Delightful new short fictions by the inimitable Parker Tettleton. OR is a travelogue of language via relationships—a state of endless conjunctions & several abbreviations. It’s also a meditation on the idea of home & a crooked bookend of sorts to This Is A City.

This Is A City is a memoir we’re still living. It’s love, it’s a marriage, it’s a cross-country move & then back again. It’s cities within small towns within & more within. It’s us, it’s ours, it’s mine, it’s yours.

Intriguing poems arising like white geese from an abandoned apple orchard in the east Cascade mountains.  Per Donald Revell (Colorado Review): Deep amid the din and barrenness of old, old voices, we are more than usually eager for new sounds and for the music of an unabashed, uncompromised elsewhere, wonderfully announced in Ann Douglas’ poems.

“I find the work of Ann Douglas extremely interesting,” added Michael Bartholomew Biggs (London Grip New Poetry), “it has a shift and elusive quality interspersed with flashes of directness and clarity.”  (Cover image by Donald Saaf.)

Tom Moore quotes Carl Jung’s description of a symbol as also a good definition of a true poem: a bridge thrown out towards the unknown. The poems in this collection walk with Moore’s soul out into the wilderness and atmospheres of the Pacific Northwest, all the while laying down a bridge for us.

See a review of Tom’s book here:  http://michaeldennispoet.blogspot.ca/2018/05/acceptable-time-tom-moore-raveena-press.html?m=1

In this fourth collection (her second with Ravenna Press), Joannie Stangeland relentlessly, relentlessly constructs a mythopoetic world that is persistently doubled. Persistently broken. And filled with a very quiet violence. It’s not that Stangeland doesn’t love our world, but its stories “crumble under surf.” Its gods and ghosts won’t go away. And its reflections, doppelgangers, palimpsests, and halves make us ask, again and again: Is this book a healing—or is this book a rending. It is perfectly and painfully both—“The sky” she tells us “mends itself. At the seam between worlds.”  (Sarah Vap)

In her most topically comprehensive collection of poetry, Rantala considers her heritage as she knows it — spare of fact, filled with impression and effect.  At varying times lyrical, modernist, post-modern and runic, the pieces create an eclectic symphony of the individual, as unique as the orchestra in which her immigrant grandfather played in early 20th Century Astoria, Oregon.

Into the Rumored Spring is “a lyrical meditation on the illness and recovery of a dear friend facing breast cancer,” says Peter Pereira, a physician and the author ofWhat’s Written on the Body, who provided comments for the book cover. “In these vivid, dreamlike poems Stangeland seamlessly weaves together the worlds of medicine, family, and nature—surgeries and radiation give way to the branches of trees, the movement of light on water, dreams of Venice, and the day to day gifts of family.”

The friend for whom the poems were written is doing well and approaching her five-year mark. All author proceeds will be donated to Seattle Cancer Care Alliance.

Produced originally as a gift for the friends and benefactors of Ravenna Press, this little volume takes a look, at once whimsical and lyrical, at things in a human scale, at the small, routine events of our days, coupled many times with descriptions of the technical underpinnings that make the small, routine actions possible.