Books
Awkward Scrapes
Soliloquy to the Night Sky
Happiness Street
Woman
Woe & Awe
Tainted
Fathers
Love House
Girl
Bardo of Becoming
Literary Accents, vol. 1 issue 3
And Luckier
Open Burning
Last Will, Last Testament
About Flight
Grief & Other Animals
Mother, Loose
A Brief Natural History of an American Girl
The Sounding Machine
Meeting Dad
Awkward Scrapes
Awkward Scrapes is a collection of poems that celebrates love, family, fatherhood, and the natural world while confronting grief, violence, memory, and healing. Rooted in Appalachia and Kentucky landscapes, Eric Scott Sutherland's lyrical, music-infused poems seek beauty, tenderness, and hope amid the awkward scrapes of being human. "The poems in Awkward Scrapes are the best kinds of love songs, never sentimental and always powerful. They are meditations on romantic love, on the profound connections we have with our children and the natural world, even on life itself. This book is a celebration of all that makes us human: the awfulness and the beauty, sometimes tangled. Sutherland is one of my favorite poets and I loved every carefully chosen yet organic word."—Silas House
Soliloquy to the Night Sky
The brave poems in this book, Kathleen Gregg's first full-length volume of poetry, tell the deeply moving and sometimes heartbreaking story of a family's struggle with Alzheimer's. " Kathleen Gregg's poignant portrayal of her sister's descent into dementia displays the attentiveness only deep love can bring. In Gregg's deft hands, we experience Nancy's "beautiful exuberance" and the sisters' long tight bond as well as the growing space between them that's like "standing in a cave / hearing the last echoes." These poems transmit grief and fear but also a "rush of wonder" at the richness of natural and human worlds. This collection is an homage, finally, not to loss but to life."—Libby Falk Jones
Happiness Street
Family relationships, travel and the importance of everyday connections take center stage in the sparse, deceptively simple poems in this award-winning poetry collection by Bulgarian poet Olya Stoyanova, translated by Katerina Stoykova. "In this spare yet expansive poetry collection, the Bulgarian poet Olya Stoyanova is an inveterate, incisive people watcher, reading the faces of strangers the way some of us read books: avidly, greedily, including between the lines. You feel her scanning, recording and interpreting what she sees in faces glimpsed on sidewalks, in windows and doorways in cities around the world. Then, in a series of imaginative leaps, she infers and invents tiny dramas that are nonetheless decisive. Nothing less than urban life itself, in all its crowdedness and isolation, is contained in these often quietly desperate poems."—Kevin Nance
Woman
Woman by Wendy Jett is the final book in the popular mixed-genre trilogy about a young woman's complicated relationships with her family, faith, friends and herself. "With its seamless blend of prose, poetry, and recipe, Jett weaves the story of a young woman who returns to her mountain roots to discover not only a sense of home, but the person she is meant to be. Woman stands alone as a testament to strength, resiliency, and acceptance, but read as a final chapter to Girl and Tainted, Woman provides a satisfying resolution to a story about change, retribution, forgiveness, and finding happiness where one is."—Marcia Thornton Jones, author/co-author of over 135 books for kids
Woe & Awe
The poems in Lisa M. Miller's debut poetry collection, Woe & Awe, draw us in with their timeless perspective and contemporary language and hold us with their fearless depth and beauty. "Throughout Woe & Awe, Lisa M. Miller invokes the voices of female ancestors, physical and spiritual, who dare to suggest, "What if adversity has always been/essential?" Sustained by their spirit, Miller wrestles intergenerational and personal trauma in poems of vision, wit, and fierce clarity. Woe & Awe spans a lifetime, addressing personal crises, cultural history, and the Jewish diaspora. By the end of the volume we've seen the poet rendered whole, daughter and mother, deep in the joy of her own daughters, carrying her darkness and bearing the care of others who've been damaged."—Leatha Kendrick
Tainted
From the author of Girl comes the next instalment of the multigenre story of a girl growing up in difficult circumstances. Friendships, family relationships, domestic violence, health challenges come into focus in this beautiful, hopeful, heartbreaking, relatable book. "Tainted picks up where Wendy Jett's first book, Girl, left off, wrestling cosmic questions posed by the family, creatures, and spirits accompanying Girl's journey. Tragic and tender, magical as God and real as beans and cornbread, Tainted is a triumph and true to the bone. If you liked Girl, you'll absolutely love Tainted."—Mike Wilson, author of Arranging Deck Chairs on the Titanic, political poetry for a post-truth world
