Author: Henry Stanton

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The poems in Kris Falcon’s “some blue, a little spur” function like a map of dark watercolors, where the speaker is building a way through a space-time collage. “You say there is nothing there. I see a lake…// I see how I am to depart.” The pathfinding work of Falcon is grounded in logic, and the surreal nature of reality holds the reader in shared experience, for instance of being in lockdown, “We are stepping out after 36 weeks of showering / at sundown.” Falcon carries us across a landscape where, “Any piece of fabric can look like / a body after a storm” and asks that we accept the lack of certainty, the fact that “Nobody understands you and your map / shaped like an infected tree.” This collection holds both our felt experience of not having the answers, and requires our acknowledgement of how that “muscles what heals.”

• Amelia Martens, author of The Spoons in the Grass are There to Dig a Moat

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Plunge by Taunja Thomson is a sensory deep dive into the natural world.  This lush full-length collection celebrates human immersion into creation’s color palate while offering the reader a taste of life’s “gasp/& gravity/its slow spin/mouthful of light.” Many of the poems are ekphrastic in that they are inspired by works of visual art. Yet, each poem is skillfully positioned in the arc to usher the reader through the rush of passing seasons— “between the tumbling/umber of dreams/and the roar/of age.”  What emerges is a breathtaking meld of sense and sentience, underscored with natures’s patterned music. Cicadas rise with “red eyes & membrane-thin wings clambering up through ground/rattling their golden tymbals–/summer kettledrums.” The poet invites “raven and wind/and creeping moonflower/to come and settle” inside her as she bids us “watch this life leap over/the gate to moon/disappear into its brilliance.” Thomson’s gift for imagery knows no bounds.

—Roberta Schultz, author of Underscore, Dos Madres Press and Asking Price, Workhorse Writers.

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The galleys for The Raw Art Review Winter 2023 are in progress and nearing completion. We will be finalizing the galleys in the next several days and will send them to all contibutors for review and comment.

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Alan Britt is the poet. He doesn’t need philosophic pragmatism to help; although, it never hurts the basic truths. His poetry speaks for itself. Straightforward, concise, matter of fact, practical, and yes, right to the bullet point. The straight shooter, at the ready with prolific trick shots, targets the bullseye of our shared dilemmas. At odds with a reality that’s not always real. Where the norm isn’t quite normal. In the Garden of Earthly Delights, like the Bosch triptych, Britt paints a profound, reluctant world where redemption and damnation are one in the same flower. Things happen, forthwith, and sans reason. The very same dualism, two headed, twin critter of dictums conjecture, and plain facts. A surreal approach, in the garden, dwelling with purpose, in and around fanciful notions, those earthly delights to savor. A good meal at the rest stop, on the road trip of the word. Traveling along the wayside, direct to the poet’s journey.

~Tom DiVenti, Apathy Press Poets

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We are reaching out to all of our followers to encourage you to buy a book by one of our authors here (instead of sending your money to Amazon, Barnes & Noble, etc.). – WE ARE OFFERING FREE SHIPPING!

This Week’s featured book:

Dean Gessie is an author and poet who has won dozens of international awards and prizes. Among other honors, Dean won the Aesthetica Creative Writing Award in England, the Allingham Arts Festival Poetry Competition in Ireland, the Samuel Washington Allen Prize in Massachusetts, the COP26 Poetry Competition in Scotland, the UN-aligned Poetry Contest in Finland and the Creators of Justice Literary Award [Fiction Category] from the International Human Rights Art Festival in New York. In addition, Dean won the Frank O’Hara Poetry Prize in Massachusetts, the Enizagam Poetry Contest in California, the Ageless Authors Poetry Contest in Texas, the Indigo Open Poetry Prize in England, the Spoon River Review Editors’ Prize in Illinois and the Southern Shakespeare Company Sonnet Contest in Florida. Dean was also included in The 64 Best Poets of 2018 and 2019 by Black Mountain Press in North Carolina. Elsewhere, Dean’s short story collection – called Anthropocene – won an Eyelands Book Award in Greece and the Uncollected Press Prize in Maryland.

DEAN GESSIE ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS AND BIBLIOGRAPHY

DEAN GESSIE ENDORSEMENTS

BOOK OF POETRY FROM UNCOLLECTED PRESS: “Goat Song ” by Dean Gessie

BOOK OF SHORT STORIES FROM UNCOLLECTED PRESS PUBLISHED: “Anthropocene” by Dean Gessie

UNCOLLECTED PRESS (UCP) INNER CIRCLE AWARD

PRAISE FOR POETRY AND PROSE FROM DEAN GESSIE

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“Dean Gessie’s scintillating goat song reveals a poet and writer at the height of his powers. Defying genre and canon, Gessie shapeshifts, skin shucks and shimmies in this masterfully crafted, explosively seditious, viscerally engaging magnum opus of satire. Equal parts alchemy, threnody and rebel gospel, goat song is a potent protest song to human, animal and planetary suffering. Threaded through with finely honed lyric, motif, imagery and metaphor, not a word is spare. This collection sings throughout with razor’s edge wit and supremely slick syntax.”

Anne Casey, poet and writer, winner of multiple international awards, including first prize in the American Writers Review Contest 2021 and winner of the 2021 iWoman Global Award in the field of literature.

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Gessie’s poems “torrent through the mind, an effort of resistance language like crashing a bus into a TV screen. Genius with a pocketful of broken fetters.”

