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| Author Ona Gritz with Present Imperfect (proof copy) |
Poets Wear Prada is pleased to announce Present Imperfect by Ona Gritz, among our fall 2021 offerings. This debut essay collection by the NY Times-published writer and longtime columnist for Literary Mama, reads like a blockbuster movie. There is a heroine with cerebral palsy, likeable and indefatigable. There is family conflict, romance, and true crime. Ona writes on disability, family dynamics, and the murder of her sister's family with candor and passion. A critically acclaimed essayist, two Notable mentions by Robert Atwan, The Best American Essays, a Best Life Story in Salon among the recent accolades, Ms. Gritz has gathered some of the best of her work from the NY Times Disability series, The Rumpus, Brevity, and more for this fine and most riveting read.
Get your brain fuel. Preorder your copy of the paperback edition today. Get FREE S&H plus other goodies. (For a limited time only.)
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| Present Imperfect by Ona Gritz Poets Wear Prada: Fall 2021 ISBN-13: 978-1-946116-23-9 Paperback: 104 pages List Price: $15.00 Click this book cover to preorder your copy, today! |
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| Shame: And Other Stories by Iris N. Schwartz Poets Wear Prada: 2019 ISBN-13: 978-1-946116-01-7 Paperback: 72 pages List Price: $12.00 |
| Author / Book |
Title of Poem / Story / Chapter
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| Daniela
Gioseffi Waging Beauty: As the Polar Bear Dreams of Ice |
“Vases of Wombs” | |
| Daniela
Gioseffi Waging Beauty: As the Polar Bear Dreams of Ice |
“Some Slippery Afternoon” | |
| Jason
Morphew what to deflect when you’re deflecting |
“Evangelical Christianity” | |
| Iris
N. Schwartz My Secret Life with Chris Noth: And Other Stories |
“The Light Show” | |
| Iris
N. Schwartz My Secret Life with Chris Noth: And Other Stories |
“My Secret Life with Chris Noth” | |
| Patricia
Carragon The Cupcake Chronicles |
“Saturday
After Midnight, August 5, 2023”
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| The Beautiful Moment of Being Lost by Michael T. Young Poets Wear Prada Press, 2014 88 pages – PWP / Amazon |
Whenever we go for a walk you askYoung then encourages us to step off the cyclical path. He invites us to get lost during walks in a familiar place. For the poet, spontaneity reveals unexpected treasures. “Never let the usual expectations plot the course,” he writes.
where we are going and I think,
Eventually, where we started.
… let the time between be unplanned,In other poems lost represents a psychological state as in lost in thought, the meandering mind. Or lost in the sense of questioning who we are. Lost turns to loss when it captures the powerlessness one feels when confronted with illness and the death of a loved one, or events over which we have no control.
as uncharted as the charted urban streets we allow….
… where I sit on the bench, shade slips over me like a hood,What I also admire about this collection is cadence. Many poems share a rhythm of ease that leads us from one moment to the next. It is obvious that Young is a careful crafter. Poems are mapped out using intentional line breaks — end-stopped or enjambed. And this creates a steady walk through words. Even the overall tone does not carry the voice of someone frantic and lost. Instead the poet winds his way through endless territory, skillfully as his use of enjambment. He speaks of this in “The Continuous Thread” when he writes: “One thing leads endlessly to another. / Even if this street is a dead end, / it will continue in a different fashion…”
and I’m whisked off, abducted by the day’s closing minions….
Watching his deliberate movement, I forgotMoving purposely, willfully, the poet remains a lifelong voyager but without a definite map. What he encounters he accepts. In “As Is” the poet shares “even before I recognize these things / for what they are, /everything is / as it should be.”
he was a name we give each other in contempt.
What I noticed was his strange beauty and slow power,
and what in me refuses to be rushed….
… I would like to think, in spite of it,This is what Young aspires to. Faith is required to journey in ways that are foreign. Faith helps us move through the unfamiliar — that we might come out of it, changed. In his poem “Directions” the poet relies on this belief:
that my inner vision is sharper
as if age alone could teach me the apostle’s words
to ‘walk by faith, not by sight.’
Our heads tilt in a slow nod or shake;This is the message that Young leaves us with. The poet is first lured into the world “thrilled by the risk and uncertainty.” He then gathers strength, as he says, “from the pleasure / of wondering if I would make it home.”
our eyes cross figures in the air
writing a tenuous language that seems to say
there is no backward or forward,
no behind or ahead, only movement
from character to character, from stop to stop,
in books, on trains, in memory….
Therése Halscheid’s latest book Frozen Latitudes (Press 53), won the Eric Hoffer Book Award, Honorable Mention for Poetry. Other collections include Uncommon Geography,Without Home and a Greatest Hits chapbook award. Poems and essays have appeared in The Gettysburg Review, Tampa Review, Sou’wester, Natural Bridge, among others. Recent awards include first in Welcome Table Press’s Creative Nonfiction contest. By way
of house-sitting she has been writing on the road for several years.
Her photography chronicles her journey, and has been in juried
shows. Poems in Frozen Latitudes recount her time in the Arctic north where she lived with and taught the Inupiaq of Alaska. See www.ThereseHalscheid.com.
Would you like a glass of milk … Lisa?Are you going outside now … Lisa?And Carol wrote:
Mom gives me time to chafe at the nameHer mother was teaching her the value of being at peace with one’s name and self, which is not an easy lesson for either child or adult to absorb. Carol writes this without being sentimental or coy. Her words are simple and her metaphors work. You feel the harsh rubbing on her psyche’s sore spots—a lesson being learned.
that has begun to rub spots on my psyche
raw. She doesn’t quit
until I tell her to abandon it.
Its ink is heavier at night
though you can still hear the hum
from some sea already faint
when sunlight too was blac
lost, floated lifeless
... and what you swallowThe mood is sad in The B Poems. There is grief at "your mouth / no longer lit for kisses / and songs about nothing" and the bleakness of death surrounds everything in "a mist / half ice, half crushed between/the first caress and darkness." There is such poignancy in the scene where "after the funeral / you drown in the row by row / where each photograph is overturned / shaken loose from the family album." These are the dead who don’t know they are dead who are still "holding hands / and what’s left they share / as memories ... for the grandchildren you almost forgot ... they mix up dates and places ... form a circle / as if they still expect to sing out loud / and you would hear it ..." Yet these are visionary poems which of fer the chance to repair, and heal, to make whole. At the end, the poet suggests, the unfinished will be made complete in ‘that slow love song/ from before the sun grew huge’ and there will be a reuniting with the other half, the double, the twin --
is already shoreline
huddled around this table
and your lips in the open
the way small stones are left
to help the dead wander back
as the dim light they make
and any moment now.
... in the darkness
that belongs to you both.
