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."

Notes from the Journey Westward is a book that interrogates the idea of America—especially our westering, both historical and contemporary, our rough, rocky journeys through the vast interiors of the continent and of our own hearts. In this wild, wide-open, god-forgotten country blind grandmothers take us by the hand, and lost fathers hide in every prairie shadow, and old devils hunch and watch from craggy peaks. We are orphaned here, all of us, and so must reckon with the very foundations of us, with the myths and stories that make and remake us as people and as a nation.

“Blink and cry but this earth is all/you’ll ever see,” writes Joe Wilkins, and he is a poet who pays attention to this earth, one who looks, looks again and comes back still again to look more deeply. Like the voice in “Mission School,” Wilkins’ poems make and remember in the wide scope of human and non-human experience: “Whatever it is,/she says to me, lost again in story,/you must love it.” One way to define love is fidelity to experience, and if this is so, then Wilkins demonstrates such love over and over in his ruthless, entirely unsentimental efforts to imagine and understand the world he inhabits—and the one that inhabits him. He can say, on the one hand, “There’s nothing to be done/about hope,” and then deliver this:

“now I am telling you I am a small bird,

dun-colored, nervous, rising

again, slamming again

my face against the glass. See there—

blue sky. A hard world away.”

Exactly. And nothing will do but that blue sky.

Wilkins has a fine ear, but he uses it, rather than displays it. For all their toughness, these are wonderfully lyrical pieces. Vowels seem to bounce off one another like stones in a creek bed, but they are ordered, deliberate; subtle sound repetitions chime throughout, like bellwethers.

Wilkins slips from chore boots to house slippers to dress shoes without effort. He has range and staying power. These are the sorts of poems one keeps close by when they’re most needed, when one can feel most lost.” 

—Sam Green

Joe Wilkins is the author of a memoir, The Mountain and the Fathers (Counterpoint 2012), and a previous collection of poems, Killing the Murnion Dogs (Black Lawrence Press 2011). His poems, essays, and stories have appeared in the Georgia Review, the Southern Review, Harvard Review, Ecotone, the Sun, Orion, and Slate, among other magazines and literary journals. He lives with his wife, son, and daughter in north Iowa, where he teaches writing at Waldorf College. You can find him online at http://joewilkins.org/. 

“Moving through this book is, truly, a wondrous journey: across rugged landscapes and the vast unsettled past that WAS the west. "A hard world away." With a ferociously steely eye and equally ferociously tender heart, Wilkins surprises us at every juncture. Echoes of ancestral voices crisscross. Quiet intimate moments intersect with large socio-political issues. Spare poems, long poems, prose poems—I so admire the depth and breadth of work here, in how much Wilkins manages to pack in and carry along in our ever-onwarding little wagon.”

                         —Nance Van Winckel

“Joe Wilkins’ poems are savage and beautiful, full of hard-won lives and a godawful tenderness. In one poem the speaker says they need a myth to tell them “Be alive”, but Wilkins has written that myth, and it is called Notes from a Journey Westward. In this book Manifest Destiny is more than political rhetoric—it’s a call to find the limits of survival. The edge of America has more than an ocean. It has dust-stunned men, hardscrabble women, and a patient devil, sharpening his teeth. We’re in this world whether it belongs to God or not—alive and bearing it.”

—Traci Brimhall

“For Joe Wilkins, the American West is no theme park or romantic diorama. Notes from the Journey Westward offers an earnest glimpse into past and present landscapes that are real and imagined, mourned and celebrated and witnessed—for these, to borrow the words of Nazim Hikmet, are human landscapes. Wilkins isn’t the kind of poet to offer answers or satisfy himself with quaint definitions of self or place. He’s the kind of poet whose writing is as ambitious as it is beautiful, as honest as it is lyrical. The unflinching poems in this collection are a delight.” 

—Michael McGriff

"If the best of T.S. Eliot’s “Tradition and the Individual Talent”—the revolutionary or perhaps evolutionary part—engendered a book of poems, that book would be Alexander Long’s Still Life, whose title resonates in its myriad possible meanings. For example, history might be life stilled but it is still life. Long listens with his acutely tuned ear and hears, as he writes in his poem about Celan, “Eternity’s chirping din in the birches again,” his call throughout Still Life, to move back and forth across the borders between chronological and eternal time, art and life, the present and the past. He is our seasoned traveler, our tour guide who keeps his extra-ordinary sense of wonder. In the Harrowing of Hell icons, with all his strength, Rabbi Jesus is pulling Adam and Eve bodily from their tombs. Similarly, Long raises from the grave and embodies in his words an astonishing cast of characters who speak in a new lexicon: vernacular and formally playful, learned and down-to-earth, utterly American and deliciously foreign. In Still Life we readers walk—there’s a lot of walking in this world—in intimate proximity with the likes of Abraham Lincoln, Frederick Douglass, Lenny Bruce, and the Vietnam Vet, Chicken Man, in Long’s hometown, Sharon Hill. We eavesdrop on conversations between Paul Celan and Franz Kafka or Jimi Hendrix and César Vallejo on the banks of the Seine or the streets of Seattle, on Venice Beach or the paving stones beneath St. Vitus Cathedral in Prague. Still Life exemplifies Eliot’s observation that “not only the best, but the most individual parts of [the poet’s] work may be the parts in which the dead poets, his ancestors, assert their immortality most vigorously.” Here we have a poet who, as Eliot puts it, "writes with his own generation in his bones," as it pays homage to the ever-present past, his empathic voice unflinchingly witnessing the world’s horror and lovingly observing its beauties. He speaks for others and his own personal life, and—Hallelujah!—questions the division between the two. In our walk together Alexander Long is still singing and he sings to us—a twenty-first century Walt Whitman—that how we perceive and what we do in the broken world portrayed in Still Life still matters."

—Aliki Barnstone

Alexander Long's books include Vigil (New Issues Poetry & Prose, 2006) and Light Here, Light There (C & R Press, 2009).  A chapbook, also titled Still Life, was selected for the 2010 Center for Book Arts Chapbook Competition.  With Christopher Buckley, Long is the co-editor of A Condition of the Spirit: the Life & Work of Larry Levis (Eastern Washington UP, 2004).  Originally from Sharon Hill, Pennsylvania, he lives in Hoboken with his wife Marina Fedosik-Long and three cats.

“There is nothing “still” in the remarkably visceral poems of Alexander Long’s third collection, Still Life, and nothing is at rest in these restless and edgy poems. Conversational and kinetic, these poems chart the traces left by the shifting overlays of the templates of literature, rock-and-roll, and contemporary culture. As each poem in Still Life attempts to fix a focus upon a scene or subject, the protean natures under view draw the poet into the eddies and complexities of reflection. This is a powerful and moving collection of poems.”

—  David St. John

“As Alexander Long writes in his remarkable new book, “Listen to history .   .   .  It can’t happen fast enough.”  This poet has forged a style which manages to seize history on the wing, even the history we think has past and gone, and set it before us on the page.  Agile, prehensile, narrative and aphoristic, these are the poems of a lively and engaged intellect and imagination and they express much of what is best in our poetry today.” 

— Mark Jarman, author of Bone Fires: New and Selected Poems

“One of Still Life's  many achievements is it's paradoxical mix of intensity and stillness.  Alexander Long's visions of landscape, identity and "History itself, a joke that no one gets"  are simultaneously meditative and  alert, restless and focused. This is a smart, compassionate poet. Still Life is a mesmerizing new book.”

—Terrance Hayes

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