chapbook

David Bachner’s Capital Ironies explores Washington, DC’s monuments and public spaces, its boulevards and side streets, its trails and riverside promenades, to delve into the deeper life of the city, Bachner writes, whose “blatancies, nuances, and contradictions” he has come to know well after forty years of residency. “In a genial voice beset by the anxieties of a fractured nation, Bachner takes us across the intersections of his life and the life of the city, monumental and momentary alike,” writes editor Robert Bensen. Dr. Bachner was dean of Global Studies at Hartwick College and scholar-in-residence at American University’s School of International Service.

With Caught Before Flight, Vicki Whicker fashions a lyric memoir that takes us on a trip from a stark 60’s childhood to her technicolor adulthood. These poems spring from a strong feminine gaze: edgy, sensual, lyrical and vivid. Poet Jack Grapes writes, “Read these poems as you would inhale oxygen, both before and after you’ve lost your breath reading these feathery poems, each one as profound as a mountain.” Memoirist Josh Kilmer-Purcell writes, “Caught Before Flight is overflowing with exquisitely succulent imagery of Whicker’s personal relationships…creating residual longing that lingers beyond the final page…Rich, mature, and impressively lyrical, these poems demand to be savored.” Whicker left the West Coast and her fashion career to experience and interpret, as poet and fine art photographer, the bucolic life of upstate New York.

Lynne Kemen’s More Than a Handful revisits childhood to see things things both as a child and as an adult, and to come home and delight in Upstate New York. Kemen “asks unanswerable questions” as her poems illuminate dark family houses and recall childhood being “natural in a body that belongs,” writes poet Lisa Wujnovich. Reviewer Linda Lowen compares the collection to “a spoonful of honey stirred into a cup of tea, swirling the sweet and the bitter into a warming, perfectly-steeped blend.” After a career in New York City theatre, dance medicine, and biopsychology, Dr. Kemen moved to her family home in Franklin and is on the board of Bright Hill Literary Center.

Julene Waffle’s So I Will Remember captures the beauty and turbulence of the past and present to vividly populate a future when memory fades. In her tribute to family, Waffle shows we are who we are because of the choices our ancestors made and the world that shaped them. Poet Liz Rosenberg said the book “is filled with small, shining gems—glimpses of her young son; an ode to the world of wind and stars. In fact her book is full of nature—the nature around us, and insight into the human nature within us.” Poet Julie Suarez said that Waffle “helps us to remember our own panoply of losses and delights…She makes the everyday luminous and catches ‘moments of awe and beauty in a web of words’—no small task.”  Waffle teaches and coaches at Morris Central School and operates Colonial Ridge Golf Course in Laurens with her family.