“Inside me, there, in the corner are my little girls. / All these years they still wait for me to save them,” writes J.V. Foerster in her powerful new debut collection, Holy Mess of a Girl. Here we are taken from childhood to widowhood, where “we’re pinching off bits / of bitter memories and find us all
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OPA Member, Linda Drach, of Beaverton is excited to announce that her poetry collection, Pop-Up Shrines, is being published by Finishing Line Press. The book is available for pre-order now through August 1st at: https://track.pstmrk.it/3ts/www.finishinglinepress.com%2Fproduct%2Fpop-up-shrines-by-linda-drach%2F./UKW0/7Di_AQ/AQ/529194b9-ce37-45ae-8454-ecd67b0316fd/1/FceQW-uu8u Pop-Up Shrines explores how illness and disability coexist with new rooms of discovery and resilience. It’s an exploration of life’s
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Reviewed by Carol Barrett Contradictions from an Uncertain Silence by Emmett Wheatfall Fernwood Press, 2025, 40 pages, $28.00 hardbound ISBN 9781594981524 Available at fernwoodpress.com From the incisive opening poem, “When the Time Comes for You to Speak,” to the concluding “America’s End,” Emmett Wheatfall urges us to resist and refuse the battlements of racism and
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Reviewed by Carol Barrett Splitting Open the World by Carolyn Martin The Poetry Box, 2025, 95 pages, $18.00 ISBN 978-1-956285-93-2 Available with free S/H at [email protected] Carolyn Martin’s sixth book of poems claims its title from a famous quotation by Muriel Rukeyser: “What would happen if one woman told the truth about her life?
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The meaning of our lives may occur to us through memory, sensory snapshots of significant moments: a mattress upended by the curb, hair lost through chemotherapy caught in a brush, the light fragrance of lavender powder on a handkerchief. In “I Know These Things” award-winning poet Cynthia Jacobi chronicles scenes from her own life, from
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Reviewed by Carol Barrett The Goodbye Kit by Daneen Bergland Airlie Press, 2024, 64 pages, $18.00 ISBN 978-1-950404-15-5 Available at www.airliepress.org Daneen Bergland’s first book of poetry is a beautiful assembly of evocative poems, almost all of which have appeared individually in literary magazines. The first thing that greets the reader is gorgeous cover art
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Irene Cooper’s second book of poetry provides a stunning exploration of form, with the poems organized by section titles drawn from various psychological theories and experiments.
Sue Fagalde Lick’s book, Dining Al Fresco with My Dog, is the most distinctive collection of poems confronting the realities of widowhood that I have ever read.
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Reviewed by Carol Barrett Coming Down the Mountain by Gary Lark Kelsay Books, 2024, 103 pages, $23.00 ISBN 978-1-63980-652-2 Available at https://kelsaybooks.com; https://garylark.work Gary Lark is an Oregon poet through and through. Born here, and raised in the Umpqua Valley of Southern Oregon, he now lives in Grants Pass. Coming Down the Mountain, Lark’s latest
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Reviewed by John Ruff Raku by Patricia Wixon, edited by Vincent Wixon and Amy Miller Cyclone Press, 2024, 73 pages, $15 ISBN 9798340757456 Available on Amazon Raku, Patricia Wixon’s fifth book of poems, was unfinished when she died at her home in Ashland, Oregon, this past July after a prolonged illness. Just days prior
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