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Birds at the Post Office
by Richard Zuras $4.99 – $12.95Price range: $4.99 through $12.95
by Richard Zuras
These poems illuminate a life of family—a life of love and loss: jobs worked, kids born and raised, love’s passions and ebbs, failures and successes, the big moments and the small, the dreams and the nightmares.
Coming Around
by Richard Rose $15.00
by Richard Rose
While researching family history for his semibiographical opera Monte and Pinky, Richmond-based poet and songwriter Richard Rose came face to face with the fact of his ancestors' involvement in the local slave trade. As a social and environmental activist, Rose became determined to explore and come to terms with the many consequences of the injustices in which his family took part.
A story in verse, Coming Around is the companion piece to Monte and Pinky, following the life and descendants of a slave named Simon Abouette and of the Ouillechaud family, who purchase him to work on their sugar plantation in the early 1800s. Interspersed with heartbreaking lyric pieces based on historical anecdotes from across the South, Coming Around is the culmination of one man's effort to heal the hurts of the past through humility, understanding, and acceptance.
Creeping Thyme
by Ron Pies $16.00
by Ron Pies
This collection of works offers a rare journey through the poet’s experience as a psychiatrist and as a man. Each poem in this collection has its “depth, space/and flowering height,” as do the hyacinth and late tulip that Pies tends in his garden. This is a world of pain, loss, joy, and growing older, where the physician’s keen observation meets the poet’s compassionate heart, and where each line is rich with tension, music, and maturity. In these poems, there is a powerful faith in man and his ability to prevail.
Ravenous Words
$14.95 – $25.95Price range: $14.95 through $25.95
By Lisa Lucas and Susan Wurtzburg
In these tumultuous times, poetry bridges borders, creates connections, and imparts ideas. Writers Lisa Lucas and Susan J. Wurtzburg whispered words and shouted stanzas to each other by text and voice across the geographical expanses of Canada, the USA, and the Pacific Ocean. Their collaboration was adorned later by paired ravens, the cover print created by James Lahey, a noted Canadian artist, living in Toronto.
This raven motif glides through the book sections and their poetry, with connections to the idea of being ravenous, insatiable, and greedy, all of which contrast with the socially normed perceptions of women. It also links to the long history of strong female writers, hungry for expression, who were largely disparaged and outcast from less contemporaneous poetry histories. Here, the title and poetic content connect these tropes in innovative ways that speak to people in the Americas and the Pacific, where most of these works are situated.
Sunset Sonata
by Robert Johnson $15.95
by Robert Johnson
Robert Johnson’s voice resonates like a wise old teacher sharing his simple, worldly wisdom. He speaks about the natural world, the preciousness of life, and about innocence, but also about injustice, loss, human frailties, and the menace of terrorism, withholding nothing.
Like Johnson’s poetry, Virginia’s Northern Neck and the rivers that run through it are abundant with a primitive, yet refined beauty, and being there inspires quiet comfort. More than any other state of mind, this contentedness defines Sunset Sonata.
In spite of global threats, cynicism, loss, and the uncertainty and brevity of life, one can find nourishment and be restored by the words of poets like Robert Johnson who can find beauty and hope in the world.
Twinings: Poems at Eighty
$6.99 – $14.95Price range: $6.99 through $14.95
by Julie Fritz
This gathering of poems from Julie Fritz’s lifetime of attention will give readers a chance to travel back in their own memories too, bringing with them the probing questions and insights she has generously shared in this heartfelt collection about a life well-lived.