Category: poetry books

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Madville Welcomes Linda Parsons as Poetry Editor

A photo of poetry editor Linda Parsons.

We are proud to announce that we asked Linda Parsons if she’d consider being our Poetry Editor, and she said yes!

You may be interested to read Linda’s latest poetry collection, Candescent.

Linda Parsons is a poet, playwright, and editor. In addition to being poetry editor for Madville Publishing, she coordinates WordStream, WDVX-FM’s weekly reading/performance series, with Stellasue Lee. Her poetry has appeared in The Georgia Review, Iowa Review, Prairie Schooner, Southern Poetry Review, The Chattahoochee Review, Baltimore Review, and Shenandoah, among others. Candescent is her fifth poetry collection (Iris Press, 2019). Linda is the reviews editor for Pine Mountain Sand & Gravel and the copy editor for Chapter 16, the literary website of Humanities Tennessee. Her most recent play is SuffRAGE: To Give Voice, written with Jeannette Brown, for Flying Anvil Theatre in Knoxville, Tennessee.

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Congratulations Gianna Russo!

Gianna Russo reads from One House Down

Congratulations, Gianna Russo on a successful book launch!

It was a huge success, and we couldn’t be happier for her. Last night, she officially launched her One House Down. There were about 100 people there and they gave her a standing ovation, an encore call, and then bought every single book!

She read at the beautiful University of Tampa, where we well be attending the Other Words Conference with her in just a few short weeks. It was the perfect venue for this collection of poetry focusing on Tampa, and Gianna is the perfect person to tell the stories of this, her hometown.

So, again we say, congratulations, Gianna Russo! You deserve it.

Here are just a few of the comments from early readers:

“…happiness is a snow globe, our house glued inside…: This is what I feel when reading One House Down, this fantasy in verse, this beauty contained in sprawling lines and stanzas. Each poem, a song. Each song, a swoon. Russo’s newest collection is both a love song and an indictment of a place she knows so well, a Florida without palms and sun, a Florida that is grit, a Florida that represents our world-one which breaks the heart and heals it in the same beat.

—Ira Sukrungruang, author of In Thailand It Is Night

One House Down is filled with story-poems from the unsung American South, where natural beauty butts up against strip malls and human ugliness. Tracing her family’s history in Tampa, a city many readers will be surprised to visit, Russo documents with terrific detail a diverse and fascinating culture in this original exploration of a very particular place.

—Heather Sellers, author of You Don’t Look Like Anyone I Know:
a True Story of Family, Face-Blindness and Forgiveness

Get ready. You’ve read the tour-de-force of an opening sentence, a poem hurdling you into the world of One House Down. Now watch Gianna Russo illuminate histories so electric and elegiac, and shadows of shame so persistent, they’re writ in our bones. Yes, this is a book very much about place; but, more importantly, this wonderful collection examines the emotional spaces we occupy as we strive for satisfaction, safety, and meaning. As Russo writes, “Flash at sunset like the luck I never spied.”

—Erica Dawson, author of When Rap Spoke Straight to God

 From front porches to the places where we live, work, and love, to the highways that lead us both out of the city and back home again, One House Down takes us on a precise and lovingly rendered tour of the rhythms, movements, and loves of a city and its people. Gianna Russo’s poems, expansive yet intimate, make a case that perhaps poetry, rather than the evening news, is the true first draft of our collective history.

—Steve Kistulentz, author of Panorama and Little Black Daydream

When it comes to one’s place of origin, the tides are strong—the pull to hold on, and the push to let go. In this luminous, thoughtful collection, Gianna Russo explores the bittersweet legacies of old Florida. One House Down is rooted rooted deeply in place, whether Nebraska Avenue and Central Avenue, cultural seats such as the Fun-Lan Drive-In and the Sanwa market, or the ripe specificity of “Faedo’s Bakery [as] men roll loaves / of Cuban bread, turnovers of guava paste.” I appreciate Russo’s musicality and her formal agility, as she experiments with ekphrasis, ghazal, pantoum, and pecha kucha. Whether the stubborn advice of the Methodist Women’s Society Cookbook, or the dark chuckle of a plaster cat on a funeral home’s roof, these are poems we need.

—Sandra Beasley, author of Count the Waves

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Poetry for Fall 2019

Poetry Collections by Two Award-Winning Poets in Fall 2019

Have we told you about the the outstanding poetry collections we have leading off our Fall 2019-Spring 2020 offerings?

 A Clearing Space in the Middle of Being and poet Jeff HardinA Clearing Space in the Middle of Being, by Jeff Hardin

978-1-948692-18-2 paper 16.95
978-1-948692-19-9 ebook 9.99
6×9, 72 pp.
Poetry
September 2019

If the taste of the eternal “is increasingly absent in our words,” then Jeff Hardin’s sixth collection, A Clearing Space in the Middle of Being, attempts to behold language anew, to listen in on its “preview of eternity.” Aware of ambiguities that plague our lives and given to swerves of logic and dislocations, to echoes and reverberations “too numerous to see in some totality,” his poems nonetheless speak openly to existence, to the mind’s “attempts/to console itself,” and to the “intoxication of incoherence” existence so often feels like. Here in a postmodern world, is it still possible to step boldly into certainty, into clarity, to find a sacred and shared space where “all moments blaze up with a speaking/voice”? Hardin listens intently, discovering more and more how “wanderingly vast” enchantment still might be. In the presence of so many options for understanding, he chooses to believe “a new/parable unfolding, still instructive,” pointing him toward a fellowship with others who likewise “lean toward thinking some healing is already/underway.”