Fathers
"True to his title, there are many fathers (along with a few prominent women) celebrated here, foremost his own father Joe Howard "Buzz" Taylor, as well as ancestors like Reuben Taylor, first of his Kentucky line, surrogate fathers including his Uncle Louis and best friend David Orr, and his son, now a father himself, continuing the generational saga. But recalling that the child is father of the man, the chief reason to welcome this book is for the insights it affords into Taylor's early life story, including nostalgic accounts of his childhood in and around Louisville, Kentucky. Taylor says this may be as close to an autobiography as he is apt to write, which is all the more reason to cherish these sketches from the life of a true Kentucky literary treasure."—Larry W. Moore
Love House
If you liked Frank X Walker's first poetry collection, Affrilachia, you will love Love House—a book highlighting family life with its joys and challenges, with special attention to social justice placed in historical context. "In Love House, Frank X Walker not only brings the collective past back to us in living color, but these poems delve into the sacred personal, the psychohistory of what it means to be father, son, husband, brother, Black. Up close and personal, he writes poems that are on a pendulum, bringing us through the intersection of what is deeply personal in the intimate glances of the depths of our insides; what we find in birdsong and the garden, the devastation of a flood and erosion, then back to the passing of his closest loved ones, what it means to age, violence and the abuse of power, what it means to be human."—Crystal Wilkinson
Girl
Wendy Jett's debut book, Girl is a mixed-genre family story, told through the innocent perspective of a young daughter, granddaughter, sister, friend. Stories and poems propel the narrative both in action and in emotion. Triumphs, tragedies, mysteries and cooking recipes work together to add their flavor into this full-bodied world. "In honest and captivating language, Jett weaves a mixture of story, poem, song, and recipe. The result is a compelling and heartfelt story where the underlying tension builds beautifully to an unexpected end. Wendy Jett is a born writer, poet, and all around marvelous storyteller. Exhale and read again."—Allison Thorpe, author of Reckless Pilgrims
Bardo of Becoming
"Bardo of Becoming is full of tender, questioning memories of a beloved father, a departed dog, a cherished partner—all of them gone now, leaving the writer with the small sensual details that make up a life; taste of cheese and crackers dissolving in the mouth, delicate scent of amaryllis, an ancient address book stuffed with post-it notes, all evidence of a life vibrantly lived, and living still in present time. In Owen's world the dead and the living rub shoulders, and the bardo of becoming is fresh as spring grass under a young girl's fingers, and always happening now."—Alison Luterman
Literary Accents, vol. 1 issue 3
If you're not already a subscriber, you can now order Volume 1, Issue 2 of Literary Accents. This issue brings you poems about family and family relationships. Please also consider buying a print or digital-only subscription to the magazine.
And Luckier
"Kendrick's powerful fifth collection springs from a mature poet's reckoning: with the family she was given and the family she has made, with the struggle to answer her calling as an artist, with the dangers and diminishments of age, and with her privileged place in a suffering world. And Luckier opens with a dispassionate question: "who might it serve that you / would grow downhearted?" The poems that follow take us through many voices, subjects, and perspectives, bringing us at last to this hard-won counsel: "So much suffering. We cannot uncause it / But we can set ourselves to mend, / ... I will pick up the rubble. / I will carry one stone at a time."—George Ella Lyon
Open Burning
At times elliptical and surreal, the emotional and psychological landscape of these poems is punctuated by flashes of the real risks and rewards of navigating difficult times with grace and compassion. Through the magic of these well-crafted poems, we become invested in the seemingly inconsequential as well as the life-changing. "The poems in this rich collection are both spare and candid, chronicling the demise of a marriage, even as it nearly coincides with a father's blooming love for his young daughter. One love is lost, but a wholly different love arrives. At times the contrast is inexplicable and the speaking voice in these poems doesn't quite know to whom the poems should be addressed. That is a perspective I find so arresting in this book, a crossroads of grief that has no bottom and love that has no end, weighted with the plain responsibility of somehow going forward.—Maurice Manning
Last Will, Last Testament
