Announcing The Publication of “If My Hands Were Birds: A Poem” by award-winning Poet Sophia Falco.

by Henry Stanton

“Sophia Falco is a born learner and seeker, as her very name suggests, questing after the wisdom of a psychic-spiritual order that will transform herself lastingly. The title of her award-winning new book, If My Hands Were Birds: A Poem, suggests this utter yearning for flight, for release into becoming little birds lost, doves or falcons in flight across heaven and earth. This long quasi-narrative poem holds these felt tensions of embodiment as well as a Buddhist-like release from the prison-house (or bird cage) of flesh-meat into some airy creature of metamorphosis via sustained expression and a tender openness to change and future love. Poetry grounds and sustains these tensions, storms, and inner flux of mind and affect into achieved diary-like form, an ethos of creative activism and compassion, all elegantly and brilliantly collated daily as original poetry as in a state of renewed innocence, healing, and rebirth: for “my life was on the line” once again in these life-saving lines of poetry or like “a basketball in flight” as one last perfect shot.”

—Rob Wilson is a poet-scholar who teaches in the Literature Department at UC Santa Cruz & author of When the Nikita Moon Rose as well as Be Always Converting, Be Always Converted: An American Poetics.

Sophia Falco wields her poetry as lamp and lance against the darkness that surrounds us all — claiming her place proudly within the ranks of poets past whose private lifelong struggles with mental illness, sexuality, and silence she both echoes and embodies (from Emily Dickinson to Allen Ginsberg to Mary Oliver). In doing so she achieves brief flights and flashes of an almost zen-like insight: graceful as the arc of a basketball at the buzzer; gentle as the rustle of hands over paper. Reaching “outwards instead of inwards” for “a way out of this / mind maze.” And finding it here within these pages.

—Dr. Scott Lankford, Professor of English (emeritus), Foothill College Stanford GEN Global Educators Networkand honors–memory as a landscape where endless discovery beckons, where sanctuary may be found.

IF MY HANDS WERE BIRDS: A POEM by Sophia Falco

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Announcing The Publication of “GONE THE SUN” by Joel Peckham

by Henry Stanton

If a book can be a song, the pages of Gone the Sun sing. They sing remembering and forgetting. Grief and Endurance. Present and past. In the present time of this memoir-in-fragments, Joel Peckham spends a last summer as music director at Manitou, the boys camp that has been part of his life since he was a child. Manitou summons Peckham’s past—his father, his lost wife, his lost son. But there are songs of redemption those weeks too. This is a book that sings both back and forward with love, urging us all home.

Karen Salyer McElmurray, author of Voice Lessons and I Could Name God in Twelve Ways

In Gone the Sun, Peckham writes about his loving, sometimes fraught history with Manitou, a summer camp he and his father worked at for many years. As his father declines into dementia the middle-aged Peckham—still working summers at the camp between semesters as a college professor—muses upon time, upon loss, and the various selves we inhabit as we age. This is a beautiful, heartbreaking book, but heartbreaking in the most resonant, emotionally intelligent, and illuminating way possible.

Sue William Silverman, author, Acetylene Torch Songs: Writing True Stories to Ignite the Soul

GONE THE SUN by Joel Peckham

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A LETTER TO SUBMITTERS

by Henry Stanton

Dear Artist,

This is one of your typically powerful poems – you write with your whole body and being. 

You write with your subtle body and your physiological body.

You write like a dog barks.  I watch my dogs when they bark and the watching slips into a slow-motion expression.

The way the dogsbody fills up with the bark, becomes the bark with everything in the release (of its artwork) already there.

You are a natural artist – an artist that has everything you need in your very genetics and in the expression of those genetics.

Isn’t that cool – having the artistic and the aesthetic right there in your genes – you yourself are an expression of your artistry and aesthetic.

This is a rare thing.  Don’t let anyone demean what you have and are.