Jeff Hardin is the author of five previous collections of poetry, most recently Small Revolution and No Other Kind of World. His work has been honored with the Nicholas Roerich Prize, the Donald Justice Poetry Prize, and the X. J. Kennedy Poetry Prize. His poems have appeared in The Southern Review, Hudson Review, North American Review, Gettysburg Review, Southern Poetry Review, and many others. He is a professor of English at Columbia State Community College in Tennessee. Visit his website at www.jeffhardin.weebly.com.

 

One House Down--Poetry by Gianna RussoOne House Down, by Gianna Russo

978-1-948692-20-5 paper 16.95
978-1-948692-21-2 ebook 9.99
6×9, 72 pp.
Poetry
October 2019

The candid poems in Gianna Russo’s One House Down are grounded in experiences of ambivalence and oneness, not unlike those we sometimes find in true love. Russo ruminates on the past and scrutinizes the present in her hometown of Tampa with honest affection, concern, anger and delight. She asks an essential question: How can we treasure a place whose history and values have sometimes supported injustice? And if those wrongs are still evident today—then what? With family roots in Tampa that go back over a century, Russo skillfully pursues an answer in these inventive, surprising poems.

Gianna Russo is a Tampa native and third generation Floridian. She is the author of Moonflower, winner of the Florida Book Award Bronze and Florida Publishers Association Silver awards. A Pushcart Prize nominee, she has had publications in Green Mountains Review, The Sun, Poet Lore, The MacGuffin, Tampa Review, Valparaiso, Ekphrasis, Crab Orchard Review, Florida Review, Florida Humanities Council Forum, Water Stone, Karamu, The Bloomsbury Review, and Calyx, among others.  She is founding editor of the Florida poetry chapbook publisher YellowJacket Press (www.yellowjacketpress.org). She holds an MFA in Poetry from the University of Tampa. She is Assistant Professor of English and Creative Writing at Saint Leo University where she directs the Sandhill Writers Retreat.

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By the Light of a Neon Moon

By the Light of a Neon Moon, edited by Janet Lowery

By the Light of a Neon Moon, edited by Janet LoweryOur first poetry anthology is at the printer!

If you’ve been following us for a while, you will have seen our calls for submissions to the Dancehall Poetry Anthology. We are happy to announce that it has gone to press, and we hope to have copies available at AWP! Editor Janet Lowery named the collection By the Light of a Neon Moon and Jacqui Davis created this eye-catching cover for it. We are humbled by the quality of the poetry we received, and we cannot wait to share it with everyone. The contributors are already discussing the fact that the launch party should include a dance. We aren’t sure how we’ll pull that off, but we love the idea!

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A sneak-peek at the Table of Contents:

We had several poets laureate contribute to the collection as well as many other award-winning poets from around the country. Have a look at the Table of Contents.

Contents

Introduction by Janet Lowery

I—Neon Light

Beloved, After These Things by Alan Birkelbach
Like People in Love by Kimberly Parish Davis
A Thing About Rhumba by Gianna Russo
Pretty Woman by Luanne Smith
Not That Sally by George Drew
Dear Will’s Pub by Pj Metz
Rose-Colored by Janet Lowery
Old Flame by Winston Derden
Music for Arms Like Ours by Mike Schneider
Oh, That Buckskin by Christine Cock
Dancing Fool by John Grey
Always Open by Karen Head
Words from My Father by karla k. morton
One Way Traffic by Alan Birkelbach
Dancing at Dirty Frank’s by Lisa Naomi Konigsberg

II—Neon Signs

The Bull Rider by Katherine Hoerth
The Archaeologist Dreams of Sleep by Kimberly Parish Davis
Chevy Pick-Up, Loaded by Ed Ruzicka
Integration 1964 by Dave Parsons
Dalliance by Ruth I. Healy
Triple-Two at the Dance by Janet Lowery
Prickly Pear by Katherine Hoerth
Partner by Sarah Cortez
You Ain’t the First Singed Hash Browns on My Plate by R. Gerry Fabian
Just Believe Her! by Alan Birkelbach
Rodeo Exchange by karla k. morton
Back by Juleigh Howard-Hobson
I May Not Be Drunk, But I’ll Get There by Herman Sutter
Your Dancing Lessons Didn’t Pay Off by J. J. Steinfeld
Little Heretic by Gerry LaFemina
Waiting for Resurrection by Leah Mueller
Always by Anusha VR
The Way We Danced Before I Became Another Ex in Texas by Laurie Kolp
Dancing with a Cue Stick by George Drew
Death at the Dancehall by Janet Lowery
Two Dogs Howling at the Moon by Dave Parsons
Resurrection Mary by Carolyn Kreiter-Foronda

III—Neon Hearts

Standing on the Edge of the Roadhouse Charybdis by Alan Birkelbach
Dancing Before by Lesley Clinton
Zydeco Shindig by Dolores Comeaux
Friday’s Dance by Mike Schneider
Road House on the Way to Cheyenne by Rick Campbell
Guitar and Mandolin by Gerry LaFemina
Dress Code at the Dance Hall by Alan Birkelbach
Here at Ransom’s Saloon by George Drew
Hard Wood by Jerry Bradley
Bootstrap by Winston Derden
6 a.m. Outside the Dance Hall by John Grey
Empties by Gerry LaFemina