Themes & Styles

With calm elegance and precise language, Rivers in My Veins is a work of lyric courage celebrating the connection we all share to the earth. Kara Briggs' poems sing her people, Sauk-Suiattle and Yakama, onto the pages. "Land we live on land," she writes, calling us to embrace our kinship with the earth. As a career journalist, Briggs uses documentary poetry to expose the false settler-colonial narratives while innovating rhythms from the social dances of her tribes in poems that take the reader to the dance circle. She received the 2024 James Welch Prize for Indigenous Poetry for "Acknowledgement Two," a poem in this collection about her uncle who fought for fishing rights. Her fierce love of lands, waters, and stories of her peoples are carried in familiar poetic forms-sonnet, pantoum, and haiku-as vehicles to carry the readers on a journey through our shared world of literary - and deeply alive - landscapes.In groundbreaking forms of her ancestors and for future generations, Briggs introduces profiles of a Yakama treaty fisherman, a great-great-grandmother basket maker, and a Sauk-Suiattle leader calling for accountability, sharing the humanity and modernity of Native peoples. She uses sonnets, pantoums, and haiku as familiar vehicles for readers as she carries them into unfamiliar history and perspectives. She questions our relationship with words about Indigenous peoples by exploring their etymologies. She engages literary ancestors, poets Carolyn Kizer and Janice Gould, re-examining their poetics in her own. Kara Briggs works on environmental issues with tribes on the West Coast and has a background in journalism and higher education. She is a former president of the Native American Journalists Association. She graduated in 2024 with a Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing from the Institute of American Indian Arts. This is her first poetry collection and her first publication with St. Julian Press.

21 years Of escaping through the words I wrote, Trying to keep myself afloat, Surviving every tear. You now hold everything I held dear; Everything that broke me, woke me, Everything that fought me, taught me How to love myself again. Years of torment, Tearing myself apart, Only to make myself Whole again.

With the attention of a field botanist, Ethereal Flowers explores healing plants, plants in mythology, plants that inspired van Gogh paintings, plants that are poisonous, and plants discovered by Lewis and Clark. By honoring plants and trees, we honor the source of life, and we acknowledge that we are mutually connected, that the survival of one impacts the other. Poet Martin Willitts Jr. gets on his hands and knees to notice the detail of petals, pistils, leaf formation, lateral and bilateral stems, the smell of earth, the bees shuttling in the garden, unearthing a deeper meaning to plants, while planting them firmly in imagination.

Paperback

Paperback

Paperback

THE CRESCENT MOON BOOK OF NATURE POETRYEdited and introduced by Margaret ElvyGift Book (Pocket Size = 6 x 4 inches)An anthology of great nature poems, including the Elizabethan pastorals of Edmund Spenser, William Shakespeare, Sir Walter Raleigh and Michael Drayton, and classics of nature mysticism by Geoffrey Chaucer, William Langland, James Thomson, William Blake and William Wordsworth, among others. Famous anthology pieces nestle amongst lesser known poems, including some neglected women poets, and American poets such as Amy Lowell and Emily Dickinson. The British nature poetry tradition builds on the Greek tradition of bucolic themes. The early poems of the nature poetry tradition in Britain include 'Sumer is y-cumen in', that famous hymn to the rebirth of Spring and warmth. The strength of the mediaeval rhythms continues undiminished. It is (partially) the solidity of the poetic rhythm of 'Sumer is y-cumen in' that makes the poem so successful. The rhymes, too, do not jar, as so they often do in British poetry from the Victorian era onwards. The rhymes of Langland, Chaucer and mediaeval English poets weld their verses together. In Chaucer's famous poem included here the rhyme scheme is as complex as any in troubadour or French Symbolist poetry, but Chaucer sticks to strong, basic end-words: 'blake', 'make', 'wake' and 'shake'. Just as beautiful as 'Sumer is y-comen in', though less well-known, are the many anonymous poems of nature, of the mediaeval era, of which "Lenten is come with love to towne" is such a delicious example.In nature poetry, whether of the mediaeval epoch or of contemporary poets, notions such as Spring, childhood and paradise fuse. Terms such as idyll, Arcadia, Eden and golden age are different names for a fount of feeling, to do with love/ nature/ childhood/ purity, and which lies at the heart of nature poetry. One finds archetypal imagery in the nature poetry included here. There is the wood or forest, for example, such a key part of William Shakespeare's plays. In Sir Philip Sidney's poem from The Countess of Pembroke's Arcadia, the woods are 'the delight of solitariness'. In Sir Thomas Wyatt's "I must go walk the woods so wild", the forest becomes a place of wilderness and banishment (again a common theme in Shakespeare). In Sir Walter Raleigh's 'The Nymph's Reply to the Sheepheard', we find the archetypal (indeed, stereotypical) imagery of the shepherd abroad in the countryside meeting the nymph. By the time of Henry Vaughan's poetry, God and Christianity has infused nature poetry, so that nature becomes subordinated to (and a part of) God's divine plan. But the love of nature continues unabated in the Romantic poets, in Shelley, Browning, and the Wordsworths, up to and beyond Thomas Hardy.With an introduction and bibliography. The text has been revised for this edition. A small, pocket size edition, ideal for gifts. Also available in an E-book edition. www.crmoon.com.<BR>

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Who knows where we will be in decades to come.The sun will rise as the moon begins to wane.The river will flow, the deer will run,swans will glide on water and fly through air.And these stones?Well, they've been here for millennia already.Elegy or legacy?Ah, that's for you to decide.

Once, in a park, I saw a little girl and her dad playing and laughing as she swung to and fro. I once saw a little boy, with a candy cane smile, ask an old man for a smile. I once climbed a mountain just to see what was on the other side. I once picked a flower and gave it to a friend. These are my moments, my reflections, on how we need to think, write and dream of the joyful and positive sides of life. To dwell on the negative is not a healthy and good way to live. These are choices we all must make and, in that regard, I committed myself to write lines that would not only make me feel good but lines that would help others overcome these most trying of times. The poems in this book reflect the way I chose to endure the COVID pandemic as well as the PTSD syndrome that is brewing as I write these words. It's all about laying strong foundations for building bridges over those valleys of despair that are ingrained in our souls. Make no mistake about it - some days were good and some tore the roof off my head. So, if you have a few moments, feel free to join me on this happiness journey.

Tale of Lakewood Jenny is a heartwarming illustrated poem about compassion, love, and ducks. It's also completely true. British-born author Jackie Caswell is a world traveler who has lived in Kenya, Cyprus and Hong Kong, but it was by a tiny lake in the Sierra Nevada foothills of California that she met and rescued Jenny the Duck. This is the true story, with whimsical verse and color photos by the author.