillo’s Cuban childhood, and follows her family as they "start over without a language" on one of the last Freedom Flights to Miami. The poems chronicle the visit of a Cuban uncle, who’s surrounded by relatives that "twenty years and English have turned into strangers," and Castillo’s bittersweet return to her homeland: "Even a map cannot show you the way back to a place that no longer exists."

“These poems . . . offer openings into new worlds profound familiar, and unexpected.”
-Pattiann Rogers