Author: Henry Stanton

a poem by Inner Circle Award winner – John D. Robinson (FROM RED DANCE).

Folks, listen to John read his poem Awaking as Lovers. It doesn’t get any better than this.

I was going to write of

waking up at dawn in a

bus-shelter, robbed of my

money, jacket and shoes

and walking home bare-

foot and fragile but it

was a poem of beauty

and tenderness, like

when Carmelina and I

first awoke as lovers

in my studio-room,

sparsely furnished,

bleak but friendly:

I made some coffee

before she awoke and I

looked at her sleeping,

I still do that now,

over 3 decades later.

BUY RED DANCE

John D. Robinson wins uncollected press’ first inner circle award!

John D. Robinson – Poet of Brutal Compassion

Uncollect Press Books by John D. Robinson

• Red Dance
• Hang in There
• The Unchanging Purpose (forthcoming)

Bibliography

Endorsements

 

Wining Poem – Spirit Animal by Gary Beaumier

1st Runner Up – Not an Ode to a Bucket Hat by Sophia Falco

2nd Runner Up – The Body by Joseph William Estlack

Runner Up – Fruit Cup by Sophia Falco

Runner Up – Gentle Geese by Sophia Falco

Runner Up –  A Church in The Landscape of Thought by Gary Beaumier

Honorable Mention – she flutters… by Mia Perez

Honorable Mention –   Window by Claire Miranda Roberts

Honorable Mention – Cancun by Olga Gonzalez Latapi

Honorable Mention – Deja Vu by Veronica Maria Carnero

 

These poems will all appear in The Raw Art Review WINTER 2023 Journal.

Donovan Hufnagle has assembled a careful poetic ethnography of tattooed bodies and the stories that they tell. Just as the tattoo inscribes meaning on the body, this book elegantly reveals the stories that only the body can tell. It is a book that connects tattoo adorned bodies to a profound human truth: we are each other’s mirrors, and the artful inscriptions of our bodies connect us to each other in ways that transcend political and social divides. This is an urgent book that does what only the best poetry can do; it opens spaces for conversation, connection, and healing.

 —Kristin Prevallet, author of “I, Afterlife: Essay in Mourning Time”.

“Sophia Falco’s poems are luminous, rich paths of acceptance. Generous in their attention to detail, they are transformative in their celebrations of the local, the neighbor, the details that make each person unique.”

—Juliana Spahr, author of This Connection of Everyone with Lungs

“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.

“In Alight, Rachael Peckham looks with clear eyes directly at the grief, loss, and haunting questions surrounding the plane crash that killed her grandfather and two uncles before she was born. She handles her volatile material tenderly, yet matter-of-factly. Through a collage of prose poems, witness testimonials, excerpts of letters, conversations, vignettes, scenes from her own flying lesson, and the white space
between it all, the story shifts and builds like fast-moving clouds in the summer sky. I am in awe of the mind that constructed this book. And yet, overwhelmingly, as I read Alight, I felt it–in my chest, in my lungs, in my eyes as they stung, and I blinked away tears. With keen perception and curiosity informed by the ache of reflected grief that inhabited her childhood, Peckham gently guides the reader into the wreckage and
back out again.”

~ Kathleen McGookey, author of Instructions for My Imposter:
Prose Poem