"In his latest collection, Last Will, Last Testament, Frank X Walker turns the same unflinching gaze he's committed to historic figures now towards his own lineage. As these poems bear witness in real time to his father's last breaths even as his new son takes his first, Walkerserves again as the linchpin between generations. Ever a master distiller of the heart, Walker presents us with, arguably, his most complex elixir to date, best imbibed with no chaser."—Bianca Lynne Spriggs
About Flight
"Up until this point in American history, no poet has written an honest and believable lament about the crippling effects from the tornado swirl of a crack pipe, how a little rock being melted between thin mesh screen creates pallid smoke: a monster, a slave to the white lady that is cocaine. In About Flight, Frank X Walker gives us the beautiful ugly narrative of a brother who is wrestling with chemical dependency, and losing. The high, in all of its beautiful contradictions takes on the metaphor of flight, and so we soar through the terrible highs and lows of a protagonist who carries his family with him into the den of iniquity."—Randall Horton, author of Pitch Dark Anarchy & Hook: A Memoir
Grief & Other Animals
"Patty Paine's superb new collection arises from the nearly unbearable—a mother's death, but most especially the senseless death of a husband. And, as the crucial elegiac poets know, grieving never truly arrives in 'stages,' and never ends in 'closure.' It is a process infinitely more intricate and nuanced than the platitudes suggest, and it ends, at best, in only a fraught and vexed consolation, what one of her poems calls, 'a sorrow deeper than solace.' Yet even a vexed consolation can be a form of quiet triumph, and these poems—spare, heartbroken, and always utterly precise—arrive repeatedly at such a triumph. Patty Paine has written a book of bravery and consummate artistry."—David Wojahn
Mother, Loose
Mother, Loose was selected by Patty Paine for the Judge's Choice award in the 2014 Poetry Chapbook competition. "Full of ripe, aching music, Brandel France de Bravo's Mother, Loose captures the overlap between what we chant as comfort and what we choose as elegy. Nursery rhymes become impishly twisted: 'Social climber, / they called me,' Humpty Dumpty admits, while Mary and her lamb pick out 'Teat Peach' polish to get their nails done. Deft and heartbreaking, these poems ask us to step out from under the sheltering wing of Mama Goose, and into the arms of Morpheus. Let this collection cradle your heart in its hand."—Sandra Beasley
A Brief Natural History of an American Girl
Winner of the Editor's Choice award in the Accents 2012 Poetry Chapbook Contest. "In A Brief Natural History of an American Girl, Sarah Freligh pulls you into the car of a 1950's girlhood and you stay, compelled by the journey through sexual awakening and into womanhood. It's a difficult story. The narrator loses a lot—she gives kisses to the boss at Donut Delite, her virginity to a boy in a cornfield, her body to men she knows, or doesn't. She gives away a baby. She buries her mother. And hope, how 'easy to give her away.' And yet not quite. Through the accumulation of experience, through the ability to look clearly and name what she sees, Freligh insists on possibility. The poems draw our attention, then elicit a shiver of recognition. This is what one girlhood looks like; this is what human experience looks like. The journey is not over, she reminds us. You 'are not there yet.' - Wendy Mnookin, Author of The Moon Makes Its Own Plea. Limited availability. Please contact accents.publishing@gmail.com before ordering this book.
The Sounding Machine
With intelligence and an awareness of the limits and possibility of metaphor, Patty Paine explores the fierce unclasping and clasping of memory as she writes of family, history, and our bonds to the world. In The Sounding Machine, she works into the complicated, messy, hearts of situations, not shying away from multiple perspectives; in one poem the devoured prey says of the predator: "It was my blood ... muscle and sinew / warming his gut." One believes these strong forays. - Talvikki Ansel
Meeting Dad
"Meeting Dad is a suspense story that every father and son should read together. Brian Russell shows how a boy, abandoned by his father, can gradually work his way through longing and regret to understanding and forgiveness." - Neil Chethik, Author of FatherLoss: How Sons Deal With the Deaths of Their Dads "...With flash, sass, poignancy and the incomprehension that those who are abandoned always retain, Brian Russell tells this story. It is a moving tale, a wicked saga in all ways, since it forces the boys [Brian and his brother] to glimpse what could have been, but was withheld. Meeting Dad recreates a shining hour, a tarnished hour." - Molly Peacock, Author of Paradise, Piece by Piece Limited availability. Please contact accents.publishing@gmail.com before ordering this book.