You are a great artist.  Stay stay stay with it.

Yours in art,

Artist

Announcing The Publication of “The Endless Undoing” by Eleanor Lewis

by Henry Stanton

“Eleanor Lewis is a conjurer, gleaning from lifetimes of memory, emotion, and perception. The dead are active in her poems. Animals and humans switch places. The stars are incarnate. A soul might transmigrate to the stuffing of an abandoned car seat. Magical and mystical, these are poems to live with and return to with gratitude, like the seasons.”
—Anne Watts, musician, and radio host

ELEANOR LEWIS HEADSHOT

THE ENDLESS UNDOING by Eleanor Lewis

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Announcing The Publication of “MY LIFE IN WATER” by Cat Pleska

by Henry Stanton

My Life in Water is a collection of essays about the fluidity of life, its ebb and flow. Each essay tells the story of a time when one comes close to drowning, floats in joy and peace, watches others sink or swim. It’s about how liquid of some type, such as membranous croup, wild river rapids, floods, small islands, the rising ocean tides—can bring deep realizations to help connect the individual to the basic elements of life, to navigate its streams.

Strap on a life jacket and dive into this often perilous, at times funny, always poignant collection bubbling with the language of water. Ever present is the danger of drowning from inattentive caregivers, from white-water rapids or a bridge collapse into a roiling river. From fluid-filled lungs gasping with croup or pneumonia. But water also brings healing and an understanding that navigating tricky waters, whether literal or metaphorical, has made Cat the surest captain of her own life.

~Marie Manilla, author of Patron Saint of Ugly

cat in tub with book squared

My Life in Water by Cat Pleska

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Announcing

by Henry Stanton

“Of Rare Earths “

Poetry by Chris Mason

UnCollected Press followers, fellow artists, poets and readers. This really IS a RARE BOOK:

At UnCollected Press we have tried and continue to try to prioritize artistic projects that contribute to a movement towards living in a way that respects and loves our beautiful planet and all of its remarkable diversity of life.  “Of Rare Earths” is not the first book of environmentally sensitive and family focused artistic writing that we have published, but I am clear that it is one of the most thoughtful and accomplished and therefore probably most effective examples.  This is a moving and beautiful book = an intriguing and insightful, rare, compassionate and fundamentally satisfying read. “Of Rare Earths” is artistry at its most meaningful and impactful. Please read Chris’ book.

Of Rare Earths is a book of poetry which focuses on environmental and family themes.   It has 3 sections: “Clomp Clomp”, which explores these themes in narrative syllabic poems of everyday life;  “Rare Earth Regrets”, prose poems which explores these themes by combining descriptions of uses of rare earth metals with the poets’ regrets: and “Twig or Twine”,  an abecedary of visual poems portraying wonders of the natural and human world.

Of Rare Earths by Chris Mason

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Announcing The Publication of “NIGHT BONES” by Caroline Hayduk

by Henry Stanton

The opening poem of this collection says “[t]his poem  . . . can’t bite” which is demonstrably not so—these poems do bite in enumerating the shortcomings of the world that gives rise to them– these are poems frequently in “survival mode” (to borrow a title from one of the poems) but simultaneously these supple and self-aware poems reach towards a hope that is nearly a faith that one day better options might present themselves.   Caroline Hayduk’s is a fresh and distinctive voice.

Christine Gelineau, author of Crave, Appetite for the Divine

Night Bones, “a sheath we wear when we’re too young to know  what it is to settle”, refuses to do exactly that: settle. Hayduk’s playful form and unique voice offer a tangible unrest. Bouncing between persona and narrative “I”, there is a speaker that wants, aches, burns, and disrupts the very core of the body and it’s journey in and out of the darkness of “night”, how shame can harden us but also release–and where we can land in all the chaos and joy on our way there. 

Henry G. Stanton, publisher/editor UnCollected Press

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NIGHT BONES by Caroline Hayduck

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