Tongo Eisen-Martin, from Enizagam Literary Journal, winner of an American Book Award, a California Book Award and shortlisted for the Griffin International Poetry Prize.

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“Gessie’s goat song reads like a whirlwind holding a machete. It takes no prisoners. He explores human failings and fragility as a Bacchanalian dance of visceral sensuality. There is so much to savour in this brilliant collection. Eulogy for Empire [the longest poem] is a tour de force.”

Fawzia Kane, poet and educator, author of Tantie Diablesse by Waterloo Press and Houses of the Dead by Thamesis Publications.

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“Readers searching for the artful language of Fitzgerald and the cultural relevance of Achebe in a volume that speaks directly to global citizens of the twenty-first century have finally found their lost ark in Anthropocene. It’s not difficult to find writers today who explore problematic issues within our brave new world of cultural collisions, gender politics and new-look human subjugation. What is incredibly rare, however, is to find a writer willing to criticize contemporary social ills with both empathic concern and vehement distaste—as Gessie does—while remaining faithful to the craft of literary fiction. There’s no dark corner he won’t articulately explore in this astonishing collection of stories. Readers will wrestle with Gessie’s thinly veiled accusations of our own complicity with social injustice and, yet, they will also laugh along with his wide array of marginalized, irreverent voices. Anthropocene is, at once, a buoyant, hilarious and deeply disturbing experience.”

Keith Kupsch
Director of the Joshua Weinzweig Creative Writing Program
Pickering College

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WINNER of the Aesthetica Creative Writing Award, London, England, anthology publication, 2021

WINNER of the Ageless Authors International Poetry Contest, Texas, U.S.A., 2021

MEDALIST in the Nosside Prize 2020 Competition and published in the XXXV World Poetry Prize Anthology, Italy, 2021

HIGHLY COMMENDED in the Desmond Morton Internationl Poetry Contest, Ireland, 2021

FINALIST for the Plough International Poetry Prize, United Kingdom, 2021

SECOND PRIZE WINNER in the 90^th Annual Writer’s Digest Writing Competition, Cincinnati, Ohio, anthology publication, 2021

THIRD PRIZE WINNER, Mikrokosmos Poetry Contest, U.S.A. 2022

terra australis incognita

WINNER of the Enizagam International Poetry Contest and published in Enizagam, Oakland, California, 2019

WINNER of the UN-aligned Poetry Competition, Finland, 2021

COMMENDED POEM, Parkinson’s Art Poet of the Year, England, 2022

Published in poets meet politics, Hungry Hill Writing, England, 2019

Published in The Best 64 Poets of 2019 by Black Mountain Press, North Carolina

diary of a dead eel boy

WINNER of the Frank O’Hara Prize in Massachusetts for best contest submission, anthology publication in 2021

WINNER of the Spoon River Poetry Review Editors’ Prize, Illinois, anthology publication, 2022

WINNER of the Allingham Arts Festival Poetry Competition, Ireland, 2021

HIGHLY COMMENDED in the Desmond Morton Internationl Poetry Contest, Ireland, 2021

TOP FOUR in the Oprelle Masters Poetry Competition, Pennsylvania, anthology publication, 2021

#mentoo

CONTEST WINNER and published in The Best 64 Poets of 2018 by Black Mountain Press, 2019

one big loud thing unheard

WINNER of the Enizagam International Poetry Contest and published in Enizagam, Oakland, California, 2019

FINALIST and published in Passionate Penholders, Wingless Dreamer Chapbook, India, 2019

gram bonkers makes a wireless connection

CONTEST WINNER and published in The Best 64 Poets of 2018 by Black Mountain Press, 2019

CONTEST WINNER and published in Nature 20/20 by Willowdown Books, England, 2020

octopus in the room

WINNER of the Enizagam International Poetry Contest and published in Enizagam, Oakland, California, 2019

FINALIST in the Poets Meet Painters 2022 Competition and published in Poets Meet Painters 2022, Ireland, 2022

existential deer

COMMENDED POEM (top five of 2000) in the Magma Poetry Competition, London, England, 2019-2020

FINALIST for the Milton Kessler Memorial Prize for Poetry in New York and published in Harpur Palate, a literary journal, 2021

a mother mulls her son’s self-injuries

HIGHLY COMMENDED in the Desmond Morton Internationl Poetry Contest, Ireland, 2021

Deer [sic] Poetry Contest Judges

SHORTLIST for the Aesthetica Creative Writing Award, London, England, anthology publication, 2020

What happens when I die?

Published by Cathexis Northwest Press, 2021

the influencer

WINNER of the Southern Shakespeare Company Sonnet Contest, Florida, 2022

old man seven bell

WINNER of the Indigo Open Poetry Prize, England, online publication, 2022

eulogy for empire

WINNER of the Samuel Washington Allen Prize for best long poem, NEPC, Massachusetts, publication, 2022

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Books by Dean Gessie

Guantanamo Redux, Anaphora Literary Press, Brownsville, Texas, 2016.

A Brief History of Summer Employment, Anaphora Literary Press, Brownsville, Texas, 2017.

TrumpeterVille, Anaphora Literary Press, Brownsville, Texas, 2017.

Anthropocene, UnCollected Press, Ellicott City, Maryland, 2020.

goat song, UnCollected Press, Ellicott City, Maryland, 2020.