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All the Beauty Still Left: A Poet’s Painted Book of Hours

The illuminated medieval manuscripts known as Books of Hours have been used to guide contemplation and prayer for centuries, with their intricate designs and exquisite coloring. Devotional poet, priest, and National Book Award nominee Spencer Reece has revived the tradition with a collection of over 50 vibrant watercolors inspired by his life journeys and his reflections on faith. His brushstrokes guide us from the bustling restaurants of Madrid, to the expansive seas of Morocco, to the coastal tranquility of Old Lyme, Connecticut. Each painting faces a quote from an acclaimed writer or spokesperson that has inspired him, among them Emily Dickinson, James Baldwin, Elizabeth Bishop, Katharine Hepburn, and Janis Joplin. The perfect gift for Easter, Mother’s Day, or any occasion, All the Beauty Still Left is a delight whose evocative images and memorable accompanying texts are sure to provoke contemplation and reflection for readers of all faiths.

The Stranger I Become: On Walking, Looking, and Writing

The Stranger I Become probes the permeable boundary between inner life and outer, thought and action, science and experience. Poet Katharine Coles begins her lyric essays with a meditation on “the urge to move beyond, to understand myself as a stranger, estranged.” The essays travel, always on foot, from Coles’ home with its kept and wild birds, into the canyon her home overlooks, itself populated with creatures ranging from voles to owls, moose, bobcats, and coyotes. From there, always looking, always walking, in the company of the words that move her, they traverse her neighborhood and distant places in this country and the world. All along, they consider the poetry that inhabits her: the winged creatures of Dickinson, Ashbery’s “reflections,” Keats’s “irritable reaching,” Anne Carson’s ever-unreachable apples, and more. Taken together, they make up what Lance Olsen calls “a poetics of the vivid.”

Father | Genocide

On the night before he “walked on,” Margo Tamez’s father recorded two questions onto a cassette tape: Where did all the good men go? Where did they go? Two decades later, Tamez reconstructs her father’s struggle to be a man under American domination, tracing the settler erasure, denial, and genocide that he and preceding generations experienced. She reclaims stolen territory in the felt and known history of colonial Texas through Ndé Dene [Lipan Apache] place, memory, and poetics of resistance.

“I was raised up in American violence,” Tamez writes, “and I have to explore all of its possibilities.” Her poetry brings out those possibilities by “timebending,” with a poetic form Tamez calls Indigenous fusionism-Indigenous futurism, a union of pastpresent, bodyknowing, intertext, bent tradition, landguage, and familial blood-knowing.

Father Genocide reveals why impunity on the Texas border is the key to understanding American identity violence. Her lightning poetry strikes the nested seeds and unburies the truth of these bitter lands.

A Line of Driftwood: The Ada Blackjack Story

Diane Glancy once again puts Indigenous women at the center of American history in her account of a young Inupiat woman who survived a treacherous arctic expedition alone.

In September 1921, a young Inupiat woman named Ada Blackjack traveled to Wrangel Island, 200 miles off the Arctic Coast of Siberia, as a cook and seamstress, along with four professional explorers. The expedition did not go as planned. When a rescue ship finally broke through the ice two years later, she was the only survivor.

Diane Glancy discovered Blackjack’s diary in the Dartmouth archives and created a new narrative based on the historical record and her vision of this woman’s extraordinary life. She tells the story of a woman facing danger, loss, and unimaginable hardship, yet surviving against the odds where four “experts” could not. Beyond the expedition, the story examines Blackjack’s childhood experiences at an Indian residential school, her struggles as a mother and wife, and the faith that enabled her to survive alone on a remote island in the Arctic Sea.

Glancy’s creative telling of this heroic tale is a high mark in her award-winning hybrid investigations of suffering, identity, and Native American history.

Divining Poets: Clifton

Plainspoken, empowering, spare, wise beyond measure, Clifton’s words are a balm and a force of good for all: “The surest failure / is the unattempted walk.”

Tracy K. Smith took a poetry workshop with Lucille Clifton following the death of her mother. The experience was an awakening. Clifton spoke of her own losses, centering not on the ideas of “letting go” or “making peace,” but of sustained communication with the departed. Clifton’s practices included using the Ouija board, or “spirit board,” as she called it, to make contact with the other world. “I sat rapt, envious, hopeful,” Smith writes, “listening to Clifton describe her own initiation into a fierce and forthright form of knowing.” Smith’s selections offer a gateway into the profound, moving, accessible, and useful notions of this essential poet.

The Divining Poets Quotable Deck Series: Elegant, boxed sets of seventy-eight cards à la tarot decks, with oracular quotes from the world’s greatest visionary poets. Each card contains inspiring and provocative lines chosen for seekers to contemplate, memorize, or answer life questions. Complete with a display stand and how-to instructions, this pocket-sized wisdom is perfect for the holiday season

Divining Poets: Yeats

This concentrated dose of the mystical wisdom of W.B. Yeats offers pleasure and insight to all who partake of it. “For nothing can be sole or whole / That has not been rent.”

Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Paul Muldoon carries on the influential tradition of Irish mystical poetry with the great words of William Butler Yeats. Yeats had a lifelong interest in Spiritualism; his work is rich in tarot and occult imagery. He asserted that a number of poems were “given” to him by supernatural powers. Yeats’s fierce ideas and images, coupled with his exquisite sense of rhyme, make for quotes that seekers will want to commit to memory. As Paul Muldoon explains, this poet is “supremely positioned to help us make sense of both the things of this world, the Otherworld, and the vast region between.”

The Divining Poets Quotable Deck Series: Elegant, boxed sets of seventy-eight cards à la tarot decks, with oracular quotes from the world’s greatest visionary poets. Each card contains inspiring and provocative lines chosen for seekers to contemplate, memorize, or answer life questions. Complete with display stand and how-to instructions, this pocket-sized wisdom is perfect for the holiday season.

Punk Rock Is Cool for the End of the World

The irreverent, tweetable, ludicrous, painful, wondrous work of the L.A. punk poet—widely available for the first time.

In Punk Rock Is Cool for the End of the World, David Trinidad brings together a comprehensive selection of Ed Smith’s work: his published books; unpublished poems; excerpts from his extensive notebooks; photos and ephemera; and his timely “cry for civilization,” “Return to Lesbos”: put down that gun / stop electing Presidents.

Ed Smith blazed onto the Los Angeles poetry scene in the early 1980s from out of the hardcore punk scene. The charismatic, nerdy young man hit home with his funny/scary off-the-cuff-sounding poems, like “Fishing”: This is a good line. / This is a bad line. This is a fishing line.

Ed’s vibrant “gang” of writer and artist friends—among them Amy Gerstler, Dennis Cooper, Bob Flanagan, Mike Kelley, and David Trinidad—congregated at Beyond Baroque in Venice, on LA’s west side. They read and partied and performed together, and shared and published each others’ work.

Ed was more than bright and versatile: he worked as a math tutor, an animator, and a typesetter. In the mid-1990s, he fell in love with Japanese artist Mio Shirai; they married and moved to New York City. Despite productive years and joyful times, Ed was plagued by mood disorders and drug problems, and at the age of forty-eight, he took his own life.

Ed Smith’s poems speak to living in an increasingly dehumanizing consumer society and corrupt political system. This “punk Dorothy Parker” is more relevant than ever for our ADD, technology-distracted times.

Cold Moon: On Life, Love and Responsibility

The Cold Moon occurs in late December, auguring the arrival of the winter solstice. Approaching the winter solstice of his own life, Roger Rosenblatt offers a book dedicated to the three most important lessons he has learned over his many years: an appreciation of being alive, a recognition of the gift and power of love, and the necessity of exercising responsibility toward one another. In a rough-and-tumble journey that moves like the sea, Rosenblatt rolls from elegy to comedy, distilling a lifetime of great tales and moments into a tonic for these perilous and fearful times. Cold Moon: a book to offer purpose, to focus the attention on life’s essentials, and to lift the spirit.

The Marble Bed

Grace Schulman rises to new heights in these poems of lament and praise. In The Marble Bed, a couple dances on a shore that is at once a shining turf and a graveyard of sea toss, of cracked shells, a skull-like carapace, and emerald weed. Here things sparkle with newness: an orchid come alive when rescued from a trash bin; the new year hidden in an egret’s wing; Coltrane’s ecstatic flight; a seductive, come-hither angel; a meteor’s arc; a rainbow’s painted ribbons; a glacial rock that glowers in moonlight. Even the tomb sculptures in an Italian cemetery sparkle with vitality. Schulman, grieving for her late husband, believes passionately in the power of art to redeem human transience. Her faith in art enables her to move from mourning to joyful wonder of existence as she meditates on an injured world and concludes: “Because I cannot lose the injured world / without losing the world, / I’ll have to praise it.”

Divining Poets: Dickinson

Turtle Point Press is pleased to introduce the Divining Poets Quotable Deck Series. These elegant, boxed sets of seventy-eight cards à la tarot decks feature short quotes meant to inspire, provoke, and guide users—to contemplate, memorize, or answer life questions. Here is the ever-astonishing Emily Dickinson.

David Trinidad was struck by the Magic 8 Ball sound in his favorite bits from Emily Dickinson’s poems—mystical answers to questions one might ask about life and death. He chose seventy-eight, the number of cards in a tarot deck, and found they worked. This is a superlative selection of indelible gems to guide, ponder, and quote.

The set includes a display stand, plus an instruction card with tips on how to use the deck. This is pocket-sized wisdom to give and to keep, here in perfect time for the holiday season.