Santa Monica Disposal & Salvage, by Penny Perry
$12.50 softcover (6×9) Spring, 2012 available at Amazon.com
Praise from Marge Piercy: “Penny Perry’s SANTA MONICA DISPOSAL & SALVAGE is a powerful and moving collection of poems that form a narrative of loss and survival. When the poet was only sixteen, her mother died suddenly and her father abandoned her. She had to take care of herself, cook, clean, learn everything she had been protected from – and she did. Her attitude is incredibly nonjudgmental in these poems rich in detail, grounded in a place and time. They are dense with specifics but flow in carefully crafted effortless-seeming narrative.”
Praise from Diane Wakoski: “I loved everything about Penny Perry’s SANTA MONICA DISPOSAL & SALVAGE. The vivid details of place, period, people, the rich linking narrative, and most of all the sense of poetry being teased out of the everday world imposed on the immigrant experience of her grandparents, the echoes of the holocaust, the odd snazzy world of movie dominated California before digitized reality usurped it. . .I who recognize personality in art was completely won over by these poems.”
Praise from Maria Mazziotti Gillan: “An amazing book. . .sad and funny at the same time. . .rooted in memory and place and laced with a sardonic, self-deprecating humor. Best of all, it refuses to give up, to give in even in the face of tragedy and humiliation. . .It is a hymn to the life force that is so evident in this narrator, her forgiveness, her vulnerability, her effervescence. You’ll want to read this book again and again.” — Paterson Literary Review
Kristen Scott’s Liasons
$12.50 softcover (6×9) Summer, 2012 available at Amazon.com
Praise for Kristen D. Scott:
“Charged with eroticism, sultry poems of desire and ecstasy, like deep earth wine: Liaisons offers the grateful reader, washed ashore in foreign lands, an eternity of nights, entrancing and passionate.” — Helene Cardona, actress, poet (The Astonished Universe)
“Kristen D. Scott has written deftly and beautifully about love, death and fear in various circumstances of a modern life in which love conquers all. Fascinated by ancestral voices in the Middle East of her travels, she presents its culture, a subject of her studies, with understanding which turns superbly on its women and her own impressions. She aptly shows locale of a few countries and moods, including American, in spare and hypnotic poetry.” — Helene Pilbosian (At Quarter Past Reality, Writer’s Digest award winner)
Trish Dugger’s “Scrambled”
$12.00 softcover (6×9) Summer, 2012 available at Amazon.com
Praise for Trish Dugger:
“Trish Dugger is a deliciously good poet, sassy and clever. I was deeply moved by poems that were, beneath the clever chattiness, heartbreaking and memorable — especially those memories of her husband and his absence.” — Steve Kowit
“You’ll want to call Trish Dugger a mischievous romantic — comical and tender. And, when you read SCRAMBLED, you’d be right-on. Here is an enthusiastic life exposed: brimming with lust, good humor and, dare I say, passion.” — Roger Aplon
Waltzing under the Buddha’s Smile, by R. Monk
$15.00 softcover (6×9) Fall, 2012 available at Amazon.com
Praise for R. Monk:
A lifetime of quiet work becomes audible in this superb collection. Waltzing under the Buddha’s Smile deserves a spot on the shelf of contemporary poets whose best efforts will be worth reading in mid-century. — William Mohr, author of Holdouts: The Los Angeles Poetry Renaissance, 1948-1992.
Garden Oak Press 