Over the past three decades Judith Skillman has written and published numerous poems for books, journals, and anthologies. She has collaborative translations from Portuguese, Italian, and French. Skillman's publications include FIELD, The Iowa Review, The Southern Review, Poetry, The Northwest Review, and Midwest Quarterly. She has ten books of poems.
From 1977 - 1978 she held a teaching assistantship at the University of Maryland, while working towards her masters degree in English Literature. She received the King County Arts Commission's Publication Prize in 1987, judged by Madeline DeFrees. This prize enabled her to find a publisher for her first book, "Worship of the Visible Spectrum" (Breitenbush Books.) In 1991 Skillman was awarded a Washington State Arts Commission Writer's Fellowship.
Skillman's poems move out from their opening point meditatively and delicately to embrace distant sights, memories of the past, other countries, and also mythologies and similarities. "Bearing the universal/forward in each particular...," she writes in "Cardoon." She is not seeking anything in this movement--neither knowledge nor possession nor control. The movement is not an urge, but rather the natural penchant to connect with what is beyond the immediate self. Things within the broader world are connected by a tissue of shared qualities. "Increments of blue and pink chalk/can be made..."-- from "On Circe's Island". Or, as she writes in "Zaydee," "...pink fragments claim/the edge of a wave...." Skillman's poems are created by following where an initial sensed quality leads; and all of the world, from objects to envisionings, is spun together by qualities similar and different. -Henry Berry
Hi all! Am happy to say we've just received David Axelrod's newest title, Deciduous Poems, from the printer! Writes Hugh Seidman of David Axelrod's latest volume:
These poems movingly explore both the highs and the lows of the family drama and of the down-to-earth variety of everyday experience. Axelrod is tender, angry, playful and vulnerable. As he says in one gentle love poem, ‘So many pieces to the heart'.
Copies of Axelrod's latest are presently on their way to Small Press Distribution - we'll give you a heads-up when they are available for purchase.
Until then, feel free to query us for purchase information! More from us all soon!
Hank Lazer has published 13 books of poetry, including The New Spirit (Singing Horse, 2005), Elegies & Vacations (Salt, 2004), and Days (Lavender Ink, 2002). He edits the Modern and Contemporary Poetics Series for the University of Alabama Press. Lyric & Spirit: Selected Essays 1996-2008 is due out shortly from Omnidawn (and is available at a big discount by clicking here). Please feel free to contact the poet by clicking here This email address is being protected from spam bots, you need Javascript enabled to view it .
Known for his acute criticism as well as exploratory poetry, Hank Lazer is a poet who might be described as a stylistic risk-taker as well as forager in the treasure house of words. ... -Cynthia Hogue, Rain Taxi
Lazer blends the purposes of poetry and the ISMs of various camps and forges poems that is both fun to read with the heart and with the mind. This is no easy exercise in these days of thick lines between the many classes of poetry. -Michael Basinski, Poetry/Rare Books Collection, SUNY-Buffalo
Ahadada Books is pleased to present Darjeeling by T. A. Noonan. Darjeeling is the first release in the Ahadada Books Online Chapbook series edited by Catherine Daly. This is T. A. Noonan's first electonic Chapbook, and second published chapbook. Download it here.
T.A. Noonan was born in Brooklyn, New York. She received her B.A. from Louisiana State University in 2002 and her M.F.A. from Florida Atlantic University in 2006. Her work has appeared-or is forthcoming-in The Outside Voices 2008 Anthology of Younger Poets, Harpur Palate, elimae, Word For/Word, 88: A Journal of Contemporary American Poetry, FOURSQUARE, Blink: Flash Fiction Before You Can Bat an Eye, and many others.
Balm, her first chapbook, is available from Flaming Giblet Press. She currently lives in Hattiesburg, Mississippi, where she is a Ph.D. candidate in Literature and Creative Writing at The University of Southern Mississippi.
A new book of poetry released by the Ibbetson Street Press of Somerville "Manufacturing America." Lisa Beatman, a well-known Boston area poet writes of her experience teaching immigrant workers at the Ames Paper Factory in Somerville, Mass.
Press Release: "Manufacturing America" Punches the Time Clock
What will happen when nothing is "Made in America" anymore? What will happen to all that machinery: the machines themselves, the operators that drove them, and the old walls and roofs that housed manufacturing villages churning out blue jeans and paychecks to a vanishing middleclass?
Award-winning author Lisa Beatman answers these questions and more in Manufacturing America (ISBN 978-0-6151-8124-0, Ibbetson Street Press, $14.95), a collection of poetry and prose. Beatman won first prize at the 2000 Lucidity poetry conference, and Honorable Mention for the 2004 Miriam Lindberg International Poetry Peace Prize. She was also awarded a Fellowship to Sacatar Foundation in Brazil, and a Massachusetts Cultural Council Grant.
Norm Davis, editor of the HazMat Review, says, " Beatman's poetry is very alive and full of feeling and pictures. The working people she writes about are not simply "victims" at the hands of exploiters. They are fighters, too. Her poem, Good Bones, portrays the magnitude and the utter tragedy of what has happened to the working class."
In Manufacturing America, Beatman conducts a chorus of immigrant factory workers. The collection moves through the ‘life cycle' of manufacturing - from its roots in the Lowell, MA textile mills, through downsizing, to the ‘artist lofts' mined from the old buildings as manufacturing moves overseas. It documents the swan song of a formerly vital sector that historically provided a leg up to many American workers. The book is true-to-life, based on her job at a manufacturing plant near Boston, MA.
Susan Eisenberg, author of Blind Spot, says, "Manufacturing America bears witness to the lyrical life of a factory and the individuals who inhabit it at the start-up of the 21st-century. Lisa Beatman adds the stories of immigrant workers, heard through the ear of a poet on site to teach literacy skills, to the growing literature of work poetry."
Lisa Beatman currently manages adult education programs at the Harriet Tubman House in Boston, MA. She studied international public administration at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard. Her poems and stories have appeared in Lonely Planet, Lilith Magazine, Hawaii Pacific Review, Powhatan Review, Rhino, Manzanita, and Pemmican. Her first book, "Ladies' Night at the Blue Hill Spa", was published by Bear House Publishing.
Doug Holder, Editor of Ibbetson Street Press, says, "Lisa Beatman's poetry reminds me of another Mass. Cultural Council Award winner, Charles Coe. Both Cole and Beatman's work is accessible but layered with meaning. Their poetry has an ample dose of levity, and at the same time, it is wise and knowing. Beatman has a gimlet reporter's eye and a poet's heart."
For information, and to place book orders, contact:
Doug Holder Ibbetson Street Press
21 School Street
Somerville, MA 02143
Phone: 617-628-2313 Click here.
ibbetsonpress@msn.com
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Ahadada Books is pleased to present Anne-Marie Derése in Translation & The Green Parrot by Judith Skillman. Anne-Marie Derése in Translation & The Green Parrot is the seventeenth release in the Ahadada Books Online Chapbook series. Download it by clicking here. 
